GK and Current Affairs Updates

Actor Emraan Hashmi along with his son Ayaan Hashmi recently unveiled his much-awaited book 'The Kiss of Life : How A Superhero and My Son Defeated Cancer.'
•    Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on 8 April 2016 launched the book The Kiss of Life: How a superhero and my son defeated cancer in New Delhi.  Emraan Hashmi co-authored the book with author Bilal Siddiqi.
•    The book has been published by Penguin Books India in three languages.  
•    The book narrates the story of Emraan’s life when his family dealt with the horrific struggle as his six-year-old son Ayaan battled his way through cancer.
•    The book is about hope to all cancer patients who loses hope, his or her body starts to give up.
•    The 37-year-old actor took to his social media and unwrapped the book that has been co-authored by Bilal Siddiqui. 
•    Many celebs took it to their Twitter pages to appreciate his special work. 
•    Actor Akshay Kumar went one step further and wrote the foreword of the book.

ITC Limited and Starwood Hotels & Resorts on 7 April 2016 announced that they have signed agreements to extend their existing partnership for 11 ITC Luxury Collection hotels and 1 hotel under the Sheraton brand.  
ITC and Starwood also announced 3 upcoming ITC hotels under The Luxury Collection brand in India. The addition of the ITC Kohinoor in Hyderabad, ITC Narmada in Ahmedabad and ITC Royal Bengal in Kolkata will take the inventory up to 15 hotels, over the next 4 years.
• ITC Limited is an Indian conglomerate headquartered in Kolkata, West Bengal.
• Its diversified business includes five segments: Fast-Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Hotels, Paperboards & Packaging, Agri Business & Information Technology.
• It was established in 1910 as the Imperial Tobacco Company of India Limited.
• The company was renamed as the Indian Tobacco Company Limited in 1970 and further to I.T.C. Limited in 1974. The periods in the name were removed in September 2001 for the company to be renamed as ITC Ltd.
• The company completed 100 years in 2010.
• Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, Inc. is an American hotel and leisure company headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut.
• It is one of the world's largest hotel companies. It owns, operates, franchises and manages hotels, resorts, spas, residences and vacation ownership properties under its 11 owned brands.
Nearly 40 decades old partnership between ITC Limited and Starwood Hotels came into being in 1979 with the Sheraton brand.
In 2007, both companies signed an agreement through which Starwood introduced The Luxury Collection brand in India, which at present stands at 11 hotels.

A statue of Maharaja Ranjit Singh will be installed in France's Saint-Tropeztown on 17 September 2016. The town is the birth place of Maharaja’s Army General Jean-Francois Allard.
Henri Prevosat-Allard, Deputy Mayor and in-charge of tourism of Saint-Tropez on 6 April 2016 met Punjab Tourism Minister Sohan Singh Thandal and invited him to the installation ceremony of Singh’s statue in France.
Henri Prevosat-Allard is a descendant of General Jean-Francois Allard, who trained Maharaja Ranjit Singh's troops. Prevosat-Allard has announced the step as a mark of respect towards the 19th century king.
In September 2016, the Indian embassy in France will hold also an exhibition on the life of the king.
The Punjab Government will hand over the bust of Maharaja Ranjit Singh to the French envoy in India in June 2016.
• Maharaja Ranjit Singh was the founder of the Sikh Empire, which came to power in the Indian subcontinent in the early half of the 19th century.
• The empire, based in the Punjab region, existed from 1799 to 1849.
• It was forged, on the foundations of the Dal Khalsa, under the leadership of Ranjit Singh from a collection of autonomous Sikh Misls (sovereign states of the Sikh Confederacy).

