New Delhi, Aug 12: The Supreme Court on Tuesday said that the inclusion and exclusion of citizens and non-citizens from electoral rolls falls within the remit of the Election Commission of India (ECI) and agreed with its view that Aadhaar is not conclusive proof of citizenship, reports Bar & Bench.

A Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi was hearing petitions challenging the ECI’s June 24 directive for a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar ahead of state assembly elections.

The petitioners argued that the process could lead to large-scale disenfranchisement, while the ECI maintained that the revision was necessary due to migration, demographic changes, and outdated rolls. The court also took note of submissions regarding errors in the draft roll and disputes over acceptable proof of identity. Proceedings will continue on Wednesday.

New Delhi, Aug 12: Parliament on Tuesday passed the new Income Tax Bill, with the Rajya Sabha returning the legislation to the Lok Sabha.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman introduced the two money bills — The Income Tax Bill, 2025, and The Taxation Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2025.

The Rajya Sabha returned the legislation with a voice vote to the lower house.

The Income Tax Bill will replace the Income Tax Act, 1961.

Explaining the reasons for bringing the new income tax law, Sitharaman said some parts of the Income Tax Act, 1961, have become outdated and hence a new legislation was needed.

She stressed that the new income tax law aims to make the language simple and does not introduce any new rate.

Sitharaman also lashed out at the Opposition for not participating in the discussion on important bills like the income tax law.

“I am shocked that the Opposition doesn’t want to participate,” she said.

Opposition parties staged a walkout in the Rajya Sabha, as they did in the Lok Sabha on Monday.

Opposition parties had agreed in the Business Advisory Committee to 16 hours of debate each in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on the Income Tax Bill, she pointed out.

She also expressed gratitude to the Select Committee of Parliament, which scrutinised the bill.

She further said a total of 75,000 person hours have gone into the drafting of the Bill.

New Delhi, Aug 12:The Supreme Court on Tuesday remarked that the Election Commission of India (ECI) is correct in asserting that an Aadhaar card does not constitute conclusive proof of citizenship.

A Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi further stated that the inclusion or exclusion of citizens and non-citizens from the electoral rolls lies within the mandate of the poll body.

The observations were made by the Justice Kant-led Bench while hearing a batch of pleas challenging the Special Intensive Revisions (SIR) of electoral rolls in poll-bound Bihar.

“The EC is correct in saying Aadhaar cannot be accepted as conclusive proof of citizenship. It has to be verified,” it remarked.

During the hearing, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the petitioners, argued that the SIR process could lead to large-scale disenfranchisement of vulnerable citizens, especially those unable to submit the required forms.

Sibal argued that most of the enlisted documents are not available to people in Bihar. “Bihar people don’t have these documents, that’s the point,” he submitted.

To this, the Justice Kant-led Bench said, “It is a very sweeping argument that in Bihar, nobody possesses these documents. Aadhaar and a ration card they have? There must be something to prove you are a citizen of India. Everybody possesses some certificate – you need it even to buy a SIM.”

It further remarked that the Aadhaar Act itself makes it clear that an Aadhaar number is not proof of citizenship, and that the ECI’s stand is consistent with this legal position.

Apart from Kapil Sibal, a battery of lawyers, including senior advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Gopal Sankaranarayanan, Prashant Bhushan and Vrinda Grover, presented their oral arguments.

The apex court will resume hearing the matter on Wednesday.

In a recently filed affidavit, the ECI opposed the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR)’s demand to disclose constituency and booth-wise details of about 65 lakh electors whose enumeration forms were not submitted.

The poll body said that the statutory scheme under the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, does not mandate creating or publishing such a list.

The ADR’s application had sought two directions: first, to publish a constituency and booth-wise list of omitted electors with reasons such as death, permanent migration, duplication, or being untraceable; and second, to disclose the names of electors whose enumeration forms have been “not recommended” by the Booth Level Officers (BLOs).

New Delhi, Aug 12: A team of US scientists showed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help detect early larynx or voice box cancer from the sound of the patient’s voice.

Cancer of the voice box is an important public health burden. In 2021, there were an estimated 1.1 million cases of laryngeal cancer worldwide, and approximately 100,000 people died from it.

Risk factors include smoking, alcohol abuse, and infection with human papillomavirus.

The prognosis for laryngeal cancer ranges from 35 per cent to 78 per cent survival over five years when treated, depending on the tumour’s stage and its location within the voice box.

Now, researchers from the Oregon Health & Science University showed that abnormalities of the vocal folds can be detected from the sound of the voice using AI.

Such ‘vocal fold lesions’ can be benign, like nodules or polyps, but may also represent the early stages of laryngeal cancer.

These proof-of-principle results open the door for a new application of AI: namely, to recognise the early warning stages of laryngeal cancer from voice recordings, said the team in the paper published in the journal Frontiers in Digital Health.

“Here we show that with this dataset we could use vocal biomarkers to distinguish voices from patients with vocal fold lesions from those without such lesions,” said Dr Phillip Jenkins, postdoctoral fellow in clinical informatics at Oregon.

In the study, Jenkins and team analysed variations in tone, pitch, volume, and clarity with 12,523 voice recordings of 306 participants from across North America.

A minority were from patients with known laryngeal cancer, benign vocal fold lesions, or two other conditions of the voice box: spasmodic dysphonia and unilateral vocal fold paralysis.

The researchers focused on differences in a number of acoustic features of the voice: for example, the mean fundamental frequency (pitch); jitter, variation in pitch within speech; shimmer, variation of the amplitude; and the harmonic-to-noise ratio, a measure of the relation between harmonic and noise components of speech.

They found marked differences in the harmonic-to-noise ratio and fundamental frequency between men without any voice disorder, men with benign vocal fold lesions, and men with laryngeal cancer.

They didn’t find any informative acoustic features among women, but it is possible that a larger dataset would reveal such differences.

Variation in the harmonic-to-noise ratio can be helpful to monitor the clinical evolution of vocal fold lesions, and to detect laryngeal cancer at an early stage, at least in men, the researchers said.