Weekly Current Affairs Update for IAS Exam VOL-2 (9th December 2013 TO 15th December 2013)

Weekly Current Affairs Update for IAS Exam

VOL - 2 (9th December 2013 TO 15th December 2013)

Issue : VOL - 2 (9th December 2013 TO 15th December 2013)

File Type: PDF ONLY "NO HARD COPY"

Covered Topics:

 

NATIONAL EVENTS

Lalu Prasad granted bail

  • After spending two months behind bars following his conviction in a fodder scam case, RJD chief Lalu Prasad was granted bail by the Supreme Court, on the ground of parity with other convicts.
  • A Bench of Chief Justice of India P Sathasivam and Justice Ranjan Gogoi allowed the bail plea after underlining that more than two dozens similarly-placed convicts had been released on bail by the Patna High Court.
  • The court pointed out that the former Bihar CM had spent almost a year of his five-year sentence during the pendency of the trial. The Bench left it to the trial court to decide the bail bonds, sureties and other such conditions to be imposed on the former Member of Parliament.
  • Lalu, who lost his membership of Parliament after being convicted, had submitted that out of the 44 persons convicted along with him in the case, 37 have been granted bail and no one's, except his bail plea has been rejected.

Impact of NOTA

  • Political parties have chosen to remain indifferent to ‘None of the Above’ (NOTA), an option given to voters for the first time to reject all contestants, saying it is irrelevant because it did not impact the outcome of the recent Assembly elections.
  • While in Chhattisgarh, 3.07 per cent of the valid votes went to NOTA — the highest among the four States for which results were declared — in Delhi, it was 0.63 per cent.
  • Voters in Mizoram did not find the option interesting: very few exercised the choice, with figures ranging from 36 to less than 200 hits.
  • In Chhattisgarh even a marginal difference, of less than 0.75 per cent between the winning Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress came at a high price.
  • The NOTA’s figures in the Left Wing Extremists-dominated areas of Bastar may as well be an expression of disenchantment with electoral politics, as espoused by the Maoists, as it may be an individual voter’s dislike for the candidates in fray in places like Chitrakot, where more than 10,000 voters chose the option.

INTERNATIONAL

Bill of digital rights

  • Over 500 leading authors across the world, including five Nobel laureates, signed an open letter challenging the global mass surveillance of Internet and telephone communications by the U.S. National Security Agency, describing the Agency’s snooping as a “theft” of data and a force undermining democratic principles most recently.
  • Hailing from 81 different nations the authors, including Margaret Atwood, J.M. Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk, and Günter Grass called on the U.N. to create an international “bill of digital rights” that would enshrine the protection of civil rights in the Internet age.
  • They argued that the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people’s digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.
  • The signatories comprised 22 Indian authors including Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Girish Karnad, Jeet Thayil, Mukul Kesavan, Ramchandra Guha, Tishani Doshi, Salil Tripathi and Suketu Mehta.
  • Following revelations since June 2013 by former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden on the extent of surveillance across multiple nations, the authors’ letter comes a day after the chief executives of leading tech firms such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft urged for sweeping changes to surveillance programmes to stop the erosion of public trust.

INDIA AND THE WORLD

India-US row

  • The arrest of an Indian diplomat amid claims she had lied on a visa form for her domestic worker has turned into a major row between Washington and Delhi with India’s national security adviser calling her treatment “despicable and barbaric”.
  • India summoned the US ambassador and announced that it was withdrawing a series of diplomatic privileges to US officials. It also reopened a road that runs past the US embassy in Delhi but which for several years has been blocked off for security reasons. Several Indian officials declined to meet with members of a visiting US delegation.
  • India has reacted with fury to the way its official has been treated, saying Indian diplomats living abroad have for years taken their domestic workers with them and that host governments have had few problems with the issue.
  • Ms Richard’s Indian passport was subsequently revoked and she and her family were taken into custody. Subsequent to that, the US authorities have been investigating the circumstances in which she arrived in New York.
  • A senior member of India’s main opposition party said India should arrest gay partners of US diplomats living in India.

ECONOMY

Heavy penalty for insider trading

  • The International Advisory Board (IAB) of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), suggested heavy penalty besides ‘naming and shaming’ to deal with insider trading and other offences in the securities market.
  • The IAB also suggested that the market regulator should publicize major insider trading cases in a separate section on the SEBI website for easier access and encourage an effective whistle blowing framework in the securities market by ensuring adequate legal protection of whistle blowers.
  • The IAB, while deliberating on the formula-based determination of consent mechanism, suggested judgmental variations in consent amount on a case-to-case basis so as to make it effectively deterrent in nature.
  • On real estate investment trusts (REITs), the IAB suggested for the gradual expansion of REITs to include retail investments and a separate framework for infrastructure investment trusts.

SCIENCE AND TECH

Mars craft course

  • ISRO did the first of its four small, planned course corrections on the Mars-bound Indian spacecraft at dawn.
  • The spacecraft, ejected from the earth’s orbit on December 1, was said to be cruising some 23 lakh km away from earth.
  • Controllers of its various systems met at tracking centre ISTRAC in the evening to take stock of its situation and plan the operation, called trajectory correction man oeuvre (TCM). Team ISRO calls it fine-tuning of its course.
  • India became the first Asian country and the fourth nation in the world to leap into the interplanetary space with its Rs.450-crore exploratory mission to Mars, about 400-million km (250 million miles) from earth.
  • So far, only Russia, US and the European Space Agency (ESA) have undertaken such missions to Mars.

