Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 28 March 2016

:: NATIONAL ::

President’s Rule was imposed on Uttarakhand, a day before the Harish Rawat government was to face a test of strength in the Assembly, which has been placed under suspended animation.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told journalists that the Cabinet took the decision.
However, the Congress questioned the move, with its spokesperson Manish Tewari citing the Bommai case judgment of 1994, which states that the legitimacy of a government has to be established in the Assembly.
Mr. Jaitley had gone to meet President Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday night to communicate the Cabinet’s decision and address questions that he might have had.
Governor K.K. Paul’s report on the constitutional breakdown was discussed in the aftermath of the sting video that showed CM Rawat allegedly involved in horse-trading. Mr. Mukherjee signed the proclamation on Sunday morning.

India will hand over the DNA samples of the four terrorists killed in the Pathankot airbase to Pakistan’s Joint Investigation Team, which arrived to probe the attack.
The team is expected to track down the families of the terrorists in Pakistan and match the samples.
The five-member team, including an ISI official, landed at the Palam technical area in a special aircraft of the Pakistan Air Force in the morning. It has a seven-day visa to visit Delhi and Pathankot.
The proof of role of J-e-M can withstand any international judicial scrutiny. Since Pakistan has not sent any letter rogatory [a judicial request to gather evidence] so far, India has said that the onus of making the evidence count in a court of law in their country is on them.

U.S. researchers have found that blowing tiny bubbles through sea water could help protect coral reefs and oyster farms from oceans, which have increasingly turned acidic through human activities.
The idea is that tiny bubbles will help cleanse the world’s oceans of carbon dioxide (CO2) by drawing the gas out of the seawater and transferring it to the atmosphere. This may provide a relatively inexpensive solution to one of the biggest threats facing coral reefs today.
Ocean acidification harms a variety of marine organisms, but especially those that use calcium carbonate to assemble their skeletons and shells, such as coral, mussels, and oysters.
The study was published online in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) is keen on deploying sensors and drones in farms, to start with, for assessing the quality of soil as well as crop losses after floods.
The devices would help speed up the analysis. At present, unless large areas get affected farmers do not get compensation.
The Indian Agricultural Research Institute, a premier ICAR institution in Delhi, in association with a few other agencies, including ISRO and IIT-Delhi, is working in this area.

A buoyant Bernie Sanders said he has the momentum as he attempts to claw back Hillary Clinton’s handsome lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, after scoring a trio of big wins.
The Vermont Senator breathed fresh life into his campaign for the White House with a clean sweep in caucuses on Saturday in the western U.S. States of Alaska, Hawaii and Washington.
In the wider context of their battle for the Democratic presidential ticket, Mr. Sanders’s Saturday success barely dents Ms. Clinton’s formidable lead — she now has 1,733 delegates, including super-delegates who are unelected by voters, to Mr. Sanders’s 1,039, according to a CNN count.
To win the Democratic nomination at the July convention in Philadelphia, 2,383 delegates are needed.
It means that the delegate math still dramatically favours Ms. Clinton, a former first lady and Secretary of State, in large part because Democrats allocate delegates proportionally by State, making it all but impossible for Mr. Sanders to overtake Ms. Clinton.

Britain and its Western allies must be prepared to send ground troops to defeat Islamic State forces or risk a terror attack in Europe of “such size and horror” that draconian security measures would have to be introduced, Tony Blair has said.
In a lengthy article on the Brussels bombings , the former Prime Minister said local forces could be used against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
But he said Western ground forces would eventually be needed to defeat the IS as it sought to create a caliphate.
The allied countries which are carrying out airstrikes against IS targets, including the U.K. and U.S., have so far not deployed ground forces beyond unannounced special forces to guide the bombers and troops that train Iraqi forces in combating the IS.

Department of Telecom is looking to commence the auction for spectrum, including in 700 Mhz band, around mid-July, which may fetch the government a whopping Rs.5.36 lakh crore.
The DoT is expecting Cabinet approval on spectrum price by mid-May and issue notice for auction in June. Taking into account various processes, spectrum auction should begin around July 15.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has suggested a plan for spectrum sale, expected to be held in July, with a potential to fetch Rs.5.36 lakh crore.
It will be the biggest-ever auction in terms of value and is more than double the gross revenue of telecom services industry.
Trai had recommended a record high base price of Rs.11,485 crore per Mhz for the 700 Mhz band. If all available radiowaves under this get sold at the Trai-suggested price, it alone will yield a whopping Rs.4 lakh crore.
According to the Trai paper, the cost of delivering mobile services in 700 Mhz band is approximately 70 per cent lower than 2100 Mhz frequency, which is widely used for 3G services.
Spectrum is priced on the basis of its efficiency to carry mobile signals and ecosystem of device and equipment available for its usage.
The government expects a revenue of Rs.98,995 crore from communication services in 2016-17, which includes proceeds from spectrum auction and other fees levied by the DoT.

A laggard in embracing the 'fintech', or financial technology, revolution, Japan is set to ease investment restrictions that could free up the flow of capital in an economy sitting on an estimated $9 trillion in individuals' cash deposits.
Strict regulation, easy access to credit due to rock-bottom interest rates, and weak demand for innovative financial services from a risk-averse population that still prefers cash to credit cards, have strangled fintech's advance in Japan.