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.
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| 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.
