Current Affairs Quiz - December, 2018

Notes:
The Maharashtra government has launched Bharat Ratna Atal Bihari Vajpayee International Schools in Mumbai on the occasion of 94th birth anniversary of the late Prime Minister. The school is affiliated to the Maharashtra International Education Board (MIEB) with an aim to achieve higher education standards in rural areas.

Notes:
Divya Patidar Joshi has been crowned the prestigious Mrs India 2018 at the Mrs. India My Identity Beauty Pageant 2018 finale in Delhi on December 25, 2018. Hailing from Madhya Pardesh’s Ratlam, Divya won the crown of Mrs India from among 24 promising contestants. She won all the rounds of Beauty with Brain contest along with Best Cat Walk title. Now, she will represent India at the Mrs Universe 2019 event.

Notes:
On 27th December, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat launched a universal health coverage scheme, which is known as the ‘Atal Ayushman Uttarakhand Yojana’. Under the scheme, each household in the state will be able to avail medical treatment of up to Rs 5 lakh annually. The scheme will benefit 23 lakh households and will cover 1,350 critical diseases. A total of 99 government and 66 private hospitals have been selected under the scheme. With this, the hill state has become the first in the country to offer universal health coverage.

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In Assam, the third Dwijing Festival 2018 has started on the bank of Aye river at Chirang district on December 27. Around 15 lakh tourists are expected to participate in the 12 day long festival. Adventure sports, food mart, cultural events, traditional games are being organized in the fest. Participants from Thailand, Bhutan and Bangladesh are also taken part in the festival. The festival provides livelihood opportunities for the local people and focuses on business activities for better economic generation through rural tourism.

Notes:
Aadi Sai Vijaykaran, a 13-year-old from Chennai, has created history by winning the Junior Debate Championship at the World Scholar’s Cup held at Yale University, the USA from November 16-21. He has been adjudged the world’s best School debater at a global contest. This is the first time an individual from India has won the coveted title. The theme for the cup was ‘An Entangled World: diplomacy, human relationships, the science of memory, and literature, art’. Vijaykaran is a trained Carnatic musician, has a black belt in Karate, plays chess and football.

Notes:
Russia has successfully tested a new hypersonic nuclear weapon delivery system , named “Avangard”, from the Dombarovskiy missile base in the southern Ural Mountains. It successfully hit a practice target on the Kura shooting range on Kamchatka, 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) away. The Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle flies 27 times faster than the speed of sound, which makes it impossible to intercept. It has been claimed the Avangard system is designed using new composite materials to withstand temperatures of up to 2000 degrees Celsius that come from a flight through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. As per officials, the Avangard could be fitted to the Soviet-made UR-100UTTKh intercontinental ballistic missile, which is code-named SS-19 Stiletto by NATO. Russia claims its new weapons will be more nimble and can change direction making them far harder to track and intercept.

Notes:
The Odisha forest department is all set to add another Olive Ridley mass nesting site to its wildlife map at the Bahuda river mouth in Ganjam district to lure the endangered sea turtles to come over for mass nesting in 2019. Around 3-km stretch of the beach from Sunapur to Anantpur at Bahuda rookery is being developed as a possible olive ridley mass nesting site. The Bahuda rookery is located around 20 km to the south of Rushikulya rookery coast, a major mass nesting site of olive ridleys on the Indian coastline. In Odisha, Gahirmatha marine sanctuary and Rushikulya rookery coast in Ganjam district are the two main Olive Ridley nesting sites. Of these sites, Gahirmatha marine sanctuary is the world’s largest rookery of endangered Olive Ridley Sea Turtles. Odisha is home to 50% of the total world’s population of Olive Ridleys and about 90% of Indian population of sea turtles.

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The 26th edition of International Camel Festival (ICF-2019) will be organized by the Department of Tourism, Government of Rajasthan in Bikaner on January 12 and 13. The fest is a lively and colourful event & activities such as fur cutting, camel decoration, designing among others would be organized in the event. Competitions like Mr Bikana and Miss Marwan, cultural performances by folk artistes from different regions would also be held during the festival.

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The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has brought out a booklet on cyber safety for school children to inform them about different aspects of cyber safety. The booklet, titled ‘A Handbook for Students on cyber Safety’, also deals with the problems of cyber bullying, cyber grooming and email fraud. It advises teenagers against accepting friend requests from unknown people on social media. The booklet explains various kinds of cyber crimes like identity theft, job fraud, email spoofing and how children can overcome them. The information provided in the handbook is intended to create awareness among citizens especially students about various cyber threats that can impact them and ways to safeguard themselves against cyber crimes. The booklet also provides details about various safeguards that can be adopted by children to protect themselves from cyber grooming.

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On December 30, India submitted its Sixth National Report (NR6) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The report was submitted online to the CBD Secretariat by the Environment Minister, Dr. Harsh Vardhan, during the inaugural session of the 13th National Meeting of the State Biodiversity Boards (SBBs) in New Delhi. With this, India is among the first five countries in the world, the first in Asia and the first among the biodiversity-rich mega diverse countries to have submitted the report. The submission of national reports is a mandatory obligation on parties to international treaties, including the CBD. The NR6 provides an update of progress in achievement of 12 National Biodiversity Targets (NBT) developed under the convention process in line with the 20 global Aichi biodiversity targets. As per report, the population of the lion has risen from 177 in 1968 to over 520 in 2015 and elephants from 12 thousand in the 1970s to 30 thousand in 2015. One-horned Indian Rhino which was on the brink of extinction during the early 20th century, now number 2400.