Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 19 June 2018

International

Trumps orders Pentagon to create US 'space force'

• President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to create a new US "space force," which would become the sixth branch of the American military and would ensure "American dominance" in space.

• When it comes to defending America it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space." Details about the role and timing of the space force were not immediately clear.

• Trump's comments came at the start of the third meeting of the National Space Council, an advisory body led by Vice-President Mike Pence.

UNSC non-permanent seat: India voted against Maldives, ensured it lost

• Indonesia trumped Male's bid for the Asia-Pacific seat by an overwhelming margin

• Maldives got support from only 46 countries in the secret ballot voting on June 8 against 144 for Indonesia

• India's step is being seen as a punitive action against Maldives President Yameen for undermining India's security interests in the region

US unveils world’s most powerful supercomputer

• US scientists have unveiled the world’s most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer that can complete over 2,00,000 trillion calculations per second — providing unprecedented computing power for research in energy, advanced materials and artificial intelligence (AI).

• The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) supercomputer called Summit will be eight times more powerful than its previous top-ranked system

• The IBM AC922 system consists of 4,608 compute servers, each containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators, interconnected with dual-rail Mellanox EDR 100 Gb/s InfiniBand.

• Summit also possesses over 10 petabytes of memory paired with fast, high-bandwidth pathways for data movement. The combination of cutting-edge hardware and robust data subsystems marks an evolution of the hybrid CPU-GPU architecture successfully pioneered by Titan in 2012.

India and world

India, Pak should fulfil obligations under international human rights law: Amnesty

• Lauding the first ever UN report on alleged human rights violation in Kashmir and Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), Amnesty International India.

• The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released its first ever report on alleged human rights violation in Kashmir and Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) and demanded an international probe into it, evoking a sharp reaction from India which termed the document as "fallacious and motivated".

• Amnesty International India said that report reaffirmed the demands of various domestic and international human rights organisations for Indian and Pakistani authorities to deliver justice for past and ongoing human rights abuses.

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National

Bjp president says Northeast emerging as the biggest contributor to India’s GDP

• BJP president Amit Shah slammed the Congress for reducing the Northeast to the “lowest level of development” and said north eastern states would soon be the biggest contributor to the nation’s GDP due to “visionary policies” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

• “At the time of independence, the North East had a very high growth rate but the region, which was mostly ruled by Congress, was reduced to the lowest level of development”, Shah said after laying the foundation stone here of 19 cancer care hospitals in the state in partnership with the Tata Trust.

• The Prime Minister has always regarded the North East as the ‘astalakshmi’ (eight aspects of goddess Laxmi) and given prime importance to its development by focussing on road and rail connectivity, IT connectivity energy, industrial development and education facilities”.

ED summons Nalini Chidambaram again in Saradha ponzi scheme case

• The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has issued fresh summons to Nalini Chidambaram, wife of former finance minister P Chidambaram, in connection with its money laundering probe into the Saradha ponzi scam.

• In her appeal, Nalini, a senior advocate, has challenged the April 24 order of Justice SM Subramaniam dismissing her petition against the ED’s summons asking her to appear as a witness in its money laundering probe in the Saradha chit fund scam case.

• The agency, they said, wants to record her statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) with regard to a specific link of her in this case.

• She had earlier been questioned by the ED and CBI in this regard but agency sources had claimed that she was being summoned in the “light of new evidence”.

• Nalini’s son Karti is already being investigated by the ED in two separate money laundering cases of the Aircel-Maxis deal and the INX Media case and he has been questioned multiple times by the agency in context of these cases.

Sports

Germany, Brazil setbacks have stirred FIFA World Cup 2018 into life, writes Bhaichung Bhutia

• The world champions lost and the neutrals’ favourites were ‘Swiss-knifed.’ The World Cup came alive on Sunday but not in the manner most expected.

• The way Mexico surprised Germany will be talked about long after the carnival ends in Russia. Being meticulous is a way of life for Germans and it influences how they run football.

• Mexico beat them on speed, stamina, technique and concentration. They made Germany look ponderous by overrunning them in midfield.

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