The Morning Wrap is Huffpost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
As a reward for adroitly managing Indo-US ties, which reached a zenith with President Obama’s recent visit, the government has appointed Dr. S. Jaishankar as the new Foreign Secretary and replaced Sujatha Singh, seven months before her tenure was to end. Singh's future is unclear as there is speculation that she might resign from the service or that she might be appointed as India's envoy to France.
Signalling an end to a dispute that had smirched India’s business profile, the government has decided to accede to a Bombay High Court ruling that said Vodafone didn't need to pay the Rs3,200 crore tax in a transfer pricing case. The Union Cabinet, which took the decision, also decided not to appeal against similar verdicts in other cases against taxpayers.
The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued notices to the Union Home Ministry, the Intelligence Bureau and the Immigration department to explain why they had deplaned Greenpeace activist Priya Pillai from a London-bound flight at Delhi airport earlier this month. This was based on a petition filed by the activist in the court.
Jammu and Kashmir will soon see a government in place as both the Peoples Democratic Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party have arrived at a broad understanding over the issue of government formation in the sensitive border state.
Mint reports that a group of powerful trade ministers—that didn’t include India-- have agreed to wrap up the fractious, long-drawn Doha Development Agenda negotiations by the end of this year by “lowering their sights, and moving on to new issues.”
The Narendra Modi government has cancelled the membership of 27 serving- and-retired bureaucrats, which includes former CBI director Ranjit Sinha, to the prestigious Delhi Golf Club, a perk gifted to them by the UPA's urban development ministry.
Fuelled by record sales of big-screen iPhones and a 70% rise in China sales, Apple Inc posted the largest ever profit ever, of $18 billion, in corporate history.
Off The Front Page
Activist Anna Hazare has said he will soon launch an agitation against the Union government as it has failed to recover black money stashed abroad and appoint a Lokpal. Hazare’s earlier agitations significantly hurt the previous UPA government’s credibility and catalyzed the political careers of Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi, chief ministerial candidates in the forthcoming Delhi polls.
The Allahabad High Court on Wednesday, commuted to life imprisonment, the death sentence of Surender Koli, convicted in the 2006 Nithari serial killings case. Koli had allegedly killed several girls, chopping their bodies to pieces before throwing them in the backyard and in the drain.
Islamic State, the militant jihadist outfit that has overrun parts of Iraq and Syria since last year, may have received funds routed through the United States. Several media reports say that Yousaf al-Salafi, a “commander” of IS, has “confessed during investigations” that he received funds through the U.S., although details of the precise origin or ownership of the funds remains unclear.
The government approved a reserve price of Rs3,705 crore per MHz for the auction of 2,100-MHz telecom spectrum and expects to be richer by Rs 90,000-100,000 crore. Several companies however consider these rates expensive.
An imam in Kashmir valley has sent a legal notice to director Vishal Bhardwaj to pay damages, after claiming that he was tricked into featuring in the movie ‘Haider.’
Continuing with multiple diplomatic overtures, the Modi government has asked Japan’s Abe administration if it would be interested in a Rs 50,000 crore project to build six stealth submarines in India. Japan, which only recently lifted an self-imposed arms export embargo, isn’t usually forthcoming on weapon development.
Opinion
C Rajamohan writes in The Indian Express that Modi’s transformation of India’s diplomatic culture is not just about warming up to the US. “Delhi’s new clarity on India’s long-term interests and its vigorous pursuit of pragmatic solutions is bound to have an impact on how the NDA government deals with the rest of the world, both at the bilateral and the multilateral levels.”
Salil Tripathy, commenting in Minton a proposal to have a statue of Nathuram Godse in Uttar Pradesh, says that many such statues are welcome provided that they feature “...A Godse with a gun near a Gandhi statue (that) will remind us that regardless of the power of good, there will always be evil within every society.”