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Rahul commends Amethi for donation towards Kerala flood relief

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Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday commended farmers and small businessmen here for contributing Rs 2.57 lakh for the relief work in flood-battered Kerala.

“In Amethi district, small businessmen, farmers, women and handicraft workers, who shared the pain of Kerala’s flood-victims, gave me a cheque of 2.57 lakh,” he tweeted.

“They are still working for the flood relief. Many thanks to the people of Amethi for this commendable work.”

Gandhi, who has held this Lok Sabha seat from eastern Uttar Pradesh since 2004, is here on a two-day visit.

IANS

World Bank will offer new initiative on Indus Treaty dispute: Pakistan

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The World Bank would soon approach India and Pakistan with a fresh initiative to resolve the Indus Water Treaty dispute, its President Jim Yong Kim has told Islamabad’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, according to a statement from Pakistan’s UN Mission.

It said that Qureshi met Jim at the UN on Monday and complained to him about India’s Kishan Ganga and Ratle projects asserting that they were violations of the 1960 treaty.

Under the provisions of the Indus Water Treaty 1960, waters of the eastern rivers – Sutlej, Beas and Ravi – had been allocated to India and the western rivers – the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab – to Pakistan, except for certain non-consumptive uses for India.

(IANS)

Modi to address Karyakarta Mahakumbh rally in Bhopal

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Ahead of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly polls to held later this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will on Tuesday address party workers at the ‘Karyakarta Mahakumbh’ rally in Bhopal.

“Looking forward to interacting with the hardworking karyakartas of BJP Madhya Pradesh at the Karyakarta Mahakumbh in Bhopal today,” Modi said in reply to a tweet from Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

According to party leaders beside the Prime Minister, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah would also be present at the largest rally so far of party workers in the poll-bound state.

About 13 lakh people were expected to participate in the ‘Karyakarta Mahakumbh’ rally as party workers from 230 assembly seats in the state would take part in the programme.

IANS

J&K gunfight: Educational institutions closed in Sopore

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Authorities on Tuesday closed educational institutions and suspended mobile internet services in Jammu and Kashmir’s Sopore town following a firing exchange between the security forces and militants.

The brief gun battle took place in Nowpora village of Tujjar area, police said.

Troops of the Rashtriya Rifles (RR), special operations group (SOG) of the state police and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) started a search operation in Nowpora following a tip off about the presence of militants there.

Hiding militants fired at the security forces triggering the gunfight, a police officer said. “Firing has stopped, but the search operation continues,” he added.

IANS

Woman shot dead in US city

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A woman was shot dead in the US city of Boston, leading to an extensive manhunt for her estranged husband who had allegedly chased her in a motor vehicle before the deadly attack.

Plymouth District Attorney Timothy Cruz identified Allen Warner, 47, the woman’s “soon to be ex-husband”, as a person of interest in the shooting which took place on Monday evening on Main Street in Marshfield, reports The Boston Globe daily.

Warner is “considered armed and dangerous”, Cruz told the media on Monday night.

Cruz asked for the public’s help in finding Warner, who the police believe was driving a gray 2013 Toyota Corolla with a Massachusetts license plate.

The woman, believed to be in her late 30s, was taken to South Shore Hospital with a gunshot wound, where she was pronounced dead.

No weapons were recovered at the scene, authorities said.

IANS

13 Indians, Israelis with blind climbers, scale Mt. Kilimanjaro

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Mumbai In an unique adventure sports initiative, a group of blind and able-bodied climbers from India and Israel have scaled the world’s fourth highest and Africa’s tallest peak, Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, an organiser said here on Monday.

The climb between September 8-14 was billed as India’s first Inclusive Climb. It included two blind climbers from India and one from Israel, besides 10 others, said the founder of Summitting4Hope (S4H) and expedition leader Anusha Subramanian.

“The climb to the 5885-metre high Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest free-standing mountain in the world, is another victory of inclusion, which is close to the hearts of S4H and Adventures Beyond Barriers Foundation (ABBF).

“It re-evaluated our rigid views about disability and shattered stereotypes that plague persons with disability,” Subramanian, a media professional told news-persons.

She said it is appalling that as a society, we define what ‘they can’ and ‘cannot do’, but combating severe fatigue and acute mountain sickness, all the participants successfully summitted Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The inclusive climb included 14-year old Baepi Donio of Israel — the youngest climber, besides a German teacher, a mother-son duo, two independent filmmakers and six local and three Indian mountain guides in the expedition.

The Pune-based ABBF founder and one of the blind climbers, Divyanshu Ganatra, said that “exclusion is something that persons with disability routinely encounter and with disability, in India, comes ‘invisibility'”, but the real challenge is to understand despite the differences.

