India began its medal quest in right earnest picking up the first gold medal of the 11th South Asian Games here on Friday. The women’s cycling quartet of Rameshwari Devi, Suchitra Devi, Mahidha Mohan and V. Rejani won the 30-km road race time trial clocking 44:22.15 seconds at Khulna. There were more successes for the [...]

Defending champion and top seed Serena Williams powered to her fifth Australian Open title and 12th Grand Slam when she beat a brave Justine Henin 6-4, 3-6, 6-2 on Saturday. Williams took a tight first set then had to hold off a charging Henin to deny the Belgian a fairytale ending to her tennis comeback [...]

The public hearing in Hyderabad on genetically modified BT brinjal turned into a show of strength by the lobbies both for and against genetically modified vegetables. The people lobbying for BT Brinjal surrounded Environment Minister Jairam Minister as he arrived for the meeting, asking for the immediate approval for the cultivation of the genetically modified [...]

An unrepentant Tony Blair defended his decision to join the United States in attacking Iraq, arguing on Friday before a panel investigating the war that the September 11, 2001 attacks made the threat of weapons of mass destruction impossible to ignore. The former British Prime Minister said that before September 11 he thought “Saddam was [...]

The Reserve Bank of India on Friday increased the cash reserve ratio by 75 basis points to 5.75 per cent in a bid to suck excess liquidity to battle rising inflation. However, the apex bank kept its short-term lending and borrowing rates unchanged. Though the CRR hike will drain Rs 36,000 crore from the banking [...]

One of the Army’s senior-most generals will face a court martial for his alleged role in a land scam that runs into hundreds of crores. The Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor has confirmed that Lieutenant General Avadesh Prakash will be court martialled. Prakash is the Military Secretary and among eight principal staff officers to the [...]

Lieutenant General V.K. Singh will be the new Chief of the Army Staff. He will assume office on March 31, the day the current Chief, General Deepak Kapoor, retires from service, the Defence Ministry announced on Friday. Lt. Gen. Singh (59) is the seniormost infantry officer, who currently heads the Eastern Army Command. During a [...]

Even as food inflation eased marginally to 16.81 per cent for the week ended January 9 from 17.28 per cent in the previous week, the overall inflation based on the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) is likely to be in excess of nine per cent by the end of the current fiscal. This adverse impact, according [...]

There were at least 16,196 farmers’ suicides in India in 2008, bringing the total since 1997 to 199,132, according to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB). The share of the Big 5 States or ‘suicide belt’ in 2008 — Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh — remained very high at 10,797, or 66.6 [...]

The Union government on Thursday lifted the more than two-month-old ban on pre-paid mobile phone service in Jammu and Kashmir. It, however, imposed a number of conditions on the operators for customer verification. The decision was taken after the Centre finalised a plan to ensure proper verification of nearly 38 lakh cellphone subscribers in the [...]