Today's Event – 19th January 2022

• 1607 – San Agustin Church in Manila is officially completed; it is the oldest church still standing in the Philippines.

• 1639 – Hämeenlinna (Swedish: Tavastehus) was granted privileges after it separated from the Vanaja parish as its own city in Tavastia. 

• 1764 – John Wilkes is expelled from the British House of Commons for seditious libel. 

• 1764 – Bolle Willum Luxdorph records in his diary that a mail bomb, possibly the world's first, has severely injured the Danish Colonel Poulsen, residing at Børglum Abbey.

• 1788 – The second group of ships of the First Fleet arrive at Botany Bay.

• 1795 – The Batavian Republic is proclaimed in the Netherlands, replacing the Dutch Republic.

• 1817 – An army of 5,423 soldiers, led by General José de San Martín, crosses the Andes from Argentina to liberate Chile and then Peru.

• 1829 – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy receives its premiere performance.

• 1839 – The British East India Company captures Aden.

• 1853 – Giuseppe Verdi's opera Il trovatore receives its premiere performance in Rome.

• 1883 – The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, begins service at Roselle, New Jersey. 

• 1899 – Anglo-Egyptian Sudan is formed.

• 1901 – Queen Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom, stricken with paralysis. She dies three days later at the age of 81.

• 1915 – Georges Claude patents the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.

• 1917 – Silvertown explosion: A blast at a munitions factory in London kills 73 and injures over 400. The resulting fire causes over £2,000,000 worth of damage.

• 1920 – The United States Senate votes against joining the League of Nations.

• 1920 – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is founded.

• 1937 – Howard Hughes sets a new air record by flying from Los Angeles to New York City in seven hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds.

• 1946 – General Douglas MacArthur establishes the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo to try Japanese war criminals.

• 1953 – Almost 72 percent of all television sets in the United States are tuned into I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth. 

• 1960 – Japan and the United States sign the US–Japan Mutual Security Treaty

• 1960 – Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 871 crashes near Ankara Esenboğa Airport in Turkey, killing all 42 aboard.

• 1969 – Student Jan Palach dies after setting himself on fire three days earlier in Prague's Wenceslas Square to protest about the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union in 1968. His funeral turns into another major protest.

• 1977 – President Gerald Ford pardons Iva Toguri D'Aquino (a.k.a. "Tokyo Rose").

• 1978 – The last Volkswagen Beetle made in Germany leaves VW's plant in Emden. Beetle production in Latin America continues until 2003.

• 1981 – Iran hostage crisis: United States and Iranian officials sign an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity.

• 1983 – Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia.

• 1983 – The Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple Inc. to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, is announced.

• 1986 – The first IBM PC computer virus is released into the wild. A boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain, it was created by the Farooq Alvi Brothers in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter unauthorized copying of the software they had written.

• 1993 – Czech Republic and Slovakia join the United Nations.

• 1995 – After being struck by lightning the crew of Bristow Helicopters Flight 56C are forced to ditch. All 18 aboard are later rescued.

• 1996 – The barge North Cape oil spill occurs as an engine fire forces the tugboat Scandia ashore on Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown, Rhode Island.

• 1997 – Yasser Arafat returns to Hebron after more than 30 years and joins celebrations over the handover of the last Israeli-controlled West Bank city.

• 1999 – British Aerospace agrees to acquire the defence subsidiary of the General Electric Company plc, forming BAE Systems in November 1999.

• 2007 – Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink is assassinated in front of his newspaper's Istanbul office by 17-year-old Turkish ultra-nationalist Ogün Samast.

• 2007 – Four-man Team N2i, using only skis and kites, completes a 1,093-mile (1,759 km) trek to reach the Antarctic pole of inaccessibility for the first time since 1965 and for the first time ever without mechanical assistance.

• 2012 – The Hong Kong-based file-sharing website Megaupload is shut down by the FBI

• 2014 – A bomb attack on an army convoy in the city of Bannu kills at least 26 Pakistani soldiers and injures 38 others.

National Events-

• A 45-year-old nursing officer at the government taluk hospital of Varkala in Thiruvananthapuram district of Kerala, who had tested positive for Covid-19 Monday, was found dead at her home Tuesday. P S Saritha had been on duty at the Covid care centre for four days from January 8. Monday, she tested positive for Covid-19 and opted for home isolation as there were no major symptoms necessitating hospitalization.

