Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR), who has been rallying opposition forces against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, on Thursday hinted at a grand opposition alliance and said there will be sensational news in the next two to three months regarding such a front. The Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) chief made the remark after holding a meeting with former prime minister and Janata Dal (Secular) chief HD Deve Gowda here on various issues. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking in English, and Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin, speaking in Tamil and English, took forward the debate on language when they shared the dais during the former’s visit to the city for the launch of a clutch of infrastructure projects. The PM, in his speech, avoided the politically combative tone he sometimes adopts when touring states ruled by parties other than his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — he was very combative in Hyderabad earlier in the day — and the visit was characterised by cordiality and warmth, but both leaders did make the points they wanted to. The hijab controversy resurfaced in Karnataka’s Mangaluru district on Thursday, with a degree college in the city issuing a ban on hijab or a headscarf inside the campus. On May 16, the college decided to ban the hijab on the college premises, and a notice was issued the next day. This week, a group of students, some of them affiliated with Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), held a protest and claimed that the order is not being enforced. After the initial euphoria over the monsoon moving fast towards the Indian coast and arriving early in Kerala — it should have arrived already by those projections — meteorologists said it is likely to make a weak, and likely marginally delayed, onset over Kerala following which it will progress slowly during the first week of June. K-pop or Korean pop, an immensely popular music genre in the world owing to its craze among youngsters, got its first-ever Indian star after 18-year-old singer from Odisha, Sriya Lenka was chosen to be one of the new group members of the K-pop group, Blackswan on Thursday along with a Brazilian girl. In December last year, Lenka, a lanky girl from Rourkela city, was selected for the last leg of training in Seoul to become a member of the Korean pop band Blackswan, after its oldest member Hyeme left the group in November 2020. Amy Satterthwaite, the seventh most prolific batter in women’s one-day internationals, has called time on her representative career after New Zealand Cricket (NZC) decided not to award her a central contract. The hard-hitting all-rounder, who made her international debut in 2007 and captained her country in 2018 and 2019, scored 4,639 runs in 145 ODIs at an average of 38.33, and another 1,784 for her country in Twenty20 matches. “It is with a degree of sadness that I announce my retirement from international cricket,” the 35-year-old said in a news release on Thursday.
