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SUPREME COURT QUALIFIES ITS RULING ON ATROCITIES ACT

• The police need to conduct a preliminary enquiry before arrest only in cases where they feel a complaint filed about an atrocity committed on Dalits is outright “absurd” or “absolutely” frivolous.
• The judgment, which banned immediate arrest of a person accused of atrocities against SC/ST community members, had led to widespread unrest and violence.
• To avoid prosecution of innocent people in frivolous cases filed under the Act, the court had ordered a preliminary enquiry to be conducted to check the veracity of the complaint. Till then, no arrests would be made.
• The Act, on the other hand, forbids anticipatory bail to accused persons and prescribes immediate arrest.

Relevance : GS 2

RIYADH LAUNCHES $34.7 BN ENTERTAINMENT REVOLUTION

• After repealing a decades-long ban on cinemas only last year, Saudi Arabia has launched an ambitious drive to become a culture and entertainment hub as part of sweeping modernisation plans.
• The project, dubbed “Quality of Life Program 2020,” is in part designed to encourage wealthy young citizens to spend more of their leisure time in the kingdom, where more than half the population is below the age of 25.

Relevance : Prelims

GOVERNMENT TO INVITE CORPORATES TO MANAGE NSDF FINANCES

• In a major policy decision that could possibly change the way sports is governed in India, the government has decided to rope in India’s top corporates and industrialists on a “public-private partnership” to invest and manage the National Sports Development Fund (NSDF), a non-taxable corpus through which the country’s athletes receive funding for their training, exposure and equipment needs.
• The NSDF is a 100 percent, tax exempted federal funding which allows its contributor to direct the sports officials where exactly they want their money to be used on which athlete and in which discipline.
• The same amount which has been contributed should also be put in by the Finance Ministry, leading to doubling up of the amount.

Relevance : Prelims, GS 2

MICROBEADS IN SOAPS, GELS FLOW INTO WATER BODIES

• The age-old Indian obsession with fair skin is having its dark impact on the environment.
• Liquid soaps and shower gels containing microbeads, or plastic beads smaller than 0.2 mm which help peel away dead skin, are finding their way into water bodies.
• In May 2017, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) classified microbeads as unsafe for use in cosmetic products and added the clause to its specification for household detergents.
• While the law exists on paper, soap, creams and gels containing microbeads are available off the shelf and online.

Relevance : Prelims, GS 3

ISLANDS OF DISCONTENT IN THE KRISHNA

• This is the last piece of land belonging to Karnataka — beyond it lies Telangana. On paper, for the government, it’s no man’s land. Yet, on the ground it is a thriving village.
• Residents of Kuruvakula, an island formed in Krishna river, now have a demand for those coming to seek their votes — help them get back titles to the land their families surrendered for the Jurala project in what is present-day Telangana.

Relevance : Prelims

NASA LAUNCHES SPACECRAFT TO EXPLORE DEPTHS OF MARS

• NASA launched its latest Mars lander, InSight, designed to perch on the surface of the red planet and listen for ‘Marsquakes’.
• InSight’s primary instrument is a French-built seismometer, designed to detect the slightest vibrations from “marsquakes” around the planet. The device, to be placed on the surface by the lander’s robot arm, is so sensitive that it can measure a seismic wave just one-half the radius of a hydrogen atom
• The project aims to expand human knowledge of conditions on Mars, inform efforts to send human explorers there, and reveal how rocky planets like the earth formed billions of years ago.
• The lander should settle on Mars on November 26. Its name, InSight, is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.
• The probe will bore down 10 to 16 feet below the surface, 15 times deeper than any previous Mars mission.
• Understanding the temperature on Mars is crucial to NASA’s efforts to send people there by the 2030s, and how much a human habitat might need to be heated under frigid conditions. Daytime summer temperatures near the Martian equator may reach 20 degrees Celsius, but then plunge by night to -73 degrees Celsius.

