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Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 15 September 2014

National

Technological and procedural delays in identifying the intended beneficiaries of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) has seen the agencies involved — the Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD), the Electronics Corporation of India Limited (ECIL), the nodal agency to provide enumeration devices and data entry operators, and state officials -- indulge in a blame game.
For the Socio-Economic Caste Census survey, proposed as the basis of the identification process, enumerators used scanned images of handwritten data from the National Population Register (NPR) to verify household members’ basic details.
They were accompanied by data entry operators (DEOs) who entered the responses into a tablet computer.

Union Minister Uma Bharti reiterated her commitment to clean river Ganga and promised to do so in three years while asserting that she would not entertain any questions in this regard before the task was achieved.
She congratulated the teachers who were felicitated in the programme, and asked all teachers to become ‘real gurus’ and students to become better human beings rather than grow professionally. — PTI

The Law Commission of India has asked the Narendra Modi government to amend provisions in a pre-Independence law dealing with property succession in Christian families, saying the statute gives “preferential approach to men and is unfair and unjust to Christian women.”
Noting that Christianity is the third largest religion in India, the Law Commission headed by Justice A.P. Shah said Sections in the Indian Succession Act, 1925 “weave an archaic principle of giving superior status to man in access to and owning property.”
The 247th Law Commission report specifically focuses on the impact caused by Sections 42 to 46 of the 1925 Act on Christian women and mothers.

Eminent educationist and former education adviser to the Union government Kireet Joshi passed away after battling cancer. He was 83.
Mr. Joshi was selected for the Indian Administrative Services in 1955 and posted as Assistant Collector of Surat, Gujarat in 1956.
However, he resigned his job the same year in order to study and practise the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo at Puducherry. He was appointed as the Registrar of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in 1958.
In 1976 the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi appointed him as the educational adviser to the Government of India.
He was instrumental in redesigning and redrafting of the Bill for Vishwa Bharati University, Shantiniketan.
He is also credited with seeding the idea of the Indira Gandhi National Open University as also of Pondicherry University.
In 1981 Mr. Joshi was appointed Secretary of Auroville International Advisory Council.
He served as the Educational Adviser to the Gujarat Chief Minister from 2008 to 2010.

Swedish voters headed to the polls in general elections with the Social Democrats poised to reclaim power after eight years in opposition and the far right expected to make historic gains.
The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats could double their seats in Parliament, as a growing proportion of the nation of 10 million express frustration with an accelerating influx of refugees.
If opinion polls prove right, Stefan Loefven, the stocky leader of the Social Democrats, looks set to become the next Prime Minister, although he could win by just a slim margin.

A single mother, people who have been married before and couples who have been living together ‘in sin’ were married by Pope Francis in a taboo-challenging ceremony at the Vatican.
In another signal of the openness of his papacy, Pope Francis asked to marry 40 people from different social backgrounds who would be a realistic sample of modern couples.
Popes very rarely perform marriages — the last one was in 2000. One of the couples was single mother Gabriella and her partner Guido, whose previous marriage was annulled by an ecclesiastical tribunal.
The last time a Pope performed a marriage was under the leadership of John Paul II in 2000, and before that in 1994. It comes three weeks before a major synod of the Catholic Church will discuss the divisive issues of marriage, divorce and conception.

Japanese actress and singer Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi, who was nearly executed in China at the end of World War II, has died at the age of 94 after a life as dramatic as any of her films.
Yamaguchi, who was born to Japanese parents in pre-war Manchuria, where her father worked for the railway, entertained Chinese and Japanese audiences posing as a Chinese under her assumed identity Rikoran or Li Xianglan.
Some of her movies at this time were seen as pro-Japanese propaganda, including China Nights (1940), in which she starred with Japanese heartthrob Kazuo Hasegawa, and she later expressed regret over them.
Arrested after the war as a collaborator, she narrowly avoided execution for treason by revealing her Japanese identity to the Chinese court.
Her hit songs included “Fragrance of the Night” and “Suzhou Serenade”, which was banned in mainland China after the war.
Following her deportation from China in 1946, she re-launched her career in Japan under her birth name, Yoshiko Yamaguchi, and went on to star in Akira Kurosawa’s Scandal and other films.
She also played a leading role in U.S. movies and musicals in the 1950s as Shirley Yamaguchi, including Samuel Fuller’s A House of Bamboo (1955). She married Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi in 1951 but their marriage lasted just four years.

Kozhikode’s Mohammed Munawar and Ernakulam’s Arathi Sara Sunil retained the men’s and women’s singles titles in the 45th Seshasayee Kerala State senior badminton championship at the FACT Udyogamandal Club, Eloor .
Munawar, unseeded as he had lost early in the lone State-ranking tourney he had played this season, defeated Ernakulam’s fourth-seeded Alwin Francis in straight sets while Arathi, a former international, defeated Thiruvananthapuram’s J.K. Malavika in a repeat of last year’s final.
The seasoned pair of Rupesh Kumar and Sanave Thomas brushed aside the top-seeded Dilshad Kamaludheen and Ram C. Vijay while Kozhikode’s Agna Anto and M.H. Haritha took the women’s doubles title.