A journalist of a Ranchi-based Hindi daily who had been facing threats was beaten to death in Jharkhand’s Chatra district, authorities said on Tuesday.

Chandan Tiwary, who worked for the “Aaj”, was abducted on Monday night from Pathhalgada, police said.

According to police officials, Tiwary was found in the Balthar forest on Tuesday in a badly wounded condition. He succumbed to his injuries in a hospital.

“Our correspondent has been brutally killed,” the newspaper’s Resident Editor Amit Kumar Agarwal told IANS.

“Tiwary had filed a complaint in April regarding threats to his life. But he was not provided any security,” Agarwal said.

He said the police had set up a special team to probe the killing.

“But our reporters have handed over a memorandum to the Deputy Commissioner of Chatra seeking a CBI probe. It is the duty of the government to provide security to journalists. We also demand compensation to the family,” Agarwal added.

Deputy Commissioner Jitendra Kumar Singh said efforts were on to nab the killers.

In 2016, another journalist of a Hindi daily was shot dead in Chatra.

IANS

A non-bailable warrant has been filed against senior BJP leader and former Deputy Chief Minister KS Eshwarappa for his repeated absence in the hearing of a criminal case.

In 2011 when B.S.Yeddyurappa had lost his power Ishwarappa had called for a bundh, questioning this High Court lawyer Dharmapala had filed a private complaint against Ishwarappa. Earlier the court had served him notices to appear in front of the court, in spite of sending the notices repeatedly Ishwarappa did not appear in front of the court.

The City Civil Court has now ordered the special court to enforce a non-bailable warrant against Ishwarappa and further ordered him to appear in front of the court on November 24 without fail.

PTI

A special court in Mumbai on Tuesday framed charges against Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and five others under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) and several sections in the September 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case.

Judge Vinod Padalkar, presiding over the special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court, framed charges against the accused persons.

Under the UAPA, the accused have been charged with being part of a terrorist act, and under IPC they have been charged with criminal conspiracy and murder. Framing of charges is a process after which the trial in a criminal case starts.

apart from Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, the other accused are Major (retired) Ramesh Upadhyay, Ajay Rahirkar, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Sudhakar Chaturvedi and Sameer Kulkarni.

All the accused were present in the court when the judge read out the charges against them.

Six people were killed and over 100 injured when an explosive device strapped on a motorcycle went off near a mosque in Malegaon, a town about 200 km from Mumbai in north Maharashtra, on September 29, 2008.

PTI

Prof. Giridhar Madras of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru — who is facing sexual harassment charges — has been asked to take “compulsory retirement”,

The internal committee that was set up in accordance with the guidelines of the institute’s anti-sexual harassment policy found Madras, a faculty member of chemical engineering, guilty of sexual misconduct after a month-long investigation.

The complaint was filed by one of his former students and a current PhD scholar in the chemical engineering department.

The student has accused him of making “sexually coloured” remarks and harassing her with repeated late-night phone calls.

The media has reached representatives of the three science academies, IISc, and the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize committee at CSIR for comments but there was no response until the time of publishing this report. The reported will be updated when they respond.

Madras had been a highly respected member of the science community and is one of the highest cited researchers in chemical engineering. He is a recipient of the prestigious Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, and a J.C. Bose National Fellow.

Madras has been with IISc since 1998 and has received the IISc Excellence Award in teaching and research. He holds fellowships from all the three national science academies — the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Science of India — as well as the Indian National Academy of Engineering.

Whether Madras will lose his fellowships and awards is not yet known.

The two people who fell to their deaths from a popular overlook in California’s Yosemite National Park were a married couple from India who were living and working in the United States, officials said.

Park rangers recovered the bodies of 29-year-old Vishnu Viswanath and 30-year-old Meenakshi Moorthy from about 800 feet below Taft Point, where visitors can walk to the edge of a vertigo-inducing granite ledge that doesn’t have a railing.

“Yosemite National Park continues to investigate this case, which will take several weeks,” park officials wrote in a news release Monday.

The couple graduated from the College of Engineering in Chengannur in 2006 in computer science and engineering.

They loved travelling and maintained a website called “Holidays and Happily Ever Afters” about their travel adventures, and described themselves as a “dream doer duo.” Meenakshi describes herself as the one “diagnosed with the curious case of interminable travel bug”

The Mercury News called Meenakshi “a free-spirited Harry Potter fan who dyed her hair pink and ominously warned people on social media about the dangers of falling from cliffs and tall buildings while trying to take spectacular photos.”

The couple’s social media pages and their travel website is full of chronicles of their travel from all over the world.

The San Francisco Chronicle writes the couple had recently moved from New York after Viswanath took a job as a systems engineer at Cisco Systems Inc., based in San Jose, according to a friend.

BBC.com reports the latest deaths come just one week after a photo of the Taft Point lookout went viral, when a photographer captured a wedding proposal amidst the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

he lower court has said that a suicide note mentioning names is not sufficient to prove abetment of suicide.

“Direct evidence is needed to establish that the accused either aided or instigated the deceased to commit suicide or entered into any conspiracy to aid him into committing suicide,” said the court while acquitting a family booked for abetment of suicide. In 2016, a man named Jasvinder had committed suicide.

