Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 07 August 2013

Raghuram Rajan,new RBI chief

• Chief Economic Adviser Raghuram Govind Rajan was appointed as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for three years.

• He will take over from D. Subbarao who demits office on September 4.

• At 50, by far one of the youngest to become RBI Governor, Dr. Rajan, who is credited to have correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis, is set to take over the mantle of the central bank at a time when the economy is faced with a multi-pronged crisis of high consumer price inflation, industrial slowdown, a free fall of the rupee and a widening current account deficit.

• Dr. Rajan, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), sought to paint the task he is faced with.

• Japan’s biggest warship since WWII

• Japan unveiled its biggest warship since World War II, a huge flat-top destroyerthat has raised eyebrows in China and elsewhere because it bears a strong resemblance to a conventional aircraft carrier.

• The ship, dubbed “Izumo”, has a flight deck that is nearly 250 metres long and is designed to carry up to 14 helicopters.

• China launches first Giant Panda channel

• Panda lovers across the world will be able to enjoy from Tuesday, live 24-hour high-definition (HD) Internet broadcasts of the daily activities of the 80 cuddly, endangered animals at China’s premier panda breeding facility.

• China Network Television has installed 28 HD video cameras in five gardens at the Chengdu Research Base of the Giant Panda Breeding in the southwest Sichuan Province.

• Documentaries and a 30-minute panda-themed programme will also be broadcast everyday on the site ipanda.com, State-run Xinhua reported.
• Giant Pandas are one of the world’s most endangered species. About 1,600 pandas live in the wild, mostly in the mountains of Sichuan, while more than 300 live in captivity.

Amazon founder surprisingly buy Washington post

• The Washington Post, the newspaper whose reporting helped topple a president and inspired a generation of journalists, is being sold for $250 million to the founder of Amazon.com, Jeffrey P Bezos, in a deal that has shocked the industry.

• Donald E Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, and the third generation of the Graham family to lead the paper, told the staff about the sale Monday afternoon.
• In Bezos, The Post will have a very different owner, a technologist whose fortunes have risen in the last dozen years even as those of The Post and most newspapers have struggled.
• 1877: Washington Post founded by Stilson Hutchins on December 6.
• 1880: The paper adds a Sunday edition, becoming DC's first newspaper to publish seven days a week.
• 1933 - Former chairman of Federal Reserve Eugene Meyer buys Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction. His daughter, Katharine Graham, would go on to lead the company.
• 1946 - Philip L Graham, who married Katharine in 1940, takes over company.

The limit of cosmetic surgery

• People who get facial plastic surgery often assume that they will look younger and more appealing afterward. But a new study, the first to try to quantify attractiveness after a face-lift, brow-lift or eyelid surgery, found only a tiny, insignificant increase in attractiveness. The study, published online in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery .

• The findings will probably provide scant comfort to the more than 120,000 American men and women who last year got face-lifts, a procedure that marketing efforts often claim can turn the clock back a decade.

• Several plastic surgeons credited the researchers for the rigor of the current study, including the use of blinded raters.

Sources: Various News Papers