Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee allegedly faced a physical assault by a crowd during a visit to meet post-poll violence victims in Sonarpur. Blaming the BJP for orchestrating the chaos, Banerjee lambasted the lack of security deployment just hours after receiving a fresh investigative summons from the CID.

A defining structural transition reshaped Karnataka’s political landscape on Friday, May 29, 2026, as Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot officially accepted the resignation of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, dissolving the sitting Council of Ministers. The high-profile exit follows a closed-door consensus engineered by the Congress high command in New Delhi, honoring an unwritten, rotational power-sharing formula established during the party’s decisive 2023 electoral victory. While Siddaramaiah will temporarily head state administration as caretaker Chief Minister, his long-time rival and organizational strongman, Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, stands poised as the definitive successor to the state’s apex executive office. Amid highly emotional demonstrations by AHINDA support groups outside the official residence in Bengaluru, both leaders projected a unified front, flying to Delhi to iron out upcoming cabinet expansions. The transition now moves to a formal legislative track, with a critical Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting summoned for Saturday, May 30, to officially elect Shivakumar as the new leader before the scheduled oath-taking ceremony on the steps of Vidhana Soudha.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) on Friday, May 29, 2026, sounded a critical ‘yellow’ weather alert across six vulnerable southern and central districts of Kerala following an aggressive, early advancement of the southwest monsoon. Fueled by an active upper air cyclonic circulation churning over the Southeast Arabian Sea, heavy downpours ranging between 64.5 mm and 115.5 mm are projected to slam Thiruvananthapuram, Kollam, Pathanamthitta, Alappuzha, Kottayam, and Ernakulam over the next 24 hours. Localized disaster management teams have been placed on high alert for urban waterlogging, severe traffic bottlenecks, and potential high-range mudslides. Simultaneously, the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) issued a high-risk coastal advisory warning of severe sea incursions linked to the dangerous ‘Kallakkadal’ (swell surge) phenomenon. Driven by deep ocean storms traveling thousands of kilometers from the southern Indian Ocean, high waves peaking at 1.6 meters are expected to hit shallow shores tonight, prompting administrators to enforce a strict maritime ban on all local fishing activities.

The long-deferred blueprint for commercial aviation in Malda district achieved a critical operational milestone on Friday, May 29, 2026, as state transport officials finalized the initial land identification phase for a brand-new greenfield airport. Moving away from the land-locked, heavily congested colonial-era airstrip at English Bazar—which has historically resisted multi-directional runway extensions—the district administration has mapped out massive, unencumbered open land parcels across the strategic Gazole–Atmile–Narayanpur belt. This site selection is intentionally optimized to interface seamlessly with National Highway 12, creating an accessible regional transit junction that links North Bengal directly to neighboring economic pockets in Bihar and Jharkhand. Aimed at facilitating 90-seater commercial aircraft under an upcoming expansion of the Central Government’s UDAN regional connectivity scheme, the infrastructure push is projected to systematically lower transit timelines to Kolkata to under an hour. Crucially, local trade chambers have strongly backed the transition, noting that a dedicated cargo terminal at the new location will comprehensively address cold-chain logistics and export bottlenecks for Malda’s premium mango and silk industries.

The Supreme Court of India on Wednesday, May 27, 2026, delivered a landmark judgment unanimously upholding the constitutional validity of the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. A division bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi ruled that under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, the poll body possesses clear, plenary powers to launch large-scale verification drives to purge duplicate, dead, or shifted entries. Rejecting public interest petitions that argued the exercise would trigger arbitrary mass disenfranchisement in states like Bihar and West Bengal, the apex court observed that free and fair elections fundamentally depend on the absolute credibility of voter logs rather than just the mechanics of polling day. Crucially, the bench clarified that while the ECI is legally empowered to conduct a limited, “rebuttable” inquiry into an elector’s citizenship to verify structural eligibility, its findings do not constitute a final legal declaration of citizenship, ordering the ECI to instantly forward all disputed deletions to competent tribunals under the Citizenship Act for a time-bound final adjudication

A tenuous, month-long Middle East ceasefire violently dissolved in the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, May 28, 2026, as the United States and Iran traded heavy direct military strikes near the strategic Strait of Hormuz. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed responsibility for a targeted 4:50 a.m. ballistic missile assault against a major American airbase in Kuwait—the suspected launchpad for an earlier U.S. operation. This retaliation came just hours after U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) carried out what the Pentagon labeled a “purely defensive” strike, deploying aerial projectiles to completely destroy an Iranian ground control station on the outskirts of Bandar Abbas Airport that was actively preparing a fifth one-way attack drone. The military flare-up, which also saw Kuwaiti air defenses rapidly intercepting incoming regional threats, has sent global energy markets into an immediate panic, with Brent crude spiking over $2 a barrel on renewed fears of an unmanageable shipping blockade. Despite frantic diplomatic channels remaining open in Qatar, Donald Trump fiercely escalated the rhetoric from Washington, mockingly asserting that Iran’s economy is in a “free fall” and warning that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is fully prepared to “finish the job” if Tehran resists a strict nuclear and maritime capitulation.