Delhi Violence: Around 27 people, including one police man and an Intelligence Bureau officer, have been killed since Sunday in the violence that broke out in northeast Delhi, according to doctors from GTB (Guru Teg Bahadur) and Lok Nayak hospitals. Major clashes broke out between groups protesting in favour and against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in northeast Delhi on Sunday which progressed into full-fledged communal riots.

Nitish Kumar: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Wednesday said that children would be taught to keep off from the porn sites, which he said was a leading cause of crime against women. The awareness drive would be carried under “Unnayan” scheme, already in action in the state-run schools across Bihar, he said.

SC on Delhi Violence: A bench comprising Justices S K Kaul and K M Joseph said it will not expand the scope of petitions filed in connection with the protests at Shaheen Bagh by looking into the pleas on violence. The Supreme Court on Wednesday termed unfortunate the incidents of violence in Delhi but refused to entertain pleas on them.

Google: Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post today that the company is going to invest more than $10 billion in offices and data centres across the US this year. Google currently has a presence in 26 states across the US and all the investments made this year will be focused on 11 of those. Namely – Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington and California.

Rajnikant: Rajinikanth hit out at the Central government by saying, “It is an intelligence failure and hence home ministry also failed. Protests can happen peacefully but not in a violent manner. If violence breaks out, it should be dealt with iron hands,” ANI quoted Rajinikanth as saying.

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RAM MANDIR: Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday announced that the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teertha Kshetra, set up by the government for construction of a temple in Ayodhya, will have 15 trustees and one of them will be from the Dalit community. The home minister’s statement comes a little over an hour after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced in Lok Sabha about the constitution of the trust.

CORONA VIRUS: A baby in China’s epidemic-hit Wuhan city has been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus just 30 hours after being born, Chinese state media reported Wednesday. The infant is the youngest person recorded as being infected by the virus, which has killed nearly 500 people since emerging late last year.

NIRBHYA CASE: Delhi High Court on Wednesday granted a week’s time to the four death row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case to avail all legal remedies available to them. A single-judge bench of Justice Suresh Kumar Kait said that the proceedings against them for the execution of death warrant will be initiated after a week. The High Court observed that according to Delhi prison rules if a mercy petition is submitted, a 14 days period has to be given after the dismissal of the mercy plea. The death warrant against all four convicts cannot be executed separately, it said. “I have no hesitation to say that after dismissal of criminal appeals on 5 May 2017 by the Supreme Court, nobody had bothered to execute the death warrants. They (authorities) waited for reasons best known to them till convict Mukesh filed a review petition before the Supreme Court on 6 November 2017 after 186 days,” Justice Kait observed.

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Union Budget 2020 India: Listing of insurance behemoth Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) may be done in the second half of the next financial year, Finance Secretary Rajiv Kumar said on Sunday. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman while presenting the Budget 2020-21 on Saturday announced stake sale in LIC through an initial public offer in the next fiscal. There are a number of processes which have to be followed for the listing and some legislative changes would also be required for the listing of LIC.  “We will follow the extant procedure for listing and for other things including the legislative changes it requires in consultation with the Ministry of Law and that process we already started … listing in the second half of FY21 seems logical,” a LIC officer said.

Budget 2020 India: The Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her second budget speech announced major reforms in the education sector but the allocations for Educations and Skill development differ by a big margin. The education sector was allocated Rs 99,300 crore but the Skill development got only Rs 3,000 crore in its purse.

DDT: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 1  abolished dividend distribution tax (DDT). But the measure came with a twist, leaving a bitter taste on investors, particularly those falling in the higher income tax slabs. While the Centre abolished DDT, dividends will now be taxed in the hands of recipients at their applicable rate — which can be as high as 43 percent for the ultra-rich.

NRI Income Tax: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on February 2  announced that there is no intention to tax the global income of NRIs and only income generated in India will be taxed. “What we are doing now is that the income of an NRI generated in India will be taxed here. If he’s earning something in a jurisdiction where there is no tax, why will I include that into mine that has been generated there?” she said. “Whereas if you have a property here and you have rent out of it, but because you are living there, you carry this rent into your income there and pay no tax there, pay no tax here … since the property is in India, I have got a sovereign right to tax,” she further added.

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NIRVHYA CASE: Dec 16 gangrape convicts won’t be hanged tomorrow. Just 12 hours before the four men who raped a 23-year-old in 2012 were to be led to the gallows at Tihar, a Delhi court on Friday stayed the black warrant for their execution. This was the second time that their execution was put off by the judge. This time, the judge did not issue a fresh warrant for their execution.

THREE TERRORIST KILLED: Three men, suspected to be Jaish-e-Mohammed operatives, were killed in the gunfight that followed when a constable started searching the vehicle. Police said truck driver Samir Dar was trying to ferry armed terrorists to Srinagar from Dayalachak in Hiranagar area of Kathua district. Samir Dar, the driver of the truck that was intercepted near Jammu on Friday, is the Pulwama suicide bomber’s cousin, a senior Jammu and Kashmir police officer said. Samir Dar was among the three persons caught after the truck was intercepted at Ban toll plaza and searched.

