KOTHARI INSTITUTE

DATE-25Mar2014

NATIONAL NEWS

1. Balamuralikrishna’s musical treat at Rashtrapati Bhavan 2. Probe ordered into PGMET ‘irregularities’ 3. Meghalaya’s villagers cut down hills for mining 4. String-theorist wins G.D. Birla Award 5. Royal Mail issues stamp on Noor Inayat Khan 6. Global jihadism rising on fringes of Indian Islamist movement

Business

1. Bank of India launches instant money transfer scheme

Sports

1. North Zone storms into Deodhar Trophy final

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

1. Ukraine orders pullout of troops from Crimea 2. China demands explanation 3. Muslims should boycott Islamic cartoon: Saudi 4. Japan to offer $1.5 billion aid to Ukraine

EDITORIAL

Gayoom comes back, in style

Dear students here are the news from “THE HINDU” and “TIMES OF INDIA”

NATIONAL NEWS

NEW DELHI, March 25, 2014

Balamuralikrishna’s musical treat at Rashtrapati Bhavan

President Pranab Mukherjee with musicianM. Balamuralikrishna in New Delhi on Saturday.— Photo: Special Arrangement

A select group of people were provided a musical treat by legendary classical Carnatic musician M. Balamuralikrishna, on Saturday at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

President Pranab Mukherjee graced the event, which lasted a little over an hour. Dr. Balamuralikrishna sang six classical songs, including Vande Mataram , Omakarakarini(Lavangi Raga) ,Robindro Sangeet, Prayang Raya Das (Raga Sindhur Bhairavi) and a Thillana in Raga Brindavani.

He left the audience spellbound with his various compositions. He was assisted by Muthu K. Krishna Kumar, R. Sridhar, Mannargudi N. Subramanium and P.S. Raja.

Dr. Balamuralikrishna is the State musician of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and the ashthana vidwan of Sringeri Peetam and Tirumala Tirupathi Devasthanam. He is also an Executive CommitteeMember of the Kalakshetra Foundation, the ICCR and the Central Sangeet Natak Academy.

He is the only South Indian artiste who, on invitation, sang Tagore’s Robindro Sangeet in All India Radio to preserve it for posterity. He has received several awards including the Padma Shri and the Padma Vibhushan, Knights of the Order of Arts and Letters awarded by the French government. — ANI

HYDERABAD, March 25, 2014

Probe ordered into PGMET ‘irregularities’

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

The government has ordered a CID enquiry into the alleged irregularities in the Post Graduate Medical Entrance exam.

The decision was taken after the one-man committee headed by the APSCHE chairman, L. Venugopal Reddy, submitted its report to the Governor. The report is said to have suggested a probe by the police since the network had several players.

Sources said the CID teams are already on the job and a team is likely to question a senior official in the NTR University of Health Sciences that conducted the exam. Another team is said to have started for Bangalore to question the paper printer and enquire whether they had any role in the allegations being levelled by the aspirants. In all, ten teams have been formed and raids are being conducted at different places in Andhra Pradesh, CID sources said.

Officials under scanner

“There is definitely something fishy and at this time we can’t rule out the involvement of NTRUHS officials,” a senior official said. “The antecedents of the students against whom allegations have been levelled can be verified only through police enquiry.”

Around 15,000 students have taken the examination held on March 2 for the 2,240-odd seats.

The results, however, stunned several aspirants, who alleged that some candidates with ‘questionable’ academic credentials have secured top ranks.

Some candidates, who had failed in some subjects in graduation, secured ranks in top 50.

Suspicions about malpractice arose as seven of the toppers were from Guntur while their performances in PG entrance exams in other States were poor.

Special Correspondent from Vijayawada reports: Health university Registrar S. Babulal was questioned here by a three-member CID team from Hyderabad, in connection with question paper leak.

NONGTALANG, March 25, 2014

Meghalaya’s villagers cut down hills for mining

MAX BEARAK

Coal being mined from a hill in Khliehriat town in JaintiaHills district near Shillong.File photo: Ritu Raj Konwar

“Bomb, bomb, bomb!” shouted the miner, and his warning echoed off the walls of the decapitated hillock. Seconds later, an explosion sliced off yet another chunk of limestone, which crumbled into a pile somewhere near where the centre of the hill used to be.

The mines owner, Alldrina Nonglamin, 40, barely noticed the explosion. On that morning in early January, she wore her slippers and a sarong tied over her shoulder as she surveyed the pile of rock that had once underlaid her orange and betel nut garden, her former source of income.

Proudly showing off the mounds of ammonium nitrate she uses as an explosive, she said, I want to finish the hill quickly so I can level the land and build a big house. It might take 20 years, but maybe less also.

Ms Nonglamin is one of the many new mine owners in the Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya who were surprised to find out that the pile of rocks they were living on might as well be made of cash. In the last few years, her village, Nongtalang, like so many other communities across this hilly north-eastern State has become home to an increasing number of family-owned limestone mines, whose owners are seeking wealth unheard-of in a region accustomed to subsistence farming.

Nonglamin took loans of more than $150,000 to purchase mining equipment after seeing the profits her neighbours were unearthing. In just one year, she has paid back more than half of the initial loan.

“My earnings are now 100 times better, and the loans are easily paid,” she said. “My kids go to private school in the city. I’m a businesswoman with more than 100 employees, while earlier I was a farmer and sometimes a tailor.”

With so many villagers rushing to mine the hills, small-scale miners are now extracting more rock per year altogether than huge multinational corporations would in a smaller network of bigger mines, environmental activists say.

Just under 1,000 trucks of the low-grade rock are exported from the small mines to Bangladesh daily. There the world’s largest cement manufacturer, the French company Lafarge, buys most of it, processes it, and churns out the fine cement powder that is ultimately transformed into the building blocks of that country’s infrastructural development.

Very few in this village of 2,000 resist the lure of mining in these hills, but those who do say runoff from the mines often goes straight into rivers that provide drinking water. The Rev. Helpme Mohrmen, a local Unitarian minister who has organised poorly attended local protests and travelled to Delhi to speak to distant advocacy groups, refers to himself as the Lone Ranger.

“Our people have always had a deep reverence for nature,” Mohrmen said. “We give our rivers personalities. We call the animals our brothers and sisters. Each plant carries some meaning. I cannot understand why we have gone about killing our rivers for this mining, but now no one will join me because they don’t want to fight against their clan members.”

Nongtalang is Mohrmens home village, but he can count his allies there on one hand. One is Brightstar Pohsnem, 26, an elementary school teacher and president of the year-old Nongtalang People’s Unity Movement, which has about a dozen members. They contend that the village can survive on farming alone and that the mines are not sustainable.

Workers in the mine can earn as much Rs. 3,000 a day. That is on a par with what they could earn on a market day selling oranges or betel nuts if they are lucky, but markets are held only once a week and only during the harvest period. — New York Times News Service

NEW DELHI, March 25, 2014

String-theorist wins G.D. Birla Award

STAFF REPORTER

Rajesh Gopakumar

Leading string-theorist Professor Rajesh Gopakumar of the Department of Physics, Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI), Allahabad, has won the 23rd G.D. Birla Award forScientific Research for 2013.

Instituted in 1991 by the K.K. Birla Foundation to recognise high-calibre scientific research by Indian scientists living and working in India who are under 50, the award has a cash component of Rs.1.5 lakh.

Professor Gopakumar (46) is a theoretical physicist who graduated from IIT, Kanpur, before undertaking doctoral work at Princeton University.

He took his Ph.D. in 1997 and, after being aresearch associate at Harvard University, joined HRI in 2001. A media release issued by the K.K. Birla Foundation noted that Professor Gopakumar has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of string theory, quantum field theory and mathematics.

In 2004, he started a programme to understand how open closed string duality is implemented in an arbitrary large N guage theory.

He is the recipient of the 2004 B.M. Birla Science Prize; the 2006 ICTP Prize awarded by the Abdus Salam centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste; the 2006 Swarnajayanthi Fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology; the S.S. Bhatnagar Award in 2009; and the TWAS award in Physical Sciences, 2013.

He was elected a member of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2009 and the Indian National Science Academy in 2010.

LONDON, March 25, 2014

Royal Mail issues stamp on Noor Inayat Khan

PARVATHI MENON

Britain's Princess Anne looks at a sculpture of Noor Inayat Khan after an unveiling ceremony in London on November 8, 2012.— File photo: AFP

Britain’s Royal Mail has issued a postage stampof Noor Inayat Khan, World War II heroine, who fought fascism and died in the Dachau concentration camp.

The stamp — part of a set of 10 stamps in the ‘Remarkable Lives’ series — honours Noor on her centenary year. Other honoured in the set include actor Sir Alec Guinness and poet Dylan Thomas.

“I am that Royal Mail has commemorated Noor with a stamp,” said Shrabani Basu, author of Spy Princess, The Life of Noor Inayat Khan , and the Chair of the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust. “It will ensure that her sacrifice and bravery will not be forgotten.”

Ms Basu campaigned for a memorial for Noor which was unveiled in November 2012 by Princess Anne.

Noor Inayat Khan was born in Moscow in January 1914 to an Indian father, Hazrat Inayat Khan and an American mother, Ora Ray Baker. The couple had met in the Ramkrishna Mission ashram in America. Hazrat Inayat Khan was a Sufi preacher and musician, and travelled the world taking Sufism to the West.

Noor was brought up in Paris and the family moved to London when Paris was occupied by the Germans in 1940 during WW II. Noor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and was later recruited for the Special Operations Executive, a secret organisation started by Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

She was the first woman radio operator to be flown undercover to Paris. She worked from there for three months under the code name Madeleine. However she was betrayed, arrested and finally executed in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Though she was tortured and interrogated, she revealed nothing, not even her real name. Her last word as they shot her was “Liberte”! She was only 30.

Noor was awarded the highest honour, the George Cross, by Britain. France awarded her the Croix de Guerre .

In 2006, President Pranab Mukherjee, then the Defence Minister, paid an official visit to Noor’s family house outside Paris and described her bravery and sacrifice as “inspirational”.

The woman of Indian origin worked for a secret organisation started by Winston Churchill

NEW DELHI AND CHENNAI, March 25, 2014

Global jihadism rising on fringes of Indian Islamist movement

PRAVEEN SWAMI AND

“I take pride,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a June 2005 interview, “in the fact that, although we have 150 million Muslims in our country as citizens, not one has been found to have joined the ranks of al-Qaeda or participated in the activities of [the] Taliban.”

Nine years on, there is growing doubt over that claim: the Internet is bringing the global jihad home for a new generation of educated radical Islamists in India.

The revelations in The Hindu of a Singapore-based jihad cell that recruited Chennai college students to serve with Islamists fighting president Bashar al-Asad’s regime in Syria are just the latest in a long series of incidents which show that Indian jihadists are making common cause with transnational groups.

In 2007, Bangalore-origin, London-based Kafeel Ahmad, a post-doctoral scientist, was killed when he crashed a jeep fitted with improvised explosive devices into the Glasgow airport, in the first suicide attack by an Indian national overseas. That summer, north Kashmir resident Aijaz Ahmad Malla was reported killed fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“This case could add a completely new dimension to the terrorist threat to India,” said Ajai Sahni, at New Delhi’s Institute for Conflict Management. “Trained by jihadists overseas, and able to access their resources, these new recruits could prove the core of a more lethal outfit than any we’ve seen so far.”

Earlier this year, National Investigation Agency prosecutors filed evidence that Indian Mujahideen commander Riyaz Ahmad Shahbandri had been in touch with al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists in Afghanistan, seeking support for the organisation’s campaign against India.

For India’s government, one particular concern is that many of these recruits are highly educated and economically successful. No one knows precisely what drove Kafeel Ahmed on his journey from being a studious, upper-middle-class Bangalore undergraduate to suicide bomber. He is known, however, to have abandoned the conservative but non-violent religious traditions of his parents in his early 20s, turning instead to a nee-fundamentalist order

Tamil Nadu cases

Tamil Nadu, interestingly, has had at least one past case involving transnational linkages. In 2011, a Madurai engineering graduate was detained at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, soon after returning to the country from Algeria. French authorities

suspected the man, married to a French national, had raised funds for jihadist groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“We are not aware whether charges were pressed against the suspect,” a police official familiar with the case said. “His family in Madurai claimed that he was innocent and got married against their advice. He did not meet his family after 2010.”

The most famous case of an Indian jihadist overseas, though, is of Muhammad Abdul Aziz, a one-time Hyderabad electrician who fought in Grozny in 1996, under the command of Saudi Arabia jihadist Samir Saleh Abdullah al-Suwailem. He also took part in combat against Serbian forces at Zentica in 1994, hoping to learn skills he could use at home.

Mr. Aziz later told Hyderabad police investigators that he had been radicalised by the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 — and hoped for revenge.

“The last few years,” said Dr. Sahni “have seen several political developments which have stoked fears among Muslims. There are those who have tried to capitalise on these fears, and the Chennai jihad case shows these elements are having some success on the extreme fringes of Muslim political opinion.”

Many of the Indian recruits are highly educated and economically successful

BUSINESS

MUMBAI, March 25, 2014

Bank of India launches instant money transfer scheme

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Withdrawal limit prescribed at Rs.25,000 a month

V. R. Iyer (right), Chairman & Managing Director, Bank of India, and Vaijayanta Anand, Director of Nirman NGO, at the launch of instant money transfer in Mumbai on Monday.— PHOTO: SHASHI ASHIWAL

Bank of India, on Monday, launched IMT (Instant Money Transfer), which allows cardless cash withdrawal at its IMT-enabled ATMs, a first-of-its-kind initiative by any

public sector bank. IMT is an innovative domestic money remittance facility that allows the customer to send money to a receiver only by using the receiver’s mobile number through the bank’s ATM and retail internet banking facility. The receiver can withdraw money from a Bank of India’s ATM without using a card.

The receiver receives partial details for cash withdrawal on his/ her mobile phone and partial details by customer.

“We see this IMT facility as an opportunity to extend the services across bank’s branches, so that the IMT sent from the account-holder of one bank, can be withdrawn from other bank ATM,” V. R. Iyer, Chairman and Managing Director, Bank of India, said.

The facility can be initiated by the bank’s customer over bank’s ATM and retail Internet banking.

The sender initiates IMT by providing receiver’s mobile number, four digits sender code, the IMT amount and authorises the transaction from either bank’s ATM or bank’s internet banking.

The sender provides receiver’s name, address and mobile number to the bank either on SMS or Internet banking. The receiver receives the notification of IMT on his mobile phone, along with a four-digit SMS Pin.

The sender separately communicates the four-digit sender code to the receiver.

Then the receiver, after getting these two pieces of information - one from the sender and the other on SMS, walks into the bank’s nearest IMT-enabled ATM and withdraws cash by punching in the mobile number, sender code, and SMS Pin.

According to Regulatory Guidelines, the monthly withdrawal limit prescribed for IMT transaction is Rs.25,000 for receiver, and per transaction limit of Rs.10,000.

IMT, once issued, is valid for 14 days, post which it expires, and the sender is credited back with the IMT amount. IMT, once issued, can also be cancelled by the sender before its expiry and withdrawal.

SPORT VISAKHAPATNAM, March 25, 2014

North Zone storms into Deodhar Trophy final

A. JOSEPH ANTONY

GREAT KNOCK:Rajat Paliwal's unbeaten 107, and his big stand with Gurkeerat Singh, helped North put up a winning total.— Photo: K.R. Deepak

South surrendered meekly to North Zone in the first semifinal of the Deodhar Trophy at the Dr. Y.S.R. Stadium here on Monday.

Karun Nair’s valiant resistance (51, 57b, 5x4, 2x6), coming a little late in the day, could only delay the inevitable as a pursuit of 265 turned a distant dream and South stuttered to defeat, 100 runs short of target.

North skipper Harbhajan Singh attributed the victory to fine displays by Rajat Paliwal and Gurkeerat Singh. “The ball was doing quite a bit and we bowled well by landing it in the right areas,” the offie said.

Sound start

South was off to a sound start, openers Robin Uthappa and Baba Aparajith dominating the bowling with a fair measure of comfort. Uthappa played the senior pro, while Aparajith squared up to the challenge well.

For all the flair with which his nine boundaries were struck, quite a few trimmers from Ishant Sharma and Ashish Nehra whizzed past the Karnataka swashbuckler’s blade or stumps. The openers were separated at the same score of 72 with Aparajith’s prod picked up by his under-19 World Cup teammate Prashant Chopra at short mid-wicket and Uthappa’s drive ballooning to Gurkeerat at long off. A rush of rash strokes then ripped apart South’s famed batting line-up as it stumbled to 110 for seven.

Paliwal hits century

Earlier, Rajat Paliwal’s unconquered century (107, 113b, 8x4, 2x6), recorded in the last over of the innings, was bolstered by Gurkeerat’s 77. Their 151-run partnership for the fifth wicket helped North recoup from 63 for four, following a near complete top order collapse but for Prashant Chopra’s 34.

Invited to bat, North shook off the stranglehold clamped by South’s seamers over more than half the innings through the highly productive fifth wicket partnership.

The more destructive of the pair was Gurkeerat, whose knock had half a dozen hits to and four over the ropes with the spinners mostly coming in for some harsh treatment. The duo took the game away with some lusty hitting, that Paliwal continued even after Gurkeerat’s exit, trapped in front by Vinay Kumar.

The scores:

North Zone: Prashant Chopra lbw b Aparajith 34, Gautam Gambhir c Ojha b Vinay 2, Nitin Saini c Sanju Viswanadh b Vinay 16, Mandeep Singh run out 0, Rajat Paliwal (not out) 107, Gurkeerat Singh lbw b Vinay 77, Parvez Rasool c Vinay b Mithun 8, Harbhajan Singh c Vinay b Ojha 7, Rishi Dhawan (not out) 4; Extras (b-4, nb-1, w-5): 10; Total (for seven wkts. in 50 overs): 265.

Fall of wickets: 1-9, 2-35, 3-40, 4-63, 5-214, 6-243, 7-252.

South bowling: Vinay Kumar 10-0-57-3, Abhimanyu Mithun 10-1-37-1, Yo Mahesh 9-1-36-0, Robin Uthappa 1-0-6-0, Pragyan Ojha 12-0-75-1, Baba Aparajith 5-0-34-1, Karun Nair 1-0-3-0, Manish Pandey 2-0-13-0.

South Zone: Robin Uthappa c Gurkeerat b Dhawan 47, Baba Aparajith c Prashant b Ishant 21, K.L. Rahul c Saini b Dhawan 3, Dinesh Karthik c Prashant b Rasool 10, Manish Pandey c Mandeep b Harbhajan 7, Karun Nair (not out) 51, Sanju Viswanadh c Prashant b Harbhajan 0, R. Vinay Kumar c Harbhajan b Rasool 3, Abhimanyu Mithun c Gurkeerat b Harbhajan 4, Yo Mahesh c Saini b Nehra 7, Pragyan Ojha c Nehra b Rasool 0; Extras (b-4, w-8): 12; Total: (in 36.3 overs): 165.

Fall of wickets: 1-72, 2-72, 3-78, 4-89, 5-106, 6-107, 7-110, 8-121, 9-148.

North bowling: Ashish Nehra 7-0-24-1, Rishi Dhawan 9-1-47-2, Ishant Sharma 6-1-40-1, Harbhajan Singh 10-0-35-3, Parvez Rasool 4.3-1-15-3.

INTERNATIONAL

MOSCOW, March 25, 2014

Ukraine orders pullout of troops from Crimea

VLADIMIR RADYUHIN

Pro-Russian forces seize marine base

LAST BASTION FALLS:Troops of Ukraine’s only marine battalion leave their military unit for home in the eastern Crimea’s port city of Feodosiya on Monday.— Photo: AFP

Ukraine has ordered the withdrawal of its armed forces from Crimea in what amounts to a de facto recognition of losing the region to Russia.

Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov told the Parliament on Monday that the Ukrainian troops and their families would be evacuated from Crimea in the face of “threats to the lives and health of our service personnel.”

The decision to pull out the remaining troops from Crimea came shortly after pro-Russian forces earlier in the day took over a Ukrainian marine base in the port city of Feodosia, about the last symbol of Ukraine’s military presence in the peninsula.

Crimean authorities said there were no Ukrainian forces left in Crimea.

“All Ukrainian servicemen have either sworn allegiance to Russia or are leaving the territory of Crimea,” Deputy Prime Minister Rustam Temirgaliyev told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti on Monday.

Ukrainian troops had been left in limbo in Crimea without any orders from Kiev after pro-Russian forces took control of the region four weeks ago.

The Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday that the Russian flag had been raised over 189 Ukrainian military facilities in Crimea.

Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Crimea to inspect the Russian naval base in Sevastopol and to meet with the Ukrainian military.

He was quoted as telling Ukrainian servicemen that those of them who wished to serve in the Russian armed forces wound get the same pay and benefits as Russian military.

Meanwhile, Western leaders led by U.S. President Barack Obama gathered in The Hague on Monday to discuss the crisis in Ukraine.

“We’re united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions so far,” Mr. Obama said on arrival in the Netherlands.

The leaders of the Group of Seven were scheduled to debate excluding Russia from the Group of Eight and slapping other sanctions against it at a meeting on the sidelines of a nuclear summit in The Hague.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has chosen not to attend the summit sending instead his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

With many European leaders resisting economic sanctions that could boomerang against their economies, the U.S. appears to be climbing down on its calls for harsher penalties.

In an interview to a Dutch newspaper on Monday, Mr. Obama said the West would go for more biting sanctions “if Russia continues to escalate the situation,” that is, extends its intervention beyond Crimea.

Ahead of his meeting in The Hague with Mr. Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry expressed the hope that Russia would continue to cooperate in securing the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons.

“All I can say is I hope the same motivations that drove Russia to be a partner in this effort will still exist,” Mr. Kerry said.

Reuters quoted U.S. officials as saying that any further sanctions against Russia “will need to be carefully calibrated to avoid bans on entire sectors, like oil or metals, that could reverberate through the global economy.”

The U.S. and its European allies have so far imposed a visa ban and assets freeze on a select group of Russian officials and Kremlin-linked businessmen, apart from cancelling a G8 summit in Sochi and suspending military ties and some political talks.

Russia has responded with its own blacklist of several U.S. officials.

BEIJING, March 25, 2014

China demands explanation

ANANTH KRISHNAN

China on Monday said it was “greatly concerned” by reports alleging that a special unit of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had hacked into the network and systems of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, as well as into commercial products sold by the company to third parties. The government asked the U.S. to “explain itself and stop such acts,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hong Lei told reporters here.

The reports said the NSA, which had also mounted an “intelligence offensive” targeting Chinese leaders including former President Hu Jintao, had copied a list of 1,400 customers of Huawei as well as internal documents. “If the actions in the report are true, Huawei condemns such activities that invaded and infiltrated into our internal corporate network and monitored our communications,” Huawei’s Vice-President for International Affairs Roland Sladek said in a statement. Huawei’s ties to the Chinese government have long been a source of debate and concern to officials in countries ranging from the U.S. and India to Australia.

Shen Yi, associate professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the U.S. had “long considered Huawei as a security threat for fear that the ‘backdoors’ of its products would make the country as a target of cyber attacks.”

But the new revelations, he told the Global Times newspaper, had proven that the U.S. also posed a “threat to others’ security.”

“New revelations prove that the U.S. also posed a threat to others’ security”

RIYADH, March 25, 2014

Muslims should boycott Islamic cartoon: Saudi

Saudi Arabia’s top clerics have declared an Islam-inspired cartoon series a “work of the devil” that Muslims should not watch.

The television version of superhero comic book The 99 is being aired by Saudi-owned satellite channelMBC3, based in Dubai in the neighbouring United Arab Emirates.

But in a religious decree carried by Saudi websites on Monday, the clerics ruled the series blasphemous because the superheroes of its title are based on the 99 attributes ascribed to Allah in the Koran.

The original comic strip version, first released in 2006, had already ran into opposition from Muslim hardliners. They won praise, however, not only from Mr. Obama but also

from Kuwait’s Emir, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, for their message of moderation and cultural dialogue.

— AFP

THE TIMES OF INDIA

Japan to offer $1.5 billion aid to Ukraine AFP | Mar 25, 2014, 09.16 AM IST

The gathering came as Ukraine ordered its outnumbered troops to withdraw from Crimea as yet another of its

bases was stormed.

TOKYO: Japan is to give up to $1.5 billion infinancial aid to Ukraine, the government in

Tokyo confirmed Tuesday, as the club of rich nations booted Russia off the membership list. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced the figure as he and fellow world leaders, including US President Barack Obama, cancelled an upcoming G8 meeting in Sochi, and said it would be replaced by a G7 event that did not involve Moscow. Chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters in Tokyo that Kiev needed help at a time of huge strain on the country's finances. "It is extremely important that each country in the international community gives support so that Ukraine, facing a severe economic situation amid political confusion, will be able to restore economic stability," he said. "Against that background, the prime minister announced that Japan will provide economic assistance of up to 150 billion yen ($1.5 billion) on condition that the Ukraine government will reach an agreement with the (International Monetary Fund) on

economic reforms.

"Of the sum, 110 billion yen will be (low-interest) yen loans." At the meeting in The Hague, the G7 also threatened tougher sanctions against Russia for its absorption of Crimea, which has plunged relations between the West and Moscow to their lowest point since the Cold War. The gathering came as Ukraine ordered its outnumbered troops to withdraw from Crimea as yet another of its bases was stormed. Earlier, the White House had said it was "very concerned" by a build-up of Russian troops on the border. Tokyo has fallen into line with Washington and its allies in tightening the screws on Moscow, despite the differing strategic priorities for a nation entirely dependent on imports for its energy, with Russia a key global supplier of gas. Abe has held multiple summits with Russian President Vladimir Putin since coming to office in late 2012 and was one of the few pro-Western leaders who attended the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Others stayed away to register disquiet over Moscow's anti-gay laws. The Japanese leader has been pushing to expand the two countries' economic ties and resolve a decades-old territorial conflict at a time that Tokyo is embroiled in separate disputes with China and South Korea.

However, isolating Putin over Crimea threatens to derail progress towards resolving the issue, which has prevented Tokyo and Moscow signing a formal treaty ending World War II hostilities.

EDITORIAL

March 25, 2014 Updated: March 25, 2014 01:02 IST

Gayoom comes back, in style

Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who ruled the Maldives with an iron hand for three decades before giving way to more democratic forces, is back. The party he founded, the Progressive Party of Maldives, has emerged as the single largest party in a surprisingly trouble-free parliamentary election in the Maldives on March 22. More important, the PPM and its allies have won a nearly two-thirds majority in the 85-member People’s Majlis, the Maldives’ Parliament. The PPM on its own has 34 seats; the Jumhooree Party, run by a business tycoon, won 15 seats, and the Maldives Development Alliance managed five. The MaldivianDemocratic Party, whose nominee, Mohamed Nasheed, was elected President in the first multi-party elections in 2008, lost its numbers in Parliament, winning just 24 seats. Islamists have got representation in the Majlis with the Aadalath Party’s lone success. The elections were held even as the head and deputy of the country’s Elections Commission (EC) were removed by the Supreme Court. Ahead of the polls, there were widespread complaints of distribution of money and goods. With no firm law in place, and being virtually headless, the EC looked the other way, and went ahead with the polls. Transparency Maldives, which monitored the polls, said the process was well administered and transparent but that wider issues of money politics threaten the democratic process. This result leaves the PPM now at the helm in both the legislature and the executive, and with Gayoom-era judges heading the Supreme Court, democracy in the Maldives has come full circle. For Mr. Gayoom’s half-brother, Abdulla Yameen, who won the presidency in the 2013 elections, the victory means freedom to put his agenda into action. During his campaign, Mr. Yameen, an economist, had asserted that turning the country around would be his first task. Ever since February 2012, after Mr. Nasheed stepped down in controversial circumstances, the Maldives has slipped from one crisis to another. The economy has hit the lowest level in decades, and many multinationals insist on payment in U.S. dollars for any transaction. Mr. Yameen presides over a mammoth government: the number of Ministers in the Maldives is only marginally less than in Sri Lanka — which has the largest number of Ministers in this region. Public confidence in institutions and government is at an all-time low. Also, though Mr. Yameen made his first foreign visit to India, there is a discernible confidence gap between the two countries. India is critical to sustaining the Maldivian economy and Mr. Yameen is aware of this. In addition to managing relations with India, he needs to carry all sections with him and work to improve governance.