News18.com Daybreak | Clashes Continue in Shillong & Stories You May Have Missed

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Three CRPF personnel were injured when local protesters pelted stones at their camp in Mawlai, even as clashes continued for the fifth day in Shillong. After curfew was relaxed for eight hours on Sunday, fresh bouts of violence broke out in the night, prompting police to use tear gas shells to quell a mob. Fifteen companies of paramilitary forces have been deployed at various locations in Shillong and curfew has been restored across the city.

NCP chief Sharad Pawar on Monday said that the present situation in the country mirrors that of 1977, when Indira Gandhi was voted out of power by a coalition of parties. He offered to play the role of a unifier for all opposition parties to come together to take on the BJP in next year's Lok Sabha polls.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of giving scripted interviews on public platforms. He was referring to Modi’s interview at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) last Friday. Controversy erupted after the Prime Minister responded to a question on addressing challenges faced by Asia. His English translator read out a lengthy passage from a piece of paper that included facts and figures not part of Modi's answer, fuelling speculation about whether the questions taken by the PM were really impromptu.

In a rare incident, Left ideologists and Right wingers shared the same stage and opinion, while deliberating over the ill-effects of global giant Walmart taking over Flipkart. The meet came a day after veteran BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi expressed concerns over the central government ignoring issues raised by an RSS-affiliated organisation against the Flipkart-Walmart deal.

With exactly a year left to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, NDA partners in Bihar, JD(U) and BJP have already started pitching for more than 40 seats in the seat-sharing formula in Bihar. The development follows the embarrassing loss for the ruling alliance in Jokihat by-elections where it lost to Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD.

Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who is next in line to become the Chief Justice of India (CJI), has called the new Child Labour Act a “mirage”, pointing out that the 2016 law, in fact, allows child labour. He underlined that on one hand, the Right To Education Act seeks to provide free and compulsory education to all children between 6 and 14 years, but on the other, a modification in the Child Labour Act “formalises employment of children between 0 and 14 years in family enterprises.”

A police constable with Kanpur police was suspended for making derogatory comments against the Muslim community on social media.

Swara Bhaskar, whose refusal to mince words has often landed her in many troubles in the past on social media, has once again found herself in the midst of a Twitter frenzy after several users slammed the actress for her masturbation scene in her recently released film Veere Di Wedding, claiming that they went to watch the movie with their grandmothers and "got embarrassed". Read to find out how Swara shut up the trolls.

In Punjab, disgruntled farmer organisations decided to end the supposed 10-day long agitation on June 6. The farmers' stir in the rest of the states will end on June 10, as planned.

For the first time in the Indian sub-continent, burial pits have been found in Uttar Pradesh with chariots that date back to the Pre-Iron Age (Bronze). This new finding is set to create space for further investigation on dating of the Mahabharata period and further inquiry into the origins of the horse in the Harappa age, as per the experts involved in the three-month trial dig Uttar Pradesh's Sanauli.

A five-year-old girl was found dead and her body was recovered from a drain in a village in Haryana's Yamunanagar district. The unidentified accused had allegedly strangled and cut the throat of the girl and killed her. Police has not ruled out sexual assault.

In yet another incident of crimes against minors, a six-year-old girl was allegedly raped by four juveniles in Indiranagar area of Lucknow on the intervening night of Saturday and Sunday. One accused has been detained in the case.

A suicide bomber on Monday killed at least eight people near Muslim clerics leaving a giant tent in the Afghan capital of Kabul where they had gathered to denounce terrorism and call for peace.

A civil services aspirant allegedly committed suicide on Sunday after being denied entry into the examination hall. The candidate, identified as Varun, was a native of Karnataka. His suicide note said that though rules of the examination were well intended, they should be relaxed for a greater good.

Agree or disagree?

Both Shiv Sena supremo Uddhav Thackeray and Janata Dal (United) president Nitish Kumar are visibly uncomfortable in the NDA. Both see themselves as the victims of BJP’s aggressive expansionist moves to occupy their political space in Maharashtra and Bihar, respectively. Interestingly, both the Sena and the JD(U) are sharing power with the BJP. Read senior journalist Venkatesh Kesari’s take on Uddhav Thackeray and Nitish Kumar’s dilemma while sailing in the same NDA boat for the 2019 elections.

On reel

Years of unabated deforestation has resulted in the drying up rivers in Uttarakhand. The heat waves which used to be absorbed by the trees have now turned the glaciers in deserts. Watch the video, featuring noted environmentalists like Sunderlal Bahuguna and Anil Prakash Joshi, to discover the implications of deforestation on India's major rivers Ganga and Yamuna which support the lives of close to 400 million people.