Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 23 May 2016


Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 23 May 2016


:: National ::

India is looking to expand cooperation with the Iran

  • Lifting of international sanctions on Iran has opened up immense opportunities said PM Modi.

  • He also said that India is looking forward to expanding cooperation with the Persian Gulf nation in sectors such as trade, investment, infrastructure and energy.

  • Mr. Modi, the first Indian Prime Minister to visit Iran in the last 15 years, was received at the Mehrabad International Airport by Iran’s Finance and Economic Affairs Minister Ali Tayyebnia, after which he left for a local gurudwara to meet people of Indian origin.

  • Stating that both public and private sector firms from India were keen on investing in Iran, he said the signing of the agreement on the development of Chabahar port will provide wider connectivity.

  • Besides signing a deal on the development of phase-1 of the port, India is looking at doubling oil imports from the Persian Gulf nation, which a few years back was its second-biggest oil supplier, as well as making progress on getting rights to develop the Farzad–B gas field.

  • Mr. Modi, who will hold formal talks with President Hassan Rouhani on Monday, said he had indicated possibilities of cooperation in ports, fertiliser and petrochemical sectors during their last meeting at Ufa last year.

  • ONGC is in talks to secure development rights for the gas field it had discovered in 2008. It has already invested about $100 million in the project

Kiran Bedi to become the LG of Puduchery

  • BJP leader and former IPS officer Kiran Bedi was, on Sunday, appointed Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry, a post that has been vacant for the past two years.

  • Puducherry was under the additional charge of Lt Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lt. Gen. Ajay Singh, since then.

  • A Rashtrapati Bhawan communiqué said: “The President has been pleased to appoint Ms Kiran Bedi to be the Lt. Governor of Puducherry with effect from the date she assumes charges of her office.”

  • The appointment comes three days after the Congress-DMK alliance won 17 seats in the 30-member State Assembly.

  • The post of Lieutenant Governor in the Union territory had been lying vacant after the Narendra Modi Government sacked UPA nominee Virendra Kataria on July 2014, barely a year after he had been appointed.

  • Ms Bedi, India’s first woman IPS officer, said she looked “forward to giving every bit of myself to the responsibility. I am there for the benefit of the country…. I am grateful for the government's decision. They trusted me.”

Gaya-model lantern in Colombo (Register and Login to read Full News..)

UP government encouraging farmers to grow oilseeds (Register and Login to read Full News..)

Mann ki baat focuses on forest conservation and saving water (Register and Login to read Full News..)

:: International ::

US President’s Vietnam visit to give push to his Asia orientation

  • When Bill Clinton landed in this lake-studded capital 16 years ago, the first U.S. President to visit since the end of the Vietnam War, his mission was to put that conflict behind him, and the trip was among the most remarkable of his presidency.

  • When President Barack Obama arrives, his task may be a bit less dramatic, but is in many ways far more ambitious.

  • These two countries, bedevilled by decades of misunderstandings, violence and wariness, now have the chance to create a partnership that seemed unlikely even three years ago.

  • Since then, China’s expansion in the South China Sea has deeply shaken a new Vietnamese government.

  • While the leadership here has not let up on its repression of its people it now appears more interested in playing one superpower off against the other, perhaps even giving the Pentagon some rotating access to key Vietnamese ports.

  • It would not be an alliance; neither side seems ready for that. But it could throw Beijing off balance in the daily shadow boxing over who will dominate one of the world’s most strategically vital waterways.

  • In many parts of Asia, Mr. Obama’s strategy of focusing on the region is still more of a slogan than an operational plan.

  • However, in this part of Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, he seems on the verge of the kind of progress Mr. Clinton could only imagine during that first visit, only 10 months before the Sept. 11 attacks changed America’s priorities.

  • The Chinese, who hindered U.S. efforts during the Vietnam War, are making things easier for the United States.

  • For years, the Communist Party leadership in Vietnam, headed by Nguyen PhuTrong, ignored Chinese activity off the country’s coast.

  • But in 2014, China placed a deep-sea drilling rig to explore for oil and gas right off Vietnam, and Mr. Trong, the party’s general secretary, could not even get his phone calls to Beijing returned.

  • Ahead of Mr. Obama’s visit, a parade of U.S. officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Daniel Russel, the State Department’s most senior Asia hand, have been showing up in Hanoi.

