Keen on bringing the Forbesganj police firing on poor Muslims to the national spotlight, LJP chief Ram Vilas Paswan plans to hold a demonstration at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on July 5.

After its stunning success in West Bengal, the Trinamul Congress has set its eyes westward with plans afoot for a foray into Jharkhand with the upcoming Jamshedpur LS bypoll.

The Purnea Assembly bypoll in Bihar, held peacefully on Saturday with a mere 44 per cent polling amid rains, is far from being even an electoral semi-final in the state to allow an early prediction of the faraway final’s outcome in 2015. But recent important developments have given this bypoll an outsized aura.

Bihar’s politics almost reached the verge of acquiring communal dimensions on Thursday as the Opposition RJD accused deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi of the BJP of trying to “become another Narendra Modi” with the brutal police firing that killed four poor Muslims in Forbesganj.

Even as four Maoists in Jharkhand were on Thursday awarded death sentences for a 2007 massacre of 20 people, including the state’s first chief minister Babulal Marandi’s son, the politician known for his hardline stance against Maoism-led violence sprang a shock by seeking less severe punishments for the convicted rebels.

The breakdown of all political alliances in Jharkhand displayed in the allies’ competition to win the state’s single vacant Lok Sabha seat of Jamshedpur in an upcoming bypoll reflects an opportunistic abandonment of ideological unity and the resulting confusion among the electorate in the coalition era.

The mystery disease that has rocked Bihar and killed six more children by Thursday morning, has at last been identified. It is encephalitis, an official on Thursday said. The latest deaths have pushed

The desperate eagerness of Bihar’s marginalised satraps Lalu Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan to get the Congress party’s favours has pushed their two-year-old alliance into danger. Competitive angling for a ministerial berth at the Centre is believed to be at the root of the two parties’ sudden disregard for their alliance.

Two more children have died of a mysterious disease in Bihar, taking the toll to 34 in the state, officials said on Wednesday.

The children died after reporting high fever followed by convulsions and

Even as the number of children claimed by a suspected attack of encephalitis rose to 30 in Bihar on Monday, confusion prevailed over the causes of the disease that kills children by the scores in the state almost every summer.