Breaking News, June 25

A woman, allegedly a drug peddler, has been arrested with contraband worth Rs 40 Lakh in her possession, police here said on Saturday. "Sonam, a drug peddler, was arrested Friday night by our team from near a graveyard in Dada Pir area. Police team recovered 395 grams of smack from her possession which is estimated to be worth Rs 40 Lakh," Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Saharanpur, Akash Tomar said. A case under relevant sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act has been lodged against her, he said. The arrest was made under an ongoing drive against drug smugglers in the district. "A police team is interrogating the woman to ascertain the course from where she got hold of the drug and the people she intended to supply it to," the SSP said. 

The flood situation in Assam remained grim on Saturday with the death count rising to 118 and Silchar town in Cachar district submerged for the sixth straight day, officials said. Ten more people have died in the past 24 hours- two each from Barpeta, Dhubri, Karimganj and Udalguri districts and one death each from Cachar and Morigaon- due to floods and landslides. The total population affected by the floods declined to 33.03 lakh in 28 districts as against the previous day's figure of 45.34 lakh in 30 districts, a bulletin issued by the Assam State Management Disaster Authority (ASDMA) said.

A labourer has found a 3.15 carat diamond during digging work in a mine in Madhya Pradesh's Panna district, an official said on Saturday. According to local experts, the precious stone may fetch around Rs 10-12 lakh in auction. The labourer, Surendrapal Lodhi, is hopeful that the amount earned will reduce his financial hardships and take care of his children's education. Lodhi found the 3.15 carat gem in a leased mine of Krishna Kalyanpur and deposited it on Friday, Anupam Singh, an official of the Panna diamond office, said. The deposited diamond will be put up for the auction, which is organised at regular intervals. After deducting the government royalty from the auctioned amount, the rest will be paid to the labourer, the official said. Talking to reporters, Lodhi said he is ecstatic about finding the precious stone after nine months of hard work.

A ruling party MLA staged a brief dharna here at the residence of health minister Parsadi Lal Meena on Saturday expressing disapproval of the transfer of four doctors from his constituency in Jaipur. Amin Kagzi, Kishanpole MLA from Congress, reached the residence of Meena along with his supporters and talked to him about the transfer list. He alleged that four doctors were transferred Friday despite his request to not do so. The move has caused resentment among the people in his constituency, he said. After he got no satisfactory answer from the minister, Kagzi along with his supporters sat on a dharna outside the minister’s house.

A Special Judge here has directed the police to lodge an FIR against a former Station House Officer (SHO) for physically assaulting a rape victim. The victim, a woman, was allegedly raped by one Karan Saroj at her house on February 1, 2021. She had initially lodged a complaint regarding the matter at Antu Police Station and was taken for a medical examination on February 6. On February 8, according to her complaint, the woman met Praveen Kushwaha, the then SHO of Antu Police Station, and appealed to him to lodge an FIR. Kushwaha, instead of filing her report, manhandled her and hurled at her casteist slur, she wrote in her complaint.

Norwegian police say they are investigating an overnight mass shooting in Oslo that killed two people and injured more than a dozen as a case of possible terrorism. In a news conference Saturday, police officials said the man arrested after the shooting was a Norwegian citizen of Iranian origin who was previously known to police but not for major crimes. They said they had seized two firearms in connection with the attack: a handgun and an automatic weapon. 

Nineteen activists of the Students' Federation of India (SFI), the students wing of the ruling CPI(M), have been arrested and remanded so far in connection with the attack on Congress MP Rahul Gandhi's office here and more arrests are expected on Saturday, police said. All the arrested persons were identified as local SFI activists and they were remanded for two weeks by a local court.

A 35-year-old woman was killed allegedly by her husband on Saturday morning following domestic discord in Ballia Nagla village, police said. The accused allegedly slit her throat and fled, SP (City) Praveen Singh Chauhan said. On getting information about the incident from the woman's relatives, the police reached the spot and sent the body for post-mortem. Domestic discord is said to be the cause of crime, the SP said, adding a hunt is on to nab the accused husband. 

Two-way traffic resumed on the 270-km-long Jammu-Srinagar National Highway on Saturday after remaining suspended for four days due to landslides, officials said. There was, however, a fresh landslide which blocked Mughal Road – an alternate surface link connecting Kashmir with Jammu. Hundreds of vehicles stranded on the national highway since Tuesday evening were cleared after landslide debris was removed in Samroli area of Udhampur district late Friday evening, the officials said.

Four years since its worst-ever water crisis in 2018, residents of Shimla are yet again facing hardship as the Himachal Pradesh capital is grappling with a severe shortage for over a fortnight now. Less rainfall, huge inflow of tourists and leaking pipes in the water distribution network are being blamed. Even as the Shimla Municipal Corporation (MC) and the Shimla Jal Prabandhan Nigam Limited (SJPNL) claimed that water was being supplied on alternate days, residents of several localities of the city, including Tutu and Kaithu, alleged they were getting water supply once in three-four days. The shortage of the vital resource has triggered a political blame game, with the Congress and the CPM attributing the current situation to mismanagement by the authorities.

The UN human rights chief has termed the US Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion as a “huge blow” to women’s human rights and gender equality, as UN agencies warned that restricting access to abortion does not prevent people from seeking it but simply makes it “more deadly.” In the historic ruling on Friday, the US Supreme Court decided by six votes to three to overturn the 50-year-old Roe v Wade judgement that guaranteed access to abortion across the country. The decision means that all questions of legality and access to abortion will now go to America’s individual states, some of whom immediately put abortion bans into place.

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It was a pleasant Saturday morning in Delhi with the minimum temperature settling at 24.3 degrees Celsius, four notches below the season's average, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said. The relative humidity at 8:30 am was recorded at 58 per cent, it added. The weather office predicted partly cloudy skies for the day with the maximum temperature expected to hover around 40 degrees Celsius.

