Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 17 June 2022

SSC CGL Current Affairs

Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 17 June 2022

::NATIONAL::

PM Modi to lead yoga day event at Mysuru Palace on June 21

Prime minister Narendra Modi will lead a mass yoga event at Mysuru Palace grounds in Karnataka on the International Day of Yoga on June 21, Union ayush minister Sarbananda Sonowal said. Modi will join 15,000 yoga enthusiasts who will participate in the event, Sonowal said.
The programme is being held in physical mode after a gap of two years due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The theme for this year’s IDY celebrations is “Yoga for Humanity” and around 25 crore people across the world are expected to participate in various events, doing yoga in unison towards better health and wellness for all, Sonowal said addressing the media.
To ensure the grand scale celebrations of the Yoga Day, the PM had written a letter in Hindi to all the sarpanchs or gram pradhans on May 6.
Sonowal said the ayush secretary has requested all the chief secretaries of the states and UTs to facilitate a translation of the PM’s letter in the local or regional language of the state and get it delivered to gram pradhans through the district collectors.
“The programme will commence at 3 AM IST and would continue till 10 PM. Starting in Fiji, Brisbane, Australia and New Zealand, it will end in San Francisco, USA and Toronto, Canada,” he said. “Seventy-nine Countries and United Nations’ organisations are onboard for the programme with full-hearted support of Indian missions abroad. The programme will be telecast live on DD India for 16 time zones,” Sonowal said.

::INTERNATIONAL::

Kyiv gets possible path to EU, Putin unaffected

The European Union’s executive arm recommended putting Ukraine on a path to membership, a symbolic boost for a country fending off a Russian onslaught that is killing civilians, flattening cities and threatening its very survival.
In another show of Western support, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrived in Kyiv to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky to offer continued aid and military training, adding that evidence points to Russia ”taking heavy casualties” in the invasion.
“We are with you to give you the strategic endurance that you will need,” Johnson said on his second visit to the country. Although he did not detail the aid, he said Britain would lead a program that could train up to 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers every 120 days in an unspecified location outside the country.
The latest embrace of Ukraine by its European allies also marks another setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who launched his war nearly four months ago, hoping to pull his ex-Soviet neighbour away from the West and back into Russia’s sphere of influence.
Putin also said on Friday he had no objections to Ukraine joining the European Union.
“We have nothing against it. It is not a military bloc. It’s the right of any country to join economic unions,” Putin said.
Russia has railed against Ukraine’s attempts to join the Nato military alliance for years, with the issue becoming a major stand-off between Moscow and the West.

::ECONOMY::

Textile exporters bat for fine tuning of RoSCTL scheme to retain edge

The Indian textile industry will rapidly lose its global export competitiveness if imbalances in the Rebate of State and Central Taxes and Levies (RoSCTL) scheme are not addressed immediately, said Apparel Export Promotion Council (AEPC).
RoCTL was launched in 2021 with the intention of making India’s textile industry competitive and strengthening its exports. However, the scheme in its current form is eroding the export margins of the domestic textile industry, AEPC said in a statement.
The RoSCTL scheme provides rebate against the taxes and levies already paid by exporters on inputs. This rebate has been converted into tradeablescrips that exporters can sell scrips to importers who, in turn, can pay import duty with these scrips instead of paying import duty in cash.
The council said in a statement that though the scheme was launched with the aim of making India’s textile industry export-competitive, these changes are acting against the government’s goal of benefitting exporters, and are instead benefitting importers. “This defeats the very purpose and intent of this entire scheme of promoting the government’s stated policy of ‘Make in India,” a statement said.
Based on estimates, of the total $16 billion in apparel exports, about 5 per cent (roughly Rs 6,000 crore) is in the form of reimbursement. At a broader level, given a discount of 20-25 per cent on this, there is a direct hit of about Rs 1,500 crore on the feeble margins of companies operating in the apparel sector, it added.

::Science and tech::

Ancient DNA solves mystery over origin of medieval Black Death

Ancient DNA from bubonic plague victims buried in cemeteries on the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia has helped solve an enduring mystery, pinpointing an area in northern Kyrgyzstan as the launching point for the Black Death that killed tens of millions of people in the mid-14th century.
Researchers said they retrieved ancient DNA traces of the Yersinia pestis plague bacterium from the teeth of three women buried in a medieval Nestorian Christian community in the Chu Valley near Lake IssykKul in the foothills of the Tian Shan mountains who perished in 1338-1339. The earliest deaths documented elsewhere in the pandemic were in 1346.
Reconstructing the pathogen's genome showed that this strain not only gave rise to the one that caused the Black Death that mauled Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa but also to most plague strains existing today.
"Our finding that the Black Death originated in Central Asia in the 1330s puts centuries-old debates to rest," said historian Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling in Scotland, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.

::Sports::

Coco Gauff beats Karolina Pliskova in Berlin for first grass semifinal

Coco Gauff reached the semifinals on grass for the first time after beating Karolina Pliskova 7-5, 6-4 at the Berlin Open on Friday to set up a match with OnsJabeur.
Already in uncharted territory in her first quarterfinal on grass, the 18-year-old French Open finalist had to fight back from 2-0 down at the start of each set against an opponent who was the Wimbledon runner-up last year.
Gauff said she needed some time to find her rhythm, and found the answer by mixing up her shots to include more slices.
"It was really tough to be honest. I had to come up with a couple different game styles that I normally don’t use, but sometimes it’s like that," she said.
Pliskova missed out on what would have been her first final since August. The Czech player missed the first two months of this season when she broke her arm in an accident while training in the gym.