Fall down seven times. Stand up eight.

-Japanese Proverb

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*Undercover investigations or so-called sting operations occupy

a complex and problematical ethical space in journalism.

*It would have amounted to more than shooting the messenger.

*Delhi police have belatedly clarified that they would focus on

tracing those who sold the passwords to enable access to the

information.

*Given the noisy hubbub and the misinformation about what was

breached, it is perhaps important to stress that the encrypted Aadhaar

biometric database has not been compromised.

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*The UIDAI is correct in stating that mere information such as phone

numbers and addresses (much of which is already available to

telemarketers and others from other databases) cannot be misused

without biometric data.

*In this digital age, a growing pool of personal information that can be

easily shared has become available to government and private entities.

*India does not have a legal definition of what constitutes personal

information and lacks a robust and comprehensive data protection law.

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*Fire and Fury

*Donald Trump had reacted furiously on Twitter to its impending release, and his lawyers reportedly sent them a cease-and-desistnotice.

*Consequently, the debate has circled back to the question of his mental health and his ability to discharge the duties of his office. If he is found wanting in this regard, his Cabinet and Congress may, under the provisions of the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment, remove him from office.

*Whatever the truth, this was the leader that the American electorate

chose.

*The world must now live with the consequences of the decision.

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*The Asian region is nowhere near achieving

the kind of equilibrium that the Concert of

Europe brought to 19th century Europe.

*The region is today an area of intense

geostrategic and geo-economic competition.

*China is the rising economic and military

power in Asia today

*But it also cannot afford to ignore the competition from Japan and India.

*Mid-2017: Doklam

*The reluctance of the U.S. and China’s rise

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*.

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*Big problems: Afghanistan and Syria’s institutions breaking down.

*East Asia will remain a troubled region for much of 2018

*nuclear sabre-rattling

*At present: Unpredictable

*Chinese Communist Party (October 2017): making China’s military ‘world

class’, one capable of ‘winning wars’.

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*More such situations will, in all likelihood, be repeated in 2018.

*In 2017 there was an over 200% increase in ceasefire violations, with infiltration touching a four-year high.

*SAARC continues to remain in cold storage

*Kulbhushan Jadhav: treatment meted out to the family

*Major terrorist attack: CRPF camp in Avantipur

*West Asia is at the crossroads today.

*Syria has almost ceased to be a state.

*Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda

*Sunni vs Shiite

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*Jerusalem as Israel’s capital

*The collapse of the so-called Islamic Caliphate and its territorial demise

has hardly weakened the terror potential of the IS.

*In much the same manner as the Afghan jihad in 1980s and 1990s

exacerbated insurgencies across parts of the world, retreating IS

members returning to their homeland could provide a new narrative of

terrorism in 2018.

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*Finance Ministry recently issued a statement warning against investing in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies (CCs).

*Likening CCs to ‘Ponzi schemes’, it linked them to terror-funding, smuggling, drug-trafficking, and money-laundering.

*Two aspects of the bitcoin phenomenon have attracted great interest:

1. the challenge it poses to states and central banks;

2. the potential of its underlying technology to unleash a new wave of creative

destruction.

*It would be safe to say that the world’s top central bankers have finally

realised the futility of trying to control CCs. They are preparing to join

them — by issuing their own Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDCs).

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*But there is one flaw endemic to any CBDC: the contradiction between the centralising tendency of a CBDC and the decentralising technology that underpins cryptocurrencies.

*It has been pointed out that bitcoins, unlike a stock or a bond, are a purely speculative asset untethered to a material basis of value.

*The global financial crisis of 2008-09 raised a simple question: what option do people have if banks are not to be trusted?

*Disciplining of the state (no more quantitative easing!)

*Given the enormous scope for increased efficiency and cost-saving, it is not inconceivable that in the medium term, the biggest threat to businesses in the finance and digital space will come from the blockchain versions of themselves.

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*In order to be functional, a virtual currency must solve the problem of

double spending.

*Nakamoto solved the double spending problem by designing a

decentralised ledger that bundles data about transactions into blocks,

timestamps them, and links each new block of transactions with the

previous one in an immutable chain of blocks that are copied,

authenticated, and updated continuously, and publicly, on thousands of

computers — the blockchain.

*It does away with the bank’s role as an intermediary, and this is what

differentiates CCs from (the digital version of) fiat currencies.

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*Individuals and businesses can do away with a whole bunch of

intermediaries whom they pay for managing trust.

*For instance, on Ethereum, a blockchain platform that calls itself “the

android of the cryptocurrency world,” you can set up an application that

enables people to rent out idle storage space on their laptop.

*Someone who needs cloud storage can pay you directly, instead of paying

Amazon, a leading cloud storage intermediary.

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Larger Bench to decide on Sec. 377

*Societal morality changes with time: Supreme Court Petition seeks to quash law criminalising homosexuality.

*The Supreme Court on Monday referred to a larger Bench a writ petition filed by five gay and lesbian members of the LGBT community to strike down the colonial Section 377 in the Indian Penal Code of 1860, which criminalises homosexuality.

