Nation Current Affairs 01.08.2017 - UPSC

Nation Current Affairs 01.08.2017

 INTERNATIONAL

• Ramon Magsaysay award , 2017
• The six winners of this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Awards, regarded as Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize.
• A Japanese (Ishizawa, Yoshiaki) historian who helped Cambodians preserve the Angkor temples
•  A Sri Lankan teacher (Shanmugam Gethise) who counselled war widows and orphans to overcome their nightmares are among an Indonesian working for the return of large tracts of forest land to indigenous communities
• A Singaporean (Tay,Tony) who leads the cooking of 6,000 meals a day for the destitute
• A Philippine (Philippine Educational Theatre Association)  theatre group which stood up to a dictatorship and a Filipino who oversaw the opening of job-generating export processing zones.
• One more Philippine (De Lima, Lilia) for harnessing sustained, non-stop and credible public service.
• An Indonesian (Nababan, Abdon) For  giving compelling face and voice to Adat communities and their rights.
• The awards, named after a Philippine president who died in a 1957 plane crash, are to be presented in Manila on August 31.
• Switzerland - World’s longest pedestrian suspension bridge opens.
• The world’s longest pedestrian suspension bridge the  Europaweg (Europe Bridge) a ribbon-thin span nearly a third of a mile long at in Randa, Switzerland.
• It measures 1,620 feet long and rises as high as 278 feet above the Grabengufer ravine.
• It replaces an older bridge which was closed in 2010 after it was damaged by falling rocks.

NATIONAL

• Supreme Court bans four toxic chemicals from crackers
• Ahead of the festive seasons of Dussehra and Deepavali, the Supreme Court prohibited the use of five chemicals, labelled as toxic by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), in the manufacture of firecrackers.
• No firecrackers manufactured by the respondents shall contain antimony, lithium, mercury, arsenic and lead in any form whatsoever. It is the responsibility of the Petroleum and Explosive Safety Organisation (PESO) to ensure compliance.
• The court had earlier pointed out a lack of clarity on the pollutive impact of explosive substances used in firecrackers.
• SBI cuts interest rate on saving a/c deposits.
• Accounts with balance ₹1 cr or less will earn 3.5% per annum, those above ₹1 cr will continue to earn 4%
• The revision would enable the bank to maintain its Marginal Cost of funds-based Lending Rate (MCLR) at existing rates.
• 29 Indian cities and towns highly vulnerable to earthquakes.
• Twenty-nine Indian cities and towns, including Delhi and capitals of nine states, fall under “severe” to “very severe” seismic zones, according to the National Centre for Seismology (NCS).
• A majority of these places are in the Himalayas, one of the most seismically active regions in the world.
• Delhi, Patna (Bihar), Srinagar (Jammu and Kashmir), Kohima (Nagaland), Puducherry, Guwahati (Assam), Gangtok (Sikkim), Shimla (Himachal Pradesh), Dehradun (Uttarakhand), Imphal (Manipur) and Chandigarh fall under seismic zones IV and V.
• The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has classified different regions in the country into zones II to V, taking into consideration earthquake records, tectonic activities and damage caused, the director of the NCS, Vineet Gauhlat, said.

Bureau of Indian Standards, based on the past seismic history, grouped the country into four seismic zones, viz. Zone-II, -III, -IV and –V. Of these, Zone V is the most seismically active region, while zone II is the least. The Modified Mercalli (MM) intensity, which measures the impact of the earthquakes on the surface of the earth, broadly associated with various zones, is as follows:

Gk bit -  Seismic Zone Intensity on MM scale: