The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
Essential HuffPost
RK Pachauri, who was accused of sexual harassment at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), was asked to go on indefinite leave, the organisation said in a statement. Ajay Mathur formally took over as director general, replacing Pachauri.
Fathimath Rahila (13), scored the highest marks in Puttur, Dakshina Kannada district, in the Ramayana exam conducted by the Bharat Sanskriti Pratishthan. The class 9 student from a Muslim family scored 93 per cent in the test.
Snapdeal employee Dipti Sarna, who was missing since Wednesday after she boarded an auto-rickshaw on her way home from work, managed to get away from her abductors and reach home safely. An NDTV report claimed Dipti was abducted by four persons who allegedly "blindfolded her and drove around before dumping her."
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said he would keep "fighting terrorism" while peace talks took place, and saw a risk of Saudi and Turkish intervention in the Syrian conflict, according to an interview with news agency AFP.
Japanese stocks plummeted 5 per cent, the worst weekly drop since 2008, as investors scrambled to dump risky assets after the dollar dived to a 15-month low against the yen. Traders said that investors feared Japanese exporters' hopes of earnings growth will suffer if the yen strengthens further.
Main News
After Home Minister Rajnath Singh and HRD Minister Smriti Irani denounced the raising of alleged anti-India slogans in JNU, Delhi Police arrested the university’s students union president on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy. “If anyone raises anti-India slogans, tries to raise questions on the country’s unity and integrity, they will not be spared. Stringent action will be taken against them,” Singh said.
The vice-president of Bihar BJP Visheshwar Ojha was killed, while a local party leader of Saran district was shot dead in Chhapra. Earlier, an LJP leader Brijnathi Singh was shot dead in Patna. The BJP has given 72-hour ultimatum to the Nitish Kumar government to arrest the criminals.
A day after American-Pakistani terrorist David Coleman Headley said Mumbra woman Ishrat Jahan was an LeT operative, special public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam said he had “instructions from the investigating agency to find out about the botched-up operation of the LeT in India.”
Banaras Hindu University has proposed to confer on Prime Minister Narendra Modi an honorary law degree for his “services as an innovator, reformer and an outstanding leader in public service and governance”, during the convocation and has requested for his consent.
Being under severe pressure, as a formal or informal alliance between the Congress and the Communists appears to be a possibility in Bengal in the forthcoming Assembly election, the Trinamool Congress chairperson Mamata Banerjee invoked the names of Gandhi family members to underscore the traditional rivalry between Left and the Centrists in Indian politics.
Off The Front Page
National bird peacock and state animal wild bison are among the animals proposed to be listed by the Goa government as 'nuisance animals'. “These animals are creating problem for farmers and are destroying their cultivation in rural areas," Agriculture Minister Ramesh Tawadkar said in Margao.
Polio-stricken Siddhant did not want a job to eke out his livelihood. Neither did he wish to draw doles for his disability. So this 25-year-old from Bihar chose a vocation that fetches him Rs 30,000 every month: begging.
The Foreigner Regional Registration Office in Bengaluru informed the high court that 1,165 foreign nationals from 68 countries are overstaying in the city as on January 1, 2016. Sudan tops the list with 212 of its nationals overstaying.
Crooks are now using e-wallets — Oxigen, PayUMoney and Billdesk — to transfer stolen money. The crime branch busted a gang of hackers that had been using such novel means of transactions to dodge the police.
Swooning after a heart attack, a 51-year-old bus driver kept calm, pulled over and stopped the vehicle to keep at least 50 passengers from harm, before he died in Maduravoyal, Tamil Nadu.
Opinion
The Hanumanthappa story reminds us of our better selves, of how some things are worth fighting for and how some things must remain free of the taint of controversy or contention. For a brief moment this week, a natural disaster on the world’s highest battleground achieved the seemingly impossible: It united an otherwise fractious country, writes Namita Bandare in the Hindustan Times.
The students may have provoked the national government with their sloganeering, whether or not Kanhaiya Kumar was involved in it. They probably knowingly waved the red flag. The government has chosen to react to it like a bull in a china shop. Till yesterday, Kumar was a student leader at JNU. The government just made him a national figure by choosing to make him the focus of everything it dislikes about the very idea of JNU, writes Sandip Roy in HuffPost India.
Of the three assembly constituencies in Uttar Pradesh going to the polls on February 13, Muzaffarnagar is getting maximum national attention due to the constant communal tension there since the September 2013 riots in the district. The campaign on the ground provides a number of significant insights, writes Sudha Pai in The Indian Express. “The bypoll result may create fresh equations of importance for the 2017 elections.”
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