Current Affairs For SSC CGL Exam - 24 April, 2014

Current Affairs For SSC CGL Exam

Brazil’s president signed into law on a “Bill of Rights” for the digital age that aims to protect online privacy and promote the Internet as a public utility by barring telecommunications companies from charging for preferential access to their networks.
The law signed by President Dilma Rousseff at a global conference on the future of Internet governance puts Brazil in the vanguard of online consumer protection and what is known as “net neutrality,” whose promoters consider it profoundly democratic in part because it keeps financial barriers for innovators low.
The new law promotes privacy by limiting the data that online companies can collect on Internet users in this nation of 200 million people, deeming communications over the Internet “inviolable and secret.” Service providers must develop protocols to ensure email can be read only by senders and their intended recipients. Violators are subject to penalties including fines and suspension.
The law obliges Internet companies, however, to hold on to user data for six months and hand it over to law enforcement under court order.

Luck for the average pedestrian is happening upon a crisp dollar bill tumbling down the sidewalk. For European astronomers, it's happening to be looking at the right portion of sky at the exact moment a star is ripped apart by a giant black hole.
The auspicious discovery was made by the European Space Agency's orbiting X-ray observatory XMM-Newton. The cosmological providence revealed not one black hole, but two -- the first pair of supermassive black holes observed in a normal galaxy. Normal galaxies, or quiescent galaxies -- as opposed to active galaxies -- are no longer actively producing stars.
Black holes are much easier to locate in newer active galaxies. While black holes in active galaxies are constantly eating up gas clouds and star matter, giving off detectable X-rays as a result, similar activity is less frequent and more sporadic in normal galaxies.
Currently, the only way to find a normal black hole is by happening upon a "tidal disruption event," like the star consumption witnessed by ESA's XXM-Newton.
What makes the latest discovery even more unusual is that the two black holes were found together, orbiting each other -- the product of two galaxies having merged.

Indian politician Arvind Kejriwal has won the readers’ poll for the 2014 TIME 100, TIME’s annual list of people who influenced the world this past year for better or worse.
As the world's largest democracy votes in the ongoing elections, the key candidates obviously have made an impact internationally.
Narendra Modi, who is already being hailed as the leader at the helm of affairs by Goldman Sachs and other agencies, was expected to be the top candidate from India on TIME magazine's list. But Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal has managed to edge past the BJP's prime ministerial candidate by a small margin.
Kejriwal has edged past international icons such as Malala Yousafzai, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Jared Leto, Vladimir Putin, Janet Yellen, and Michael Bloomberg among others. Narendra Modi, who has gained much prominence of late, has secured the third post. According to TIME, Modi may clamour past pop star Katy Perry to the second spot and give Kejriwal a run for his money.

Multiple Olympic champion Carl Lewis was confirmed as the event ambassador of the TCS World 10K 2014 recently. The event will be flagged off from Bangalore`s Sree Kanteerava Stadium on May 18.
In a career spanning from 1979 to 1996, Lewis won 10 Olympic medals including nine golds in disciplines as varied as 100m, 200m, 4X100m relay and Long jump. Besides the Olympic glory, he also won 10 World Championships medals, setting numerous records. The International Olympic Committee honoured him with the title, the Sportsman of the Century for his unrivalled achievement as a track and field athlete.