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(Current Affairs) Person in News | June: 2015

Person in News

Pakistan’s cricket chiefs named batsman Azhar Ali as the national side’s new One-Day International captain, despite the fact that he has not made the 50-over team in more than two years. The 30-year-old replaces Misbah-ul-Haq, who retired from ODIs following Pakistan’s World Cup quarterfinal exit at the hands of eventual champion Australia.
Ali has played just 14 ODIs, the most recent in January 2013, when he contributed two with the bat as Pakistan beat arch-rival India by 85 runs at Kolkata’s Eden Gardens. Ali was also named as vice-captain for the Test side, which Misbah will continue to lead, while big-hitting all-rounder Shahid Afridi stays on as T20 skipper.

The President has appointed the senior-most Election Commissioner, Dr. Nasim Zaidi as the Chief Election Commissioner in the Election Commission. Dr. Nasim Zaidi has assume the charge of office of the Chief Election Commissioner on 19th April, 2015 vice Shri Harishankar Brahma consequent upon his demitting the office of the Chief Election Commissioner on the 18th April, 2015.

Indian chess Grandmaster Dronavalli Harika on 6 April 2015 won the bronze medal in the World Women’s chess championships along with Swedish Grandmaster Pia Cramling. In the semifinal match played at Sochi in Russia, Harika lost to Ukraine’s Mariya Muzychuk and settled to Bronze medal with US $ 20,000. World Women’s chess championship’s winners are.

The Interpol has issued a ‘red corner’ notice for the arrest of Bangladesh Nationalist Party leader Tarique Rahman, who has been in exile in London for more than six years.
The notice was issued for the arrest of Tarique, senior vice chairman of the party and son of Khaleda Zia, on the charge of murder and explosion of hand grenade in an Awami League rally on August 21, 2004. The Interpol ‘most wanted’ list has carried Tarique’s picture with details, saying Bangladesh is seeking him to stand trial in the case.

Gunter Grass, the Nobel-winning German writer who gave voice to the generation that came of age during the horrors of the Nazi era has died. He was 87. Grass was lauded by Germans for helping to revive their culture in the aftermath of World War II and helping to give voice and support to democratic discourse in the post war nation.
Yet he provoked the ire of many in 2006 when he revealed in his memoir “Skinning the Onion” that, as a teenager, he had served in the Waffen-SS, the combat arm of Adolf Hitler’s notorious paramilitary organization.
In 2012, Grass drew sharp criticism at home and was declared persona non grata by Israel after publishing a prose poem, “What Must Be Said,” in which he criticized what he described as Western hypocrisy over Israel’s nuclear program and labelled the country a threat to “already fragile world peace” over its belligerent stance on Iran.

President Barack Obama has nominated Shamina Singh, an Indian American as a member of the Board of Directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service for a term expiring in Oct. 2019.
Singh currently serves as the Executive Director of the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth. She joined MasterCard in 2013 as the Global Director for Government Services and Solutions, where she expanded MasterCard’s business capabilities to digitize social subsidy programs in over 40 countries, according to the World Economic Forum.
Prior to joining MasterCard, she has also spent 15 years in the public sector holding senior positions within the Clinton Presidential Administration and the U.S. House of Representatives. Singh was executive director for the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders from 1999 to 2001.

The BJP government in Haryana has decided to accord the rank, equal to that of a cabinet minister, to yoga guru Ramdev; he had earlier been named as the state’s brand ambassador with the government then explaining his elevation as an attempt to promote yoga and ayurveda in the state.