Breaking News, September 2

A teacher has been booked for allegedly thrashing a 13-year-old student here, officials said on Friday.

A tantric was allegedly killed by a 40-year-old man in Odisha's Jajpur district on Friday for failure to bring back his estranged wife to him as promised, police said.

The "main conspirator" behind last month's grenade attack on a police post was arrested and two grenades were recovered following his disclosure from a forest area in Jammu and Kashmir's Ramban district, police said on Friday. 

Sri Lanka’s Parliament passed the interim budget presented by President Ranil Wickremesinghe for 2022 on Friday, a day after the IMF announced it will provide a loan of about USD 2.9 billion to help the crisis-hit country tide over its worst economic hardships.

A 7-year-old boy from Rabodi in Thane drowned on Friday night in an artificial lake made for Ganpati idol immersions, an official said.

The Nationalist Congress Party on Friday slammed the Mira Bhayander Municipal Corporation authorities in Maharashtra's Thane district for issuing a tender to build a toilet complex exclusively for the Jain community.

Four people were killed and two injured in a collision between a pick-up van and a motorcycle near Dhaba village on Delhi-Yamunotri Highway here on Friday, police said.

Three members of a family, including a woman, were arrested for allegedly stealing valuables from devotees at temples across the city, police said on Friday. The accused have been identified as Suresh Ramdas Kamble, his wife Asha Bai Kamble and son Roshan Suresh Kamble, they said, adding the family originally hailed from Maharashtra but were living in Mathura for several years.

Police have arrested three people with the help of Paytm transaction from Rajasthan for allegedly robbing two men in Delhi's Paharganj area, officials said on Friday.

Maharashtra's Nashik district on Friday recorded 34 new cases of coronavirus that raised the tally of infections to 4,81,538, an official said.

A 25-year-old man has died from injuries suffered in an attack at a gay pride event in the western city of Muenster, prosecutors in Germany said on Friday. The victim, identified in German media only by the first name Malte, had come to the aid of other participants in the August 27 Christopher Street Day event after they were insulted by an unknown man.

A joint operation of police and the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) busted a cross-border narcotics gang and arrested four smugglers of Nepalese origin from Rupediha here near the Indo-Nepal border, police said on Friday. A total of 7 kg of charas worth Rs 2.10 crore was seized from their possession, they said.

A woman was arrested on the charge of strangulating her three young daughters to death in Bihar’s Buxar district on Friday, a police officer said. The reason why Pinki Devi, a resident of Barki Gai Ghat village under the jurisdiction of Brahmpur police station, killed her daughters is not yet clear. Her neighbours contacted the police after finding the bodies of Poonam (8), Roni (7) and Babli (4) on Friday morning.

A jawan of the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) posted at the atomic power station in Tarapur in Maharashtra's Palghar district has been reported missing, police said on Friday. A missing person's complaint has been lodged with the Palghar police station over the disappearance of jawan Manoj Yadav on Thursday, an official said. Yadav has gone missing with a rifle and 30 cartridges, he said.

Supreme Court grants interim bail to Teesta Setalvad. 

The Delhi High Court has refused to quash an FIR against a man on molestation allegations and directed that the woman will have to pay damages to the accused in case he is acquitted by the trial court. The accused had to resign from his lucrative job in the United Nations following the complainant's letter to his organisation. The high court said the direction for damages was necessitated as on September 3, 2021, it had directed both the parties not to precipitate the issue any further as they were in mediation and despite that, the woman seemed to have written a letter to the man's employer. The high court said it cannot act as an investigating agency or as the trial court going into the intricacies of the evidence and the submissions and added that it has perused the FIR, which disclosed a cognisable offence.

A POCSO court here awarded 20 years of imprisonment to a man for sodomising an 11-year-old boy, officials said on Friday. The (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) court on Thursday also directed convict Shailendra Pandey to pay a fine of Rs 22,000. In June 2020, an FIR was lodged at Jaisinghpur police station against Pandey for sodomising the boy in a field, public prosecutor Ramesh Chandra Singh said. 

