·       Melbourne Renegades star Harmanpreet Kaur became the first Indian player to be named the Women Big Bash League (WBBL) Player of the Tournament, while Phoebe Litchfield has been named the Young Gun of Weber WBBL  /07's 'Young Gun'.

·       Harmanpreet Kaur enjoyed a dominant season in red, ending the regular season as her side's leading batter with 399 runs and bowler with 15 wickets.

·       Kaur was voted as the competition's top player by the standing umpires at each match, polling 31 votes to finish three clear of Perth Scorchers pair Beth Mooney and Sophie Devine on 28 votes each. Grace Harris (25 votes) and Georgia Redmayne (24 votes), both of the Brisbane Heat, and Hurricanes batter Mignon du Preez (24 votes) round out the top six.

·       Kaur joins New Zealand pair Devine (twice) and Amy Satterthwaite as international players to be awarded the competition's top individual honour, with Mooney, Meg Lanning and Ellyse Perry also previous recipients.

·       On the other hand, Sydney Thunder's Phoebe Litchfield was named Weber WBBL|07's 'Young Gun'. The Young Gun award is given to the best player under 21 years of age, as selected by Cricket Australia's National Selection Panel.

·       Previous winners of the award are Darcie Brown, Hannah Darlington, Georgia Wareham, Sophie Molineux, Ashleigh Gardner and Lauren Cheatle. 

·       The Defence Ministry HAS approved a proposal to procure GSAT-7C satellite and related equipment for the Indian Air Force (IAF) at a cost of Rs 2,236 crore.

·       The procurement is being made to enhance the communication network of the IAF .

·       The decision to clear the procurement was taken at a meeting of the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) chaired by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh.

·       The DAC accorded Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) for one capital acquisition proposal of the IAF for its modernisation and operational needs amounting to Rs 2,236 crore under the category of 'Make in India', the defence ministry said.

·       It said the project envisages complete design, development and launching of satellite in India.

·       The BJP’s social engineering for the upcoming Uttar Pradesh elections appears to be taking shape, with the government listing a legislative proposal to amend the list of Scheduled Tribes (STs) for the poll-bound state in the upcoming winter session of Parliament. A similar bill to amend the list of STs in Tripura, where the BJP is facing heat from the Trinamool Congress, is part of the proposed legislative business.

·       In all, 26 new bills and three others that had already been introduced, have been lined up for the forthcoming session. The bulletin released by the Lok Sabha  has also listed a bill to repeal the three contentious farm laws that were enacted by Parliament last year.

·       The BJP’s poll mantra in UP, incidentally, for the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections and the 2017 Assembly polls had been the consolidation of the non-Yadav other backward classes (OBCs), with focus on the most and extremely backward castes, which were previously supporting the BSP. 

·       Ten days after country’s first world class railway station in Bhopal was renamed, Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan has said that a proposal to rename Indore’s Patalpani railway station as Amar Krantikari Tantya Bheel station would be sent to the centre shortly.

·       Shimla tops the list of cities scoring highest on urban Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) index. Coimbatore and Chandigarh were at second and third position in the ranking of urban SDG index. Thiruvananthpuram, Kochi, Panaji, Pune, Tiruchirapalli, Ahmedabad and Nagpur are among the list of top 10 cities.

·       The Niti Aayog on Nov 23  launched the SDG Urban Index & Dashboard (2021-22) which ranks 56 urban areas on 77 SDG indicators across 46 targets of the SDG framework.

·       The BJP  has  suffered a setback in Himachal Pradesh after its state unit vice-president Kripal Parmar resigned from his post.

·       He posted his resignation letter addressed to state party president Suresh Kashyap on Facebook.

·       Parmar said that for the last four years, he was continuously being ignored in the BJP and he could no longer bear it.

·        Trapped in conflicts, the children of West and Central Africa are the most recruited by armed groups in the world and also have the highest number of victims of sexual violence, says a report released  by the United Nations Children’s Fund.

·       For five years the region has seen increased conflicts in which more than 21,000 children have been recruited by government forces and armed groups, says the report. In addition, more than 2,200 children in the region have been victims of sexual violence since 2016, says the report.

·       More than 3,500 children have been abducted, making it the region with the second-highest abductions in the world, said the report.

·       Since 2005, when the U.N. established a system to monitor and report on serious violations against children, such as recruitment, abduction, rape and attacks on schools and hospitals, one out of four violations globally was committed in West and Central Africa, said the report.

·       In conflict-affected countries such as Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Chad, Congo, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, violence has had devastating humanitarian consequences for children and communities, with the pandemic exacerbating the situation, said the U.N.

·       More than 57 million children are in need of humanitarian assistance, a number that’s doubled since last year as a result of conflict and the virus.

·       Conflict in the four countries straddling the Lake Chad basin — Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria — has displaced some 3 million people and in Burkina Faso, where a jihadist insurgency has killed thousands, child recruitment rose at least five-fold this year, up from four documented cases in all of last year, according to information seen by the AP in an unpublished report by international aid and conflict experts.

·       The head of the United Nations' atomic watchdog met on  November 22, 2021, with Iranian officials to press for greater access in the Islamic Republic ahead of diplomatic talks restarting over Tehran's tattered nuclear deal with world powers.

·       Rafael Mariano Grossi of the International Atomic Energy Agency yet again faces tightrope-style talks with Iranian officials as his inspectors remain unable to access surveillance footage and face greater challenges in trying to monitor Tehran's rapidly growing uranium stockpile. In the wake of then-President Donald Trump's unilateral withdrawal from Iran's deal, the Islamic Republic now enriches small amounts of uranium up to 60% purity — its highest ever and close to weapons-grade levels of 90%.

·       While Iran maintains its program is peaceful, regional rival Israel has repeatedly warned it won't allow Tehran to build a nuclear weapon and is suspected of launching attacks targeting its program as part of a wider regional shadow war playing across the Mideast in recent years. The U.S. under President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has said it's willing to return to the deal, but has warned time is running out.

·      All this raises the risk of a wider confrontation with Iran, which has taken a harder tack ahead of the talks under new President Ebrahim Raisi, a protégé of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.