A select list of stories to read before you start your day
Opposition hits out at govt. over Rafale
The Congress led the Opposition parties in attacking the Narendra Modi government over the Rafale fighter aircraft deal both in Parliament and outside following Monday’s report in The Hindu that crucial anti-corruption safeguards were dropped from the final agreement. While Congress president Rahul Gandhi said the government had waived anti-corruption clauses to open the door for Anil Ambani to “steal” ₹30,000 crore, former Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said the deal was “unravelling faster than the government thought.”
NRC verification to begin on Thursday
The process of verifying the documents of some 36 lakh applicants who were excluded from the published list of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) would begin on Thursday. Nearly 40.07 lakh of the 3.29 crore applicants were left out of the complete draft of NRC published on July 30 last year.
60% children adopted in India between 2015 and 2018 are girls
The number of female children placed for in-country adoptions and inter-country adoptions between 2015 and 2018 are relatively higher than male children. During this period, about 11,649 children were put up for in-country adoptions; of them 6,962 were girls and 4,687 were boys. Of the 3,011 children that were placed for in-country adoption in 2015-16, as many as 1,855 were female children.
New immigration checkpoint for Kartarpur Sahib corridor
The Home Ministry has designated the Dera Baba Nanak land check post in Gurdaspur district, the exit and entry point in Punjab for visiting the Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara in Pakistan, as an authorised immigration checkpoint. In a notification, the Ministry said on Monday that anyone with valid travel documents could exit or enter through the check post.
Bhupen Hazarika’s Bharat Ratna tied to Citizenship Bill
Tez Hazarika, the U.S.-based son of music maestro Bhupen Hazarika, has said that accepting or rejecting the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award bestowed posthumously on his father, depends on “how the Centre moves” on the issue of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016.
‘No-deal Brexit could cost 6,00,000 jobs’
Researchers at the IWH institute in Halle, eastern Germany, examined what would happen if U.K. imports from the remaining EU fell 25% after Brexit. They reckoned that some 1,03,000 jobs would be under threat in Europe’s largest economy Germany and 50,000 in France.