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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 04 June 2014

Road safety in India

Every four minutes a life is lost in a road accident in India with 1,40,000 deaths recorded in 2012 alone. In the past decade, over a million people have lost their lives in road accidents in the country and over 5 million have been left seriously injured or permanently disabled.
According to Save LIFE Foundation, an advocacy group which aims to reduce the high number of road accident deaths in India through rapid emergency care for injured victims, “road safety has been a victim of India’s policy paralysis since 2001”.
The World Health Organization 2013 Global Status Report on Road Safety indicates that worldwide the total number of road traffic deaths remain unacceptably high at 1.24 million per year.
Only 28 countries, covering 7 per cent of the world’s population, have comprehensive road safety laws on five key risk factors: drinking and driving, speeding, and failing to use motorcycle helmets, seat-belts, and child restraints.
For India, the report notes the rising fatalities in road accidents – rising from 8 deaths per lakh of population to nearly 12 in 2010. Sixteen per cent of all such deaths occur in four wheeled cars and 32 per cent in two or three wheelers.

Astronomers have discovered the “Godzilla” of all Earths – a new type of rocky planet that weighs 17 times as much as our planet and is more than twice as large in size, a surprising find that could change scientists’ understanding of the origins of the universe.
The newly found mega-Earth, Kepler-10c, circles a Sun-like star once every 45 days. It is located about 560 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco. Theorists believed such a world could not form because anything so hefty would grab hydrogen gas as it grew and become a Jupiter-like gas giant. This planet, though, is all solid and much bigger than previously discovered “super-Earths,” making it a “mega-Earth.”
Kepler-10c was originally spotted by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Kepler-10c was known to have a diameter of about 18,000 miles, 2.3 times as large as Earth. This suggested it fell into a category of planets known as mini-Neptunes, which have thick, gaseous envelopes. The team used the HARPS-North instrument on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) in the Canary Islands to measure the mass of Kepler-10c. They found that it weighed 17 times as much as Earth – far more than expected. This showed that Kepler-10c must have a dense composition of rocks and other solids.

The path breaking clean energy policy unveiled by the Obama administration would put the US at a disadvantage against countries like India and China, top US lawmakers and policy advocacy groups have said.
The US Environmental Protection agency has announced to cut carbon emission from existing power plants, which is the single largest source of carbon pollution in the US, by 30 per cent by the year 2030.
It also announced to cut by 2030 particle pollution, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide by more than 25 per cent as a co-benefit.
The White House described this as American leadership to the world.
But Republicans and many others are not willing to buy the argument, according to whom such a policy would put the United States at an disadvantage against countries like India and China.
The United Mine Workers of America international president Cecil E Roberts alleged that the proposed rule issued by the Environmental Protection Agency will lead to long-term and irreversible job losses for thousands of coal miners, electrical workers, utility workers, boilermakers, railroad workers and others without achieving any significant reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions.

The cabinet of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy has approved a proposal for emergency legislation that allows King Juan Carlos to abdicate and hand over his duties to Crown Prince Felipe.
The proposal will be fast—tracked by the Spanish Parliament and is expected to pass easily because Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party has the majority of seats and the leading opposition Socialist Party also supports the legislation.
Jesus Posada, who leads the Parliament’s lower house, predicted the law will take effect by June 18, meaning Prince Felipe would be proclaimed king before lawmakers shortly after that.
Juan Carlos is widely respected for leading Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy and staring down a 1981 coup attempt, but was hit hard by royal scandals over the last several years.

JP Morgan downgraded Reliance Industries Ltd to "neutral" from "overweight", saying share prices already reflect positive catalysts even as fundamentals remain on "a solid footing".
Reliance Industries' strategy of organic growth in core businesses is very much positive and there is a belief that the current share price already reflects the positive catalysts that were identified in our upgrade in 4Q CY13.

Maria Sharapova battled into her fourth successive French Open semi-final and fifth of her career with a 1-6, 7-5, 6-1 win over rising Spaniard Garbine Muguruza recently.
The seventh-seeded Russian, who was the 2012 champion and runner-up to Serena Williams last year, goes on to face Canada’s Eugenie Bouchard for a place soon.
But the four-time major winner and former world number one was given a fright by the 20-year-old Muguruza who had knocked out Serena in the second round.