News in Short

• European Union lawmakers backed new safeguards for tracing transfers of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
• Under the draft law first put forward last year by the EU’s executive European Commission, crypto firms such as exchanges would have to obtain, hold, and submit information on those involved in transfers.
• That would make is easier to identify and report suspicious transactions, freeze digital assets, and discourage high-risk transactions.

• Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann moved a resolution during a special session of the Vidhan Sabha and reiterated Punjab’s claim on Chandigarh as its capital.
• The comes after Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced that the Central Service rules will be applicable to employees of Chandigarh instead of the Punjab service rules.
• Chandigarh administration had always been managed by the officers of Punjab and Haryana in the ratio of 60:40.

• Police in Sri Lanka’s capital lifted a curfew after protests in which dozens of people were arrested near the home of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa over his handling of an economic crisis.
• Hundreds of protesters gathered near Rajapaksa’s residence in a Colombo suburb before police dispersed them with tear gas and water cannons.
• The island nation of 22 million people is in the midst of its worst economic crisis in years with rolling blackouts for up to 13 hours a day because the government does not have enough foreign exchange to pay for fuel imports.

• Australia will send armoured Bushmaster vehicles to Ukraine after President VolodymyrZelenskyyasked for more help in Ukraine’s war against Russia.
• Zelenskyy addressed the Australian Parliament and asked for the Australian-made, four-wheel-drive vehicles. They will be flown over on Boeing C-17 Globemaster transport planes.
• Zelenskyy also called for tougher sanctions and for Russian vessels to be banned from international ports.

• Researchers have completed an end-to-end sequence of the roughly 3 billion bases in our DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), which is critical to understanding human genetic diversity.
• Since its initial release in 2000, the human reference genome did not cover the entire sequence leaving important heterochromatic regions unfinished.
• About 92 per cent of the genome was fully known. Sequencing the remaining 8 per cent of the genome, the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium has now presented a complete 3.055 billionbase pair sequence.