Breaking News, January 6

A new idol of Lord Ram will be installed at the sanctum sanctorum of the grand Ram Temple here at a height of nine feet and the finest sculptors will be engaged for it, a member of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust said Friday.

An anti-terror operation here entered its fifth consecutive day in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district on Friday, a senior police officer said. Security forces will soon neutralise the terrorists involved in twin terror attacks in which 6 people, including two children, were killed and 15 others were injured in Dhangri village, he said.

Aska police station in Odisha’s Ganjam district has been selected as one of the three best police stations in the country for the year 2022 by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), official sources said.

Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya on Friday took a dig at Congress leader Rahul Gandhi over his 'Bharat Jodo Yatra' and said he now needs to take out a "Mafi Mango Yatra". He also targeted Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav saying that with works like 'mafiagiri', land grabbing, katta and bomb-making factories shutting down in the state, "he is now behaving like a fish without water".

A man has been arrested and two juveniles have been apprehended in connection with the killing of a 15-year-old boy who was allegedly stabbed to death following a minor argument in west Delhi's Khyala area, police said on Friday. After being informed about the incident, a police team reached the spot and found the boy lying dead in pool of blood at HMP Park. The victim had multiple stab injuries on his body.

Residents of a housing complex, police and fire brigade personnel in Virar in Maharashtra's Palghar district managed to foil the suicide bid of a 14-year-old girl who was allegedly taking the extreme step after being reprimanded over her excessive cellphone usage, an official said on Friday.

One person was killed and three were injured when the balcony of an under-construction house collapsed here, police said on Friday. The incident took place in Shekhan locality under Sherkot police station on Thursday night, they said.

A construction crane crashed onto a shopping mall in central Norway on Friday amid strong winds, killing one person and injuring at least two others, police said. The winds likely caused the unmanned crane, which was at least 50 metres high to slam onto the mall in Melhus, which is south of Trondheim, the Scandinavian country's third-largest city, police spokesman Ebbe Kimo told the VG newspaper. The crane collapse caused damage to the first and second floors of the shopping mall and firefighters went through the building searching for people, said police, adding they used dogs and a drone in their search.

At least six women died and 18 other passengers were injured after a bus they were travelling in veered off a cliff in Western Nepal's Palpa district, police said. The accident took place on the Saljhandi-Dhorpatan road section on Thursday. The bus en route to Khursane from Saljhandi in Rupandehi district fell some 60 metres down the road at Madhubanregion, The Kathmandu Post newspaper reported. All six passengers who died on the spot were women, the report said, quoting police officials.

Four people died while about two dozen were injured in a head-on collision between a bus and a truck here on Friday, police said. The bus was on its way to Jodhpur from Osian when the accident occurred near Mathania bypass at 3.30 pm, they said.
Villagers from the nearby areas rushed to rescue the passengers stuck in the bus and sent them to a hospital, police said.
Of the total injured, six have been admitted to the MDM Hospital Jodhpur while the rest are being treated at the local hospital in Mathania, they said.

Former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from power last year over his government's mishandling of the cash-strapped country's economy, has returned here from Dubai, his first foreign trip since returning to Sri Lanka four months ago. Rajapaksa and wife Ioma arrived at Bandaranaike International Airport here from Dubai on Thursday, the Daily Mirror Lanka newspaper reported, quoting the airport duty manager and spokesperson of the airport immigration department.
They arrived on an Emirates flight from Dubai, the report said.

Over 80,000 voters have been enrolled in the final voters list in Tripura taking the number of total electors to 28, 13,478, a senior election official said on Friday. Assembly elections are due in Tripura in February. “We have published final electoral rolls for all the 60 Assembly constituencies on Thursday as per the instruction of ECI. The total electorate stood at 28, 13,478. It was 27. 33 lakh when the draft rolls were published on November 9, 2022”, the official said. Out of the total electors, there are 13, 98,825 women while the transgender count is 77, he said.

A Jain monk who was on a fast against the Jharkhand government's decision to declare Shri Sammed Shikharji as a tourist place died in Jaipur, a community leader said on Friday. Samarth Sagar (74) died at around 2 am on Friday after fasting for five days, said Rajasthan Jain Sabha president Subhash Chandra Jain. Sagar was on a hunger strike at the Sanghiji temple in Sanganer area here.This comes days after another Jain monk, Sugyeysagar Maharaj (72), fasting to protest the Jharkhand government's decision died at the temple on Tuesday. Shri Sammed Shikharji is a Jain pilgrimage centre in the Parasnath hills of Jharkhand. The state government decided to turn it into a tourist attraction, which irked the community.

