News in Short

• Lionel Messi will end his 20-year career with Barcelona after the Argentine superstar failed to reach agreement on a new deal with the club.
• Six-time Ballon d'Or winner Messi, 34, last month finally landed a major international trophy with Argentina when they beat rivals Brazil to win the Copa America.
• Messi had agreed to sign a new five-year contract with the Spanish giants. The 34-year-old was set to accept a deal that would see his weekly wage reduced by 50 per cent.

• A recent publication has provided crucial evidence that Ancestral Dravidian languages were possibly spoken by a significant population in the Indus Valley civilisation.
• In the absence of any deciphered written documents of Indus Valley civilisation, there are no direct ways of identifying Harappan languages.
• The only feasible starting point is to find certain proto-words whose likely origin in Indus Valley civilisation gets confirmed through historical and linguistic evidence.

• The government took the first step towards doing away with the contentious retrospective tax law of 2012, which was used to raise large tax demands on foreign investors like Vodafone and Cairn Energy.
• Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Nirmala Sitharaman introduced the Taxation Laws (Amendment) Bill in the Lok Sabha to nullify the relevant retrospective tax clauses that were introduced in 2012 to bring past indirect transfer of Indian assets under the ambit of taxation.
• As per the proposed changes, any tax demand made on transactions that took place before May 2012 shall be dropped, and any taxes already collected shall be repaid, albeit without interest.

• Valentino Rossi, one of motorcycling's greatest and most charismatic champions, announced his retirement from MotoGP at the end of the 2021 season.
• The 42-year-old Italian, who races with the number 46, is a nine times world champion with seven of his titles won in the top category.
• Rossi is riding for the Malaysia-based Petronas Yamaha team this season but his form has faded, the veteran languishing 19th in the championship with a best finish of only 10th from nine races.

• Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna award will now be known as the  Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna Award.
• The Khel Ratna award was instituted in 1991-1992 and the first recipient was Chess legend Viswanathan Anand.
• The now renamed Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna award comes with a cash prize of Rs 25 lakh. Known as The Wizard, Major Dhyan Chand played international hockey from 1926 to 1949.
• Dhyan Chand, born in Allahabad, was part of the Olympic team that won gold medals in 1928, 1932 and 1936.