Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 23 September 2014

Sports

India’s Olympic gold medalist Abhinav Bindra plans to leave full-time shooting after competing in his favourite 10m air rifle event in the Asian Games.
“Tomorrow will mark the end of my professional shooting life!,” “I will however still shoot, compete as a hobby shooter training twice a week.” Bindra, tweeted.
Despite giving up serious shooting, Bindra still hopes to qualify for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
Bindra, who won the gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this year, failed to make the final at the world championships in Spain.

Lieutenant General Rizwan Akhtar was appointed the new chief of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in commander-level promotions announced in the country’s powerful Army.
Announcement comes as current ISI chief Lt. Gen. Zaheerul Islam and five other lieutenant generals are scheduled to retire from service in the first week of October.
Lt. Gen. Akhtar is a graduate of the Command and Staff College in Quetta, National Defence University and the Army War College, U.S.

Myanmar gave citizenship to 209 Muslims displaced by sectarian violence, after the first phase of a project aimed at determining the status of about a million Rohingya whose claims to nationality have been rejected in the past.
Meanwhile Myanmar government’s chief negotiator said that efforts to secure a historic ceasefire agreement with ethnic armed groups are “at a crucial moment” at the start of a fresh round of negotiations
The Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine State need permission to move from their villages or from camps, where almost 140,000 remain after being displaced in deadly clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012.
Some of the 209 who received citizenship were members of the Kaman Muslim minority, who are recognised by the government as indigenous to Myanmar, but there were also Rohingya.

India will support the proposed international automatic exchange of tax and banking information that is expected to aid unearthing and retrieving black money stashed offshore.
Forty-six countries, including India, have agreed to set rolling by 2017 the automatic exchange of information on tax evaders.
At present, countries exchange information on the basis of requests and that too only on suspected tax evasion and other financial crimes.
The proposed global standard would facilitate a systematic and periodic transmission of bulk taxpayer information by the source country of income to the country of residence of the taxpayer.
The implementation of these standards by developing countries could also improve domestic tax compliance as substantial amount of data received from financial institutions by the tax administration could be used for domestic tax purposes also.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) submitted a confusing affidavit to the National Green Tribunal saying State governments in the Western Ghats region may, after undertaking demarcation of eco sensitive areas (ESA) by physical verification, propose the exclusion/inclusion of certain areas in the draft notification dated March 10, 2014.
This draft notification issued by MoEF was based on the ESA demarcated by the high-level working group (HLWG) headed by K. Kasturirangan.
Justice Swatanter Kumar of the NGT asked the counsel for the Ministry to take direction from secretary or additional secretary on the question of demarcating ESAs. He said that if Kerala had completed its demarcation of ESAs, then let it be finalized.

The test-firing of the engine on India's spacecraft to Mars for four seconds went off smoothly, boosting the hopes of ISRO engineers about the engine's performance on 24th when it will fire for 24 minutes to insert the Mars orbiter into the Red Planet's orbit.
The engine ignited after it had slumbered in space for 300 days during the spacecraft's voyage to the moon. The LAM engine was fired last on December 1, 2013 to catapult India's Mars orbiter from its earth-orbit into sun-centric orbit and its sojourn to Mars began.
The news about the confirmation of the success of the test-firing was received from the spacecraft after a time-delay of about 13 minutes, Mr. Kesava Raju, Mission Director said.