  • Their goal has been to get enough human rights guarantees from the Vietnamese to allow for the lifting of sanctions on arms sales to Vietnam and perhaps the return of U.S. military units to its shores for the first time since the chaotic helicopter evacuation from Saigon that is seared in American memory.

France looking to solve the Israel-Palestine issue (Register and Login to read Full News..)

:: Science and Technology ::

New research opens many possibilities

  • In a breakthrough, scientists have discovered a new form of light, which will impact our understanding of the fundamental nature of light.

  • One of the measurable characteristics of a beam of light is known as angular momentum.

  • Until now, however, it was thought that in all forms of light the angular momentum would be a multiple of Planck’s constant — the physical constant that sets the scale of quantum effects.

  • Now, researchers from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Physics and CRANN Institute have demonstrated a new form of light where the angular momentum of each photon (a particle of visible light) takes only half of this value.

  • In the 1830s, mathematician William Rowan Hamilton and physicist Humphrey Lloyd found that, upon passing through certain crystals, a ray of light became a hollow cylinder.

  • The team used this phenomenon to generate beams of light with a screw-like structure.

  • Analysing these beams within the theory of quantum mechanics they predicted that the angular momentum of the photon would be half-integer, and devised an experiment to test their prediction.

  • Using a specially constructed device they were able to measure the flow of angular momentum in a beam of light. They were also able, for the first time, to measure the variations in this flow caused by quantum effects.

  • The experiments showed a tiny shift, one-half of Planck’s constant, in the angular momentum of each photon.

  • Theoretical physicists since the 1980s have speculated how quantum mechanics works for particles that are free to move in only two of the three dimensions of space.

 

NASA led study found out contrast about Antarctica and Arctic ice cover (Register and Login to read Full News..)

:: Business and Economy ::

Benefits of lower prices will be extended to medium and long-term as well

  • The benefits of lower prices accrued through the e-bidding of power procurement will be extended to the medium- and long-term procurement as well, according to the government.

  • The details of short-term procurement through the Discovery of Efficient Electricity Price (DEEP) e-bidding portal were unveiled.

  • The process has resulted in substantial savings as the prices discovered through e-bidding are significantly lower than the prices at which power was procured during the similar period in the last year.

  • According to a statement issued by the Power Ministry, “the scope of this portal shall be further expanded soon to cover medium-term and long-term procurement of power.”

  • Four entities participated in the e-bid—the state governments of Kerala, Uttarakhand, and Bihar, and private sector company Torrent Power.

  • For Kerala, the lowest power price for May in slot of the day was Rs.3.14 per unit compared with the Rs.4.7 per unit price at which the state procured short-term power last year, according to the statement.

  • Uttarakhand saw a price of Rs.2.59 per unit for power for July on a round-the-clock basis through a reverse auction in the e-bidding process.

  • Last year, the lowest price at which the state’s distribution companies (discoms) purchased power in July was Rs.3.41 per unit.

  • Bihar got the lowest price of Rs.3.08 per unit for slot of the day for July. The state’s discoms did not buy any power during the last two years.

  • The e-bidding process of Torrent Power saw a lowest price of Rs.2.95 per unit in slot of the day for May-June.

  • The e-bidding portal was inaugurated by Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power, Coal, and New and Renewable Energy Piyush Goyal in April.

RBI governor says speeding up structural reforms is politically difficult (Register and Login to read Full News..)

:: Sports ::

Anurag Thakur appointed as BCCI chairperson

  • It took less than five minutes for Anurag Thakur to be formally elevated to the post of president from being the secretary of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

  • Thakur’s promotion, forced by the untimely resignation of Shashank Manohar on May 10, was confirmed a day before 22nd May’s special general meeting (SGM) since his was the only nomination filed for the post.

  • As a result, the SGM, chaired by Delhi’s C.K. Khanna, one of the five vice-presidents, unanimously elected Thakur as the president. That was followed by the BJP’s member of Parliament from Hamirpur, Himachal Pradesh, resigning as secretary.

  • Thakur, thus, became the sixth BCCI official to have been a secretary and president. The others are Anthony S. D’Mello, A.N. Ghose, S. Sriraman, Ranbir Singh Mahendra and N. Srinivasan.

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Sources: Various News Papers & PIB

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