IndianRepublic.in

Indian customs officers found 45 live reptiles sedated and hidden inside food packets in the luggage of two passengers arriving from Bangkok, in one of two recent wildlife cases the government disclosed Representational Image Only / Canva Stocks The passengers, both Indian nationals, landed at Tiruchirappalli airport in Tamil Nadu on 26 October on a flight routed through Colombo. Acting on prior intelligence, officers from the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the airport’s air intelligence unit searched their bags and recovered the animals from 27 separate food containers. The haul comprised 23 corn snakes, 16 ball pythons, five Argentine black and white tegus and a single white iguana. None of the species is native to India; all are common in the international exotic pet trade. The animals were seized and both passengers were arrested under India’s customs law. Separately, the environment ministry said it had sent a central team to Madhya Pradesh to investigate the death of ...

India used a regional security meeting in the Philippines to press its argument that countries which fund or shelter armed groups should face no tolerance from the rest of the world, and said the United States had reaffirmed its support for India against cross-border terrorism Image Via: @SecWar on X India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh, met his American, Japanese, Singaporean and South Korean counterparts in a single day on the margins of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus in Cebu. In the meeting with US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the two reviewed a ten-year defence framework agreed between the countries and discussed quicker technology transfer, closer integration of defence industries and the security of supply chains. According to India’s defence ministry, Singh called for an uncompromising approach towards states that support, train or finance armed groups, and Hegseth reaffirmed American support for India against cross-border terrorism. No American account of ...

India and Mexico have formally begun negotiating a preferential trade agreement, signing terms of reference that set out the scope, method and timetable of the talks. Image Via: PIB India A preferential agreement is narrower than a full free trade deal, cutting tariffs on selected goods rather than opening markets across the board. The terms agreed cover market access for goods, rules of origin, customs procedures, trade facilitation, dispute settlement, sanitary and plant health rules, technical barriers to trade and trade remedies. The negotiations follow an understanding reached between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Claudia Sheinbaum when they met on the margins of the G7 summit in Canada in June 2025. The terms were signed during a visit by India’s commerce secretary, who held talks with Mexico’s undersecretary for foreign trade, standing in for the economy secretary. Both sides identified automotive components, chemicals, electronics, pharmaceuticals, agriculture a...

Cyclone Arnab came ashore on India’s southeastern coast in a prolonged landfall lasting six hours early on Wednesday, killing at least eight people, uprooting tens of thousands of trees and cutting power across coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh. Representational Image Via: @IndianTechGuy on X The storm crossed the Andhra Pradesh and Yanam coastline between 2am and 8am, passing some 20 kilometres east-northeast of Narsapur and about 60 kilometres southwest of Kakinada. It arrived as a very severe cyclonic storm, with sustained winds of 125 to 135 kilometres an hour gusting to 150, and weakened to a severe cyclonic storm once inland. Forecasters expected it to decay into a deep depression within hours and to track north-northwest. 39 NDRF teams on ground in 5 states. 4 teams being airlifted for deployment in Andhra as additional reserve; people will be evacuated from low-lying areas before landfall.” : NDRF DIG Mohsen Shahedi on preparations for cyclone Arnab #WeathAlert #weatherfor...

India is pressing the global financial crime watchdog to examine Pakistan’s record on acting against the head of Jaish-e-Mohammed, as the Financial Action Task Force opens a three-day plenary in Paris running until Friday File Photo Via: @SukhiNehra on X At issue is the whereabouts of Masood Azhar, whom the United Nations designated a global terrorist in 2019. Pakistan has said he has been in Afghanistan since that year. The Taliban administration rejected that account in September, saying he was not in the country and that Islamabad had never formally raised the matter with Kabul. New Delhi has argued that the contradiction undermines Pakistan’s position, and that Islamabad should act against figures on its own territory rather than make announcements. It pointed to a bounty of seven million Pakistani rupees placed on Azhar last month, which India dismissed as a gesture rather than enforcement. Indian officials have spent the past week urging diplomats from partner countries and...

Three days before India’s opposition holds the largest rally of its campaign against the country’s election chief, the dispute surrounding it has stopped being only about electoral rolls. It has become an argument about who may gather in the capital, where, in what numbers, and at whose expense File Photo Via: @RahulGandhi on X The INDIA bloc meets at Ramlila Maidan on 1 November to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a nationwide revision of electoral rolls the opposition says removed voters improperly. Delhi Police have cleared the rally for 10am to 5pm, with conditions: high-definition cameras at every gate and across the seating, a dedicated control room with at least five monitors, drinking water and women’s toilets, volunteers for crowd control, nobody on the ground overnight, and no procession beyond the venue. That last condition is the significant one. Every road into Ramlila Maidan will be barricaded and manned to stop any march towa...

The aircraft came in low from the left, over the point where the Varuna meets the Ganga, turned above the water in front of the crowd and went out to the right towards the bridge and the spires of the Kashi Vishwanath temple Image Via:@myogiadityanath on X The Indian Air Force marked its 94th anniversary with a display at Namo Ghat in Varanasi, the city Prime Minister Narendra Modi represents in parliament. He watched from the main gallery with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, the state governor Anandiben Patel and the chief minister Yogi Adityanath. The air chief presented him with a memento before the flying began. मां गंगा की लहरें, नमो घाट का अद्भुत नज़ारा और आसमान में भारतीय वायुसेना के विमानों की रोमांचक उड़ानें! काशी का वातावरण विशेष आकर्षण का केंद्र बना ! @narendramodi जी #VaranasiAirShow #WingsOverGanga #IndianAirForce #NamoGhat #Kashi #PMModi #narendramodi https://t.co/h9OtkLwVmF — जितेन्द्र मेहरा (@Jitendramehra93) October 25, 2026 Around a hundred aircraft took part, ...

India’s Narcotics Control Bureau sent 38 teams into 38 locations across three northeastern states in simultaneous raids aimed at the finances of a drug syndicate run from Myanmar, arresting 18 people and freezing 1,424 bank accounts File Photo Source: @AmitShah The raids were carried out in the early hours of 23 October by the bureau alongside Mizoram police and the Enforcement Directorate, the agency that investigates financial crime. Teams searched sites in Aizawl and Champhai in Mizoram, including Zokhawthar on the Myanmar border, as well as Churachandpur in Manipur and the Cachar corridor in Assam. Property worth 178 million rupees was attached. Officers seized 1.2 million rupees in cash and 500 detonators. The ministry listed no narcotics among the recoveries. Modi Govt deals another lethal blow against drugs with Operation Trident. Our agencies launched a barrage of simultaneous crackdowns across 38 locations in Assam, Mizoram and Manipur on 23 October, smashing an internati...

Smog settled over Bandra Kurla Complex on Saturday morning and the city’s municipal corporation spent the day setting out, at length, how much better Mumbai’s air has become Image Source: @iam_Jinesh on X Mumbai has recorded 231 days in the good or satisfactory air quality categories so far this year, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said, against 218 in all of 2025, 216 in 2024 and 185 in 2023. PM10, the coarser airborne dust, is down by about 48 per cent since 2017-18, according to the environment ministry’s monitoring portal. It listed the machinery behind this. Twenty-eight guidelines for construction sites and seventy-six ward squads to enforce them, each required to inspect two sites a day. Compulsory sensor monitors at building sites, 3,166 of them wired to a central dashboard. Twenty-nine road sweepers. Covered debris lorries with washed wheels, tracked through a dedicated system. Cleaner fuel at 384 of the city’s 593 bakeries, which it calculates produce 3.5 per cent...