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PMO defends Manmohan, says GDP has grown
three times during UPA rule
NEW DELHI: Economic data shows unprecedented development in the last decade which would have been impossible if Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had been "weak", his Communications Adviser Pankaj Pachauri said today, countering the damaging claims made by a former Media Adviser.
Pachauri lamented that people were not getting to know of all the aspects related to the government's achievements because the media has "different priorities".
At an interaction with reporters here, he came out with the economic data with respect to various sectors to highlight that there was progress over the last 10 years.
"GDP and Per Capita Income have grown three times in the last 10 years. In villages, minimum wages have also gone three times more. It shows
the government has been working continuously.
"But people are not getting to know about this work because the media's priorities are different," Pachauri said.
"If the Prime Minister had been weak, the (economic) figures related to our country would not been strong. These figures reveal that the PM was working and he always believed that his work would speak for him," he said.
His comments came against the backdrop of contention by the PM's former Media Adviser Sanjaya Baru in his book "The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh", that Singh had been "defanged" by the Congress party in his second term, with Sonia Gandhi deciding on key appointments to the Cabinet.
Seeking to counter the perception that Singh has remained silent, he said the PM had delivered around 1,198 speeches and many press releases were issued but most of them were on economy, development, agriculture, science, education etc.
"On an average, the Prime Minister has talked every three days... Most of the things that the Prime Minister is talking about in his speeches, in our press releases, in his press interactions with the press is not registered," Pachauri said.
— PTI
Ajit Pawar threatening
villagers: AAP to EC
PUNE: Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar has landed in a fresh controversy after a video purportedly featuring him surfaced in which he allegedly threatened to cut off water supply to a village if people there did not vote for his cousin Supriya Sule, daughter of NCP chief Sharad Pawar.
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) candidate for Baramati and former IPS officer Suresh Khopade has alleged in his complaint to Vadgaon police station on Thursday that Pawar issued the threat of cutting off water supply during an election speech at village Masalwadi on April 16, a purported video of which was aired on national television.
"If anybody from this village indulges in any trouble (failing to vote for Sule), I will cut off the water supply," he said in the dim and grainy TV footage after a villager reportedly insisted that he should announce a date to fix the water supply problem.
He also asked policemen to remove the villager even as somebody was heard desperately pleading "Sorry, Dada! Sorry, Dada". Ajit is fondly addressed as 'Ajit Dada' by his supporters.
Sule is seeking a second term from her father's pocket borough Baramati.
Assistant Police Inspector Vilas Bhosale said the police had received Khopade's complaint but no case has so far been registered against the
Deputy CM.
He said the police and Election Commission officials would check the authenticity of the "poor quality" video before taking appropriate action.
"Due process will be followed after preliminary investigations into the complaint," he said.
Khopade, he said, had filed the complaint with the election officials and not the police as the video was shot during electioneering and related to alleged violation of the model code of conduct.
Bhosale said the concerned video had not been handed over to the police.
"Khopade made the complaint to the police belatedly on April 17 while the actual speech was purportedly made on April 16," he said.
The model code for elections prohibits campaigning 48 hours prior to the closing time for casting votes and Pawar could face the charge of violating the code as the video was purportedly shot just a day ahead of the poll on April 17.
Ajit Pawar and Supriya Sule could not be contacted for their comments.
Water shortage is a major problem in the village and several others in the region and Ajit Pawar has often ruffled the feathers of the local people by his remarks on the issue.
"If there is no water in the dam should I urinate into it?," he had asked while responding to demands by a farmer agitating against inadequate availability of water in a dam in the area last year.
The NCP leader had followed up this comment laced with crass humour with another remark poking fun at load-shedding in the state, saying, "I have noticed that more children are being born since the lights go off at night. There is no other work left then."
As his remarks triggered outrage, Ajit had to tender apology in the legislative assembly. — PTI
Ferry
mishap: Rescued vice-principal found hanged
JINDO: A high school vice-principal rescued from a sinking South Korean ferry that sank with hundreds of his students on board was found dead
on Friday, in what media reports said was an apparent suicide.
The local police on Jindo island said the body of vice-principal Kang Min-Kyu, 52, was found near the gymnasium, where relatives of the 268 people still missing from the ferry disaster have been staying.
"The precise cause of death is still under investigation," one police official told AFP.
Yonhap news agency cited the police as saying he was found hanging from a tree having apparently committed suicide.
Of the 475 people on board the ferry, when it capsized Wednesday morning, 352 were students from Danwon High School in Ansan city just south of Seoul.
They were taking the ferry for a school excursion to the popular southern resort island of Jeju.
The vice-principal was among 179 people who managed to escape the ferry in the few hours before it capsized and sank. — AFP
Killer quest:
12 die in Everest avalanche
KATHMANDU: At least 12 Nepalese guides preparing routes up Mount Everest for commercial climbers were killed on Friday by an avalanche in the most deadly mountaineering accident ever on the world's highest peak, officials and rescuers say.
The men were among a large party of Sherpas carrying tents, food and ropes who headed out in bright sunshine in an early morning expedition ahead of the main climbing season starting later this month.
The avalanche occurred at around 6:45 am (0100 GMT) at an altitude of about 5,800 metres (19,000 feet) in an area known as the "popcorn field" which lies on the route into the treacherous Khumbu icefall.
