Let's leave you with this.

You might imagine that the musical children of The Beatles would be hugely inspired by that mighty band's near-perfect body of work. Dhani Harrison, though - son of the late, great George - seems to have been influenced more by his father's extra-curricular activities. Read

Gandhi has been all over New York lately. First he appeared at Occupy Wall Street as a patron saint of sorts, inspiring the protest's nonviolent tactics. (The demonstrators even named a lane for him.) Then he emerged at the Metropolitan Opera as the star of Philip Glass's opera Satyagraha.

Read more on the NYT.

Thirty-year-old Biathleng fled Myanmar's Chin State for Delhi in June, with three children and a teenage wife. "I have an appointment for my refugee card,' he says carefully, when asked about his new life.

Read the report on the New York Times.  

Uttarakhand High Court today fixed December 2 for pronouncing its verdict on the petition of yoga guru Baba Ramdev's aide Balkrishna seeking the quashing of an FIR lodged against him by CBI for allegedly using fake educational degrees for procuring a passport.

The final hearing in the case, which began yesterday, concluded this evening and after hearing the arguments, a single bench of the High Court fixed Friday for pronouncement of its verdict, said Rajendra Dobhal, counsel for Balkrishna.

This is what happened during the earlier meeting this morning. The CongressCore Group today discussed the issue but could not not take any decision.

"No decision," an informed source said after the hour-long meeting that took place at the residence of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh which was also attended by Congress President Sonia Gandhi.Senior ministers Pranab Mukherjee, A K Antony, P Chidambaram and Congress General Secretary Ahmed Patel also attended the meeting.

Just in: The Congress Core Group will meet again this evening on the FDI retail
issue. Another meeting was held early this morning. Tomorrow commerce ministry Anand Sharma will hold another meeting with Cong MPs on the same issue.

Earlier in the day, law minister Salman Khurshid had said the PM was firm on FDI, but open to dialogue on the issue and the views of MPs Sanjay Singh and Praveen Aaron (who wants a tweaking of the issue) were welcome. Congress MP Mani Shankar Aiyar also says that there must be a debate on the issue in Parliament.  

From the start of the trial in the 2G spectrum scam case, the prime accused and main conspirator, former telecom minister A Raja, started a silent protest. From the start of the trial in the 2G spectrum scam case, the prime accused and main conspirator, former telecom minister A Raja, started a silent protest. Six witnesses have so far entered the box to depose before Judge OP Saini in the trial.

Read more on legallyindia.com

Verbal explosives were hurled across the aisle during the Sohrabuddin fake encounter hearing in the Supreme Court of India today between additional solicitor general Indira Jaisingh, senior advocate Ram Jethmalani and former solicitor general Gopal Subramanium.

Read more on legallyindia.com  

Police have registered an FIR against Bollywood actor Salman Khan, his bodyguard Shera and five others at the Kakadeo police station in Kanpur for allegedly assaulting anti-corruption activist Omendra Bharat, an ex-IIT-ian and chief general secretary of Jan Rajya Party, on August 24.

Read the report on the Times of India.

A medical report filed in the Supreme Court by a special medical team of a Kolkata hospital on Friday backed allegations raised by Maoist sympathiser Soni Sori that she was tortured in police custody in Chhattisgarh.

The report by a team of doctors from the NRS Medical College and Hospital, Kolkata is believed to have reported removal of certain "foreign objects' from her private parts, sources said.

Read the story on the Indian Express

Yuvraj Singh: Was so touched by the wishes of people @espncricinfo and everywhere. Also so much love from neighborhood. Thanks once again.  

Yuvraj was diagnosed with a non-malignant tumour in his lungs. Read: It was unbearable to see how he suffered, says mother Shabnam

In a major blow to the already-struggling banking sector in a weak global economic scenario, rating agency major S&P has downgraded as many as 15 large banks globally, including some big American names like Bank ofAmerica, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. 

Standard and Poor's has also cut ratings for US-based banking giants like JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, while some European banking titans like Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, RBS (Royal Bank of Scotland) and Rabobank have also been downgraded.

