The Daily Brief – 2nd October, 2016

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• India is set to ratify the Paris climate agreement today. In this context, Union Minister for Environment and Forests, Anil Dave has confirmed that there was no link between India ratifying the deal and its membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG). He has also said that India would push for finance and technology from developed countries at the climate talks in Morocco. The ratification document will be submitted in the evening today, at the offices of the UN Secretary-General by Syed Akbaruddin, India’s Permanent Representative to the UN. 
• India has ended up with 3 per cent less rain than normal during the monsoon months of June to September this year. This is the first time since 2011 that the department was not able to forecast the overall ‘sign’ of the monsoon — meaning that it expected heavy rain but ended up with less than normal. Kerala also recorded a deficient Southwest monsoon. The State as a whole had a rainfall deficit of 33 per cent during the period from June 1 to September 28.
• The Union Cabinet has approved the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between India and Singapore in the field of Industrial Property Cooperation. The MoU will be signed between India’s Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) during the visit of Singapore’s Prime Minister to India from 4-7 October 2016.
• A United Nations Sanctions Committee will soon up the proposal to put Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar on the list of proscribed terrorists. China had put a technical hold on this proposal in April this year. Azhar, a resident of Bahawalpur in Pakistan, has been accused by Indian agencies of orchestrating several terror attacks here, the latest being the attack on an Army camp in Jammu and Kashmir’s Uri.
• Army Chief Dalbir Singh visited the Northern and Western Commands to assess operational readiness. The Army has been asked to fortify positions on the LoC and the international border to thwart any reprisal by Pakistan.
• The government has extended the term of Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, State Bank of India (SBI) by a year. This will enable her to bring down the bank’s bad loans and help complete the merger process of the bank’s five subsidiaries and Bharatiya Mahila Bank.
• The Tamil Nadu government has chosen R. Subramanian, Chairman of the Cauvery Technical Cell (CTC), as its nominee for the proposed Cauvery Management Board (CMB). This follows the direction of the Supreme Court to the Cauvery Basin States and the Union Territory of Puducherry to select their nominees and intimate the Union government.
• Scientists claim to have discovered a new species of Pika, a mammal belonging to the rabbit and hare family ( Lagomorpha ), in the Himalayas in Sikkim. After six years of research, a team of international collaborators, led by scientists from Bangalore’s National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) announced the discovery.
• India’s Sania Mirza and her doubles partner Barbora Strycova from the Czech Republic faltered in the Wuhan Open women’s doubles final, losing to Bethanie Mattek-Sands and Lucie Safarova.
• Sumit Nagal beat Peter Nagy to win the title in the $25,000 Futures tennis tournament held in Hungary.
• The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa) have adopted the New Delhi Declaration of Education. The nations pledged to develop an enabling framework to promote research cooperation and knowledge transfer among these countries in collaboration with other BRICS initiatives.
• People in Hungary are voting in a referendum on accepting mandatory EU quotas for relocating migrants. Under the scheme, announced after last year’s migrant crisis, Hungary would receive 1,294 asylum seekers. Opinion polls suggest strong support for a rejection among those who say they will vote. In order for the referendum to be valid, turnout needs to be over 50% of voters. During the migrant crisis, Hungary became a transit state on the Western Balkan route to Germany and other EU destinations.

• The International Day of Non-Violence is observed across the world on 2 October 2016, the date that marks the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi. The UN General Assembly through its resolution dated 15 June 2007 established the International Day of Non-Violence to disseminate the message of non-violence through education and public awareness.
• The world’s first baby was born from a new procedure that combines the DNA of three people, in Mexico. The baby was born using the new and controversial technology, called mitochondrial donation, which incorporates DNA from three persons. Mitochondrial donation is a special form of in vitro fertilization in which the future baby’s mitochondrial DNA comes from a third party.

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