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
India and Pakistan have together announced a comprehensive dialogue process that will discuss all issues between the two countries. That sounds a lot like things used to be in the Composite Dialogue process. Except that it’s now called the Comprehensive Bilateral Dialogue. And yet, this is a landmark because it marks Narendra Modi giving in to better counsel and resuming such a dialogue with Pakistan.
"I am not able to defend Modi’s foreign trips or his performance in 18 months." Read why a Bajrang Dal activist in Varanasi is unhappy with Modi.
At the climate talks in Paris, India is quite literally stuck between a rock and a hard place. With less than two days left to go, and the world waiting for the talks to succeed, India is now contending with the trickiest bits of negotiations: what bargains will it strike behind backdoors, how much ground will it concede and what will it get in return.
Meet Manasi Joshi, the national para badminton player whose inspirational story is going viral — and getting her job offers and marriage proposals now.
Main News
A Mumbai court on Thursday granted pardon to David Coleman Headley, one of the main accused in the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks case, and accepted him as a prosecution witness.
Bollywood actor Salman Khan was on Thursday acquitted of the charge of culpable homicide not amounting to murder in the 2002 hit-and-run case. The Bombay High Court, which has been hearing an appeal against a five-year-sentence handed out to the actor by a sessions court in May, said that the prosecution had failed to prove that the actor had consumed liquor and was driving the Toyota Land Cruiser when the mishap occurred, giving Khan "the benefit of doubt".
A sessions court in Kolkata on Thursday found three men guilty of raping Suzette Jordan, an Anglo-Indian mother of two, in a moving car in Kolkata's Park Street. While Jordan died earlier this year of of multi-organ failure, two of the five men named by the police in their chargesheet, including prime accused Kader Khan, are still absconding.
The Islamic State group's finance chief, Abu Saleh, has been confirmed killed in a coalition air strike last month, US officials said on Thursday.
The Union Home Ministry may ask the juvenile, held guilty in the December 16 gangrape case, to sign a legal bond assuring good behaviour following his release.
Off The Front Page
Villages in Nagaur district of Rajasthan which have been shown as electrified by the rural electrification app under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's pet project Deen Dayal Upadhay Gram Jyoti Yojna are uninhabited and have no power connection. The rural electrification app lists three of a proposed five villages in the area as already electrified.
The Madurai bench of Madras High Court has ordered that police should ensure a dress code for people entering temples, adding that prescribing such a code for devotees is inevitable in Tamil Nadu “to enhance the spiritual ambience among devotees”.
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a Haryana State law mandating that only those having “minimum” educational qualifications will be eligible to contest panchayat elections in the State. The law leaves 68 per cent of the Scheduled Caste women and 41 per cent of the Scheduled Caste men in Haryana ineligible to contest panchayat elections.
Hundreds of policemen threw a tight security ring around Osmania University on Thursday and foiled the proposed beef and pork festivals on campus. However, students ate beef biryani and kebabs in the hostel to their heart's content and declared the festival a success.
Opinion
If Salman Khan didn’t run over the five people on that fateful night in December 2002, then who did, asks Shuma Raha in The Times of India: "I am not angry that Salman Khan, the entitled mega star, has gotten off. I am angry that the guilty has got off scot free."
Sarthak Bagchi writes in The Indian Express on why post-mortems of this year’s most crucial election — in Bihar — are missing the point: "In a place like Bihar, where the state is the main source of all resources being distributed to the population in a top-down redistributive mechanism, the control of the state apparatus becomes the primary goal of electoral politics."
Pollution is not a new problem in India. But its recent intensity is a clarion call for policy action, write Asit K Biswas and Kris Hartley in The Economic Times: "Both at the central and state levels, governments must decide whose interests to serve: industrialists or citizens."
Is the IS really invincible as its supporters claim, asks Stanly Johny in The Hindu: "By deciding not to send ground troops to ‘Syraq’, Barack Obama has denied the IS prophecy, for now. But by not coming up with a comprehensive strategy to fight the group, the U.S. and its allies are actually helping the ‘Caliphate’ flourish."
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