Jnanpith award-winning Assamese litterateur Indira Goswami has donated her eyes to Sri Sankardeva Nethralaya (SSN) here, with the corneas being
extracted. 

"Goswami had pledged to donate her eyes in 2009 and following her death yesterday, the corneas were extracted by a team of doctors from Sri Sankardeva Nethralaya," SSN's Medical Director Harsha Bhattacharjee said.

The doctors after initial inspection found Goswami's corneas fit for donation and they will be implanted in a recipient's eyes within the next four days, he said.

Home Minister P Chidambaram reacts to the bomb blast in Imphal that killed one person, today: We will not bend before violence. Maoists and north east insurgents should suspend violence before talks. He also denied that Maoist leader Kishenji was killed in a fake encounter and said all Maoist-affected states have been put on high alert after his death. He said the postmortem report indicated that Kishenji had in fact died in a gun battle. 

Over 500 people have been killed in various incidents of terrorist and Naxal violence in the country this year, the Rajya Sabha was informed today.

The largest causalities have been reported from Naxal-hit states with 275 civilians and 93 security force personnel killed till October this year, Minister of State for Home Jitendra Singh said in a written reply.

The corresponding figures for terror and insurgency-related incidents in north-east states was 61 and 32 respectively while in Jammu Kashmir the numbers were 28 and 30, during the same period.

Thousands of UK schools and offices remained closed today as one of country's biggest public sector strikes in decades got underway here that also
threatens to affect the airport passenger traffic. 

The 24-hour strike is expected to disrupt hospitals, courts, job centres, driving tests and council services, such as libraries, community centres and refuse collections. 

Teachers and heads are taking to the picket lines, affecting almost three in four schools, according to early Government figures. However, it is feared this number could rise.

More on the Independent, UK.

First, read this: This is Suhel Seth's book review on Caravan magazine. The Age of Seth: How vice pays tribute to virtue in contemporary India.

The book was reviewed by Mihir S Sharma and is, to be put it mildly, not kind to the author.

Here's an excerpt: If there is something that strikes you as disingenuous in a chapter that urges you to pretend not to be seeking out celebrities in order to achieve success at seeking out celebrities, you are not alone. This off-key clash between tone and motive is the discordant leitmotif that runs through the book. For those of us less able or willing to carry off this cognitive dissonance with Seth's panache, Rule 6 is thus less helpful than it may have first seemed.       

Read

This is a really fun one on Twitter and is likely to be fake.

Charles_HRH Prince Charles: One sincerely hopes that Mother goes on #strike. King for a day.

What's that they say about a woman scorned? Here's what men do.

A furious woman is suing her ex-boyfriend after he tattooed a steaming poo on her back. Rossie Brovent wants 60,000 in damages from Ryan Fitzjerald. Rossie, from Dayton, Ohio, US, wanted a scene from the Narnia trilogy inked on her back. Instead she was left with a pile of excrement with flies buzzing around it.  Read the story on the sun.co.uk.

It has become an oft-repeated truism of late that the Misbah-ul-Haq led Pakistan side is quite a different beast to the swash-buckling, opponent destroying Pakistan's teams of yore.

Further proof of this assertion came, if any was needed, in the ICC's ODI Player Rankings for this week. Read the report on the Dawn.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today headed to Myanmar in the first top-level US visit for half a century, hoping to ignite a "movement for change" in
one of the world's most closed nations. 

After attending an aid conference in South Korea, Clinton was flying to a little-used airport in Naypyidaw, Myanmar's remote showcase capital unveiled in 2005 by military rulers of the strategic but long-isolated country.

If you were not at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai on Sunday to watch what is being called the flash mob dance, watch the video.

This is what happened on Sunday: The station became the scene of a joyous, music-fueled flash mob Sunday in what is being called the "first large-scale citizen flash mob" in Mumbai.

The surprise choreographed dance, which featured around 200 people singing and dancing at CST station, took a month of planning and practice to pull together, according to an article in The New York Times.

Read more on the Huffington Post.

Also on Twitter: Shiraz Hassan  @ 'SubhanAllah' RT @HafeezChachar my cable operator has replaced BBC world TV with HadiTV1, a religious tv channel.   

