The race is on for the post of West Bengal PCC chief. Union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s political secretary Pradyut Guha, apparently, has an edge over the other candidate, Mr Pradeep Bhattacharya.

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.

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.

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 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.

Celebrated Indian artist Maqbool Fida Husain, who was in self-imposed exile from India, died at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London early on Thursday morning. He was 95.

Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh on Thursday questioned the credibility of yoga guru Ramdev and accused the Rahstriya Swayam Sevak Sangh of hatching the conspiracy leading to his “campaign against corruption”.