Nine persons accused in the 2006 Malegaon serial blasts that left 31 dead got bail on Saturday. The Maharashtra ATS had arrested them claiming that they belonged to outlawed SIMI and aided a Pakistani in carrying out the attacks. The NIA, which has taken over the probe after Swami Aseemanand's confession that a saffron group was behind the blasts, did not oppose bail. Two of the nine, Shaikh Mohd Ali Alam Shaikh...

Three years after he was arrested by CBI from a Mumbai hotel along with an arms dealer, Indian Revenue Service officer Ashutosh Verma was reinstated by the Income Tax Department. Last month, he was promoted as Joint Commissioner, Income Tax. In March 2008, Verma was arrested together with arms dealer Suresh Nanda, his son Sanjeev and Nanda’s chartered accountant Bipin Shah. The arrests were made after a surveillance unit of the CBI...

Boiling milk several times before drinking and that too at high temperatures, which reduces its nutritious value, is highly prevalent among Indian women. A first-of-its-kind Milk Boiling Habits study that involved 2, 400 women across eight major cities has found that Chandigarh leads the pack, boiling milk more than three times a day. While, 84% of women surveyed in Kolkata always boiled milk for over five minutes. About 46% of women...

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer. Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet.  But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project...

Some of the recent cases in the higher courts bring into sharp focus the dilemmas on the death penalty. ON October 10, the Supreme Court Bench of Justices Aftab Alam and C.K. Prasad stayed the execution of Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving assailant in the November 2008 Mumbai terror attack, by admitting his appeal against the death sentence awarded to him by the Bombay High Court. The Bench wondered whether Kasab deserved...