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The Morning Wrap: Akhilesh Yadav To Skip SP's Silver Jubilee Celebration; Ola To Train 50 Lakh Driver-Entrepreneurs

Our selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
Uttar Pradesh CM Akhilesh Yadav.
Pawan Kumar / Reuters
Uttar Pradesh CM Akhilesh Yadav.

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.

Five days after Najeeb Ahmed allegedly had a quarrel with students from a right-wing group on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus in Delhi, the graduate student of biotechnology is still missing, and there are no leads to trace him. Hundreds of students staged a midnight protest at the JNU campus on Thursday, demanding that the administration take immediate action to find him. While the students admitted to not letting senior officials of the university leave the administrative block building, they denied having "illegally confined" them.

Donald Trump made his boldest claim about the election being rigged Wednesday night during the third and final presidential debate, refusing to commit to accepting the outcome of the race. "I will look at it at the time," Trump said when asked whether he would accept the results. "It is crooked," he said. "She is guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run, and just in that respect, I say it is rigged." Trump was referring to Clinton's email scandal, but claiming that Clinton shouldn't be allowed to run is new for Trump. Clinton responded by saying Trump's argument was "horrifying."

The United Kingdom extradited Samirbhai Vinubhai Patel, wanted by India in connection with the 2002 Gujarat riots. The Gujarat police escorted Patel back from London to face trial in a case of rioting at Ode village where 23 people were killed. Patel was arrested after the riots, but he jumped bail and made his way to the UK, where he arrested by Scotland Yard. "Following Government of India's request for extradition, Samirbhai Vinubhai Patel, an Indian national, is being extradited on 18th October 2016 to face trial in India," the Indian High Commission said in a statement.

In yet another sign of worsening infighting in Samajwadi Party, UP Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday announced that he will embark on his 'Vikas Rath Yatra' alone from 3 November which will make him skip the party's silver jubilee celebrations slated to begin two days later. In a letter to his father and party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, the Chief Minister declared his intention to commence his yatra, which was put off last month after the open turf war with his uncle Shivpal Yadav, saying all political parties have already started their campaign for the Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh.

Union Ministers Smriti Irani and DV Sadananda Gowda have reportedly been dropped from Inter-State Council. Irani and Gowda were permanent invitees to the council headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Irani and Gowda were divested of their HRD and Law and Justice portfolios respectively in the last Cabinet reshuffle in July. Irani is now Textiles Minister, while Gowda holds Statistics and Programme Implementation portfolio. Both the ministers were dropped from the council which was reconstituted on Tuesday, according to an official order.

Manoj Naik, owner of Bhubaneswar's SUM Hospital, where 21 people were killed in a massive fire, was arrested by the state police this morning. He was arrested after he surrendered at the Khandagiri Police Station in Bhubaneswar. The police had earlier issued a look-out notice against Naik and his wife Saswati Das to prevent them from fleeing the country. Both of them were on the run since the major fire broke out at their healthcare unit killing patients on Monday.

The Indian government must immediately release a prominent Kashmiri human rights activist arrested last month on charges of involvement in activities against the public order, a group of United Nations experts urged on Wednesday. Khurram Parvez, 39, coordinator of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCSS) has long campaigned against human rights violations committed by state forces in India's volatile Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir.

India's largest transportation platform, Ola, has announced that the company will skill 50 lakh driver-entrepreneurs on its platform by 2022. This announcement was made at the launch of India's first state-of-the-art dedicated training centers for drivers in partnership with Rise India, NSDC and Ola.

A 25-year-old man from Mumbai has been booked for allegedly posting objectionable morphed pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and circulating them on WhatsApp. The accused has been booked under IPC section 153 (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc).

British Prime Minister Theresa May's visit to Indian in November will put to the test her government's claim that forging strong non-EU alliances and adopting a hardline stance on immigration are not incompatible, writes Vidya Ram in The Hindu. "When it comes to the relationship with India, May has promised a fresh approach that will focus on forging links between small and medium-sized enterprises in India... Among issues likely to be at the forefront of bilateral discussion is a potential India-UK Free Trade Agreement, something that is being considered at the behest of the UK but which Indian officials have spoken favourably of too. Though official negotiations on such a deal would not be possible while Britain remains an EU member (EU rules forbid this), detailed informal negotiations could mean that a deal could be concluded rapidly after a British exit," she says.

The Supreme Court's stand on triple talaq remains to be seen. But male monopoly over reading of Islam is under serious challenge, writes Javed Anand in The Indian Express. "Across the globe, an increasing number of Muslim women and men are now doing their own reading of religious texts and coming to the same conclusion. That the core values enshrined in the Quran are consonant with the fundamental rights and freedoms embedded in the Indian Constitution, as also the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. The real conflict today, then, is between their 'our Islam' and the supremacist, misogynist 'their Islam' of the patriarchs," he writes.

As a global regime on drones is put in place, India's voice should be a determining one, not one that is marginal and out there in the wilderness, writes Harsh V Pant in Mint. New Delhi should be engaging with other like-minded countries to come up with its own principles to guide the emerging global order on drones and their use. The debate has only just begun and India should be at the front and centre of this discussion so that its own interests do not get marginalised as a new regime on the use of drones is put in place.

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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.