A man has been detained for allegedly threatening to upload private pictures of a woman on social media and kill her family members, police said on Friday. According to police, the family alleged that the man threatened to “behead them all” if they didn't allow their daughter to go with him. “The family members have alleged that one Raheesh, a resident of Ghaziabad, called them from unknown mobile numbers and threatened to kill them. “He also threatened to put private pictures of their daughter on social media,” Superintendent of Police (SP), Baghpat, Neeraj Jaudaun said. Based on the complaint, police lodged an FIR at Khekra Police Station and detained the accused on Thursday.

A 24-year-old man died after being thrown from the roof of a building by some uninvited guests during his friend's birthday party in Chhattisgarh's Janjgir-Champa district, police said on Friday. Eight men were arrested on Thursday on the charge of murder following the incident which took place on the intervening night of August 31 and September 1 at Sri Krishna Tulsi Dharamshala in Champa police station area. Kamleshwar Dewangan, the deceased, was attending his friend Binni Dewangwan's birthday celebration, said a police official. As the party, also attended by some women, was underway, Kiran Sarathi and Manish Sarathi whom nobody at the party knew turned up uninvited and started dancing, he said.

After the NCRB fared Rajasthan among the states with highest crime rate against women, Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Friday said the high numbers were due to compulsory registration of FIRs in every case even though half of them later turned out to be false. During a programme at the Rajasthan Police Academy here, the chief minister directed the director general of police to take action against those who registered false rape cases in order to discourage such a practice.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot on Friday expressed grief over the death of six pilgrims mowed down by a car while they were walking towards the temple town Ambaji in Gujarat's Arvalli district. "It is sad to learn about the death of 6 pedestrians going for Ambaji darshan in Gujarat in a painful accident. My deepest sympathies are with the bereaved families," the chief minister tweeted. Gehlot also wished a speedy recovery of the seven people injured. The accident took place around 6 am on a road connecting Arvalli with adjoining Banaskantha district, where the famous Ambaji temple is situated. 

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Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami has written to Speaker Ritu Khanduri asking her to institute an inquiry into allegations of backdoor recruitments in the state assembly. "You will agree that the state assembly is an autonomous constitutional institution. Maintaining its sanctity has been our topmost priority," Dhami said in his letter on Thursday. He urged Khanduri to consider instituting a high-level probe into the allegations of irregularities in the appointments to the state assembly, an allegation that has been in circulation on social, electronic and print media for some time. He said if irregularities are detected, the recruitments should be cancelled and provisions should be made for neutral and transparent recruitment to the constitutional institution.

The Indian Supreme Court's recent ruling to widen the definition of families to "atypical" households like same-sex couples has starkly illustrated the risks of a legal challenge to Singapore's current definition of marriage, said Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam. In a Facebook post on Thursday, Shanmugam said the constitutional amendments that the Singapore government intends to pass would seek to ensure that the definition of marriage here is decided in Parliament, not through the courts. The Indian top court had ruled last month that family benefits under law must be extended to blended families, same-sex couples and other households. Singapore's courts have avoided such an approach and left the changing of laws to Parliament, The Straits Times quoted the minister as saying.

China has introduced a lockdown in the 21-million population city of Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan province, to conduct PCR testing among residents, local authorities said on Thursday amid the spike in COVID-19 infections.This comes after Chinese health authorities reported that 492 new COVID-19 cases were registered in the province from Monday to Wednesday. More than 6 million cases of COVID-19 infection have been registered since the beginning of the pandemic in mainland China, with 24,806 related deaths.

Acting tough with the offenders of crime against women, the Police in Srinagar have arrested two accused persons involved in allegedly blackmailing a girl, extorting money and circulating her video on WhatsApp, Police said. "Police received a written complaint from a resident of Shunglipora area of Srinagar stating that an obscene video of his niece was captured by two boys namely Danish Majeed Bhat, son of Abdul Majeed Bhat and a resident of Noorbagh, and Aadil Ahmed Rather, son of Abdul Ahad Rather and a resident of Shunglipora Noorbagh," Police added.

