Shimla: A moderate intensity earthquake of magnitude 3.1 struck Himachal Pradesh’s Kinnaur district on Sunday, a disaster management official said.

There was no immediate report of any casualty or damage to property, he said.

The earthquake’s epicentre was at a depth of 10 km in Kinnaur. Tremors were felt in and around the district at 1.13 pm, the official said.

Mangaluru: Veteran Yakshagana artiste Bottikere Purushotham Poonja, who worked as ‘Bhagavath’ for 45 years in several Melas, died late Saturday night, family sources said.

Poonja was 68. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Poonja, who had been ailing for some time, was undergoing treatment at a hospital.

He had served the first Mela of Kateel as chief Bhagavath. Poonja worked as chief Bhagavath for 45 years in Uppala Mela, Geetambika Mela of Mumbai, Puttur Mela, Karnataka Mela and served in Kateel Mela for the past 30 years.

Poonja has written 32 ‘prasangas’ in Kannada and Tulu languages. His prasangas Ma Nishada, Ubhayakula Billoja, Nalinakshi Nandini, Megha Mayuri and Swarnanupura, are very popular in the Yakshagana field.

He has received several honours including Muddana award, Yaksha Manasa award of Mumbai, Academy book literature award, Asranna award and Karnoor award.

Poonja had converted his home into Gurukula and used to teach hundreds of students about Bhagavathike and Yakshagana literature.

KABUL: The Taliban completed their sweep of Afghanistan’s south on Friday, taking four more provincial capitals in a lightning offensive that brought them closer to Kabul just weeks before the U.S.

In the last 24 hours, the country’s second- and third-largest cities — Herat in the west and Kandahar in the south — have fallen to the insurgents, as has the capital of the southern province of Helmand, where American, British and NATO forces fought some of the bloodiest battles of the conflict.

The blitz through the Taliban’s southern heartland means the insurgents now hold half of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals and control more than two-thirds of the country.

The Western-backed government in the capital, Kabul, still holds a smattering of provinces in the center and east, as well as the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

While Kabul is not directly under threat yet, the resurgent Taliban were battling government forces in Logar province, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) from the capital.

The U.S. military has estimated that Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that the Taliban could overrun the rest of the country within a few months.

They have already taken over much of the north and west of the country.

In the south, insurgents swept through three provincial capitals on Friday.

Attaullah Afghan, the head of the provincial council in Helmand, said the Taliban captured Lashkar Gah following weeks of heavy fighting and raised their white flag over governmental buildings.

He said that three army bases outside of the city remain under government control.

In Tirin Kot, the capital of the southern Uruzgan province, Taliban fighters paraded through a main square, driving a Humvee and a pickup seized from Afghan forces.

Local officials confirmed that the Taliban also captured the capitals of Zabul province in the south and Ghor in the west.

With security rapidly deteriorating, the United States planned to send in 3,000 troops to help evacuate some personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Britain and Canada are also sending forces to aid their evacuations.

Denmark said it will temporarily close its embassy, while Germany is reducing its embassy staff to the “absolute minimum.”

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have fled their homes amid fears the Taliban will return the country to the sort of brutal, repressive rule it imposed when it was last in power at the turn of the millennium.

At that time, the group all but eliminated women’s rights and conducted public executions as it imposed an unsparing version of Islamic law.

An early sign of such tactics came in Herat, where insurgents paraded two alleged looters through the streets on Friday with black makeup smeared on their faces.

There are also concerns that the fighting could plunge the country into civil war, which is what happened after the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

“We are worried. There is fighting everywhere in Afghanistan. The provinces are falling day by day,” said Ahmad Sakhi, a resident of Kabul.

“The government should do something. The people are facing lots of problems.”

The U.N. refugee agency said nearly 250,000 Afghans have been forced to flee their homes since the end of May, and 80% of those displaced are women and children.

In all, the agency said, some 400,000 civilians have been displaced since the beginning of the year, joining millions who have fled previous rounds of fighting in recent decades.

Peace talks in Qatar between the Taliban and the government remain stalled, though diplomats are still meeting, as the U.S., European and Asian nations warned that battlefield gains would not lead to political recognition.

“We demand an immediate end to attacks against cities, urge a political settlement, and warn that a government imposed by force will be a pariah state,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. envoy to the talks.

But the Taliban advance continued.

Hasibullah Stanikzai, the head of the Logar provincial council, said fighting was still underway inside Puli-e Alim, with government forces holding the police headquarters and other security facilities.

He spoke by phone from his office, and gunfire could be heard in the background.

The Taliban, however, said they had captured the police headquarters and a nearby prison.

The onslaught represents a stunning collapse of Afghan forces after the United States spent nearly two decades and $830 billion trying to establish a functioning state.

U.S. forces toppled the Taliban in the wake of the Sept.11, 2001, attacks, which al-Qaida planned and executed while being sheltered by the Taliban government.

With only weeks remaining before the U.S.

plans to withdraw its last troops, the fighters now advancing across the country ride on American-made Humvees and carry M-16s pilfered from Afghan forces.

Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Afghan army has rotted from within due to corruption and mismanagement, leaving troops in the field poorly equipped and with little motivation to fight.

The Taliban, meanwhile, have spent a decade taking control of large swaths of the countryside.

KABUL: It was early evening and Zahra, her mother and three sisters were on their way to dinner at another sister’s home when they saw people running and heard gunshots on the street.

“The Taliban are here!” people screamed.

In just a few minutes, everything changed for the 26-year-old resident of Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city.

Zahra grew up in a mostly Taliban-free Afghanistan, where women dared to dream of careers and girls got an education. For the past five years, she has been working with local nonprofit organizations to raise awareness for women and press for gender equality.

Her dreams and ambitions came crashing down Thursday evening as the Taliban swept into the city, planting their white flags emblazoned with an Islamic proclamation of faith in a central square as people on motorcycles and in cars rushed to their homes.

Like most other residents, Zahra, her parents and five siblings are now hunkering indoors, too scared to go out and worried about the future. The Associated Press chose not to identify her by her full name to avoid making her a target.

“I am in big shock,” said Zahra, a round-faced, soft-spoken young woman. “How can it be possible for me as a woman who has worked so hard and tried to learn and advance, to now have to hide myself and stay at home?”

Amid a lightning offensive over the past several days, the Taliban now control more than two-thirds of the country, just two weeks before the U.S. plans to withdraw its last troops. And they are slowly closing in on the capital, Kabul.

The U.N. refugee agency says nearly 250,000 Afghans have fled their homes since the end of May amid fears the Taliban would reimpose their strict and ruthless interpretation of Islam, all but eliminating women’s rights. Eighty percent of those displaced are women and children.

The fundamentalist group ruled the country for five years until the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. During that time, it forbade girls an education and women the right to work, and refused even to let them travel outside their homes without a male relative to accompany them. The Taliban also carried out public executions, chopped off the hands of thieves and stoned women accused of adultery.

There have been no confirmed reports of such extreme measures in areas the Taliban fighters recently seized. But militants were reported to have taken over some houses and set fire to at least one school.

At a park in Kabul, transformed since last week into a shelter for the displaced, families told the AP on Friday that girls riding home in a motorized rickshaw in the northern Takhar province were stopped and lashed for wearing “revealing sandals.”

A schoolteacher from the province said no one was allowed to go out to the market without a male escort. Some 3,000 families mainly from northern provinces recently taken over by the Taliban now live in tents inside the park, some on the sidewalks.

Zahra stopped going to the office about a month ago as the militants approached Herat, and she worked remotely from home. But on Thursday, Taliban fighters broke through the city’s defensive lines, and she has been unable to work since.

Her eyes welled up with tears as she considered the possibility that she will not be able to return to work; that her 12-year-old sister will be unable to continue going to school (“She loves learning”); that her older brother will not be able play football; or that she won’t be able to freely play the guitar again. The instrument hung on a wall behind her as she spoke.

She listed some of the achievements made by women in the past 20 years since the Taliban’s ouster — incremental but meaningful gains in what is still a deeply conservative, male-dominated society: Girls are now in school, and women are in Parliament, government and business.

Marianne O’Grady, Kabul-based deputy country director for CARE International, said the strides made by women over the past two decades have been dramatic, particularly in urban areas, adding she cannot see things going back to the way they were, even with a Taliban takeover.

“You can’t uneducate millions of people,” she said. If women “are back behind walls and not able to go out as much, at least they can now educate their cousins and their neighbors and their own children in ways that couldn’t happen 25 years ago.”

Still, a sense of dread appears to be omnipresent, particularly among women, as Taliban forces take more territory each day.

“I feel we are like a bird who makes a nest for a living and spends all the time building it, but then suddenly and helplessly watches others destroy it,” said Zarmina Kakar, a 26-year-old women’s rights activist in Kabul.

Kakar was a year old when the Taliban entered Kabul the first time in 1996, and she recalled a time when her mother took her out to buy her ice cream, back when the Taliban ruled. Her mother was whipped by a Taliban fighter for revealing her face for a couple of minutes.

“Today again, I feel that if Taliban come to power, we will return back to the same dark days,” she said.

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Saturday that August 14 will be observed as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day in the memory of the struggles and sacrifices of people, saying the pain of partition can never be forgotten.

Modi noted that millions of people were displaced and many lost their lives due to mindless hate and violence caused by the partition.

May the Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, the prime minister said, keep “reminding us of the need to remove the poison of social divisions, disharmony and further strengthen the spirit of oneness, social harmony and human empowerment”.

Pakistan was carved out as a Muslim country after the division of India by the British colonial rule in 1947, and millions of people were displaced and many lakhs of them lost their lives as large scale rioting broke out.

India will be celebrating its 75th Independence Day on Sunday.

CHENNAI: Will the DMK government’s first budget under the leadership of MK Stalin have a growth plan for southern districts? All eyes will be on State Finance Minister Palanivel Thiagarajan, who was elected from Madurai Central constituency, as he would present the Budget on Friday, to see what vision he has to develop the southern region of the State.

The region lacks equitable development, resulting in huge migration of workforce from Madurai, Thoothukudi and Tirunelveli districts to Chennai and Coimbatore.

Although funds could be a constraint for planning projects now, the Finance Minister is unlikely to ignore the south. A few announcements aiming at the region’s development can be expected, says Ligi George, Managing Director, Madras Suspensions and former chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry (Madurai Zone).

It is learned that the government had held various meetings in this regard with trade bodies and elicited their suggestions.

“The government should come out with a massive plan like building an electronics city in any of the southern districts as it would have access to Thoothukudi Port. This should be similar to what Gujarat did by creating a financial city. Rather than going for a piecemeal approach, the government should have a vision, or create a master plan on how it would develop the southern districts,” George adds.

While the new industrial policy, which came into effect recently, talks about a flexible capital subsidy of 40 percent to industries, which invest in southern and backward districts, industrialists say this is just a good plan on paper.

“Until there is no real commitment from the government or a phased plan to pursue growth in these districts, there won’t be equitable development,” says George, who feels that Palanivel Thiagarajan with his experience abroad could be a game-changer.

Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Srivats Ram says that there is a need to identify the export potential of each district and work towards identifying one exportable product and building the necessary infrastructure.

“This would enable sustainable and equitable economic development in the State,” he says.

Former Confederation of Indian Industry chairman of Tamil Nadu State Council Hari K Thiagarajan says he expects a budget announcement pertaining to southern districts. This could be pertaining to the Chennai- Kanniyakumari Industrial Corridor, which is a part of India’s East Coast Economic Corridor and connects India to the production networks of Southeast and East Asia.

“We are expecting some subsidies to be given for the Madurai-Thoothukudi corridor. But I think there needs to be a huge effort on the government’s part to achieve development here,” says Thiagarajan.

“Giving stamp duty waivers and power generation tax incentives will not help anymore. There needs to be a big push from the government. Manufacturing could play a key role here. The focus could be on batteries for e-vehicles or hydrogen fuel cells. Since land is cheaper here than in Chennai, the government should definitely push large retail investment, which is coming to Chennai, to south Tamil Nadu and offer more subsidies. The previous government failed to woo investments into the southern districts,” Thiagarajan adds.

A mega industrial park between Madurai and Thoothukudi, with major infrastructure similar to the parks in China could be planned. “Once the infrastructure is created then the State government should go in for a plug and play policy,” says Thiagarajan, adding that, “If one such hi-tech industrial park is set up, investment would start flowing in.”

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Thursday alleged that India and Afghanistan were behind last month’s suicide attack on a shuttle bus in the country’s restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that killed 13 people, including nine Chinese engineers.

The bomb attack took place in the Dasu area of Upper Kohistan district where a Chinese company is building a 4,300-megawatt hydropower project on the Indus river.

At least 13 people were killed when the bus carrying Chinese engineers and workers to the site of the under-construction Dasu Dam exploded on July 14.

The bus fell into a deep ravine after the explosion.

Addressing a press conference in Islamabad after the completion of the probe, also assisted by Chinese experts, Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said Afghan soil was used and the vehicle used for the attack was smuggled from Afghanistan.

He accused the Indian spy agency Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) of carrying out the attack.

“It was a blind case but Pakistani institutions managed to trace it,” Qureshi said, alleging that there is a nexus of the two agencies which were behind the incident.

He said the Pakistani authorities examined footage of 36 CCTV cameras while the area under the investigation was almost 1,400 kilometres.

Last month, Pakistan alleged that the mastermind of an attack near the residence of banned Jamat-ud-Dawa outfit chief Hafiz Saeed in Lahore on June 23 was “an Indian citizen” and he was associated with R&AW.

Later it claimed that a “common link” has been established between the Dasu blast and the explosion outside Saeed’s house.

India has previously trashed as “baseless propaganda” Pakistan’s claim that it was behind some attacks in Karachi and Lahore and asked Islamabad to take “credible and verifiable” action against terrorism emanating from its soil instead.

Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Arindam Bagchi last month asked Pakistan to focus on setting its own house in order in containing terror networks and said that the international community is well aware of that country’s credentials when it comes to terrorism.

“It is not new for Pakistan to engage in baseless propaganda against India. Pakistan would do well to expend the same effort in setting its own house in order and taking credible and verifiable action against terrorism emanating from its soil and terrorists who have found safe sanctuaries there,” Bagchi said on July 8 in New Delhi at an MEA briefing.

“The international community is well aware of Pakistan’s credentials when it comes to terrorism. This is acknowledged by none other than its own leadership, which continues to glorify terrorists like Osama Bin Laden as ‘martyrs’,” he said.

On Thursday, Qureshi claimed that the first target was the Diamer-Bhasha dam site in Gilgit-Baltistan but on failing to target it, the terrorists targeted the Dasu project.

He said the authorities have traced the handlers and the people connected with it.

The Chinese officials have visited the crime scene and were updated about the investigation, Qureshi said, adding that China was satisfied with the probe.

Director-General of Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Javed Iqbal, who also briefed the media on the occasion, said that it was a suicide attack and a thumb and a limb of the attacker were found at the scene.

He said the suicide bomber was identified as Khalid aka Sheikh and he was an Afghan national.

Iqbal said 14 people were involved in the attack, and the group was led by a person named Tariq, a member of the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

He claimed that Tariq and another person Muawiya were trained by NDS and R&AW for this attack.

“We have so far arrested three suspects and are going to nab others,” he said.

Separately, the Foreign Office said that the Pakistani authorities have conducted thorough investigations of the incident and shared the findings with the Chinese side at every stage.

The planning for the terrorist attack was done in Afghanistan, with provision of material support as well, including the vehicle, while the suicide bomber was trained in Afghanistan and brought to Pakistan to carry out the attack, it claimed.

“Some of those involved in the attack have been arrested, while others are at large in Afghanistan. An MLA (Mutual Legal Assistance) request is being made to the Afghanistan Government,” the FO said in a statement.

“We would not allow any hostile force to undermine the iron-clad friendship between Pakistan and China,” it said.

Pakistan had initially said that the accident was caused due to technical problems and later an explosion occurred due to gas leakage, while China has from the beginning called it a terrorist attack due to which the vehicle fell down.

Beijing also sent a 15-member team of experts to Pakistan to probe the incident.

The Dasu bus blast had accentuated Beijing’s concerns as thousands of Chinese personnel are working on the USD 60 billion China-Pakistan installations, projects and personnel in Pakistan.

For Pakistan, ties with China are crucial due to its increasing economic dependence on Beijing.

This year, the two nations are celebrating the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations and more than 100 celebratory events have been planned of which over 60 events have already been held so far.

MATHURA: A special court here awarded a man life imprisonment till last breath for kidnapping and raping his stepdaughter, saying he deserved no leniency as he was the custodian of the girl, a minor when the incident happened eight years ago.

The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act court judge Amar Singh also imposed a cumulative fine of Rs 2 lakh on convict Saubi.

“The learned Additional Special Judge POCSO Act, court no 2, Amar Singh also ordered the government would pay Rs 2 lakh to the victim girl in case the convict fails to deposit the fine,” Additional District Government Counsel (ADGC) Subhash Chandra Chaturvedi said.

Sharing the details about the incident, Chaturvedi said that on February 2, 2013 Saubi kidnapped the girl, who was 15 then, and raped her when her mother had gone to a relative’s place.

Upon her return, the mother filed a complaint against Saubi, also alleging he stole a motorbike, Rs 1.05 lakh cash and jewellery.

An FIR was registered under Indian Penal Code sections 363 (kidnapping), 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing woman to compel her for marriage) and 376 (rape) on the woman’s complaint.

Four years after the death of her first husband, the woman had married Shaubi, a resident of Aligarh, expecting him to support the family, the ADGC said.

After the marriage, they started living together in Karahari village under Surir police station of Mathura district.

Saubi’s counsel requested the court to take a lenient view of the matter as his client is poor and a first-time offender, the ADGC stated.

The judge rejected the plea, saying since the accused was the father and the custodian of the girl, what he did was a heinous crime that merited an exemplary punishment.

The convict also deserved a severe punishment since the girl was less than 16 years of age when he subjected her to the crime, he said.

The judge then awarded the convict 10 years rigorous punishment and Rs 50,000 fine under section 366 of the IPC, and life imprisonment (till his last breath)) and Rs 1.50 lakh fine under section 376, the ADGC said.

In case the convict fails to deposit the fine, the government would pay Rs 2 lakh to the victim as compensation, cancelling bail of the convict, the judge ordered.