A suicide note has been found in which he mentioned four persons- Bhupinder Singh (father-in-law of Jasvinder’s daughter), Jaswinder Singh (son-in-law), Parminder Singh (brother-inlaw) and Balwinder (mother-in-law).

When Jasvinder’s wife, Amita and daughter Gurpreet learnt about the suicide, they accused the family of Bhupinder Singh alleging that he and his family had threatened Jasvinder.

In January 2015, Jaswinder and Gurpreet got married and within 20 days she complained of harassment. In July, she filed a complaint of domestic violence.

The trial was being conducted at Rohini Court. Based on the suicide note, the Delhi Police arrested Jaswinder and his father Bhupender. Parminder managed to get anticipatory bail while Balwinder expired.

The father-son duo remained in jail for over three months. “The prosecution has miserably failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt,” said advocate Pradeep Khatri, the defence lawyer.

“There is no direct evidence to establish that any of the accused either aided or instigated the deceased to commit suicide,” the court said.

IANS

A National Investigation Agency (NIA) team on Tuesday raided the residence of a businessman here.

An NIA official in New Delhi confirmed that the raid was being conducted at Fayaz Ahmad Mir’s residence in the city’s Lal Bazar area.

The team was accompanied by Jammu and Kashmir Police personnel.

No other details of the raid were immediately available.

The agency has been carrying out raids at the offices and residences of separatists and businessmen in connection with the hawala scam that the NIA has been investigating.

Two months ago, the NIA raid the residence of another businessman in Srinagar’s Nowhatta area.

IANS

A Bangladesh court on Tuesday doubled the jail term of opposition leader and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia from five years to 10 in an orphanage graft case following an appeal by the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC).

On February 8, a special court sentenced Khaleda, the chief of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), to five years in jail for embezzling funds of around $200,000 meant for the Zia Orphanage Trust, reports bdnews24.

A bench of the Bangladesh High Court comprising Justices M Enayetur Rahim and Md Mostafizur Rahman pronounced the decision on Tuesday.

“Khaleda Zia was the key suspect in the case, which is why we demanded increasing her punishment. The High Court granted our appeal scaling up the punishment to 10 years from five. As a result, all defendants have the same punishment — 10 years. The bails for other defendants were also rejected,” Khurshid Alam, a lawyer for the ACC, said after the verdict.

Khaleda’s son Tarique Rahman and four others were also sentenced for 10 years.

On Monday, she was sentenced to seven years in jail in a corruption case.

The temporary court set up at the old central prison here found Khaleda and three others guilty of using their political clout to raise funds of around 31.5 million taka ($375,000) from unknown sources for the Zia Charitable Trust.

The case was filed against Khaleda by the ACC eight years ago.

IANS

Newlywed woman from Babain area of Kurukshetra, Haryana, has accused her husband, his relatives and four tantriks of gangraping her on the night of her wedding.

Kurukshetra women police station, on the basis of a complaint filed by the woman’s father, has registered a case against her husband, his brother, his sister’s husband, father, mother, sister and four unknown tantriks.

Station House Officer of Kurukshetra women police station, Inspector Sheelavanti has confirmed the registration of an FIR.

“The case was transferred to us from Kurukshetra police station which had registered a zero FIR on September 26. According to the complaint, the woman was gangraped on September 13 and 14. We have got the woman medically examined and the samples have been sent for a lab test,” Inspector Sheelavanti said.

According to the complaint, the 22-year-old woman got married on September 12. On the night of September 13, she was given a spiked drink by her husband and his relatives. She was locked in a room where she lost her senses.

The woman’s brother-in-law and her husband’s brother-in-law gangraped her on September 13. As planned by the woman’s husband, his father, mother and his sister, four tantriks were called for performing pooja on September 14, who then also gangraped the woman.

The accused also allegedly threatened to kill the woman.

No arrests have been made so far.

Former Bihar Minister Manju Verma’s husband Chandrasekhar Verma surrendered before a court on Monday in connection to the Muzaffarpur shelter home case.

Chandrasekhar Verma, who was absconding for over a month, surrendered in the Begusarai District Court after a lower court and the Patna High Court repeatedly rejected his interim bail petitions.

In September, the police issued an arrest warrant against Chandrasekhar Verma in connection with an FIR registered by the Central Bureau Investigation (CBI) under the Arms Act.

The Patna High Court on Oct 9 rejected an anticipatory bail plea by Manju Verma against arrest by the CBI, which is probing the Muzaffarpur shelter home horror.

At least 34 girl inmates of the shelter home were found to have been raped during a social audit in June.

The CBI has seized 50 live cartridges from the former Minister’s Begusarai home.

Manju Verma resigned on August 8 following allegations that Brajesh Thakur, the main accused in the case, had links with her husband.

Arrested on June 2, Thakur was lodged in the Muzaffarpur jail and was shifted to the Bhagalpur Central Jail last week.

Of the 42 girls lodged at the short-stay home run by Thakur’s NGO, 34 were found to have been sexually assaulted. The crime came to light after a social audit by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

IANS