Current Affairs: 13 December 2016

The Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone starrer 'La La Land' won the 'Best Picture' and seven other awards at the 22nd Critics' Choice Awards.
Casey Affleck won the Best Actor award for 'Manchester by the Sea' while Natalie Portman was named the Best Actress for her role in 'Jackie'.
Meanwhile, 'Game of Thrones' won the award for 'Best Drama Series'.

Coimbatore-based Varun Aditya recently won the first prize in National Geographic's 'Nature Photographer of The Year' contest in the 'Animal Portraits' category.
He was awarded for a photo titled 'Dragging You Deep into the Woods', featuring a 20-centimetre Green Vine snake, found in Amboli, Maharashtra.
The self-taught photographer usually focuses on wildlife, nature and landscape photography.

The EU has signed a deal with Cuba on political dialogue and cooperation, with Cuba being the only Latin American country to lack such an agreement earlier.
This comes after EU repealed its 1996 policy which stated that Cuba must improve its human rights conditions before normalisation talks with EU.
The deal covers issues like trade, human rights and immigration.

Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo was named the world's best footballer of 2016 after winning the Ballon d'Or award on Monday.
The 31-year-old forward led Portugal to their maiden EURO triumph and also helped Real Madrid win the Champions League this year.
Ronaldo, who has now won the award four times, is second on the all-time winners' list behind Argentina's Lionel Messi.

Bill English has officially become New Zealand's new Prime Minister after John Key resigned from his post last week.
English, who earlier served as the Finance Minister and Deputy PM, is a social conservative and has voted against euthanasia, same-sex marriage and abortion.
Notably, he had led his party to their worst election defeat in the country's history in 2002.

Despite being far from his best, Pankaj Advani held his nerve and played the big points well to scale another peak at a place he calls his second home, the Karnataka State Billiards Association.
In the IBSF World Billiards Championship points format final, which never rose to any great heights and one that had the big crowd disappointed, the all-conquering Advani outplayed an off-colour Peter Gilchrist of Singapore 6-3 to annex a mindboggling 12th World billiards crown and 16th overall.

Former Portuguese PM António Guterres was sworn in as the 9th UN Secretary-General at the UN headquarters in New York.
Guterres (67), who had earlier served as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, replaced South Korea's Ban Ki-moon.
Guterres said, "our duty is to work together to move from fear of each other, to trust in each other."

Akbar Ebrahim has been unanimously elected as president of the Federation of Motor Sports Clubs of India in the 43rd AGM held in Chennai on Monday.
Former president J Prithviraj of Coimbatore was elected as vice-president.
Eight clubs were also elected to the FMSCI council.