*A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, decided to revisit a December 2013 verdict of the Supreme Court in the Suresh Kumar Kaushal versus Naz Foundation, which dismissed the LGBT community as a negligible part of the population while virtually denying them the right of choice and sexual orientation.

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*The Bench said a section of people cannot live in fear of a law which atrophies

their right to follow their natural sexual inclinations.

*It said societal morality changes with time, and law should change pace with life.

*While the court noted that Section 377 punishes carnal intercourse against the order of nature, it added, “The determination of order of nature is not a common phenomenon. Individual autonomy and individual natural inclination cannot be atrophied unless the restrictions are determined as reasonable.”

*The court observed that what is natural for one may not be natural for the other, but the confines of law cannot trample on or curtail the inherent rights embedded with an individual under Article 21 (right to life) of the Constitution.

*Mr. Datar argued that Section 377 has the potential to destroy individual choiceand sexual orientation.

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*.

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Cybercrime victims can complain online

*The Ministry of Home Affairs is set to launch a web portal where people who have faced online abuse and victims of cybercrimes like financial frauds can register complaints on a real-time basis.

*The Centre also plans to give access rights to banks on the portal to address cases of fraudulent transactions online.

*Home Minister Rajnath Singh said last week that according to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), there was a 21% increase per year in incidents of cybercrime.

*“If money has been fraudulently withdrawn through someone’s credit or debit card, the person can log onto the portal and register a complaint. Since banks would be given access rights, the bank concerned would receive the complaint and take action immediately,” said a senior official of the Home Ministry.

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*.

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Centre to review rules on anthem

*The Centre has asked the Supreme Court to take back its order making it

compulsory for cinema halls to play the National Anthem before

screening a film and for patrons to stand up.

*An affidavit by the Home Ministry informed the court that an inter-

ministerial panel had been formed to frame guidelines on the issue and it

would require at least six months to complete the task.

*The court had justified the playing of the anthem in cinema halls, seeing

it as an opportunity for the public to express their “love for the

motherland.”

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Break silos of information: PM

*Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday asked the State police chiefs to share information with one another as “security cannot be achieved selectively, or alone, and for that breaking of silos and information sharing among States can help make everyone more secure”.

*Speaking at the concluding day of the annual conference of DGPs and IGPs at the BSF Academy in Tekanpur, Madhya Pradesh, Mr. Modi said there was an emerging global consensus towards greater information sharing on illicit financial dealings, and India could play a key role in achieving this.

*Mr. Modi said cybercrimes should be given top priority and dealt with immediately, an official release said.

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Tuting row resolved, says Army chief

*India and China held a Border Personnel Meeting (BPM) last week to resolve the incident of road building by Chinese civilians at Tuting in Arunachal Pradesh.

*“The Tuting issue has been resolved. A border meeting was held two days back,” the Chief of the Army Staff, Gen. Bipin Rawat, said on Monday.

*He was speaking to presspersons on the sidelines of an Army-industry seminar on indigenisation.

*In December last week, a group of Chinese civilians were noticed undertaking track alignment activity about one kilometre inside the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Tuting.

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Trump’s outburst deepens Sino-Pak. ties

*Already its “iron brother”, China now appears set for an even tighter

embrace of Pakistan, following a possible slide in ties between Islamabad

and Washington.

*China should pay more attention to the potency of its economic

assistance to Pakistan “as ties are set to get closer amid hostility from

the U.S.”.

*Soon after Mr. Trump’s tweet, Pakistan’s Central Bank swiftly announced

that it would use the Chinese Yuan to settle bilateral trade and

investment with China.

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‘BharatNet covers 1 lakh panchayats’

*The government on Monday said it had laid optical fibre in more than 1

lakh gram panchayats, completing the first phase of the BharatNet

project that forms the backbone for the Digital India initiative.

*The delay-marred project aims to bring high speed broadband to all 2.5

lakh gram panchayats (GPs) through optical fibre.

*“As on December 31, 2017, 2,54,895 km of OFC has been laid covering

1,09,926 GPs out of which 1,01,370 GPs have been made service ready,”

the government said, while expressing hope for completing the project

by December this year.

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India unveils Pratyush, its fastest supercomputer yet

*India’s supercomputing prowess moved up several notches Monday after it unveiled Pratyush, an array of computers that can deliver a peak power of 6.8 petaflops. One petaflop is a million billion floating point operations per second and is a reflection of the computing capacity of a system.

*According to a statement by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pratyush is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world dedicated to weather and climate research, and follows machines in Japan, USA and the United Kingdom.

*It will also move an Indian supercomputer from the 300s to the 30s in the Top500 list, a respected international tracker of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

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*.

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1. El Nino current appears along the coast of which one of the following?

A. Brazil

B. Peru

C. Alaska

D. Western Australia

2. Identify cold ocean current/s from the below given list

A. Canary

B. Humboldt

C. Brazil

D. Oyasiwo

3. John Young

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1. Maximum number of sugar factories are located in

A. Uttar Pradesh

B. Tamil Nadu

C. Bihar

D. Assam

2. Oldest and still active oil field of India

A. Bombay High

B. Ankleshwar

C. Digboi

D. Naharakatiya

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