India on Friday summoned Tehran’s acting ambassador to convey its deep disappointment over supreme Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s “unpalatable” remarks on Kashmir. New Delhi also broke with tradition and abstained from voting on a UNGA resolution critical of the human rights situation in Iran. India has voted against the resolution in the past, and sought to explain its abstention in New York on Thursday by citing the remarks on Kashmir.

Even as the relief and rescue operations at the Lalita Park building collapse site completed on Friday evening, the MCD has decided to give more time to its vigilance department for completing an inquiry into the incident. Meanwhile, a team of officials of the MCD on Friday went to the Central Building Research Institute, Roorkee, for discussions on the structural safety survey that is to be conducted in three months.

Thousands of commuters were stranded at various stations as the Delhi Metro services were crippled on the Jahangirpuri-HUDA City Centre line after a problem was reported in OHE line. The trains were run in short loop on various stretches but there was no train available on the 12.53 km Central Secretariat-Qutab Minar stretch.

With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh under fire over delaying his sanction for former communications minister A. Raja’s prosecution, AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi came out in strong support of Dr Singh on Friday, saying he did not think the PM was in an “embarrassing situation”.

Two years after its scheme for 5,000-odd flats got mired in controversies, the DDA on Friday announced its biggest housing scheme till date, offering nearly 16,000 flats in the city. The proportion of the houses for the economically weaker section (EWS), introduced for the first time, is the highest and has more than 11,000 flats. Thanks to maintenance charges being levied to look after the common areas and the exteriors for a period of 30 years, the houses will be slightly costlier than the previous schemes.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi both spoke out on Friday against the “cancer of corruption” in the country: while Dr Singh said rising growth levels had “increased the expectations” of people, Mrs Gandhi noted that growth was not an end in itself, and that while “our economy may increasingly be dynamic, our moral universe seems to be shrinking.”

After making it to the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize, Kishwar Desai’s Witness the Night has been shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Book Awards. Witness the Night, published by HarperCollins, is a mystery novel set in a small town in India and has female foeticide at the core of its plot.

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh on Friday stated that decision in the Posco case will be taken within a couple of weeks. The fate of South Korean giant Posco’s `54,000 crores integrated steel plant in Orissa has been hanging in balance.

While fusion food gained prominence with the rise of Tex-Mex (Texan-Mexican) cuisine, thanks to the Spaghetti Westerns films, in our day to day lives we come across many varieties of food that we take for granted as either foreign or authentic Indian. Foremost among these are the food we get at most Chinese restaurants. Indians

Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah on Friday said there were “visible and invisible links” among the militants in the state, the Maoists, Left-leaning academicians and supporters.