Wednesday, 01 January 2025
Wednesday, 01 January 2025
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said the Opposition is pretty well united and a lot of good work is happening on the ground as he asserted that there is a hidden undercurrent building and it will "surprise" the people in the next general elections.
"I think the Congress party will do very well in the next two years. I think it will,” said 52-year-old Gandhi, a former party president.
Gandhi also answered a range of questions, including on press and religious freedoms in India, the issues faced by the minorities and on the state of the economy.
The district administration has denied permission to BJP MP and Wrestling Federation of India chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, who has been accused of sexual harassment, to hold a rally here on June 5, an official said on Friday.
Singh, however, said he postponed the 'Jan Chetna Maharally' at the Ram Katha Park for "a few days" due to the ongoing police probe into the wrestlers' allegations against him.
Concerned that the protesting wrestlers can take the extreme step of immersing their medals into holy river Ganga, members of the 1983 World Cup winning cricket team on Friday urged the elite athletes not to take a hasty decision and hoped their grievances will be heard and resolved.
On the other hand, Union Sports Minister Anurag Thakur on Friday said everyone wants justice to be delivered to the wrestlers demanding action against outgoing Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, but it will happen only after following the due process of law.
The Karnataka Cabinet on Friday decided to implement the ruling Congress's five guarantees, without any discrimination of caste or religion, within this financial year, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said.
The Cabinet held a detailed discussion regarding the five guarantees and its implementation, and has arrived at decisions, Siddaramaiah who headed the meeting told reporters.
Speaking about the Gruha Lakshmi scheme that provides Rs 2,000 per month to women heads of the family, also known as 'kartha', the CM said it will be implemented from August 15.
More than 140 weapons have been surrendered in different places in Manipur after Union Home Minister Amit Shah's appeal a day ago, sources said on Friday.
Shah, on the last day of his four-day visit to Manipur on Thursday, appealed to all concerned to surrender their weapons to the security forces and administration.
"Any deviation from the Suspension of Operations agreement will be considered as violation of the pacts they have signed. Strict action will be taken against the violators," he said.
Curfew called off in 5 Manipur districts, relaxed for a few hours in others: reports NDTV
Visva-Bharati Vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakraborty has said that the university will not restrain itself from taking legally endorsed steps to reclaim land held "illegally" by Nobel Laureate Amrtya Sen in its Santiniketan campus.
The eviction notice served to Sen by VB is in the public domain and those criticising the university for serving it to the well-known economist are requested to go through it before making their comments, Chakraborty said in an open letter on Thursday.
Twitter's head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, told Reuters on Thursday that she has resigned from the social media company, which has faced criticism for lax protections against harmful content since billionaire Elon Musk acquired it in October.
Irwin, who joined Twitter in June 2022, took over as head of the trust and safety team in November when previous head Yoel Roth resigned. She oversaw content moderation.
Musk has promoted a feature called Community Notes, which lets users add context to tweets, as a way to combat misleading information on Twitter.
The India and South Asia head of Amazon.com Inc's cloud division, Puneet Chandok, has resigned with effect from August 31, the company said on Friday.
Chandok had taken the helm of Amazon Web Services in June 2019.
Vaishali Kasture, currently head of enterprise for mid-market and global businesses at AWS India and South Asia, would take on the role of interim leader of commercial business for the unit, the U.S. online retailer said.
The Bombay High Court on Friday refused to grant any urgent relief to jailed gangster Rajendra Nikalje, alias Chhota Rajan, who had filed a plea against web series “Scoop”, noting that the series was already released on Netflix.
A vacation bench of Justice S G Dige directed the makers and producers of the series, including Hansal Mehta and Netflix Entertainment Services India on whose platform the series has been released, to file their affidavits in response to Rajan's plea by June 7.
“The series is already released. All the episodes are published. We will see on the next date. Let reply affidavits be filed by all the defendants. List the matter on June 7,” the court said.
Several parts of West Bengal are reeling under scorching heat as the Met department on Friday forecast heatwave conditions to prevail in the state's hill districts of Darjeeling and Kalimpong for the next three to four days.
The weather office said that the Himalayan state of Sikkim is also likely to experience heatwave conditions, which is a departure of at least five degrees Celsius on the higher side from normal.
In the plains, day temperatures on Thursday were above 40 degrees Celsius at Panagarh (40.3), Purulia (41.3), Asansol (40.5) and Jhargram (40), it said.
The United Nations food agency's world price index fell in May to its lowest in two years, as a slump in prices of vegetable oils, cereals and dairy outweighed increases for sugar and meat.
The Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) price index, which tracks the most globally-traded food commodities, averaged 124.3 points in May against a revised 127.7 for the previous month, the agency said on Friday. The April reading was originally given as 127.2.
In a separate report on cereals supply and demand, FAO forecast world cereal production this year at 2.813 billion tonnes, a 1% increase from 2022 that mainly reflected an expected rise in maize output.
