5 stories you must read today, September 17: From Khedkar family going incommunicado to lab test proving Navalny’s poisoning and more

The family of Puja Khedkar, the trainee IAS officer who was sacked last year, has reportedly gone into hiding as police in Navi Mumbai and Pune are on the lookout for them in connection with the abduction of a truck cleaner on Saturday following a road rage incident. The family has switched off mobile phones and has not made any online transactions since Sunday. While Dilip Khedkar, a retired Maharashtra government official and his bodyguard are accused of abducting the truck cleaner, his wife Manorama is accused of trying to prevent the Navi Mumbai police team from entering their house and unleashing their dog on the cops. Read more

The Patna High Court on Wednesday directed social media sites, including Facebook, X and YouTube, to take down the controversial AI-generated video, featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his late mother. The Patna HC’s interim order came in a PIL seeking the removal of the video from social media platforms. The video, posted by the Bihar Congress on social media last week, had caused massive outrage after it depicted the PM’s late mother, Heeraben, as criticising her son for using her name to gain votes. Read more

More than a year after he died in a Russian prison under suspicious circumstances, the wife of Alexei Navalny has claimed that the Russian opposition leader and Putin critic was poisoned. In a social media post, Yulia Navalnaya said biological samples smuggled out of Russia last year were analysed by labs in two different countries, both of which concluded he was poisoned. The 47-year-old Navalny, who was one of the most prominent opposition figures in Russia, was serving a nine-year jail term in a remote Arctic prison, where he was reported as dead on February 16, 2024. Navalny had previously survived several murder attempts, including poisoning. Read more

Fourteen Indian institutions have featured in the QS Global MBA and Business Master’s Rankings 2026. While IIM Bangalore, Ahmedabad, and Calcutta made it to the top 10, IIM Indore, Kozhikode, and Lucknow also made it to the list of the highest-ranking institutes in India. Globally, Wharton, Harvard, MIT, HEC Paris and London Business School were the top five in this year’s rankings. Read more

In a shocking case of theft, masked men dressed in military-style clothing and wielding country-made pistols robbed an SBI branch in Karnataka’s Vijayapura district on Tuesday. According to the police, at least five robbers were involved in the theft, which took place as the bank was about to close for the day. Two men pretending to open an account entered the manager’s room and pulled out a gun, as more of their accomplices tied up the staff and some customers, before fleeing with Rs 1.04 crore in cash and 20 kg of gold. Read more