Breaking News, June 10 | LIVE UPDATES

Days after the killing of singer Sidhu Moosewala, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann on Friday sought support of the government of Canada for nabbing gangsters allegedly operating from Canadian soil.

A 30-year-old autorickshaw driver was on Friday arrested here for allegedly sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl, police said.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has issued fresh summons to Congress president Sonia Gandhi to appear before it on June 23 for questioning in a money laundering case linked to the National Herald newspaper, officials said Friday. Gandhi, 75, was earlier asked to depose on June 8 but she sought a fresh date from the federal probe agency after she contracted the coronavirus infection.

A state minister's nephew allegedly beat up a home guard and tore his uniform. He was arrested and released on bail on the same day, police said. Another accused in the case, identified as Ankit Agnihotri, has also been arrested, while the third accused is yet to be identified, they said.

The Delhi Police has identified six shooters allegedly involved in the murder of popular Punjabi singer Sidhu Moosewala, a senior police officer said on Friday. H S Dhaliwal, Special Commissioner of Police, Special Cell, told media that the singer's death was an organised and brazen killing. During the media briefing, he said the police had issued eight pictures of the suspects and six of the shooters were identified. 

A hybrid terrorist and an associate linked with proscribed terror outfit LeT in Budgam were arrested by the Jammu and Kashmir police and security forces in a combined operation. Incriminating materials and arms/ammunition were recovered. Acting on specific information, police along with 62RR and 43Bn CRPF arrested them on Friday.

Senior journalist Biswadeep Ghosh passed away due to cardiac arrest at a private hospital here on Friday, his colleague said. Ghosh, 57, was working as a News Coordinator with The Pioneer newspaper in Lucknow. He had earlier worked in Times of India and Hindustan Times.

Odisha recorded 20 new coronavirus cases on Friday, 11 less than the previous day, with the tally rising to 12,88,596, a health department bulletin said.

The fire broke out on the fourth floor of Union Public Service Commission's building on Shahjahan Road in central Delhi on Friday afternoon, officials said.

Three Russian canoeists including a gold medalist at the 2012 London Olympics were banned on Friday for being part of the state-backed doping program eight years ago. The Court of Arbitration for Sport said in a statement from Lausanne, Switzerland that its judges upheld appeals filed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) after the International Canoe Federation refused to prosecute individual cases. The judges were “comfortably satisfied that Aleksandr Dyachenko, Nikolay Lipkin and Aleksandra Dupik had each committed anti-doping violations and that the decision taken by the ICF not to pursue the matters was wrong,” the court said.

A 90-year-old woman, who had not been inoculated against COVID-19, died of the infection at a hospital in Madhya Pradesh's Indore, a health official said on Friday. The nonagenarian was suffering from high blood pressure and other ailments for a long time, said Dr B S Saitya, the chief medical and health officer (CMHO). “The woman was admitted to a hospital, where she tested positive for COVID-19. She died of the infection on Thursday,” the official said.

Gold prices on Friday fell by Rs 89 to Rs 50,916 per 10 grams in futures trade as speculators reduced their positions amid low demand. On the Multi Commodity Exchange, gold contracts for August delivery traded lower by Rs 89 or 0.17 per cent at Rs 50,916 per 10 grams in a business turnover of 14,155 lots. Analysts attributed the fall in gold prices to trimming of positions by participants. Globally, gold was trading 0.19 per cent lower at USD 1,849.30 per ounce in New York. 

A woman and a child were wounded in an unspecified incident at an elementary school in southwestern Germany on Friday, police said. Police said they were still looking for the suspected perpetrator after the incident in Esslingen, near Stuttgart, news agency dpa reported. They were using a helicopter in the search. It was not immediately clear whether the victims were wounded in or outside the school. Schools in the region are currently on vacation but some children are being looked after at the facility during the holiday. German newspaper Bild reported that the attacker was a man armed with a knife. Police said there was no immediate information on a motive.

The Bombay High Court has held that income tax cannot be deducted from an amount given by way of compensation for property the National Hi-Speed Rail Corporation Ltd (NHSRCL) acquired for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project. A division bench of Justices SV Gangapurwala and M G Sewlikar passed its order on Thursday, on a petition filed by one Seema Patil, who sought a refund of the income tax deducted at the source by the NHSRCL after it acquired her property at Bhiwandi in Thane district for the project.

