News in Short

• The Navy is set to hold the largest multilateral exercise in this region, Milan 2022, which will see participation of all major Navies including Quad countries, Russia and from West Asia amid tensions in Ukraine and developments in West Asia.
• This year’s Milan will see the participation of all Quad countries, with the U.S. being invited for the first time.
• The invitees include all Indian Ocean littoral states and countries from south-east Asia among others.

• U.S. President Joe Biden urged Americans to leave Ukraine immediately, as a Russian invasion could come “any time” — including during the Winter Olympics.
• With Moscow continuing to amass tens of thousands of troops on the Ukraine border, and talks to avoid war making little headway.
• Observers have described the gathering of Russian forces on three of Ukraine’s flanks as the largest show of force since the Soviet Army marched on Berlin at the end of World War II.

• India’s industrial recovery slowed sharply in December, with output growing just 0.4% year-on-year, and manufacturing activity contracting 0.1%, as per the Index of Industrial Production (IIP).
• Electricity output grew 2.8%, while mining activity rose 2.6%. The IIP data also shows capital goods output shrank 4.6% in December while consumer durables and consumer non-durables saw output shrink 2.7% and 0.6%, respectively.
• Growth in other use-based segments was marginal and couldn’t lift the overall industrial output trend, with primary goods output rising 2.8%, infrastructure and construction goods growing 1.7% and intermediate goods seeing a mere 0.3% uptick.

• Luc Montagnier, the French virologist and Nobel laureate whose co-discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus sparked a global search for an AIDS cure, has died. He was 89.
• The scientist from the Pasteur Institute in Paris shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Germany’s Harald zurHausen.
• Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi worked together on retroviruses at the institute, and their findings coincided with similar results presented by Robert Gallo in the U.S.

• Tata Sons Pvt Ltd board considered and approved the re-appointment of its executive chairman N Chandrasekaran for another five years.
• Chandrasekaran joined the board of Tata Sons in 2016 and took over as Chairman in 2017 at a time when the group was mired in crisis after the ouster of his predecessor Cyrus Mistry.
• Under Chandrasekaran, Tatas sold the mobile phone business of Tata Teleservices to Bharti Airtel in an attempt to cut losses.