Current Affairs For SSC CGL Exam - 21 July, 2014

Current Affairs For SSC CGL Exam

Rajya Sabha will have a short-duration discussion on violence in Gaza, where hundreds of people have lost their lives.
The government was placed in a tight spot over its reluctance to hold a discussion on the issue even after the motion was admitted by the presiding officer.
The discussion in Rajya Sabha will see the participation of Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Jairam Ramesh, JD(U)’s K.C. Tyagi and CPI(M)’s P. Rajeev among others.

The monsoon deficit has come down to 31 per cent with rains picking up in July across the country, giving relief to farmers.
Central and northwestern India have been receiving deficient rainfall, but even in these parts the monsoon has been making progress.
The monsoon is expected to remain good for the next two weeks in north, central, southern peninsula and eastern India.
However, parts of northwestern India, which includes western Rajasthan and Kutch region, may still receive weak rainfall.
In the next 24 to 48 hours, the weather system will bring in widespread good monsoon rains over Telangana, Chhattisgarh, east Madhya Pradesh and Vidarbha. The rain belt will gradually shift to bring rest of Madhya Pradesh and adjoining Maharashtra under its purview. By July 22-23, a fresh weather system will bring rains over Gangetic West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Odisha.

Ukrainian investigators have found 196 bodies at the crash site where a Malaysian passenger plane carrying 298 people was brought down by a missile in pro-Russia rebels-held eastern part of the country.
The Boeing 777 was on a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur and it had not made a distress call.
It is still not clear if the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down purposely or mistakenly.
The rebels also have allegedly recovered the black boxes from the plane and will hand them over to the International Civil Aviation Organization, a rebel leader said.
The Ukrainian government and the pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country have blamed each other for the alleged shooting down of the plane.
Three air crash investigators from Ukraine accompanied the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
Western and Australian countries fear that tempering of evidence has happened.
On other hand Britain, Germany and France agreed that they should be ready to ratchet up sanctions on Russia over the downing of a Malaysian jet carrying 298 passengers.

Everyday Sexism project, a website that Ms. Laura Bates set up for women to share their experiences of sexism and harassment in their daily lives.
Two years on, what started as a simple idea has become a movement that is steadily gaining momentum, galvanising support from politicians, police and thousands of women and men from Britain and beyond.
The project has collected 70,000 posts from some 20 countries, describing a wide range of unwelcome behaviour and offences from a colleague’s casual comment to unreported rapes. Many tell of assault, threats of violence and verbal abuse in public places. Others report seemingly innocuous behaviour and comments.

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week to understand his development priorities.
“The historic mandate from the people of India represents a tremendous opportunity to unlock India’s growth potential and take advantage of its immense demographic dividend,” said Mr. Kim
Mr. Kim will visit World Bank-supported project sites in Tamil Nadu to see the challenges of India’s rural-urban transformation, and how, empowered with the right skills, rural women in the state are taking advantage of emerging urban employment opportunities.
World Bank Group’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) has successfully mobilised its $1 billion offshore rupee bond program, aimed at strengthening India’s capital markets and attracting foreign investments.
India is home to the largest operations of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).
World Bank Group assistance to India between July 2013 and June 2014 amounted to $6.4 billion.

The high inflation in India owes to “higher weight for the food basket (about 50 per cent)” as against 14 per cent and 32 per cent weights for Korea and China, respectively, according to the data.
The consumer price index-based inflation remained elevated at 9.5 per cent in 2013 and 10.2 per cent in 2012.
In 2013, CPI inflation or retail inflation in China stood at 2.6 per cent, Korea 1.3 per cent, Sri Lanka 6.9 per cent, Indonesia 6.4 per cent, Malaysia 2.1 per cent and Thailand 2.2 per cent.
The difference in inflation in Asian countries may be on account of several factors such as composition, base, weights of respective CPI basket, structure of the economy, resource endowments and distribution of income.
To bring down inflation, government has made several announcements in Budget 2014-15 including technology driven second green revolution with focus on higher productivity and protein revolution.
Apart from these, a price stabilisation fund has been proposed to mitigate risk of price volatility in agriculture produce. Restructuring of Food Corporation of India (FCI) and reducing cost of transportation, distribution losses and improving efficacy of public distribution system are amongst other measures announced.