Target IAS : 21-31 Jan 2013

In order to increase the availability of pulses, especially for the people living under the low poverty line, the government has resumed import of pulses through State Governments for distribution under Public Distribution System.The thrust of the scheme is to make pulses available to the BPL card holders at least one kg. per month. For More
Bangalore Gears Up to Host Aeroindia – 2013 .
Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) lab, which will audit the SAR values of mobile phones; and the Next Generation Network (NGN) lab in the Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC).For More.
Shri S. N. Ananthasubramanian, has been elected as the President of the Institute of Company Secretaries of India . Shri Harish K. Vaid, has been elected as the Vice President.
One Year Agenda for DeitY(Department of Electronics and Information Technology).
India and Rawanda have singed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on bilateral co-operation in Water Resources Development and Management.
India has decided to go it alone in its second lunar mission, the Chandrayaan-2, which was originally proposed as an Indo-Russian venture.
India and Sri Lanka signed two separate agreements on combating international terrorism and avoidance of double taxation.
A voter, by pressing the Electronic Voting Machine, will know who he is voting for in an election through a printing slip which will display the name of the candidate and go into a box : Election Commission
Heritage status for Netaji’s ancestral house
Rajnath Singh is new BJP president
Uddhav Thackeray elected Shiv Sena president
The Justice Verma Committee formed to look into crimes against women on Wednesday ruled against recommending death penalty even in the rarest of the rare rape cases, and also did not favour lowering the age of a juvenile from 18 to 16.However they also said the minimum sentence for a rapist should be enhanced from 7 years to 10 and that life imprisonment must always mean jail for ‘the entire natural life of the convict .
Supreme Court on Wednesday restraining airlines from levying transaction fee in any form on them.
Indian firms gear up for the mega Thirty Metre Telescope project which will be the world’s most advanced ground-based observatory that will be operating in optical and mid-infrared wavelengths.
Congress announced that the party’s yuvraj, Rahul Gandhi, had just been appointed vice-president
Japan to replace Fukushima plant with world’s largest wind farm’.
Govt will auction spectrum in 700 Mhz band, which is used for offering high-speed Internet services through fourth generation technologies, in 2014.
INS Saryu commissioned near Andaman & Nicobar islands.
Malaysia and Sri Lanka bans Kamal Hassan's Vishwaroopam.
U.S. sanctions cause shortage of drugs in Iran particularly for life-threatening ones such as cancer and cardiac disorder.
U.S. President Barack Obama appointed Denis R. McDonough, one of his top foreign policy advisors and long time trusted aide as his next Chief of Staff.
US sentencing commission website hacked to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.
Milos Zeman is first directly elected Czech President.
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy on Sunday declared a state of emergency and a nightime curfew for one month in three restive cities after days of deadly violence.
Multiple Entry Visa agreement between India and Bangladesh.
OVL, the overseas arm of Oil & Natural Gas Corp., in November agreed to pay US energy giant ConocoPhillips about US $5 billion for the 8.4 per cent stake in Kashagan, the biggest oilfield discovery in over four decades get nod from all partners.
Joint US-Japanese team, investigating into the Boeing Dreamliner’s battery problems, has shifted from the battery-maker to the manufacturer of a monitoring system.
UN group okays new video format (codec known as H.265) to save bandwidth .
UK-based global conglomerate Hinduja group has signed a deal to acquire Belgian media company Alfacam, which provides TV facilities and services to broadcasters and production houses.
P. Chidambaram will launch the much-awaited Rajiv Gandhi Equity Savings Scheme (RGESS)(Under the scheme, an individual with an income of less than Rs 10 lakh would get tax incentives for investing up to Rs 50,000 in the stock market but there would be a lock—in period of one year on investments made under the scheme) in Mumbai.
To reduce Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) from biomedical waste, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) has launched a project titled "Enviornmental sound management of medical waste"
First time a video can be embedded in the tweet itself of not more than 6 seconds.
A secret plant (at Aldermaston — a village in Berkshire, South-East England) which enriches uranium for Britain’s nuclear warheads has been shut down over safety fears .
Russia to ban smoking in public places from mid 2014.
Britain introduces same-sex marriage bill.Soon it will become law after voting.
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta announced more than 230,000 battlefront posts, many in Army and Marine infantry units and in potentially elite commando jobs, are now open to women.
Pak Supreme Court ordering the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to file a reference within a week against the Prime Minister, Interior Minister and Pakistan Peoples Party secretary general for the questionable appointment of Tauqir Sadiq as chairman of Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) and then allegedly facilitating his exit from the country to avoid arrest.
Headley gets 35 years in jail.
787 Dreamliners: Japan probe finds battery not overcharged.
King Abdullah II of Jordan has given the parliament the right to choose the prime minister, previously appointed by the crown.
