Monthly Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2018

Notes:
John Sankaramangalam (84), the Veteran filmmaker and former director of Film and Television Institute of India (FTTI), has passed away in Thiruvalla, Kerala on July 30, 2018. A multi-time recipient of national and state awards, Sankaramangalam was known for his experimental movies. Some of his directorial ventures are “Aval Alpam Vaikippoyi”, “Janmabhoomi” and “Samantharam”.

Notes:
Prabhat Koli (19) from Maharashtra, who crossed the English Channel when he was 16, has become the first Asian to swim the choppy water from Jersey (an Island in the UK) to France in cold weather. The long-distance sea swimmer covered 25km in 6 hours and 54 minutes. He started off from La Coupe Point of Jersey, behind St Catherine’s backwater and touched the shore of St Germain Plage on the Normandy coast of France. As part of his seven seas challenge, Prabhat is now training to cross the North Channel in Ireland in first week of August.

Notes:
The Myanmar Government has appointed an independent 4- member commission to investigate alleged human rights abuses against the ethnic Rohingya minority. The Independent Commission will investigate the allegations of human rights violations and related issues, following the terrorist attacks by Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA). The commission will be comprised of two local members & two international members. It will be headed by Filipino diplomat Rosario Manalo. The other members includes Japan’s former ambassador to the UN Kenzo Oshima, lawyer Mya Thein and economist and former UN official Aung Tun Thet. In August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar’s western Rakhine state to Bangladesh after a military crackdown started in response to attacks by ARSA on security posts.

Notes:
The first cow sanctuary in Rajasthan will be situated in Napasar, Bikaner to dedicate the entire area for cows, much on the lines of a wildlife sanctuary. It will provide shelter for 10,000 bovines spread over an area of more than 220 hectares in Bikaner district. The facilities in the sanctuary will include hospitals and Sewan grass as fodder for the animals. The state government has recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with a private trust in this regard. The cow sanctuary will be the latest in a string of initiatives announced by the BJP government in the state for the protection of bovines since it came to power in 2013. The state already has a ministry dedicated to the welfare of cows and last year it had announced a 10% surcharge on stamp duty towards cow protection.

Notes:
The Madhya Pradesh government will observe the 2018 Independence Day eve as Shahid Samman Divas to honour martyrs. The decision to this effect was taken at a cabinet meeting in Bhopal on July 30, 2018. According to official information, it will be a comprehensive program and spread across all the villages, blocks and districts of Madhya Pradesh, where rallies will be organized to mark the day. The martyrs will be paid homage and the relatives of the martyrs will also be honoured on the day. Ministers, members of Parliament and state legislative assembly and chief Minister himself will meet family members of martyrs on the occasion to express gratitude for supreme sacrifice done by their near and dear for the nation.

Notes:
K. Anvar Sadath, the vice chairman and executive director of the Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), has won the 2018 International Contributions Award given by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT), USA. He has been chosen for the award to recognize his outstanding contribution to the field of educational communication and technology in an international setting. With this, he has become the first Indian to be honoured with the International Contributions award. The award will be presented at 2018 AECT International Convention function to be held in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 26, 2018. The AECT is a premier professional association for instructional design and educational technology.

Notes:
The President of India, Ram Nath Kovind presented the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award (OPA) for the years 2013-2017 in New Delhi on August 1, 2018. Dr Najma Heptullah, the Manipur’s governor and 5-times Rajya Sabha member, won the award for 2013. Meanwhile, BJP’s Lok Sabha member Hukum Dev Narayan was the recipient of OPA for 2014, Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad for 2015, Trinamool Congress’ Dinesh Trivedi for 2016 and Bhartruhari Mahtab of the Lok Biju Janata Dal (BJD) for 2017. The OPA is an award given by the Indian Parliamentary Group (IPG) to an outstanding sitting Member of Parliament (MP) for overall contribution in the Parliament. It was instituted in 1992 by Shivraj Patil, who was the Speaker of Lok Sabha from 1991 to 1996.

Notes:
On August 10, the NITI Aayog will host an Investors’ Conference for the Holistic Development of Islands at Pravasi Bharatiya Kendra and will be inaugurated by Amitabh Kant (CEO of NITI Aayog). The purpose of the conference is to attract investments for the sustainable development of eco-tourism projects on a Public Private Partnership (PPP) basis in the Andaman & Nicobar and Lakshadweep Islands. Approx 11 anchor tourism projects are proposed to be implemented with private sector participation under suitable risk-sharing model and through open-competitive bidding.

Notes:
The Election Commission of India (ECI) has conducted the first-ever Orientation Workshop on Election Management for IAS Asstt Secretaries in New Delhi on August 3, 2018. The aim of the workshop is to familiarize the Assistant Secretaries with all facets of Electoral Management before they are required to handle crucial assignments in conducting Elections in their field postings soon. In it, Chief Election Commissioner Om Prakash Rawat advised the officers to be prepared for facing the newer challenges like Data harvesting; targeted messaging & profiling; money and media influencers.

Notes:
Ranjit Srivastava, the Ranchi-based software developer, has claimed to develop the world’s first Hindi speaking realistic humanoid robot and India’s first lip-synching robot. The robot “Rashmi” has developed in 2 years at a minimum cost of Rs 50,000. In simple words, Srivastava developed an Indian version of a social humanoid robot ‘Sophia’ that was developed by a Hong Kong based company. The robot can speak Hindi, Bhojpuri and Marathi along with English. It uses Linguistic Interpretation (LI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), visual data and facial recognition systems. It functions under a specially designed software and linguistic interpretation system. The LI programme analyses the feeling of the conversation while AI program analyses the conversation to extract the response from the device.