From The Newsroom: Republic TV accused of TRP scam; Domestic flights may operate at 75% capacity

In your evening news brief, From the Newsroom, Three broadcast news channels including Republic TV are being investigated for TRP manipulation; Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said he was deliberating on allowing domestic airlines to operate at 75% capacity; The World Bank said that India’s GDP is expected to contract by 9.6 per cent this fiscal.

Here are the top stories of the day, October 8, 2020:

Three broadcast news channels including Republic TV are being investigated for TRP manipulation, the Mumbai police said today. Two persons have been arrested. One of them is a former employee of an agency that installed "people metres" in homes to assess ratings.

The investigation is part of a larger analysis of the manipulation of news trends and how "false narratives" were spread. The information has been shared with the central government, the police said.

Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said he was deliberating allowing domestic airlines to operate at 75% of the total capacity, according to news agency Reuters.

In an interaction with officials from the civil aviation sector and the media, Puri said they expect total passengers to double to 2 lakh by the end of October.

Puri also said that he may meet officials from Germany in a couple of days to finalise bilateral air-bubble flights.

The Supreme Court castigated the Union government for filing an "evasive" reply with "unnecessary nonsensical" statements by a junior officer in a matter alleging "communal headlines and bigoted statements" by a section of media on Tablighi Jamaat participants in Nizamuddin Markaz in Delhi in March 2020.

As a senior advocate, Dushyant Dave said, on behalf of petitioner Jamiat Ulama-I-Hind, that the government accused it of seeking a gag order against the media, a bench, presided over by Chief Justice S A Bobde said, "Freedom of speech is one of the most abused freedoms in the recent times."

The World Bank said that India’s GDP is expected to contract by 9.6 per cent this fiscal which is reflective of the national lockdown and the income shock experienced by households and firms due to the Covid-19 pandemic, noting that the country's economic situation is “much worse” than ever seen before.

Uber on Thursday announced a partnership with electric vehicle fleet operator Lithium Urban Technologies to deploy over 1,000 EVs, all sedans, across Uber Rentals and Premier in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune. This means that soon, you could zip to work or run an errand in an electric Uber soon!

That is it today, From the Newsroom. Tune in tomorrow morning for our feature show, The Lead.

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