As Russian artillery pummeled the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol in April, one family decided to flee, walking for miles with three young children in tow to a nearby village. But it was thanks to a volunteer driver who crossed the front line that they managed to eventually make it out of Russian-held territory. “The driver, Zhenya, is a saint,” said Luda Lobanova, 58, after stepping off a minibus in the central Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia in early May along with 8-year-old Ihor, 7-year-old Sofia and 2 1/2-year-old Vlad. “There were so many times that they turned us around. If it wasn't for Zhenya, we wouldn't have made it.”

A 28-year-old woman was allegedly raped at a hotel in southwest Delhi's Dwarka by a man she met on a dating app, police said on Friday. The accused, a resident of Hyderabad, is absconding, a senior police officer said. In her police complaint filed on June 3, the woman claimed that after meeting the accused on a dating app she went to the hotel with the man on May 30 where she was sexually assaulted. Since then, the accused has allegedly stopped picking up her calls, she said in her complaint. Based on the woman's complaint, a case has been registered and efforts are on to nab the accused, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Dwarka) M Harsha Vardhan said. 

Five people were killed and one injured when their car fell into a gorge here, police said on Friday. The incident occurred on Thursday night in the Okhalkanda area when the car was going to Gurdwara Reetha Sahib from Haldwani, Senior Superintendent of Police Pankaj Bhatt said. Five passengers were killed on the spot and the injured driver was rushed to a hospital, the SSP said. Earlier on Thursday, five people had been killed when a utility vehicle fell into a gorge in the Tehri district. 

There are "no plans" to review the basic customs duty (BCD) levied on solar modules and cells, Union Power Minister RK Singh has said. "I don't want any Chinese imports and want everything Made in India," Singh, who is also the Minister of New and Renewable Energy told PTI in reply to a question related to the duty levied on the two items. Last year, the government had announced imposing 40 per cent BCD on solar modules and 25 per cent on solar cells with effect from April 1, 2022. Singh said as a result of the duty, the domestic manufacturing capacity of modules and cells has started going up.

The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a batch of petitions seeking a special stray round of counselling to fill 1,456 seats in NEET-PG-21 which have remained vacant after the conduct of a stray round of counselling for All India Quota. A bench of Justices MR Shah and Aniruddha Bose said there cannot be any compromise with the quality of medical education which will affect public health. The top court said the decision of the government and the Medical Counselling Committee not to allow special stray round is in the interest of medical education and public health.

Authorities imposed a curfew in the Doda and Kishtwar districts of Jammu and Kashmir and snapped Internet services in the Bhaderwah and Kishtwar towns on Friday to thwart attempts of creating communal tension in the area. Union minister and local MP Jitendra Singh appealed to the elders and heads of communities to sit together to sort out the issue and maintain harmony. According to officials, tension spread in the Bhaderwah area on Thursday evening after alleged inflammatory speeches were made during a protest against derogatory remarks made against Prophet Mohammad by now-suspended BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma.

Equity benchmark Sensex declined nearly 600 points in early trade on Friday, following weakness in IT, banking and finance stocks amid sluggish investor sentiment in global markets. Besides, a weaker rupee also weighed on the domestic equity markets, traders said. The 30-share index was trading 597.2 points or 1.08 per cent lower at 54,723.08 in initial deals. Similarly, the Nifty slumped 176.30 points or 1.07 per cent to 16,301.80. Wipro was the top loser in the Sensex pack, shedding 3.38 per cent, followed by Tech Mahindra, Tata Steel, Infosys, Kotak Bank, Bajaj Finance, HDFC twins and TCS.

Voting is underway in the Rajya Sabha polls for four seats from Karnataka on Friday, as suspense continues over the outcome of the fourth seat, for which all three political parties are contenders, despite none of them having adequate number of votes to win it. Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) are voters in this election. The voting that began at 9 AM will go on till 4 PM and counting of votes will take place at 5 PM, after the polling hours.

The rupee depreciated 8 paise to a record low of 77.82 against the US dollar in opening trade on Friday, tracking the strength of the greenback in the overseas market.

At the interbank foreign exchange, the rupee opened on a weak note at 77.81 against the American dollar, then lost ground to quote at 77.82 -- its all-time low level, registering a fall of 8 paise from the last close. On Thursday, the rupee fell by 6 paise to close at 77. 74 against the US dollar.

The rupee opened weaker against the dollar this Friday tracking the overnight strength of the greenback, said Sriram Iyer, Senior Research Analyst at Reliance Securities.

