Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Thursday decided to send External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee to Sri Lanka to press for a ceasefire between forces and LTTE and resumption of dialogue.

"I requested the Prime Minister to send Mukherjee to issue a strong warning to the Sri Lankan Government to announce a ceasefire immediately and to hold peaceful negotiations with them," said M. Karunanidhi at New Delhi after meeting Singh along with a multi-party delegation from the state.

As many as 68 percent voters exercised their franchise for assembly polls in Rajasthan on Thursday.

"The polling percentage is expected to be around 68 percentages as we are still compiling the figures," election commission officials said. Same percent turnout was registered in the 2003 Assembly elections.

There were 43,000 polling stations in 33 districts where 43,000 EVMs were used. Mechanical problems were reported in about 150 EVMs which were replaced immediately, they said.

Rajasthan has a 200 seated assembly with 3.62 crore-strong voters.

The Planning Commission of India called off a visit of its officials to Pakistan last Friday in the wake of the growing tension between the two countries.

The high-level team was all set to visit Pakistan to prepare the ground and finalise dates for plan panel deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia's trip to take the bilateral planning process forward.

The team, headed by secretary, planning, Subhas Pani was scheduled to visit Pakistan last Friday but was asked by the external affairs ministry to call it off at the last minute following the attack on Mumbai.

A new research claims that too much exercise in pregnancy may cause dangerous high blood pressure. For study, more than 85,000 women were enrolled at the Danish National Birth Cohort (DNBC) between 1996 and 2002. The researchers found that due to intense physical activity oxidative stress induces in the mother and contributes to the development of pre-eclampsia. 

A new study carried out by Dr Coren Apicella, an anthropologist at Harvard University, U.S, found that females preferred males with deeper voice and males preferred higher pitched women. The researchers conducted the study on a remote tribe of hunter-gatherers in Africa, involved playing two versions of the same voice to the Hadza tribe in Tanzania.

At least 15 passengers were injured when 14 bogies of a train derailed in the early hours of Thursday in Andhra Pradesh.

Patna bound Ernakulam-Patna passenger train has derailed at Baruva near Sompeta in Andhra Pradesh in wee hours on Thursday.

The injured were being treated in local hospitals at Sompeta and Polasa in Andhra Pradesh.

According to an eye witness, two bogies of the train had derailed from the track near Baruva, 2km away from Sopmeta station (AP) and 30 km away from Berhampur station, at around 12.40 am on Thursday.