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Essential HuffPost
The 10 Army personnel, including an officer, who were buried under snow after being hit by an avalanche at a high-altitude post on Siachen Glacier in Jammu and Kashmir, died. Specialised teams were pressed into service but all efforts to rescue them failed.
Four days after a Tanzanian woman was attacked on a street in Bengaluru, the government of Karnataka refuted allegations that she was stripped and paraded naked, characterizing the incident as a mob reaction to an accident instead of a racist attack. Five persons have been arrested so far.
Google search's head Amit Singhal decided to leave the company and retire from work to focus on philanthropy. He announced his retirement in a Google+ post after working at the internet giant for 15 years. Singhal was part of a small group of India-born executives who were in high-ranking jobs at the tech giant.
The CBI will prosecute Congress Party leader Ashok Chavan for the offences of cheating and conspiracy in the Adarsh Scam, which forced him to resign as the Chief Minister of Maharashtra in 2010. Accusing the BJP government of “vendetta politics”, Chavan said, “CBI’s re-application to the Governor to prosecute me is illegal.”
Main News
Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed warned of more Pathankot-style attacks, prompting India to say it “is a matter of great concern” that people like the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai attacks continue to enjoy freedom in Pakistan. “You have only seen one attack on Pathankot. Matters could easily escalate,” Saeed said in a rally.
The Budget Session of Parliament will begin with the Presidential Address on February 23. This being a leap year, the Union Budget will be presented on February 29. The Railway Budget will be presented on February 25 and the Economic Survey will be tabled the next day.
A temple in Kerala stopped offering pujas for two days this week to mourn a 23-year-old Muslim man who was beaten to death. Following the death, the temple also decided to abandon the “annadanam” and the traditional procession for the 10-day festival starting February 9.
India and Russia have set up a working group to locally build components for nuclear power plants of Russian design. The ‘Make In India’ move could become a model for countries keen for a share of India’s civil nuclear energy pie.
Trying to get the perfect selfie with the district magistrate landed a UP youth in jail for three days. Despite repeated warnings, officials said, Ahmad continued trying to get that “perfect picture” with the DM and then got into a scuffle with the cops when asked to delete them.
Canada's first Sikh defence minister Harjit Sajjan was heckled in Parliament with an opposition member shouting that MPs needed an “English-to-English” translation as he spoke, an act dubbed as “racist”.
Off The Front Page
In Kawardha, the home district of Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh, a woman sarpanch decided to delegate all her responsibilities to her nephew, citing her busy household routine as the reason.
A bouquet sent by a Dubai-based couple to a relative’s wedding triggered a bomb scare, sending the Kochi city police into a tizzy. A police dog squad was called in to examine the packet that turned out to be nothing but a bunch of flowers.
Cricketer Ravindra Jadeja is getting engaged to a 25-year-old Rajkot-based engineer, Reeva Solanki. She has a mechanical engineering degree from Atmiya College and is now preparing for the UPSC examination.
Meet the engineer who quit his job to light up remote himalayan villages. Last year, Paras Loomba, founder of Global Himalayan Expedition, and his team helped bring solar-powered electricity to Shingo, a village in the Hemis national park region situated at a trekking distance of 40 miles from the nearest motor-able road.
A 19-year-old girl in Uttarakhand was caught by the government railway police on charges of smuggling heroin. But after the police discovered that the fatherless girl, whose mother is a cancer patient, had committed the offence to afford a wedding dress, they booked her on a lighter offence and let her go.
Opinion
Delhi needs a strong governance model based on clear chain of command, writes Rajdeep Sardesai in the Hindustan Times. “There is little doubt that the Centre has treated the AAP government with a mix of contempt and hostility, an unhappy scenario that can only result in constant confrontation. And Kejriwal by targeting the prime minister personally has made his position even more vulnerable. You cannot call the prime minister a ‘psychopath’ and expect a conducive atmosphere to be created. Which is why the one year anniversary of the Kejriwal government might be a good time to press the reset button.”
“The bearers of the tax code (PAN card) are the obvious targets of the campaign against black money,” writes Vinayshil Gautam in The Pioneer. “It cannot be anybody’s case that those with black money should be spared, but it carries more credibility and conviction if the bigger advantage-taker is targeted first. Nowhere in the world, or at any point of history, hitting soft targets has really won a war… time has come to move beyond the much misplaced emphasis on regulation being the sole harbinger of the clean economy. The instruments of clean economy have to be smarter that they have been in the past. A harassed citizen can be confounded, but turning around the economy is another matter.”
When discussing the rural-urban divide in India, scholars say there is a huge contrast between Bharat that lives in the villages and the India that lives in cities. You could take that as a cue and say that India’s technology capital has two sides: A prosperous, globalised Bangalore and its uneasy underbelly, Bengaluru, writes Narayanan Madhavan in the Hindustan Times.
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