News in Short

• India’s RavindraJadeja climbed to the top spot in the ICC Test rankings for all-rounders on Wednesday after his match-winning performance against Sri Lanka in the opening Test in Mohali.
• His unbeaten 175 lifted him up to 17 places from 54th to 37th with the bat and he added nine wickets to move up to 17th with the ball.
• His all-round contribution was enough for him to regain the top all-rounder spot from Jason Holder. Jadeja’s only previous time on top was in August 2017, when he spent a week at number one.

• India lifted the ban on international flights after two years.  overseas flights, suspended because of the coronavirus pandemic, will be available from March 27.
• Air Bubble arrangements  - which allow two countries to operate flights into each other's territories subject to certain conditions - also stand revoked.
• Special international flights have been operating between India and 37 countries since July 2020 under this arrangement. The Bubble arrangement hurt airlines' operations and their profitability.

• Chandra’s Atmospheric Composition Explorer-2 (CHACE-2) instrument onboard Chandrayaan-2 has found Argon-40 in the tenuous lunar exosphere.
• The new observations provide insight into the dynamics of the lunar exospheric species and activities in the first few tens of meters below the lunar surface.
• The observations show the presence of Argon in the equatorial and mid-latitude regions of the Moon.
• While it’s not the first time that Argon-40 has been detected on the Moon, so far these detections had been limited to near-equatorial regions as seen by the Apollo-17 mission.

• President VolodymyrZelensky said he is no longer pressing for NATO membership for Ukraine, a issue that was one of Russia’s reasons for invading its  neighbour.
• Russia has said it does not want neighboring Ukraine to join NATO, the transatlantic alliance created at the start of the Cold War to protect Europe from the Soviet Union.
• In more recent years the alliance has expanded further and further east to take in former Soviet bloc countries, infuriating the Kremlin.

• India, Bangladesh and Nepal finalised a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for implementing the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal (BBIN) Motor Vehicles Agreement (MVA) that is aimed at boosting regional trade and connectivity.
• The BBIN connectivity project was conceived after the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) failed to agree on a regional motor vehicles agreement at a summit in Nepal in 2014.
• The BBIN project suffered a setback in 2017 when Bhutan temporarily opted out of it after being unable to get parliamentary approval for the MVA. The 3 other countries decided at the time to press ahead with the agreement.