8th September 2015 Current Affair Updates | Daily GK Download

1. To safeguard minority shareholders' interests and promote capital market as a key platform to raise funds, G20 and OECD announced new Corporate Governance Principles for listed companies and regulators in all member countries including India. The new global principles were released on the sidelines of the G20 Meeting of Finance Ministers and Central Bankers (Ankara, Turkey) being attended by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and RBI chief Raghuram Rajan. The new code calls for enhanced cross-border cooperation among regulators, including through bilateral and multilateral arrangements.

2. India finally has an estimate of leopards. The first ever count of India's leopards, conducted alongside last year's tiger census, has put the spotted cat population at 7,910 in and around tiger habitats across the country, except the northeast. The leopards were counted using the same methods adopted for the tiger census. India's total leopard population is in the range of 12,000 to 14,000. The exercise covered 3,50,000 sq km of forested habitat of central and western part of the country.

3. British financial services major Barclays has maintained its India growth forecast of 7.8 percent for 2015-16. According to Barclays the strong rise in central government spending should help GDP growth to accelerate in second quarter of fiscal year 2015-16. The Indian economy grew 7 percent in the first quarter of this fiscal and 7.5 percent expansion was seen in the quarter before. But the growth was 6.7 percent registered in the first quarter of the last fiscal.

8th September 2015 Current Affair Updates | Daily GK Download

4. Australian all-rounder cricket player Shane Watson announced his retirement from Test cricket. He will continue his international career in the One-Day Internationals and Twenty20 Internationals. 34-year-old Watson's 10-year Test career came to an end at the Ashes opener at Cardiff, which England won by 169 runs.

5. In a significant development in the ongoing European migrant crisis, Germany and Austria opened their borders to thousands of refugees. Both Germany and Austria threw open their borders to thousands of refugees as after days of confrontation and chaos, Hungary’s government deployed over 100 buses overnight to take thousands of refugees to the Austrian frontier. From Austria these migrants entered Germany, with over 1,000 arriving by special trains in Munich. The migrant crisis of 2015 has become Europe’s most acute refugee crisis since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

6. Britain's Mercedes racing driver Lewis Hamilton won the 2015 Formula 1 Italian Grand Prix. The final race was held at Monza near Milan in Italy. While Hamilton topped the table, Sebastian Vettel (Ferrari) and Felipe Masse (Williams) were at the second and third positions respectively. Sergio Perez (Mexico) and Nico Hulkenberg (Germany) of Force India stood at the 5th and 6th positions respectively.

7. Pune girl Snehal Mane won her second ITF girls' singles tennis title in two weeks in Mauritius. The 16-year-old Maharashtra player claimed the title by winning the Mauritius Open ITF Junior championships, a Grade 5 event. Snehal, the fifth seed, bagged the crown by defeating sixth-seeded local girl Amelie Boy 6-3, 6-0 in just over an hour in the final.

8. Young Indian shooter Apurvi Chandela clinched the silver medal in women’s 10m air rifle event of the ISSF Rifle and Pistol World Cup Finals in Munich. The 22-year-old Jaipur girl finished second on the podium after she tallied 206.9, just 0.6 behind Ahmadi Elaheh of Iran, who won the gold medal with a tally of 207.5. Andrea Arsovic of Serbia bagged the bronze after prevailing in a shoot-off with Croatia’s Valentina Gustin.

9. A committee set up by the government to rationalise distribution incentives for financial products and curb their mis-selling, has in its report recommended flexible exits for financial products and that profits from exit charges not accrue to product providers. Sumit Bose, former Finance Secretary is the head of the committee. The report of the Sumit Bose Committee has recommended that the choice of withdrawal of all financial products, except those pertaining to pensions, should remain with the investor.

10. RBI released its Annual Report for 2014-15. It has revealed that the central bank’s Contingency funds, used in case of unforeseen shocks, have fallen to 8.4% of total assets. Apart from this, for the last two years, the RBI has made no transfers to its Contingency Fund or its Asset Development Fund. While the total in these contingency funds of the RBI stood at Rs. 2,424 billion in 2012-13, it was Rs. 2,434 billion in 2014-15. This meant that balance in these funds has barely changed since 2013. The stipulated target for funding of RBI’s contingency funds is 12% of assets.