General Awareness Updates – January 2010

Persons in News:

Miss Gibraltar Kaiane Aldorino (left) won the 2009 Miss World crown at a glittering ceremony in Johannesburg. Miss India Pooja Chopra disappointed by failing to make it to the final round.

An HR clerk by profession, the 22-year old blonde brought her country the Miss World title for the first time. Miss Mexico Perla Beltran finished second, while South Africa’s Tatum Keshwar took the third place.

South Africa’s Kumi Naidoo, an anti-apartheid campaigner, is the new head of the environmental group Greenpeace International. The first African to head Greenpeace, he succeeds Gerd Leipold.

Jose Mujica, co-founder of the radical leftist Tupamaros movement, was declared the winner of a presidential runoff vote in Uruguay after his opponent ex-President Luis Lacalle conceded defeat. Mr. Lacalle, who governed Uruguay from 1990 to 1995, conceded defeat after exit polls showed Mr. Mujica had won some 51 per cent of the vote.

The result, in an election triggered after neither candidate garnered an absolute majority in an October first-round vote, makes Mr. Mujica the second former Latin American rebel to be elected president recently, after Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, an ex-Sandinista.

EU leaders have chosen the Belgian Prime Minister, Herman van Rompuy, to be the first permanent European Council President. The other top job created by the Lisbon Treaty - foreign affairs supreme - has gone to the EU Trade Commissioner, Baroness Catherine Ashton from the UK. Both are seen as consensual politicians with limited foreign policy experience.