- Government de-regulated the price of diesel and announced a new price for domestically produced natural gas. Direct Benefit Transfer Scheme for liquefied petroleum gas relaunched.
- Cabinet has decided that LPG subsidy will be provided on a per-kg basis instead of a per-cylinder basis. LPG subsidy will for the first time become available to slum dwellers and migrant labourers as it will apply to all purchase of LPG irrespective of cylinder size. Earlier smaller sized cylinders were excluded from the subsidy. The subsidy will be provided through direct cash transfers to plug leakages.
- Cabinet approved India’s participation in the Chahbahar port project in Iran. This will give significant geo-strategic advantage to India by way of smooth access to Afghanistan. An Indian Joint Venture (JV) company will lease two fully constructed berths the port’s first phase for a period of 10 years, with an investment of $ 85.21 million within 12 months. Located along the Makran coast in the Gulf of Oman, Chahbahar is in close proximity to the Strait of Hormuz which facilitates about 40 per cent of the world’s oil trade, and hence has significant strategic implications for India. The road or rail link from Chahbahar would provide India the shortest access to Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, from the Nimroz province. Not only would it allow India to gain easier access to Afghanistan and central Asia without having to depend on Pakistan, it is also being touted as India’s answer to Chinese control over Pakistan’s Gwadar port, just 76 km from Chahbahar. The port was a dream project of former PM Atal Behari Vajpayee, who had inked a MoU for its joint development with the then Iranian president Mohammad Khatami in 2003.
- Prompted by controversy over dangerous research and recent laboratory accidents, the White House announced that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous.
- Twenty-two people, most of them women and children, have been hacked and clubbed to death by Ugandan rebels in the troubled east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) just days after a similar massacre. The Ugandan rebels have committed strings of atrocities since they were chased into neighbouring Congo by the Ugandan army in the 1990s. The Congolese army, supported by U.N. peacekeepers from the MONUSCO stabilisation mission, had dealt the rebels a series of severe blows earlier this year.
- One of Thailand’s most prominent scholars, Sulak Sivaraksa, is the target of a criminal complaint on charges of lese majeste for comments he made about a Thai king who died more than 400 years ago.
- Rome’s Mayor has registered 16 gay marriages entered abroad in open defiance of Italy’s law. Gay marriage is illegal in Italy.
Credits: The Hindu, Google.
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