News in Short

• The Railway Board has urged officials to stop the use of Dak messengers, a practice dating back to the colonial era, and instead use video conferencing for any communication.
• With train operations suspended, the Railways saw its revenue slide by nearly 58 percent in May. The allowances of the hand-picked personal and dak messengers, apart from their salaries, were a major burden on establishment cost.
• Dak messenger and personal messenger are picked from office peons to play what was considered a crucial role up until recently of ferrying “secret” and “confidential” messages within the Railways, between departments, and up and down the hierarchy.

• Karishma Tanna has been declared the winner of a reality contest show Khatron Ke Khiladi season 10, which was pending since lockdown.
• Khatron Ke Khiladi 10 was shot in Bulgaria last year on a 40-day schedule. While it started airing from February 22, it went off the air after shoots were restricted following the coronavirus-induced lockdown.
• Apart from Karishma Tanna, Karan Patel, Dharmesh Yelande, and Balraj, the other contestants this season were Shivin Narang, Tejasswi Prakash, Adaa Khan, RJ Malishka, Rani Chatterjee and Amruta Khanvilkar.

• 'Gone With the Wind' star Olivia de Havilland, considered the last surviving actress of the Golden Age of Hollywood, passed away at the age of 104.
• De Havilland's acting career included two Academy Awards, a victory over Hollywood's studio system and a long-running feud with sister Joan Fontaine that was worthy of a screenplay.
• She first drew attention by playing opposite swashbuckling Errol Flynn in a series of films starting in the 1930s and made an enduring impression as the demure Southern belle Melanie in "Gone With the Wind" in 1939.

• About 200 investment proposals from China are awaiting security clearance from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) after new rules were notified in April.
• The new regulations makes prior government approval mandatory for foreign direct investments (FDI) from countries which share a land border with India.
• As FDI is allowed in non-critical sectors through the automatic route, earlier these proposals would have been cleared without the MHA’s nod.

• The US has been forced to close its consulate in Chengdu in the Sichuan province of China after the US ordered closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston.
• Consulate closures in Houston and Chengdu have escalated a sharp deterioration in ties between the world’s two biggest economies.
• The issue has found itself in the limelight of international politics as China and the US exchanged tit-for-tat orders last week to close each other's consulates in the two heartland cities.