In a day of sensational developments, 14 of 15 ministers of state in Karnataka opted out of the ministry, three senior ministers were dropped and two ministers were inducted into the team by CM Ramakrishna Hegde.

Iraqi raid on Iranian villages

Iraqi warplanes raided six Iranian border towns and bombed Iran’s oil export terminal at Kharg Island in retaliation for an Iranian surface-to-surface missile attack on the Iraqi oil province of Kirkuk. Iran reported five civilians killed and 28 wounded in one of the raids and vowed to “retaliate forcefully as before”, a reference to a string of medium-range missile attacks launched on Baghdad last year.

Pranab keeps pot boiling

Politics in West Bengal never stays dull for long. There is always something new to lend piquancy to it. The crusade by Pranab Mukherjee, former Union finance minister, against the Congress-I is a case in point. The expelled Congress-I leader is trying to make the people understand that the process of concentrating all power and responsibility in a single individual (Rajiv Gandhi) has done the party incalculable harm. All dissidence, corruption and indiscipline can be traced back to this single source, he says.