Current Affairs for IAS Exams

Current Affairs for IAS Exams – 18 October 2016

The parched Cauvery basin is become a fertile reason for farmers' suicides and mass migrations to urban areas in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, a Supreme Court-appointed High Level Technical Team told the apex court.
In its report, the team, said the “ground realities” of the Cauvery delta region include drought, rising unemployment, bore wells dug a 1000-feet deep for ground water and withering of acres of crops in both States.”
On October 4, a Bench led by Justice Dipak Misra, unable to resolve the impasse over the release of water, set up the team to conduct a field inspection in the Cauvery area.
The matter is scheduled for hearing on October 18.

Babies born to women aged over 40 from assisted reproduction have fewer birth defects compared with those from women who conceive naturally at that age, a new study has found.
This is contrary to widespread belief that the greater risk of birth defects after assisted conception is due to the frequent use of these services by older women.
According to researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia, this may point to the presence of more favourable biological conditions in IVF (in vitro fertilisations) specific to pregnancies in older women.
The research is based on data of all live births recorded in Australia from 1986 – 2002, including more than 3,01,000 naturally conceived births, as well as 2,200 births from IVF and almost 1400 from ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection).
The average prevalence of a birth defect was 5.7 per cent among naturally conceived births, 7.1 per cent for the IVF births, and 9.9 per cent for the ICSI births, across all age groups.
In births from assisted reproduction, the prevalence of birth defects ranged from 11.3 per cent at its highest for women less than age 30 using ICSI, down to 3.6 per cent for women aged 40 and older using IVF.

Russia announced an eight-hour “humanitarian” ceasefire in Aleppo later this week, as the EU warned that the Syrian regime’s Moscow-backed assault on the city could amount to war crimes.
The United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU) welcomed the announcement, but said the planned pause in fighting needed to be longer to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid.
In the latest violence, dozens of civilians including 12 members of the same family were killed in heavy bombardment of rebel-held eastern sectors of the embattled city, a monitoring group said.
Russia's announcement, to which there was no immediate reaction from rebels, came as the EU condemned the ferocious air war waged on Aleppo over the past three weeks.
“Since the beginning of the offensive by the regime and its allies, notably Russia, the intensity and scale of the aerial bombardment of eastern Aleppo is clearly disproportionate,” EU Foreign Ministers said in Luxembourg.