All that u call sin is nothing but mistakes. And mistakes r the way
of learning. Those people who never commit mistakes r the most
stupid people. Osho
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*Jallikattu events: Two onlookers have died
*Safety arrangements monitored by the district administration
at these annual events in the Pongal season failed to prevent
death and injury.
*Last year’s protests against the Supreme Court ban on Jallikattu
*District authorities have so far failed to find better ways to regulate the
events, but more than the size of an event, the scale is the challenge.
*In short, there are too many events in too many places within a period of a few
days, making regulation next to impossible.
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*The sharp rise in bond yields has hit banks with losses on treasury operations dominated by sovereign bond holdings.
*Rating agency ICRA believes the fall in bond prices on expectation of the Central government breaching its fiscal deficit target has led to banks suffering a loss on paper of over D15,500 crore in the quarter that ended in December.
*That deposits have grown while credit offtake has not, makes matters worse.
*Banks, which are supposed to be good at assessing not just creditors’ credibility but also the broader trends in the economy and the financial markets, cannot feign surprise at a rise and fall in bond yields.
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*India’s public distribution system (PDS) is in
danger
*Recent disruptions of the PDS
*compulsory biometric authentication
*direct benefit transfer
*The consequences are alarming, but tend to
go unreported.
*Jharkhand government made Aadhaar-based biometric authentication
compulsory for PDS users.
*Consequences: vulnerable groups found themselves excluded from the
PDS
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*.
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*Connectivity and biometric failures
*Worse, there was a revival of corruption, as PDS rice meant for those who failed the
biometric test was siphoned off with abandon.
*Mid-2017’s mass-cancel: Ration card with Aadhar
*11 lakh
*Santoshi Kumari, an 11-year old Dalit girl who died of hunger on September 28
*Further attacks:
* DBT: People have to collect their food subsidy in cash from the bank
before using it to buy rice from the ration shop at D32 per kg. Until now,
they were able to buy rice from the ration shop at D1 per kg.
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*The main problem with DBT is that people
waste enormous time shuttling between the
banks, pragya kendras (common service
centres) and ration shops to get hold of
their money and then use it to buy rice at
the ration shop.
*three-step process
* Incidentally, the State government announced last year that Nagri was all set to become
Jharkhand’s first “cashless block”. Today, it is forcing people to handle more cash than they want
to.
*Tremendous pressure from the Central government to impose Aadhaar-
based biometric authentication or move towards DBT
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*The most disturbing aspect of this trend is a lack of concern for the
hardships that people face.
*Aadhaar-less ration cards are cancelled without notice.
*Pensions are discontinued without the victims being told what the
problem is.
*Job cards are cancelled just to meet the “100% seeding” targets.
*Elderly persons with rough fingerprints are deprived of food rations
without compensation.
*Cash payments are automatically redirected to Aadhaar-linked bank
accounts that people sometimes know nothing about.
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*Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is
accompanied on his visit to India by a large
delegation drawn from the defence, cyber,
and agricultural sectors; he intends to boost
trade, investment, and tourism between the
two nations.
*Israel’s Ministry of Tourism will spend $5-6 million in India in a bid to
boost tourism to Israel.
*The goal is to have one lakh tourists visiting Israel in 2018.
*1950s and ’60s, India had virtually no relations with Israel.
*Several people from the Israeli foreign service visited India to help make
arrangements for those Jews who wished to make aliyah – the right of
any Jew to “ascend” to Israel.
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*Most Israelis knew little about India until about the mid-1990s.
*Some of the European pioneers of Israel were familiar with Tagore’swritings, and a street in Tel Aviv is named after him.
*Many Israelis knew of Mahatma Gandhi.
*Few know about the 800-year-old Indian hospice that was set up at the site where the Sufi saint, Baba Farid, is said to have prayed and meditated when he visited Jerusalem in the 13th century.
*It serves as a guesthouse for pilgrims of all faiths who come to Jerusalem to pray at Al-Aqsa mosque.
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*India recognised the state of Israel in 1950, and in 1953 permitted it to open a consulate in Mumbai. Despite there being no formal relations, Israel provided India with crucial intelligence information during several wars. Full diplomatic relationswere established between India and Israel until 1992 when India opened its embassy in Tel Aviv.
*Few in Israel know about the Jews of India, their varied histories, and the marked cultural and ethnic distinctions between them.
*In the 1960s, the Bene Israelis fought and won a major case to be fully accepted as Jews.
*Mr. Netanyahu called the Indian diaspora “a human bridge” between the two nations.
*More than 40,000 Israelis visit India each year. For a country with a population of 6.5million, that is a considerable number.
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*The Indo-Nepal Treaty of Peace and Friendship, 1950 provides for an open border between Nepal and India.
