Good Morning, Swarajya Readers! Here’s What You Need To Know Today.

POLITICS



Setback for AAP. President Pranab Mukherjee has refused to give his assent to Delhi Government’s bill which seeks to retrospectively exempt MLAs who are currently holding the post of Parliamentary Secretary violating the constitution which bars them from holding any office of profit.



The AAP government had appointed its 21 MLAs as Parliamentary Secretaries last year. When the matter reached courts, the government decided to bring an amendment to exclude this post from the office of profit retrospectively to save its MLAs from disqualification.



The President has referred the matter to the Election Commission which, acting as a quasi-judicial body, has sought the replies of the MLAs.

GOVERNANCE



Infra boost. The Central government is planning national highway (NH) grid for smooth and seamless travel. The NHAI has identified 27 vertical and horizontal corridors at a distance of every 250 Kms.



The proposed NH grid seeks to provide highway link to 12 major ports, 45 out of 53 million plus cities and 26 state capitals besides providing connectivity to major tourist and religious places.



The total length of these corridors is about 36, 600 km. But only 18, 800 km of them are of four-lanes. Four-laning of these roads will cost the government Rs 25,000 crore.



The government has shared the plan with state governments and it has sought their views on the matter.



Opposition failure. State governments are putting a spanner in Union government’s ambitious work of seeding all NREGA workers to Aadhar card and ensuring that their payments go through Aadhar based payment bridge. Especially, the states ruled by the opposition parties are big laggards. West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Bihar, even Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat have failed to get the consent of workers for getting Aadhar-based payments.

NATIONAL SECURITY



Chinese incursion. According to various news reports, some 250 China’s Peoples Liberation Army soldiers entered Yangste, East kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh on June 9 when PM Modi was lobbying hard in the west for India’s bid for Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) membership.However, the transgression didn’t last long and the soldiers went back after three hours.

UDTA PUNJAB



One Cut only. Barring deletion of the urination scene and modification of the disclaimer as directed by the Censor board, the Bombay High Court has quashed the CBFC’s 6 June order which directed the makers of movie Udta Punjab to make 13 cuts.



The court noted that the CBFC’s powers to call for cuts, changes, deletions in a movie come into play only if the film affects the sovereignty, integrity or security of India, foreign relations, public order, and or is likely to incite the commission of an offence.

M&A



Big deal. Microsoft Corp. will buy LinkedIn Corp. for $26.2 billion. What’s in it for the both companies?

Well, for Microsoft, the deal will help it in its mission of trying to keep services like Outlook email relevant enough that customers won’t want to leave it for competitors such as Google’s Gmail. For LinkedIn, the opportunity to tap Microsoft’s customers, including the 1.2 billion users of its Office suite of business software, could help it jumpstart growth, which has slowed in recent quarters.



Microsoft’s acquisition offer of $196 per share represents a premium of 49.5% to LinkedIn’s Friday closing price.

MUST READ OP-EDS



How To Deal With The Corporate Debt Problem: Three general principles —decisive action, capital restructuring and governance reforms—can prove to be useful guidelines as the banking mess is sorted out.



Intolerant Liberals: Liberalism needs to recover the noble lie that ideas are not politics by other means.



NITI Aayog Paper On Agriculture: As a part of its strategy to bring a Second Green Revolution, India must return to permitting proven and well-tested GM technologies with adequate safeguards.

SWARAJYA SPECIAL



Why Gawadar Is An Overrated Port: The Gwadar port in Pakistan is unlikely to provide any meaningful economic or strategic advantage to the Chinese. Most likely, it is only a ploy by Beijing to extract funds from the Pakistani govt.



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