Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 10 October 2014

National

PM Modi warns Pakistan

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi said Indian soldiers had responded with courage to ceasefire violations by Pakistan while Defence Minister Arun Jaitley called Pakistan the “aggressor” which would have to bear an “unaffordable” cost for its “adventurism.”
• “The enemy has realised that times have changed and their old habits will not be tolerated,” Mr. Modi said. Mr. Modi accused his political opponents of using the border situation for electoral gains.
• “Issues like ceasefire violations should not be a matter of debate for political gains.” Giving Pakistan a stern warning, Mr. Jaitley said Pakistan has “clearly been the aggressor.”
• “But it must realise that our deterrence will be credible. If Pakistan persists with this adventurism, our forces will make the cost of this adventurism unaffordable.”
• Senior officials said Pakistan Rangers targeted 60 border outposts and over 80 villages in fresh mortar shelling and firing in Jammu, Samba and Kathua districts along the International Border, injuring three persons.
• Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khwaja Asif warned India that it was fully capable of responding to any aggression. “We don’t want to convert the border tension between two nuclear neighbours into a confrontation,” he said.

‘Hudhud’ will not be as intense as Phailin: IMD

• Severe cyclonic storm 'Hudhud' will not be as intense as 'Phailin' that had hit India's eastern coast exactly a year ago but the country's weather forecaster advised states - mainly Odisha and Andhra Pradesh - to remain as alert and prepared as they were in 2013.
• Just hours before Hudhud is expected to turn "very severe" from "severe", the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in its latest update said, "The system will continue to move west-northwestwards, intensify further into a very severe cyclonic storm during next 12 hours."
• Predicting wind speed of 145 kmph which will intensify to 155 kmph bringing "very heavy" to "extremely heavy" rainfall, it said Hudhud will cross north Andhra Pradesh coast around Visakhapatnam by the afternoon of October 12.
• Its wind speed will not be close to what the east coast had witnessed through Phailin which had touched 210 kmph in October 2013 and became the second-strongest tropical cyclone ever to make landfall in India. The country had witnessed its severest cyclone of all time in Odisha in 1999.

Jayalalithaa moves Supreme Court challenging HC order

• Thirteen days after entering the Parappana Agrahara prison in Bangalore, three-time former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa moved the Supreme Court challenging the October 7 Karnataka High Court order refusing to suspend the execution of her sentence and grant bail in a disproportionate assets case.
• Ms. Jayalalithaa, who was Tamil Nadu Chief Minister at the time of her conviction, was sentenced to four years’ simple imprisonment and ordered to pay a fine of Rs. 100 crore for offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act. Her co-accused — Sasikala Natarajan, V. Sudhakaran and J. Elavarasi — were sentenced to four years’ imprisonment and a fine of Rs. 10 crore each.
• The special leave petition was filed by her legal team in the Supreme Court Registry during the evening after hectic preparations which went on through the day.
• Lawyers of Ms. Jayalalithaa said the petition sought relief from incarceration on the grounds that she is a woman, 66-years old and suffering from ailments.

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Persons in news

Veteran journalist M.V. Kamath passes away

• Veteran journalist M.V. Kamath passed away after a brief illness. He was 93. “He died of cardiac arrest at 7.30 a.m.,” said M. Dayananda, Medical Superintendent and COO of Kasturba Hospital.
• The last rites were held at the Beedinagudde crematorium in Udupi in the evening. Jairam Kamath and Rajaram Kamath, nephews of Kamath; Vinay Kumar Sorake, Minister for Urban Development; and S.S. Pattanashetti, Deputy Commissioner, were present.
• “In his death, Manipal University has lost a treasure,” said Ramdas M. Pai, Chancellor of the university. “He was greatly responsible for the growth of the School of Communication, which is today among the best communication schools in the country. He will be missed by every single student and faculty alike,” Dr. Pai added.
• A Padma Bhushan recipient, Kamath had a long journalistic career. He served as the Editor of Free Press Bulletin, The Bharath Jyothi and as Editor-in-Charge of the Free Press Journal in succession, from 1950 to 55. He also worked as Special Correspondent of the Press Trust of India at the United Nations from 1955 to 1958.

