With just a day to go for Ram Navami, Ayodhya is witnessing extensive preparations for Shri Ram Janmotsav, with lakhs of devotees from across India and abroad expected to arrive in the holy city on Sunday.

Elaborate security arrangements have been put in place to ensure a safe and smooth celebration. The surveillance is being carried out through drones and an extensive CCTV network.

Inspector General of Police, Ayodhya Range, Praveen Kumar said: "CCTVs have been installed at all key locations, and drone surveillance is underway. City residents, including boatmen and vendors, are also playing a role in maintaining vigilance and reporting any suspicious activity."

In anticipation of large crowds and rising heat, arrangements are being coordinated with the health department and civil administration. “Everyone is working together in a spirit of teamwork to ensure crowd management and devotee comfort,” the IG added.

India’s financial system has become more resilient and diverse, driven by rapid economic growth, and regulatory framework in securities markets has been enhanced in line with international practice to manage and prevent emerging risks, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) said on Saturday, citing a latest IMF-Financial System Stability Assessment (FSSA) report.

The markets regulator said, in a statement, that the financial sector in India has shown recovery from various distress episodes of the 2010s and withstood the pandemic well.

"In terms of evolution of the financial sector landscape, the Non-Banking Financial Intermediaries (NBFI) sector has become diverse but more interconnected. Banks and Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) have sufficient aggregate capital to support moderate lending even in severe macro-financial scenarios," the SEBI said, citing the IMF report findings.

Amid rising bird flu cases in the country, the Union Government has made registration of poultry farms mandatory and urged the need for increasing surveillance to curb avian influenza.

A high-level meeting in New Delhi, chaired by Alka Upadhyaya, Secretary at the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying (DAHD) under the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying set up a three-pronged strategy with stricter biosecurity, surveillance and mandatory registration of poultry farms.

The strategy “encompasses stricter biosecurity measures wherein poultry farms must enhance hygiene practices, control farm access and follow stringent biosecurity protocols to minimise the risk of infection, strengthened surveillance and mandatory registration of poultry farms to enhance disease tracking and control”, stated the ministry.

New Zealand continued their dominance over Pakistan with a comprehensive 43-run win in the third ODI at Mount Maunganui, sealing a 3-0 series whitewash.

After a rain-delayed start, the match was curtailed to 42 overs per side. Hosts posted 264, thanks to impactful half-centuries from Michael Bracewell and youngster Rhys Mariu. Pakistan, despite several starts in the chase, folded for 221 as Ben Sears picked up another five-wicket haul.

Put in to bat after Pakistan captain Mohammad Rizwan won the toss for a third time in the series, New Zealand overcame early trouble with a series of steady partnerships. Mariu (58) and Henry Nicholls added 78 for the second wicket before captain Bracewell’s late assault - 59 off just 40 balls - lifted the total. He struck six sixes, five of them off Akif Javed, including three in the final two overs to provide the late flourish.

The retiring out of Tilak Varma in the IPL 2025 game between Lucknow Super Giants and Mumbai Indians on Friday kickstarted a debate over whether the side should have gone ahead with the move or not.

At the BRSABV Ekana Cricket Stadium, a struggling Varma, who had hit a 23-ball 25, became just the fourth batter to be retired out in an IPL game. Though Mitchell Santner came to replace him, it didn’t help MI’s cause as they eventually lost by 12 runs, as LSG pacer Avesh Khan defended 22 runs in the final over.

Slamming the vile comments made by Khalistani supporter Gurpatwant Pannun about Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLA Manwinder Singh Giaspura said that a hatemonger cannot be a Sikh.

Giaspura stated that our Gurus never taught us hatred or violence. They taught us to pray and work for Sarbat da Bhala (welfare of all). This man knows nothing about Sikh principles. He is blind to wisdom. Gurpatwant Pannun does not live up to even a single teaching given to us by our Guru Sahibans.

He said that Baba Saheb Ambedkar, through his revolutionary thoughts, gave important constitutional rights not only to Dalits but to women and all citizens. But people like Gurpatwant Pannun want to provoke common people in the name of religion and caste. Punjab will never accept such people.

As the artificial intelligence (AI) turf war escalates, Elon Musk-owned Grok and Chinese DeepSeek models now stand at the forefront of AI capability -- one optimised for accessibility and efficiency and the other for brute-force scale -- despite the vast disparity in training resources, a report showed on Saturday.

Grok-3 represents scale without compromise -- 200,000 NVIDIA H100s chasing frontier gains, while DeepSeek-R1 delivers similar performance using a fraction of the compute, signalling that innovative architecture and curation can rival brute force, according to Counterpoint Research.

Since February, DeepSeek has grabbed global headlines by open-sourcing its flagship reasoning model DeepSeek-R1 to deliver performance on a par with the world’s frontier reasoning models.

“What sets it apart isn’t just its elite capabilities, but the fact that it was trained using only 2,000 NVIDIA H800 GPUs — a scaled-down, export-compliant alternative to the H100, making its achievement a masterclass in efficiency,” said Wei Sun, principal analyst in AI at Counterpoint.

Australia's prime minister has announced additional support for communities affected by catastrophic flooding in the country's northeast.

Anthony Albanese spent the eighth day of the campaign for the general election touring a vast area of the outback in the western part of the state of Queensland that has been inundated by flooding since late March.

The flooding in the sparsely-populated region, which is a major livestock farming area, is considered the worst since 1974 and has caused widespread damage as well as estimated losses of over 140,000 head of livestock, reports news agency.

Albanese on Saturday announced 105 million Australian dollars ($63.4 million) in funding to rebuild fencing to protect livestock from feral pigs and dogs. The state government previously made disaster assistance grants worth up to 75,000 Australian dollars ($45,314) available for affected primary producers in the region.

German forward Thomas Muller confirmed on Saturday that he will leave Bayern Munich at the end of the season.

Bavaria-born Muller joined the FC Bayern academy at the age of 10 in summer 2000, underwent an unparalleled development, made history with the club, won everything there is to win and has become the club’s record appearance maker with a total of 743 competitive matches.

"The German record champions will honour Muller’s magnificent career with, among other things, his own testimonial. It’s also been agreed that the two-time treble winner and world champion will play his final games for Bayern at the FIFA Club World Cup, which takes place in the USA from June 15 to July 13," Bayern Munich said in a statement.

India has stepped up vigil to prevent the dumping of cheap Chinese imports in the country after the steep US tariff hike on the goods exported by the Communist country.

Commerce Secretary Sunil Barthwal is reported to have held a number of meetings to take stock of the situation. Government officials are also in touch with industry to get a wider view of the ground reality and formulate a strategy to protect the Indian economy.

The Commerce Ministry has already been keeping a close watch on goods such as steel from China which was hurting industry after the earlier round of tariff hike by the US. Now the vigil has been widened to other goods as well, a senior official confirmed.

While the US has hiked tariffs for all countries, China is the worst hit as the additional tariff of 34 per cent announced by President Donald Trump has ramped up the total duty to 54 per cent.