Current Affairs 17-06-2020

The traditional art of ‘talamaddale’, a variant of Yakshagana theatre, too has gone virtual in times of COVID-19. A performance was streamed live on social media on June 13.
Tala-Maddale is an ancient form of performance dialogue or debate performance popular in the Karavali and Malnad regions of Karnataka and Kerala.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) launched the findings of SIPRI Yearbook 2020, which assesses the current state of armaments, disarmament and international security.
The nine nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea—together possessed 13,400 nuclear weapons at the start of 2020, a decrease from the 13 865 nuclear weapons at the beginning of 2019.

World Day to Combat Decertification and Drought is being observed on June 17, 2020 with the theme “Food. Feed. Fibre. - the links between consumption and land.”
The day is observed every year on June 17.

India has set up its first mobile testing laboratory in a bid to meet the growing demand to conduct corona virus disease (COVID-19) tests.
The mobile laboratory, with on-site Elisa, RtPCR & Bio-chem analysers, was created within eight days by a team from Andhra Pradesh MedTech Zone Limited.
The laboratory can be deployed at remote and inaccessible areas in the country, where there is no such facility.

U.S President Donald Trump authorised sanctions against International Criminal Court (ICC) officials involved in investigations into possible war crimes by US troops or those of its allies.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a permanent judicial body based at The Hague in the Netherlands.
It was created by the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (its founding and governing document), and began functioning on 1 July 2002 when the Statute came into force.

Sweden has officially closed among the world’s longest police investigations, into the assassination of its former Prime Minister Olof Palme.
Sven Olof Joachim Palme (1927 – 1986) was a Swedish politician who led the Swedish Social Democratic Party from 1969 until his assassination in 1986.
He was posthumously awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Peace Prize in 1987.

NASA recently finalized the contract for the initial crew module of the agency’s Gateway lunar orbiting outpost. The contract, which is worth $187 million has been awarded to Orbital Science Corporation of Dulles, Virginia, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Space.
NASA has issued this contract to design the habitation and logistics (HALO) support for the Gateway, which is a part of NASA’s Artemis program that aims to send the first woman and the next man to the Moon by 2024.
Essentially, the Gateway is a small spaceship that will orbit the Moon, meant for astronaut missions to the Moon and later, for expeditions to Mars.
Further, astronauts will use the Gateway at least once per year and not stay around the year like they do on the International Space Station (ISS).
Compared to the ISS, the Gateway is much smaller, while the ISS is about the size of a six-bedroom house.

India joined the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI or Gee-Pay) as a founding member to support the responsible and human-centric development and use of AI.
India joined the league of leading economies including USA, UK, EU, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Singapore to launch the GPAI.
GPAI will be supported by a Secretariat, to be hosted by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris, as well as by two Centers of Expertise- one each in Montreal and Paris.

Union Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister launched the Indian Gas Exchange (IGX), which is the first nationwide online delivery-based gas trading platform.
IGX has been incorporated as a wholly owned subsidiary of the IEX, which is India’s energy market platform.
IGX will be a delivery-based trading platform for delivery of natural Gas. The trading platform will enable market participants to trade in standardised gas contracts.

A new species of fish has been discovered in Arunachal Pradesh. The fish species is named as Schizothorax sikusirumensis.
The fish species belongs to genus Schizothorax.
The name of this fish species has been derived from the name of the rivers where it was found. This fish was collected from the junction of River Siku and Sirum near Gakang area under Mebo circle of East Siang District.
The fish inhabits the water logged area of torrential river drainage.