News for Feb 2013

• Milos Zeman has won presidential poll of Czech Republic
• Timbuktu Manuscript : 
• A majority of these manuscripts are written in Arabic and deal with subjects like art, medicine, science, and calligraphy of the late Abbasid Caliphate, and even multiple priceless old copies of the Quran. These manuscripts date b/w the late 13th and the early 20th centuries (i.e. from the Islamisation of the Mali Empire until the decline of traditional education in French Sudan).
• Here the ancient manuscripts were preserved at the Ahmed Baba Centre for Documentation and Research, which housed between 60,000 and 100,000 manuscripts.
• A new campaign called ‘Green Kumbh’ is going hand in hand with the onging Maha Kumbh Mela in Allahabad. The green initiative which is being lead by Swami Chidanand Saraswati of Parmarth Niketan, Rishikesh who is also the force behind the Clean Ganga campaign
• Objective: The initiative is designed to beautify the grounds of Kumbh and its environs, while protecting the health and well-being of festival attendees.  Besides, this program will spread awareness and education about the importance of being “green”, thus informing and motivating festivals-goers from all over the world to become stewards of the environment around them. Under this campaign various programs like tree plantation, providing free eco friendly toilets, and solid waste management are being organized at Kumbh Mela and its surroundings.
• SpiceJet has become the only private Indian airline to offer flights to China. The low cost carrier will launch four weekly flights from New Delhi to Guangzhou.
•  An Expert Committee has been set up by the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting under the chairmanship of Sam Pitroda has with the task of reviewing the institutional frame work of Prasar Bharati including its relationship with Government, its continuing role as a public broadcaster and steps needed to ensure technical up-gradation of the organization. 
• Review the status of implementation of the suggestions given by various committees that have undertaken study of Prasar Bharati, namely, the Sengupta committee, the Bakshi Committee and the Narayanamurthy committee and suggest a road map ahead for enhancing the reach and potential of Prasar Bharati.
• Recommend measures to digitize the archival material in the possession of Doordarshan (DD) and All India Radio (AIR)
• To suggest ways of using the new media to deliver digital content – both in broadcast mode (DTH) and in a demand-based mode (Free on social media like You-Tube, and on payment through IPTV).
• Scientists have discovered a 10-million-year old star named TW Hydrae located 176 light years far from Earth may still be giving birth to new planets
• The findings were made using the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Telescope.
• International Crop Research Institute for Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), have succeeded in decoding the genome sequence of the CDC Frontier chickpea variety
• Office 365 as a service in the Internet cloud
• The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has allowed the erstwhile Hyderabad Stock Exchange (now Hyderabad Securities and Enterprises Limited (HSEL)) to exit as a stock exchange.
• India has stumbled nine places to 140^th position in the list of 179 countries in the latest World Press Freedom Index2013.
• Indian American Rangaswamy Srinivasan, has been nominated by President Barack Obama for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
• iscovery that an ultraviolet excimer laser could be used to etch a living tissue without causing any thermal damage to surrounding areas. He named the phenomenon Ablative Photodecomposition (APD)
• These excimer lasers led to the development of now famous lasik lasers used in eye and dental surgery.
• The first triangular India-US-Africa partnership in agricultural training was inaugurated by India and the US at the National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management (MANAGE), Hyderabad.
• The objective of this program is to improve agricultural productivity, strengthen agricultural value chains, and support market institutions in 3 African countries namely Kenya, Liberia, and Malawi.
• The Programme is being implemented by India’s National Institute of Agricultural Extension Management (MANAGE), Hyderabad, and the Chaudhary Charan Singh National Institute of Agricultural Marketing (NIAM), Jaipur.
• The British Government, for the first time, has declared to impose a ban over the sale of five species of invasive non-native aquatic plants
•  Water fern
• · Parrot’s feather
• · Floating pennywort
• · Water primrose
• · Australian swamp stonecrop
• Two PSUs BHEL and GAIL have been conferred with the Maharatna status by the government
• A Maharatna firm can take investment decision of up to Rs 5,000 crore without going to the government.
