Saudi Arabia has extended its suspension of commercial passenger flights by at least one week and possibly two amid concerns over a new variant of the coronavirus. Saudi Arabia will however allow flights in "exceptional cases", an interior ministry official said according to the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) on Sun | Read more|
Farmers protesting against the Centre's new farm sector laws clanged thalis and raised slogans as Prime Minister's monthly radio address Mann ki Baat was broadcast this morning. The protest took place at three spots -- Singhu border, Faridkot in Punjab and Rohtak in BJP-ruled Haryana. | Read more|
The coronavirus crisis will not be the last pandemic, and attempts to improve human health are "doomed" without tackling climate change and animal welfare, the World Health Organization's chief said. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also condemned the "dangerously short-sighted" cycle of throwing cash at outbreaks but doing | Read more|
The highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus first detected in England had by Saturday been documented in several European countries, as well as Canada, Japan, Australia and Lebanon, despite efforts to curb its spread through massive global disruptions in travel and movement. Fears over the fast-spreading form o | Read more|
The BJP will organise nearly 25 webinars over the next few days on the issue of "one nation, one election", as it seeks to build popular support for what has been a strong plank of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Party sources said its senior leaders, besides members of academia and legal fraternity, will be attending th | Read more|
Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal will today visit the Singhu border point between Delhi and Haryana, which is one of the spots where thousands of farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and other states have been camped for over a month in protest against three central agricultural laws. | Read more|
Forty farm unions will hold a meeting today at 2 PM to chalk out their future course of action and take a decision on holding talks with the centre as the deadlock continues over the new agricultural laws. The agitation near Delhi borders, which began late November, has entered its 31st day. The fresh discussions betwe | Read more|
The Madhya Pradesh Cabinet today passed by a voice vote a bill aimed at curbing forced religious conversions. If passed into law, it will include a maximum punishment of up to 10 years in jail and up to ₹ 1 lakh in fine, with the burden of proof virtually falling on the accused and those associated with the accused, | Read more|
Trinamool Congress workers showed black flags, shouted slogans and surrounded the vehicle of rebel party MP Sunil Mondal in Kolkata this morning, just as he was arriving at the BJP office in Hastings for a felicitation programme. Mr Mondal had joined the BJP in the presence of Amit Shah on December 19, along with sever | Read more|
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday launched the Ayushman Bharat scheme via video-conferencing to extend health insurance coverage to all residents of Jammu and Kashmir. The Prime Minister's Office said the scheme will ensure universal health coverage, and focus on providing financial risk protection and ensuring | Read more|
A huge blast tore through a section of downtown Nashville early Friday, after police responding to reports of gunfire discovered a parked motorhome reportedly blaring a warning that it carried a bomb. The explosion shattered windows and ripped apart trees but appeared calculated to spare lives, injuring just three peop | Read more|
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today released ₹ 18,000 crore to over nine crore farmer families under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) programme. With the push of a button, PM Modi enabled the transfer of money at an event that the ruling BJP has made into a big exercise amid the protest by farmers agai | Read more|
Nitish Kumar, still smarting from the Bihar election that demoted him as junior partner to BJP, has been served fresh humiliation by his long-time ally in a state where his party had recently registered its presence. Six of seven legislators of Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal United (JDU) in Arunachal Pradesh have defected t | Read more|
The Government of India has chosen Punjab to conduct the dry run of COVID-19 vaccine on December 28 and 29, said Punjab Health Minister Balbir Singh Sidhu on Thursday. The districts Ludhiana and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar have been selected as the two districts where the dry run for COVID-19 vaccine will be carried out | Read more|
Two Aam Aadmi Party MPs today shouted slogans inside the Central Hall of Parliament against the farm laws. The commotion broke out when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was offering his tribute to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on his 96th birth anniversary. | Read more|
China appears to be backing away from its initial financial promises to Pakistan under Beijing-financed China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a US$60 billion infrastructure building plan, amid rising corruption and terrorist attacks on Chinese engineers. According to Asia Times, Pakistan Army is set to take near-tot | Read more|
Congress leaders led by Rahul Gandhi, marching to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, were stopped by the police before a small delegation was allowed to enter the presidential palace to submit to President Ram Nath Kovind a memorandum seeking his intervention for the withdrawal of the farm laws against which thousands of farmers | Read more|
