The foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan are expected to meet later in June, the external affairs ministry’s spokesman said Thursday. Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao had conveyed this to a team of visiting Pakistani journalists who called on her, the spokesman said in a Twitter posting.

Noted painter M.F. Husain, who was living in self-imposed exile due to reported threat from some right-wing Hindu outfits over his controversial paintings of the Hindu gods and goddesses, faced a large number of cases across the country.

The government rode its luck in dealing with the yoga manipulator Ramdev and is lucky to have come through, if a little bruised. But its first instincts in dealing with Ramdev were unbecoming and worrisome. The Manmohan regime could scrape through this past week only because the yoga teacher rapidly revealed his true colours.

Ever since DMK president M. Karunanidhi called an emergency meeting of the party’s high level committee on Friday without even mentioning the agenda, speculation is rife that the octogenarian, who is seething with anger at the Congress, would pull out his ministers from the UPA government.

India on Thursday successfully test-fired surface-to-surface Prithvi-II (P-II) missile from interim test range (ITR) at Chandipur in Orissa’s Balasore district, nearly 300 km from here.
Thursday’s test firing was fourth such exercise in the last eight months.

HIS LUST for life wasn’t contagious. It was humbling. The experience of walking on the wintry London streets with an indefatigable Maqbool Fida Husain, characteristically barefoot, belonged to the realm of the unbelievable.

The government on Thursday asserted that Parliament is the final authority in making laws and a handful of people cannot claim to be the sole repository of all knowledge.

Yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who is on an indefinite hungerstrike against black money and corruption, on Thursday claimed that his four trusts are worth over `1,100 crores. He also mentioned that everything in the four trusts, which he heads, was in order.

The Congress party on Wednesday virtually declared redundancy of the joint committee to draft a strong Lokpal bill on a day when social activist Anna Hazare sat on a fast protesting the crackdown on Baba Ramdev’s protest.
Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan said civil society representatives “could not be the alternate sources” for lawmaking including the key legislation.

A Delhi court on Wednesday remanded a woman director of a real estate firm, who had allegedly duped more than 1,000 investors on the pretext of providing them affordable flats, to five-day police custody.