Current Affairs For Bank, IBPS Exams - 30 July, 2014
Current Affairs For Bank, IBPS Exams
30 July, 2014
Russia violated missile treaty: U.S.
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U.S. President Barack Obama said in a letter to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in a letter on Monday that Russia had violated a 1987 arms control treaty when it allegedly ground-launched a cruise missile.
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The Obama administration’s charge against Russia, described as the “most serious allegation of an arms control treaty violation,” made to date, follows reports by U.S. officials that Russia began testing cruise missiles as far back as 2008.
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The INF Treaty was signed on December 8, 1987 by erstwhile U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and was considered to be an agreement that would limit the risk of strikes against Europe.
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This risk increased after the Soviet Union achieved “rough strategic parity” with the U.S. in the mid-1970s and then began replacing older intermediate-range SS-4 and SS-5 missiles with a new intermediate-range missile, the SS-20.
SBI wins I-T case
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The Income Tax Appellate Tribunal (ITAT) has held that the State Bank of India was not required to deduct any tax at source (TDS) on over Rs. 11,000 crore in the Site Restoration Fund (SRF) account maintained by the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) from 2002.
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Total stakes involved in this case including tax, interest and penalty in all assessment years from 2003 could well exceed Rs. 1,000 crore. Now, the SBI will be entitled to receive refund of whatever amount that had been coercively recovered by the I-T department.
Flipkart sets eyes on $100 b valuation
- India’s leading e-commerce retailer Flipkart announced that it has raised funds worth $1 billion (over Rs.6,000 crore), the largest-ever by an Indian Internet company.
- Flipkart has raised $210 million as recently as May this year. Bangalore-based e-tailer which crossed $1 billion in gross merchandise value in March and then went on to acquire competitor Myntra.com in one of the biggest deals in the sector.
Contact re-established with Russian satellite carrying geckos
- Russia’s space agency lost contact last week with a Photon-M satellite carrying five of the lizards for an experiment on weightlessness and sexual behaviour.
- But mission control outside Moscow said this weekend it had re-established communications with the satellite and the intrepid gecko sexplorers’ research would continue.
- The satellite was launched from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome on July 19 after electrical problems delayed it for three weeks.
