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The Morning Wrap: Dadri Lynching Accused Dies In Jail; La Liga Club Takes First Indian Aboard

Our selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.
File photo from a protest against Dadri lynching.
Hindustan Times via Getty Images
File photo from a protest against Dadri lynching.

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.

A 45-year-old motivational speaker from Indore, who lost both his hands in a road accident when he was seven year old, has won a hard-fought battle to get his driver's license. Vikram Agnihotri, who drives with his legs, managed to get a learner's license in May last year, but it took him nearly a year and four months to convert it into a driver's license. In that time period, he has driven nearly 15,000 kilometres in his modified car and now wants to drive to Leh once the situation stabilises.

Motorola on Tuesday launched its modular flagship smartphones Moto Z and Moto Z Play in India. The Lenovo-owned company is targeting premium segment of customers by pricing the phones at ₹39,999 and ₹24,999 respectively. Both the phone have pins on the back where you can attach the modules. The company announced pricing for all the mods as well.

Bollywood actor Om Puri's comment during a TV debate infuriated a lot of people on Monday. Defending Pakistani artistes who have been banned by Indian producers from acting in Indian films until hostilities between the two nations are resolved, Puri made a clear case of why art and war shouldn't be mixed. During the debate, referring to the soldiers, he said, "We didn't force the soldiers to join the army." "Prepare 15-20 people as suicide bombers and send them to Pakistan," the actor further added.

21-year-old Ravin Sisodia who was accused and arrested for allegedly beating Mohammad Akhlaq to death in Dadri, September last year, died in a Delhi hospital on Tuesday. Villagers have alleged that Sisodia, along with the other accused in the case, was beaten up in jail.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked Karnataka to release 2,000 cusecs of water to Tamil Nadu daily from 7 to 17 October as an interim measure. The apex court also put on hold its order to constitute the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) and finally settled for the Centre's suggestion to appoint a 'technical team' to visit the Cauvery basin and report back on the ground reality there.

British-born scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane andMichael Kosterlitz won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday for their studies of unusual states of matter, which may open up new applications in electronics. Their discoveries, using advanced mathematics, had boosted research in condensed matter physics and raised hopes for uses in new generations of electronics and superconductors or future quantum computers

Bengaluru's Ishan Pandita has become the first Indian footballer to sign a professional contract with a club in La Liga, the top tier of Spanish football. Three years ago, Pandita had took a controversial step in his life — of quitting education to focus on football. Now the 18-year-old has inked a one-year deal with newly promoted side Club Deportivo Leganes, who are 11th in La Liga.

Riding on the wave of big pre-festival sales on online shopping portals, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has said that it has sold over half a million smartphones in India in the last 72 hours. Now the company is working towards making more stock available as it nears Diwali — a peak sale period for most brands in the country.

Pakistani actor Fawad Khan, known for his roles in Khoobsurat and Kapoor & Sons, became a father on Tuesday evening. Fawad and his wife Sadaf are now proud parents of a baby girl.

Why has RBI settled for a lower neutral interest rate? Does the RBI now believe that India's potential growth rate is lower than earlier estimated, asks Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in Mint. "The Indian central bank has broadly been working over the past three years under the assumption that the neutral interest rate here is somewhere between 1.5-2%. Former governor Raghuram Rajan often used this as a thumb rule in his speeches. In a working paper published in 2015, RBI economists had said that the natural real interest rate in India at the beginning of 2015 was somewhere between 1.6-1.8%, with a standard error of 50 basis points. That number has now been brought down to 1.25% — or around 50 basis points," he says.

Media is not to blame for the unrest in Jammu and Kashmir. By banning newspapers, government is only looking for scapegoats, says Mir Hilal in The Indian Express. "Its massive bureaucracy needs to become more responsive to the media in difficult times. At the height of the unrest, upto 70 incidents would occur in a single day... Journalistic ethics demand that we talk to the other side, the government, for its version of the events. Are the officials concerned available to respond the queries of 10 reporters? Ask any Kashmiri local journalist and he would frown. Has the government reinforced its PR machinery, or geared up its existing one, to widen its media outreach? No," he writes.

Only a full-time commission, which is independent of the government and the judiciary, can impart transparency and credibility to the system of appointments to the higher judiciary, writes Prashant Bhushan in The Hindu. "The road to securing judicial accountability is long and hard, but proper accountability for such a powerful and vital organ like the Indian judiciary is essential for the survival of the rule of law and democracy in this country. The time has come for the people of the country, who are the real stakeholders in an honestly functioning judiciary, to assert themselves and demand for such a body to be appointed and this scuffle over judicial appointments to be laid to rest," 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.