The Daily Brief – 9th September, 2016

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• Nitin Gadkari, Minister of Road Transport and Highways and Shipping, and Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology and Law and Justice jointly launched integration of DigiLocker with Driving Licenses & Vehical Registration Certificates in New Delhi. People will no longer have to carry the physical copies of these documents.
• NASA launched OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft. The unmanned spacecraft blasted off onboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The spacecraft is USA’s first mission to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and return to the Earth, a journey that will take nearly 2 years.
• Into the Hidden Valley written by Stuart Blackburn has won the 2016 MM Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction in the UK. The novel narrates the story of the Apatani tribe of Arunachal Pradesh during British India. Blackburn has previously authored 16 books on Indian culture and folklore.
• The 28th and the 29th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit concluded on 8th September at Vientiane, Laos. The theme for this year’s summit was Turning Vision into Reality for a Dynamic ASEAN Community.
• President Pranab Mukherjee gave his assent to the Constitution (122nd Amendment) (GST) Bill, 2014. With this assent, the bill becomes law and allows rolling out a new indirect tax regime. The bill will now be notified to the Goods and Services Tax Council that will decide the tax rate, cess and surcharges. This council is going to be headed by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and will comprise of the state Finance Ministers.
• Assam’s Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal inaugurated Majuli as the 35th district

  

  of Assam making it the first island district of India. Recently, Majuli had replaced Marajo in Brazil to become the world’s largest river island in the Guinness Book of World Records.

• Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched advanced weather satellite, INSAT-3DR with the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV-F05), from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota.
• ICICI, India’s largest private sector bank has deployed ‘Software Robotics’ for power banking operations becoming the first bank in the country to do so.

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