GK and Current Affairs Updates

Time Magazine on 21 April 2016 released a list of 100 Most Influential People in the World.
•    RBI Governor RaghuramRajan, tennis player Sania Mirza, actress Priyanka Chopra, Google CEO SundarPichai and founders of Flipkart, Binny Bansal have been named by Time magazine in its list.
•    The TIME 100 is not a ranking, but a combination of public figures from various different fields. The list includes the public figures who have had some kind of significant impact on the world.
•    Some of the people in this list are as follows:
•    Aziz Ansari
•    Caitlyn Jenner 
•    SunitaNarain
•    Binny Bansal and Sachin Bansal
•    Pope Francis
•    SundarPichai
•    Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg
•    Kim Jong-un
•    Lori J. Robinson
•    RaghuramRajan
•    Hillary Clinton
•    Justin Trudeau
•    Barack Obama
•    Donald Trump
•    Nicki Minaj
•    Sania Mirza
•    Adele
•    Leonardo DiCaprio

Veteran Movie director Guy Hamilton, who directed four hugely popular James Bond films, passed away on 20 April 2016. He was 93.
He was popularly known for raising the Bond movie brand through his work with actors Sean Connery and Roger Moore.
• He was born in Paris in September 1922 and worked for the Paramount News newsreel company in England during World War II before serving in the Navy.
• In 1948 legendary British director Carol Reed hired him as first assistant director for The Fallen Idol, a thriller told from the perspective of a 9-year-old boy. 
• In 1950, Hamilton directed several movies and landed up for directing the Goldfinger.
• He directed four iconic Bond movies including Goldfinger in 1964, Diamonds are Forever in 1971, Live and Let Die in 1973 and The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974.

The Union Government in the third week of April 2016 has merged Rajiv Gandhi Khel Abhiyan (RGKA), launched by the UPA government, with the Khelo India programme for development of sports.
Two other sport projects, Urban Sports Infrastructure Scheme (USIS) and National Sports Talent Search Scheme (NSTSS), launched by the Congress-led UPA regime have also been absorbed under Khelo India.
Khelo India is based on Gujarat's model of Khel Mahakumbh, in which schools and colleges from different parts of the country participate in about 27 disciplines. Similarly, the Sports Authority of Gujarat (SAG) organises summer camps under this project every year.
• Rajiv Gandhi Khel Abhiyan was a centrally sponsored scheme launched on 21 February 2014 in place of erstwhile Panchayat Yuva Krida aur Khel Abhiyan (PYKKA).
• PYKKA is a rural sports initiative introduced by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, Government of India to promote youth and social development through sports.
• Rajiv Gandhi Khel Abhiyan aimed at constructing sports complexes in each block and exclusively both for outdoor and indoor sports discipline for 5 years.

Laos's National Assembly on 20 April 2016 appointed Communist Party chief Bounnhang Vorachit as the country's new president and named foreign minister Thongloun Sisoulith as prime minister.
•    The picks are seen by many analysts as a continuation of the status quo in secretive Laos, where the communists have ruled since the end of the Vietnam War.
•    The 149-member assembly completed the process of nomination and voting for both candidates in around an hour.
•    One of the fastest-growing economies in East Asia, landlocked Laos has averaged GDP growth of 7 percent over the past decade, with increasing use of natural resources contributing a third of output growth, the World Bank says.
•    This has boosted incomes and access to electricity, telecoms and healthcare for its mostly rural population of 6.7 million.
•    Laos has close political ties to communist Vietnam and mirrors its political system.
•    Communist neighbour China has been vying aggressively for influence in Laos, however, providing loans, aid and infrastructure investment.
•    Laos is still struggling to rid itself of the painful legacy of the Vietnam War, when it became the most heavily bombed country in history after the U.S. and its allies dropped about two million tons of ordnance from 1964 to 1973.
•    More than four decades on, the country grapples with millions of cluster munitions and other unexploded ordnance devices that kill and maim dozens each year.
Govt. renames Rajiv Gandhi Khel Abhiyan as ‘Khelo India’

