Context: Facing the heat for his recent critical remarks on the state of Indian democracy, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi has once again approached Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, seeking permission to respond to “totally baseless and unfair charges” made against him by senior Ministers in the Lok Sabha. What is Rule 357: In the Rules …
CONTEXT: Releasing the final report, known as the Synthesis Report, of its sixth assessment cycle, IPCC added that there is still a chance to avert this mass-scale destruction, but it would require an enormous global effort to slash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and completely phase them out by 2050. Importance: The world …
Context: The International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, for the alleged war crime of unlawfully deporting and transferring children from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation. While the former relates to the “unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement”, the latter relates to the direct or …
Context: With only 9% of annual plastic waste recycled, the myth that we can recycle our way out of a mounting plastic pollution crisis doesn’t add up. Problem Around 85% of plastic packaging worldwide ends up in landfills. In the United States, which is by far the world’s biggest plastics polluter, only around 5% of …
Context: Taking exception to the UPSC taking nearly 15 months to complete Civil Services Examination from notification to final results, a Parliamentary Standing Committee has said the duration of any recruitment exam “should not ordinarily exceed six months”. Fact: In the last five years, 2020 saw the highest time taken for completing the Civil Service Examination …
No recruitment exam process should exceed 6 months Read More »
Context: Almost a third of people live in water-stressed countries. Water security depends on rainfall-generating forests. Water supplies, climate change and nature losses linked. Facts About 2.3 billion people — almost one in three — live in water-stressed countries, a third of those facing critical pressures, according to 2021 data from UN-Water. Even more …
Water warning: Economic stability threatened by vanishing rainfall Read More »
Context: OpenAI has said that GPT-4 is supposedly bigger, faster, and more accurate than ChatGPT. It can now analyses image-related queries as well. The most noticeable change to GPT-4 is that it is multimodal, allowing it to understand more than one modality of information. It can be fed images and asked to output information accordingly. …
Context: Under the Smart Cities Mission, cities across the country were asked to submit proposals for projects to improve municipal services and to make their jurisdictions more livable. At a review meeting by Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary, these cities were offered help towards meeting the deadline. As the June 2023 deadline for completing the Smart Cities …
CONTEXT: Panel The Intergovernmental on Climate Change, an UN-backed scientific body whose periodic assessments of climate science form the basis of global climate action, is set to finalize what is known as the Synthesis Report. What is IPCC? The IPCC provides regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, …
Context: A draft international agreement referred to as the UN High Seas Treaty also referred as the ‘Paris Agreement for the Ocean’, was finalized to govern the conduct of governments in ‘open seas’ – a majority of the world’s oceans that lie beyond the jurisdiction of any one country. “This action is a victory for …