Relevance : Prelims

LIMIT TRANS FATS TO 1% OF CALORIE INTAKE

• The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recommended that adults and children should consume a maximum of 10% of their daily calorie intake in the form of saturated fat (found in meat and butter) and 1% in trans fats.
• These draft recommendations, the first since 2002, are aimed at controlling non-communicable diseases (NCDs), which are responsible for an estimated 39.5 million deaths (72%) of the 54.7 million deaths worldwide in 2016.
• Of the major NCDs, cardiovascular diseases (CVD) were the leading cause of NCD mortality in 2016, and were responsible for nearly half of all NCD deaths. Dietary saturated fatty acids and trans-fatty acids are of particular concern as high levels of intake are correlated with increased risk of CVDs, noted the WHO.
• Saturated fatty acids are found in foods from animal sources such as butter, milk, meat, salmon, and egg yolks, and some plant-derived products such as chocolate and cocoa butter, coconut, palm and palm kernel oils.
• Trans-fatty acids can be industrially produced by the partial hydrogenation of vegetable and fish oils, but they also occur naturally in meat and dairy products from ruminant animals (for example, cattle, sheep, goats and camels). Industrially-produced trans-fatty acids can be found in baked and fried foods (doughnuts, cookies, crackers, pies, etc.), pre-packaged snacks and food, and in partially hydrogenated cooking oils and fats that are often used at home, in restaurants, or by the informal sector, such as street vendors of food.

 

Relevance : Prelims

FIRST RECORD OF INVASIVE APHID IN KASHMIR VALLEY

• It’s bad news for Kashmir Valley, the fruit bowl of India.
• The brown peach aphid – an insect that attacks temperate fruit trees – has been recorded here for the first time.
• The spread of the aphid could affect the local economy which is dependant on fruit trees to a large extent.
• In India, the aphid was recorded for the first time in the 1970s from Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. Now, almost 40 years later, it has resurfaced in the Kashmir Valley.

Relevance : Prelims, GS 3

WESTERN GHATS’ FORESTS VITAL FOR TAMIL NADU’S MONSOON

• Researchers have found one more reason why urgent steps have to be taken to stop deforestation in the Western Ghats.
• The dense vegetation in the Western Ghats determines the amount of rainfall that Tamil Nadu gets during the summer monsoon.
• The dense forests of the Western Ghats contribute as much as 40% of moisture to the southwest monsoon rainfall over Tamil Nadu during normal monsoon years. The average contribution is 25-30%. But during monsoon deficit years, the contribution increases to as high as 50%.

Relevance : GS 3

 

BANGLA: MAKE INDIA OBSERVER IN FORUM OF ISLAMIC NATIONS

• In a move likely to displease Pakistan, Bangladesh has sounded the first official call to induct countries with large Muslim populations, like India, as observers to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, a club which has only Muslim majority countries as its members.
• Muslims in India constitute 10% of the global adherents of the faith. Indian Muslims 10% of global population.
• In terms of Muslims as a percentage of the global population, India ranks third after Indonesia and Pakistan.
• “A number of countries, not OIC members, have a large number of Muslims as their citizens. The Muslims may be minority in those countries, but in terms of number they often exceed the total population of many OIC member countries. There is a need to build bridges with those non-OIC countries so that a large number of Muslim populations do not remain untouched by the good work of OIC. That is why reforms and restructuring is critical for OIC,” Bangladesh

Relevance : Prelims, GS 2

IMPORTANT FACTS IN NEWS

Busiest international air route

The trip between Singapore and the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur is the world’s busiest international air route.

GravityRAT

GravityRAT, a malware allegedly designed by Pakistani hackers, has recently been updated further and equipped with anti-malware evasion capabilites.

Relevance : Prelims

 

IMPORTANT TERMS IN NEWS EXPLAINED

Organisation of Islamic Cooperation ( OIC )

• The OIC is an international organization founded in 1969.
• It is a religious organization.
• It consists of 57 member states from Asia, Europe, Africa, and South America.
• It is headquartered at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Noble Prize in Literature

• The Nobel Prize in Literature is a Swedish literature prize that has been awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.
• Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, the award is based on an author’s body of work as a whole.
• It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895

Relevance : Prelims