• For Navratna firms, this limit is Rs 1,000 crore.
• P.R. Vasudeva Rao has been appointed as the new director of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR).
• SEBI is planning to introduce color-coded Mutual Fund  (MF) products which will inform investors about the level of risk involved with the instrument.
• India handed over a Dornier 228 surveillance aircraft (by HAL)to Seychelles. The maritime surveillance aircraft will be used to guard the extensive coastline of the island nation in the Indian Ocean.
• A secretary level committee has been constituted by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to assist the PM’s council on climate change in implementing the 8 missions of the National Action Plan of Climate Change (NAPCC)  headed by Pulok Chatterji
• Scientists at Berkeley Lab have created the world’s first genome-wide digital atlas of gene enhancers in the brain, the switches that tell genes when and where they need to be switched on or off.
• India’s largest private sector bank, ICICI Bank has partnered with Aircel to launch a mobile banking service, ‘Mobile Money’.First launched in TN
• Rare migratory bird Whooper Swan was spotted in Pong Dam lake of Kangra valley in Himachal Pradesh after 113 years.
• Whooper Swans, which migrate from Central Asia and Europe and are rare migrants to India,
• The 10^th International Heavy Haul Association (IHHA) Conference will be hosted by the Indian Railways in New Delhi.
• South Africa was declared as the world number one team in the ICC Test Cricket Rankings. It is followed by England, Australia, Pakistan and India.
• Linear projects, such as roads, transmission lines and gas pipelines will not have to seek consent of gram sabhas to get clearance under the Forest Rights Act as the Environment Ministry has exempted these projects from it. 
• 30 Indian software product companies have decided to form a new association called the Indian Software Product Industry Round Table, or “iSpirt”.
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became the first Iranian leader to visit Egypt after Tehran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. He visited Egypt capital Cairo for attending the summit of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
• Dell’s sale is the highest-priced leveraged buyout of a technology company.
• Researchers have discovered the world’s largest prime number which consists of over 17 million digits.
• The number has now shot up to 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times minus 1.
• The finding was made as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS).
• GIMPS is a distributed computing project designed to discover a particular kind of prime number first identified in the 17th century
• The Mersenne prime numbers are rare which occur in the form 2 multiplied by itself p times minus 1, where p is itself a prime number. Thus its general form is 2^p-1. 
• The latest finding is only the 48^th  Mersenne prime ever found and the 14th discovered by GIMPS. 
• Ranchi Rhinos has won the maiden Hockey India League (HIL). They defeated Delhi Waveriders in the final match of the tournament
• Hero Goal of the Day: Manpreet Singh
• Man-of the-Match: Mauritz Furtse
• What is Rex ?
  
• Researchers have built the world’s first complete bionic man named “Rex”.
• has the face of a man, prosthetic limbs, a functional artificial blood circulatory system and artificial organs, including a pancreas, kidney, spleen and trachea
• India signed a Social Security pact with Austria. As per the pact, the Indian professionals working in Austria would be exempted from paying the social security contribution of the country, if such payments are already made in India. 
• Social security contribution is similar to India’s Employees Provident Fund (EPF).
• The 9^th biennial Aero India air show at Air Force Station, Yelahanka in Bangalore
• India bagged 46 Medals in 2013 Special Olympics World Winter Games in Pyeongchang (South Korea)
• The mascots were Ra, In and Bow.
• They are the world’s largest sports organization for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, providing year-round training and competitions to more than 4 million athletes in 170 countries.
