Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 7 SEPTEMBER 2019

SSC CGL Current Affairs

::NATIONAL::

A new industry collaboration to tackle disinformation was announced by the BBC and partners today. Major news and tech organisations will work together to protect their audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around moments of jeopardy, including elections.
Earlier this summer the BBC convened a ‘Trusted News Summit’, bringing together senior figures from major global technology firms and publishing. Recent events such as the Indian elections have highlighted the dangers of disinformation and the risks it poses to democracy, and have underlined the importance of working together around shared principles.
Under this collaboration, news and technology majors will work together to protect their audiences and users from disinformation, particularly around crucial events such as elections.

The Supreme Court on Friday directed the Centre to respond to a plea to make violence committed against doctors and medical personnel and establishments a separate penal offence.
The petition said police hardly swung into action to prevent incidents of violence or protect the medical community. The medical fraternity had become demoralised by the increasing number of attacks on them. This was one of the reasons why doctors avoided serving in rural areas. “Unless such attacks are checked, there will be serious repercussions on patient care.”
Violence against doctors was unacceptable and needed to be condemned. Small and medium private healthcare establishments formed the bulwark of the healthcare sector.

The consolidation of 10 public sector banks into four will be credit positive due to increased operational scale and capital, and improved corporate governance in the long run, rating agency Moody’s said on Thursday.
As most of these banks have higher bad loans, Moody’s expects no significant change in asset quality and profitability, post merger.
“Asset quality and profitability will remain broadly unchanged after consolidation. PSU banks already score poorly on these two factors, and there is no reason to assume that the merged entities will make significant improvements in these metrics,” it said.
“While boards have been given more power, their roles and responsibilities will remain significantly circumscribed compared with boards of private sector companies, including private sector banks,” it said.
Moody’s added that flexibility in PSBs’ human resources practices, compared with private sector peers, remained limited.

States and districts were honoured today for improved sex ratio and awareness generation under the BetiBachaoBetiPadhao campaign.
Haryana, Uttarakhand, Delhi, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh received honours for improving sex ratio at birth. Nine districts were also awarded for better sex ratio at birth.
These include East Kameng of Arunachal Pradesh, Mahendragarh and Bhiwani in Haryana, Udham Singh Nagar of Uttrakhand, Tamil Nadu's Namakkal, and Jalgaon district of Maharashtra.
During the event, 10 districts were also awarded for good work in awareness generation and outreach activities under the campaign.

In Colombia, Presidents and Ministers from seven Amazon countries met yesterday to take measures on protecting the world's biggest rain-forest from wildfires and rampant deforestation.
Colombia's Environment Minister Ricardo Lozano said, the new measures include the establishment of an Amazonian Cooperation Network to share information on deforestation. He added, the information includes the weather data to mitigate the effects of climate change, and threats from illegal mining and logging.
Presidents of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia also attended the meeting. Suriname's vice-president and Guyana's natural resources Minister also attended. Brazil was represented by the Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo.
In a message to the Summit, UNESCO Director General Audrey Azoulay called on leaders to reinforce existing instruments, designed to protect the Amazon.

The researchers at Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IIT-H), have collaborated with research institutions across the world to develop a device to detect heart diseases in minutes.
Headed by Renu John, head of Department of Biomedical Engineering, IIT-H, the research team says clinical complications of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are at present the major causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide.
Primary and specialist health-providers use a variety of tools for clinical assessment of the existing heart diseases and to identify vulnerable patients at risk for CVD. Biosensors are one such tools. Prof. Renu John’s studies on microfluidics would help in building biomarker-based biosensors that could be used for instantaneous detection of heart attack and other cardiac diseases.
Prof. Renu John and his team tested the performance of the microfluidic biosensors using blood serum of cardiac patients and compared the results with those of conventional chemiluminescence assays.
They found that the microfluidic devices could detect the CVD biomarker cTns with extremely high degree of accuracy and sensitivity. cTns levels as low as 0.000000000005 grams in one millilitre of blood could be detected, which makes this technique a useful tool for detection of cardiovascular maladies, they say.