Senior IAS officer A Ajith Kumar appointed as Kerala-based Rubber Board's chairman, a post lying vacant for over a year and a half. 
•    The appointment comes less than a month ahead of Assembly polls due in the southern state on May 16.
•    The Appointments Committee of Cabinet has approved the appointment of Kumar,a 1994 batch IAS officer of Kerala cadre, to the post of chairman, Rubber Board, Kottayam, an order issued by Department of personnel and Training. 
•    He has been appointed for a period up to May 31, 2018, which is the date of his superannuation.
•    The post has been lying vacant since August 2014. The vacancy has been a political issue in the state. 
•    Ramesh had denounced the Union governments policy for the rubber sector, saying India has become a large importer of natural rubber due to poor investments in the Rubber Board.
•    Commercial cultivation of natural rubber was introduced in India by the British, although the experimental efforts to grow rubber on a commercial scale in India were initiated as early as 1873 at the Botanical Gardens, Calcutta. 
•    The first commercial Hevea plantations in India were established at Thattekadu in 1902. 

Justice PK Mishra, former Chief Justice of Patna High Court, was on 20 April 2016 appointed as the Lokayukta of Goa. The decision in this regard was taken by the state government.
•    The announcement was made by the Goa Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar after state government obtained the consensus of the Chief Justice of Bombay High Court and the Leader of Opposition in the Goa Assembly as stipulated in the Lokayukta Act, 2013.
•    Now the state Cabinet will be recommend name of Justice Mishra to Mridula Sinha, Governor of Goa for appointment.
•    Mishra had recently retired as the Chairman of Goa State Human Rights commission. He retired as Chief Justice of Patna High Court before taking up his assignment in Goa. 
•    The post of the Lokayukta of Goa was lying vacant for the last two years. Goa’s first Lokayukta Justice (Retd) Sudarshan Reddy had resigned within seven months of his appointment in October  2013 and since then the post was vacant for more than two years.
•    His resignation left investigations of 21 cases, including the crucial illegal mining scam and the recruitments in government department, pending before the ombudsman in the State.
•    As per the Lokayukta Act, 2013, the Governor is the final authority to appoint the Lokayukta on the advice tendered by the Chief Minister, in consultation with the Chief Justice of Bombay High Court and the Leader of the Opposition.
•    It also speaks that a person to be appointed as Lokayukta shall be a person who has held the office of a judge of the Supreme Court or a Chief Justice of the High Court.

The Uttarakhand High Court, on 21st April 2016, quashed the order of the Central government that had put the State under President’s Rule on March 27. 
•    Deciding that the Congress shall return to power, the Division Bench of the Court also ordered that a floor test must be held in the Uttarakhand Assembly on April 29 where former Chief Minister Harish Rawat’s claim of having majority support shall be put to test.
•    Prior to the judgment, the Bench slammed the Centre for planning to attempt the revocation of President’s Rule before the Court’s verdict.
•    Questioning the Centre over planning to attempt revoking President's Rule before court's final verdict, Chief Justice Joseph slammed the Centre for such attempts. The Chief Justice said, "If they [the Centre] revoke Article 356 and try and form a government... What is it but a travesty of justice?"
•    In an application filed by former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat on April 7 it was apprehended that the Centre might revoke Article 356 from Uttarakhand and attempt to get the BJP in Uttarakhand to form government.
•    The Centre had then assured the Bench that the Court would be informed about the Centre's decision but the assurance was only until April 17. 
•    However, when the Court questioned the Court again whether the Centre would indulge in such attempts, the Centre’s counsels remained silent, after which Mr. Rawat’s counsels requested that the Bench must pass an Order in the case on Thursday itself.

