Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived here today to attend a summit meeting of the BRICS nations that will address regional crises and security threats to restore a climate of peace while advancing global economic stability.

The Bombay high court today sought to know from the Maharashtra government what measures it had taken to prevent drink driving cases after the accident involving Bollywood actor Salman Khan in 2002.

Justices Abhay Oka and A S Chandurkar were hearing a public interest litigation filed by journalist Nikhil Wagle seeking compensation for the victims and their families.

Khan's vehicle had allegedly rammed into a bakery at suburban Bandra on September 28, 2002, killing one person and injuring four others. A sessions court is currently trying the actor in this case.

The wrecked Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia has been successfully raised from the under-sea platform it has been resting on for the past year..

The wreck -- the target of one of the biggest maritime salvage operations in history -- is now floating about 2m off the platform, reports BBC. 

But the 33-year-old waiter from India remains the only victim of the 2012 shipwreck whose remains haven't been found.

It has been more than 2.5 years since the ship ran aground off Italy's Giglio Island with more than 4,200 passengers aboard, killing 32 people in a disaster that drew global attention.

RJD supremo Lalu Prasad today recorded his statement in a fodder scam case in a special CBI court while claiming that he was a victim of conspiracy in the Rs 950 fodder Animal Husbandry Department scandal.        

 

Facing questions from special CBI judge A K Rai in the RC64A/96, the former Bihar chief minister claimed that he was innocent and asked how many times should he should be convicted for the same case after being been convicted in the RC20A/96 case earlier.      

 

Recording the statement under CrPC 313 (power to examine the accused) in the case pertaining to illegal withdrawal of Rs 96 lakh from the Deogarh Treasury in the 1990s, Prasad alleged that the CBI's chargesheet and documentary evidence contradicting each other and that the investigating agency had made him who was the complainant, guilty.     

 

To a question, he denied having carried out any transfer or extension of any official during his chief ministerial tenure in the 1990s when the scam was unearthed.       The RJD chief's counsel, Prabhat Kumar said that the court had asked the same questions which his client recorded during the RC20A/96 case.

The South African Nobel-prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, one of the literary world's most powerful voices against apartheid, has died at the age of 90, her family say.

 

Gordimer died peacefully at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her children, Hugo and Oriane, a statement from the family said.

 

Born in Gauteng, South Africa, in 1923 to immigrant European parents, Gordimer was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1991 for novels and short stories that grappled with the human tensions of the apartheid system and the problems of the post-apartheid state. She was called one of the great "guerrillas of the imagination" by the poet Seamus Heaney, and a "magnificent epic writer" by the Nobel committee.

 

Read more on The Guardian

The urban future depends on making cities intelligent, and that applies equally to both new and old parts of the city. Read

Congress spokesperson Ajay Maken @ajaymaken tweets: During @INCIndia regime terrorist were hanged & now Ramdev aide meeting with them.

KP Unnikrishnan, the father of the late NSG commando reacts to the meeting between JuD chief Hafeez Saeed and Baba Ramdev's aide, Ved Pratap Vaidik. "It's very surprising. I am very frustrated with this and Baba Ramdev's defence. It is not about an insult to martyrs, I just can't digest what was he doing there.

Major Sandeep was killed by two of the 10 Pakistani terrorists in the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai, during Operation Black Tornado on November 26, 2008, in what is known as the Mumbai terror attacks.

'Those monsters ate her up alive, please hang them'. Read our 2013 interview with the Delhi braveheart's parents. 

The death sentence for Askhay Thakur and Vinay Sharma were stayed today, while that of Mukesh Singh and Pawan Gupta had been stayed earlier. In effect the death sentence for all four convicts have been stayed. However, this is just a technicality, which means that the SC has agreed to hear their pleas. It is not a verdict.

Supreme Court stays the death sentence of two convicts in the Delhi gang-rape case.  While all four adults were convicted of raping and killing a young student in Delhi in December, 2012, only two had challenged the order of the Delhi High Court, which had awarded the death sentence.

The four convicts in the December 16 gang rape-cum-murder case were on September 13, 2013, awarded the death penalty by a Delhi court which said the gravity of the offence cannot be tolerated.

"Death to all," Additional Sessions Judge Yogesh Khanna said while delivering the verdict in the case that had evoked nationwide outrage and led the government to bring in a stringent anti-rape law.

"Besides discussing others offences, I straightaway come to section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code. This falls under inhuman nature of the convicts and the gravity of offence they committed cannot be tolerated. Death sentence is given to all the four convicts," he said.

