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
A mob in Bengaluru waylaid, stripped and paraded a 21-year-old Tanzanian student who was passing by the site of an accident in which a Sudanese man had allegedly mowed down a woman in the city's Hesaraghatta area. A report claimed that the assault happened right under the watch of the local police.
An Indian pharmaceutical company from Hyderabad may be the first to develop a vaccine against the mosquito-borne Zika virus, of which there has been a fresh outbreak in south America. Bharat Biotech claimed to have achieved a breakthrough in developing a vaccine to fight the dreaded virus, which causes serious birth defects in children.
In a security lapse, a 20-year-old woman broke barricades and threw a flower pot in Rajpath in the heavily guarded Raisina Hills area less than a minute before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s convoy was to pass through. The woman was detained and taken for a medical check-up.
Uber's got a new logo. Gone is the stylized "U" logo and has been replaced with a circle, with a square inside. The internet thinks it’s absolutely ridiculous.
Read why the new Amazon commercial titled #WhenAWomanShops is just a gift-wrapped cliche.
Main News
Ten soldiers were buried under snow after their camp in the northern part of the Siachen glacier was hit by a major avalanche. Rescue operations by specialised teams of the Army and the Air Force are under way, and are being coordinated from Leh and Udhampur.
Not leaving anything to chance after Pakistani terrorists attacked the Pathankot airbase in January, the air force has issued shoot-on-sight orders against intruders at more than 20 of its front-line bases in the western sector, a senior IAF officer said.
A police complaint was filed against India hockey captain, Sardar Singh, by a UK-born woman of Indian origin. In an interview to HT, Sardar denied they were engaged and rejected allegations that he had sexually exploited her.
Sameer Sardana, 44-year-old man from Dehradun who is being interrogated by the Anti-terrorist Squad of the Goa Police for the past three days on suspicion of being linked with jihadi groups, is a Doon School alumnus and son of a former Major-General of the Indian Army.
Faced with the challenges of extremism, Maharashtra rolled out a deradicalisation programme for the minority community that included opening vyayam shalas, making NCC, Bharat Scouts and Guides (BS&G) compulsory in minority schools, and setting up an independent media outlet to deliver ‘mainstream thoughts and values’ to its youth.
Off The Front Page
An unhappily married couple in Bareilly recently took to Facebook (using pseudonyms) to find new love. However, fate played the estranged couple a cruel hand, by hooking them up without either one realising that they were actually chatting up their spouse the whole time.
A minor schoolgirl from rural Jharkhand decided she wanted to study further and reached out to the authorities to stop her parents from getting her married. She is now under the protection of the Child Welfare Committee.
An obsession to get their name in the Guinness Book of World Records made two Agra brothers create what they call the world's “heaviest and largest” underwear, 18 feet tall and weighing 2kg.
A 21-year-old final-year B Tech student of IIT-Kharagpur bagged a job with Microsoft that pays a whopping Rs 1.02 crore per annum. Vatsalya Singh Chauhan studied in a Hindi-medium government school and is the son of a welder from Bihar.
An NRI woman, who was allegedly duped of Rs 27 lakh by a Jaipur man posing as a Union minister, has now accused the state police of being reluctant in pursuing the case. Anamika Singh, who currently resides in Germany, said she had sent an online complaint to the Jaipur police, which refused to lodge an FIR.
Opinion
“The problem with the BJP is that Section 377 falls dead bang in the middle of the conflict between the party’s aspiration and reality. The Narendra Modi-led government aspires to present an image of India as a modern liberal democracy to the rest of the world, a beacon of hope in the region, a bastion against illiberal forces,” writes Sandip Roy in The Huffington Post India. “Section 377 flies in the face of the very idea of such a modern liberal democracy.”
The Right to Education (RTE) Act just completed five years of operation. While it is too early to pass a judgment on the success of this Act, the initial trends are somewhat disappointing, explains Ajey Sangai in The Hindu. “The Annual Status of Education Report 2014 reveals that enrolment in private schools has increased from 18.7 per cent in 2006 to 30.8 per cent in 2014. But has this increase been accompanied by a proportionate inclusion of disadvantaged groups?”
“The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has completed 10 years and the NDA government recently claimed that its rule resulted in a “transformation” in the implementation of the scheme. The veracity of the claim is highly questionable as we observe a wide lacuna in its implementation in several places,” write Chakradhar Buddha and Rajendran Narayanan in The Indian Express. In the drought-hit district of Mahabubnagar in Telangana, lack of adequate staff and payment delays undermine the act.
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