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Essential HuffPost
In a temporary breather for Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, the state's High Court put a stay for two months on a vigilance court's directive that a FIR be lodged against him in case of graft that has seen violent protests over the past two days.
In a major headway, more than a year after the Church Street blast in Bengaluru, the NIA arrested the prime accused in the case in which a woman was killed and three others were injured.
Around 140 prisoners of Nagpur Jail were allotted SBI ATM cards for use inside the premises, with plans to extend the service to all 800 prisoners. The inmates can swipe the cards in the canteen to purchase daily use items like soaps, hair oil, eatables against the payment they receive for doing works on the premises.
Here's some bad news for social media addicts. The photos of Narendra Modi and Francois Hollande — which earned the award for being the most awkward hug ever the moment it landed on Twitter — may not have been a 'hug' after all.
While Akshay Kumar's Airlift has met with appreciation from a majority of its audience, people who are more familiar with the details of the operation to evacuate thousands of Indians from Kuwait in 1990-91 have several bones to pick with the film.
Main News
Vipin Srivastava, who was the acting Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, went on leave with effect from Friday afternoon. The next most senior professor, M Periasamy, was made the VC until further orders. The varsity has been on the boil following the suicide of research scholar Rohith Vemula on January 17.
More than two years after the Supreme Court turned down a plea to decriminalise gay sex in India, there is still hope for the LGBT community as the apex court has agreed to examine on February 2 whether it had erred in passing the judgment.
Political uncertainty in Jammu and Kashmir is set to continue until the weekend when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will hold an internal meeting to discuss government formation. PDP president Mehbooba Mufti would meet party leaders, including legislators, at her Fairview home to decide on continuing the alliance with the BJP.
Three Indians, said to have links with terrorist outfit Islamic State were detained and later arrested by the National Investigation Agency from the IGI airport in Delhi after they were deported from the UAE on India’s request.
The Centre is unlikely to allow Internet giant Google’s Street View service in India amid red flags raised by the Ministry of Defence and security agencies. Street View allows users to have a panoramic view of places in cities, as they would look in real life.
Off The Front Page
Ahmedabad now has a special hospital for injured birds. The hospital — set up to treat birds injured during the kite festival — took over 20,000 volunteers from 20 different NGOs to set up, and has been a roaring success.
Charles Bombardier, the man behind the concept aircraft Skreemr which could travel at Mach 10, has now unveiled the Antipode, a hypersonic jet that he claims will cover the distance between London and New York in a mind-boggling 11 minutes.
Indian classical instruments and ‘popular’ music took centre stage at Beating Retreat. While the ceremony — an age-old military tradition passed down to India from the British — used drums to call troops back from battle at sunset, it had never reverberated with the notes of Indian classical instruments such as sitar, tabla and santoor.
Veteran actress Waheeda Rehman was honoured with a special award for her contribution to the film industry at the Yashwant International Film Festival in Mumbai. The festival was organised from January 22 to 28 and around 60-65 movies were screened.
Opinion
On 2 February, the Supreme Court will decide whether it wants to rethink its decision of keeping Section 377 in the statute books. The law effectively renders as “criminal” all lesbians, gays, bisexuals and the transgendered. As the guardian of the Constitution that gives all Indians fundamental rights of life, dignity and privacy, the Supreme Court must ask itself if it is doing justice to sexual minorities, writes Shivam Vij.
The social and ideological stresses of the 20th century divided the world into distinct camps; now, as we are forcing the planet's physical systems to change at the same breakneck pace, it seems possible that we'll see a replay of those divisions, this time along epidemiological lines, and as usual making life hardest for those who have done the least to cause our problems. The Zika virus provides a glimpse into a future we should do everything possible to avoid, a terrifying reminder why the fight for a stable physical planet is the fight of our time, writes Bill McKibben.
The death of Rohith Vemula might have ended up as a stray paragraph in the papers, but for the sustained agitation that began with a group of students of the Ambedkar Students’ Association at the University of Hyderabad. Rohith wanted to be a scientist and a writer, not a martyr. Inadvertently he may well end up as one, writes Namita Bhandare.
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