Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 03 February 2021

SSC CGL Current Affairs

::NATIONAL::

''Aatmanirbharta'' implying self-reliance has been named by Oxford Languages as its Hindi word of the year 2020 as it "validated the day-to-day achievements of the countless Indians who dealt with and survived the perils of a pandemic".
The word was chosen by an advisory panel of language experts Kritika Agrawal, Poonam Nigam Sahay and Imogen Foxell.
The Oxford Hindi word of the year is a word or expression that is chosen to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a term of cultural significance.
In a statement, Oxford Languages said in the early months of the pandemic when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India''s COVID-19 recovery package, he emphasised the need to become self-reliant as a country, as an economy, as a society and as individuals, in a bid to navigate the perils of the pandemic.
"In an unprecedented year, ''aatmanirbharta'' found resonance with a wide cross-section of people as it is seen to be an answer to the revival of a COVID-impacted economy," said Oxford University Press India managing director Sivaramarkrishnan Venkateswaran.

Health Minister Saeed Namaki told state TV the shipment is expected later this month and was secured through the global vaccine procurement system backed by the World Health Organization.
In January, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced a ban on importing British and U.S. Covid-19 shots, saying they couldn’t be trusted. But the country’s top epidemiologist later signaled a loophole when she said she was looking to import the British-made vaccine from outside the U.K.
Some 2 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik vaccine are also expected to arrive in Iran.
The Islamic Republic has the worst outbreak of the disease in the Middle East and has officially reported more than 58,000 deaths and 1.4 million cases so far.

India’s largest private lender HDFC Bank Tuesday said the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has appointed an external firm to conduct a special audit of its entire IT infrastructure.
In December, RBI ordered HDFC Bank to halt its digital banking initiatives and freeze credit card issuances until it addressed the lapses that led to a series of glitches. The lender’s e-banking service faced three outages since 2018, inconveniencing customers.
“…kindly note that RBI has appointed an external professional IT firm for carrying out a special audit of the entire IT infrastructure of the Bank under Section 30 (1-B) of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949 (‘the Act’), at the cost of the bank under Section 30 (1-C) of the Act,” it said.
The bank said it will extend cooperation to the IT firm. HDFC Bank said last month it has provided a remedial plan on its e-banking outages to the regulator and expects its strategies to take shape in 10-12 weeks, following which it will request an inspection by the regulator.

A new study could help settle arguments over which microfossils are signs of early life and which are not.
The study was published in the journal 'Geology'. The new experiments by geobiologists Julie Cosmidis, Christine Nims, and their colleagues have shown that fossilized spheres and filaments--two common bacterial shapes--made of organic carbon (typically associated with life) can form abiotically (in the absence of living organisms) and might even be easier to preserve than bacteria.
"One big problem is that the fossils are a very simple morphology, and there are lots of non-biological processes that can reproduce them," Cosmidis said.
"If you find a full skeleton of a dinosaur, it is a very complex structure that is impossible for a chemical process to reproduce," he added.
It's much harder to have that certainty with fossilized microbes. Their work was spurred by an accidental discovery a few years back, with which both Cosmidis and Nims were involved while working in Alexis Templeton's lab.
While mixing organic carbon and sulfide, they noticed that spheres and filaments were forming and assumed they were the result of bacterial activity. But on closer inspection, Cosmidis quickly realized they have formed abiotically.
The researchers noted that very early they "noticed that these things looked a lot like bacteria, both chemically and morphologically."

It's a rare thing for Serena Williams to play a tournament the week leading into one of the tennis Grand Slams.
Now that she's at Melbourne Park, though, she's making the most of her time in the Yarra Valley Classic to prepare for next week's Australian Open.
The 23-time major champion beat Tsvetana Pironkova 6-1, 6-4 on Wednesday to advance to the quarterfinals. She's still on track for a semifinal match against top-ranked Ash Barty.
Williams had a tough win over Pironkova at last year's U.S. Open, and then withdrew from their scheduled match at the French Open because of an Achilles injury.