21st August 2018 Current Affairs

Contents

Apurvi and Ravi won bronze in team shooting at Asian Games 2018

Apurvi Chandela and Ravi Kumar won bronze in 10m Air Rifle mixed Team Shooting event in Asian Games 2018, Indonesia. The team scored 429.9. It was a maiden Asian Games medal for Apurvi.
Chinese Taipei’s Yingshin Lin and Shaochuan Lu won the gold by scoring 494.1. The silver was won by Chinese pair Ruozhu Zhao and Haoran Yang who scored 492.5. Korea and Mongolia finished fourth and fifth respectively in the event held for the first time at the Games.

The Indian and Thailand’s armed forces concluded a two-week long platoon level military exercise called ‘Exercise Maitree 2018’ in Jammu & Kashmir’s Srinagar. The exercise was an annual event designed to strengthen the partnership between armies of the two countries.
The exercise began on August 6 and comprised of cross-training period, which included familiarization between the two armies to evolve drills and procedures that help in counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations in varied terrains under the United Nations (UN) mandate.

Former West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi was on August 20, 2018 conferred with Rajiv Gandhi National Sadbhavana Award on the occasion of 74th birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The award was given at a function in New Delhi in presence of former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress leader Karan Singh.
Speaking on the occasion, Manmohan Singh said that Gopalkrishna Gandhi has had a long and distinguished career in public life as a civil servant and a distinguished diplomat. He said, Gandhi is also a man of deep scholarship, which is reflected so clearly in his writings.

No ATM will be replenished with cash after 9 PM in cities and 6 PM in rural areas from next year. The announcement was made by the Union Home Ministry through a notification. The Ministry said that the deadline for putting money in the ATMs located in Naxal-hit areas will be 4 PM.
It said that private cash handling agencies must collect money from the banks in the first half of the day and transport notes only in armoured vehicles.
Two armed guards will accompany crisp notes in transit as per a new directive issued by the Home Ministry.
The new Standard Operating Procedures (SoPs) will come into effect from February 8, 2019 in view of the spurt in incidents of attacks on cash vans, cash vaults, ATM frauds and other internal frauds leading to increased sense of insecurity.
There are over 8,000 privately owned cash vans plying across the country, operated by non-bank private agencies and they handle over Rs 15,000 crore daily on behalf of banks.

Using data from the Chandrayaan-I spacecraft that was launched by India 10 years ago, NASA on August 21, 2018 said that scientists have found frozen water deposits in the darkest and coldest parts of the Moon’s polar regions.
Scientists used data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.
According to the study published in the journal PNAS, the ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient.
The study said with enough ice sitting at the surface within the top few mm water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon.
Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above minus 156 degrees Celsius.
Due to the very small tilt of the Moon’s rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.