India’s first voter Shyam Saran Negi died on Saturday morning at his residence in Himachal Pradesh’s Kinnaur. He was over 100 years old.

On November 3, Negi had cast his vote through postal ballot for the state’s Assembly polls, the Election Commission said.

The EC mourned Negi’s demise and said he had great faith in democracy.

A Delhi court has granted interim bail to one accused for a period of 60 days on the grounds of the pregnancy of his wife and noted that the scheduled delivery is in mid-November.

The accused Sayed Shallauddin was arrested last month by Delhi Police in PFI related case registered under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

Additional Sessions Judge Sanjay Khanagwal on Friday while granting interim bail noted that the verification report of the investigation office revealed that the wife of the applicant/accused is pregnant and the delivery is expected on November 16/17, 2022.

India’s coronavirus tally climbed to 4,46,59,447 on Saturday with 1,082 fresh infections, while the number of active cases declined to 15,200, according to Union health ministry data.

The toll due to the viral infection climbed to 5,30,486 with seven fatalities, including two deaths reconciled by Kerala, the data updated at 8 am stated.

The active cases comprise 0.03 per cent of the total infections. The national COVID-19 recovery rate has increased to 98.78 per cent, according to the ministry’s website.

A decrease of 505 cases has been recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours.

On Friday, Italian Climate activists threw pea soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘The Sower’ painting at the Kroeller-Mueller museum in the Netherlands.

According to the New York Post, four women who belonged to the environmental group Ultima Generazione (Last Generation) directed the stunt and shouted slogans against global warming and fossil fuels.

“These issues should be on the front pages of the news channels and political agendas every minute, but are instead only addressed with ‘scandalous’ actions like the one this morning,” the group said in a statement, the New York Post reported.

Previously, in London, environmental protestors from the group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on Van Gogh’s ‘The Sunflowers’ painting at London’s National Gallery.

Unanimously reelected as president of the Apna Dal (Sonelal), Union minister Anupriya Patel has said she will never retreat from the path of fighting for social justice irrespective of the challenges, including those from “own people”.

The Apna Dal (S) is a constituent member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and is part of the BJP governments at the Centre as well as in Uttar Pradesh.

Patel was chosen as party president at its one-day national convention here on Friday, the first after Apna Dal (S) was recognised by the Election Commission as a state-level party.

Senior party leader Jawahar Lal Patel, the chief election officer for the party presidential election, said Anupriya Patel was the lone candidate for the post and the house unanimously chose her as president once again.

Storms ripped through parts of Texas on Friday, flattening homes and toppling trees, with local officials in one county reporting at least two dozen people injured.

One community hit hard was Powderly, Texas, near the border with Oklahoma and about 120 miles (193 kilometers) northeast of Dallas.

Randi Johnson, chief of the Powderly Volunteer Fire Department, told The Paris News newspaper that she wasn’t aware anyone had been killed but knew of injuries.

Uttar Pradesh Assembly Speaker Satish Mahana has said he had “no role” in the disqualification of Samajwadi Party MLA Azam Khan following his conviction in a hate speech case, dismissing RLD president Jayant Chaudhary’s charge of bias.

In a letter to Chaudhary on Friday, Mahana said, “At the level of Speaker, no decision to cancel any membership is taken in the event of any member being punished by the court.”

A copy of the letter went viral on social media.

Mahana could not be reached for his comments on the matter, but sources in the assembly secretariat confirmed that the letter had been sent to Chaudhary.

Chaudhary had written to the speaker on October 29 recording his concerns over the prompt disqualification of Khan.

In his letter, the Rajya Sabha member wrote, “The membership of senior Samajwadi Party leader Mohammad Azam Khan has been cancelled with immediate effect by your office taking a quick decision in the hate speech verdict by the special MP-MLA court.”

Russia and China have again blocked plans supported by the European Union, the United States and 23 other nations to protect three vast stretches of ocean around Antarctica from most fishing.

But conservationists said there were some positives from a two-week international meeting on the future of Antarctica’s pristine waters that concluded in Australia late Friday.

Those included an agreement on new protections for krill fishing and a commitment to meet in Chile next year to further discuss the proposal for the new marine protected areas, which combined would cover a swath of ocean larger than India.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her first public appearance since the brutal attack on her husband, rallied grassroots activists Friday, saying the midterm elections for control of Congress are a fight for democracy and “very winnable.”

“People say to me, What can I do to make you feel better?’ I say: Vote!’” Pelosi told those on the call.

“I believe that this race is very winnable,” Pelosi said.

Her voice cracked at times as she said of her husband’s recovery, “It’s going to be a long haul.”

Pelosi thanked those on a video call for the outpouring of support for Paul Pelosi, 82, who suffered a fractured skull and other injuries after an intruder broke into their San Francisco home late last week and bludgeoned him with a hammer in what authorities say was an intentional and political attack.

Five Indian-Americans are in race for the US House of Representatives when the country goes for its mid-term polls on November 8.

If the pollsters and opinions of political pundits are any indication, Indian-Americans are likely to have a 100 per cent strike rate for the House of Representatives. The four incumbents – Ami Bera, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal – are likely to be re-elected. All four are from the Democratic party.

Adding to the so-called Samosa Caucus of Indian-Americans in the House of Representatives would be entrepreneur and businessman Shri Thanedar, who is seeking his election from the 13th Congressional District of Michigan.

The opposition Congress on Friday announced its first list of 43 candidates for the Gujarat Assembly elections, fielding Rajya Sabha MP Amee Yagnik from the Ghatlodia constituency which is currently held by Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel.

Senior leader and former party MLA Arjun Modhwadia has been nominated from the Porbandar seat, which he had lost to the BJP’s Babu Bokhiriya in 2012 and 2017.

Yagnik has been chosen to fight from Ahmedabad’s Ghatlodia seat, currently held by Chief Minister Patel.

Of the 43 seats for which the opposition party has declared its candidates, only one seat, Jhalod (ST) of Dahod district, is currently held by it.

Angry supporters of Imran Khan took to the streets across Pakistan after Friday prayers to protest against the assassination bid on the ousted prime minister who, in a dramatic address to the nation from a hospital, vowed to resume his march to Islamabad demanding fresh general elections.

While Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party insisted that Thursday’s attack was a “prelude to a well-thought-out conspiracy” to assassinate their leader, the federal government has asked the PTI-led Punjab provincial government to constitute a high-level joint investigation team (JIT) for a thorough probe to bring facts to light.

Khan, 70, suffered bullet injuries in the right leg when two gunmen fired at him on Thursday in the Wazirabad area of Punjab province, where he was leading a protest march against the government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, just 1,600 light-years away.

Scientists reported Friday that this black hole is 10 times more massive than our sun. And it’s three times closer than the previous record-holder.

It was identified by observing the motion of its companion star, which orbits the black hole at about the same distance as Earth orbits the sun.

The black hole was initially identified using the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, said Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

Farmers in Odisha’s Kendrapara district protested on Friday, demanding water for irrigating their fields.

They blocked the Kendrapara-Gandakhia Road at Ayeba Chhack, stating that many villages in Kendrapara block were not receiving water for agriculture.

Farmers in Kendrapara, Pattamundai, Jamboo and Marsaghai get water from the canals in October to grow black grams, green grams, potatoes, sugar canes and vegetables. However, this year the thin flow of water in the canals has caused an alarm, said Madhab Das, the vice-president of the district unit of Krusaka Sabha.