• Dara Singh Chauhan, a former minister in the Yogi Adityanath cabinet and a BJP legislator from the Madhuban constituency, formally joined the Samajwadi Party in the presence of its national president Akhilesh Yadav in Lucknow.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested ES Ranganathan, Director (Marketing) of the Gas Authority of India (GAIL) and five others in an alleged bribery case

• A Haridwar court on has sent religious leader Yeti Narsinganand to 14-day judicial custody after he was arrested by Haridwar police for allegedly making inflammatory remarks at a Dharma Sansad in the city in a hate speech case.

• The Nagar Kotwali police arrested Mahamandaleshwar Yeti Narsimhanand Maharaj of Juna Akhara from Sarvanand Ghat in Haridwar where he was reportedly fasting at Sarbananda Ghat demanding the release of Wasim Rizvi, former chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Central Shia Waqf board who was earlier arrested in this same case.

• Altogether there are three cases registered against Swami Yeti Narsimhanand in Haridwar Kotwali. He has also been sued for making indecent remarks on women.

• Wasim Rizvi alias Jitendra Narayan Tyagi was also arrested and sent to jail. Religious leader Yeti Narsinganand apparently called for the genocide and use of arms against Muslims while speaking at an event in Haridwar from December 17 to 19, 2021. An FIR was also registered against him along with many others in the case.

• The Supreme Court has issued notice to Uttarakhand and Delhi Police on a petition seeking an independent enquiry into the Haridwar Dharam Sansad speeches allegedly inciting violence against minorities.

• In a shot in the arm for the BJP ahead of the Uttarakhand Assembly polls, state's women Congress president and former Nainital MLA Sarita Arya has joined the ruling party and has been expelled from the Congress.

• Arya had won from Nainital in 2012 but had lost the seat in the 2017 Assembly polls to BJP candidate Sanjeev Arya, who is now in the Congress.

• A Pakistani court has denied bail to three persons belonging to the minority Ahmadi community who were arrested under blasphemy charges for sharing alleged objectionable religious content in a WhatsApp group.

• The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) Cybercrime Wing has recently arrested Mahmood Iqbal Hashmi, Shiraz Ahmad and Zaheer Ahmad from Lahore and booked them under various sections of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA).

• The FIA took action against the Ahmadi community members on a complaint of an individual, Mohammad Irfan, who alleged that they have added him to a WhatsApp group which contained blasphemous material.

• Pakistan's Parliament in 1974 declared the Ahmadi community as non-Muslims. A decade later, they were banned from calling themselves Muslims.

• They are banned from preaching and from travelling to Saudi Arabia for pilgrimage In Pakistan, around 10 million out of the 220 million population are non-Muslims.

• According to the 2017 census, Hindus constitute the largest religious minority in Pakistan. Christians make up the second-largest religious minority.

• Taliban burned musical instrument in front of a musician in Afghanistan's Paktia province, a video posted by an Afghan journalist shows, in which the musician was seen crying after his instrument was set on fire.

• A viral video posted by Abdulhaq Omeri, a senior journalist of Afghanistan also shows that a man with a gun was laughing at him, while another was making a video of his "miserable condition."

• The number of Indian billionaires grew from 102 to 142, while 84 per cent of households in the country suffered a decline in their income in 2021, which was also a year marked by tremendous loss of life and livelihoods, according to non profit Oxfam India's latest report published on Jan 17 .

• The report 'Inequality Kills' comes ahead of the World Economic Forum's Davos Agenda. It indicates that the collective wealth of India's 100 richest people hit a record high of Rs 57.3 lakh crore in 2021.

• In India, during the pandemic (since March 2020, through to November 30th, 2021) the wealth of billionaires increased from Rs 23.14 lakh crore to Rs 53.16 lakh crore. More than 4.6 crore Indians, meanwhile, are estimated to have fallen into extreme poverty in 2020 (nearly half of the global new poor according to the United Nations).

• The stark wealth inequality in India is a result of an economic system rigged in favour of the super-rich over the poor and marginalised, the report said. It advocates a one per cent surcharge on the richest 10 per cent of the Indian population to fund inequality combating measures such as higher investments in school education, universal healthcare, and social security benefits like maternity leaves, paid leaves and pension for all Indians.

The 10 richest men in the world have seen their global wealth

double to $1.5 trillion since the start of the global pandemic following a surge in share and property prices that has widened the gap between rich and poor, according to a report from Oxfam.

• Urging governments to impose a one-off 99 per cent wealth tax on Covid-19 windfall gains, the charity said World Bank figures showed 163 million more people had been driven below the poverty line while the super rich were benefiting from the stimulus provided by governments around the world to mitigate the impact of the virus, the report said.

• Oxfam projects that by 2030, 3.3 billion people will be living on less than $5.50 per day. The charity said the incomes of 99 per cent of the world's population had reduced from March 2020 to October 2021, when Elon Musk, the founder of the electric car company Tesla, and the other nine richest billionaires had been collectively growing wealthier by $1.3 billion a day.

• Musk, according to figures taken from Forbes magazine's billionaires list, saw his wealth increase 10-fold to $294 billion in the first 20 months of the pandemic, catapulting him above Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, to be the world's richest person, the report said.

• During a period when technology stocks were soaring on Wall Street, Bezos's net wealth rose 67 per cent to $203 billion, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg's wealth doubled to $118 billion, while the wealth of the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, increased by 31 per cent to $137 billion.

• While people on more modest incomes have also seen their assets rise in value during the pandemic, Oxfam said the 10 richest men own six times as much wealth as the bottom 40 per cent (3.1 billion people). It would take the 10 billionaires 414 years to spend their combined wealth at a rate of a million dollars each per day, the charity added, the report said.