News in Short

• The government has cancelled more than 1.63 lakh GST registrations over October and November due to non-filing of returns by the taxpayers concerned for more than six months. This exercise is aimed at weeding out fake firms, fly-by-night operators, and circular trading entities.
• More than 11,000 GST registrations were cancelled in Ahmedabad and nearly 20,000 in the Chennai GST and central excise zone.
• The cancellation proceedings were being initiated for about 29,000 more taxpayers who had not filed their GSTR-3B returns for more than six months.

• Iran executed a once-exiled journalist Ruhollah Zam over his online work that helped inspire nationwide economic protests in 2017.
• In June, a court sentenced Zam to death, saying he had been convicted of “corruption on Earth,” a charge often used in cases involving espionage or attempts to overthrow Iran’s government.
• Zam’s website AmadNews and a channel he created on the popular messaging app Telegram had spread the timings of the protests and embarrassing information about officials that directly challenged Iran’s Shiite theocracy.
• Those demonstrations, which began at the end of 2017, represented the biggest challenge to Iran since the 2009 Green Movement protests and set the stage for similar mass unrest in November of last year.

• India’s industrial output grew at the fastest pace in eight months in October 2020 at 3.6%, with consumer durables production surpassing levels last seen prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• This was the second month in a row that industrial output recorded positive growth. The NSO also revised upwards its estimates for September’s industrial output growth from 0.2% to 0.5%, in light of updated data.
• Total industrial output so far in 2020-21 is now 17.5% lower than the April 2019-October 2019 period. Electricity generation grew 11.2% in October compared to a 12.2% decline a year ago, while manufacturing activity grew 3.5% in contrast to a 5.7% contraction October 2019. Mining shrank 1.5%.
• Capital goods recorded positive growth for the first time in 21 months in October. But primary goods continued to record negative growth (-3.3%) while intermediate goods recorded a tepid 0.8% growth, which suggests that the recovery is dissipated and uneven.

• The Global Carbon Project has calculated that the world will have put 37 billion US tons (34 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide in the air in 2020.
• Scientists say this drop is chiefly because people are staying home, travelling less by car and plane, and that emissions are expected to jump back up after the pandemic ends.
• Ground transportation makes up about one-fifth of emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief man-made heat-trapping gas.
• Emissions dropped 12% in the United States and 11% in Europe, but only 1.7% in China. That’s because China had an earlier lockdown with less of a second wave. Also China’s emissions are more industrial based than other countries and its industry was less affected than transportation.

• South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, a controversial figure both for his work and in his personal life, died in Latvia from coronavirus complications.
• Kim, who had won awards at the Venice, Cannes, and Berlin film festivals, had been staying in the Latvian capital Riga.
• Kim earned global praise as a regular at international festivals but also faced criticism especially over his portrayals of women, including in the ultra-violent "Pieta". That film won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2012.