WHAT IS NATO?

🌈 What is NATO? नाटो एक सैन्य गठबंधन है जिसे साल 1949 में अमेरिका, कनाडा, यूके और फ्रांस सहित 12 देशों द्वारा बनाया गया था. 

🌈 इसका पूरा नाम North Atlantic Treaty Organization अर्थात् उत्तरी अटलांटिक संधि संगठन है.

🌈 नाटो का गठन बड़े पैमाने पर द्वितीय विश्व युद्ध के बाद सोवियत संघ से खतरे का मुकाबला करने के लिए किया गया था.

🌈 नाटो यूरोप एवं उत्तरी अमेरिका के देशों के मध्य एक सैन्य गठबंधन है.

🌈 नाटो में कोई भी निर्णय सभी तीस सदस्यों के सामूहिक इच्छा के आधार पर ली जाती है.

🌈 नाटो की स्थापना के समय मुख्य उद्देश्य पश्चिम यूरोप में सोवियत संघ की साम्यवादी विचारधारा को रोकना था.

🌈 नाटो का उद्देश्य 04 अप्रैल 1949 को हस्ताक्षरित उत्तरी अटलांटिक संधि को लागू करना है.

🌈 नाटो सामूहिक सुरक्षा की एक प्रणाली का गठन करता है.

🌈 प्रणाली के तहत, एक सदस्य राज्य पर हमले को सभी पर हमला माना जाता है और यह सामूहिक प्रतिक्रिया की मांग करता है.

🌈 यह सदस्य देशों के बीच एकजुटता और सामंजस्य की भावना पैदा करता है. 

🌈 अंतर्राष्ट्रीय स्तर पर उत्पन्न होने वाले नए खतरों से निपटने के लिए न केवल सामूहिक रक्षा प्रदान करना बल्कि संकट की स्थितियों का प्रबंधन करने के साथ-साथ सहकारी सुरक्षा को प्रोत्साहित करना भी है.

🌈 नाटो के सदस्य देशों में 2 उत्तरी अमेरिकी देश, 27 यूरोपीय देश और 1 यूरेशियन देश शामिल हैं.

Tungabhadra aarti" project

🔆"Tungabhadra aarti" project.  

✅Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai , said that the State Government has decided to introduce ‘Tungabhadra aarti’ on the banks of the Tungabhadra river at Harihar town similar to the popular ‘Ganga aarti’ of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.

✅Bommai also laid the foundation stone for ‘108 yoga mantapas’, the first-of-its-kind in South India, worth Rs 30 crore on the banks of the Tungabhadra river near Raghavendra Swamy Mutt in Harihar

✅Besides the 108 yoga mantapas, Hoysala’s Hari-Hareshwara temple, railway over bridge, walking path, boating, and other development works would be initiated under ‘Tungabhadra aarti’ project. 

India-UAE Virtual Summit

🔆 India-UAE Virtual Summit

✅ In a historic move, India and UAE signed the futuristic Comprehensive Economic Partnership (CEPA) during a virtual summit.

♻️ What is CEPA?

✅ The CEPA is a bilateral trade agreement that includes trade in goods and services, investments, competitions and Intellectual Property Rights.

♻️ About Free Trade Agreement:

✅ A free trade agreement is a pact between two or more countries to reduce trade barriers facilitating imports and exports.

✅ The goods and services can be brought within the purview of free trade policy.

✅ It involves trade across international borders with little or no government tariffs, quotas, subsidies or any inhibition in the exchange of goods and services. 

✅ It is implemented by a formal and mutual agreement between the participating nations. 

✅ A government need not take specific action to promote free trade and is free from stringent regulations and interference which is often referred to as laissez-faire trade or trade liberalisation. However, in the US and European Union, free trade agreements do not come without regulations and oversight.

✅ In the modern-day practice of international trade, few trade agreements result in completely free trade. 

✅ The US has a number of free trade agreements such as NAFTA and the Central American Free Trade Agreement. 

♻️ The India- UAE trade agreement:

✅ The free trade agreement aims to boost the trade relations between the two countries to US$ 100 billion in the next five years. 

✅ The joint vision statement emphasised on enhanced maritime cooperation, collaborative efforts to fight terrorism and measures to boost trade and investments. 

✅ The signing of CEPA will result in several benefits like promoting businesses, enhancing market access and reduced tariffs. 