"We have retrieved 12 bodies from the snow, we don't know how many more are trapped underneath," Nepal tourism ministry official Dipendra Paudel told AFP in Kathmandu.
Assisted by rescue helicopters, teams of climbers are still searching for survivors with at least seven people plucked alive from the ice and snow, Paudel told AFP.
A rescue team official working at the base camp of the 8,848-metre (29,029-foot) peak, Lakpa Sherpa, told AFP that the death toll could rise as high as 14.
"I have seen 11 bodies brought to the base camp, we have been told to expect three more," the member of non-profit Himalayan Rescue Association said by telephone.
Kathmandu-based expert Elizabeth Hawley, considered the world's leading authority on Himalayan climbing, said the avalanche was the most deadly single accident in the history of mountaineering on the peak.
The previous worst accident occurred in 1996 when eight people were killed over a two-day period during a rogue storm while attempting to climb the mountain.
That tragedy was immortalised in the best-selling book "Into Thin Air" written by US mountaineering journalist Jon Krakauer.
"This is the absolutely the worst disaster on Everest, no question," Hawley told AFP.
Kathmandu-based climbing company Himalayan Climbing Guides Nepal confirmed that two of their guides were among the dead and four were missing.
"When our guides left base camp, there was no snowfall, the weather was just fantastic," operations manager Bhim Paudel told AFP.
Dozens of guides from other companies crossed the icefall safely before the avalanche struck, Paudel said.
"We expected to follow them, we had no warning at all," he said.
Every summer, hundreds of climbers from around the world attempt to scale peaks in the Himalayas when weather conditions are at their best.
The accident underscores the huge risks taken by sherpa guides, who carry tents, bring food supplies, repair ladders and fix ropes to help foreign climbers who pay tens of thousands of dollars to summit the peak.
More than 300 people have died on Everest since the first successful summit by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953.
Nepal's worst-ever climbing disaster happened in 1995 when a huge avalanche struck the camp of a Japanese trekking group near Mount Everest, killing 42 people including 13 Japanese.
The impoverished Himalayan country is home to eight of the world's 14 peaks over 8,000 metres.
Nepal's government has issued permits to 734 people, including 400 guides, to climb Everest this summer.
In a bid to address concerns of overcrowding on the "roof of the world", the government earlier announced plans to double the number of climbing ropes on congested ice walls near the summit of Everest to reduce congestion and risks for climbers.
Authorities have also stationed soldiers and police at Everest base camp starting this month so climbers can approach officers in case of any trouble following a brawl between commercial climbers and Nepalese guides last year.
— AFP
Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez dies at 87
Mexico City: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate whose intoxicating novels and short stories exposed millions outside Latin America to its passions, superstition, violence and social inequality, has died at home in Mexico City. He was 87.
Widely considered the most popular Spanish-language writer since Miguel de Cervantes in the 17th century, the Colombian-born Garcia Marquez achieved literary celebrity that spawned comparisons to Mark Twain and Charles Dickens.
His flamboyant and melancholy fictional works — among them "Chronicle of a Death Foretold", "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Autumn of the Patriarch"
— outsold everything published in Spanish except the Bible.
The epic 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" sold more than 50 million copies in more than 25 languages.
His stories made him literature's best-known practitioner of magical realism, the fictional blending of the everyday with fantastical elements such as a boy born with a pig's tail and a man trailed by a cloud of yellow butterflies.
The Mexican government said Garcia Marquez died at 2 pm on Thursday. A gray hearse escorted by dozens of police officers in patrol cars and on motorcycles left the author's home about three hours later.
"A thousand years of solitude and sadness because of the death of the greatest Colombian of all time!" Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said on Twitter. "Solidarity and condolences to his wife and family ... Such giants never die."
The first sentence of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" has become one of the most famous opening lines of all time: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
Biographer Gerald Martin told The Associated Press that the novel was the first in which "Latin Americans
recognised themselves, that defined them, celebrated their passion, their intensity, their spirituality and superstition, their grand propensity for failure."
Dozens of journalists camped outside the author's colonial red-brick home in a wealthy neighborhood, swarming the slow trickle of friends who came to pay respects. Three women dressed in black went inside the house separately. Loud crying could be heard from inside.
His family said late Thursday, in a statement read by a Mexican cultural official, that Garcia Marquez's remains would be cremated and a private ceremony held at an unspecific time.
The Mexican government said it would hold a memorial to Garcia Marquez on Monday in the Art Deco Palace of Fine Arts in the capitol's historic center.
When he accepted the Nobel prize for literature in 1982, Garcia Marquez described Latin America as a "source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune." Like many Latin American writers, he transcended the world of letters. Widely known as "Gabo," he became a hero to the left as an early ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and a critic of the US' violent interventions from Vietnam to Chile.
"The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers — and one of my favorites from the time I was young," US President Barack Obama said.
— AP
PDP Sarpanch shot
dead in Kashmir
SRINAGAR: Suspected militants killed a sarpanch affiliated to opposition People's Democratic Party in Pulwama district of Kashmir,
the police said today.
Mohammad Anin Pandith was shot dead by gunmen outside his residence at Awantipora in Pulwama late last night, they said.
No militant outfit has claimed responsibility for the killing so far.
— PTI
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