General Awareness Updates - May 2015 (PIN)

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Lee Kuan Yew, (right) Singapore’s first prime minister passed away, aged 91. Lee was considered as the architect of Singapore’s rapid rise from British tropical outpost to global trade and financial centre.
He became Singapore’s first prime minister in 1959 and continued to hold the post for over three decades. The south east Asian country which was separated from Malaysia in 1969, was transformed into one of Asia’s most prosperous nations during this period. 
He stepped down as prime minister in 1990 and continued to be an influential senior minister in his successor Goh Chok Tong’s cabinet. He subsequently took over as the ‘minister mentor’ when his eldest son Lee Hsien Loong became prime minister in 2004. He left active politics when he stepped down from eldest son Lee Hsien Loong’s cabinet in 2011. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pipped Chinese President Xi Jinping to secure the top rank in handling domestic and international affairs in a global survey conducted by a Chinese firm.
In the ‘China’s National Image Global Survey 2014’, conducted in nine countries – the U.S., UK, Australia, Japan, South Africa, India, Russia, Brazil, and China – Mr Modi’s handling of domestic and international affairs has won him the top rank while Mr Xi figured second.
“Xi’s handling of both domestic and international affairs has won high praise. He ranks second, after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for his capability of handling domestic and international affairs,” the China International Publishing Group, said citing the survey report, which was released in Beijing.
The survey, based on 4,500 respondents from the nine countries, was conducted by the Centre for International Communication Studies of China Foreign Languages Publishing Administration, Millward Brown and Lightspeed GMI. The survey, which did not include China’s close ally Pakistan, found that Beijing’s overall image has been increasingly recognised by the global community. The average score of China’s national image in 2014 was 5.9 on a scale of 1 to 10, up from the previous year’s 5.1.
The survey found that Mr Xi was the fourth best-known among the leaders of the nine countries, with 70 per cent of the respondents having heard of him, after the U.S. President Barack Obama (97 per cent), Russian President Vladimir Putin (91 per cent) and British Prime Minister David Cameron (86 per cent), it said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has won re-election in Israel’s closely-fought general election, thus making him the country’s longest-serving premier. 

Former military ruler, Muhammadu Buhari, (left) delivered a crushing defeat to President Goodluck Jonathan in the most competitive presidential race ever in Nigeria, one of the largest democracies in the world. Now, if power is handed over peacefully, it will be a major shift for the nation; the first transfer between civilians of different parties in a country that has spent much of its post-colonial history shaken by military coups.
Since the end of military rule in 1999, Nigeria has been governed by a single, dominant party: Goodluck Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party.
The 72-year-old former military ruler who heads the All Progressives Congress, Mr Buhari, a northern Muslim, faces the tasks of ending a six-year war against the Islamist militant group Boko Haram that’s killed more than 13,000 people and restoring investor confidence in an economy that’s reeling from a 50 per cent drop in the price of oil, its main export.
A retired major general who lost three previous elections, Mr Buhari has led Nigeria before, when he overthrew a democratically elected government on 31 December 1983. He built a reputation among his backers as a ruler who cracked down on corruption and crime before being ousted by the army 20 months later.

In Maldives, former President Mohammed Nasheed has been sentenced to 13 years in prison after he was found guilty of ordering the arrest of a judge while in office.
Mr Nasheed was cleared of the charges in February this year, but was re-arrested and charged under anti-terrorism laws. The jail term will effectively prevent Nasheed running for president at the 2018 elections. 

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