“Mountains and nature or outdoors don’t differentiate between anyone, so why is it that we discriminate among people? I believe that to change something, you have to change yourself,” said Subramanian.

Besides Ganatra and Subramanian, the 13-member group included filmmakers Sehran Mohsin and Omkar Potdar, mountain guide Karn Kowshik, IT consultant Prasad Gurav, German teacher Omana Kale, Israelis Uri Basha, Sophie Donio and her 14-year old son Baepi, adventure sports enthusiast Vaishak J.P., motivational speaker Nupur Pittie and consultant Adi Raheja.

The ABBF is said to be the only NGO in the country working with cross-disabilities by providing more opportunities to disabled persons with adaptive adventure and sports activities, marathons, tandem cycling, scuba-diving, paragliding and mountaineering.

S4H, co-founded by Subramanian and Guneet Puri in 2013 with the aim to rehabilitate the flood-ravaged people of Uttarakhand, has supported other causes like Kashmir floods, Nepal earthquake and since last year the disabled persons especially from the economically weaker income groups.

(IANS)

Chidambaram targets Modi government for dodging Rafale probe

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Congress leader P. Chidambaram on Monday ridiculed the Narendra Modi government for refusing a probe into the Rafale deal after Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley discredited former French President Francois Hollande’s revelation on the choice of an offset partner.

“Truth cannot have two versions’ says Finance Minister (Jaitley). Absolutely correct. Since, according to the Finance Minister, there are two versions, what is the best way to find out which version is ‘true’?

“Either (1) order an inquiry or (2) toss a coin. I suppose the Finance Minister would prefer to toss a coin (preferably with ‘head’ on both sides).

“It is a pity that the government does not see the inexorable flow of events and refuses to order an inquiry. Who knows what will happen in six months or 12 months,” the senior Congress leader said in a series of tweets.

“Truth cannot have two versions,” Jaitley on Sunday cited Hollande’s initial claim to a French website that “Reliance Defence partnership with Dassault Aviation was entered at the suggestion of the Indian Government” and his subsequent statement to the AFP news agency that “he is not aware if government ever lobbied for Reliance Defence”.

Continuing its relentless attack against the Modi government over the “Rafale scam”, a delegation of top Congress leaders will meet the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) later on Monday seeking a probe into the alleged regurgitates in the deal announced by the Prime Minister in April 2015.

The party has already submitted a memorandum to the Comptroller and Auditor General of India Rajiv Mehrishi for a special and forensic audit into the intergovernmental deal with France to purcure 36 Rafale jets.

(IANS)

India launches world’s largest state-run healthcare programme

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday launched the ‘Ayushman Bharat – Pradhan Mantri Jan Aarogya Yojana (AB-PMJAY)’ here, hailing it as the “worlds biggest state-run healthcare scheme”.

Launching the scheme, Modi said the intended beneficiaries outnumber the total population of the European Union or that of the USA, Canada and Mexico put together.

Modi said that the scheme, which targets more than 50 crore people, will be a subject for research for medical and social scientists and a model for the world to follow. He had announced AB-PMJAY in his Independence Day speech.

Without taking names, Modi used the occasion to target the Congress for “using schemes for the sake of vote-bank politics”.

“Since long, we have been hearing the slogan of ‘gareebi hatao’ (abolish poverty) but they only indulged in politics of poverty, politics of vote bank. They were only giving out freebies to the poor instead of empowering them.

“Previous governments’ schemes were guided by vote bank, with the beneficiaries selected on the basis of potential vote bank for them. But we strive for the empowerment of the poor. We believe in inclusive growth. The scheme is not aimed at benefiting a particular region or community or caste. It is for all, for the poorest of poor. The poor don’t want freebies, they have self-respect and seek empowerment. We work for their empowerment,” he added.

Modi also laid the foundation stone of medical colleges at Chaibasa and Koderma in Ranchi, and distributed e-card, a unique helath identity card, to the beneficiaries of PMJAY.

Jharkhand Governor Draupadi Murmu, Chief Minister Raghubar Das and Union Ministers J.P. Nadda and Jayant Sinha were present on the occasion.

The scheme will provide a cover of up to Rs 5 lakh per family per year, for secondary and tertiary care hospitalisation through a network of Empanelled Health Care Providers (EHCP).

The EHCP network will provide cashless and paperless access to services for the beneficiaries at both public and private hospitals.

The services will include 1,350 procedures covering pre- and post-hospitalisation, diagnostics and medicines.

Ayushman Bharat has two components — creation of 150,000 health and wellness centres which will provide Comprehensive Primary Health Care (CPHC) and the PMJAY which provides health protection cover to poor and vulnerable families for secondary and tertiary care.

The first Health and Wellness Centre was launched by Modi at Jangla, Chhattisgarh on April 14.

