The Government has approved the proposal for grant of ex-gratia monetary compensation to over a one lakh workers and officers of the Food Corporation of India (FCI) including contractual labourers who are working non-stop to ensure the supply of food grains across the country amidst the lockdown due to coronavirus outbreak.

While there is already an existing provision of one-time monetary compensation to kin of FCI employees in case of death due to various unnatural causes, the approval now includes death due to COVID-19 as well.

The global coronavirus deaths on Friday crossed one lakh mark with the United States registering second-highest death of nearly 18,000 behind Italy.

As of 11:30 pm on Friday (IST), 100,376 deaths have been recorded with 1,650,210 global cases of COVID-19, John Hopkins University's coronavirus tracker showed.

The US has recorded 475,749 cases and 17,925 deaths while Italy has 147,577 total COVID-19 infections with 18,849 deaths.

Maharashtra government on Friday sent a senior IPS officer on compulsory leave for allowing DHFL promoters Kapil and Dheeraj Wadhawan to travel despite the ongoing lockdown, Home Minister Anil Deshmukh said.

The bureaucrat had issued a letter exempting the Wadhawans from the lockdown norms citing a family emergency.

India's largest airline IndiGo will fill its airport buses at 50 per cent capacity when service resumes. The airline will also discontinue on-board meal services, CEO Ronojoy Dutta told employees on Friday.

These along with frequent deep cleaning of aircraft are part of the multiple changes that the airline will do its protocols in order to keep crew and passenger crew safe when the airline starts operating again.

Pakistan has extended the suspension of all kinds of flight operations, including domestic and international, till April 21, in view of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic outbreak in the country. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of Pakistan also informed, in a separate notification, that all chartered and private flight operations will also remain shut between April 10 to April 21.

All small aircraft that don't fall under the notification will also have to take special permission from the government for taking flights.

The number of people who have tested positive for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Mumbai's Dharavi area has now reached 22, as five more persons from the slum tested positive for the virus infection here, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) informed in a statement on Friday.

The civic body of the Greater Mumbai area also stated that out of the five new COVID-19 cases in Dharavi, three are male patients and two are female. These cases were reported from the areas of the PMGP colony, Muslim Nagar, Kalyanwadi and Murugan Chawl.

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson has been moved out of intensive care after his condition showed significant recovery and the Prime Minister was found to be in extremely good spirits, according to a Downing Street statement.

The statement detailed that Johnson had been moved out of the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) back to his ward at the St Thomas' Hospital in London where he was being treated.

In a major relief for liquor baron Vijay Mallya, the High Court in London on Thursday deferred hearings on a plea by the SBI-led consortium of Indian banks, seeking the indebted tycoon to be declared bankrupt to enable them recover a loan of around GBP 1.145 billion from him, reported PTI.

Justice Michael Briggs of the insolvency division of the High Court granted relief to Mallya, ruling that he should be given time till his petitions to the Supreme Court of India and his settlement proposal before the Karnataka High Court be determined, allowing him time to repay his debts to the banks in full.

Coronavirus or COVID-19, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2, was first reported in late December 2019, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. The deadly virus since then has infected more than 1.5 million people and caused more than 90 thousand death around the world, according to John Hopkins University on April 9.

Researchers with the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention re-analyzed 640 throat swabs collected from patients in Wuhan with influenza-like-illness from 6 October 2019 to 21 January 2020 and found that 9 of the 640 throat swabs were positive for COVID-19.

India on Thursday once again slammed China for raking Kashmir, this time in New York on the website of its permanent mission.

The development came after China in its statement said that it 'immediately' responded and processed the letter by Pakistan on 10 March on Kashmir and it remains high on the agenda of the council. While China's statement on its mission at UN was on Indian media reports, the country as the President of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the month of March showed no response or urgency to COVID-19 meet.

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