• 2015 – Games to be held at Los Angeles, California
• The government of Scotland has outlined a transition plan to independence in case the people of the country give "Yes" vote in the autumn 2014 referendum in which the people will be asked whether Scotland should be an independent nation or not
• The UK currently consists of 4 countries:
  
  1. Scotland
  2. England
  3. Wales
  4. Northern Ireland
• Twitter has launched the first ‘pay-by-tweet’ service with American Express (Amex) which will allow its cardholders to purchase products simply by sending a short message
• India’s GDP growth projections by other agencies for current fiscal 2012-13:
  
• As per the RBI: 5.5%
• As per the Finance Ministry: 5.7 to 5.9%
• As per the IMF: 5.4%
• As per the CSO : 5%
• ‘Operation Three Star’ was the code name of the top secret execution plan in which Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru was sent to gallows in the high-security Tihar Jail
• Pope Benedict XVI has announced that he would resign at the end of this month after as the head of the Catholic Church citing old age and poor health to continue.
• The last Pope who resigned was Pope Gregory XII, who stepped aside in 1415 amid a schism within the Church.
• A panel has been set up by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) with the objective to review how elephant reserves and corridors across the country can get a higher level of legal protection under existing green laws. 
• The panel will be chaired by Vinod Rishi, retired senior forest officer, along with the director of Project Tiger as member convener.
• The Ministry of I&B (Information and Broadcasting) launched the ‘My India Initiative-A Digital Volunteer Programme’.
• The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) has raised the equity investment limit for the Insurance companies to 15% up from existing 10%.
• IRDA also gave nod to standard proposal form to record full details of a policyholder as per the KYC norms for sale of life insurance products.
• India’s new stock exchange MCX-SX has started trading in equities, competing against the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE).
• MCX-SX is the third national equity market trading platform.
• India’s oldest stock exchange is BSE
• The benchmark index for the MCX-SX is called SX-40, just like BSE Sensex and NSE Nifty.
• SX-40
• A free-float based index of 40 large-cap and liquid stocks, representing diverse sectors of the economy.
• Base value: 10,000
• Base date: March 31, 2010
• The index will measure the economic performance with better representation of various industries and sectors based on ICB, a leading global classification from Britain’s FTSE.
• As per a recent study, life on Earth faces danger from a catastrophic “Supervolcano” which seismologists say is due to erupt in ‘200 million years’ time.
• Hotspot plume supervolcano eruptions are like those during the past 2 million years at Wyoming’s Yellowstone caldera, which covered North America with volcanic ash. Massive flood basalt eruptions that formed “large igneous provinces” like the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River basalts 17 million to 15 million years ago, India’s Deccan Traps some 65 million years ago and the Pacific’s huge Ontong Java Plateau basalts, which buried an Alaska-sized area 125 million to 199 million years ago.
• Iran test-fired a surface-to-surface cruise missile named “Ghader”, which means Capable in Farsi, in international waters near the Strait of Hormuz
• Surface-to-surface, ground-to-ship cruise missile
• Range of 200 kilometres
• Highly advanced with radar, satellite communications, precision in target destruction, as well as range and radar-evading mechanism
• Asteroid 2012 DA14 fly-by closest to Earth
• Newly discovered asteroid 2012 DA14 flew by closest to Earth.
• DA14 is the largest known object of its size which passed this close without making any impact.
• It shot past in a south-north direction above Earth on Feb 15-16, 2013.
• About 2012 DA14
• It is a near near-Earth asteroid with an estimated diameter of 50 meters (160 ft) and an estimated mass of 190,000 metric tons. It was detected in February 2012 by La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain.
• The head of Italian firm Finmeccanica, Giuseppe Orsi, has been arrested in Milan in connection with charges that bribes were paid to secure an Indian defence helicopter deal worth Rs 3600 crore.
• It is suspected that Italian firm Finmeccanica paid bribes to Indian political parties to secure a defence deal worth Rs 3600 crore signed in 2010 for sale of 12 three-engine AW-101 AgustaWestland VVIP choppers produced by Finmeccanica’s subsidiary AgustaWestland to Indian Airforce
• A meteor which was about 17 metres across and weighed 10,000 tons impacted Earth nearly 30 to 50 km above the ground near Russian city Chelyabinsk
• NASA has claimed to have discovered the youngest black hole, named W49B, in Earth’s galaxy or the Milky Way
• The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has held that its decision of cancellation of the environmental clearance granted to Vedanta for the Lanjigarh Bauxite mining project in Odisha was right and that forest land cannot be diverted under the provisions of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006.
