TOP NEWS

As the Yogi Adityanath-led Uttar Pradesh government began surveying private madrassas to acquire information on the number of students, teachers, curriculum, and its affiliation with any non-governmental organisation, senior BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi on Friday said that doubts should not be raised on all such institutions, but a controversy over the survey itself raises a question.

"We should not raise doubts on all madrassas, but the row over the survey itself raises the question - why create a hubbub when there is nothing to hide?"

Addressing party members on the concluding day of the Uttar Pradesh BJP Minority Morcha's three-day training programme at the Visvesvaraya Hall, Naqvi said the horrible history of cruelty against humanity can never be a part of the DNA of any Indian group.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Friday made a big promise to Delhiites that if his Aam Aadmi Party gets control of the MCD, it will 'beautify' the national capital. During a press conference, the AAP chief also accused the current MCD of trying to turn the city into a city of "garbage mountains." The Chief Minister alleged that the civic body has plans to create 16 new landfill sites. At present, three landfill sites -- Ghazipur, Okhla, and Bhalswa -- are located on Delhi borders.

"People living in the vicinity of these landfill sites are affected by the foul smell emanating from these garbage mounds and a host of other issues. Their life is literally like hell. We have heard that there are plans to make 16 new garbage mountains in the national capital," the CM said.

A Supreme Court bench, in a rare instance, has expressed displeasure in its judicial order over a new case listing mechanism introduced by Chief Justice U U Lalit for speedy disposal of matters pending for years. A bench headed by Sanjay Kishan Kaul, the number three-judge in seniority at present in the apex court, while hearing a criminal case passed the order, “The new listing system is not giving an adequate time to take up matters fixed for hearing like the present case as there are number of matters within the span of ‘Afternoon’ session”.

The bench, which passed the order on September 13, listed the matter for hearing on November 15. Under the new mechanism, the judges of the top court are working in two different shifts .The new system stipulates that on Monday and Friday of every week, 30 judges are to sit in a combination of two and deal with over 60 miscellaneous matters of each bench, including the fresh PILs.

The Centre told the Supreme Court that they will not be able to accommodate Indian medical students who were forced to flee Ukraine following the Russian invasion of the country. In an affidavit, the government stated that the students took admission in Ukrainian colleges due to poor National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) scores or due to low college fees.

The medical students have been facing an uncertain future ever since they were forced to evacuate Ukraine after Russia declared war on its neighbouring nation in February this year.

In an abrupt switch of gears, the Muslim side on Monday said the Supreme Court, not being sufficiently proficient in Arabic, is ill-equipped to interpret the Quran. It argued that instead of determining the essentiality of hijab to Islam by attempting to interpret the holy book, the court should view hijab as an individual woman’s right to choose a piece of cloth to protect her privacy, dignity and identity.

The fresh of argument by the side that had earlier contended that hijab was essential to Islam, advanced in different forms by senior advocates Yusuf H Muchhala and Salman Khurshid. The last hearing in the court had seen a bench of Justices Hemant Gupta and Sudhanshu Dhulia, relying upon the Muslim side’s argument on non-mandatory nature of five tenets of Islam — Nama, Riza, Zakat, Hajj and Imaan — to ask how hijab, ranked lower in the hierarchy, could then be termed compulsory in Islam.