China on 6 April 2016 successfully launched a bullet-shaped retrievable scientific research satellite SJ-10 (Shijian-10). The satellite was launched aboard Long March 2-D rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwestern China's Gobi desert.
The satellite was launched with an aim to help scientists in their study of microgravity and space life science.
It is the second of four scientific satellites under a CAS space program. Unlike the other three, SJ-10 is returnable. SJ-10 is the 25th such retrievable satellite launched by China in the past decades.
The bullet-shaped probe will house 19 experiments in the space involving microgravity fluid physics, microgravity combustion, space material, space radiation effect, microgravity biological effect and space bio-technology, before coming back to Earth with results.
• Study of early-stage development of mouse embryos in microgravity and this will help in shedding light on human reproduction in space, and another studying space radiation effects on genetic stability of fruit flies and rat cells.
• The Soret Coefficient in Crude Oil experiment will investigate coal combustion and pollutant formation under microgravity. The experiment will be carried out in partnership with the National Space Science Center under CAS and the European Space Agency (ESA). This experiment will be carried out to improve scientists understanding of oil reservoirs buried kilometers underground and the latter will help in enhancing energy efficiency and cut emissions.
•    Overall, eight of the experiments on fluid physics and microgravity combustion will be carried out in the orbital module.
•    The other experiments will be conducted under the re-entry capsule which is expected to land at Siziwang Banner in Inner Mongolia, the designated landing spot for China's Shenzhou manned space missions and a 2014 test lunar orbiter.

The Scientists team from the Institute of Advance Study in Science and Technology (IASST), Guwahati in Assam developed an eco-friendly nanotechnology for water-softening applications.
•    The report was published online on 30 March 2016 in the joural Nanoscale and the authors are Upama Baruah and Achyut Konwar of IASST
•    The green technology is the first of its kind with potential to act as a biodegradable and green material for water-softening applications
•    It can be used in civic water treatment plants for generating potable water.
•    The technology is basically a biopolymer, which uses a naturally occurring substance called Chitosan.
•    Chitosan is obtained from the hard outer skeleton of shellfish, including crab, lobster, and shrimp. It will be used as a backbone for the carbon nanoparticles to sit on during the purification process.
•    In conventional water-softening techniques the synthetic resins are used where as in the newly developed biopolymer, the nano particles are the functional parts.
•    They remove calcium and magnesium components of water through ion exchange which will purify the water.

Iceland ruling coalition on 6 April 2016 named Sigurdur Ingi Johannsson as the Prime Minister of the country. The coalition also decided to hold elections in the autumn.
•    Earlier, the polls were scheduled to take place in the spring of 2017.
•    He will succeed Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson who resigned on 5 April 2016 after his name was the leaked in the Panama Papers. The leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca, showed Gunnlaugsson owned an offshore firm with his wife that held millions of dollars in debt from failed celandic banks.
•    Johannsson, 53, is Agriculture and Fisheries Minister and deputy leader of the Progressive Party (PP).
•    Johannsson, who had served also as agriculture minister in the government, told reporters the government would further pursue its big projects of the last three years, the largest being the abolition of capital controls.
•    The opposition has been trying to force a new election with a vote of no confidence in the government, which could lead to a radical political shift.
•    A few thousand demonstrators, though fewer than on Monday, gathered for another evening of protests in front of the parliament building on Wednesday.

Hashim Thaci, the leader of the Democratic Party of Kosovo, was on 7 April 2016 sworn-in as President of Kosovo. 
•    The sworn-in ceremony at the Kosovo Assembly was boycotted by Opposition parties.
•    Thaci, who succeeded Atifete Jahjaga, was elected for the post on 26 February 2016 in the absence of nearly all opposition lawmakers who had earlier tried to disrupt the voting with tear gas.
•    After taking the oath, Thaci said, his goals were Kosovo's integration into NATO and European Union, and the continuation of the process of normalizing relations with Serbia.
•    In the 1990s, he was a leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which fought a guerrilla war against Serbia from 1998-99.
•    He was the first Prime Minister of Kosovo and the Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister in the cabinet led by Isa Mustafa, which assumed office on 12 December 2014.
•    In 2008, he declared Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.

