New Delhi

NEW DELHI -- Officials trumpeted a US-India civilian nuclear deal as the centerpiece of the countries' new partnership, but India struck a note of caution yesterday over "extraneous" provisions. There is broad agreement that the deal, which allows the shipment of nuclear fuel and know-how to India, is reshaping India-US relations and could alter the global power balance. But India's concerns over some of the bill's provisions, while not enough to scuttle the deal, highlight challenges the two counties face as they try to overcome decades of mistrust.

NEW DELHI - Jubilant Foodworks, the Indian distributor of Domino's Pizza, plans as many as 100 Dunkin' Donuts stores in India over five years as fast-food sales grow. The company will spend as much as $2.45 million to open up to 10 stores in Delhi and its suburbs this financial year, chief executive Ajay Kaul said at a conference in New Delhi. Jubilant Foodworks opened India's second Dunkin' Donuts store Tuesday. Dunkin' Donuts will compete in India with companies such as Cafe Coffee Day, run by Amalgamated Bean Coffee Trading Co., Lavazza's Barista Coffee Co., and Starbucks, which plans...

NEW DELHI - A powerful bomb hidden in a briefcase ripped through a crowd of people waiting to enter a New Delhi courthouse yesterday, killing 11 people and wounding scores more in the deadliest attack in India's capital in nearly three years. An Al Qaeda-linked group claimed responsibility, though government officials said it was too early to name a suspect. The attack outside the High Court came despite a high alert across the city and renewed doubts about India's ability to protect even its most important institutions despite overhauling security after the 2008 Mumbai siege.

Police say a French citizen has died a week after being beaten unconscious on a train in northern India, allegedly by a conductor. Police Inspector-General V. Kamraj says Frank Wilfred was found last week bleeding with head injuries at a train station in Haryana state where he had been dumped from a train. He says Wilfred died Thursday without regaining consciousness. Police have arrested a train conductor, Manoj Kumar, on suspicion of assaulting Wilfred and charged him with attempted murder.

India: Women traveling alone have been victims of crime recently when arriving in New Delhi on international flights. On March 11, a Japanese woman who arrived from Tokyo hired a prepaid taxi at the airport (the "right" thing to do) and was later robbed of her belongings and $200 by the taxi driver and a "hotel owner" who offered her accommodations in his home rather than at his hotel. On March 17, an Australian woman arrived from Brisbane via Hong Kong around 2 a.m., hired a taxi from the prepaid booth, and was killed by her taxi driver when she resisted his robbery attempt.

A SEAT of power for more than a thousand years, the city-state of Delhi is a survivor of conquest and change. The Lodi and Mughal dynasties ruled this area, as did the British, until it was again transformed by the refugees of partition. Today, new money has conquered the region, which includes New Delhi, the capital of a rapidly changing India. Spiraling rents have put a Swarovski shop where a small independent bookshop once stood, and in the same market, a shop called It’s All About Bling sells spangly earrings.

NEW DELHI - Manjit Bawa, a leading Indian artist whose work highlighted peaceful coexistence, died Monday at his home here. He was 67 and had been in a coma for three years after a stroke, said Ashok Bajpai, a family friend and chairman of India's National Academy of Art. Mr. Bawa studied at the School of Art in New Delhi and worked as a silkscreen painter in Britain, where he also studied between 1964 and 1971. Often using animal imagery - tigers and lambs sharing the same space - Mr. Bawa sought to convey the message that people could coexist with animals in nature, said art...

NEW DELHI — New Delhi yesterday ordered the evacuation of dozens of buildings near where an overcrowded apartment building collapsed and killed 67 people, highlighting the dangerous housing conditions among the poor in India’s capital. The collapse of the crude brick five-story building Monday night shocked the city and led to the owner’s arrest. Officials said he had built two floors illegally — an act that is not uncommon amid New Delhi’s skyrocketing land prices. Poor construction material and inadequate foundations are also blamed for building collapses in India.

NEW DELHI - The ramshackle neighborhoods of northeast Delhi are home to 2.2 million people packed along narrow alleys. Buildings are made from a single layer of brick. Extra floors are added to dilapidated buildings not meant to handle their weight. Tangles of electrical cables hang precariously everywhere. If a major earthquake struck India's seismically vulnerable capital, these neighborhoods - India's most crowded - would collapse in an apocalyptic nightmare. Waters from the nearby Yamuna River would turn the water-soaked subsoil to jelly, which...

