Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

Editorials are covered separately. HINDU NOTES are available free date wise| CLICK HERE

India’s child marriage numbers drop sharply, driving down global rate, says UNICEF

News

The proportion of girls getting married in India has nearly halved in a decade, the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF said,which has contributed significantly to a global decline in child marriage.

Findings

• UNICEF said 25 million child marriages were prevented worldwide in the last decade, with the largest reduction seen in South Asia where India was at the forefront.
• India constitutes more than 20% of the world’s adolescent population and accounts for the highest number of child marriages in South Asia given its size and population.

In the current trend, 27% of girls, or nearly 1.5 million girls, get married before they turn 18 in India. This is a sharp decline from 47% a decade ago.

• UNICEF estimates that 12 million girls a year are married globally, and says more is needed to end the practice by 2030 the target set under the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.
• The legal age of marriage in India is 18 for women and 21 for men. Last year the Supreme Court ruled that sex with an underage wife constituted rape.

India’s Prohibition of Child Marriage Act imposes a fine of 1,00,000 and two years in prison for parents caught trying to marry off their underage children.

Japanese volcano erupts, dozens of flights grounded

News

A volcano in southern Japan has erupted, shooting smoke and ash thousands of metres (feet) into the sky and grounding dozens of flights to and from a nearby airport.

Beyond News

• The Meteorological Agency says the Shinmoedake volcano erupted violently several times , shooting up ash and smoke up to 2,300 metres (7,500 feet) in its biggest explosion since 2011.
• It said some lava was rising from inside a crater at the volcano.
• The volcano has had smaller eruptions since last week.
• Entry to the 1,421-km-high volcano was restricted. About 80 flights in and out of the nearby Kagoshima airport were canceled.

Japan has 110 active volcanoes.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

Bengaluru’s first helitaxi service takes off

##Not much important. Still its good to know this.

News

App-based taxi service took on a whole new meaning when Bengaluru’s first helitaxi service took off, ferrying passengers from Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) to Electronics City in 15 minutes.

Beyond News

The helitaxi, touted to be the first such service in the country, was announced in August 2017 .
The service is being offered by KIA in partnership with Thumby Aviation Pvt Ltd, in an effort to reduce the time taken to travel to the city from the international airport.

 

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

Maoists torch 2 Telangana State buses, 4 private buses in Sukma district of Chhattisgarh

News

An alert has been sounded up in Bhadrachalam Agency, the tribal heartland of Telangana, following the killing of a youth and torching of two Telangana State buses and four private vehicles, allegedly by Maoists, in the insurgency-hit Sukma district of Chhattisgarh.

Beyond News

In an apparent retaliatory action to the killing of 10 Maoists in an alleged encounter in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district , Maoists allegedly killed the youth, who is believed to be one of the passengers of a bus, and set ablaze the two TSRTC buses, both belonging to Hyderabad-II depot, when they were heading towards Hyderabad from Jagdalpur and Bailadilla in Chhattisgarh respectively.

The incident prompted the Bhadrachalam sub-division police to beef up security and intensify vehicle-checking operations along the inter-State border.

Vehicle checking has been intensified in coordination with the CRPF personnel.

Threat of new malware looms over cyberspace

News

After Mirai and Reaper, cybersecurity agencies have detected a new malware called Saposhi, which is capable of taking over electronic devices and turning them into ‘bots’, which can be then used for any purpose, including a Distributed Denial Of Service attack which, with enough firepower, can cripple entire industries.

Being monitored

Saposhi is similar in its intensity to Reaper, which was taking over millions of devices at the rate of 10,000 devices per day. Various cyber security agencies are currently keeping tabs on it to get a better idea of what it is capable of.

In October last year, the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), a central government body that deals with cyber attacks, had issued an alert about reaper, a highly evolved malware capable of not only hacking devices like WiFi routers and security cameras, but also able to hide its own presence in the bot a device taken over by a malware.

Beyond News

Malwares like Saposhi, Reaper and Mirai are primarily aimed at DDoS attacks, in which the malware first creates a network of bots called a botnet and then uses the botnet to ping a single server at the same time.

As the number of pings are far beyond the server’s capacity, the server crashes and denies service to its consumers.

In 2016, Mirai, using a botnet of 5 lakh devices, had caused the servers of Dyn, a leading domain name service provider, to crash, affecting services of popular websites like Twitter, Netflix and Reddit.

CLICK HERE TO SEE DATE WISE CURRENT AFFAIRS