14 September 2024, The Indian Express
Port Blair is now Sri Vijaya Puram, Shah says removing slavery symbol
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Prelims Syllabus- Current Affairs
- THE CENTRE on Friday renamed Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as Sri Vijaya Puram. Making the announcement, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said the decision was taken as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision to “rid the country of all symbols of slavery”.
- Andaman and Nicobar Islands had an “unparalleled place” in India’s freedom struggle, Shah said.
India successfully test fires two surface-to-air missiles in 2 days
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Prelims Syllabus- Current Affairs
- India on Friday successfully test-fired the Vertical Launch Short Range Surface to Air Missile (VLSRSAM) for the second consecutive day from the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur on the Odisha coast, defence sources said.
- A statement from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) confirmed that both tests on September 12 and 13 were successful.
- “In both the tests, the missile successfully intercepted a high-speed low altitude aerial target mimicking sea skimming aerial target,” the statement said.
Caesar’s wife to caged parrot: Justice Bhuyan questions CBI role
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GS2- Statutory, regulatory and various quasi-judicial bodies
- Even as he agreed with Justice Surya Kant on the question of granting bail to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, in a separate judgment, differed on the question of the AAP leader’s arrest by the CBI saying it “raises more questions than it seeks to answer” and that “it is in public interest that CBI must not only be above board but must also be seem to be so”.
- The judge said that that even though the CBI case was registered on August 17, 2022, “till the arrest of the appellant by the ED on 21.03.2024, CBI did not feel the necessity to arrest the appellant though it had interrogated him about a year back on 16.04.2023”.
Disengaged at four places in Eastern Ladakh, situation stable, says China
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GS2- India and its neighbourhood relations
- A day after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that about 75 per cent of the “disengagement problems” with China have been sorted out, the Chinese Foreign ministry Friday said that the troops have disengaged at four places in Eastern Ladakh, including Galwan Valley.
- This came a day after National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held talks on the sidelines of a meeting of BRICS NSAs in St Petersburg in Russia where they discussed the progress made in the recent consultations on border issues, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.
After Indore emerged winner 7 times, clean city rankings to have ‘golden cities’ category
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Prelims Syllabus- Current Affairs
- With Indore winning the tag of cleanest city for seven years in a row, Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Manohar Lal Khattar said Friday that the next round of the Swachhata rankings will have a separate category for cities that have been ranked number one in the past, leaving the general competition open for new winners.
- “It is true that sometimes a student who gets first place in the first standard continues to get the first rank every year. Sometimes we hear that ‘if only one will get first place every time, then why should others put any effort’. When we see the competition between cities, we see Indore gets first place repeatedly. So, we have come up with a new category for cities that get first place, called the Golden Cities Club,” Khattar said at a press conference.
Eye on farmers before state polls, Govt moves to boost onion, Basmati exports
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GS3- Agricultural Export
- The Union government Friday lifted the export curbs on onions and Basmati rice in what is being seen as an attempt woo farmers ahead of the Assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana.
- Campaigning is on for the October 5 elections in Haryana, a major producer of basmati rice, while Maharashtra, the top onion producing state, is set to go to the polls in the coming months.
IISc proposes ‘human brain-inspired’ computing platform to boost AI tools
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GS3- Achievements of Indians in science & technology; indigenization of technology and developing new technology
- In a pathbreaking technological progress in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a group of researchers from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has developed an analogous computing platform within a molecular film which is able to mimic a human brain-like functioning.
- The Bengaluru-based researchers working at Centre for Nano Science and Engineering (CeNSE) at IISc said that the ‘brain on the chip’ design, even though is analogous, could perform functions like processing and data storage which showed close resemblance to that of a human brain. And more importantly, it offers 16,500 conductance states within the molecular film. For comparison, the existing digital computing platform needs to be programmed and it operates on the binary states of 0 and 1. They can also be bulky on energy and time consumption, thus offering a reduced speed in comparison to the estimated AI-based calculation speeds with this platform.
‘High targets can help cut CO2 emissions from transport sector up to 71% by 2050’
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GS3- Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation
- Carbon dioxide emissions from India’s transport sector could be reduced up to 71 per cent by 2050 if high-ambition strategies are adopted on three key parameters – electrification, improving fuel economy standards, and switching to cleaner modes of transport and mobility, said a new study by World Resources Institute (WRI) India.
- India’s transport sector accounted for 14 per cent of the total energy-related CO2 emissions in 2020, and there is a need for an emission reduction roadmap and targets for this sector, the study said.
What is OpenAI01, the AI model that thinks before it answers?
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GS3- Science and Technology- developments and their applications and effects in everyday life
- OpenAI has dropped its latest AI model, which is part of its secretive ‘Project Strawberry’. The new OpenAI o1 is the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have been designed to solve more complex tasks and problems in science, coding, and maths.
- The company, in a statement, said, “We are releasing the first of this series in ChatGPT and our API. This is a preview and we expect regular updates and improvements. Alongside this release, we’re also including evaluations for the next update, currently in development”.
What is Helium and why is it used in rockets?
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GS3- Awareness in the fields of Space
- Two NASA astronauts aboard Boeing’s Starliner will stay on the International Space Station for months because of a faulty propulsion system whose problems included helium leaks.
- Back on Earth, SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission, which finally launched on Tuesday, was delayed because of helium issues on ground equipment.
- Past missions that have been affected by pesky helium leaks include ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 and ESA’s Ariane 5.
Port Blair and its historical connection to the Chola conquest of Srivijaya
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Prelims Syllabus- Ancient history
- Port Blair, the capital city of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, will now be known as ‘Sri Vijaya Puram’, Union Minister Amit Shah said in a post on X on Friday (September 13). He said the decision of changing the name was inspired by the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “to free the nation from colonial imprints”.
- Shah added that “while the earlier name had a colonial legacy, Sri Vijaya Puram symbolises the victory achieved in our freedom struggle and the A&N Islands’ unique role in the same.”
India’s economic relationship with China unfair, lacking balance, says Jaishankar
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GS2- India and its neighbourhood relations
- Amid a growing trade deficit with China, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said that India’s economic relationship with China has been lacking balance, as Indian goods do not have the same market access in China as Chinese products enjoy in India.
- This comes after Chinese imports surpassed $100 billion in FY24 and continue to rise in the current financial year. However, India’s exports barely crossed $16 billion in the last financial year. Imports from China have already exceeded $60 billion in the first seven months of 2024, a 10 per cent increase compared to $55 billion recorded during the same period last year.