GMR synchronises Kamalanga Thermal plant Orissa with the central grid.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), notified the enhanced limit of investing in government securities (G-Secs) by foreign institutional investors (FIIs) and long-term investors(include SEBI-registered sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), multilateral agencies, endowment funds, insurance funds, pension funds and foreign central banks. ) by $5 billion to $25 billion from $20 billion.It also hiked the investment limit in corporate bonds by these entities by $5 billion $50 billion from $45 billion.
As part of the UPA Government’s National eGovernance Plan, the Commerce and Industry Ministry, on Monday, announced the launch of an eBiz portal aimed at providing Government-to-Business (G2B) services for India’s investor and business communities developed by Infosys in a public-private partnership (PPP) mode.The online single-window concept was visualised to enable businesses and investors to save time and costs and improve the business environment.
Air India puts up Dreamliners for sale, leaseback.
Home-grown GPS ‘Gagan’ likely by 2014.
Genome sequence of 90 chickpea lines decoded(Chickpea(gram) is the second largest cultivated grain food legume in the world, grown in about 11.5 million hectares mostly by resource poor farmers in the semi-arid tropics. It contributes to income generation and improved livelihoods of smallholder farmers in African countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya, and is crucial to the food security in India.)
Reserve Bank of India slashed its key interest rates by 0.25 per cent and released Rs 18,000 crore additional liquidity into the system to perk up growth through reduced cost of borrowing(cutting repo rate by 0.25 per cent to 7.75 per cent and cash reserve ratio (CRR) by similar margin to 4 per cent.)
Boeing delivers first of 10 C-17 Globemaster III airlifters to the Indian Air Force (IAF).
Railways addressing food complaints in real time ( call 1800111321 any time between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m.)
Software for rapid diagnosis of dengue : Dengue Decision Support System (DDSS) has been developed by U.S N. Murty.
3 new High Courts in the northeast — Meghalaya, Manipur and Tripura — taking the total number of High Courts in the country from 21 to 24.
King of Bhutan(King Jigme Khesar) : Chief guest of Republic Day 2013
India on Sunday successfully test-fired the underwater ballistic missile, K-15 (code-named B05), off the Visakhapatnam coast.
Largest Russian naval exercise in post-Soviet era conduct nine-day exercises in the Mediterranean and Black seas.
Myanmar : mining project in Monywa is a joint venture between a military-controlled holding company and China’s Wanbao Mining Copper Ltd., a subsidiary of NORINCO, a Chinese weapons manufacturer.Protestors wanted it to be halted.
Nepal to issue IDs to third gender.
Hawaiian Surfer Garrett McNamara rides world record wave of 100ft at Atlantic Coast off Nazare.
Israel became the first country to boycott a U.N. review of its human rights practices in which all 193 member-states submit every four years.
Chinese company taking over management of Pakistan’s deep-sea Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea.
China's 12th Plan stresses hydropower from Yarlung Zangbo (Brahmaputra).(4 Dams).
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) approved state-run ONGC Videsh’s (OVL’s) acquisition of U.S. energy major Hess Corp’s 2.7213 per cent stake in the Azeri, Chirag and the deep water portion of Guneshli (ACG) fields in the Azerbaijan sector of the Caspian Sea and 2.36 per cent interest in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline in Azerbaijan for $1.001 billion.
Vodafone-DoT collision course could jeopardise 2G spectrum auctions(acquisitions : auction guidelines have arbitrarily fixed reserve price at levels that are higher than international benchmarks.)
Samsung launches Galaxy Grand(powered by Android 4.1.2 (Jelly Bean) operating system, and runs on a 1.2 GHz dual core processor)
To prevent anaemia, the government will soon launch an ambitious programme to provide Iron Folic Acid (IFA) tablets every week to 13 crore adolescent girls in the age group of 10-19 years across the country.
Protein, known as IRHOM2, as the potential new target for drugs to treat patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).
NASA launches communication satellite : unmanned Atlas V rocket blasted into the starry night sky carrying the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite.
NASA Super-TIGER balloon shatters flight record carrying the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (Super-TIGER) experiment(Super-TIGER is flying a new instrument for measuring the rare heavy elements among the flux of high-energy cosmic rays bombarding Earth from elsewhere in our Milky Way Galaxy)
HTC launched Butterfly has the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon quad-core processor.
Blackberry released OS upgrade Blackberry 10.
Prof U R Rao, former Chairman, ISRO and Secretary, Department of Space is being honoured by the Society of Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) by inducting him as a Member of the highly prestigious “Satellite Hall of Fame”, Washington.
Indian scientist Dr C N R Rao has been conferred with China's top science award for his important contributions in boosting Sino-India scientific cooperation.
IT to help differently abled students to ramp up the use of information technology in teaching.
India would flight test sub-sonic, medium range cruise missile Nirbhay, in Feb 2013.
Twitter launches Vine, a six-second iPhone video app (a service that lets users upload videos. Just as Twitter limits posts to 140 characters, Vine limits videos to six seconds.)

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Jan 30, 2013

21-31 Jan 2013