Current Affairs For SSC CGL Exam - 21 December, 2013

Current Affairs For SSC CGL Exam

India and China have taken the first step towards pushing forward an ambitious corridor linking the two countries with Bangladesh and Myanmar, as representatives from the four nations held the first ever official-level discussions about the project this week.
The four nations have for the first time drawn up a specific timetable on taking forward the long discussed plan, emphasising the need to quickly improve physical connectivity in the region, over two days of talks in the south-western Chinese city of Kunming – the provincial capital of Yunnan, which borders Myanmar – on Wednesday and Thursday.
The BCIM project, which has been the subject of discussions and debates for more than a decade among scholars from the four countries, finally received official support earlier this year, highlighted as a key initiative during two meetings between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang, in New Delhi in May and in Beijing in October.

The death of three Indian UN peacekeepers on Thursday has brought into sharp focus a power struggle, whose roots may lie not so much in an inter-ethnic contest for political ascendancy, but a larger tussle for the control and diversion of South Sudan’s rich energy and mineral resources.
The three soldiers were killed when fighting between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar spiralled on Thursday, resulting in an attack on a UN peacekeeping base.
The targeted UN stronghold in the town of Akobo is in Jonglei State whose capital Bor is already under the control of Mr. Machar’s forces, making it an ideal base for a further advance.
UN forces are protecting 14,000 civilians who have fled the fighting in Bor.
More than 500 people have so far been killed amid fears that a civil war may be on the cards, riding on the growing animosities between the country’s Dinka and Nuer ethnic groups.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon and political opponent of Vladimir Putin, has been released from prison after being pardoned by the Russian President.
Mr. Khodorkovsky, who has spent the last 10 years in prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion, left a prison colony in Russia’s northwest near the Arctic Circle, on Friday morning, within an hour after the Kremlin published Mr. Putin’s decree pardoning the 50-year-old businessman on “humanitarian” grounds.
Mr. Putin said Mr. Khodorkovsky had cited his mother’s worsening illness when asking for clemency.
Russia’s richest man and owner of the country’s largest oil company was arrested in October 2003 and sentenced to eight years in prison. His company, Yukos, was dismantled and taken over by the state. In 2010 Mr. Khodorkovsky was tried again on charges of embezzlement and slapped with another prison term that would have kept him behind bars till August 2014.

The former Supreme Court judge, Asok Ganguly, questioned the jurisdiction of the three-judge committee which probed sexual harassment charges levelled against him by a law intern, and used other technical grounds to defend himself.
The Supreme Court panel, which rejected the defence, concluded that the law intern’s statement prima facie disclosed an act of “unwelcome verbal/non-verbal conduct of sexual nature.”
The report shows that Justice Ganguly appeared before the committee, comprising Justices R.M. Lodha, H.L. Dattu and Ranjana Desai, on November 27.
Justice Ganguly said he “strongly” denied the allegations of sexual harassment. But he argued that even accepting them to be true, the date of the alleged incident was December 24, 2012 and sought to defend himself on the ground that this was before the enactment of the Sexual Harassment (Prevention, Prohibition & Redressal) Act, 2013.
He cited Article 20(1) of the Constitution under which “no person shall be convicted of any offence except for violation of a law in force at the time of the commission of the act charged as an offence.”
The former judge also said the Visakha guidelines could not be applied to this case as “this court is not the workplace of either the intern or the judge concerned who retired.”

The report of the Adarsh Commission of Inquiry, tabled in the Maharashtra Assembly on Friday, has indicted four former Congress Chief Ministers, including Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde, and two Nationalist Congress Party Ministers for extending political patronage to the controversial building project.
The report, rejected by the Maharashtra Cabinet, names the former Chief Ministers, Ashok Chavan and the late Vilasrao Deshmukh.
It also indicts Shivajirao Nilangekar Patil, who served as Revenue Minister when the building received clearances. Mr. Patil had also served as Chief Minister in the 1980s.
The scam, which broke in in 2010, rocked the political establishment. It was found that the building received many out-of-turn clearances from politicians, bureaucrats and defence officials. Many of them later got flats in the building.
The report observed that as Chief Minister, Mr. Chavan granted 15 per cent extra floor space index (FSI) for the building, excluding a recreation ground from the plot. Earlier, as Revenue Minister, he, along with Mr. Deshmukh, had cleared reduction of an adjoining road to increase the space available for the Adarsh Society.