✅ Two MoUs have been signed including a MoU between APEDA and DP World and Al Dahra has been signed to set up a food security corridor and MoU between India’s Gift city and Abu Dhabi Global Market on cooperation in financial projects and services. This will be a welcoming move to enhance resilience and reliability of food supply chains.

✅ The two countries also agreed to work together on logistics and services, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, agriculture, agri-tech and steel and aluminium. 

✅ According to CEPA, an extension of zero duty will be given to several sectors comprising 9% of India’s exports within five to ten years. 

✅ The trade agreement will also facilitate the automatic registration and marketing authorisation of Indian generic medicines in 90 days. UAE plans to become a global regional distribution hub for pharmaceuticals by 2030 which will be of immense benefit to India.

Lake Tanganyika

🔆Lake Tanganyika

✅Why in News: Most internal displacement in East Africa’s Burundi due to rise of Lake Tanganyika.   

✅It is the second largest lake in eastern Africa. 

✅It is the longest freshwater lake in the world and the second deepest after Lake Baikal in Russia. 

✅The lake is shared among four countries namely Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Tanzania and Zambia. 

✅It is situated on the line dividing the floral regions of eastern and western Africa, and oil palms, which are characteristic of the flora of western Africa, grow along the lake’s shores. 

✅The largest rivers discharging into the lake are the Malagarasi, the Ruzizi, and the Kalambo. Its outlet is the Lukuga River, which flows into the Lualaba River. 

✅Rice and subsistence crops are grown along the shores, and fishing is of some significance. Hippopotamuses and crocodiles abound, and the bird life is varied

National Means Cum-Merit Scholarship Scheme

🔆National Means Cum-Merit Scholarship Scheme

✅Why in News: the Ministry of Education has approved the continuation of National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship (NMMSS) over the 15th Finance Commission cycle for a period of five years i.e. from 2021-22 to 2025-26 with financial outlay of Rs. 1827.00 crore.

▪️What are the Key Points?

✅It is a central Sector Scheme, launched in 2008-09 to award scholarships to meritorious students of economically weaker sections to reduce drop-outs in class VIII.

✅22.06 lakh scholarships have been sanctioned till 2020-21 involving an expenditure of Rs. 1783.03 crore.

✅It also intends to encourage students to continue the study at a secondary stage.

✅The scheme envisages award of one lakh fresh scholarships every year to selected students of class IX and their continuation/renewal in classes X to XII for study in a State Government, Government-aided and Local body schools under the scheme.

▪️Details of the Scholarship:

✅Scholarship of Rs. 12000/- per annum (Rs.1000/- per month) per student is awarded to selected students every year for study in classes from IX to XII.

✅The selection of students awarded the scholarships is made through an examination conducted by the State Governments.

✅Scholarships are disbursed by the State Bank of India directly into the bank accounts of students on a quarterly basis.

▪️Eligibility Criteria:

✅Students whose parental income from all sources is not more than Rs. 3,50,000/- per annum are eligible to avail the scholarships.

✅The students studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya, Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, Residential Schools run by the State Government Institutions and private schools are not eligible for the scholarship under this scheme.

✅At the time of selection for the award of scholarship the candidate must have scored at least 55% marks or equivalent grade in Class VIII examination. There will be 5 % relaxation for SC.

Science and technology

🔆THE AI RESEARCH SUPERCLUSTER (RSC)

✅Meta announced in January 2022 that it is building an AI supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC).

✅Meta considers the RSC as a powerful supercomputer capable of quintillions of operations per second. It can perform tasks like translating text between languages and help identify potentially harmful content on Meta's platform.

✅The RSC, compared with Meta’s legacy production and research infrastructure, can run computer vision workflows up to 20 times faster, and train large-scale natural language processing (NLP) models three times faster.

✅Meta estimates that a model with billions of parameters can finish training in three weeks, compared to the nine weeks it was before.

✅RSC today comprises a total of 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems as its compute nodes, for a total of 6,080 GPUs.

✅RSC’s storage tier has 175 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashArray, 46 petabytes of cache storage in Penguin Computing Altus systems, and 10 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashBlade.

▪️Supercomputers?

✅A supercomputer can perform high-level processing at a faster rate when compared to a normal computer.

✅Supercomputers are made up of hundreds or thousands of powerful machines which use better artificial intelligence (AI) models to improve operations that process huge amounts of data in less time than normal computers.

