Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) on Friday hit out at Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) for suing it over the Krishna-Godavari (K-G) gas dispute. It has also denied the claim made by ONGC that the company was stealing gas from ONGC’s K-G gas block off Andhra coast.

State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest lender, sprung a pleasant surprise by reporting a drop in bad loans even as higher provisioning dragged its net profit down 7.8 per cent in the fourth quarter ended March 2014.

SBI said better risk management resulted in gross non-performing loans as a percentage of total loans falling 78 basis points sequentially to 4.95 per cent. Net NPA dropped 67 basis points. Sale of bad loans of Rs 3,000 crore also helped the lender reduce its NPAs. The stock ended at its highest level in three years.

Even before Prime Minister-elect Narendra Modi could take the oath of office, he found himself nursing a foreign policy headache following an attack on the Indian consulate in Herat, Afghanistan, by four men armed with grenades and rocket launchers. To make matters worse, alliance partner Vaiko continued to question Modi's invitation to Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa to attend the oath ceremony and decided to boycott the event even as the BJP made light of that.

Dutch anti-EU populist Geert Wilders appeared to suffer a setback as European parliament elections were held in the Netherlands and Britain on Thursday, despite predictions of continental gains for the far-right. Exit polls showed a disappointing result for anti-Islam Wilders, but that was not expected to buck the Europe-wide momentum of anti-immigration parties bent on dismantling the European Union from the inside.

Hewlett-Packard said that it aims to cut another 11,000 to 16,000 jobs by October, bringing the total number of planned layoffs to a maximum of 50,000 and nearly doubling the largest payroll reduction ever for the 75-year-old technology giant.

An employee of Election Commission of India has been arrested for stalking and harassing a girl after she had turned down his proposal in February. The accused had also waylaid her mother and fired at her house in Rohini, said police.

'Raising the bar' has been Saina Nehwal's calling card for years. The Hyderabadi diehard and her team of gutsy shuttlers made Uber Cup history on Thursday, taking India into the semifinals for the first time in modern era of the tournament with a 3-0 win over Indonesia.

Russia will seek an explanation from British officials on Thursday after reports that Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, likened Russian President Vladimir Putin to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler for annexing part of Ukraine.

The lack of experienced players in NDA ranks seems to have opened up the prospect of BJP veterans landing important portfolios in the incoming Modi government.
Sources said while there was uncertainty about the chances of former party president Murli Manohar Joshi and leader of opposition in the outgoing LS Sushma Swaraj getting ministries which are part of the Cabinet Committee on Security, the situation has perked up somewhat because of what is being referred to as BJP's "poor bench strength".

Gunmen armed with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades attacked the Indian consulate in western Afghanistan's Herat province on Friday, an assault that injured no diplomatic staff, police said. Indian diplomats said there had been a threat against its diplomats in Afghanistan, but gave no other details.

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