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National

BIETC Inaugurated

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated aircraft manufacturing giant Boeing’s largest investment facility outside the USA in Bengaluru.
• The name of this facility is Boeing India Engineering and Technology Center (BIETC), built with an investment of Rs 1,600 crore, have a 43-acre campus. BIETC is Boeing’s new campus in India.

New rooftop solar power scheme

• Prime Minister announced the ‘Pradhan Mantri Suryodaya Yojana’, a government scheme under which one crore households will get rooftop solar power systems.
• In 2014, the government launched the Rooftop Solar Programme that aimed to achieve a cumulative installed capacity of 40,000 megawatts (MW) or 40 gigawatts (GW) by 2022. However, this target couldn’t be achieved.
• The Pradhan Mantri Suryodaya Yojana seems to be a new attempt to help reach the target of 40 GW rooftop solar capacities.

Sapinda marriages

• Delhi High Court rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of Section 5(v) of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 (HMA), which prohibits marriage between two Hindus if they are “sapindas” of each other.
• Under the provisions of the HMA, on the mother’s side, a Hindu individual cannot marry anyone who is within three generations of them in the “line of ascent”.
• On the father’s side, this prohibition applies to anyone within five generations of the individual.

The Nagara style

• The Ram temple in Ayodhya has inaugurated on 22 January 2024.
• Chandrakant Sompura, 81, and his son Ashish, 51, have designed the complex in the Nagara style of temple architecture.
• The Nagara style of temple architecture emerged sometime in the fifth century CE, during the late Gupta period, in northern India.
• It is seen in juxtaposition with the Dravida style of southern India, which too emerged in the same period.

Boeing Sukanya Program

• The program provides opportunities for girls and women to learn critical skills in STEM fields and train for jobs in the aviation sector.
• For young girls, the program will create STEM Labs at 150 planned locations to help spark an interest in STEM careers.
• The program will also provide scholarships to women training to be pilots.

ASI hands over Gyanvapi mosque report

• The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in its scientific survey report on the Gyanvapi mosque complex has concluded that “there existed a Hindu temple prior to the construction of the existing structure” at the site.
• The report added that names of deities like Janardhana (another name of Vishnu), Rudra (another name of Shiva), and “Umesvara” were found in the inscriptions. 

International

Free Movement Regime (FMR)

• Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced that the Centre has decided to fence the entire length of the India-Myanmar border to stop the free movement of people.
• The two countries share a largely unfenced 1,643 km border, which goes through the states of Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh.
• The FMR is a mutually agreed arrangement between the two countries that allows tribes living along the border on either side to travel up to 16 km inside the other country without a visa.

UNRWA

• UN officialsurged countries to reconsider their decision to suspend the funding for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).
• UNRWA stands for UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. It was founded in 1949 to provide aid to about 700,000 Palestinians who were forced to leave their homes.

Iran’s Chabahar port

• During this visit to Iran, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar held discussions with Iran on establishing a long-term cooperation framework for the Chabahar port in the south of the country.
• Chabahar, which sits at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman, is Iran’s first deepwater port that puts the country on the global oceanic trade route map.
• Chabahar is of strategic importance to both Iran and India.

Iran attacks on Pakistan

• Iranian missiles and drones hit targets in Pakistan’s BalochistanJaysh al-Dhulm (Jaish al-Adl) terrorist group.
• Jaish al-Adl, literally the “Army of Justice”, are a Sunni Salafist militant group with bases in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, who are active in the mountainous border regions of Pakistan and Iran.

Marg Bar Sarmachar

• Pakistancarried out "highly coordinated and specifically precision military strikes" against terrorist’s hideouts in Iran, a day after Tehran launched deadly missile and drone attacks in Balochistan.
• It has codenamed the operation as "Marg Bar Sarmachar". 

19th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM)

• The 19th Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summitwas heldin Kampala, Uganda amid global challenges including terrorism and climate change.
• The summit is the largest grouping of states worldwide after the UN, with 120 member states, 18 observer nations, and 10 organizations.
• NAM does not have a permanent secretariat or a formal founding charter, act, or treaty. The summit usually takes place every three years.

Economy

First trillionaire within a decade

• The scourge of global poverty is estimated to take more than 200 years to eradicate, but the rich may reach new heights in just a fraction of that time, with the world on track to see its first-ever trillionaire within a decade, anti-poverty organization Oxfam said in a new report on inequality.
• The rise of billionaires, which first emerged in 1916, has already raised concerns about systemic exploitation lurking behind the widening wealth gap; some have argued that there is no such thing as good billionaires.

 Science & Technology

NASA regains contact with Mars helicopter

• The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) regained contact with its Mars helicopter Ingenuity, after it was unable to communicate with it towards the end of its 72nd flight on the red planet earlier.
• The small robotic chopper is the first aircraft in history to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet.
• The chopper made its first flight on Mars on 19 April 2021. It rose to a height of 10 feet, hovered for 30 seconds, and then descended back to the ground.

MISCELLANEOUS

Dragon babies

• In 2022, China recorded a decline in its population compared with the previous year for the first time since the 1960s.
• The fall was repeated in 2023, when it saw around 11 million deaths and 9 million births. Amid this trend, the term ‘dragon babies’ has been floating.
• ‘Dragon babies’ refers to babies born in the year of the dragon. The animal-based classification of years is based on the Chinese zodiac. It begins in February 2024.

Havisure

• Biopharma majorIndian Immunologicals Ltd has developed India’s first indigenous Hepatitis-A vaccine — Havisure — to protect against the highly contagious liver infection that is transmitted through theingestion of contaminated food or water.
• The two-dose inactivated virus vaccine for pediatric, adolescent and adult use, that took eight years to develop as the company lost a few years due to Covid-19, was rolled out.