Daily Top-10 Current Affairs MCQs / News (March 19, 2022) for CSS, PMS

Table of Contents

6. Asaan Karobar launched

• President Arif Alvi on March 18, 2022 launched the Asaan Karobar Programme saying innovative strategies by incorporating digital technology was essential to ensuring sustainable business activities especially to lessen the compliance burden on businesses particularly small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
• Addressing the ceremony, President Alvi said the prime interest of a country is to promote business activities and emphasised the importance of taking stakeholders on board for a successful policy formulation.
• He congratulated the Board of Investment (BoI) for establishing an online portal to identify regulatory bottlenecks and issues with the involvement of private sector and business associations

7. Sri Lanka secures Indian lifeline as IMF signals help

• Cash-strapped Sri Lanka has secured a billion-dollar credit line from India to buy urgently needed food and medicine, officials said on March 18, 2022, as the IMF confirmed it would discuss a possible bailout.
• The South Asian nation is suffering its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948, with crippling shortages of essentials and fears it will default on its foreign debt or ask bondholders to take a `haircut` on repayments.
• India and Sri Lanka formally entered into the credit agreement on Thursday during Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa`s visit to New Delhi, Treasury Secretary Sajith Attygalle told reporters in Colombo

8. Finland judged world`s happiest nation, Afghans unhappiest

• Finland has been named the world`s happiest country for the fifth year running, in an annual UN-sponsore d index that ranked Afghanistan as the unhappiest, closely followed by Lebanon.
• The latest list was completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
• Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia recorded the biggest boosts in wellbeing. The largest falls in the World Happiness table, released on Friday, came in Lebanon, Venezuela and Afghanistan.
• Lebanon, which is facing economic meltdown, fell to second from last on the index of 146 countries, just below Zimbabwe.
• War-scarred Afghanistan, already bottom of the table last year, saw its humanitarian crisis deepen since the Taliban returned to power last August following the pull-out of US-led troops

9. Iran converts uranium into material crucial for detecting cancer

• Iran has converted a fraction of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium into material crucial for detecting cancers and other diseases, the UN nuclear watchdog and an Iranian media report said on March 18, 2022.
• Iran`s decision to convert the uranium takes it out of a form that can potentially be further refined into weapons grade levels. The development comes as talks in Vienna over restoring Tehran`s nuclear deal with world powers hang in the balance.
• In a statement on Friday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had used 2.1 kilograms of its 60 per cent enriched uranium to produce so-called `highly enriched uranium targets` at a facility in Isfahan. Those targets will be irradiated at the Tehran Research Reactor and later used to produce molybdenum-99, the IAE A said

10. Massive moon rocket begins crawl to its launch pad

• Nasa`s massive new rocket eased onto its launchpad on March 18, 2022, ready for a battery of tests that will clear it to blast off to the moon this summer on an uncrewed flight.
• It left the Kennedy Space Center`s Vehicle Assembly Building Thursday evening and began a nearly 11-hour journey on a crawler transporter to the hallowed Launch Complex 39B, arriving at 4:15 am.
• Around 10,000 people had gathered to watch the event.
• With the Orion crew capsule fixed on top, the Space Launch System (SLS) Block 1 stands 322 feet (98 meters) high taller than the Statue of Liberty, but a little smaller than the 363 feet Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo missions to the moon.