Here's the context: Pakistani cable television operators have blocked broadcasts of the BBC's World News channel, and threatened to suspend other foreign channels showing 'anti-Pakistan' content.   The operators said that the move is in response to a documentary broadcast by the channel, entitled Secret Pakistan, the BBC reports.

The two-part BBC documentary questioned the country's commitment to tackling Taliban militancy. It quoted US intelligence officials as saying that they acted as America's ally in public while secretly training and arming the Taliban in Afghanistan.
 

Terming the economic partnership as the bedrock of India-US strategic relationship, Indian Ambassador to Washington Nirupama Rao has marked nuclear energy and high technology as some of the new areas where the two countries can expand their cooperation. 

At a rare reception hosted in her honour by the Senate India Caucus at the Capitol Hill, Rao said the growth of the knowledge economy has brought forth new areas of cooperation and the ties have the potential to shape the destiny of the people of the two countries.

From that romantic story to the more prosaic:

Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today briefed party MPs over the FDI issue and the government's steps to check blackmoney, inflation. He said the move to allow 51 per cent FDI in retail would help contain inflation and bridge the gap between farmers and retail prices. 

Commerce Minister Anand Sharma will brief the party MPs in detail on FDI tomorrow, as Mukherjee mainly concentrated on the other two issues in the Congress Parliamentary Party meeting this morning. 

In the one-hour long briefing, Mukherjee apprised the party members in detail about the steps taken by government to check the outflow of blackmoney to tax havens abroad.

Though she died on November 22, news of Josef Stalin's daughter, Svetlana's death, appeared just yesterday. Here's something to chew on: Svetlana's Indian connect.

In 1967 she travelled to India to scatter the ashes of her Indian Communist lover in the river Ganges. During that visit she defected to the US causing a political sensation. Indian journalist Inder Malhotra recalls the scandal on the bbc.co.uk. Read

Update on the Imphal blast: Police identified the injured as Kora, a rickshaw puller. He was paid Rs 20 by suspected KCP militants to carry the bomb, they said.

The site of the blast is about 50 metres away from the newly-constructed 'City Convention Centre' which would be inaugurated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on December 3, official sources said.    

Sources said a faction of the KCP (Kangleipak Communist Party) had called a 72-hour general strike in Manipur which would end tomorrow at 6 am tomorrow in protest against the prolonged economic blockade on national highways. 

Thousands of people gather at the ground during the 'Sangai festival'. Foreigners, mainly from south-east Asian countries, participate in large numbers and stalls sell foreign items.

Break from FDI and blast news for an update on what Mr Shekhar Kapoor has been upto.

Not since his breakthrough with Bandit Queen in 1994, has Shekhar Kapoor been really prolific. The Indian-born director made four films prior to that, but despite the Oscar-nominated success of Elizabeth, his western debut, he's only made two films since, both poorly received historical epics, in "The Four Feathers" and the sequel "Elizabeth: The Golden Age."

It's now three years since we've seen anything from Kapur (namely a segment of anthology flick "New York, I Love You"), but the filmmaker has just announced he's the latest of a string of top-flight filmmakers to be attached to a classic novel from the 1980s.

The director now says that he's to direct London Fields, an adaptation of the 1989 novel by Martin Amis. Read more on indewire.com

India's GDP growth has slowed down to 6.9 per cent in second quarter of 2011-12 from 8.4 per cent in corresponding period of previous year. The GDP growth has dipped to 7.3 per cent in first half of 2011-12 from 8.6 per cent in corresponding period of the previous year.

Read more on the Wall Street Journal.

Rediff.com's Sumit Bhattacharya reports from Imphal:

A bomb went off at the Sangai festival in Imphal, Manipur, this morning just days before the Prime Minister's visit to the troubled state.

Dr Manmohan Singh is scheduled to visit the state, which just lifted a 100-day blockade, on December 3.

Three people were injured, one critically, when the bomb went off at the gate of the festival venue on the closing day. Police sources say that the IED was carried to the venue in a rickshaw.

The state governor is scheduled to attend the festival today.

Had the explosion taken place in the evening, the casualty figures would have been hundreds if not thousands.

