Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 27 June 2015

Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 27 June 2015

The emerging market BRICS nations will have their own development bank by the end of the year, South Africa said on Saturday.
The BRICS nations -- Brazil, Russia, India,China and South Africa -- which represent 40% of the world's population and a quarter of its economic output, decided in 2013 to create their own development bank to step up lending for the infrastructure projects needed to close the gap with the industrialised world.
The bank, which will be headquartered in Shanghai, is expected to have up to USD 100 billion in capital.
The inaugural meeting of the board of governors of the New Development Bank will be held in the Russian city of Ufa on July 7 to confirm the appointment of the management of the lender.
Maasdorp, who heads up southern African operations for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, was formerly an advisor to the current head of South Africa's central bank, Tito Mboweni, and supervised the government's privatisation programme from 1999 to 2002.

An EU deal to relocate 40,000 migrants from Italy and Greece could be “counter-productive” by encouraging more people to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean in smugglers’ boats, David Cameron has warned.
The deal was agreed in the early hours of yesterday morning after a fractious meeting during which Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi accused some counterparts of lacking “solidarity” because of their unwillingness to accept mandatory quotas of migrants.
The EU also agreed to resettle 20,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq.
It emerged that the expansion of the UK’s contribution to these schemes will see more than 1,000 people resettled in the country annually — expected to include around 800 Syrians over a three-year period.
Mr Cameron said Europe’s focus should not be on dispersing the migrants who cross the Mediterranean illegally, but discouraging them from making the journey in the first place.
Britain was able to avoid involvement because of a “robust” opt-out on EU home affairs issues.

Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Friday said the government will hold the tenth round of auctions for oil and gas blocks under the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) in the current fiscal.
The auction, which will be held almost four years after the ninth round received a lukewarm response in 2010-11, is expected to bring in investments and boost domestic production.
The open acreage system will enable bidders to bid for blocks on offer at any time of the year, and data for these blocks would be made available to the bidders through the National Data Repository.
“In NELP-X, there will be three major thrust areas. There are some issues with the current production sharing model. CAG has also made some observations,”.

NASA is sending Microsoft’s virtual reality headset to the International Space Station (ISS) to beam back to the Earth what astronauts see in space.
NASA and Microsoft are teaming up to develop Sidekick, a new project using commercial technology to empower astronauts aboard the ISS.
A pair of the tech giant’s devices called HoloLens is scheduled to launch on SpaceX’s seventh commercial resupply mission to the station on June 28.
“HoloLens and other virtual and mixed reality devices are cutting-edge technologies that could help drive future exploration and provide new capabilities to the men and women conducting critical science on the International Space Station,” said Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS programme at the NASA Headquarters in Washington.
The goal of Sidekick is to enable station crews with assistance when and where they need it.
This new capability could reduce crew training requirements and increase work efficiency in space.
Sidekick has two modes of operation. The first is “Remote Expert Mode”, which uses Skype to allow a ground operator to see what a crew member sees, provide real-time guidance and draw annotations into the crew member’s environment to coach him or her through a task.