DAILY CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS
1 – Indira Gandhi Peace Prize: GS II – Government Policies and Interventions:
Context:
- Daniel Barenboim and Ali Abu Awwad were just jointly awarded the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament, and Development for 2023 for their efforts to unite the youth and peoples of Israel and the Arab World in support of a peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
- Barenboim is a renowned classical pianist of Argentinean descent, and Awwad is a notable Palestinian peace campaigner who has been promoting a peaceful settlement of the region’s protracted conflict.
What does the Indira Gandhi Prize for Development, Peace, and Disarmament entail?
About:
- Since 1986, the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust has honoured former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with the annual Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament, and Development.
- The award recognises individuals or organisations for their remarkable contributions to world peace, disarmament, and development.
- One of the greatest awards in the field of peace and development, the prize is given out every year.
Categories:
- Three criteria are used to award the prize: development, disarmament, and peace.
- Standards for Acknowledgment:
- The honorees are selected on the basis of their outstanding and persistent work towards addressing important international issues pertaining to development, disarmament, and peace.
- Their effort ought to show that it has a beneficial effect on the global community and advances human welfare.
Source The Hindu
2 – India’s Involvement in the TIWB Initiative: GS II – International Issues:
Context:
- An important stride forward in international collaboration in tax matters is India’s participation in the Tax Inspectors Without Borders (TIWB) programme, which aims to strengthen the tax administration of Saint Lucia, an island nation in the Caribbean.
- For this 12- to 18-month programme, India has been selected as the Partner Administration and will supply Tax Experts.
- The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) jointly launched the TIWB initiative.
- The goal is to improve Saint Lucia’s tax administration through the transfer of technical expertise, with an emphasis on the efficient application of the Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) provided by the OECD under the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) framework.
- The OECD Council authorised the establishment of the CRS in 2014 in response to a G20 request, and it requires countries to share yearly financial data that is gathered from their institutions.
- The categories of accounts, taxpayers, and financial institutions’ due diligence processes are described in this framework. Its global goal is to stop tax evasion.
Source The Hindu
3 – SCO Joint Counterterrorism Exercise: GS II – International Issues:
Context:
- This exercise, which was hosted by India, aimed to reduce the use of the Internet by extremists, terrorists, and separatists.
- A new democratic, just, and reasonable international political and economic order is what the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) seeks to advance. It is a permanent intergovernmental organisation. It was produced in 2001.
- After being signed in 2002, the SCO Charter came into effect in 2003.
Source The Hindu
4 – Microsoft’s Phi-2: Compact Design, Vast Effect: GS III – Science and Technology:
Context:
- The tiny language model Phi-2, recently released by Microsoft, represents a major advancement in the field of language models.
- This model, which is positioned as an improved version of Phi-1.5, has generative AI capabilities that rival those of its larger equivalents, such as Llama-2, Mistral, and Gemini-2.
- The secret is that Phi-2 was trained on a variety of “textbook-quality” datasets, endowing it with linguistic comprehension, common sense, logical thinking, and even the ability to solve challenging physics and arithmetic issues.
Source The Hindu