Just in: A powerful bomb explodes in a crowded area in Imphal, casualties feared.

In another 30 minutes, the Parliament will reconvene after it was adjourned this morning.

Right now, the BJP Parliamentary committee is meeting to discuss the way-ahead. Earlier in the day, senior BJP leader Sushma Swaraj had tweeted: Want discussion on adjournment motion on FDI.

In world news:

Conrad Murray, the US doctor convicted of the involuntary manslaughter of pop superstar Michael Jackson, has been sentenced to four years in county jail. Murray was found guilty earlier this month after a six-week trial. Read more on the bbc.co.uk.

If you've been feeling particularly hot in Mumbai, this is probably why.

The World Meteorological Organization has said that temperatures in 2011 were nearing the top of records dating back to 1850 despite weather patterns which cool global temperatures.  

According to the WMO, the 13 warmest years on record have all occurred in the 15 years between 1997 and 2011.  

Their data shows that the average global temperature for January to October 2011 was 14.36C, 0.36C above the 1961 to 1990 long-term average of 14C, the Daily Mail reports.

The Delhi Police sources have claimed to have solved the Jama Masjid blast case, the Pune German Bakery blast case and Chinnaswamy stadium terror attack case with the arrest of a Pakistani national and six Indian Mujahideen operatives.

This comes days after two Indian Mujahideen operatives were arrested in Chennai and brought to Delhi for questioning, says a CNN IBN report.

The police have been conducting raids at other places including Bihar to find clues in terror cases like the Jama Masjid blast, the Delhi High Court blast and even the German Bakery blast.

Four people were also detained three days ago as the police questioned some people in connection with these terror cases.

The seventh day of the winter session of Parliament has just begun. Earlier in the day the PM and Sonia Gandhi briefed Congressmen about the way ahead on the FDI on retail logjam in Parliament.

Both houses of Parliament have been adjourned till noon.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today voiced regret that Pakistan had announced a boycott of a meeting on Afghanistan in Germany and urged it to consider. Speaking at an aid conference in South Korea, Clintonreiterated the US stance that the border killing of Pakistani soldiers was a "tragic incident" and pledged an investigation "as swiftly and thoroughly as possible." 

"Frankly this is regrettable that Pakistan has decided not to attend the conference in Bonn because this conference has been long in the planning," Clinton told reporters. 

"Pakistan like the United States has a profound interest in a secure, stable and increasingly democratic Afghanistan," Clinton said.

Polling also began this morning for the by-election to the Adampur and Ratia Assembly constituencies in Haryana where the ruling Congress is facing an uphill task after the electoral setback it suffered in Hisar last month. 

From Adampur, Congress has fielded former legislator Kulbeer Singh against political greenhorns -- Haryana Janhit Congress President Kuldeep Bishnoi's wife Renuka Bishnoi and INLD's R S Baswana, who retired as Sessions Judge from Kaithal in August. Adampur has remained a citadel of former Haryana Chief Minister late Bhajan Lal and his family.

FDI in retail: Pranab to brief Congress MPs on govt's policy (The Times of India)

According to Times Now, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has called for a parliamentary party meeting to decide strategy to end the FDI logjam. Read

Kanimozhi walks out of Tihar jail (The Hindu)

Kanimozhi had to spend one night extra in prison as orders for her release from Tihar was issued by the special CBI court on Tuesday evening. Read

Kanimozhi was one of the most obedient inmates, say Tihar Jail authorities (The Times of India)
During her initial days at Tihar, Kanimozhi learnt the skill of candle making. She also took interest in work done for the inmates involving spiritual empowerment. Read

Nato attack was blatant aggression, says Pakistani army (The Hindustan Times)
A senior Pakistani army official has said a Nato cross-border air attack that killed 24 soldiers was a deliberate, blatant act of aggression, hardening Pakistan's stance on an incident which could hurt efforts to stabilise Afghanistan. Read

Anna on warpath again, gives govt Dec 23 deadline (Hindustan Times)
Social activist Anna Hazare has put the government on notice again, with another threat of a renewed agitation towards the end of December to push for a stronger lokpal bill. His chosen stage will be a familiar one, Delhi's Ramlila Maidan. Read