*Following the 2015 Nepal earthquake, the Ministry of Home Affairs said that human trafficking from Nepal to India witnessed “a three-fold jump”.
*Closing the border may prevent cross-border trafficking, but it could also engender or accentuate economic vulnerabilities for those who have jobs or own businesses along the border.
*It is imperative to create economic opportunities, particularly for the
youth, within the country.
*Further, the Nepal-India border needs to be equipped with enhanced
intelligence networks and effective monitoring mechanisms.
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CJI meets judges, initiates dialogue
*Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra met with his four senior-most
colleagues on Tuesday to initiate a discussion on issues highlighted by
them in the January 12 press conference.
*The main purpose of the meeting was “to sit together and sort out the
issues.”
‘Timely move’
*Political parties have welcomed the CJI’s initiative. While former Law
Minister Ashwani Kumar felt it was “timely and welcome,” CPI(M) leader
Sitaram Yechury said the issues raised were very important and must be
settled.
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*.
Nine years later Moshe Holtzberg, survivor of the 26/11 attacks, praying at the Chabad House in Mumbai on Tuesday,
where his parents were killed by terrorists in November 2008.
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Govt. to revisit Malimath report
*A 2003 report of a Committee on reforms in the criminal justice system that recommended admissibility of confessions made before a police officer as evidence in a court of law is being revisited by the Centre, a senior government official said.
*The Committee on Reforms of the Criminal Justice System, or the Justice Malimath Committee, was constituted by the Home Ministry in 2000 by then Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, who also held the Home portfolio.
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Haj subsidies to be phased out: Naqvi
*Union Minister for Minority Affairs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Tuesday
announced that the Centre would phase out subsidies for the annual Haj
pilgrimage.
*The Centre’s decision followed a 2012 Supreme Court order asking that
subsidies for the Haj be phased out by 2022 and the money saved (around
D450 crore annually) diverted to more welfare-oriented activities.
*Political parties reminded the government of the caveat in the court
order that the funds should be spent on welfare.
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Only the strong survive: Israel PM
*Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said here on Tuesday that intelligence, big data and defence preparedness were necessary to ensure national security.
*Inaugurating the third annual Raisina Dialogue of the External Affairs Ministry, the visiting Israeli leader said he represented a special country that produced solutions to challenges, and urged stronger partnership between India and Israel by attacking bureaucratic bottleneck with an “axe”.
*“I like soft power, but hard power is often better,” he said explaining that submarines, cybercapabilities, science and technology, interceptors were part of the security necessities to “ensuring security for countries in the present-day world”.
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Netanyahu to gift PM a desalination jeep
*Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, the Gal-Mobile water desalinisation and purification jeep the two leaders rode on Israel’s Olga beach last year. The jeep is on its way to Bhuj, sources said.
*“There will be a live demonstration of desalination of seawater that the two Prime Ministers will witness through video conferencing from the iCreatecentre on January 17,” they said.
*The jeep is said to cost around about D70 lakh.
*It can purify up to 20,000 litres per day of seawater and 80,000 litres per day of brackish, muddy or contaminated water and bring it to WHO standards.
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Govt. holds firm on disability pensions
*The Defence Ministry has no proposal to withdraw pending appeals
against disability pensions and benefits. This was conveyed by Defence
Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in a letter to Rajya Sabha member Rajeev
Chandrasekhar.
*“At present, there is no proposal to withdraw pending appeals in the
Supreme Court,” Ms. Sitharaman said in the letter dated December 31,
2017 in response to Mr. Chandrasekhar’s July 2017 letter.
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‘5,000 children killed or hurt in Yemen war’
*The war in Yemen has killed or injured more than 5,000 children and left
another 400,000 severely malnourished and fighting for their lives, the
UN children’s agency said on Tuesday.
*In a report unveiled in Sanaa, UNICEF said nearly two million Yemeni
children were out of school, a quarter of them since the conflict
escalated when a Saudi-led coalition intervened in March 2015.
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*.
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*.
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Australia seeks rescue ideas for reef
*Australia is calling on the world’s top scientific minds to help save the Great Barrier Reef, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund research into protecting the world’s largest living structure.
*The UNESCO World Heritage-listed reef is reeling from significant coralbleaching due to warming seatemperatures linked to climatechange.
*The 2,300-kilometre site is also under pressure from farming runoff, development and predatory crown-of-thorns starfish.
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1. Arrange the following events chronologically
A. Cripps Mission
B. Cabinet Mission
C. Quit India Movement
D. Individual Satyagraha
E. RIN Mutiny
2. In reference to Freedom Struggle, Usha Mehta is well-known for
A. Running the Secret Congress Radio around Quit India Movement
B. Took part in 2nd Round Table Conference
C. Leading a contingent of Indian National Army
D. Assisting in the formation of interim govt. under Pt Nehru.
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