Daily Current Affairs : 10th October 2013

1. The World Mental Health Day Observed on 10 October 2013 across the world to raise awareness about mental illness and its effects on people. The theme for the year 2013 is Mental health and older adults. World Mental Health Day is a day for global mental health education, awareness and advocacy. It was first celebrated in 1992 at the initiative of the World Federation for Mental Health, a global mental health organization with members and contacts in more than 150 countries. 

2. Alice Munro won Nobel Prize 2013 in literature and became the first Canadian woman to take the Nobel Prize since its launch in 1901. Canada's Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for her short stories that focus on the frailties of the human condition. Munro is just the 13th woman to win the Nobel Literature Prize since it was first awarded in 1901.  Munro is the author of 14 story collections; her latest is "Dear Life," which includes four autobiographical tales. Earlier this year, the 82-year-old writer announced plans to put down her pen and retire. Munro is the 17th Nobel laureate born in Canada.

3. Eminent agricultural scientist M S Swaminathan, known as the father of Green Revolution, will be conferred the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration, it was announced today.  The Award for the year 2012 consisting of a citation and Rs five lakh will be presented to the 88-year-old scientist by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi at a function here on October 31, the death anniversary of Indira Gandhi, Member Secretary of the award committee Motilal Vora said.

4. To boost mobile banking, the Reserve Bank of India has formed a technical committee to examine the feasibility of encrypted SMS-based fund transfers. Transfers that can be facilitated using an application that can run on any mobile handset. B. Sambamurthy, Director, Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology, will chair the committee and Vijay Chugh, Chief General Manager at RBI will be the member secretary.

5. The UN owes $80 million to India, the most it has to pay to any country, for costs relating to peacekeeping operations, a top official said. Apart from India, among the largest troop contributing countries to UN peacekeeping missions, the other top countries which are owed outstanding payments for such operations are Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Rwanda and Nigeria.

6. IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, has launched a $1-billion offshore bond programme, touted as the largest of its kind in the offshore rupee market, to strengthen India’s capital markets and attract greater foreign investment. Under the programme, IFC will issue rupee-linked bonds and use the proceeds to finance private sector investment in the country.

7.    Janet Yellen to be first woman to head U.S. Fed Reserve. The U. S. Federal Reserve is going to exit the list of top power institutions in the country where the top position has never been held by a woman. President Barack Obama's administration has nominated Janet Yellen to run the central bank She is going to be the first woman to be the chairperson of the Federal Reserve. But, she is not the world's first woman to head a central bank.

8. Pakistan's teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban for fighting girls' rights to education, was today awarded the European Parliament's prestigious Sakharov human rights prize. The 16-year-old who has become an emblem of the fight against the most radical forms of Islamism has also been nominated for the Nobel peace prize. 

9. The government’s ambitious rural job scheme MNREGA has not only unleashed a revolution in rural India but has also established the country as a model of inclusive development worldwide : World Bank.

10.  Star batsman Jayasurya among new Ministers in Lanka cabinet. Sri Lanka’s cabinet was expanded today with the inclusion of nine new Deputy Ministers, including former star batsman and Chairman of the Selection Committee, Sanath Jayasuriya.

11. Wilfried Martens, nine-times Prime Minister of Belgium and who led the European Union's Christian Democrat group, died at Lokeren, in East Flanders. He was 77 years old.

13. Well-known Telugu film actor, Srihari died on 9 October 2013 at a private hospital in Mumbai. He was shooting for a Hindi film Rambo Rajkumar being directed by Prabhu Deva with Shahid Kapoor and Sonakshi Sinha in the lead. Srihari, was suffering from a liver ailment for some time.

14.  Leprosy awareness campaign “Heal INDIA” launched today by the Leprosy Mission Trust of India in an effort to remove the stigma attached to leprosy. The campaign Hire Educate Accept Leprosy-affected (HEAL) will be reaching out to people through 40,000 children in schools across Delhi, NCR, and also colleges through workshops, films and music. 

15.  Today is the birth anniversary of one of India's most loved authors, R K Narayan. R K Narayan  whose works gave the generation one of its most cherished tele-serials, Malgudi Days, and Bollywood, one of its most celebrated movies, 'Guide'. R. K. Narayan, full name Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, is one of three leading figures of early Indian literature in English (alongside Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao), and is credited with bringing the genre to the rest of the world.

16. Jignesh Shah, Vice-Chairman and Shareholder Director of the MCX-SX, and Joseph Massey, Managing Director and CEO, have resigned from the board of the exchange. According to a press release, market regulator SEBI has nominated Thomas Mathew, a former Chairman of LIC, as Public Interest Director of the exchange.

17. Akshay Kumar's upcoming film "Boss" has entered the Guinness World Records for having the largest poster in the world. The width of the poster is 193 feet and 1 inch while its height is 180 feet and 2 inches. Boss" broke the record of Michael Jackson's "This Is It", a documentary-concert film.

18. Sachin Tendulkar, regarded as the greatest batsman in contemporary cricket, today called it quits from Test cricket, announcing his retirement after his 200th match against the West Indies next month, bringing the curtains down on an extraordinary career spanning a marathon 24 years. Tendulkar, who has scored a monumental 15,837 runs in 198 Tests at an average of 53.86, said it was hard to imagine a life without playing cricket.

19. Widely-popular fast-food chain McDonald on Wednesday announced its decision to launch its international coffee format McCafe in India. McDonald's Indian arm, WestLife Development Ltd. (WDL), will first launch McCafe in western and southern parts of India, followed by an expansion of the new coffee format in the remaining parts of the country by Connaught Plaza Restaurants Ltd.

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