Arun Janardhanan

Hyderabad 'encounter': Saying that there was “pressure for immediate action” and it’s doubtful if justice would have been served through courts since “Indian judicial process will go on forever”, he said the “credit goes to the Chief Minister”.

Before being posted as Cyberabad police commissioner, Sajjanar was IG, Special Intelligence Branch. During his stint there, he was credited with the arrest and surrender of several top Naxalites and encounters with them.

The Telangana High Court, taking cognizance of a plea seeking judicial intervention in the matter, has ordered that the bodies of all four accused be preserved until December 9 when it will hear the plea.

BJP state vice-president B T Arasakumar, who had kicked up a controversy last week for his remarks praising DMK chief M K Stalin, joined the party on Thursday, calling it a “homecoming”.

And all it took for Shanmuga Subramanian (33) to find what the world was looking for was perseverance, a corner of his apartment in Besant Nagar and a basic image viewer on his personal laptop. May be that’s why, facing a crowd of media cameras, the man himself says “it’s not a big deal”.

The announcement faced the wrath of Opposition parties, as State Election Commissioner R Palanisamy announced dates for elections only to rural civic bodies, keeping urban local body polls on hold.

The government had on Friday issued an order to Manickavel to hand over the records of all cases being probed under him. Manickavel “shall hand over all the records/details pertaining to cases and work done by him and by the special investigation team.

Father Churchill, general secretary of South Asian Fishermen Fraternity, who was in Kochi on Saturday to help them complete formalities with the government agencies, said many such fishermen are stranded in Gulf countries, living a slave’s life.

10 years after war with LTTE ended, Lanka remains haunted by its ghosts. What does victory of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the man most closely associated with it, mean for the country's strained religious, ethnic mix? The Indian Express travels from Colombo to Jaffna, Buddhist strongholds and Christian towns to Muslim refugees and Tamil victims, and finds a yearning for peace.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s new President, is best known for defeating the LTTE in a final, bloody war in 2009. His brother Mahinda had a strong pro-China tilt, and India will be watching his policies closely.

As a symbolic first step, the President-elect chose Anuradhapura, the World Heritage City and ancient capital known for its traditional links to India, for his swearing-in ceremony Monday — instead of the traditional Independence Square in Colombo.

As many as 12,845 polling stations were set up across the country for 15.9 million voters. Polls opened at 7 am local time and concluded at 5 pm with overall voter turnout at almost 80 per cent, the National Elections Commission said.

According to about a dozen Tamil voters who spoke to The Indian Express on the eve of polling, the situation has changed in the last five years of the Sirisena regime.

Maithripala Sirisena, who rode a surge of public anger against the Rajapaksa family to win by a massive margin four years ago, is not in the fray.

On Thursday, in an interview with The Indian Express at his office in Colombo, Basil was going through a red-coloured map on his table that showed the 160 electoral constituencies in the country.

Fathima Latif, a first year student of MA, humanities and development studies (integrated), who came from Kollam, Kerala, was found hanging in her hostel room at IIT-Madras on Saturday morning.

The 1955-batch IAS officer was CEC from 1990 to 1996 and was known for his fight against electoral malpractices such as bogus voting and booth capturing.

The controversy began with the BJP state unit tweeting a picture of Thiruvalluvar, whose white robes had been replaced with saffron, which drew protests from Dravidian and Left parties.

It is learnt that the NDA and the ruling AIADMK may agree on a 50-50 seat-sharing formula for the about 1.25 lakh seats and the BJP is looking to get at least 15 per cent seats from the NDA’s share.