ANSWER: C

ANSWER: A

ANSWER: B

ANSWER: A

• India and Indonesia were the top two beneficiaries of the European Union’s Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) schemes for exports in 2022.
• Clothing, machinery, and footwear accounted for nearly half of all standard GSP imports, as per a joint report of the EU to the European Parliament and the Council.

About GSP scheme

• Under the GSP scheme, the EU allows identified products originating in certain developing countries preferential access to its markets in the form of reduced or zero rates of customs duties.
• As the items become more competitive and reach a particular threshold, the GSP is withdrawn.
  • The EU has already withdrawn the GSP benefit from about 1,800 items from India in 2023, and the present policy will now continue for another four years until 2027.
  • The items include electrical machinery, plastics, articles of stone and articles of leather and could affect exports worth $7.9 billion.
• GSP was instituted under the aegis of United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

ANSWER: C

FASTER 2.0

• Keeping up with the technology adoption to streamline the justice delivery system, the Chief Justice of India (CJI) launched the ‘FASTER 2.0’ portal recently.
• The new portal is designed to promptly inform jail authorities, trial courts, and high courts about court orders for the release of prisoners.
• The new digital facility looks to plug the delay in the present system, which currently is much time taking as as this is based on physical orders copies that are to be officially received via formal government channels before the jail authorities.
• The ‘FASTER 2.0’ portal is now live and facilitates instant communication to the concerned authorities, enhancing the efficiency of the justice system.

e-SCR portal

• In addition to the ‘FASTER 2.0’ initiative, CJI also unveiled a Hindi version of the e-SCR portal.
• This portal allows access to Supreme Court judgments in Hindi, making legal information more accessible and inclusive.
• The Supreme Court’s eSCR website that contained Hindi translations of 21,388 judgments of a total 36,068 judgments delivered so far by the Supreme Court since January 26, 1950.
  • The rest of the judgments are in the process of being translated into Hindi and would be uploaded after vetting.
• All the judgments in English are already available free of cost to judges, lawyers, litigants and the general public on eSCR portal.

ANSWER: B

• The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs is making raw data from Indian cities available on a single platform for academics, researchers, and stakeholders to help data-driven policy making.
• The Amplifi 2.0(Assessment and Monitoring Platform for Liveable, Inclusive and Future-ready urban India) portal was launched in this context recently.
• Currently, 225 urban local bodies (ULB) have been on-boarded, and data for 150 cities is available on the portal.
  • It is hoped that data from the more than 4,000 Urban Local Bodies will eventually be made available on the portal.
• The website provides data on a range of information for several cities, including, for example, the total diesel consumption; the number of samples tested for water quality; the average annual expenditure on healthcare; the total number of people residing in slums; the fatalities recorded due to road accidents.

ANSWER: D

• Scientists have detected one of the most powerful cosmic rays ever slamming into Earth but they have no idea what caused it or where it came from.
• The extremely high-energy particle has been named Amaterasu after the Japanese Sun goddess, and it seemingly arrived from a void in space where nothing is known to exist.
• The Amaterasu particle has an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV).
• That is millions of times more powerful than the particles produced by the Large Hadron Collider, which is the most powerful accelerator ever built.
• It is second only to the “Oh-My-God” particle, another high-energy cosmic ray detected in 1991.
  • That came in at 320 EeV.

ANSWER: C    

• International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is observed on November 29^th.
• In 1977, the UN General Assembly called for the annual observance of 29 November as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
  • On that day, in 1947, the Assembly adopted the resolution on the partition of Palestine.
• “The resolution on the observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People also encourages Member States to continue to give the widest support and publicity to the observance of the Day of Solidarity.” UN official statement reads.