Sajid Majeed Mir, one of India’s most wanted terrorists on whom the US has placed a bounty of USD 5 million for his role in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, has been jailed for over 15 years in a terror-financing case by an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan, which is struggling to exit the grey list of the FATF. The Counter Terrorism Department (CTD) of the Punjab Police, which often issues convictions of the suspects in such cases to the media, did not notify Mir’s conviction.

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Chinese leader Xi Jinping will visit Hong Kong this week to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the former British colony's 1997 return to China, a state news agency said Saturday, in his first trip outside the mainland since the start of the coronavirus pandemic 2 1/2 years ago. Xi also will attend the inaugural meeting of the territory's newly installed government, Xinhua News Agency said. It gave no indication how long Xi would stay in Hong Kong or other details.

READ FULL STORY HERE 

READ FULL STORY HERE 

Congress passed a bill Friday that aims to keep up the expanded, pandemic-era distribution of free meals for all students this summer. Final passage of the Keep Kids Fed Act in the US House came less than a week before rule changes for child nutrition programs were set to expire June 30. "Our action today staves off a dangerous hunger cliff: ensuring universal free meals for all children throughout this summer, while helping schools keep up supply chain snags and rising costs for the upcoming school year," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, in a statement. The bill now goes to President Joe Biden for his signature.

The police have rescued a three-year-old boy of Jharkhand, abducted on June 19 and sold to a woman in Bihar for Rs 1.30 lakh allegedly his aunt, an official said here on Friday. The accused aunt and the woman who purchased him were arrested and sent to jail. The boy who was rescued from Makhdumpur area of Bihar's Jehanabad district was brought back to his home in a village under Muffasil police station of Hazaribag district of Jharkhand on Thursday night, the officer said. After the child went missing, his family members lodged a complaint with the police on June 20. After knowing that he was last seen at the house of his aunt, the police interrogated her and she revealed that the child was sold to a woman in Bihar who has three children but no son. The police, along with the child’s father, went to Makhdumpur and rescued the boy. Altogether Rs 1.10 lakh in cash was recovered from the house of the child’s aunt at Meru village, the police officer said. The police were trying to find out if any other person was involved in the incident. 

Eighteen Africans seeking to cross into Spain were killed and scores of migrants and police were injured in what Moroccan authorities called a "stampede" of people surging across Morocco's border fence with the Spanish North African enclave of Melilla on Friday. A total of 133 migrants breached the border between the Moroccan city of Nador and Melilla on Friday, the first such mass crossing since Spain and Morocco mended diplomatic relations last month. A spokesperson for the Spanish government's office in Melilla said about 2,000 people attempted to cross, but many were stopped by Spanish Civil Guard police and Moroccan forces on either side of the border fence.

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An Afghan prisoner held in US custody for nearly 15 years has been released from the Guantanamo Bay detention center after a federal court ruled that he was unlawfully detained, the US Department of Defense said Friday. Asadullah Haroon Gul's release was first announced earlier in the day by the Taliban in Afghanistan and an international human rights group. From Kabul, Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban-appointed deputy culture and information minister, tweeted that Gul was one of the last two Afghan prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Shiv Sena has sent the names of four more rebel MLAs to the Maharashtra Assembly deputy speaker for initiating action of disqualification against them, a senior leader said. The party will also issue notices to 16 MLAs of the rebel faction and ask them to respond by Monday, Sena MP Arvind Sawant on Friday. The four legislators whose names were forwarded to the deputy speaker were Sanjay Raymulkar, Chiman Patil, Ramesh Bornare and Balaji Kalyankar, he said. “Despite issuing a letter to them, none of them attended party meeting on Wednesday evening here in Mumbai," Sawant said.

The Anti-Corruption Bureau Friday produced a charge sheet against two officers of the department of food, civil supplies & consumer affairs at Udhampur for allegedly misappropriating government funds worth crores of rupees, officials said. They said the two chargesheeted officials are: Krishan Kumar, the then assistant director; and Subash Chander Gupta, the then tehsil supply officer of the department in Udhampur. A corruption case was registered against the officers in 2018 accusing them of abusing their officials position, and fraudulently and dishonestly misappropriating government money worth crores of rupees between January 2007 and March 2008, they said.

After weeks of ferocious fighting, Ukrainian forces have begun retreating from a besieged city in the country's east to move to stronger positions, a regional governor said on Friday, the four-month mark in Russia's invasion. The planned withdrawal from Sievierodonetsk, the administrative centre of the Luhansk region, comes after relentless Russian bombardment that has reduced most of the industrial city to rubble and cut its population from 100,0000 to 10,000. Ukrainian troops fought the Russians in house-to-house battles before retreating to the huge Azot chemical factory on the city's edge, where they remain holed up in its sprawling underground structures in which about 500 civilians also found refuge. In recent days, Russian forces have made gains around Sievierodonetsk and the neighbouring city of Lysychansk, on a steep bank across a river, in a bid to encircle Ukrainian forces.

In perhaps the first-of-its-kind in the state, a sub divisional magistrate on Friday held a full-day revenue court during which he heard at least 100 cases, some pending since 2005, and disposed of 80. Encouraged with the good turnout of farmers in Manahor Thana of Jhalawar, District Collector Bharti Dixit has decided to organise such full-day courts in other sub divisions too and passed directions to the sub-divisional magistrates concerned. At least three sittings in a week are scheduled for hearing of revenue cases in the sub-divisional magistrate court most of the times. However, some of them are missed due to engagement of advocates in other cases and packed schedule of presiding officials in administrative affairs, while others get delayed as litigants get entangled in their personal affairs, leading to pendency.