The British government’s so-called Brexit legislation that would allow the country to leave European Union became law Tuesday after Queen Elizabeth II gave her approval.

House Commons Speaker John Bercow announced that the European Union Withdrawal Bill received royal assent and passed into law. The announcement was cheered by pro-Brexit officials.

“I have to notify the House in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967 that her Majesty has signified her royal assent to the following acts ... European Union Withdrawal Act 2018,” Bercow said.

New Delhi: Senior bureaucrat S Ramesh has been appointed as chairman of the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC), the apex policy-making body for indirect taxes, according to an official order.

He will succeed Vanaja N Sarna, who superannuates on June 30.

Ramesh, a 1981 batch officer of the Indian Revenue Service (Customs and Central Excise), is at present the member in the board, mandated with the responsibility of implementing the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Indian Naval Ship Sahyadri has reached the Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, to participate in the 26th edition of Exercise RIM of PACific (RIMPAC), the Navy said today.

INS Sahyadri, commanded by Captain Shantanu Jha, is a state-of-the-art indigenously built guided missile stealth frigate which is a part of the Eastern Fleet under the Eastern Naval Command.

It reached Pearl Harbour of the USA on Monday.  

Prior to RIMPAC 18, the ship also participated in the 22nd edition of MALABAR 18 exercise in the south-western Pacific region between June 7 and 16.

The RIMPAC is the largest multilateral naval exercise in the world and is held biennially in the Western Pacific Ocean.

India is the world's most dangerous country for women due to the high risk of sexual violence and being forced into slave labour, according to a poll of global experts released on Tuesday.

War-torn Afghanistan and Syria ranked second and third in the Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of about 550 experts on women's issues, followed by Somalia and Saudi Arabia.

The only western nation in the top 10 was the United States, which ranked joint third when respondents were asked where women were most at risk of sexual violence, harassment and being coerced into sex

The poll was a repeat of a survey in 2011 that found experts saw Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, India, and Somalia as the most dangerous countries for women.

Experts said India moving to the top of poll showed not enough was being done to tackle the danger women faced, more than five years after the rape and murder of a student on a bus in Delhi made violence against women a national priority.

The Pakistan Squash Federation (PSF) has sought the game's world body's intervention after it failed to secure visas for its team which is set to take part in the World Junior Squash Championship to be held in India next month.

The PSF has asked the World Squash Federation to help it in procuring Indian visa or else cancel the event. PSF secretary Tahir Sultan said that the Indian authorities were doing injustice with the Pakistani sports persons.

"The World Junior Championship is an international event of the World Sqush Federation and it has been given to India to host next month. Unfortunately, so far we have been denied visas by the Indian authorities to send our contingent," Sultan told PTI.

Blue Origin, the space-tourism startup owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, says it will start selling passenger tickets for trips into space in 2019.

The timeline came from Blue Origin senior vice president Rob Meyerson, whose comments at an Amazon Web Services event were reported by Space News. Meyerson did not say how much the tickets would cost when they go on sale.

The company also plans to conduct crewed test flights of its New Shepard rocket “soon” — meaning Bezos’s company could, at least by one metric, get a jump on rival SpaceX.

Blue Origin, at least for now, is less ambitious than Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which just nabbed a landmark military contract for its new Falcon Heavy rocket. The New Shepard is minuscule compared to the Falcon Heavy, or even the Falcon 9, and has a much lower maximum altitude than either, reaching only suborbital altitudes.

New Delhi: Its close to a year since the implementation of GST, and a significant percentage of the country's chief financial officers believe that it had a positive impact on the overall business climate, says a Deloitte survey.

According to Deloitte India's annual CFO Survey, 77 percent CFOs believe that GST has had a positive impact on the overall business.

Moreover, 57 percent of CFOs are now willing to take greater business risks, as the next couple of years are expected to be a period of consolidating gains from recent reforms.

"Introduction of GST necessitated a relook at the existing business models by CFOs. It had far-reaching implications on business functions, where the impact was on taxation, finance, legal, IT systems and supply chain. Overall, GST's value proposition has been appreciated by CFOs," said Porus Doctor, Partner, Deloitte India.

New Delhi: Powerdistribution company BYPL has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Business Finland, a Finnishgovernment agency, for collaborative activities in different areas, including energy efficiency and electric vehicles. 

The agreement was signed last week by BSES Yamuna Power Limited (BYPL) chief executive officer PR Kumar and Jukka Holappa, commercial councilor and head 'Business Finland' India, at the Embassy of Finland here, said a BYPL spokesperson. 

The three year MoU on 'cooperation in the power distribution sector' will encompass joint studies, pilot projects, knowledge-sharing and consultancy, research projects for inducting future and emerging technologies at the distribution utility level.