A powerful car bombing near the office of the provincial police chief in southwestern Pakistan on June 23, 2017 killed 11 people and wounded 20, officials said.

The explosion near the police chief’s office in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province, was powerful enough that it was heard across the city, shattering windows of nearby buildings, said police spokesman Shahzada Farhat.

Detectives in Britain have arrested two men in connection with an international “conspiracy” to hack the Microsoft network, a media report said. According to a Thursday report in The Registrar, the detectives — based in the South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) — were now investigating “unauthorised intrusion into networks that Microsoft owns” between January and March. “This group is spread around the world and therefore the investigation is being coordinated with our various partners (including Microsoft, the FBI, EUROPOL and the NCA’s National Cyber Crime Unit),” a detective was quoted as saying.

Indian shares fell on Friday, with the NSE index hitting a one-week low, as investors booked profits in financials such as State Bank of India and automakers such as Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. Still, the indexes were headed for small weekly gains on hopes the central bank will cut interest rates after minutes from a monetary policy committee meeting earlier this month showed one member acknowledging that inflation had eased. Caution is, however, likely to prevail in the near term as India gears up to unveil a nationwide goods and services tax on July 1, while monitoring global factors such as falling crude prices.

The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) has qualified 15 companies and 10 bidders in joint venture and solo for the 700-km Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway for a total of 16 packages.

The qualified bidders include L&T, Reliance Infrastructure & Cenzig Insaat Sanayi VE Ticaret AS consortium, Tata Projects- Makyol- Insaat Sanayi Turizm ve Ticaret AS consortium, ILFS Transportation Network-Oriental Structural Engineers consortium, China Guangdong Provincial ChangDa Highway Engineering-SEW Infrastructure consortium, Navayug Engineering, China Construction Fifth Engineering Division Corporation, Afcons Infrastructure and NCC-Megha Engineering & Infrastructure consortium.

Huge block deals were executed on Tata Motors and Himatsingka Seide counters on the BSE in Friday's trade.

Tata Motors saw 83.6 million shares or 2.85% of total equity of Tata Group Company exchanging hands on the BSE.

Almost a week after the big-bang announcement by Reliance Industries (RIL) and BP Plc to invest Rs 40,000 crore in the Krishna Godavari Basin field, a senior BP official said that the company has withdrawn its arbitration with the government related to gas prices.

This has triggered expectations that the government could now allow the oil majors to charge a higher price for gas from KG-D6. While the price for domestic natural gas for the period of April 1 to September 30 has been kept at $2.50 per million metric British thermal unit (mmbtu), for deepwater blocks, a higher price of $5.56 per mmbtu is allowed. However, RIL and its partners were denied this price due to arbitration.

SBI ETF Nifty 50, an exchange traded fund, has nudged past HDFC Equity to become the largest equity scheme in the country, a position the latter had held for more than three years.

SBI ETF Nifty has assets worth Rs 19,377 crore compared with Rs 19,093 crore managed by HDFC Equity, data from Value Research shows.

Software exports from the country are expected to grow by single digits for a second year in a row.

A number of reasons such as automation, slowing business in traditional services, growing protectionism in developed markets, and a shift in client spending to newer areas such as digital and cloud has been attributed for slow growth.

Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka has sought to allay concerns over the ongoing issue of H1B visa curbs, saying that the Indian IT industry is not overly dependent on the US visas to run its business, even as President Donald Trump cracks down on the US companies employing foreigners at low wages instead of Americans. Infosys shares rose in trade today, and were among the top large cap gainers, rising by over 2.5% to Rs 968.

Idea Cellular has moved the Bombay High Court against the investigation ordered by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) into the charges of cartelisation made by Reliance Jio against the top three operators — Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea. Sources in the know of the development told FE that Idea petitioned the Bombay High Court on Tuesday against the CCI. In its petition, the operator is believed to have said that there is already a regulator and a tribunal for regulating the sector — the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).

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