NEW DELHI — Police and rescuers raced today to pull survivors from the debris of a four-story apartment building that collapsed in a congested neighborhood in New Delhi, killing at least 51 people and injuring 76 others. The 15-year-old building housing about 200 people — mostly migrant workers and their families — collapsed yesterday evening into a mountain of concrete slabs, iron rods, bricks, and mortar in New Delhi’s Lalita Park neighborhood. About 30 people were believed still trapped under the rubble, said New Delhi’s top elected...

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as he continues his three-day visit to the country. Ban will meet later Friday with Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna and other officials. He arrived in India on Thursday, when he met with Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad. A U.N. statement says that in his meetings with officials, Ban praised India's success in eradicating polio. But he also said India needs to improve its dismal record on maternal health and child mortality.

LAST FALL, while in India for a wedding, Narain Bhatia stopped for a coffee. Looking around the crowded New Delhi shop, the accountant from Wakefield was surprised to see a familiar face. It was his friend Raman Handa, the former owner of Alpha Omega, the Boston-area watch and jewelry company. The two men chatted, but Handa seemed distracted and forlorn. "He said he was in depression," says Bhatia. "We did not talk long. " It has been more than four years since Handa and his family abruptly left the United States and returned to India, and $6.6 million worth of the chain's...

NEW DELHI - The west Indian state of Gujarat is flipping the switch on Asia's largest solar power field. The 3,000-acre Gujarat Solar Park can supply 214 megawatts of electricity, making it larger than China's 200-megawatt Golmud Solar Park. The project gives a serious boost to energy-hungry India's renewable energy ambitions. India wants renewables to account for at least 15 percent of its energy capacity by 2020, up from 6 percent today. The new solar park has 21 companies involved in its management and development, including four from the United States.

NEW DELHI - In the first visit to India by a Pakistani head of state in seven years, President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India on Sunday expressed a mutual desire to improve relations between their rival South Asian nations. Singh also announced that he would at some point visit Pakistan for the first time since taking office. The meeting was not a formal summit, and diplomats tried to tamp down expectations. Zardari had originally requested to make a private visit to an important Muslim religious site, the Ajmer Sharif shrine, in Rajasthan...

NEW DELHI - A Tibetan exile who set himself on fire in India to protest a visit by China's president died Wednesday, while hundreds of other activists were being detained. Jamphel Yeshi, 27, set himself alight Monday at a demonstration in New Delhi. He ran screaming past other protesters and the media before falling to the ground, his clothing partly disintegrated and nearly his entire body covered in burns. "Martyr Jamphel Yeshi's sacrifice will be written in golden letters in the annals of our freedom struggle," said Dhondup Lhadar, an activist with the Tibetan...

NEW DELHI — A Tibetan exile lit himself on fire and ran shouting through a demonstration in the Indian capital Monday, just ahead of a visit by China's president and amid a series of self-immolations done inside Tibet to protest Beijing's rule. Indian police, who had already tightened security in New Delhi for President Hu Jintao's visit, swept through the protest a few hours later, detaining scores of Tibetans. The man apparently had doused himself with something highly flammable and was fully in flames when he ran past the podium where speakers were...

An earthquake of magnitude 4.2 shook the Indian capital of New Delhi late Wednesday, officials said. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The quake shook buildings throughout the capital for several seconds. R.S. Dattatreya, the director of seismology for the meteorology department, said the quake was of magnitude 4.2. "It was a slight event, there is no need for panic," he told the CNN-IBN news channel.

NEW DELHI - Hundreds of students who were jammed into a narrow school staircase panicked and set off a stampede yesterday that left five girls dead and 31 other students injured in India’s capital. Five of the injured were in critical condition, said O.P. Kalra, medical superintendent of the Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital, where the injured boys and girls were taken. The stampede occurred early in the day as students arrived for an exam, Kalra told reporters. Amod Kant, a former police officer and well-known child rights activist, said the students...

Police in southern India have arrested a Roman Catholic priest wanted in the United States on charges of sexually assaulting a teenage parishioner in Minnesota, officials said Monday. The Rev. Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul appeared Monday in a New Delhi court and will be held in custody pending a formal U.S. request for his extradition, to be filed along with case evidence, government officials said. Processing the request could take up to three months. Police detained Jeyapaul on Friday near the southern Indian town of Erode after Interpol issued an alert, police Subinspector Pugal...

NEW DELHI - With its health care system increasingly eclipsed by rivals, India has a plan to nearly double public spending on health during the next five years, with the longterm goal of making medical care free for all citizens. It is an ambitious goal, and the kind of investment many experts have been advocating for decades. But already critics are wondering whether the government will live up to its promise, or if throwing money at the problem without reforming the health care delivery system from top to bottom will make much of a difference.