Six COVID-19 patients are currently undergoing treatment in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a health bulletin said on Friday. The coronavirus tally of the Union Territory remained unchanged at 10,053 as no fresh infection was recorded in the last 24 hours, it said. The six active patients are undergoing home quarantine, the bulletin said. The death toll stood at 129, while 9,918 people have recovered from the disease in the archipelago so far. The administration has thus far tested over 7.43 lakh samples for COVID-19 and the positivity ratio is at 1.35 per cent. Over 3.40 lakh people have been inoculated with both doses of vaccines, the bulletin added. 

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An Indian engineer with prior military service aboard an oil tanker headed towards the US city of New Orleans helped in the rescue of individuals from a disabled sailboat caught amid bad weather at sea. A press release by the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said Thursday that in April four individuals: a US citizen, an Argentine, an Antiguan and a British captain had set out from Antigua and Barbuda for a month-long journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Barcelona.

NASA is launching a study of UFOs as part of a new push toward high-risk, high-impact science. The space agency announced Thursday that it's setting up an independent team to see how much information is publicly available on the matter and how much more is needed to understand the unexplained sightings. The experts will also consider how best to use all this information in the future. NASA's science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen acknowledged the traditional scientific community may see NASA as “kind of selling out” by venturing into the controversial topic, but he strongly disagrees. “We are not shying away from reputational risk,” Zurbuchen said during a National Academy of Sciences webcast. “Our strong belief is that the biggest challenge of these phenomena is that it's a data-poor field.”

West Bengal on Thursday reported 95 fresh COVID-19 cases, 10 more than the previous day, raising the tally to 20,19,927, the health department said. The death toll, however, remained at 21,205, it said. The state now has 517 active cases, while 19,98,205 people have recovered from the disease thus far, including 47 in the last 24 hours. Bengal has seen a rise in Covid cases in the past few weeks, with experts attributing the spike to non-adherence of safety protocols like wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing.

A decades-long search by a Florida woman and her extended family linked to an unsolved murder case has resulted in the woman finally finding her missing granddaughter, now grown with no previous knowledge of her tragic history, officials said Thursday. Meanwhile, the mystery behind who brutally killed the girl's parents more than 40 years ago remains unsolved and has Texas authorities seeking the public's help.

Over two years after the coronavirus was first detected in China, and after at least 6.3 million deaths have been counted worldwide from the pandemic, the World Health Organization is recommending in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is required into whether a lab accident may be to blame. That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency's initial assessment of the pandemic's origins, and comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.

Arizona officials have confirmed the first cases in the Southwest of a bird flu that has led to the deaths of 37 million birds from commercial farms in the central and eastern U.S. The disease was spotted after tests by federal wildlife officials in three wild cormorants that had been found dead in a park in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale, Arizona Game and Fish officials announced this week. The disease has not yet been found in any domestic birds or in commercial operations, the agency said. But it is a concern, according to Glenn Hickman, president and CEO of Hickman Family Farms, one of the largest egg producers in the Southwest. Hickman operates four chicken ranches in Arizona, one in California and two in Colorado.

Curfew was imposed and the Army called in to conduct a flag march in Bhaderwah of Doda district in Jammu and Kashmir as tension spread in the area Thursday evening after alleged inflammatory speeches were delivered from a mosque, officials said. Police have registered a case over the alleged inflammatory speeches and warned people against taking the law into their own hands.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday condemned the remarks by two BJP functionaries on Prophet Mohammad, terming them "hate speech", and demanded that the accused leaders be immediately arrested so that the country's unity is not disturbed. Noting that such remarks not only cause violence but also lead to societal division, she called upon people from all religions, castes and communities to maintain peace despite provocation. She also asked demonstrators who have put up road blockades in several places of West Bengal's Howrah district to protest against the controversial speech of Nupur Sharma and Naveen Jindal to call off their stir and go protest in New Delhi and BJP ruled states instead.

Mobile internet services have been suspended for 12 hours starting 9 pm on Thursday in Jaipur's Amber tehsil where the Congress and other supporting MLAs are staying ahead of the Rajya Sabha polls. The divisional commissioner issued the order to suspend the services stating security threat to the protected people staying and moving in the area. The MLAs are staying at Hotel Leela in the teshil since evening after being shifted from Udaipur. They will go to the assembly building for the Rajya Sabha elections on Friday morning from this hotel. Taking a dig at the Congress, BJP state president Satish Poonia tweeted the order saying, "Internet shutdown in Amber due to fear of paper leak."