Current Affairs - June 20, 2018 Current Affairs

Every year, World Refugee Day is held on 20th June to commemorate the strength, courage and perseverance of millions of refugees. The theme for World Refugee Day 2018 is 'Now More Than Ever, We Need to Stand with Refugees'. World Refugee Day was established by the United Nations on December 4, 2000.

Punjab govt launched a mobile app named "i-Hariyali" under 'Mission Tandarust' to offer free saplings for users. The users can book a sapling of their choice, a maximum of 25 per person, from a nearby government nursery.

The high-level Conference on "International Decade for Action: Water for Sustainable Development, 2018-2028" will be held in Tajikistan from June 20, 2018. The two-day conference is being organized by the United Nations and Government of Tajikistan to discuss key water-related issues of sustainable development goals adopted by UN member countries. India will be represented by Nitin Gadkari, the Union Minister for Water Resources, River Development & Ganga Rejuvenation. In it, Mr. Gadkari will share the initiatives, solutions and best practices that Government of India (GoI) is taking in the field of Drinking Water & Sanitation, Water Resource Assessment, Resource Distribution, Management, Conservation and Harvesting.

The Union government has appointed Uday Vora the chief conservator of forest as the member of the National Wetland Committee. The National Wetlands Committee (NWC) under the chairpersonship of secretary, MOEF&CC has been constituted. The Committee has been formed under the Wetlands (Conservation and Management) Rules, 2017.

U.S. based ride hailing firm Uber has appointed Pradeep Parameswaran as new President of India and South Asia. This comes after Amit Jain was elevated to head the Asia Pacific region for Uber in May this year. Parameswaran joined Uber in January 2017 and was CEO of Den Networks, a Cable TV company in his last stint.

Technology giant Google has recently announced the launch of a training programme for journalists with an aim to raise awareness against misinformation and providing new tools to the fourth estate against fake news. The Google News Initiative India Training Network will provide training to 8,000 journalists in English and six other Indian languages in the next one year. The network will select 200 journalists from cities across India, who will hone their skills in verification and training during five-day boot camps that will be organised for English and Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada. The focus of the training will be fact-checking, online verification and digital hygiene for journalists, using a curriculum built by experts.

Yes Bank has received approval from market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) for acting as custodian of securities. This would enable the bank to play a larger role in channelising domestic and foreign investments into Indian financial market and would enhance bank's current capital market offerings. The bank has taken advantage of its global reach through its international banking team, IFSC banking unit in GIFT City and its representative office in Abu Dhabi as a part of its strategy.

The United States withdrew from the United Nations Human Rights Council, accusing it of a "chronic bias against Israel," a move that activists warned would make advancing human rights globally even more difficult. The United Nations Human Rights Council consists of 47 member states, with a specific number of seats given to each region of the world. Members are elected by the U.N. General Assembly for three-year terms and cannot serve more than two terms in a row.

India is planning to gift a Dornier aircraft to Seychelles and explore trilateral cooperation involving France.This would safeguard the interests due to refusal of Seychelles on Assumption Island. Dornier aircraft is second such aircraft that could be gifted to the Indian Ocean Region. India and France share a logistic service agreement to support each other naval forces in the Indian Ocean Region. France also has strategic interests in Seychelles and recently engaged with Faure to expand French-Seychelles strategic ties. The Assumption Island proposal entailed investment of $550 million in the development of an airstrip, jetty and housing infrastructure for the Seychelles Coast Guard.

Anukreethy Vas, a 19-year-old Tamil Nadu college student, has been crowned Femina Miss India 2018 in a grand ceremony in Mumbai hosted by filmmaker Karan Johar and actor Ayushmann Kurrana. Anukreethy Vas was previously crowned fbb Colours Femina Miss Tamil Nadu. Meenakshi Chaudhary from Haryana was the first runner-up while Shreya Rao Kamavarapu from Andhra Pradesh secured the second runner-up position. Anukreethy Vas will now represent India at Miss World 2018 while the two runners-up will represent the country at Miss Grand International 2018 and Miss United Continents 2018 respectively.

To honour soldiers who have been disabled in line of duty, the Indian Army is observing the year 2018 as the "Year of Disabled Soldiers in Line of Duty". The primary focus is towards alleviating the sufferings of these soldiers, who have done their duty with utmost dedication to the Nation and have been disabled for the life. The endeavour this year is to provide a one-time financial assistance to disabled soldiers who have been boarded out from service on medical grounds and are rendered non-employable due to their medical or physical conditions. Indian Army plans to create awareness on organizational support available to soldiers and their dependents with respect to medical, rehabilitation, various beneficiary schemes of Central and State Governments, vocational opportunities and assistance for their placement. Army also plans to showcase talent of disabled soldiers by organizing sports and physical activities, cultural events and their art exhibitions.

US scientists have unveiled the world's most powerful and smartest scientific supercomputer named "Summit" that can complete over 200,000 trillion calculations per second. This supercomputer called Summit will be eight times more powerful than its previous top-ranked system, Titan.

The Haryana government has decided to introduce a scheme under which school children will be given ₹50 for planting trees every six months for a period of three years. The scheme will cover students from Classes 6 to 12 of both government and private schools. It will be launched on July 10.

The Union Human Resource Development Minister, Prakash Javadekar has launched the new digital initiative of HRD Ministry 'National Digital Library of India' (NDL) on the occasion of National Reading Day in New Delhi. The digital library at present hosts 17 million-plus items (books, audiobooks, images etc) in 200-plus languages from more than 170 institutions.

Puan, the world's oldest Sumatran orangutan, passed away due to old age, at Perth Zoo, in Australia. Puan was 62 years old. She was called the "grand old lady" of Sumatran orangutans, in Australia. She was honoured by the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest living Sumatran orangutan in the world. Sumatran orangutan has been categorized as a critically endangered species, as per WWF.