Daily GK Updates 18th April 2014

1.    EC launches Voter Educational Channel

i. The Election Commission has launched its own internet-based media arm called ‘Voter Education Channel’.

ii. Numerous video clips featuring iconic personalities urging citizens to vote have been uploaded on the channel and can be viewed on social media platform YouTube.

iii. While the first clip showcases a recorded speech of Chief Election Commissioner V S Sampath asking voters to exercise their voting right, a number of other video links have sportpersons like M S Dhoni, Saina Nehwal and MC Mary Kom urging the young and the old to go for the most important right of an Indian citizen — that of the vote.

iv. Voters can also view videos of EC brand ambassadors such as former President APJ Abdul Kalam and actor Aamir Khan on the e-link.

v. The YouTube link, tagged as ECI which stands for the Election Commission of India, also hosts a number of other messages recorded by various state Election Offices asking and motivating voters to exercise their franchise.

vi. Some of the e-links of the unique ‘EC Channel’ give details about the procedures deployed to use the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and their functioning while others detail about the NOTA option procedure.

2.    Randstad Awards 2014 announced

i. Randstad Awards 2014 was announced on 17 April 2014 to encourage best practices for talent attraction and to identify the best Employer Brand in the country based on perceived attractiveness of a company.

ii. Randstad have awarded the Global software major Microsoft as the most attractive employer in India followed by Sony India as the runner-up. The award was won by Microsoft for the fourth consecutive year. 

iii. Special recognition awards were given to Larsen & Toubro as the most attractive employer in the infrastructure industry, State Bank of India in the banking sector, Taj Group in the hospitality and Tata Power in the energy sector.

iv. The Randstad Award was instituted globally by Randstad. Randstad is a leading HR services provider. The Randstad Award is the world’s largest employer branding survey that is conducted with over 200000 respondents across 23 countries in the world. 

3.    Nobel laureate Garcia Marquez dies at 87

i. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate whose intoxicating novels and short stories exposed millions outside Latin America to its passions, superstition, violence and social inequality, has died at home in Mexico City. He was 87.

ii. Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, the Colombian-born Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. 

iii. His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works - among them "Chronicle of a Death Foretold", "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Autumn of the Patriarch" - outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible. 

iv. His stories made him literature's best-known practitioner of magical realism, the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements such as a boy born with a pig's tail and a man trailed by a cloud of yellow butterflies. 

v. "The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers - and one of my favorites from the time I was young," US President Barack Obama said. 

4.    PepsiCo launches free talk time offer

i. PepsiCo today announced an exciting free talk time offer this Twenty20 cricket season, wherein they will be able to stay connected with their friends.

ii. To stay connected one has to just grab a multi-serve pack of a range of PepsiCo beverage or food brands and look for the code at the back of the label or inside the pack, SMS the code to9818181234 and get Rs. 10 talk time or go online on paytm.com and enter the code to redeem free talk time of Rs 15, instantly.

iii. Pepsi and Lays brand ambassador, Ranbir Kapoor, will feature on the small screen in a fun ad-film “Is T20 season harr koi jeetega“.

iv. This offer is available on PepsiCo’s beverage brands Pepsi, 7UP, Mirinda Orange, Mountain Dew or Slice and food brands Kurkure (Rs 30 pack, all flavours) and Lay’s (Rs 35 pack, all flavours).

5.    Airtel names new CTO

i. Bharti Airtel has appointed Abhay Savargaonkar as its Chief Technology Officer for India operations. He will also be on the company's managing board.

ii. Abhay has been at Airtel for over a decade and is currently the Chief of Network Operations. He has held various senior leadership roles covering all network verticals, including leading the 3G planning and deployment, quality, network planning and being the CTO of mobile business when it was a standalone business.

iii. The new CTO comes in a time when telecom companies are looking at deploying multiple technologies to meet the challenges of offering data services.

6.    ICICI Prudential MF launches 'Dividend Yield Equity Fund'

i. ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund is planning to launch a new open-ended 'ICICI Prudential Dividend Yield Equity Fund'.

ii. The new fund offer will open for subscription on April 25 and close on May 9, 2014, a company release said.

iii. Companies with a good track record of paying high dividends yields are seen as better investment options. Investing in such companies is also one of value investing strategies," Nimesh Shah, Managing Director & CEO, ICICI Prudential MF, said.
iv. The fund house also said the scheme will invest mostly in those companies that have dividend yield greater than the dividend yield of CNX Nifty Index at the time of investment.
v. ICICI Prudential MF has an average assets under management of Rs 1.06 lakh crore by the end of last fiscal.

7.    Anand Mahindra, Banmali Agrawala appointed to USIBC Board

i. Anand Mahindra, Ellen Lord and Banmali Agrawal were on Friday appointed as board members of the US India Business Council (USIBC).

ii. While Mahindra is chairman & managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra, Ellen Lord is president & CEO of Extron Systems and Banmali Agrawala is president & CEO, South Asia, General Electric.

iii. Anand Mahindra, Ellen Lord and Banmali Agrawala bring an excellent combination of both business and civic leadership experience to this position," said USIBC chairman and MasterCard President and CEO Ajay Banga.

iv. In 1991, Mahindra was appointed deputy Managing Director of Mahindra & Mahindra, India's leading producer of tractors and off-road vehicles.

v. Agrawala is the president & CEO for GE South Asia and is responsible for all of GE's operations in the region. A veteran in the energy domain, Banmali has over 29 years of global experience.

8.    Vietnam not to host 2019 Asian Games

i. Vietnam said on Friday it had decided against hosting the 2019 Asian Games for financial reasons, and was exploring procedures to withdraw from staging the region's largest sporting event.

ii. There was scant public jubilation when the communist country's capital was chosen in 2012 to host the showpiece competition and public sentiment has hardened against the move, with even tightly-controlled state-run newspapers criticising the move in recent weeks.

iii. Hanoi in November 2012 won the right to host the 2019 Asian Games, beating Indonesia's second city Surabaya after Dubai in the United Arab Emirates pulled out just before the vote.

9.    Sant Chatwal pleads guilty to US polls laws breach

i. Indian-American hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal on Thursday pleaded guilty at a court in New York to violating federal election laws by using straw donors to secretly funnel money to political campaigns and will pay a million dollars to the US as part of his plea agreement.

ii. Chatwal admitted that he used straw donors to secretly funnel money to political campaigns so that he could gain access to the politicians, and he coerced another person to hide his crime," said acting US Assistant Attorney General David O'Neil.

iii. Chatwal, 70, had raised at least $100,000 for former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama.

iv. "Chatwal's scheme sought to subvert the very purpose of the Election Act. Chatwal then rolled the dice to stymie the government's investigation, thinking he could corruptly convince witnesses to his federal election crimes to stay silent. That gamble did not pay off," said US Attorney Loretta Lynch.

v. The Washington Post said Chatwal faces a maximum of nearly six years in prison when he is sentenced on July 31. He is free on a $750,000 bond secured by property in Manhattan.

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