PMJAY primarily targets the poor, deprived rural families and identified occupational category of urban workers’ families as per the latest Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) data for both rural and urban areas as well as the active families under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY).

The objectives of the scheme are to reduce out of pocket hospitalisation expenses, fulfil unmet needs and improve access of identified families to quality inpatient care and surgeries.

The scheme allows states enough flexibility in terms of packages, procedures, scheme design, entitlements as well as other guidelines while ensuring that key benefits of portability and fraud detection are ensured at a national level.

States have the option to use an existing trust/society or set up a new trust/society to implement the scheme as State Health Agency and will be free to choose the modalities for implementation.

It can implement the Scheme through an insurance company or directly through the trust/society/implementation support agency or a mixed approach.

Pilot launch of the scheme has already been done in around 22 states and Union Territories. About 30 states and union territories have signed a Memorandum of Understanding and started working on implementating the mission.

IANS

Pakistan’s one-trick pony act on Kashmir doesn’t resonate at UN: Akbaruddin

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India will be focusing on a multilateral agenda at the high-level UN General Assembly (UNGA) session that begins on Tuesday and let Pakistan be a “one-trick pony” on Kashmir if it wants to, India’s Permanent Representative Syed Akbaruddin has said.

The UN works best on the basis of multilateralism and “India’s positions based on partnerships get a great resonance”, he said on Sunday at a news conference while replying to a reporter’s query about the possibility of Pakistan raising Kashmir at the UNGA.

He said: “If somebody else would like to be a one-trick pony, it is for them to regurgitate that act. We’ve handled this act many times in the past and are confident we’ll do so again.”

“Solo players in a multilateral context have neither a past nor a future” and get “no resonance in such matters”, he added.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has said that Islamabad would bring up Kashmir at the UNGA and give “unequivocal support to the cause”, Radio Pakistan has reported.

Pakistan has been raising Kashmir at all UN forums, regardless of the topic of the meetings, but no other country has joined it in making it an issue or even talking about it.

During the 2017 UNGA meeting, Pakistani zeal produced a major embarrassment when its Permanent Representative Maleeha Lodhi was caught out trying to pass off a picture of a wounded Palestinian girl as a Kashmiri.

Akbaruddin said that even when India talks about terrorism, it does not treat it as just a bilateral issue but deals with it in the international context of havoc it wreaks around the world, for example the Boko Haram in Africa, and terrorist groups elsewhere.

Led by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj at the UN session, India will focus on five topics: reformed multilateralism, climate change action, health, development and peacekeeping, he said.

Fresh from India’s launch of the world’s biggest public health insurance programme, Health Minister Jagat Prakash Nadda will be joining the Indian delegation to represent the country at a high-level event on Ending Tuberculosis and on Non-Communicable Diseases.

Sushma Swaraj is scheduled to address the UNGA on Saturday at the morning session scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Listed as the fifth speaker, she will likely speak around 7.15 p.m. (India time).

Qureshi’s speech is set for Saturday’s afternoon session, which will give him an opportunity to react to Sushma Swaraj’s address.

If he raises issues relating to India, the nation would have a right of reply which could take place towards the end of that session or Monday’s session.

Customarily a junior diplomat exercises the right of reply at the UNGA high-level meeting.

IANS

Trump’s tariffs on $200 bn of Chinese goods kicks in

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The ongoing trade war between the US and China has escalated after American President Donald Trump’s administration’s new 10 per cent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods kicked in on Monday, spanning thousands of products, including food seasonings, baseball gloves, network routers and industrial machinery parts.

China retaliated immediately with new taxes of 5 to 10 per cent on $60 billion of US goods such as meat, chemicals, clothes and auto parts, reports CNN.

Trump’s latest tariffs on China now apply to over $250 billion of Chinese goods, roughly half the amount the country sells to the US.

The latest round affects thousands of products bought by US consumers, including hundreds of millions of dollars of furniture and electronics imports.

The US tariffs imposed earlier in the year mostly hit industrial goods.

The measures are meant to punish China for what the Trump administration says are unfair trade practices, such as intellectual property theft.

Beijing has rejected the US assertions, accusing Washington of protectionism and bullying. It has fired back with tariffs on American goods worth more than $110 billion.

Monday’s tariffs are set to increase at the end of the year from 10 to 25 per cent, CNN said.

Trump has also threatened tariffs on another $267 billion of Chinese products which would mean the US measures effectively cover all Beijing’s annual goods exports to Washington (the total for 2017 was about $506 billion).

Trump’s decision to move ahead rapidly with the latest tariffs appears to have put the brakes on plans for a new round of negotiations between the two sides.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had invited Chinese negotiators to Washington to resume talks, but a senior White House official said on Friday that no new meetings are planned for the time being.

(IANS)

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