World Map : November (II) 2018

SRI LANKA is facing a political crisis after its President dissolved the Parliament. The Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena had earlier, in October 2018, controversially dismissed the Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The dissolution happened after it became evident that Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had been appointed Prime Minister recently, did not enjoy a legislative majority. Sri Lanka has been roiled by political uncertainty ever since lawmakers of Mr. Sirisena’s party withdrew support from the ‘national unity government’ to facilitate Mr. Wickremesinghe’s removal and the swearing-in of Mr. Rajapaksa in his place.

SINGAPORE, along with India will participate in the 25th edition of SIMBEX, an acronym for “Singapore-India Maritime Bilateral Exercise”. The exercise will commence at Port Blair, the capital of Andaman and Nicobar Islands and home to India's only Tri-Services Command – from November 10-21, 2018. Since its inception in 1993, SIMBEX has grown in tactical and operational complexity. It also complements India’s ‘Act-East’ policy. Indo-Singapore bilateral relations have been on an upswing in the recent past. In November 2015, the robust relationship between the two countries was elevated to ‘Strategic Partnership’.

The UNITED KINGDOM has for the first time switched on the world’s largest supercomputer designed to work in the same way as the human brain. The newly formed million-processor-core Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker) machine is capable of completing more than 200 million million actions per second. It has been designed and built in the University of Manchester in the UK. It can model more biological neurons in real time than any other machine on the planet. Biological neurons are basic brain cells present in the nervous system that communicate primarily by emitting ‘spikes’ of pure electro-chemical energy. SpiNNaker is unique because, unlike traditional computers, it does not communicate by sending large amounts of information from point A to B via a standard network. Instead it mimics the massively parallel communication architecture of the brain, sending billions of small amounts of information simultaneously to thousands of different destinations.

MAURITIUS is the country where Agalega Islands are located. In 2015, India signed an agreement with Mauritius for development of Agalega Islands. It was in news recently because Mauritius opposition and the local population have raised concerns regarding transparency in the project.

MIGINGO ISLAND, located in Lake Victoria, Africa, has led neighbouring Kenya and Uganda to both lay claim to its sovereignty. For over a decade, Migingo has been a source of tension between Uganda and Kenya, who have been unable to decide to whom it really belongs.Kenya and Uganda created a joint commission to determine where the watery border is but nothing conclusive came out of it.