The offence committed by Mukesh, 26, Akshay Thakur, 28, Pawan Gupta, 19 and Vinay Sharma, 20, falls under the rarest of rare category warranting capital punishment, the judge said.

The four were convicted by the court on September 10 for the gang rape and murder of a 23-year-old paramedic student.

Hashim Amla has been appointed captain of South Africa's test cricket team, becoming the first black cricketer to hold the post permanently. He takes over from Graeme Smith, who retired earlier this year after a world record 109 matches in charge.

Malala, the girl who became a symbol for women's rights after being attacked by the Taliban for attending school, flew to Nigeria this weekend to help draw attention to the missing Nigerian school girls.

The teenager spent her 17th birthday talking to the families of the missing schoolgirls, who were kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Haram.

"I thought It would be good to go to Nigeria because they are suffering and they need someone to raise up their voice and they love education," the teenager told ABC News. "I want to support them."

The government has slapped an additional penalty of USD 579 million on Reliance Industries for producing less than targeted natural gas from its KG-D6 block, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said today.

With this, the total penalty on RIL for missing the target in four fiscal years beginning April 1, 2010 now stands at a cumulative USD 2.376 billion, the Minister informed the Lok Sabha today.

The penalty is in the form of disallowing costs incurred. The Production Sharing Contract (PSC) allows RIL and its partners BP Plc and Niko Resources to deduct all capital and operating expenses from the sale of gas before sharing profit with the government. Disallowing costs will result in government's profit share rising by USD 195 million from 2010-11 to 2013-14, he said.

The national discourse is so superficial that it only talks of foreign direct investment, investment allowance, tax sops and the like which are just about a twentieth to a sixth of the national economy. It did not even notice paragraph 102 in the Union budget speech which is about half of India's economy. Read

Mike Haysman tweets: Surprising News - Cricket's 2013 Champions Trophy Final had a bigger global TV audience than football's 2014 World Cup Final The TV audiences explained by cricket obsession in Ind, Pak & Bang (3 of top 8 populous nations) & football WC in middle of night in Asia.

Criticising Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, former party MP Gufran Azam on Monday accused the Gandhi scion of destroying the grand old party.

Speaking to ANI, Azam said, "Rahul thought Youth Congress is a lab and did experiments and destroyed it," adding, that he did the same with the Congress.

Azam also questioned Rahul's leadership credentials, saying, "Hum toh thak gaye sun sun ke, koi use pappu bolta hai, koi munna bolta hai, sharam aati hai.' (We are tired of hearing people addressing the Congress vice president as 'Pappu' and 'Munna' and feel ashamed).

Azam, who appeared to be very upset with the party leadership, said that he had been writing to Congress president Sonia Gandhi since 2005 that sycophants are ruling the roost in the party. He said that the Congress started started going downhill every since Sonia made Rahul in-charge of the party.

Commenting on the landslide victory of the BJP in the recently held General Elections, the former Congress MP asserted, "Modi's prediction was right, he has crushed the Congress. The party did not see it coming, I warned but no one listened,' Azam added.

President Pranab Mukherjee announces the appointment of Padmanabha Balakrishna Acharya as Governor of Nagaland.  Further, the President has also appointed Padmanabha Balakrishna Acharya, to discharge the functions of the Governor of Tripura, in addition to his own duties, until regular arrangements for the office of the Governor of Tripura are made.

The president has also announced the appointment of Ram Naik as the Governor of Uttar Pradesh, Balramji Dass Tandon as the Governor of Chhattisgarh; Keshari Nath Tripathi as the Governor of West Bengal and Om Prakash Kohli as the Governor of Gujarat.
 
 

Former Sri Lanka skipper Mahela Jayawardene has announced his retirement from Test cricket following the home series against South Africa and Pakistan this year. Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) said Jayawardene, 37, has written a letter to the chief executive officer Ashley De Silva announcing his wish to retire from the longest version of the game.

Nothing can make a footballer go crazy than winning the biggest prize on offer. So, after Germany beat Argetina to win the FIFA World Cup on Sunday, Germany's forward Lucas Podolski went on a selfie spree after the West Europeans won their first World Cup win in 24 years. 
See our slideshow.

Childhood friends Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli seem to be a study in contrasts. While the former enjoys the status of a god and can do no wrong in the eyes of his legion of fans, the latter seems to be controversy's poster child.

