A metropolitan court here on Wednesday rejected pleas seeking copies of the special investigation team’s final report regarding Zakia Jafri’s complaint, saying it would decide on this only after all related documents were submitted by the probe agency.

Union minister for commerce and industry Anand Sharma said on Wednesday that an Indian business delegation would still visit Iran despite a string of bomb attacks blamed on the increasingly isolated Islamic republic.

The Jammu and Kashmir high court on Wednesday gave four weeks’ time to the defence ministry to respond to a petition filed by a Kashmiri woman alleging that her son was killed in a fake encounter and later branded as a foreign militant involving Lt. Gen. Bikram Singh, the Eastern Army Commander and top contender to the Army chief post, in March 2001.

The Pakistan government is likely to take a crucial decision on the ‘negative list’ trade approach with India in a fortnight, even as the two countries today signed three important pacts to improve economic ties.

In fresh trouble for the Narendra Modi government, the Gujarat high court on Wednesday issued contempt notice to it for not obeying its order to compensate people whose shops were burnt down in the post-Godhra riots.
The notice comes a week after the court indicted the state government for non-restoration of religious places destroyed in the communal frenzy.

Cracks surfaced in the BJP’s Rajasthan unit over nomination of district presidents in Dausa and Jaipur when a section of the party questioned such appointments and raised voice against it. Former president of the state BJP Omparkash Mathur expressed his displeasure on such nominations and termed that the state unit is in a poor condition.

All is not well with the BJP in Himachal Pradesh. The party state unit is facing a rebellion of sorts, after many of its leaders, considered close to party’s senior national vice-president Shanta Kumar, formed a separate party, Himachal Lokhit Party (HLP). Even as the BJP’s national leadership had sent a team of observers to quell the rebellion and do the damage control, the exodus from the state BJP continues.

Senior BJP leader L.K. Advani on Wednesday praised the working of the Shivraj Singh Chouhan-led BJP government in Madhya Pradesh and said that all the states in the Hindi belt, except UP, where the BJP is in power have shed the Bimaru tag.

Iran announced new strides in its nuclear programme on Wednesday in a defiant blow to US and EU pressure to rein in its atomic activities, and amid signs of an increasingly vicious covert war with Israel over the issue. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled on state television what was described as Iran’s first domestically produced, 20-per cent enriched nuclear fuel for Tehran’s research reactor.

If you owned a vintage car, would you keep it polished in your garage out of the harm’s way? British vintage car enthusiast Geoffrey Herdman, who just returned from a 16-month round-the world-tour on his Bristol 405 Drophead Coupe, says the best way to take care of a vintage car is to drive it regularly like a modern car.