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee opened a music festival and even broke into a dance, in an interlude from the heavy-duty campaign for the state election in four months. Taking a time-out in her intense sparring with the BJP, Mamata Banerjee honoured several folk artistes in the event, including musicians, si | Read more|
Moderna Inc said on Wednesday it expects that the immunity induced by its COVID-19 vaccine would be protective against the coronavirus variants reported in the UK. The company said it plans to run tests to confirm the vaccine's activity against any strain. | Read more|
A 20-year-old Muslim man in Delhi has been charged by the police over his wife's allegations that she was forced to convert after their wedding in May and harassed by her in-laws. "His family forced me to change my religion to Islam. I was forced to wear a burqa and offer namaz. His father tried to sexually harass me," | Read more|
In the wake of detection of a new COVID-19 variant in the UK, Goa health authorities are trying to track down 602 people who arrived in the state from Britain and the UAE since December 9, an official said on Thursday. The maximum number of people who have arrived from these two places are expected to be in Cansualim a | Read more|
When Jack Ma took to a Shanghai conference stage in October, China's most famous entrepreneur was on the brink of pulling off an unprecedented $35 billion initial public offering for the finance juggernaut he co-founded two decades earlier. Ant Group Co.'s listing would value the company at more than $300 billion and s | Read more|
The government is holding talks with farmers "with full sensitivity", Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said today as he wished farmers on Kisan Diwas or Farmers' Day, that marks the birth anniversary of Chaudhary Charan Singh, the fifth Prime Minister of India. The day coincides with the 28th straight day of protests by | Read more|
The Congress is set to lose its senior leader Ahmed Patel's Rajya Sabha seat in Gujarat -- which it fought hard to win in 2017 -- to the BJP. Ahmed Patel, a five-time Rajya Sabha member, died at 71 last month. The Congress veteran's seat was declared vacant on November 25, the day he died. His term was up to August 18, | Read more|
The Farooq Abdullah-led Gupkar alliance has won big in the first local polls in Jammu and Kashmir since it lost special status last year and was turned into a Union Territory. In the first-ever polls for the District Development Council (DDC) across 20 districts in J&K, the seven-party alliance, along with the Congress | Read more|
Amid global fears over the new mutant strain of coronavirus, a night curfew has been announced in Karnataka - between 10 PM to 6 AM - till January 2. Karnataka has become the second state after Maharashtra to announce new restrictions this week as concern grows over the new strain, which is believed to be 70 per cent | Read more|
RT-PCR testing on arrival, separate isolation of those testing positive for the new variant of coronavirus, institutional quarantine for co-passengers of those testing positive: These are some of the salient requirements mentioned in the standard operating procedure (SOP) issued by the government of India today for tra | Read more|
The Farooq Abdullah-led People's Alliance for Gupkar Declaration took a big lead over the BJP on Tuesday as votes were counted in the first District Development Council (DDC) election in Jammu and Kashmir. This is the first election in Jammu and Kashmir since its special status was scrapped last year and it was downgra | Read more|
The parent of a TikTok copycat from India has raised more than $100 million from investors including Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft, months after the Chinese-owned short-video app was banned in the country. | Read more|
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said development should not be seen through the political prism and when it came to the nation's progress, ideological differences must be secondary. | Read more|
US President-elect Joe Biden on Monday named Indian American Bharat Ramamurti as one of the three new members of the National Economic Council that coordinates domestic and international economic policymaking process for the administration. | Read more|
The government is fully alert about the new strain of coronavirus reported in the United Kingdom, Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said today, stressing that "there's no need to panic". Canada, Saudi Arabia, and several European countries have temporarily banned flights from the UK over the new virus strain, believed to b | Read more|
An indefinite relay hunger strike starts today against the government's new agricultural laws as farmers harden stand amid protests that began late November around Delhi borders. After five rounds of negotiations failed, the government on Sunday asked the protesting farmers to choose a date for the next round of talks. | Read more|
Slamming West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee over the recent attack on BJP chief JP Nadda's convoy, Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Sunday asserted the centre has the right to summon state IPS officers responsible for providing him security for central deputation, and asked the TMC to go through the rules befor | Read more|
European countries - and some beyond the continent - are restricting travel from the United Kingdom amid mounting fears over an infectious new strain of the novel coronavirus first detected in England. | Read more|