New Delhi: The Maharashtra government has recommended cricketer Sachin Tendulkar's name for the country's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna. Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan made the announcement in the Assembly on Wednesday.

Bhubaneswar: Bowing to Maoists’ demands,  for securing the release of a BJD MLA and an Italian from the captivity of ultra-Left activists’ captivity, Odisha government today said it would facilitate the release of 27 persons, including 8 Naxals, from jails. 

Visakhapatnam: India today inducted the Russian-origin nuclear-powered submarine ‘Nerpa’ into the Navy, joining the elite league of nations having such sophisticated warships.

NEW DELHI: President Pratibha Patil conferred the Padma awards to late cartoonist Mario Miranda, actors Dharmendra and Shabana Azmi and former chief vigilance commissioner N Vittal among other eminent citizens on Wednesday.

BHOPAL: Madhya Pradesh cancelled licences of seven 'gutkha' companies and banned its manufacture and sale in the state from April 1. MP is the first state in the country to ban tobacco, magnesium carbonate and nicotine-based 'gutkha' following provisions of the Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and Restriction on Sales) Regulation 2011.

Mumbai: The CBI today detained two persons including an IAS officer for alleged irregularities in granting sanction to multi-crore Adarsh housing society here.

Chandigarh,: Amid reports that VIP facilities including an LCD TV were being provided to Bibi Jagir Kaur, lodged in Theh Kanjla Jail in Kapurthala in connection with the abduction case of her daughter, a top Punjab Prisons official today ordered an inquiry into it.  Punjab DGP (Prisons) Shashi Kant also insisted that rules will be followed in the case.

New Delh: The senior Defence Ministry official, who was found dead under mysterious circumstances in his south Delhi flat, died of suffocation after he allegedly set himself afire while his wife was strangled to death, police said today quoting their post mortem report.

Karachi, Apr 4: Twenty-three Indian fishermen were arrested and four of their boats seized for fishing “illegally” in Pakistan’s territorial waters, officials said here on Tuesday.

Exactly on April 3, 28 years back, IAF Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma strapped himself inside a Soyuz T-11 mission capsule. As the rocket, essentially a gigantic intercontinental ballistic missile, carrying the 6850-kg spacecraft, blasted off from its launch pad in Baikonur in Kazakhstan, Sharma became the first Indian cosmonaut, the first Indian in space.