Short News Article

Polity and Governance (GS-II)

Mission Shakti 4.0

Uttar Pradesh government has launched the fourth phase of Mission Shakti, focused on promoting women’s self-reliance, safety and respect.

About the Mission:

• Mission Shakti has the clear objective of empowering women through gainful activities by providing credit and market linkage.
• Empowerment of women through WSHGs under Mission Shakti is a flagship Programme of the Government.
• It envisages that over a period of time more & more women would be part of a WSHG.
• The fourth phase of the Mission Shakti aims to replicate the success of earlier phases and reach towards broader segment.
• Rallies across 75 districts have been initiated.
• The government will also honour entities and individuals demonstrating exemplary efforts in enhancing women’s safety, self-reliance and respect, within their districts.

Location in News

Haiti Islands

Kenya’s Cabinet has approved the deployment of 1,000 police to lead a multinational peacekeeping mission to Haiti to combat gang violence.

• From Jan. 1 until August 15, more than 2,400 people in Haiti were reported killed, more than 950 kidnapped and another 902 injured, according to the most recent U.N. statistics.

About the region:

• Haiti, country in the Caribbean Sea that includes the western third of the island of Hispaniola and such smaller islands as Gonâve, Tortue (Tortuga), Grande Caye, and Vache.
• The capital is Port-au-Prince.
• Geographic Location: Haiti is bordered to the east by the Dominican Republic, which covers the rest of Hispaniola, to the south and west by the Caribbean, and to the north by the Atlantic Ocean.

Science and Technology (GS-III)

High-speed craft ‘Cheriyapani’

Recently, the Prime Minister has launched an international, high-speed passenger ferry service between Nagapattinam on the eastern coast of Tamil Nadu and Kankesanthurai in the northern province of Sri Lanka.

About:

• The ferry service will help strengthen cultural, commercial, and civilizational ties between the two nations.
• Connectivity is the central theme of the joint vision of the India - Sri Lanka economic partnership.
• The Nagapattinam port is one of the non-major ports under the maintenance of the Tamil Nadu Maritime Board, and is located on the shores of the Bay of Bengal at the estuary of the Kaduvaiyar River that flows south of the town between Akkaraipettai and Keechankuppam villages.
• The Union Ministry of External Affairs had sanctioned Rs. 8 crore to upgrade the infrastructure at the port.

Science and Technology (GS-III)

NASA's Psyche mission

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is on its voyage to an asteroid which a metal-rich world that could tell us more about the formation of rocky planets.

About the mission:

• Psyche is a NASA mission that will explore a 140-mile-wide (225 kilometers) metallic asteroid called ‘16 Psyche’. 
• The mission will explore a metal-rich asteroid that may shed light on our own planet’s formation.
• No spacecraft has ever visited an object like 16 Psyche, which is thought to be the exposed core of a demolished planet.
• The asteroid 16 Psyche, or simply Psyche, was only the 16th asteroidever discovered, according to Arizona State University (ASU).
• The space rock was spotted in 1852 by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis, who named it for the ancient Greek goddess of the soul.
• Psyche has a mass of about 440 billion billion pounds (220 billion billion kilograms), making it 0.03% the mass of Earth's moon.
• It's the 11th-most-massive known asteroidin the solar system, though it's only a few hundredths the mass of behemoths such as Ceres and Vesta.