The astronomers at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) discovered a supermassive Black Hole which weighs about 17 billion times the mass of Sun.
•    It was discovered in the center of a galaxy in a sparsely populated area of the universe and it may indicate that these monster objects may be more common than once thought.
•    The discovery was published on 6 April 2016 in the journal Nature.
•    The lead discoverer is Chung-Pei Ma, a University of California-Berkeley astronomer and head of the MASSIVE Survey, a study of the most massive galaxies and supermassive black holes in the local universe, whereas the lead author is Jens Thomas of the Max Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany.
•    Main finding of the discovery
•    The newly discovered supersized black hole resides in the center of a massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1600, located in a cosmic backwater, a small grouping of 20 or so galaxies.
•    It is located about 200 million light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Eridanus.
•    The amount of stars pushed away by this black hole equals 40 billion suns, comparable to ejecting the entire disk of our Milky Way galaxy.
•    Unlike other galaxies, wherein the galaxy bulge is proportional to the mass of the black hole, galaxy NGC 1600 has a relatively sparse bulge in relation to the discovered black hole’s mass.
•    The presence of the massive black hole was made through measuring the velocities of stars near it, which are strongly influenced by the gravity of the black hole. The velocity measurements give us an estimate of the black hole’s mass.
•    The velocity measurements were made by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North 8-meter telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.  GMOS spectroscopically dissected the light from the galaxy’s center, revealing stars within 3000 light-years of the core.
•    However, these stars were found to be moving in a straighter path away from the core suggesting that they had ventured closer to the center and had been slung away, most likely by the twin black holes.
•    This observation was supported by the images taken by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) of Hubble telescope. The NICMOS images revealed that the galaxy’s core was unusually faint, indicating a lack of stars close to the galactic center.
•    A star-depleted core distinguishes massive galaxies from standard elliptical galaxies, which are much brighter in their centers.

Forbes on 6 April 2016 released Asia’s 50 Power Businesswomen 2016 list. The list features eight Indian women business leaders.
•    Reliance Industries Director Nita Ambani and State Bank of India Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya have been ranked top two in Forbes’ Asia 50 Power Businesswomen 2016 list. China’s Zhu Chongyun, Cofounder & Chairman of Shenzhen Marisfrolg Fashion, was ranked 50th on the list.
•    The list also includes more than 27 newcomers.
•    The list includes following women business leaders from India
•    Nita Ambani, Director, Reliance Industries
•    Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, Bank of India
•    Ambiga Dhiraj, CEO, Mu Sigma
•    Dipali Goenka, CEO and Joint Managing Director, Welspun India Ltd
•    Vinita Gupta, CEO, Lupin Ltd
•    Chanda Kochhar, MD and CEO, ICICI Bank
•    Vandana Luthra, Founder, VLCC Health Care Ltd
•    Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairman and Managing Director, Biocon Ltd.
•    Top 10 Power Businesswomen 2016
•    1 - Nita Ambani (India)
•    2 - Arundhati Bhattacharya (India)
•    3 - Cao Thi Ngoc Dung (Vietnam)
•    4 - Somruedee Chaimongkol (Thailand)
•    5 - Sabrina Sih Ming Chao (Hong Kong)
•    6 - Solina Chau Hoi Shuen (Hong Kong)
•    7 - Eva Yi-Hwa Chen (Japan)
•    8 - Sonia Cheng (Hong Kong)
•    9 - Chew Gek Khim (Singapore)
•    10 - Yuwadee Chirathivat (Thailand)

Justice (retd.) Permod Kohli in the first week of April 2016 took over as the Chairman of Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT).
Kohli succeeded Justice Syed Rafat Alam and will be in the office for a period of 5 years or till attaining the age of 68 years, whichever is earlier.
• Born in 1951 in the town of Rajouri, Jammu and Kasmir, he joined Bar at Jammu in 1972.
• He became Advocate General of Jammu & Kashmir in December 1990.
• He is an expert in Constitutional, Civil and Taxation cases
• He remained Legal Advisor to Sri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board and Sri Mata Vaishno Devi University till elevation.
• He as Judge has provided services to the High Courts of Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand and Punjab & Haryana.
• In 2011, he was elevated as the Chief Justice of the Sikkim High Court.
• Article 323A of Part 14A of the Indian Constitution provides for establishment of CAT and was inserted by the 42nd Amendment Act, 1976.
• It was constituted in November 1985 under Section 29 of the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985. It was set up at Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Allahabad.
• The CAT is headed by a Chairman who is a sitting or retired Judge of a High Court. Besides the Chairman, the authorized strength consists of 16 Vice-Chairmen and 49 Members.
• The Tribunal follows the principles of natural justice in deciding cases and the procedure, prescribed by Evidence Act or Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) does not apply.
• Now, there are 17 Benches of the Tribunal located throughout the country wherever the seat of a High Court is located, with 33 Division Benches.