Senior politician Tulsi Giri has passed away on 18 December. He was the Former Prime minister of;

The 41st President of the US, George HW Bush has passed away on at the age of 94.

Bhagwati Kumar Sharma, noted Gujarati language author and poet passed away in Surat at the age of 84 years. Some of his novels include 'Aarti ane Angara' published in 1957, 'Man Nahi Mane' in 1962, 'Rikta' in 1968, 'Vyaktamadhya' in 1970, 'Samaydvip' in 1974 and 'Urdhvamool' in 1981.

On 22nd December 2018, Dr. Jiko Luveni, the first female speaker of Fiji's Parliament, died in office at the age of 72. Luveni first served for eight years as minister for women, social welfare and poverty alleviation in the interim government of Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama, who seized power in a 2006 coup.

Veteran actor-writer Kader Khan passed away in Canada at the age of 81. Kader Khan made his acting debut in 1973 with Rajesh Khanna's "Daag" and has featured in over 300 films. He wrote dialogues for over 250 movies. Before becoming an actor he had written dialogues for Randhir Kapoor-Jaya Bachchan's "Jawani Diwani". As a screenwriter, Khan frequently collaborated with Manmohan Desai and Prakash Mehra.

Renowned Hindi poet Pradeep Choubey passed away of a cardiac arrest. Choubey (70) was the younger brother of celebrated humorist, satirist, and poet Shail Chaturvedi. Besides humour, he was famous for satirical comments on the system.

A renowned Marathi writer, novelist and translator Kavita Mahajan, died following pneumonia in Pune, Maharashtra. She was 51 years old. She was born in Nanded, Maharashtra. Some of her popular novels are Brr, Bhinna, etc. She had won Sahitya Akademi translation award in 2011 and Shashikalatai Agashe Award for Children's Literature in 2013.

Popular ad filmmaker and theatre personality Alyque Padamsee passed away in Mumbai. 90-year-old Padamsee was reportedly in bad health and had been ailing for quite some time. Padamsee played the role of Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Richard Attenborough's Oscar winner Gandhi. A veteran in the theatre and advertising world, Padamsee was known as the brains behind several iconic Indian ad campaigns including Lalitaji for Surf, the Liril girl under the waterfall, Hamara Bajaj and the MRF muscle man.

An international research team including Dr. Surhud More and Dr. Anupreeta More from Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune has ruled out the possibility of primordial black holes being a major constituent of dark matter using Subaru telescope. This finding disproves a theoretical claim of Prof Stephen Hawking. In the solar system, Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, takes just 88 days to make one revolution around the sun, while Neptune, the farthest one, takes 165 years to make one round. In like manner, laws of gravity expect us to see stars closer to the centre of galaxies rotating faster than the stars on the edge.

The Union Cabinet has approved the Gaganyaan project under which a three-member crew will be sent to space for at least seven days, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad stated. The project will cost INR 10,000 crore. The Gaganyaan project was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day speech. He had stated that the mission will be undertaken by 2022. India has already inked agreements with Russia and France for assistance in the ambitious project.

According to a new collaborative study by the Queen's University Belfast and Aberystwyth University in the UK, the sun's magnetic field is ten times stronger than previously thought. Using the Swedish one-metre Solar Telescope at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, in the Canary Islands, David Kuridze studied a particularly strong solar flare which erupted near the surface of the Sun on September 10, 2017. A combination of favourable conditions and an element of luck enabled the team to determine the strength of the flare's magnetic field with unprecedented accuracy. The researchers believe the findings have the potential to change our understanding of the processes that happen in the Sun's immediate atmosphere. The study found that the sun's corona extends millions of kilometres above the surface, measuring 1,400,000 kilometres across -- 109 times larger than Earth and 150,000,000 km from Earth. Solar flares appear as bright flashes and occur when magnetic energy that has built up in the solar atmosphere is suddenly released.