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20 October 2026

15 Stories · About 4 min

India

One orangutan goes home. Will the five babies follow?

Indonesia is also seeking the repatriation of five baby orangutans rescued in Odisha, whose origins and suspected trafficking are under investigation.

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Union Commerce and Industry Minister Shri Piyush Goyal Launches National Strategic Trade Command Centre at Vanijya Bhawan

Union Minister of Commerce and Industry, Shri Piyush Goyal, launched the National Strategic Trade Command Centre (NSTCC) at Vanijya Bhawan, New Delhi, in the presence of Commerce Secretary, Shri Rajesh Agrawal, and Director General, Director General of Foreign Trade (DGFT), Shri Lav Agarwal.

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Since last week

NIXI removed website on NEET protest 3 days after it went live without notice

The Delhi High Court has issued notice to the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) over its suspension of chalosansad.in, a website documenting protests against the NEET-UG paper leak, three days after the domain was registered.

According to the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), NIXI suspended the domain on July 22, 2026 without prior notice, a hearing or a written order.

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IEEE Report on Members Engineering for Public Good

Last year IEEE launched its Mobile Outreach Vehicle (MOVE) program in India.

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Mathematics Of Liberty: First-Time Offenders And Section 479 BNSS

Section 479(2) provides that a person facing investigation, inquiry or trial in more than one offence or in multiple cases shall not be released under the section.

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World

Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts

On October 9, Ledger said it had launched an investigation into user reports of cryptocurrency losses and asked CryptoBilis to stop selling and shipping Ledger devices.

Yesterday, Ledger provided another update, confirming that all user reports of unexpected fund drains were linked to devices sold through CryptoBilis and describing the affected volume as “limited.”

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New York Plans Stronger Sports Betting Regulation to Curb Gambling Addiction

While the drafts have been months in the making, their official introduction follows mounting media scrutiny, including a ProPublica investigation last month that showed weaknesses in the guardrails that companies like DraftKings have erected to address problem gamblers on their platforms.

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Azerbaijan ban on headscarves in schools opens rift with ally Turkey

Azerbaijan’s cabinet last month approved a ban on items of clothing that are “inconsistent with the principle of secularism”.

Turkey used to have expanding ties with Israel too, but relations nosedived after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza.

Emine Ilyas heads the 28th February Students’ Association, a group representing Turkish women whose education was interrupted in the 1990s because they wore headscarves.

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Science & Space

Correction

Author Correction: The molecular basis of force selectivity by PIEZO2

The corrections do not affect the outcome or significance of any reported statistical comparison, the direction of any experimental result, or the scientific conclusions or interpretations presented in the article.

If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

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Solar Orbiter tracks origin of mysterious magnetic switchbacks

The spacecraft has now added another crucial piece to this puzzle by tracing a switchback back to its source at the Sun.

Closed regions have lines that initially extend into space before curving back to the Sun, creating closed loops.

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NASA Selects GIMLI to Search the Marius Lunar Pit for a Potential Lunar Base Site

This includes the Geophysical Instruments for Marius Lunar pit Investigation (GIMLI), a Planetary Science Institute-led proposal that will investigate a "skylight," a hole in an old lunar lava tube, to see if a large cave system extends beyond it.

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Technology & Security

Linux Kernel Out-of-Bounds Write Vulnerability

CISA added CVE-2026-53266, affecting Linux Kernel, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

Linux Kernel contains an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the ebtables SNAT target which allows an ARP sender hardware address rewrite to write directly into a nonlinear socket-buffer fragment backed by a splice-imported file page. The impacted product(s) could be end-of-life (EoL) and/or end-of-service (EoS). Users are advised to discontinue use and/or transition to a supported version.

The catalog lists 2026-09-21 as the due date; that date had passed by this edition.

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Turkish Crackdown On LGBTQ+ Organizations Threatens Freedom of Expression and Association

EFF strongly condemns Turkey’s state-led discriminatory, oppressive attacks on feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations, media platforms, student groups, and rights defenders and activists within the country.

Since mid-September, access to the websites and social media accounts of a dozen organizations have been blocked by court order, while over 60 members and activists have been detained, their offices and homes raided, mobile phones, laptops and other digital devices seized, and judicial proceedings launched against them.

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Outside Your Orbit

A worthwhile piece from beyond the usual orbit.

‘Stomach bugs’ send protective immune cells rushing from gut to brain

Once there, the cells became residents that responded to a second round of infection more than a month after the first, suggesting that they kept a record of past illnesses.

Previous studies have found that, under healthy conditions, some types of immune cell found in the gut are also housed in the meninges.

Before infection, CD4+ T cells made up only a small portion of the immune cells found in the meninges.

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Worth Your Time

Quiet Desk

  • No meaningful update: Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) and Central Bureau of Narcotics (CBN) destroy 2.87 Hectares (7.08 Acres) of illicit cannabis (ganja) cultivation in wildlife sanctuary, District Dhule, Maharashtra
  • No meaningful update: Keeping the sky dark and quiet
  • No meaningful update: 'Unprecedented' Cyberattack cripples supermarket fridges across Europe as hackers activate automatic defrosting — delivery and store prices also impacted by incident

You’re caught up.