1.Caracas (Venezuela) At least 164 people have died, and 971 were injured after a pair of powerful quakes rocked Venezuela, Acting President Delcy Rodriguez said Thursday

2.Malkangiri: Officials of the Odisha Forest Department Thursday seized 311 turtles during a raid in Malkangiri district and arrested three persons

3.State Film Awards for 2023 and 2024 have been announced. For 2023, 'Pushkara' and 'My Sweet House Wife' have been nominated for the best film award. For 2024, the film 'Ashram' won, while Hollywood's chocolate boy Babushan and actress Debjani were adjudged the best.

4.Odisha's daughter Sonia Behera has been considered eligible for the three-year Diploma in Dramatics (2026-2029) course of the country's highest drama institution, the Rashtriya Natya Vidyalaya (NSD), New Delhi.

5.The Special Investigation Team (SIT) in the Ram temple donation money misappropriation case in Ayodhya has named eight accused, including Tinnu Yadav and Anukalp Mishra, in connection with the allegations of theft and misappropriation of donations.

6.The Maharashtra government is now planning to make it mandatory to include the date of birth of both the bride and groom in the wedding invitation card.

7. Election Commission officials Thursday said that Indian passports continue to be among the 12 valid supporting documents required by voters to prove their eligibility to be on the voters' list under the ongoing special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

8.Sujatha Karthikeyan joins BJD. She formally joined the party in the presence of Naveen Patnaik.

9.Students will get free new school bags. Children from nursery to class III will get these bags.

10.The government has revised the passport fee structure through an amendment to the Passports Rules, 1980, increasing application fee for an ordinary fresh passport containing 36 pages from Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,500. The new rules will come into force with effect from  from July 1, 2026.

11.The central  government has lifted all sector-wise restrictions on non-domestic packaged LPG supply.

12.The new textbooks for classes 1 to 8 prepared by state governments based on the National Education Strategy-2020 have exceeded the error limit. While earlier books on grammar, literature, mathematics, English, geography etc. had over 2,000 errors, the revised books also contain a large number of errors.

13. Nearly five decades after the Emergency was declared in India, the NCERT  has incorporated the subject into a Class IX Social Science textbook for the first time.

14.A landmark verdict by the Delhi High Court has paved the way for the audit of electricity distribution companies (DISCOMs) by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). After this verdict, there has been a growing demand for a CAG audit of the four DISCOMs run by Tata Power in Odisha.

15.A low pressure area is likely to form over the north Bay of Bengal around July 3 under the influence of an upper-air cyclonic circulation expected to develop over the northwest Bay of Bengal off theOdisha  coast,