Current Affairs Quiz - August, 2019

Notes:
Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry has become the first cricketer of either gender to reach the rare milestone of scoring 1000 runs and taking 100 wickets in T20 international cricket. She achieved the feat run in the multi-format 2019 Ashes series where Australia beat England by 7 wickets in Hove. Former Pakistani all-rounder Shahid Afridi (1416 runs and 98 wickets) currently stands closest to achieving the feat, while Bangladesh’s Shakib al Hasan, with 1471 runs and 88 wickets, stands next in line to join Perry.

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Union Minister of Petroleum & Natural Gas and Steel, Dharmendra Pradhan has recently launched Atal Community Innovation Centre (ACIC) in New Delhi to encourage the spirit of innovation at the community level. The aim of the initiative is to encourage the spirit of innovation through solution-driven design thinking to serve society. The ACIC is a new initiative of Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) to support community innovation drive in the country. It will provide a platform in many of the rural, tribal areas and Tier-II and -III cities and unserved regions to have access to latest technologies for innovation and to ideate and create prototypes for innovation.

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Microsoft India has partnered with Apollo Hospitals to set up a National Clinical Coordination Committee (NCCC), which will guide the two entities on all cardiology and cardiovascular related Artificial Intelligence (AI) projects. It will also provide clinical insights on developing clinical algorithms and treatment guidelines based on the inferences of national, multi-centre prospective study. The committee will work for the AI-powered Cardiovascular Disease Risk Score API. It will have members drawn from Apollo Hospitals, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi; and King George’s Medical University, Lucknow. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the biggest cause of mortality in India with nearly 25% of mortalities – amongst the age group of 25 to 69 years.

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NDTV India’s senior executive editor, Ravish Kumar has been honoured with the prestigious 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award for his ‘ethical journalism’. Kumar has won the honour for his news show, Prime Time, which deals with real-life & under-reported problems of ordinary people. He is among five individuals who were declared winners of the award. The four other winners of the 2019 Ramon Magsaysay Award are Ko Swe Win from Myanmar, Angkhana Neelapaijit from Thailand, Raymundo Pujante Cayabyab from Philippines and Kim Jong-Ki from South Korea. The Ramon Magsaysay Award is the highest honour given to Asian individuals and organisations and often referred to as the Asian version of the Nobel Prize.

Notes:
The joint venture company namely Khanij Bidesh India Ltd. (KABIL) has been set up with the participation of three Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSEs) to ensure a consistent supply of critical and strategic minerals to Indian domestic market. These CPSEs are National Aluminium Company Ltd. (NALCO), Hindustan Copper Ltd. (HCL) and Mineral Exploration Company Ltd. (MECL). The newly setup company will ensure supply of Lithium and Cobalt which is available in less quantity in the country. It will help in building partnerships with other mineral rich countries like Australia and those in Africa and South America, where Indian expertise in exploration and mineral processing will be mutually beneficial bringing about new economic opportunities. The equity participation between NALCO, HCL and MECL is in the ratio of 40:30:30.

Notes:
In Shooting, Aishwary Pratap Singh Tomar from Madhya Pradesh clinched a yellow metal in Men’s Rifle 3 Positions (3P) at 12th Sardar Sajjan Singh Sethi Memorial Masters competition in New Delhi. In the finals, Aishwary posted a comfortable victory with a score of 459.9 and a classy 10.7 in the end. Meanwhile, multiple International Shooting Sport Federation medallist and India’s most accomplished 3P shooter Sanjeev Rajput, had to be satisfied with a silver, finishing with a score of 455.5, a clear 4.4 behind Aishwary. India international Parul Kumar settled for the bronze.

Notes:
The Department of Revenue under the Ministry of Finance is conducting India’s first national Time Release Study (TRS) between 1st – 7th August to enable faster movement of cargo across borders to benefit traders. The exercise will be institutionalized on an annual basis, during the same period every year hereafter. The TRS is an internationally recognized tool advocated by World Customs Organization (WCO) to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of international trade flows. This initiative will be conducted at the same time across 15 ports including sea, air, land and dry ports which cumulatively account for 81% of total Bills of Entries for import and 67% of Shipping Bills for export filed within India. The national TRS will establish baseline performance measurement and have standardized operations and procedures across all ports. Based on the results of the TRS, government agencies associated with cross border trade will be able to diagnose existing and potential bottlenecks which act as barriers to the free flow of trade, and take remedial actions for reducing the cargo release time. The initiative is on ground lead by the Central Board of Indirect Tax and Customs.

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The United States has officially withdrawn from Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. The INF Treaty is a Cold War-era missile treaty that was signed by then US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. The treaty banned both countries from deploying land-launched cruise missiles in the 500- to 5,500-km range. It was a key to ending the arms race between the (then) two super powers and helped protect the U.S.’s NATO allies in Europe from Soviet missile attacks. The reasons for withdrawal are as follows: the Trump and Obama administrations have repeatedly alleged that Russia was violating the treaty by fielding a ground-based cruise missile – the Novator 9M729 (“SSC-8” in NATO terminology) that could strike Europe at a short notice, an allegation that Russia has repeatedly denied.

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Maharashtra has become the India’s first state to adopt a digital fingerprint and iris scanning system – Automated Multi-modal Biometric Identification System (AMBIS) – to aid police investigations. This system will soon be replicated by other state police forces across the country. An AMBIS unit consists of a computer terminal, a camera, and iris, fingerprint, and palm scanners. It also includes a portable system to dust off and capture fingerprints from crime scenes. With the integration of the system with facial recognition from CCTV cameras, AMBIS enables the police to cross-reference and put faces to criminals whose fingerprints have been captured on paper over the decades, apart from solving fresh crimes. This new system has replaced the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which has been used by Indian law enforcement agencies to search finger and palm prints.

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India off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin has been chosen as the Professional Cricketers Association’s(PCA) Player for the month of July 2019 for his consistent performances in the county championships. Ashwin signed with Nottinghamshire for six County Championship matches as practice for India’s World Test Championship fixture against West Indies that gets underway later this month. In three matches, he took 23 wickets at 19.91 and scored 197 runs at 39.40.