North Korea called the UN's top expert on the country's human rights “a puppet” of the United States, warning Friday that it won't tolerate an American-led plot to use the rights issue to overthrow its political system. North Korea is extremely sensitive to any outside criticism of its rights record, calling it a provocation aimed at slandering its government that has been run by the same family for more than 70 years. Its latest reaction comes as Elizabeth Salmón, the UN special rapporteur on the North's human rights, is making her first visit to South Korea this week to meet officials, activists and North Korean defectors since her appointment last month.

Micron will invest $15 billion though the end of the decade on a new semiconductor plant in its hometown that the chipmaker said will create 17,000 American jobs. Sanjay Mehrotra, president and CEO of Boise, Idaho-based Micron, said his company's investment was made possible by last month's passage of the CHIPS and Science ACT of 2022, a $280 billion bill aimed at bolstering U.S. competitiveness against China and avoiding another chip shortage like the one that derailed the auto and tech industries during the pandemic.

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The White House has slammed China for its continued violation of human rights against minority communities. White House Press Secretary Karen Jean-Pierre during her daily news conference on Thursday welcomed the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report on Xinjiang that was released the previous night. The report said China's discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic groups in the western region of Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity.

President Joe Biden warned that “equality and democracy are under assault” in the US as he sounded an alarm about his predecessor, Donald Trump, and “MAGA Republican” adherents, labelling them an extremist threat to the nation and its future. Aiming to reframe the November elections as part of a battle for the nation's soul — “the work of my presidency," Biden used his Thursday night prime-time speech at Independence Hall in Philadelphia to argue that Trump and “Make America Great Again” allies are a challenge to nation's system of government, its standing abroad and its citizens' way of life.

Congress is the only party in the country that holds an election for the post of its president, AICC general secretary Ajay Maken said on Thursday. Maken, who is Congress' Rajasthan in-charge, arrived here to review the preparations for the party's proposed 'Halla Bol' rally on September 4 in Delhi. He stressed that the presidential election will take place according to the party's rules. "Everyone should be satisfied as there are no elections in any political party. Has anyone heard about election of J P Nadda in the BJP, has anyone heard about election of Amit Shah?” he said. Nadda is the president of the BJP while Shah was his predecessor. Responding to objections being raised by some party leaders on the fairness of the exercise, Maken said the election is being held according to the tradition and rules of the party.

The day after a boat ferrying people capsized in the Ganga in this Uttar Pradesh district, rescue teams retrieved five bodies of children from the river on Thursday, officials said. The incident occurred on Wednesday evening when the boat carrying 24 people capsized in the river under the Reotipur police station limits. The people were returning from a weekly market. "Seventeen people were rescued safely with the help of locals while seven were reportedly missing," Sub-Divisional Magistrate Arun Singh said. A search-and-rescue operation with trained divers was launched. The divers had retrieved the bodies of Nagina Paswan (70) and Vishambhar Gaur on Wednesday. The bodies of Sandhya Kumar (6), Anita Paswan (10), Alisa Yadav (5), Khushal Yadav (10) and Satyam (12) were retrieved from the river on Thursday, officials said.  The district adminstration has promised financial support to the kin of the deceased from the disaster relief fund.

A member of western Uttar Pradesh's Sundar Bhati gang was killed allegedly by unidentified miscreants in Greater Noida on Thursday, police said. Nagesh, a history-sheeter, was at Neemka village in the Jewar area when the motorcycle-borne assailants intercepted him around 7.30 pm and pumped five bullets into his body, they said. "According to locals, five to six unidentified men on three motorcycles had intercepted Nagesh and pumped his body with bullets. "He was rushed to a nearby hospital but died. Prima facie the killing appears to be a result of a personal rivalry but the matter is being investigated,” a senior police officer said.

Chief pontiff of Murugha Math Shivamurthy Murugha Sharanaru was arrested for alleged sexual abuse of high school girls and sent to judicial custody for 14 days, police said. He was taken into custody by the police following an interrogation, sources said soon after the arrest on Thursday, adding that due procedures were followed later in the night. The pontiff of one of the most prominent and influential Lingayat seminaries in the state was then questioned at an undisclosed location by Deputy Superintendent of Police Anil Kumar, the investigation officer in the case.