Kambli, who has had several non-cognisable complaints registered against him in the past, is in the news again after a Dombivli bank issued an advertisement in a leading Marathi daily on Saturday, labelling him and his wife defaulters. "Kambli had taken housing and vehicle loans from the bank, which were given to him after following all the rules.

He paid a few installments initially and then stopped. One of our employees, Deepa Upadhyay, had gone to his house in September 2010 to request him to pay the money, but his wife had slapped Upadhyay and filed a non-cognisable complaint against her," said a senior official from Dombivli Nagari Sahakari (DNS) Bank, which has around 40 branches in the city.

Read more

The Middle East is back, and back with a bang. For some time now, the West -- the United States of America in particular -- had lulled itself into believing that if it would only ignore the region, its problems would go away.

After all, at a time of diminishing economic resources in the West, the Indo-Pacific, with a rising China at the centre of its changing strategic landscape, was the region that deserved greater attention.

The strategically diffident Barack Obama administration embraced this thinking with great enthusiasm partly for sound economic reasons and partly because it saw no need for the US to get bogged down in the millennium-old Shia-Sunni feuds. Read

An Air India Boeing 777 flight carrying 313 people on board returned here, soon after take off, following a bird hit that damaged its left engine.

No one was injured in the incident in which the aircraft, operating the Mumbai-bound flight AI 144, took off from Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, at about 4:30 pm Sunday local time.

The flight was grounded, as it landed at about 5 pm local time, due to the "loss of the port (left) engine", after the bird hit, an AI official said.

Passengers were deplaned and provided hotel accommodation and alternative arrangement were being made by the airline to bring them back. Men and material have been flown from Delhi to repair the damage, the official said.

The cartoon on the Hindu today. Arun Jaitley's budget has been criticised for few big-ticket reforms. 

The BBC's prestigious Reith Lectures for 2014 will feature renowned surgeon and writer Atul Gawande. The series, which examines The Future of Medicine with Gawande takes a look at the nature of modern medicine: Both it's progress and it's failures. Medicine is defined he says by "the messy intersection of science and human fallibility.' The lectures will take place in India, the USA and UK.

The very first Reith lecturer was the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who spoke on Authority and the Individual. Previous Reith lecturers from the world of medicine include Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, who in 2003 lectured on new insights into the human brain's workings; Professor of genetics and broadcaster Steve Jones who delivered the 1991 Reith Lectures examining what we know and have still to discover about genetics;  and English zoologist and neurophysiologist John Zachary Young in 1950 who explored the function of the brain, and the current scientific methods used to increase our understanding of it.

Germany vs Argentina World Cup 2014: Best memes and Tweets, including Lukas Podolski selfie with Angela Merke. See

The Central Hall of Parliament wore a deserted look today. Congress MPs have been steering clear of the Central Hall after their dismal performance in the Lok Sabha polls.

The other reason, Central Hall was empty is because BJP MPs have been MIA what with Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in Berlin en route to the Brics summit in Germany.

BJP MP Poonam Mahajan is a familiar face in Central Hall. From the PM to junior MPs everyone goes up and speaks to her, a carry over of the respect with which they held her father Pramod Mahajan and uncle Gopinath Munde. 

A bill to amend the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Act was passed in the Lok Sabha today amid ruckus with the Congress signalling its opposition to the proposed legislation. The bill replaces an ordinance brought by the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government to facilitate the appointment of Nripendra Misra as the principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Misra is a former chairman of TRAI.

So why didn't anyone think of this before?

ESPN announced Thursday that part of its coverage for next week's British Open will include an exclusive Tiger Woods broadcast.

The network says the feed will follow Woods for each round as he makes his first major championship start of the year at Royal Liverpool.

The broadcast will be available as a feed on ESPN3. Read more

 Decades after soldier and legendary runner Paan Singh Tomar turned into a Chambal bandit, two members of his family were gunned down in a bloody clash in the ravines. The killings followed a family feud over land in Tomar's ancestral village Bhidosa in Morena district on Sunday.

While two of them, Rahul Tomar, 19, and Vrindavan Tomar, 36, died of bullet injuries, two others Pinky and Ravi are critically injured. They have been taken to a hospital in Gwalior, said Silhonia police station in charge, O P Chanderia.