• Inhabitants : Dongria kondh 
• Self-Employed Women’s Association of India (SEWA) founder Ela R Bhatt has been conferred with the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development for the year 2011.
• Around 140 nations will adopt the world’s first legally binding treaty on mercury
• T.S. Vijayan took over as the chairman of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA).
• World football’s governing body FIFA has announced that goal-line technology will be used during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. 
• A method to determine whether the Football has completely crossed the goal line or not using an electronic device
• FIFA has already approved two systems – Hawk Eye and GoalRef. The Hawk Eye system, used in cricket and tennis, involves the strategic placing of cameras from different points within the stadium while GoalRef uses an electronic chip inside the ball.
• The Kerala Abkari Act Amendment Ordinance 2013 has been given approval by the Kerala Cabinet. With this amendment, the age limit for buying and selling liquor has been raised from 18 to 21
• As per the white paper, the illicit money transferred outside India may come back to India through various methods such as hawala, mispricing, foreign direct investment (FDI) through beneficial tax jurisdictions, raising of capital by Indian companies through global depository receipts (GDRs) and investment in Indian stock markets through participatory notes.
• Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) pilot projects along four metro corridors and another pilot project near Karkardooma in Delhi.  It will be implemented by the UTTIPEC (Unified Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure (Planning and Engineering) Centre) which is working to develop a vision and strategy for the creation of a mass-rapid transport system in the Capital. The UTTIPEC, which is a division of the Delhi Development Authority.
• It is a mixed-use residential and commercial area in such a fashion so as to maximize access by Transit and Non-motorized transportation. In a TOD residential and commercial districts are located near and around a transit station/corridor which provides high quality service, good walking area, good parking management and many other design features that facilitate transportation use and maximize overall availability.
• TOD is designed in order to maximize access to public transport. It would make public transport the first choice of travel for all sections of society.
• Reduced household driving and thus lowered regional congestion, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
• Walkable communities that accommodate more healthy and active lifestyles.
• The Court of Arbitration the Court chaired by Stephen M. Schwebel, at the Hague has permitted India to go ahead with the construction of the Rs. 3600 crore Kishenganga Hydro-electric project (KHEP) in North Kashmir. The court eliminated Pakistan’s plea that this was a violation of the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty.
• Kishanganga is a tributary of Jhelum.
• Kishenganga is called ‘Neelam’ in Pakistan.
• KHEP is a 330 MW run-of-the-river Kishenganga project.
• Project is under construction by the NHPC (National Hydro Power Corporation) in Gurez valley near Bandipura in north Kashmir.
• At the same time, the court has confined India from adopting the drawdown flushing technique for clearing sedimentation in the run-of-the river project.
• Thus, now India will have to adopt a different flushing technique for clearing sedimentation in the run-of-the river project.
• Every year February 28 is celebrated as the National Science Day Rashtriya Vigyan Diwas (राष्ट्रीय विज्ञान दिवस).
• 1928- To mark the discovery of the Raman effect by Indian physicist Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman on February 28, 1928. For this discovery, Sir C.V.Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.
• 2013- The American Chemical Society designated the ‘Raman Effect’ as an International Historic Chemical Landmark.
• Theme for the National Science Day 2013 – “Genetically Modified Crops and Food Security”
• ISRO launched Indo-French satellite SARAL and six foreign mini and micro spacecraft from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. Thus, PSLV-20 successfully puts seven satellites in orbit.
• Besides SARAL, the other 6 mini and micro spacecrafts were:
  
  1. Micro-satellite UniBRITE from Austria
  2. Micro-satellite BRITE from Austria
  3. AAUSAT3 from Denmark
  4. STRaND from United Kingdom
  5. Micro-satellite NEOSSat from Canada
  6. Mini-satellite SAPPHIRE from Canada