Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 06 October 2014

National

India along with five nations to build world's largest telescope

• India along with Japan, the US, China and Canada will start work on the world’s biggest telescope on Hawaii Island that will enable to identify an object as small as coin from a distance of 500 kms.
• The 30-meter telescope will be established near the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano with a cost of $1.4 billion.
• The construction is expected to be completed by March 2022. Japan is expected to cover about a quarter of the construction costs.
• To mark the start of construction, 100 astronomers and officials from the five countries are scheduled to attend a ceremony on October 7 at a location 4,012 meters high on Mount Mauna Kea.
• The telescope will be larger than Japan’s Subaru Telescope, one of the world’s biggest, which was also built on the summit of Mauna Kea and started observation in 1999.
• The Subaru Telescope’s single main mirror measures 8.2 meters in diameter, while the new telescope will be composed of 492 hexagonal mirrors, each measuring 72 cm across.
• The telescope’s light-condensing capabilities will be 13 times greater than the Subaru telescope’s, enabling the identification of an object as small as a coin from a distance equivalent to 500 kms.

Persons in news

Nobel Prize 2014 winners in medicine

• U.S.-British scientist John O’Keefe and Norwegian married couple May—Britt Moser and Edvard Moser won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering the brain’s positioning system.
• This “inner GPS” helps explain how the brain creates “a map of the space surrounding us and how we can navigate our way through a complex environment,” the Nobel Assembly said.
• The Nobel awards in physics, chemistry, literature and peace will be announced later this week. The economics prize will be announced soon.
Dilma Rousseff to face Neves in election runoff
• Brazil’s unpredictable election took another twist, with left-leaning President Dilma Rousseff being forced into a runoff race as expected, but against a centre-right challenger who only surged in the final week of the campaign.
• Ms. Rousseff will face Aecio Neves in the Oct. 26 runoff vote, required as no single candidate won an outright majority. With over 99 per cent of the vote counted, the President had won 41.5 per cent against Mr. Neves’ 33.6 per cent.
• As surprising as Mr. Neves’ rise was the fall from grace of another candidate, former Environment Minister Marina Silva, who took just 21 per cent of the vote. In late August, she held a double-digit lead over Ms. Rousseff in polls after being thrust into the race when her Socialist Party’s first candidate died in a plane crash.
• But over the past three weeks, the powerful political machine of Ms. Rousseff’s Workers’ Party eviscerated Ms. Silva with what some analysts called the most negative and aggressive campaigning Brazil has seen since returning to democracy nearly 30 years ago. Ms. Silva fell hard in polls and could never regain her footing or get her message out.

International

IS progress toward Syrian town slowed by fresh strikes

• Kurdish fighters backed by U.S.-led air strikes battled Islamic State (IS) jihadists for control of a key Syrian town and Turkey evacuated some border areas as mortar fire spilled over.
• IS fighters seized part of a strategic hill overlooking the town of Kobane, a monitor said, but their progress was slowed by new strikes from the coalition of Washington and Arab allies.
• A Syrian Kurdish official said IS fighters were just one km from Kobane and air strikes are not enough on their own to stop them.
• The dusty border town has become a crucial battleground in the international fight against IS, which sparked further outrage this weekend with the release of a video showing the beheading of Briton Alan Henning.

Underwater search for Malaysian airliner (Register and Login to read Full News..)

Sports

Djokovic wins China Open again

• World No. 1 Novak Djokovic crushed Tomas Berdych 6-0, 6-2 Sunday to win the China Open and maintain a remarkable 100 per cent record in the Beijing tournament.
• Meanwhile, French Open champion Maria Sharapova was forced to battle hard to overcome Petra Kvitova 6-4, 2-6, 6-3 in the women’s final — a victory which moves her into second place in the rankings.
• Serb Djokovic was 5-0 ahead in the second set, one game from serving up an incredible “double bagel” as he tore through his Czech opponent with a brilliant serving display.

Business & Economy

Oil PSUs set for a big change

• Under-recoveries (losses incurred on selling regulated fuels like diesel, LPG and kerosene below their cost prices) on petroleum products are expected to decline by over 50 per cent over the next 2 years from 2013-14 levels due to decline in crude oil prices as well as ongoing efforts to move towards market-linked diesel prices. This will have a significant positive impact on the profitability of oil PSUs and the exchequer as well.
• CRISIL Research believes that international crude oil prices and thereby petroleum product prices will slip by 8-10 per cent over the next two years to about $100 per barrel in 2015 from an average of $109 per barrel in 2013, barring any major geo-political events, fuelled by supply glut, waning demand growth and increased use of cleaner fuels.
• While crude oil output from Iraq, Iran and North America will increase, global demand is expected to be impacted by weak consumption. The tepid consumption growth will be on account of better efficiencies and a shift towards natural gas in developed regions like North America and Europe, as well as relatively slower increase in demand from developing countries such as China and Indonesia because of reduction in subsidies and slower economic growth.