The index has been topped by Finland followed by the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and New Zealand at second, third, fourth and fifth position respectively.
At the bottom of the index lies Eritrea at 180th rank. It is preceded by North Korea, Turkmenistan, Syria and China at 179th, 178th, 177th and 176th position respectively.
•    India continues to languish in the bottom third of the World Press Freedom Index, because of the number of journalists killed and the impunity for crimes of violence against the media.
•    The situation is worsening in India, although its media are dynamic and much more capable of playing the role of democracy’s watchdog than the media in most other countries in last third of the Index.
•    Frequent lawsuits against journalists by local officials and draconian legislation on defamation and online publications impose major constraints on the media and encourage self-censorship.
•    Violence has emerged as the main brake on media activity in recent years, especially for reporters in the field and investigative journalists. Wherever they work, Indian journalists are exposed to growing violence.
•    Frequent verbal and physical violence, attacks by armed groups are on the rise in several states and the local authorities have had little success in reining it in.
•    With almost one attack on a journalist every month and four journalists murdered in 2015 (at least two of them in connection with their work), the state of Uttar Pradesh has become one of India’s most dangerous regions.
•    Indian government has made no provision for the creation of a special unit to combat impunity for crimes of violence against journalists, although there was an attack against a journalist every three days in 2014, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.
World Press Freedom Index is published annually by RSF since 2002. It measures the level of freedom available to journalists in 180 countries using the following criteria – pluralism, media independence, media environment and self-censorship, legislative environment, transparency, infrastructure, and abuses.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on 20 April 2016 announced that the European Region became the first in the world to have achieved interruption of indigenous malaria transmission. The number of indigenous malaria cases in the region dropped from 90712 in 1995 to zero cases in 2015.
Besides, WHO announced that the European Region hit its 2015 target to wipe out malaria, thus contributing to the global goal to End malaria for good.
• The number of malaria cases globally fell from an estimated 262 million in 2000 to 214 million in 2015, a decline of 18%.
• The number of malaria deaths globally fell from an estimated 839000 in 2000 to 438 000 in 2015, a decline of 48%.
• The number of malaria deaths in children aged under 5 years is estimated to have decreased from 723000 globally in 2000.
• The proportion of children infected with malaria parasites has halved in endemic areas of Africa since 2000. Infection prevalence among children aged 2–10 years is estimated to have declined from 33% in 2000 to 16% in 2015, with three quarters of this change occurring after 2005.
• It is estimated that a cumulative 1.2 billion fewer malaria cases and 6.2 million fewer malaria deaths occurred globally between 2001 and 2015 than would have been the case had incidence and mortality rates remained unchanged since 2000.
• The WHO European Region reported zero indigenous cases for the first time in 2015, in line with the goal of the Tashkent Declaration to eliminate malaria from the region by 2015.

A new discovery, announced on 22nd April 2016 in the journal eLife, shows the perfectly preserved 3D fossilised heart in a 113-119 million-year-old fish from Brazil called Rhacolepis.
This is the first definite fossilised heart found in any prehistoric animal.
•    Certain rare fossil deposits, called konservat laggerstätten (meaning "place of storage"), are formed by rapid burial under special chemical conditions. These deposits can preserve a range of soft tissues from the organism.
•    The first fossilized heart ever found in a prehistoric animal
•    The fish Rhacolepis imaged by synchrotron tomography showing the heart (left) and a cross-section through the heart showing valves (right, white arrows). Credit: Maldanis et al. (2016)
•    The famous Burgess Shale fossils from British Columbia in Canada show soft-bodied worms and other invertebrate creatures. These were buried by rapid mudslides around 525 million years ago.
•    The well-preserved fishes from the 113-119 million-year-old Santana Formation of Brazil were among the first vertebrate fossils to show evidence of preserved soft tissues. These include parts of stomachs and bands of muscles.
•    The discovery of complete soft tissues preserved as whole internal organs in a fossil was a bit of a Holy Grail for palaeontologists. Such finds could contribute to understanding deeper evolutionary patterns as internal soft organs have their own set of specialised features.
•    Finding a complete fossilised heart in a fish almost 120 million years old was a major breakthrough for José Xavier-Neto of the Brazilian Biosciences National Laboratory, Lara Maldanis of the University of Campinas, Vincent Fernandez of the European Synchotron Radiation Facility and colleagues from across Brazil and Sweden.
•    Back in 2000, a group of US scientists claimed to have found a heart preserved in a dinosaur nicknamed Willo, a Thescelosaurus. But recent work has debunked this claim, showing the cavity of the dinosaur body was infilled by sediment and then impregnated with iron-rich minerals to make the cavity inside look a bit heart-like when imaged by CT scanning.