SPORTS

ICC's Hall of Fame

  • Pakistan's pace bowling great Waqar Younis and former Australian wicket-keeper Adam Gilchrist were inducted into cricket's Hall of Fame.
  • Waqar joins Hanif Mohammad and former team-mates Imran Khan, Javed Miandad and Wasim Akram as the Pakistanis in the exclusive club. Gilchrist will be the 19th Australian male inductee.
  • Waqar claimed 373 wickets in 87 Tests and 416 wickets in 262 one-day internationals before retiring after the 2003 World Cup. He now works as a television commentator.

IOA amends constitution

  • IOA’s amended clause clearly states that where charges have been framed by any court in India, in respect of an offence which is of serious nature under Indian Penal Code/ Prevention of Corruption Act in which punishment of imprisonment of more than 2 years is prescribed then the member/office bearer/member of executive council of IOA will resign immediately and if not they will be provisionally suspended and will not be eligible to contest in elections and the case will be referred to IOA Ethics Commission for further guidance.
  • The House unanimously decided to amend the relevant clause in IOA constitution which would bar charge-framed persons from contesting elections.

IN THE NEWS (PERSONS)

Michelle Bachelet

  • Chile's once and future President Michelle Bachelet won runoff election after promising profound changes in society in response to years of street protests.
  • With 90 percent of the votes counted, Bachelet had an unbeatable 62 percent to 38 percent for the center-right's Evelyn Matthei, who conceded defeat.
  • A moderate socialist, Bachelet served as president in 2006-2010, then ran the United Nation's women's agency from New York as her successor, conservative Sebastian Pinera, was confronted with widespread demonstrations for change.
  • She has a new center-left coalition and promises to finance education with higher corporate taxes, reduce the wealth gap, protect the environment and reform the constitution.

Selected Editorials of Importance

Managing Modi and Moody’s

Faced with the impending reality of a general election and the difficulty in adhering to fiscal targets to avert a global credit rating downgrade, the Centre has come up with a familiar ‘solution’: window-dressing. Last week, it announced a Rs 7,200-crore package to enable sugar mills to clear cane payment arrears to farmers. However, this money — equal to their total excise liability over the last three sugar seasons — will not be disbursed through the exchequer. It will, instead, be lent out by banks. The Centre has promised to meet the interest burden of up to 12 per cent on these loans. It is a stratagem that leaves almost everyone happy. The Centre gets to earn brownie points for ensuring discharge of growers’ dues without ostensibly incurring much fiscal cost; the banks earn 12 per cent on loans that are backed by Central guarantee; and it hardly needs to be explained why the mills and the farmers aren’t unhappy.

A similar approach has been adopted for fertiliser. The Union Budget for the current fiscal had allocated Rs 65,971.53 crore towards fertiliser subsidy. This amount is already exhausted thanks to the policy of keeping urea prices unchanged and forcing companies to reduce farmgate prices of even ‘decontrolled’ non-urea fertilisers. But rather than providing for additional subsidy via supplementary demand for grants, the Centre has got banks to extend 60-day bridge loans to the cash-strapped industry. It has agreed to bear 8 per cent of the total 10.7 per cent interest cost on these loans to firms against future subsidy receivables. Until now, a sum of Rs 15,500 crore has been approved under this ‘special banking arrangement’. Just as in sugar, this stratagem will impose no explicit fiscal costs, apart from the interest subvention on the monies borrowed by the companies.

Such schemes may seem like an effective way of addressing the challenges posed by politics (Narendra Modi) and rating agencies (Moody’s). But at the end of the day, such expediency, which is essentially an attempt to window-dress accounts, will not convince anybody. In the past, the Centre had issued special bonds in lieu of paying subsidy in cash to fertiliser firms, oil marketing companies and the Food Corporation of India. In his 2010-11 Budget speech, former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had promised to stop issuing such bonds and bring “all subsidy related liabilities (directly) into our fiscal accounting”. The current Finance Minister could do well to honour the spirit of this commitment and refrain from replacing bonds with ‘special banking arrangements’. Postponing payment obligations is hardly the way to address fiscal problems.

(Courtesy: Business Line)

MCQs

:: NATIONAL ::

Q1.

i) Feminization of poverty refers to women representing a disproportionate share of the world’s poor.
ii) It was Delhi that polled the largest number of ‘none of the above’ (NOTA) votes — an option available for the first time to voters to reject all the candidates.

Which of the above statement/statements is/are true?

a) Only i
b) Only ii
c) Both i and ii
d) Neither i nor ii

Q2.

i) The Supreme Court issued an order that red beacon lights without flashers would be used on the vehicles of only high constitutional functionaries and blue beacon lights will be used only on emergency services and police.
ii) The apex court bench was headed by Justice Ranjan Gogoi.

Which of the above statement/statements is/are true?

a) Only i
b) Only ii
c) Both i and ii
d) Neither i nor ii

Q3.

i) A marathon 'run for unity' was organised by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) across the country in honor of Mahatma Gandhi.
ii) The revised Code of Conduct for Ministers (both Union and States)has a new provision as per which Ministers cannot force civil servants to take decisions that may be in conflict with their duties and responsibilities.

Which of the above statement/statements is/are true?

a) only i
b) only ii
c) both i and ii
d) neither i nor ii
 

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