• The Madhya Pradesh government has started the process to replace with Hindi the Urdu, Farsi (Persian) and other non-Hindi words being used by the state police in various proceedings.

• The crime syndicate responsible for the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts are enjoying 5-star hospitality in Pakistan and given state protection, Indian envoy at the UN has said, in a veiled reference to the D-company head Dawood Ibrahim.

• India recorded 2,82,970 new Covid-19 cases and 441 related deaths in the last 24 hours ending 8 am Wednesday, data updated by the Union Ministry of Health showed. The daily count is a slight increase from Tuesday’s 2,38,018 cases.

• Embattled businessman Vijay Mallya on Tuesday lost a legal battle to hold on to his plush London home after a British court refused to grant him a stay of enforcement in a long-running dispute with Swiss bank UBS.

International Events-

• 90% of Taiwan’s people trace their roots to mainland China, but more than ever, they are embracing an identity that is distinct from that of their communist-ruled neighbor. Beijing’s strident authoritarianism — and its claim over Taiwan — has only solidified the island’s identity, now central to a dispute that has turned the Taiwan Strait into one of Asia’s biggest potential flashpoints.

• The worst of the coronavirus pandemic-deaths, hospitalisations and lockdowns could be over this year if huge inequities in vaccinations and medicines are addressed quickly, the head of emergencies at the World Health Organisation said Tuesday.

• Australia’s government will give visa rebates to students and backpackers who want to come to the country, in a bid to get them to fill a record number of job vacancies caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

• A wave of omicron cases may be cresting in the Northeastern United States, but the number of Covid-19 patients is at a record high and climbing, overwhelming hospitals whose staffs have been hollowed out by the coronavirus.

• Citizen Lab, an internet watchdog group, said in its report the MY2022 app has seriously flawed encryption that would make users’ sensitive data and any other data communicated through it vulnerable to being hacked. Other important user data on the app wasn’t encrypted at all, the report found.

Job alerts-

• Indian Oil Corporation Limited Jobs for Apprentice and other posts. Last date 31 January 2022

• Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission Jobs for Medical Officer and other posts. Last date 16 February 2022

• Railtel Corporation of India Limited Jobs for Manager and other posts. Last date 23 February 2022

• Punjab State Power Corporation Limited Jobs for Lineman and other posts. Last date 17 February 2022

• Securities and Exchange Board of India Jobs for Young Professional and other posts. Last date 24 January 2022

Sports-

• South Africa captain Temba Bavuma won the toss and opted to bat against India in the first One-day International. India handed debut to all-rounder Venkatesh Iyer. Left-arm pacer Marco Jansen, who excelled in the Test series, made his debut for South Africa.

• Defending champion Juventus reached the quarterfinals of the Italian Cup by beating Sampdoria 4-1 to keep alive at least one chance of winning silverware this season.

• Indian Grandmaster Vidit Santhosh Gujrathi settled for a draw against Russia’s Andrey Esipenko in the fourth round to stay in the lead with three points in the prestigious Tata Steel Masters chess tournament here.

• Captain Tom Prest struck a run-a-ball 93 before chipping in with three wickets to help the former champions England register a 106-run victory over Canada in a group A league match of the ICC U-19 World Cup here.

• India’s Rohan Bopanna and his French partner Edouard Roger-Vasselin were knocked out of the Australian Open men’s doubles event by wild card pair of Chirstopher Rungkat and Treat Huey here on Wednesday.

Technology-

• Garmin Venu 2 Plus, the new smartwatch from the popular wearables brand, is now official in India. The new Garmin Venu 2 series smartwatch comes with a voice-calling function for letting users make and receive calls directly from their wrist. The smartwatch offers support for voice assistants that allow users to control the device hands-free. Garmin Venu 2 Plus has more than 25 sports apps and has multiple health-tracking features including a Body Battery Energy Monitor, pulse Ox sensor and stress tracking. It has Health Snapshot function as well. The new Garmin smartwatch comes in three different colour options as well.

