In order to demonstrate the consolidation of the Congress-Trinamul Congress alliance to the people of West Bengal, Ms Mamata Banerjee has invited Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee for the Martyrs’ Day rally. The Trinamul Congress organises this annual event on July 21 at Esplanade to commemorate the killing of 13 Youth

It’s getting bitter on Twitter as celebrity cat-fights are played out on the micro-blogging site. The fur has been flying between Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar and Mahesh Bhatt for a while and while it’s illuminated their professional differences, the film-frat-pack is not above getting down, dirty and personal with their not-so-sweet tweets.

West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee was the lone chief minister who attended the the conclusion of the conference on the second phase of green revolution held here on Saturday. The chief ministers of four other states gave it a skip while Jharkhand’s Assembly is under suspended animation.

Mr Sharad Pawar’s plan to form a Secular Democratic Front is a clear rebuff to the Congress which wanted the NCP’s merger in it.
Congress leaders have been questioning the longevity of Mr Pawar’s NCP which he floated about a decade ago, in private conversations or sometimes publicly. But the NCP and Mr Pawar have been ruling it out time and again.

The Congress has decided to hold a meeting of party workers in Kolkata in September this year in a bid to show off its strength to ally Trinamul Congress and rival Left Front. This exercise is being viewed as part of a big electoral battle to be fought in the coming months.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s only Muslim MP in the Lok Sabha and the party’s national spokesman Shahnawaz Hussain on Saturday hammered the Congress over its “targeting” of BJP chief Nitin Gadkari for the latter’s forceful criticism of the delay in the execution of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru.

Unmindful of the fact that eating and drinking inside Metro station premises, more so in the trains, is not allowed, many passengers utilising the services from Noida, Sector 32 station do not seem to care enough.

Even as the strike by sanitation workers has finally been called off, the MCD seems to be caught in a catch-22 situation on the issue of payment of salaries. While on the one hand, the unions of sanitation workers are sharply divided on political lines, on the other the MCD is facing a cash crunch.

Tripping of transmission line from Wazirpur in north Delhi to Geeta Colony in east Delhi led to continuos powercuts in many south and east Delhi areas on Saturday afternoon.

A gang of undergarment clad robbers looted jewellery and cash worth over Rs 2 lakhs from half-a-dozen houses in Modinagar and Pilkhuwa towns of Ghaziabad on Saturday. So far the police officers have said that the gang committed robberies in the two towns simultaneously after Friday midnight.