Current Affairs For Bank, IBPS Exams - 22 July, 2014

Current Affairs For Bank, IBPS Exams

Telecom sector regulator TRAI has recommended allowing sharing of all categories of spectrum.
The move is likely to benefit major operators such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea, Reliance Communications and Tata Teleservices, helping them reduce costs and at the same time improve service quality.
At present, telecom operators are allowed to share passive infrastructure such as mobile towers and have been demanding allowing of spectrum sharing for a long time.
All access spectrum i.e. spectrum in the bands of 800/900/1800/2100/2300/2500 MHz will be sharable provided that both the licensees are having spectrum in the same band.
According to the regulator, this will help operators achieve better spectral efficiency. Sharing can also provide additional network capacities in places where there is network congestion due to a spectrum crunch.
As per the guidelines, post-spectrum sharing, SUC (spectrum usage charges) will increase by 0.5 per cent for both the licensees. The guidelines also suggest a non-refundable processing fee of Rs 50,000 per operator for each service area in which they opt for spectrum sharing.

The Ministry of Shipping has decided to reduce paperwork by scrapping the requirement of annual renewal of licenses for Indian ships and any other vessel charted by an Indian citizen or company.
Such licences will now be issued with a life-time fee instead of annual fee but the licence will be co-terminus with the certificate of Registry of the Ship.
The decision also provides for all the five Registrars of Ships at Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Goa and Cochin to issue these licenses under the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act,1958.

The powerful 15-nation Council held an emergency meeting and expressed serious concern about the escalation of violence in and around Gaza.
The Palestinian death toll rose to 501 after bodies of 16 people who were killed in an Israeli air strike on a house in the south of the Gaza Strip were found this morning.
The members of the Security Council called for an immediate cessation of hostilities based on the November 2012 ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Hamas.
The Council also emphasised the need to improve the humanitarian situation, including thorough humanitarian pauses, such as the five-hour truce brokered last week by the Secretary-General’s Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Robert Serry.
The emergency UNSC meeting came even as Mr. Ban is in the region as part of a visit aimed at expressing solidarity with Israelis and Palestinians and help bringing about a ceasefire.
Meanwhile U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to Cairo to meet Egyptian and other officials on the volatile situation in the Gaza Strip and seek an immediate cessation of hostilities.
Mr. Kerry told that Israel is responding to an intransigent Hamas that it was offered a ceasefire and didn’t want to take it.

NASA’s telescopes are not just helping us look into the dark deep universe but have inspired surgeons to restore the eyesight of the elderly.
The tiny telescopes inserted in Phyllis Price (a 79-year-old woman can see again) eyes, magnified the images and also directed them away from diseased parts of the eye and onto healthier areas.
This “giant leap” in medical science holds hope to an optical disease that affects hundreds of thousands of elderly people.