Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 11 March 2021

SSC CGL Current Affairs

::NATIONAL::

The RajyaSabha passed the National Capital Territory of Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) Second (Amendment) Bill, 2021 to regulariseunauthorised colonies in Delhi which is expected to benefit 1.35 crore people.
The bill replaces the National Capital Territory of Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) Second (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020 which was promulgated by President Ram NathKovind on December 30, 2020.
Minister of state (Independent Charge) of housing and urban affairs Hardeep Singh Puri said Delhi’s population has increased from 8 lakh in 1947 to 1.6 crore in 2011. “Exponential growth has led to serious stretch on resources leading to vast gaps in demand and supply.” However, the government has followed a three-pronged approach to address the urbanisation needs of Delhi through three schemes.
“A total of 1.35 crore of its (Delhi) citizens will benefit from three schemes, namely, the PradhanMantriUnauthorised Colonies in Delhi AwasAdhikarYojana which is expected to benefit 50 lakh people; the ‘JahanJhuggi, WahanMakaan’ under the PMAY (Urban) is expected to benefit about 10 lakh people.

France launched its first military exercise in space this week to evaluate its ability to defend its satellites and other defense equipment from an attack. Michel Friedling, the head of France's newly created Space Command said the exercises are a "stress-test of their systems.
He said that they were a first for the French army and even a first in Europe. The exercise, codenamed "AsterX" in memory of the first French satellite from 1965, will be based on 18 simulated events in an operations room.
During the drill, the French military will monitor a potentially dangerous space object as well as a threat to its own satellite from another foreign power possessing a considerable space force.
The new US Space Force and German space agencies are taking part in the French exercises which began on Monday and will last until Friday. The French Space Forces Command, Commandement de l'Espace (CdE) was created in 2019 and is set to have 500 personnel by 2025.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis has led to a spike in the country’s unemployment rate to 27.11% for the week ended May 3, up from the under 7% level before the start of the pandemic in mid-March, the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) has said. The Mumbai-based think tank said the rate of unemployment was the highest in the urban areas, which constitute the most number of the red zones due to the coronavirus cases, at 29.22%, as against 26.69% for the rural areas.
Analysts have been warning about the spectre of unemployment ever since the country was put under a lockdown on March 25 by Prime Minister NarendraModi to arrest the spread of the coronavirus infections.
Scenes of migrants fleeing urban centres including Delhi and Mumbai only confirmed the long-held concerns on their employment as the economic activity came to a grinding halt.
The government has so far announced income and food support to the vulnerable people as part of a ₹1.70 lakh crore fiscal stimulus to the economic-, financial- and possibly humanitarian crisis, and is also mulling a second round of measures soon.

Researchers at the Utah State University recently used the silk from silkworm to grow skeletal muscle cells, improving on traditional methods of cell culture and hopefully leading to better treatments for muscle atrophy.
When scientists are trying to understand the disease and test treatments, they generally grow model cells on a flat plastic surface (think petri dish). But growing cells on a two-dimensional surface has its limitations, primarily because muscle tissue is three-dimensional.
Thus, USU researchers developed a three-dimensional cell culture surface by growing cells on silk fibers that are wrapped around an acrylic chassis. The team used both native and transgenic silkworm silk, the latter produced by silkworms modified with spider silk genes.
Native silkworm silks have been used previously as three-dimensional cell culture models, but this is the first time that transgenic silkworm silk has been used for skeletal muscle modeling.

Thomas Bach was re-elected as president of the International Olympic Committee on Wednesday for a final four-year term with his immediate focus on this year’s delayed Tokyo Games.
The German lawyer was unopposed and won the vote 93-1, with four members abstaining, following an opening eight-year mandate dominated by the Russian doping scandal and the first Olympics to be postponed in peacetime.
"Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart for this overwhelming vote of confidence and trust,” Bach said during an online meeting of IOC members.