Live news updates: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will flag off a Vande Bharat Express train connecting Secunderabad with Visakhapatnam on Sunday via video conferencing, his office said. The train will be the eighth Vande Bharat Express to be introduced by the Indian Railways and will be the first one connecting the two Telugu speaking states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, covering a distance of around 700 kilometre, a statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office said.
Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday pitched for increasing efforts at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for getting patent waivers for diagnostics and therapeutics used to deal with the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. In June last year, members of the WTO agreed to grant a temporary patent waiver for the manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines for five years. It was agreed to start talks on including therapeutics and diagnostics, as proposed by India and South Africa, under the purview of this waiver after six months.
The Lord Venkateswara swamy shrine on the Tirumala hills here, considered as the world’s richest Hindu temple, has earned over Rs 1,450 crore in 2022 by way of offering (hundi collections) from devotees. According to Dharma Reddy Executive Officer of Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams (TTD), as many as 23.7 million devotes visited the temple last year.
Omicron new subvariant XBB.1.5 is estimated to account for 43 per cent of the Covid-19 cases in the US for the week ending January 14, according to data released Friday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The subvariant XBB.1.5 is spreading quickly in the US. It made up 30.4 per cent of the total cases in the week ending January 7, rising from 20.1 per cent from a week before and 11.8 per cent from two weeks prior, Xinhua news agency reported, citing the CDC.