Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

September 23, 2012, 1:05 am

By SRUTHI GOTTIPATI

Tehelka's cover story this week, “The Invisible Dead,” is about malaria, which the magazine calls Chhattisgarh's silent killer. Officially, the story says, there have been no malaria deaths in the state this year; investigating such claims, the writers found what they call “a snare of lies and Stalinist statistics.”

“Falciparum malaria is known all over the world to kill between 1-3 percent of its patients,” the story says. “Perplexingly, Chhattisgarh's reports seem to defy all medical odds.'' Data sent to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in New Delhi for 2007 indicated a death rate of 0.00002 percent in the state, according to the magazine, which estimates that Chhattisgarh's true annual toll is in the thousands.

“Malaria is not just a seasonal predicament in Chhattisgarh,” the story says. “It is its secret epidemic, and kills many more people than the Maoist insurgency. Deliberately or otherwise, everybody is blind to it.”

In June, Tehelka lost a photographer, Tarun Sehrawat, to the deadly disease that he contacted during an assignment in the forest-dense state of Chhattisgarh.

Open magazine has a special film issue this week. Featured subjects include what Bollywood stars' Twitter feeds reveal about them, as well as “the hottest rain song ever” - it's Raveena Tandon's yellow-sari-drenched number in “Mohra,” if you were wondering. There's also a piece entitled “Tragic Heroes” about the relatively anonymous lives of Bollywood lookalikes. “In Hindi cinema, the job of a lookalike is not just to look like the original, but to do â€" in film parlance â€" the ‘undoable,' ” the ar ticle says. A Shah Rukh Khan lookalike was asked to get drenched in paint for a commercial because the star himself had refused, according to the story. (Only in print for now).

Facebook Invitation Draws Thousands, and a Melee, to Dutch Town

September 22, 2012, 12:47 pm

By CARA BUCKLEY

A sleepy Dutch community was still recovering on Saturday from the aftermath of a sweet sixteen party whose invitation, for no clear reason, went viral, spawning a YouTube video, drawing impromptu partygoers by the thousands as well as riot police, and causing the young celebrant and her family to flee town.

Fires were set, a car was burned, shops were vandalized, six people were hurt and some 34 arrested, according to the BBC and the Netherlands Broadcasting Foundation.

“She posted the invitation on Facebook and sent it to friends, who then sent it to other friends and soon it spread like wildfire across the Internet,” a spokeswoman for the Groningen police, Melanie Zwama, told Agence France Presse, according to the BBC.

Haren, a town of 19,000 about 110 miles northeast of Amsterdam, had been girding for trouble all week after the youngster's Facebook party invitation, which had not been set to be private, ended up going out to a reported 30,000 people. Popular deejays endorsed the event, a Twitter account was born, and T-shirts were printed, sold and sported by some who descended on the town.

“Scum ran amok in our town,” said the town's mayor, Rob Bats, according to Britain's Channel 4.

A week and a half ago, a video posted on YouTube christened the event Project X Haren, an apparent reference to the film Project X, where three high schoolers' party gets madly out of control. Although the event was cancelled and officials pleaded for revelers not to come, some 3,000 did anyway, according to the BBC.

By Saturday, another Facebook page went up, Project Clean-X Haren, that by mid-afternoon had garner ed nearly 27,000 likes.

Other Project X parties emulating the film were thrown earlier this year in Houston, where one reveler was fatally shot, and in Miramar, Fla., where youngsters broke into a foreclosed come and caused $19,000 in damage, according to ABC News.

  A video on YouTube is said to show riot police trying to contain partygoers in Haren, The Netherlands.

Newswallah: Bharat Edition

September 22, 2012, 7:09 am

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Punjab: Gulzar Singh Ranike, a minister in the Punjab state government, resigned on Sunday in the wake of allegations that he misappropriated public funds, The Times of India reported. Mr. Ranike and an associate were accused of transferring 25 million rupees, about $ 460,000, from funds intended for a border area development program.

Uttarakhand: The death toll from landslides in Rudraprayag district  last week rose to 50 on Tuesday, according to an ANI report. Five villages were affected; 20 people were reported missing and 500 were said to be homeless.

Assam: Since India gained its independence, the country's chief mapping agency, the Survey of India, has never published a map of Assam,   The Assam Tribune reported, citing a reply to a Right to Information Act request.  An  agency official said a combined map of Assam  with the other northeastern states Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Tripura, Meghalaya and Mizoram is available, dating from 1984.

Uttar Pradesh: Heavy rainfall has claimed the lives of 18 people in separate incidents across the state this week, according to a Press Trust of India report on the NDTV Web site.

Gujarat: In Surat, an attempt to create a “communally harmonious” Ganesh idol for the festival of Ganesh Chaturthi, which celebrates the Hindu god's birthday, went awry, The Indian Express reported. Hindu activists objected to the statue of the Virgin Mary  holding an infant Ganesh as well as a cross.  The cross was replaced with an Indian flag; the statue now “looks like Mother India with Lord Ganesha in her arms,” an activist told the newspaper.

