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The Morning Wrap: Godhra Train Attack Suspect Caught; Fatwa Issued Against Products With Cow Urine

The Morning Wrap: Godhra Train Attack Suspect Caught; Fatwa Issued Against Products With Cow Urine
India, Karnataka, Bangalore, sacred cow sitting in traffic
Boris Breuer via Getty Images
India, Karnataka, Bangalore, sacred cow sitting in traffic

The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Essential HuffPost

Offended by veteran actor Rishi Kapoor’s comments against the Gandhi family, Congress workers on Wednesday staged a protest outside the his house in Mumbai. The workers pelted stones and shouted slogans protesting against the actor’s tweets questioning naming of national assets after the Gandhi family.

One of the producers for Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Randeep Hooda-starrer Sarabjit said that the government should limit the number of English [foreign] films released in India. Sarabjit is set to clash with the release of X-Men: Apocalypse on 20 May.

Women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi does not think that the government can decide whether women can enter religious places of worship or not. She called it a religious issue and suggested that the "society" should decide on it.

Apple announced on Wednesday that it was going to open an iOS app design and development centre in Bengaluru, Karnataka. This initiative is taken by Apple to support the development community in India who are making apps for the devices such as iPhone and iPad.

Main News

All exit polls have already shown that Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi won't return to power. But Gogoi is so confident of becoming the next CM that he has ceased to worry and has even stopped taking his blood pressure medicine for the last two-three days.

Farooq Mohammed Bhana, 50, a key conspirator for allegedly planning the torching of a Sabarmati Express coach, was finally arrested by the Gujarat anti-terrorism squad (ATS) on Tuesday. 59 kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya had perished in the blaze that led to one of the worst communal riots in the country. As of now, 94 accused have been arrested for Godhra train carnage. Out of these, 21 were sentenced to life imprisonment and 10 were given death penalty.

According to new data tabled at the Lok Sabha revealed that more than 22,000 children went missing in Delhi in three years. Among them, over 9,000 are yet to be traced. Every year, more than 7,000 children go missing and 1,500 of them remain untraced in Delhi, the second highest in the country after Maharashtra. Many of them are never found.

An EgyptAir flight carrying 69 people from Paris to Cairo disappeared from radar early Thursday. The Boeing 737-800 vanished from radar just off the coast of Egypt, after flying for about three hours and 44 minutes, according to flight tracker Flightradar24. EgyptAir said it was working to confirm details.

Off The Front Page

Loaded with assignments and submission deadlines a desperate engineering student landed at his professor's wedding ceremony, requesting him to sign his record book. The bride and groom who looked like they were going to burst into laughter, lauded the semester 8 student of Musaliar College of Engineering, Kerala, for his effort. But happily for the couple and the diligent student, the professor did end up signing the record book.

31-year-old Manu TR who had been pushed off a moving train for trying to save a couple for harassment had lost both his hands in 2013. Now, as India's first patient to get a hand transplant last year, Manu now works as a transplant assistant at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kerala. It is the same hospital which restored his hands.

Dargah Aala Hazrat issued a fatwa against usage of products in which cow urine is mixed. The decision came after a resident of Bareilly posed a question asking if it was okay to use products of a company known for mixing cow urine in their offerings. The fatwa said that products of any company having cow urine should not be used as per Shariat.

Opinion

The bill on passive euthanasia is a good response to a tricky question, says an editorial in Mint. "Although the ethical and philosophical arguments for passive euthanasia apply equally to active euthanasia, the government has made the correct decision in addressing only the former at the moment. By doing so, it has curtailed the potential for misuse of the proposed legislation. A revised bill would be a significant step towards allowing suffering individuals a measure of human dignity," it says.

The Election Commission may believe it has done enough by postponing voting in two Assembly constituencies in Tamil Nadu where there were allegations of rampant voter bribery and distribution of cash and gifts over the last month,; but given the situation on the ground, coupled with the EC’s own grim portrayal of the widespread electoral malpractice, deferring the election by a week is a grossly inadequate response, says an editorial in The Hindu. "The EC cannot wage this battle alone — efforts to curb the flow of cash in election campaigns need to be embedded in a wider cleaning up of the account books of political parties. Campaign finance remains anachronistically opaque, and the distortions include not just “money power” at election time, but also corruption in administration and in, say, the use of local area development funds. The only cause for cheer in this grim scenario is that voters do not necessarily vote for the highest bidder," says the article.

The government should clean up the entire banking sector, make the banks bigger and allow the rump to be worked out over the next three to five years, says Janmejaya Sinha in his column in The Indian Express. "I believe the government should promote five new banks under the RBI guidelines for new private banks. The RBI guidelines stipulate that promoters can own no more than a 40 per cent stake at the time of launch, which needs to come down to 15 per cent in 12 years," he says.

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This article exists as part of the online archive for HuffPost India, which closed in 2020. Some features are no longer enabled. If you have questions or concerns about this article, please contact indiasupport@huffpost.com.