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Shreyas Media, a division of Aadhyasree Infotainment, on Monday announced that it bagged exclusive advertising rights for Maha Kumbh Mela 2025, scheduled to be held from January 13 to February 26, next year at Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh. A press release from the city-based firm said it also secured rights for multiple other activities, including vending zones, an amusement zone and a food court at the world's largest spiritual congregation.

Hindu temple, once located at the site, was allegedly occupied, destroyed, and later transformed into an Islamic structure, alleged Chief Priest of Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir in Ayodhya, Acharya Satyendra Maharaj on Monday.

Assam STF in Murshidabad, West Bengal, BJP leader Arjun Singh alleged that 90 per cent of the civic volunteers in the state are Jamaat supporters. «You will find a Jamaat terrorist in every police station. 90 per cent of the civic volunteers who check our passports are Jamaat supporters… It's unfortunate that the Assam police are capturing terrorists in West Bengal. They work for the country while the West Bengal police only work for the state and the party,» Arjun Singh told ANI. Notably, in a joint operation, the Assam STF and West Bengal STF arrested two suspected terrorists — Abbas Sheikh and Minarul Sheikh — in Murshidabad's Hariharpara on December 19.

Amazon delivery drivers and Starbucks baristas are on strike in a handful of U.S. cities as they seek to exert pressure on the two major companies to recognize them as unionized employees or to meet demands for an inaugural labor contract. The strikes that started Thursday and Friday followed other recent standoffs between corporate America and organized labor. Large and established labor unions secured meaningful employer concessions this year following strikes by Boeing factory workers, dockworkers at East and Gulf coast ports, video game performers, and hotel and casino workers on the Las Vegas Strip. But workers at Starbucks, Amazon and some other prominent consumer brands still are fighting for their first contracts. Amazon refuses to acknowledge the organizing efforts of drivers and warehouse workers — many of whom have voted to unionize — even though the powerful Teamsters union says it represents them. Starbucks long resisted the unionization of its stores, but had agreed to negotiate a contract by the end of the year. Why are the strikes happening now?

Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Sunday hit out at the Congress, saying their «leadership is frustrated as they have been rejected by the people again and again.» Responding to Mallikarjun Kharge's statement after the Centre amended the rule to restrict access to certain poll documents, the Union Minister for Education told ANI, «The condition of the Congress is very bad. They are going through a phase of disappointment. Their leadership is frustrated because they have been rejected by the people again and again. »They round up any work of a constitutional body with their allegations," he added. «They win the elections and see EVMs alright. They lose the polls and raise questions about the EVMs».

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI engineer and whistleblower who helped train the artificial intelligence systems behind ChatGPT and later said he believed those practices violated copyright law, has died, according to his parents and San Francisco officials. He was 26.

Delhi Police on Sunday said that bomb threat emails sent to two schools in Rohini were sent by their own students. According to the police, both students sent threat emails as they wanted to postpone their exams because they were unprepared. «After investigation by the Special Cell of Delhi Police, it was found that the emails were sent to both schools by two different students of the same school. Both students had sent this email to stop the exam because they were not prepared for the exam paper,» Delhi Police said.

The notice comes in response to a petition filed by Pankaj Pathak, who alleged that the remarks were like an «attempt to start a civil war in the country.» «We felt that the statement given by Rahul Gandhi during the elections on caste census was like an attempt to start a civil war in the country».

Rishi Sunak surprised many within his own Conservative Party by calling an earlier-than-expected election on July 4 — exactly a month on from a third term win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's National Democratic Alliance. This meant the FTA talks, having entered their 14th round of intense negotiations, slipped into a more uncertain phase until the new Labour Party-led government committed itself to «deepening our bilateral ties». «We agreed to raise the ambition of our UK-India comprehensive strategic partnership… Crucially, this work will start with trade and investment, and I am pleased to say that we agreed to relaunch Free Trade Agreement negotiations early in the new year,» said newly-elected British Prime Minister Keir Starmer after his first meeting with Modi on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Brazil last month.

Congress leader Sandeep Dikshit on Saturday slammed the Aam Admi Party (AAP) national convenor Arvind Kejriwal after Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena granted permission to the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to prosecute him in the excise policy case. Expressing his surprise over what he felt was a delayed action, Sandeep Dikshit told ANI, «I wonder why it took so many days for the LG to give permission. They (Delhi ministers) should have been in jail by now....» «The liquor scam has nothing to do with the elections. The probe has been going on for 2-3 years. If the facts are believed to be correct, the Delhi government has suffered huge losses, and the excise policy has only benefited private contractors from South India...,» he said.

election-related materials, particularly electronic records such as CCTV footage. On December 9, the Punjab and Haryana High Court invoked the 1961 rulebook to order the poll panel to submit videography, CCTV footage, and copies of papers relating to votes cast at a polling station during the recent Haryana assembly elections to counsel Mehmood Pracha. The latest amendment in Rule 93(2)(a) of the Conduct of Election Rules, 1961 will allow EC to deny CCTV footage/electronic records.

