Hindustan Times News | 2nd March 2022 | 8 AM

HT Daily News Wrap

Tanzanian content creator Kili Paul has thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi for praising him, The World Bank is preparing $3 billion in funding for Ukraine, There is no evidence that Aryan Khan was part of a larger drugs conspiracy & other top news in this bulletin.
The World Bank is preparing $3 billion in funding for Ukraine as it works with the International Monetary Fund work to support the country following its invasion by Russia. The World Bank’s board will consider a fast-disbursing budget support operation for at least $350 million that will be submitted this week, followed by $200 million in support for health and education, the two institutions said in a joint statement on Tuesday. The IMF board could consider as early as next week Ukraine’s request for emergency money through the Rapid Financing Instrument, the Washington-based institutions said. That would come mostly without the conditions on the borrower country normally required by the fund. The IMF also said that it continues to work on a review of Ukraine’s 2020 loan, $2.2 billion of which remains to pay out. Board members last week questioned whether they have leeway under fund rules to approve more disbursements based on the political and economic uncertainty caused by the war, according to people familiar with the matter. The US believes that while Russia may have had challenges in the initial phase of its invasion of Ukraine – largely because it underestimated the nature of Ukraine’s resistance and overestimated its own ability to take over Kyiv – Moscow still has formidable combat power it has not used, will learn lessons from the setbacks, and work through it to seek to achieve its military objectives. Experts suggest that it is precisely because of the setbacks that Russia faced over the weekend – it has not been able to capture a single city even as its aggression has drawn global flak – that Russia has begun deploying more destructive power in the coming days, with mounting human costs. On Monday, John Kirby, Pentagon spokesperson, said, “We know clearly they have intentions with respect to Kyiv. What we have also seen is Ukrainian resisting quite effectively, around Kyiv. And Russians have not only experienced a stiff and determined resistance by the Ukrainians but also logistics and sustainment problems of their own.” There is no evidence that Aryan Khan, the son of actor Shah Rukh Khan, was part of a larger drugs conspiracy or an international drugs trafficking syndicate, and there were several irregularities in the raid on the yacht Cordelia during which he was arrested, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), has found, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named. Indeed, contrary to the allegations of NCB’s Mumbai unit, some of the key findings of the SIT, shared by officials with HT, are: Aryan Khan was never in possession of drugs hence there was no need to take his phone and check his chats; the chats do not suggest Khan was part of any international syndicate; the raid was not video-recorded as mandated by the NCB manual; and the drugs recovered from multiple accused arrested in the case shown as single recovery. The Delhi government has approved withdrawal of 17 cases lodged by the Delhi Police against farmers who were protesting on city’s borders against the three farm laws during 2020-2021, including a case related to violence at the Red Fort during a tractor rally taken out by the farmers on Republic Day last year, according to official documents seen by HT. The Delhi government has approved withdrawal of 17 cases lodged by the Delhi Police against farmers who were protesting on city’s borders against the three farm laws during 2020-2021, including a case related to violence at the Red Fort during a tractor rally taken out by the farmers on Republic Day last year, according to official documents seen by HT. More than four decades after a landmark ruling on death sentence cases, a bench in the Supreme Court has made psychological evaluation of the condemned prisoner mandatory, along with seeking a report on the inmate’s conduct at the time of examining whether the gallows remains the only fitting punishment. The measure has been adopted by a bench, headed by justice Uday U Lalit, which took recourse to the spirit of the Supreme Court’s verdict in Bachan Singh vs State of Punjab (1980). This verdict established the doctrine of “rarest of rare” crime in handing down capital punishment while mandating a comparative analysis of aggravating and mitigating circumstances in connection to the accused.