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International

World’s oldest rock art discovered in Indonesia

• Australian scientists have found what could be the world’s oldest figurative art in a cave in Indonesia, a report released said.
• The team’s discovery of cave art on the island of Sulawesi, estimated to be about 40,000 years old, challenges the idea that the oldest artwork had originated in Spain and France, Xinhua reported.
• The team’s study dates the earliest image, a hand stencil, to be at least 39,900 years old, 900 years prior to the world’s oldest known cave painting, a red disc in Spain.
• The series of Indonesian images discovered also includes pig-like animals painted more than 35,400 years ago, possibly older than the earliest known figurative rock art in western Europe - a painted rhinoceros in France, estimated to be between 35,300 and 38,800 years old.
• The report said the sheer volume of ancient cave art in Europe had pointed to the theory that the human capacity for abstract thinking originated there, but the new discovery makes the case that this development was occurring in Asia at the same time.

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Business & economy

IMF stresses labour reforms for India

• The global economy needs a new momentum and a bold policies agenda to avoid a “new mediocre” period of low and uneven growth as it continues to struggle with a disappointing recovery six years after the Lehman Brothers’ collapse triggered a financial crisis, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde said.
• Ms. Lagarde said the IMF was recommending country-specific infrastructure investments and structural reforms, including those for labour markets in emerging market economies such as India, as the imperatives for raising growth.
• It was a question of getting on with the job and doing it and not just talking about building infrastructure to push growth, Ms. Lagarde said at a press conference at the onset of the IMF’s annual meeting of members. Finance Secretary Arvind Mayaram is leading the Indian delegation to the meeting as Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is recovering from a surgery.

On India, Ms. Lagarde said India’s growth was better than expected.

• Earlier this month, Ms. Lagarde had in a speech at Georgetown University here said: “The global economy is at an inflection point: it can muddle along with sub-par growth — a ‘new mediocre’ — or it can aim for a better path where bold policies would accelerate growth, increase employment, and achieve a ‘new momentum.’”
GIF launched, to help India tackle infrastructure deficit
• World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, while launching the Global Infrastructure Facility (GIF), said the potential economic impact of the Ebola epidemic could be as high as $32.6 billion, if not quickly contained.
• The GIF is aimed at mobilising the private sector to help tackle the massive infrastructure deficit now facing developing countries and emerging markets such as India. The World Bank estimates that these countries need $1 trillion a year in extra investments through 2020 and with public purses stretched, it is significant that the heads of some of the world’s leading institutional investors such as insurance and pension funds will be signing up as partners in the GIF.
• Deep-pocketed institutional investors have $80 trillion in assets but less than a percentage of pension funds are allocated directly to infrastructure projects and the bulk of that is in advanced countries, Dr. Jim said.
• He said the GIF would address the challenge of finding “bankable projects” as investible resources were available with the private sector. This was in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking the World Bank’s technical support for the country’s infrastructure augmentation plans that he had raised in his meeting with Dr. Jim recently, the President said.

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Science & technology

Increased toilet coverage has a little health impact: study

• New evidence has raised troubling questions about India’s 25-year strategy of pushing people to use toilets as a way to improve health.
• In a paper published in the medical journal Lancet, researchers led by Thomas Clasen of the U.S.-based Emory University found that increased toilet coverage did not lead to any significant improvements in the occurrence of child diarrhoea, prevalence of parasitic worm infections, child stunting or child mortality.
• For their study, Dr. Clasen and his team looked at 50 villages in Odisha’s Puri district between May 2010 and December 2013, where the then Total Sanitation Campaign to build toilets was in effect, and 50 otherwise similar villages where the campaign had not yet started.
• One key possible explanation for the absence of a health impact, the researchers said, could be the patchy implementation of the scheme, and uneven rates of use of toilets — at the end of the study period, just 63 per cent of households in the villages where the scheme ran had any toilet, and two-thirds of this group reported a family member using the toilet. Usage was substantially lower among men than among women.

PSLV-C26 to launch navigation satellite on October 16

• A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, PSLV-C26, will lift off from the space centre at Sriharikota on October 16 at 1.32 a.m. to put a navigation satellite, Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System, IRNSS-1C, into orbit.
• The launch window opens at 1.32 a.m. and lasts till 1.47 a.m. The 1,425-kg satellite has already been integrated with the four-stage PSLV in the first launch pad and the final phase of checks is under way. The 67-hour countdown will begin at 06.32 a.m. on October 13.