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The Morning Wrap: PM Modi Among Top 10 Most Powerful People In The World; Zee Buys 'Dangal' TV Rights For ₹75 Cr

Our selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
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The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Rio Olympics and sportswomen PV Sindhu, Dipa Karmakar and Sakshi Malik were among the most searched terms on Google in India in 2016, according to Google's annual list of the most-searched terms. Social media meme Sonam Gupta ranked high as well, being the third most-search 'person' on Google in India in 2016.

Working women in India in non-agricultural jobs have fewer children than non-working women, but are more likely to have girls, new data from the 2011 Census shows. In India, typically, not working among women is associated with being better-off, demographer Dr P Arokiasamy, Professor and Head of Department at the International Institute for Population Sciences, says; in other words, you don't work only if you can afford not to.

The share of Indians taking loans for productive purposes is declining, and short-term loans at crushing rates of interest dominate rural India. New data on 'Household Indebtedness' from the National Sample Survey Office's 70th round, released late last week, shows that nearly one in three rural households and over one in five urban households is in debt.

Indian-American PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi joined Donald Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum that aims to assist the president-elect in implementing his economic agenda, the presidential transition team said on Wednesday. The other corporate bigwigs to join the forum are Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and SpaceX and Tesla chairman Elon Musk.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been ranked among the top 10 most powerful people in the world by Forbes. The list has been topped by Russian President Vladimir Putin for the fourth straight year and had US President-elect Donald Trump in the second place. Modi ranks 9th on the Forbes list of 74 of the World's Most Powerful People.

Concerned over the disappearance of a JNU student for nearly two months, the Delhi High Court on Wednesday directed the police to "scan" the entire campus, including hostels, classrooms and rooftops, of the varsity by using sniffer dogs. The directions came on the habeus corpus plea by Najeeb Ahmed's mother who has moved court to trace out her son who has been missing since the intervening night of October 14-15.

In a satellite rights deal that is supposed to be the most expensive one in the world, Zee has acquired the television rights for Aamir Khan's yet-to-be-released film Dangal for a whopping ₹75 crore.

According to a new study by the Pew Research Centre it was found that Hindus were the most-educated people in the United States. But ironically Hindus are the least-educated group of people worldwide, tied for the position with Muslims, both of whom only received only 5.6 years of formal education on an average.

Over 65 teenagers were made to sit through counselling sessions in Hyderabad, as they were found to be secretly watching porn and disturbing content such as videos of ISIS beheadings. The parents of the children were called to the meeting by the police who asked them to take better care of the children, who were as young as 11 years old, and used to frequent local cyber cafes on the pretext of 'researching' for homework. Cases have been registered against the cyber cafe owners for not installing CCTV cameras and letting minors watch porn.

Tropical storms are an annual affair, with the more vulnerable eastern coast taking a pummelling from 92 severe cyclones out of a total of 262 between 1891 and 1990, and several more in the years since. Such weather events are a part of the climate system, and their impact in the form of economic losses could well be greater going forward, as development creates more assets in coastal cities. It is vital, therefore, that the learnings from each event are shared nationally, and the capacity of officials and communities to manage disasters built continuously, says an editorial in The Hindu, regarding cyclone Vardah that has hit Tamil Nadu hard.

The demonetisation decision falls in the category of absolutist government decisions as it makes demands of all sections of society in the name of a higher purpose, writes Rohit Prasad in Mint. "Any strong leader can win the support of people by taking on the mighty on their behalf. But only a demigod can make the entire population take on personal suffering gladly for a dream sold to them by him," he says.

There is no reason to impose a Uniform Civil Code on Muslims, but a legal basis exists to abolish triple talaq, writes AG Noorani in The Indian Express. "The lust for uniformity may obliterate Muslim identity and alienates people. A small UK has two systems of criminal law. Scottish law recognises the plea of "not proven", English law does not. There is no national bar; England has barristers, Scotland has advocates," he writes.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.