ONLINE LOTTERY BAN: The Punjab government on Friday decided to ban all types of online lottery schemes in the state, an official spokesperson said. The ban, under Section 5 of the Lotteries (Regulation) Act 1998, would not only check illegal lottery business but also give a boost to the state’s tax and non-tax revenue, the spokesperson said after a Cabinet meeting here.

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Royal estate discovered: Archaeologists uncovered a gigantic complex in northern Israel that they think once served as a rural estate for ancient kings of biblical fame. The stunning building is in Horvat Tevet, an ancient site just outside modern-day Afula. About 2,900 years ago, archaeologists say, the structure served as a key place for Israelite officials to collect and redistribute agricultural produce from the region.

Farukkhabad hostage: Nearly 20 children have been held hostage by a man at his house in Uttar Pradesh’s Farukkhabad. The man, Suresh Batham, with criminal antecedents is reported to have invited the kids over to his place on the pretext of a birthday party and then held them hostage. When some local people tried to get the door opened, he started firing from inside injuring three policemen and a villager. Batham even hurled a low intensity bomb from the window.

Chatbot Meena: Google introduced chatbot Meena: “Meena is an end-to-end, neural conversational model that learns to respond sensibly to a given conversational context. The training objective is to minimize perplexity, the uncertainty of predicting the next token (in this case, the next word in a conversation). At its heart lies the Evolved Transformer seq2seq architecture, a Transformer architecture discovered by evolutionary neural architecture search to improve perplexity,” it said in a blog post.

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SPEEDY TRIAL:  Chief Justice of India S A Bobde on Friday made a case for speedy resolution of tax disputes saying it will act as an incentive for tax payers and free the funds locked in litigation. “A just and speedy dispute resolution is perceived as a tax incentive by the taxpayer. To the tax collector, an efficient tax judiciary assures that demands arising out of legitimate assessment are not strangled in delayed litigation,” Bobde said at the 79th foundation day celebrations of Income Tax Appellate Tribunal.

NSA ON CAA PROTESTOR: The Supreme Court Friday said it cannot issue blanket orders restraining authorities from invoking the stringent National Security Act against people protesting the enactment of Citizenship (Amendment) Act.The Supreme Court Friday said it cannot issue blanket orders restraining authorities from invoking the stringent National Security Act against people protesting the enactment of Citizenship (Amendment) Act. A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Indira Banerjee refused to entertain a plea challenging the imposition of NSA in few states as also in the national capital amid anti-CAA protests. “We are of the opinion that general writ will not lie in this case. We cannot invoke powers under Article 32. We agree that the NSA should not be misused but there cannot be a general command. This will create chaos,” the bench said.

INDIAN WORDS INCLUDED: The latest edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary features 26 new Indian English words, including Aadhaar, chawl, dabba, hartal and shaadi. The 10th edition of the dictionary, which was launched on Friday, has 384 Indian English words and incorporates over 1,000 new words such as chatbot, fake news and microplastic. The dictionary focuses on language change and its evolution through the years and has ensured that the language and examples used in the new edition are relevant and up to date with the times, Oxford University Press (OUP) said.

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NATIONAL

CAA: The Supreme Court on January 22  gave the Centre four weeks to respond to pleas challenging the validity of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and said it will set up a five-judge Constitution bench to hear the petitions. SC said that it will not grant any stay on the CAA without hearing the Centre. A bench headed by Chief Justice S A Bobde also restrained all high courts from hearing pleas on CAA till it decides the petitions. The bench said it will hear petitions related to  Assam and Tripura separately as the problem with CAA in these two states is different from the rest of the country.

UP: The UP government will provide land subsidy to the proposed food park of  Patanjali Group in Greater Noida. Patanjali is going to invest more than Rs 6,000 crore in the mega project spread over 91 acres of land in the National Capital Region (NCR). The decision was taken at the UP cabinet meeting chaired by chief minister Yogi Adityanath on January 21. Subsidies granted to the company include stamp duty rebate of 25 per cent.

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Submarine Project: The defence ministry on January 21, selected two Indian shipyards and five foreign defence majors for the Rs 50,000 crore project to build six conventional submarines in India for the Navy besides approving military procurement worth Rs 5,100 crore. The shortlisted Indian entities to construct the submarines are the L&T group and state-owned Mazagaon Docks Ltd (MDL).

Ayodhya Case:  A curative petition was filed in  Ram Janambhoom-Babri Masjid land dispute case on January 21,  challenging the November 9 verdict which cleared the way for construction of a Ram Temple at the disputed site at Ayodhya. The curative petition filed by Mohammed Ayyub, President of the Peace Party of India.

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