Read more

Night owls and stargazers were presented with a beautiful view on Saturday night, as the first of this season's supermoons filled the night sky. For the uninitiated, a supermoon is a scientific phenomenon when the moon is 48,280 kilometre closer to Earth than the farthest point in its orbit and the moon looks bigger and brighter. Two additional supermoons are expected in 2014, one on August 10 and another on September 9, NASA said. August's supermoon is expected to be the most remarkable of the year. See

Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi on Sunday said juveniles accused of heinous crimes like rape should be treated on par with adult offenders.

Speaking to reporters in Chennai, she said according to the police, 50 per cent of all sexual crimes were committed by "16-year-olds who know the Juvenile Justice Act so they can do it."

"But now for premeditated murder, rape, if we bring them into the purview of the adult world, then it will scare them," she said.

Former Women and Child Development Minister Krishna Tirath during the previous UPA regime had proposed that juveniles above 16 years guilty of heinous crimes be treated on par with adult offenders.

The move was however opposed by various NGOs and National Commission of Protection of Child Rights which stated that such a proposal was against child rights.

BJP's Prakash Javadekar says Vaidik is a journalist who has nothing to do with the govt. "Our stand has always been that Hafiz Saeed is a terrorist," he said. 

Fifa have barred Barcelona from publicly unveiling their new 75 million signing Luis Suarez while his ban for biting remains in force. Read

How Granville Austin beat Delhi babudom to write his book on the Indian Constitution. A friend of the historian, who died a week ago, recalls the time the American scholar spent in India doing research for this seminal work. Read this and go back in time.

Vaidik also said that Saeed wants to come to India to clarify his position. Saeed also said he would welcome Modi if he came to Pakistan.

Baba Ramdev's aide, Ved Pratap Vaidik, says, "I told Hafeez Saeed that Narendra Modi should not be feared. I am not anyone's envoy, I went as a journalist. I put my life in dangerCongress leaders are making so much noise in Parliament, agar unke neta milne jaate toh unka pajama giila ho jata, stretcher pe lana padta (Had their leaders met Saeed, they would have been frightened, and would have be brought out in a strecher). Salman Khursheed and Mani Shankar Aiyer were also part of delegation. "

Lalu Prasad Yadav to appears before CBI court in the fodder scam. 

In electing Amit Shah as its president, the Bharatiya Janata Party seems to have lost sight of its special responsibilities as a ruling party at the Centre. There are many sides to Mr. Shah, but the BJP Central Parliamentary Board chose not to look beyond his organisational skills, and his success as the political strategist for Uttar Pradesh in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.

An accused in the case of the extrajudicial killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Tulsiram Prajapati, two persons who were facing charges of extortion, Mr. Shah had a controversial tenure as Home Minister in Gujarat under the chief ministership of Narendra Modi.  Read more

Rajya Sabha adjourned till noon after uproar over Ved Pratap Vaidik meets 26/11 terrorist Hafeez Saee.

The Congress has raised the issue in Parliament. 

Ved Pratap Vaidik, Baba Ramdev's close aide, sparked off a major controversy after his pictures with 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed emerged on the social media.

The photograph shows Vaidik engrossed in a deep conversation with Saeed.

Vaidik later played down his meeting saying that he also met Nawaz Sharif and many other leaders from Pakistan.

He also said that he met Saeed as a journalist and nothing more should be read out of read into his meeting with the 26/11 attacker.

The images that are doing rounds on the social networks are likely to put the yoga guru Baba Ramdev in an embarrassing spot.

Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Saeed had orchestrated the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks.

Just days after his organisation was declared a terror outfit by the US, Saeed addressed a seminar at the Lahore High Court plooting against India and America. This is the second time that Saeed, who is the founder of banned terror organisation Laskar-e-Taiba, has addressed lawyers and others within the court premises this year. -- Zee News

The Rajya Sabha has been adjourned to 11:20 am. 

Old-timers swear they hadn't seen such a galaxy of 'A' listers from politics and bureaucracy at one place ever in the Gujarat capital, as they did on the occasion of BJP's newly appointed president Amit Shah's son's engagement ceremony on Sunday. Jay Shah, 24, got engaged to his college mate Hrishita Patel, 24, daughter of a Ghatlodia-based builder Gunwant Patel.

Shah's meteoric rise through the BJP's ranks was amply visible in the size and profile of the people who arrived for the ceremony, from party stalwarts LK Advani and Arun Jaitley to industrialist Gautam Adani, and from former party president Rajnath Singh to first time Union minister Smriti Irani.  Read more

We start off this Monday morning with news of an Air India flight out of New Jersey being forced to return to the airport because of an engine fire sparked by a bird strike. 

Good Morning!