1.The Higher Education department has also directed varsities/ colleges to strictly follow POSH Act, 2013 and the guidelines issued by the UGC in this regard, and organise awareness workshops.

2.As many as 65 students were rescued by fire services personnel after a major fire broke out at the Institute of Technical Education & Research (ITER), a private engineering college, located in the Jagamara area here.

3.Senior faculty member of the Utkal University’s department of Geography Professor Kabir Mohan Sethy has been conferred with the prestigious National Geospatial Faculty Fellow Jury Award – 2025 by the FOSSEE GIS Project at IIT Bombay recently.

4.Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi has instructed departmental secretaries to expedite implementation of various developmental work in the Cuttack Parliamentary constituency area.

5.Gastrointestinal (GI) cancers are rising at alarming rates worldwide in adults younger than 50 years, according to two studies. The first study, published in JAMA, showed that the surging cancer cases go beyond colorectal, and include gastric, oesophageal, and pancreatic.

6.The Supreme Court has issued a stern warning to all states and Union Territories (UTs), including Odisha, over continued non-compliance with its directives regarding appointment of special teachers for Divyang (differently-abled) students in schools.

7.The Centre has appointed IAS officer Nikhil Pavan Kalyan as the Director of Census Operations (DCO) and Director of Citizen Registration (DCR) for Odisha.

8.Nearly 3,000 Myanmar refugees, including women and children, who earlier this month crossed the unfenced International Border and took shelter in Mizoram during the armed clashes between two armed ethnic groups, have returned to their villages in the neighbouring country.

9.All political parties are on board on the move to impeach Justice Yashwant Varma, from whose residence here burnt wads of currency notes were found, the government said Friday, paving the way for a motion on this matter during the upcoming Monsoon session of Parliament.

10.MNS chief Raj Thackeray Friday warned Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis that if Hindi was made compulsory for Classes 1 to 5 in the state, “we will not hesitate to shut down schools”.

11.The declared incomes of registered unrecognised political parties witnessed a 223 per cent spike in 2022-23 and more than 73 per cent of these parties failed to publicly disclose their fi nancial records, according to poll rights body the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR).

12.The Enforcement Directorate Friday arrested Chaitanya Baghel, son of senior Congress leader and former Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel, in an alleged liquor scam linked money laundering case.

13.The European Union Friday agreed an 18th package of sanctions against Russia over its war in Ukraine, including measures aimed at dealing further blows to the Russian oil and energy industry.

14.Israel has agreed to allow limited access by Syrian forces into the Sweida area of southern Syria for the next two days, an Israeli offi cial said Friday after days of bloodshed in and around Syria’s Druze city of Sweida.

15.OpenAI is rolling out new options for chatbot ChatGPT to carry out a variety of increasingly complicated tasks on a user’s behalf, part of its push to bring so-called AI agents to the mainstream, Bloomberg reported.