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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 03 March 2022

::NATIONAL::

Dera chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim, who is serving a 20-year jail term, was brought back to Sunaria jail in Rohtak after his 21-day furlough ended.

About Furlough:

In legal terms, it refers to granting leave of absence for a specified time period to a convict from the prison.
While Parole is granted for the prisoner to meet a specific exigency; furlough may be granted after a stipulated number of years have been served, without any reason.
Condition for granting of it vary from state to state because prisons is State subject under theState List of the 7th Schedule of Constitution.
It is not a legal right of the prisoner.
Its main objective is to break the monotony of imprisonment and to enable the convict to integrated integration with society.

The Gujarat Forest department has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based photo-identification software, specially designed to distinguish patterns/marks to identify Asiatic lions individually.

About:

The software is named SIMBA (Software with Intelligence Marking Based identification of Asiatic lions.)
According to the forest department, computer-assisted photo-identification is a helpful tool for understanding population demographics and expanding conservation and management efforts.
The persistent identification of individuals significantly enhances conservation and management efforts and ecological aspects of the species.
The SIMBA works with a deep machine learning technique that matches a point-pattern for pairwise comparisons and that automates the individual identification.
The software also extracts the uniqueness from the photograph and can cluster similar patterns.

Nepal’s House of Representatives passed by voice vote the Millennium Challenge Corporation Nepal Compact, a $500 million grant from the US to build power and road infrastructure projects.

About:

The biggest American financial pledge to Nepal so far, it was signed more than four years ago, but ratification was delayed by criticism that it undermined Nepal’s sovereignty.
The deal was ultimately approved with a note stating that it has no military or security component and nothing to do with the US strategy in the Indo-Pacific — and that Nepal would be free to pull out if the US violated this understanding.
The MCC is a bilateral United States foreign aid agency established by the US Congress in 2004.
It is an independent agency separate from the State Department and USAID.

The island nation of Madagascar is shoring up for its fourth tropical cyclone in a month, UN aid agencies warned as they outlined plans to help the authorities assist the most vulnerable.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has been noted that, it is the typhoon season in the Indian Ocean, it is rare to see four storms hitting the same country in the space of four weeks.

About:

It is an island country located in Indian ocean off the coast of southern Africa. It is also the world's fifth largest island.
Shares maritime borders with Comoros, France (Mayotte and Reunion), Mauritius,Mozambique and Seychelles.
Separated from the African continent by Mozambique Channel.

Geographical features:

Climate is tropical along the coast, temperate inland, and aridin the south.
With over 250 islands it is home to world’s largest coral reef systems and most extensive mangrove areas in the WesternIndian Ocean.

National Logistics Portal (NLP) is set to be integrated with Unified Logistics Interface Platform (ULIP) to make the multi-modal logistics ecosystem more efficient.

About:

Established ULIP aims to ensure ease of trading in international and domestic markets linking all the stakeholders of EXIM, domestic trade and movement etc. on a single platform.
ULIPbrings all mode of transportation under a single window by connecting all logistics stakeholders spread across multiple ministries, associations.
Objective is to bring down the logistics cost which is currently at 13-14% of GDP.
It has 3 key components –

A Large Area Soft X-ray Spectrometer (CLASS), a payload on-board Chandrayaan-2 Orbiter, has detected solar proton events (SPEs) which significantly increase radiation exposure to humans in space.

About:

The ISRO observation has said, such multi-point observations help us understand the propagation and its impact on different planetary systems.
When the Sun is active, spectacular eruptions called solar flares occur that sometimes also spew out energetic particles (called Solar Proton Events or SPEs) into interplanetary space.
Most of these are high energy protons that impact space systems and significantly increase radiation exposure to humans in space.
They can cause ionisation on large scales in Earth’s middle atmosphere.