A 55-year-old hotelier collapsed and died while exercising in a gym in Madhya Pradesh's Indore, police said on Friday. The incident, which took place at a fitness centre in Vijay Nagar area on Thursday, was captured by the CCTV cameras and its video has gone viral on social media. Pradeep Raghuvanshi, who ran a restaurant business, felt uncomfortable during his workout and fell to the ground within seconds, family sources said. In the CCTV footage, the hotelier hurriedly walks up to a machine at the gym, puts his hands on it and tries to rest but collapses on the floor.

Tata Group-owned Air India CEO Campbell Wilson has told the airline staff to report any improper behaviour on aircraft to authorities at the earliest even if the matter appears to have been settled. Wilson wrote an internal communication to employees after Air India faced criticism including from the aviation regulator for its handling of an incident involving a man, while apparently inebriated, urinating on a fellow female passenger on a flight from New York in November. The airline on Thursday acknowledged a second similar incident that occurred last month on a flight from Paris to Delhi.

Schools were closed in a few districts of Madhya Pradesh on Friday as the intense cold spell continued across the state, officials said. The lowest temperature was recorded at 0.2 degree Celsius in Nowgong town of Chhatarpur district in the morning, said H S Pandey, a senior official at the India Meteorological Department (IMD) office here. Traffic on the roads was thin in many parts of the state while people were seen huddling around bonfires.
Schools up to Class 8 remained closed in some districts including Bhopal, Indore, Vidisha and Ujjain on the orders of the local administration. Dense fog was reported in Guna, Satna, Datia, Jabalpur, Sagar and Chhatarpur districts, while moderate fog covered areas of Gwalior, Rewa districts and Nowgaon town in Chhatarpur district. The minimum temperatures in Bhopal and Indore were recorded at 7.3 and 10.6 degrees Celsius.

Assam and Meghalaya governments on Friday moved the Supreme Court challenging the orders of the Meghalaya High Court staying the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by chief ministers of the two states for settling their boundary dispute. A bench comprising Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices P S Narasimha and J B Pardiwala took note of the submissions of Solicitor General Tushar Mehta that the matter needed an urgent hearing as the single and division bench of the high court have stayed the operation of the inter-state border pact which was signed earlier last year.

India, among the largest troop-contributing countries to UN peacekeeping, is deploying a platoon of women peacekeepers in Abyei, the country’s largest single unit of female Blue Helmets in a UN mission since 2007. The move heralded India's intent of increasing significantly the number of women in peacekeeping contingents.
 

“India is deploying an all #women’s platoon of peacekeepers as part of our battalion to the UN Mission in #Abyei @UNISFA_1. This is the single largest deployment of women #peacekeepers in recent years. Good wishes to the team!” India’s Permanent Representative to the UN Ambassador Ruchira Kamboj tweeted Thursday, along with a photo of the contingent.

The Bharat Jodo Yatra resumed its journey from Sanoli-Panipat Road here on Friday morning on the first day of the Haryana leg's second phase. The Rahul Gandhi-led yatra re-entered Haryana on Thursday evening from Uttar Pradesh. After the night halt, the yatra began from the Sanoli border in Panipat. Several senior Congress leaders from Haryana joined Gandhi for the yatra. Gandhi left for Delhi on Thursday night to meet his ailing mother, former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda had said. He returned in the morning to join the yatra. Former Congress chief Sonia Gandhi was admitted to Delhi's Sir Ganga Ram Hospital on Wednesday for treatment of a viral respiratory infection. The yatra was accorded a warm welcome by Congress leaders and workers as it re-entered Haryana territory on Thursday evening. In the afternoon, Gandhi, party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and other senior leaders will address a public meeting in Panipat.

Air India CEO Campbell Wilson has told the airline staff to report any improper behaviour on aircraft to authorities at the earliest even if the matter appears to have been settled. In an internal communication to airlines' employees, he reflected on the urinating incident to say that "the repulsion felt by the affected passenger is totally understandable and we share her distress. "Whilst the story is more complicated than has been reported, there are clearly some lessons we can and must learn.

A 22-year-old man was found hanging at the home of his relative at a village in Sangrampur police station limits, police officials said. The deceased has been identified as Suraj Verma. Verma was found hanging at his relative's home on Thursday. His brother has alleged that he was murdered, Sangrampur police station SHO Umesh Kumar Mishra said.
The police have sent the body for post-mortem. "The relatives of the deceased are being questioned. Further action will be taken once the post-mortem is done," Mishra said.

Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar has said that the Union government must change its attitude towards cooperative banks and support them because they serve the common people. There is a misconception that irregularities largely take place in cooperative banks, the former Union agriculture minister said at a function here on Thursday. Pawar was speaking at the closing ceremony of the golden jubilee of Vishweshwar Cooperative Bank Ltd. Nationalised and scheduled banks in the country account for more than 90 per cent of irregularities whereas cooperative sector banks account for only 0.46 per cent irregularities, he said.

A rickshaw puller was bludgeoned to death by his friend over sleeping space at an accommodation at a religious place, about 500 metres from the Uttar Pradesh Governor House here in Lucknow. The police came to know about the incident only after some rickshaw pullers alerted them. Several homeless rickshaw pullers get shelter at the accommodation at the religious place every night. The victim, Imamul Khan, 60, had a verbal spat with one Shamsher a.k.a Chhote Lal Kori for sleeping at a place which was cosier in view of biting cold. Later, Shamsher attacked Imamul and left him bleeding profusely. Another rickshaw puller, Santosh Kumar Chauhan, spotted Imamul in a pool of blood and he alerted the staff of the religious place who, in turn, informed the police.

The US will send Ukraine nearly USD 3 billion in military aid, in a massive new package that will for the first time include several dozen Bradley fighting vehicles, US officials said on Thursday, in the Biden administration's latest step to send increasingly lethal and powerful weapons to help Ukraine beat back Russian forces. The aid — totalling about USD 2.85 billion — is the largest in a series of packages of military equipment that the Pentagon has pulled from its stockpiles to send to Ukraine. It is aimed at getting as much to the Ukrainian forces as possible during the winter months, before spring sets in and an expected increase in fighting begins. An announcement is expected Friday, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the package have not been publicly announced.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is "really going out of his way" to work with the Sikh community, both inside and outside India, Indian-American businessman and philanthropist Darshan Singh Dhaliwal said Thursday. Dhaliwal has been selected as one of the 27 recipients of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman this year. "I think Modi is doing a lot for the Sikh commander. He's doing a lot for the country, but especially for the Sikhs he is doing a lot. And I don't know what else can he do? He is really going out of his way to work with the Sikh community," he told PTI in an interview. Dhaliwal is one of the two recipients from the US of this year's Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, the highest honour given by the Indian government to people of Indian origin. Rajesh Subramaniam, CEO of FedEx, is the other awardee.

Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Thursday appealed to Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari to clear projects worth Rs 1 lakh crore in the state. He also requested him to undertake projects related to ring roads in Raichur, Gadag, Koppal and Shivamogga as well. "We mainly discussed the works of the national highway. Work is presently underway in projects worth around Rs 46,830 crore but still work on projects worth more than Rs 1 lakh has to be done. A decision has been taken to fast track those projects," Bommai told reporters after a meeting with Gadkari here on Thursday. He also said the STRR (Satellite Town Ring Road) project is coming up at the Bannerghatta Reserved Forest.

The exercise to carry out the decennial census has been further postponed- at least till September 30, officials said. The housing listing phase of the census and the exercise to update the National Population Register (NPR) were scheduled to be carried out across the country from April 1 to September 30, 2020, but were postponed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In a communication to all states, the Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India conveyed that the date of freezing of administrative boundaries has been extended till June 30. According to norms, census can be conducted only three months after the freezing of boundary limits of administrative units such as districts, sub-districts, tehsils, talukas and police stations. In its letter, the census authorities, while referring to an earlier communication to extend the date of freezing of boundaries up to December 31 in 2020, said it has now been decided by the competent authority to further extend the date of freezing of boundaries. The boundaries of the administrative units for the ensuing census will now be freezed with effect from July 1, 2023. The finalisation of boundaries of administrative units entails covering all jurisdictional changes between two consecutive censuses. The communication said the state governments can give effect to the changes in administrative boundaries, if any, latest by June 30, 2023, and send copies of notifications on jurisdictional changes to the Directorate of Census Operations in the state or Union Territory concerned with an endorsement to the census authorities in Delhi. The freeze on administrative boundaries was effective from January 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday ordered his armed forces to observe a unilateral 36-hour cease-fire in Ukraine this weekend for the Orthodox Christmas holiday, the first such sweeping truce move in the nearly 11-month-old war. Kyiv indicated it won't follow suit. Putin did not appear to make his cease-fire order conditional on Ukraine's acceptance, and it wasn't clear whether hostilities would actually halt on the 1,100-kilometer (684-mile) front line or elsewhere. Ukrainian officials have previously dismissed such Russian moves as playing for time to regroup their invasion forces and prepare additional attacks. At various points during the war that began Feb. 24, Russian authorities have ordered limited, local truces to allow civilian evacuations or other humanitarian purposes. Thursday's order was the first time Putin has directed his troops to observe a cease-fire throughout Ukraine.