• Parasite won the Best Picture award in the recently announced Oscar Awards
• Joaquin Phoenix Won the Best actor award in the recently announced Oscar Awards
• Kaamya Karthikeyan, a class VII student of Navy Children School (NCS), Mumbai, became the youngest girl in the world to summit Mt. Aconcagua, the highest peak in South America and outside of Asia. She summited the mountain peak of 6962 m height on 01 Feb 2020 and unfurled the Indian tricolour. Years of physical and mental preparation along with regular participation in adventure sports combined with strong character, helped the young girl in overcoming many administrative hurdles and extreme climbing conditions to achieve this rare feat.
• Dejfa, is a cyber security project of Iran and it recently stopped a  powerful cyber-attack on the telecommunication system of Iran.
• Thaipusam or Thaipoosam, is a festival celebrated by the Tamil community across the world like India, Malaysia, Singapore on the full moon in the Tamil month of Thai, usually coinciding with Pushya star, known as Poosam in Tamil.
• The 23^rd National Conference on E-Governance was held in Mumbai. The conference adopted Mumbai Declaration.

Awards : The awards were presented to government entities that excelled in implementing National E-Governance initiatives.

• National Health Authority and Ayushman Bharat received gold awards under the category of government process re-engineering for Digital Transformation.
• In the category of providing citizen-centric delivery of services, Department of IT of Haryana received the gold medal.
• The golden award for outstanding research on citizen-centric services was presented to IIT Roorkee’s Satellite based agriculture information system.
• Among the North-Eastern States, Nagaland won the first rank.
• Iran’s Simorgh rocket failed to launch the Zafar-1 satellite. Liftoff took place at around 19:15 Iran Standard Time .However, the mission’s failure means that Iran is still waiting for its first successful orbital launch in five years.
  
  
• Recently, Esperanza Base on the Antarctic Peninsula which recorded a temperature of 18.3 °C , becoming the hottest on record for continental Antarctica belongs to Argentina.
  
  
• Bangladesh beat India by 3 wickets in the finals of U19 cricket world cup held at South Africa. This is the first win for Bangladesh.
  
  
• The Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has paired up 20 best performing smart cities with least performing cities. They will work as “sister cities”.
  The best performing cities include Tiruppur, Nagpur, Bhopal, Ranchi, Kanpur, Surat, Indore, Vellore, Vishakhapatnam, Varanasi, Vellore, Nashik, Vadodara, Pune, Kota, Davangere, Dehradun, Udaipur, Amaravati and Agra.The programme to join a least performing city with the best performing city has been named 20-20 formula. The sister cities under the programme will sign MoUs. For instance, Ranchi has been paired with Pune, and Shimla with Dharmsala and so on.
  
  
• Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI) published by the World Economic Forum in 2018 ranks 149 countries on their status of gender equality through various parameters. On this index, India ranked 108^th on its performance on gender equality. In the Global Gender Gap Index 2020, the number of countries increased to 153 in which India’s ranking was 112^th. India’s score has moved from 0.665 in 2018 to 0.668 in 2020.
  
  
• Uttarakhand’s First Heli Services under UDAN Scheme from Dehradun’s Sahastradhara helipad to Gauchar, and Chinyalisaur under the Regional Connectivity Scheme.

MoCA awarded the Sahastradhara-Gauchar-Chinyalisaur route to Heritage Aviation under the UDAN 2 bidding process.  

The services on this route will boost the tourism sector in the Uttrakhand region and will also assist the Chaar Dhaam Yatra pilgrims as Gauchar is en route to Badrinath and Chinyalisaur is en route to Gangotri in the Uttarkashi district.

• NASA astronaut Christina Koch, who spent nearly 11 months in orbit to set a record for the longest spaceflight by a woman, landed safely Thursday in Kazakhstan along with two International Space Station crewmates. Koch wrapped up a 328-day mission after her first flight into space, providing researchers the opportunity to observe the effects of long-duration spaceflight on a woman. The study is important since NASA plans to return to the moon under the Artemis program and prepare for the human exploration of Mars
  
  
• The birth anniversary of the 14th century saint Ravidas was celebrated all over India on Febraury 9^th . PM Modi and President Kovind and other leaders paid tribute to guru ravids. The saint emphasized brotherhood and harmony to bring upon positive change in the society. His songs are included in Guru Granth Sahib.
• The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has started working on the development of the 200-km strike range Pranash ballistic missile which would be armed with conventional warheads.

The missile is an advanced version of the 150-km strike range Prahar missile which was being developed for tactical mission