Current Affairs For SSC CGL Exam

31 October, 2013

Recommendations of parikh panel about LPG & diesel

• The Government-appointed Kirit Parikh Committee has recommended a price increase of Rs. 5 per litre in diesel, Rs. 4 per litre in kerosene, and Rs. 250 in LPG cylinder with immediate effect.
• It has also recommended that the subsidised LPG cylinders be reduced from the present nine to six cylinders per annum to each household.
• It has pitched for capping the subsidy on diesel at Rs. 6 per litre. At the same time, it has called for the elimination of subsidy on diesel within one year, which could save the exchequer Rs. 72,000 crore in fuel subsidy.
• Mr. Parikh submitted the report to Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Veerappa Moily .
• The Kirit Parikh panel was set up by the Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry to suggest a methodology for pricing of diesel and cooking fuel.

Count down begin for mars mission by ISRO

• The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will initiate a dry run of the Mars Orbital Mission on board the PSLV C25 that is scheduled for lift-off from the spaceport here on November 5.
• The dry run will simulate the entire command sequence of the eight-and-a-half hours of the countdown, leading to the lift-off, barely six days before the PSLV rocket actually zooms away into space on what ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan called “the most cost-effective mission” to showcase Indian capability to reach and orbit around the red planet.
• There have been only 51 missions to Mars, predominantly by the U.S., Russia and the European Union consortium, and the success rate has been under 50 per cent.
• India has made bold an attempt to “engage in meaningful scientific experiments” on a relatively modest budget of about Rs. 450 crore.
• The stage has been set at Launchpad 1 in Sriharikota, where all the subsystems of the Mars mission have been fully integrated with the PSLV C25, which will be on its silver jubilee flight after achieving a remarkable success rate of 96 per cent. The mass at lift-off is 1,340 kg.

Bitcoins made by Norwegian

• The meteoric rise in bitcoin has meant that within the space of four years, one Norwegian man’s $27 investment turned into a $886,000 windfall.
• Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption.
• He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of thedecentralised digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.
• Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something he had forgotten.
• After eventually working out what the password could be, Mr. Koch got a pleasant surprise: “
• In April 2013, the value of bitcoin peaked at $266 before crashing to a low of $50 soon after.
• Since then, it has seen large fluctuations in its value, most recently following the seizure of online drugs marketplace Silk Road, plummeting before jumping $30 in one day to a high of $197 in October.
• Mr. Koch exchanged one fifth of his 5,000 bitcoins, generating enough kroner to buy an apartment in Toyen, one of the Norwegian capital’s wealthier areas.
• Typically bitcoins are bought using traditional currency from a bitcoin “exchanger”, although due to strict anti-money laundering controls, the process can be tricky.
• A user can then withdraw those bitcoins by sending them back to an exchanger like Mt. Gox, the best known bitcoin exchange, in return for cash.
• However, bitcoin is gaining more and more traction within the physical world too.
• It is now possible to actually spend bitcoins without exchanging them for traditional currency first in a few British pubs, including the Pembury Tavern in Hackney, London, for instance. On 29 October, the world’s first bitcoin ATM also went online in Vancouver, Canada, which scans a user’s palm before letting them buy or sell bitcoins for cash.
• time at least in line with growth in the per capita agriculture GDP,”.

Newly elected chief minister of Sri lanka’s northern province(Wigneswaran) invites manmohan

• While a decision is still to be taken on whether the Prime Minister will attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran has invited Manmohan Singh to visit Jaffna (capital of the Tamil majority province).

• In a message to Dr. Singh, Mr. Wigneswaran thanked the Prime Minister and India for “persuading the Sri Lankan government” to hold the Northern Province elections under the 13th Amendment.

• He underlined that he had won the elections in the province — the focal point of fierce battles between Sri Lankan armed forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, with a large number of civilians badly affected — by a “sizeable majority.”

• “Basically, Mr. Wigneswaran would like Dr. Singh to engage both in Colombo and Jaffna. This also shows that Sri Lanka’s Tamil community wants India to remain engaged on issues important to them such as national reconciliation, political devolution of power and resettlement of the displaced,”

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