Maharashtra: Farmers are benefiting from the India Meteorological Department's text messaging service, The Daily Bhaskar reported. The system sends them agricultural advisories based on weather forecasts; more than 400,000 farmers in Maharashtra  are registered, the report said.

Karnataka: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday directed Karnataka to release 9,000 cubic feet per second of water  from the Cauvery River to Tamil Nadu at the border every day from Sept. 21 to Oct. 15. Both states found the ruling “unacceptable,'' The Hindu reported.

India\'s Premier Pleads for Support of His Plans in Televised Address

NEW DELHI - Prime Minister made a rare nationwide televised appeal on Friday night to defend a series of unpopular measures, intended to revive the floundering Indian economy, that have stirred mass protests across the country and almost toppled his coalition government.

Mr. Singh's speech came on a day of intense political jockeying, as the governing coalition lost the support of a crucial regional ally yet managed to stay in power, for the moment, by securing support from two other nonaligned regional parties.

“The time has come for hard decisions,” Mr. Singh said, in an apparently prerecorded address that was broadcast across the country in prime time. “For this I need your trust, your understanding and your cooperation.”

The political storm erupted last week after Mr. Singh's government announced a series of economic moves, including an increase in the price of diesel fuel, a cap on the subsidy for cooking gas and measures that would allow for greater foreign investment in civil aviation and retail, opening the door for big, multibrand retailers like Walmart.

Business leaders and many economists praised the moves as critical for containing 's fiscal deficit and attracting foreign investment, but rival political leaders pounced, as did some political allies of the government, saying the measures threatened the livelihoods of small shop owners and common people. Thousands demonstrated on Thursday in several Indian cities in coordinated protests organized by several parties.

On Friday, Mr. Singh urged people to “not be misled,” framed the moves as essential, if tough, and said they would begin to restore economic growth and help prevent India from falling into the same economic malaise that Europe is in. Economic growth, which topped 8 percent in 2011, is now projected to be as low as 5.4 percent in the current fiscal year. “We are at a point where we can reverse the slowdown in our growth,” he said. “We need a revival in investor confidence domestically and globally.”

Hours earlier, Mamata Banerjee, the populist chief minister of the state of West Bengal and once the most crucial regional ally in the governing coalition, formally withdrew her party's support. On Friday afternoon, with television crews beaming live reports across the nation, Ms. Banerjee's cabinet ministers submitted their resignations to protest the new economic measures.

The departure of Ms. Banerjee's 19-member parliamentary delegation means that the governing coalition, led by the Indian National Congress Party, has lost its parliamentary majority. However, the coalition will survive, for now, courtesy of support by a two nonaligned regional parties, which extended lukewarm endorsements on Friday.

“Our support is clear,” said Mulayam Singh Yadav, a regional leader who told the Indian news media that he would support the government, though not join it.

Friday's machinations dispelled, for the moment, the possibility of the government collapsing or of elections, now scheduled for 2014, being called early. But the Congress Party now faces a complicated governing situation, in which it will need to massage and maneuver around regional leaders like Mr. Yadav, as well as his rival, Mayawati, another powerful figure who is supporting the government and uses only one name.

“We have another 18 months to go for the next elections,” said Digvijaya Singh, a general secretary in the Congress Party. “We've got sufficient numbers to carry us through.”

The prime minister's appeal to the nation amounted to an effort to reboot his much-maligned government. For roughly two years, the Congress Party has been mired in corruption scandals and widely criticized for arrogance and ineffectiveness, while also overseeing a rapidly declining economy.

Mr. Singh, considered the father of India's first era of economic overhaul in the 1990s, has been accused of failing to lead or to articulate a clear vision for the government. On Friday, Mr. Singh argued that rising global oil prices meant that the government had to reduce popular subsidies on diesel and cooking gas or risk a rapidly higher fiscal deficit.

“Where would the money for this have come from?” Mr. Singh asked. “Money does not grow on trees.”

Mr. Singh did not mention the weeklong political controversies or the loss of support from Ms. Banerjee. Some analysts predicted that her departure could free the government to push ahead with other economic measures. Palaniappan Chidambaram, the country's recently appointed finance minister, has signaled that recently announced economic moves will come as soon as next week.

To some degree, Ms. Banerjee had held veto power over such initiatives because of her periodic threats to withdraw her party's support and bring down the government. Last year, she blocked a water treaty with Bangladesh - embarrassing the prime minister and Indian diplomats - and also forced Mr. Singh to reverse himself after his cabinet first approved the plan to open the door to retailers like Walmart.

“The government faces a stark choice - stand firmly behind the measures to promote India's long-term economic interests or back off the reforms in the interests of short-term political survival,” said Eswar Prasad, an economist and an adviser to the Indian government. “The outcome of this battle, and even the way it is fought and ultimately resolved, will reverberate in India's economic and political arenas for many years to come.”

When it became clear on Friday that the government was not bending this time, India's stock market recorded the biggest gain of the year.