23rd October 2015 - Important Current Affairs updates

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International Affairs

• The India China Combined Military Training Exercise Hand in Hand 2015, which was commenced on 12 October at Kunming Military Academy, Yunnan of China, was concluded today. 
• Strict laws against homosexuality have come into effect in the conservative Indonesian province of Aceh.
• Gay sex between Muslim men or women, both locals and foreigners, can now be punished with 100 strokes of the cane.
• The law, passed in 2014 but only now being enforced, has faced opposition by rights groups.
• Note : The strictly Muslim province has become increasingly conservative in recent years and is the only one in Indonesia allowed to implement Sharia law.

National Affairs

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Pranab Mukherjee will next month launch "IMPRINT", a single window funding clearance mechanism backed with a Rs 1,000-crore to get Indian technical institutions to conduct original research in areas where the country is heavily dependent on foreign technology. 

Business & Economy

• RBI allows banks to fix their own interest rates on gold deposit scheme.
  
• The Government has exempted the banking correspondents from service tax for opening savings account under Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY).
• In a bid to surpass competition from China and other countries keen to be part in the 1st bullet train project, Japan has offered financial support besides technology for India's ambitious rail project.
• Japan has offered to finance Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail corridor estimated to cost about 90,000 crore rupees at an interest rate of less than one per cent.
• Today is Ipod Day.
• On this day in 2001, apple released the first I-Pod capable of storing 1,000 songs |  The Ipod came with a 5 GB hard drive
• Prime Minister Narendra Modi has laid the foundation stone of Shri Venkateswara Mobile and Electronics Manufacturing Hub at Tirupathi, Andhra Pradesh.
• This is India's first mobile manufacturing electronics cluster.

Awards & Honors

• Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe was honored with Confucius Peace Prize 2015, for supposedly “injecting fresh energy” into the global quest for harmony.
• This prize is also known as China's Nobel peace prize.

Sports

• Paragliding World Cup begins at Bir Billing in Himachal Pradesh today.
• 123 pilots from 35 countries have been competing in this event.
• This is for the first time that India is hosting the Paragliding World Cup .
• Himachal Pradesh was chosen to host the World Cup after it successfully conducted the paragliding pre-World Cup-2013.

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