Maulana Gulam Mohammed Vastanvi, who stirred a controversy with his remarks on Gujarat, on Thursday, said he has not resigned as the vice-chancellor of Darul Uloom Deoband and a final decision on him will be taken by the governing council of the Islamic seminary.

In an unexpected development that has taken the Gujarat government completely by surprise and shock, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the Ishrat Jahan case has taken a curious turn with one of the SIT members and investigating officer Satish Varma filing an affidavit stressing that the SIT appointed to probe the into the case is not proceeding satisfactorily in an unbiased manner. He has also said evidence points that Ishrat Jahan encounter was fake but attempts are being made to divert the investigation in that direction.

The Hindi service of BBC Radio, one of the oldest radio stations broadcasting to India, will close in a couple of months. It began broadcasting in 1940 and its last transmission will be on March 31, 2011.

A day after Malegaon additional district collector Yashwant Sonawane (45) was burnt alive by the oil mafia in Nashik, his grief-stricken family demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) investigation of the murder and the adulteration racket being operated by black-marketers.

The Kashmir Valley witnessed a tense Republic Day on Wednesday as the authorities enforced a tight security clampdown to foil attempts by BJP activists and Muslim separatists to pour into Srinagar’s Lal Chowk.

Despite the government toughening its stand on disclosure of the names of 26 Indians with “black accounts” in Liechetenstein’s LGT Bank made known to New Delhi by Germany, the focus of Thursday’s hearing in the Supreme Court is likely to be on how the United States managed to get data about its 4,500 citizens’ secret accounts from Switzerland and why India should not follow the same route.

Even though the court had already framed charges against two accused persons allegedly involved in the murder of Pushpa Sen, the sister of retired Supreme Court judge D.P. Wadhwa and they were in jail since April 2010, the Delhi high court, after finding sufficient evidence against them, dismissed their bail application on the ground that they had committed a gruesome act by murdering a 80-year-old woman, who was alone at the time of incident.

A 30-year-old man shot his wife at point blank range in a fit of rage in central Delhi on Wednesday morning.
The incident was reported at 10.30 am from Anand Parbat where the accused, Pappu, a driver, was fiddling with a licensed .32 rifle owned by his brother-in-law, the police said. “Pappu’s brother-in-law, Ashok Pandey, a railways employee, was visiting the couple and had brought along his licensed rifle. Pappu was fiddling with it when his wife Sunita challenged him to use it. He got angry, kept it on her forehead and pressed the trigger,” the officer said.

A 40-year-old shooter was arrested by the Delhi police from the New Delhi Railway Station on Wednesday morning for carrying live ammunition in a large quantity.
The police said the accused, identified as Roming Liam, a member of Mizoram Rifles Club, who had come to the city for a shooting competition, was held when he refused to let his bag through a scanning machine at the station. “When the carton was opened, we found 1,025 bullets of .22 bore rifle and five bullets of .32 bore file in it,” a police official said.