Hindustan Times News | 22nd March 2022 | 8 AM

HT Daily News Wrap

Pramod Sawant will continue as Goa’s chief minister for the second term, Ukrainian president insists on the need for meeting with the Russian president to end the war, Vidya Balan feels that Kahaani 2 could have done better, blames demonetization and other top news in this bulletin.
Pramod Sawant will continue as Goa’s chief minister for a second term, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) central observer Narendra Singh Tomar announced on Monday evening. After a marathon meeting in which Tomar along with co-observer L Murugan held one-on-one meetings with BJP legislators at the state party headquarters, Pramod Sawant emerged as the unanimous choice to head the state for the second consecutive term. Having lost the election on his seat by over 6,500 votes, Pushkar Singh Dhami, who has been picked for another term as the Uttarakhand chief minister, faces an uphill task of rebuilding his credibility among the masses. The 46-year-old was defeated by Bhuwan Kapri of the Congress by 6,579 votes from Khatima constituency, although he earlier won from the seat twice in a row. Also, the seats won by the Bharatiya Janata Party halved to four in his home district of Udham Singh Nagar in the recently held assembly elections. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday insisted that a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin “in any format” is needed to end the war in Ukraine. “I believe that without this meeting it is impossible to fully understand what they are ready for in order to stop the war,” Zelensky said in an interview with the Ukraine regional media outlet Suspilne. A Moscow court said on Monday that Meta was guilty of “extremist activity”, but the ruling will not affect its WhatsApp messenger service, focusing on the U.S. firm’s already-banned Facebook and Instagram social networks.The ruling came as the Ukraine war is set to complete a month. Vidya Balan feels that her 2016 film Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh, the sequel to the 2012 film Kahaani, could have drawn more viewers to the theatres if it were not for demonetisation. The film was released on December 2, less than a month after the Government of India announced the demonetisation of all ₹500 and ₹1,000 banknotes. Rahul Dravid and Rohit Sharma have been handed the tricky task of finding the perfect team combination and assigning specific roles to players as India gear up for this year’s T20 World Cup, which is less than eight months away. The home T20I assignments against West Indies and Sri Lanka were India’s first two assignments in the lead-up to the T20 showpiece event in Australia.