Current Affairs Quiz - June, 2021

Notes:
The state government of Karnataka has introduced a city sewage surveillance system in Bangalore. This is aimed to track coronavirus at an early stage.
This effort of Karnataka is supported by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and COVIDactionCollab (CAC). CAC is supporting the state by providing training to sanitation workers in collecting samples and analysing them in labs.

Notes:
West African leaders have suspended Mali from their regional association- the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
The 15-member bloc held an emergency summit in Ghana’s capital, Accra, in response to last week’s coup. Mali’s military has toppled the President and Prime Minister for the second time in nine months.

Notes:
NASA’s Curiosity rover captured the images of the clouds seen above Gale Crater of the Mars. The crater is 154 km in diameter and estimated to be about 3.5-3.8 billion years old.
The image is a combination of 21 individual photographs the rover took recently to study a strange type of cloud over the Gale Crater. The Scientists made the rover watch for the early clouds, as it was observed that the cloud type was forming earlier in the Martian year.

Notes:
Sinovac vaccine developed by China’s Sinovac Biotech Ltd has been granted emergency use approval by the World Health Organisation.
WHO has recommended the vaccine to be used by people who are 18 years and above. The vaccine needs to be administered in two doses with a gap of two to four weeks.

Notes:
The rate of global unemployment in the year 2022 is estimated to be 5.7% by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).
ILO has estimated that nearly 205 million unemployed people would exist around the world, which is higher than the 2019 level of 187 million. Further the ILO has stated that 108 million more number of workers have been categorized as poor or extremely poor.

Notes:
The Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar launched the Seed Minikit Programme by distributing kits of higher yielding varieties of seeds to farmers.
It aims to introduce new varieties of seeds to the farmers and helps in increasing the seed replacement rate. The mini kits are being provided by the National Seeds Corporation (NCS), NAFED and Gujarat State Seeds Corporation and wholly funded by the Union through the National Food Security Mission.

Notes:
China recently launched into orbit a new-generation weather satellite named Fengyun-4B (FY- 4B) successfully.
The Fengyun-4B satellite was launched aboard a Long March 3B rocket into the geostationary orbit, to join the network of Fengyun satellites. The first of the Fengyun series, a low-Earth orbit satellite testing machine – FY-1A, was launched in 1988.

Notes:
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced to create a Special liquidity window of Rs 15,000 crore with a tenor of 3 years at the repo rate to provide liquidity support to the contact-intensive sectors hit by Covid-19.
This encourages banks to provide fresh lending support to hotels, restaurants, tourism, aviation ancillary services, and other services including private bus operators, car repair and rental service providers, event/conference organizers, spa clinics, and beauty parlours/saloons. RBI will extend a special liquidity facility of ₹16,000 crore to SIDBI for on-lending/refinancing.

Notes:
The Union Minister of State for Finance and Corporate Affairs has launched a module of 6 short films of Investor Education & Protection Fund Authority (IEPFA), named “Hisaab Ki Kitaab”.
These short films have been developed by CSC eGov for IEPFA, as a part of their training module. These films portray the importance of budget, saving, insurance schemes etc.

Notes:
Paleontologists in China have unearthed a fossil of an 8-metre-long dinosaur, which is estimated to have lived 180-million-years ago.
The fossil is found to be 70 percent intact and the Dinosaur Fossil Conservation and Research Center carried out emergency excavations to help prevent damage to the bones. This is a type of giant Lufengosaurus, which lived during the Early Jurassic period, as per media reports.