✅Supercomputers require high-speed and specialised chip architectures. The chip performs 660 operations per cycle and thus run up to 230 gigaflops at 350 MHz.

✅AI supercomputers are built by combining multiple graphic processing units (GPUs) into compute nodes, which are then connected by a high-performance network fabric to allow fast communication between those GPUs.

◾️What is SWIFT and why is Russia being threatened with its exclusion?

✅As tensions peaks over Ukraine the United States could exclude Russia from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

◾️What is SWIFT?

✅SWIFT is an international network for banks worldwide to facilitate smooth money transactions globally.

✅It is basically a messaging network used by banks and financial institutions globally for quick and faultless exchange of information pertaining to financial transactions.

✅The Belgium-headquartered SWIFT connects more than 11,000 banking and securities organization in over 200 countries and territories.

✅First used in 1973, it went live in 1977 with 518 institutions from 22 countries, its website states.

◾️What exactly is it?

✅SWIFT is merely a platform that sends messages and does not hold any securities or money.

✅It facilitates standardized and reliable communication to facilitate the transaction.

◾️How does it facilitate banking?

✅Each participant on the platform is assigned a unique eight-digit SWIFT code or a bank identification code (BIC).

✅If a person, say, in New York with a Citibank account, wants to send money to someone with an HSBC account in London, the payee would have to submit to his bank the London-based beneficiary’s account number along with the eight-digit SWIFT code of the latter’s bank.

✅Citibank would then send a SWIFT message to HSBC. Once that is received and approved, the money would be credited to the required account.

◾️What happens if one is excluded from SWIFT?

✅US excluding Russia from SWIFT could have serious repercussions on how Russian banks carry out international financial transactions.

✅If a country is excluded from the most participatory financial facilitating platform, its foreign funding would take a hit, making it entirely reliant on domestic investors.

✅This is particularly troublesome when institutional investors are constantly seeking new markets in newer territories.

✅An alternative system would be cumbersome to build and even more difficult to integrate with an already expansive system.

🔆Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

◾️How does it facilitate banking?

✅Each participant on the platform is assigned a unique eight-digit SWIFT code or a bank identification code (BIC).

✅If a person, say, in New York with a Citibank account, wants to send money to someone with an HSBC account in London, the payee would have to submit to his bank the London-based beneficiary’s account number along with the eight-digit SWIFT code of the latter’s bank.

✅Citibank would then send a SWIFT message to HSBC. Once that is received and approved, the money would be credited to the required account.

SOURCES OF CONSTITUTION

■ GOVERNMENT OF INDIA ACT 1935

◇ Federal Scheme, 

◇ Office of governor, 

◇ Judiciary, 

◇ Public Service Commissions, 

◇ Emergency provisions and

◇ Administrative details

■ BRITISH CONSTITUTION

◇ Parliamentary government, 

◇ Rule of Law, 

◇ Legislative procedure, 

◇ Single citizenship, 

◇ Cabinet system,

◇ Prerogative writs, 

◇ Parliamentary privileges and 

◇ Bicameralism.

■ US CONSTUTUTION 

◇ Fundamental rights,

 ◇ Independence of judiciary, 

◇ Judicial review,

◇ Impeachment of the president,

◇ Removal of Supreme Court and high court judges and 

◇ Post of vice president.

■ IRISH CONSTITUTION

◇ Directive Principles of State Policy,

◇ Nomination of members to Rajya Sabha and 

◇ Method of election of president

■ CANADIAN CONSTITUTION

◇ Federation with a strong Centre,

◇ Vesting of residuary powers in the Centre, 

◇ Appointment of state governors by the Centre, and

◇ Advisory jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.

■ AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION

◇ Concurrent List, 

◇ Freedom of trade,

◇ Commerce and inter-course, and

◇ Joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament.

■ WEIMAR CONSTITUTION OF GERMANY

◇ Suspension of Fundamental Rights during Emergency.

■ SOVIET CONSTITUTION (USSR, now Russia)

◇ Fundamental duties and the ideal of justice (social, economic and political) in the Preamble.

■ FRENCH CONSTITUTION

◇ Republic and the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity in the Preamble.

■ AUSTRALIAN CONSTITUTION

◇ Concurrent List, 

◇ Freedom of trade,

◇ Commerce and inter-course, and

◇ Joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament.