NEWS

New Delhi: Polls campaign for Urban Local Bodies polls in Jammu and Kashmir has gained momentum with people wooing voters in this region of Jammu and Kashmir as the dates for the first phase of Urban Local Bodies (ULB) polls draw closer.

The ULB polls are scheduled to begin on October 8. A total of 422 wards, covering municipal corporations, municipal committees and municipal councils, spread across various districts, both in Jammu and Kashmir divisions, will go to polls in the first phase of the four-phased election.

New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary Ram Madhav has said that Caste-based untouchability has ended in India but “political untouchability” has been invented.

Speaking at an event on ‘Gandhi-Mandela Legacy: Way Forward’, organised by RIS (Research and Information System, an autonomous policy research institute) to celebrate 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi and 100th birth anniversary of Nelson Mandela, Madhav said that both Gandhi and Mandela had adversaries but not enemies in their political lives.

New Delhi: The Centre has dissolved the Medical Council of India (MCI), which regulates medical education in the country, and replaced it with a seven-member Board of Governors (BoG) by bringing an ordinance.

The BoG has been appointed initially for a period of one year, and will be the sole decision-making body till the National Medical Commission (NMC) Bill, 2017 -- meant to replace the MCI -- is cleared in Parliament. The Bill is pending in Lok Sabha.

The seven members in the BoG include three doctors from the AIIMS- Dr VK Paul (former HoD paediatrics and current member, Niti Aayog), Dr Randeep Guleria (Director) and Dr Nikhil Tandon (professor endocrinology).

New Delhi: India has successfully tested a pre-induction trial of India’s indigenously developed beyond visual range air-to-air missile (BVRAAM) ‘Astra’ over Bay of Bengal near Chandipur in Odisha.

The missile was fired from a fighter aircraft of the Indian Air Force in the afternoon and targeted an unmanned aerial vehicle ‘Banshi’ which it successfully engaged, the sources said.

‘Astra’ was successfully test fired by the IAF from a Su-30 aircraft that had taken off from Air Force station, Kalaikunda, a defence statement said. The missile successfully engaged a maneuvering target with high precision, meeting the mission objectives, it said.