The report said that according to the five-member commission headed by a retired Supreme Court judge, there was a «persistent suggestion in law enforcement circles» that some Bangladeshi prisoners might still be languishing in Indian jails. «We recommend the Ministries of Foreign and Home to extend their best efforts to identify any Bangladeshi citizens who may still remain incarcerated in India. It is beyond the jurisdiction of the commission to follow this trail outside Bangladesh,» the commission said.

Supreme Court has dismissed a plea seeking review of an order granting bail to Tamil Nadu minister V Senthil Balaji in a money laundering case related to a cash-for-jobs scam. A bench of justices Abhay S Oka and Augustine George Masih also dismissed a prayer for conducting open hearing on the review petition. «Application seeking oral hearing of the review petition is rejected. The review petition seeks review of judgment and order dated September 26, 2024. Having gone through the review petition and the connected papers, we do not find any ground to review the order sought to be reviewed. There is no error apparent on the face of the record,» the bench said in its order passed on December 17, and uploaded on the apex court website on Saturday. The bench noted that an application for recall of the same order is pending and is being heard by the court.

C T Ravi on Saturday claimed that a there was threat to his life and the government should give him protection. The MLC was arrested two days ago for allegedly using a derogatory word against Minister Laxmi Hebbalkar inside the Legislative Council in the Suvarna Vidhana Soudha in Belagavi and was released later on a court's direction. Addressing reporters with a bandage on his forehead, Ravi alleged that Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar and Minister Laxmi had hatched a conspiracy against him. «Human rights were violated. D K Shivakumar and Laxmi Hebbalkar have conspired against me,» Ravi, a former minister, said.

Delhi Lieutenant Governor Delhi LG VK Saxena on Saturday gave sanction to the Enforcement Directorate to prosecute AAP chief and Former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in the excise policy case ahead of the Delhi assembly election. On December 5, ED sought the LG's nod to prosecute Kejriwal after it allegedly found a «huge level of corruption in framing and implementation» of the excise policy. This was mentioned in prosecution complaint no. 7 filed in the Rouse Avenue court on May 17 this year. The court took cognisance of the complaint on July 9. ED's prosecution complaint alleged that Kejriwal conspired with member of the «South Group» to receive Rs 100 crore and passed on undue benefits to private entities by formulating and implementing a “tailor-made” liquor policy.

The proposal is much narrower than the government's push to make Google sell its Chrome browser, which Google called a drastic attempt to intervene in the search market. Google urged U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington to move cautiously in deciding what the company must do to restore competition, after his ruling that the company holds an illegal monopoly in online search and related advertising. Courts have cautioned against imposing antitrust remedies that chill innovation, Google said in court papers.

Google said Friday what it thought should change to address a ruling that it had illegally maintained a monopoly over online search: not much. Google's proposal followed the landmark ruling in August by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who said Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in online search by paying companies like Apple and Samsung to be the search engine that automatically appears when users open a web browser or a smartphone. In response, the government last month asked the judge to force Google to sell Chrome, the world's most popular browser, among other remedies. In Google's own proposal to fix the search monopoly, it asked Mehta to allow it to continue to pay other companies for its search engine to get prime placement. But it said those agreements should be less restrictive than in the past.

Qualcomm's central processors are properly licensed under an agreement with Arm Holdings, a jury found in a trial in U.S. federal court that removed some, but not all, uncertainty around the mobile chipmaker's expansion into the laptop market. A week of courtroom arguments and deliberations ended in a mistrial after the jury failed to resolve one of three questions put before it in the trial between the two chip giants. Qualcomm said the result affirmed its right to innovate, but Arm vowed to seek a new trial. Arm's shares were down 1.8% in extended trading after the news, and Qualcomm's shares were up 1.8%.

Meta Platforms' WhatsApp in a lawsuit accusing Israel's NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the messaging app to install spy software allowing unauthorized surveillance. U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, granted a motion by WhatsApp and found NSO liable for hacking and breach of contract. The case will now proceed to a trial only on the issue of damages, Hamilton said. NSO Group did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Frank McCourt is crafting a fundamental overhaul of TikTok's business model as part of a plan to bid for the Chinese-owned short-form video app, he told Reuters. McCourt, who formerly owned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, said he has received verbal funding commitments totaling $20 billion from a consortium of investors to rescue the app from legal purgatory as it awaits a Supreme Court decision to determine if it will be forced to sell its US operations. His vision for TikTok includes revamping the company's advertising model so that users will have control over the ads and type of content they want to see. Over time, TikTok could earn revenue through ecommerce and licensing data for artificial intelligence training models — with users' consent — which will diminish the business' reliance on ads.