Current Affairs for SSC CGL Exams - 15 May 2015

:: National ::

Facebook, launched its much-rumoured product “Instant Articles”, a programme that directly host articles from news organizations so that users do not have to click out and wait for websites to load. The firm has tied up with nine media companies - The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel and Bild - for Instant Articles, which would be available on iPhone to start with.
Publishers can sell ads in their articles and keep all the revenue or allow Facebook to sell ads, with the social network getting 30 per cent of the proceeds. Publishers will also have the ability to track data and traffic through comScore and other analytics tools.
According to the New York Times, Facebook clearly plays an important role as a gatekeeper to news. Nearly half of American Internet users said they got news about politics and government on Facebook during the course of a week, almost as many as got such news from local television, it said quoting a survey last year by the Pew Research Center.

The Supreme Court improvised on the N.R. Madhava Menon Committee’s recommendations to direct the government to appoint a three-member ombudsman body of persons with “unimpeachable integrity” to monitor and redress violations of the guidelines against publishing of photographs of political leaders, ministers or prominent persons in government advertisements..
The Bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and N.V. Ramana disagreed with the panel’s suggestion for a separate performance audit of compliance with these advertisement guidelines, to be conducted on Ministries, departments and agencies.
It observed that the government has inbuilt mechanism machinery for redress and audit. The verdict also mentioned that governments need not patronise media houses, especially during elections. It said the Centre and the States should maintain the concept of fairness and even dispensation to all media and publishing establishments while giving government ads for publication.
The court clarified that the judgment was not comprehensive and gave the executive liberty to further work on it in the public interest.
The verdict comes on petitions filed by NGOs Common Cause and the Centre for Public Interest Litigation in 2003 seeking the court’s intervention to restrain the Centre and State governments from using public funds on ads primarily intended to project individual functionaries of the government or a political party.

The Central Government will sell its 10 per cent stake in blue-chip Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) and five per cent in power producer NTPC to mop up about Rs.13,600 crore in this fiscal’s first disinvestment approval. The approvals are part of Rs.41,000 crore disinvestment target for the current financial year. Buoyed by diesel price deregulation, the government is looking at selling stake in Indian’s largest fuel retailer IOC for the second time in 13 months.
Sale of 24.27 crore shares, or 10 per cent stake, in IOC would mop up close to Rs.8,000 crore at current market price. A total of 41.22 crore shares, or five per cent, in NTPC could fetch Rs.5,600 crore to the exchequer at current rates.

In a bid to ensure flow of funds to infrastructure projects, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), allowed Infrastructure Debt Fund-Non-Banking Financial Companies to invest in public-private partnerships (PPPs) and infrastructure projects which have completed at least one year of satisfactory commercial operation. The maximum exposure that an IDF-NBFC can take on individual projects will be at 50 per cent of its total capital funds.
An additional exposure up to 10 per cent could be taken at the discretion of the board of the IDF-NBFC. The Reserve Bank of India also said that all assets covering PPP and post-commercial operations date (COD) infrastructure projects in existence over a year of commercial operation would be assigned a risk weight of 50 per cent.

Harbhajan Kaur Dheer an Indian-origin councillor woman has became the first Asian woman elected mayor of Ealing Council in London; she became the Mayor of Ealing Council after succeeding councillor Tej Ram Bagha.
Her husband councillor Ranjit Dheer is a former Mayor of Ealing. Born in Punjab in 1953, Harbhajan Kaur came to Britain in 1975. She studied Social Sciences at Kingston University and obtained a degree in 1995. She worked as an Approved Mental Health Professional in Surrey County Council until 2003. She has served the borough as a governor of a number of schools. She is a passionate advocate of rights of children and elderly including those with mental health issues.

Indian’s youngest chess player Tejaswini Sagar won her maiden world title bagging the gold in the under-15 category of World School Chess Championship. Needing a last round win and one favourable result, the Aurangabad-girl defeated Kavinya Miyuni Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka in the ninth and final round.
Tejaswini was aided by the result on the top board as overnight leader Irina Barbayeva of Russia lost to Alisa Kozybayeva of Kazakhstan in the final clash. For the record, Tejaswini scored seven points out of a possible nine, winning six, drawing two and losing one game.
Among other Indians in the fray, Anand Nadar bagged the silver medal in under-15 open category while Saloni Sapole also won the silver in under-17 girls' section.