• With Bitcoin continuing its reign as the king of cryptocurrencies since 2009, more people are getting into its mining process. In a bid to reduce the electricity–consuming process of Bitcoin mining, a town in Georgia ended up taking a rather drastic decision. Residents of Georgia's Svaneti town have reportedly been made to pledge a holy oath against indulging in crypto mining. The decision comes in the backdrop of power crisis impacting the region.

• ExoMars — a joint project of European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia's Roscosmos — has moved a step closer to landing on the Red Planet after it rehearsed how to drive off its Kazachok landing platform on the Martian surface. The simulation involved the UK-built Rosalind Franklin rover making a carefully choreographed move on the Martian soil, in the same way as it would have done after a nerve-wracking descent to the surface of the planet for the first time. The mission now sets its aim to launch by September this year.

• Joining the growing list of Indian states wooing Tesla's billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk to start a manufacturing unit, Karnataka on Tuesday projected itself as the "Electric Vehicle (EV) hub" of India and an ideal destination to set up a plant.

• Elon Musk-founded SpaceX has successfully launched 49 more Starlink satellites aboard a Falcon 9 rocket to take the total number to more than 2,000. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, US, on January 19. About nine minutes later, the rocket's first stage returned back to Earth for a pin-point touchdown on a SpaceX drone ship called "A Shortfall of Gravitas," which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast.

Economy –

• Air India said on Tuesday it will curtail or revise its flights to the US due to deployment of 5G internet there from January 19.

• Bond yields are on the rise ahead of the Union Budget. While the yield on the 10-year benchmark bond closed near the two-year high at 6.63 per cent, showing a jump of 22 basis points in the last one month, yields spiked further at the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI’s) State Development Loan (SDL) auction on Friday.

• Logistics startup Delhivery on Tuesday received the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s (Sebi) approval to raise Rs 7,460 crore through an initial public offering (IPO).

• At 10:19 am, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 216.59 points (0.36 per cent) at 60,538.27, while the Nifty 50 declined 54.45 points (0.30 per cent) to 18,058.60. Earlier in the day, both the indices had opened around 0.5 per cent lower and slipped nearly 1 per cent in the early trade before trimming some losses.

• In about two years of commercial roll out of its fixed-line broadband services, Reliance Jio has toppled 20 -year-old state-run telecom company BSNL as top service provider in the segment. According to a monthly telecom subscribers report released by the telecom regulator Trai on Tuesday, Jio now leads the fixed-line broadband segment with 4.34 million customers.

Local –

• Delhi has administered 1,47,354 precaution doses of the Covid-19 vaccine in 10 days since the vaccination drive was opened for a third dose for healthcare workers, frontline workers, and those above the age of 60 years with comorbidities.

• The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Wednesday told the Bombay High Court that there has been a gradual decline in Covid-19 cases in areas under its administration.

• West Bengal recorded 10,430 new Covid-19 cases over the last 24 hours, an increase of 1,045 infections from Monday, a bulletin issued by the state health department stated. The fresh cases took the state’s tally of cases to 9,17,514.

• Ahead of the Republic Day celebrations on January 26, the Greater Chennai Police has announced traffic diversions in parts of the city on January 20, 22, 24 and 26.

• Recording a massive spike in Covid-19 cases, Karnataka on Tuesday logged 41,457 new infections and 20 deaths. Among the new cases, 25,595 cases are from Bengaluru. With today’s numbers, the state’s positivity rate rose to 22.30 per cent. On Monday, Karnataka had recorded 27,156 new Covid-19 cases and 14 deaths.

GK –

The bilateral trade between India and China in 2021 ……………. from that of last year (2020).

[A] Increased
[B] Decreased
[C] Remained Same
[D] None of the above

‘Rojgar Mission’ is the recent initiative of which state?

[A] Uttar Pradesh
[B] Chhattisgarh
[C] Punjab
[D] Assam

Pandit Birju Maharaj, who passed away recently, was associated with which dance?

[A] Kathak
[B] Bharatanatyam
[C] Kuchipudi
[D] Mohini Aattam

As per Standards for Charging Infrastructure for Electric Vehicles (EV),who can set up a Public Charging Station (PCS)?

[A] DISCOMs
[B] Individuals
[C] Ministry of Power
[D] State Governments

India’s Commemorative postal stamp on Covid-19 vaccination features which vaccine?

[A] Covishield
[B] Covaxin
[C] COVOVAX
[D] ZyCoV-D