New Delhi: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar on Friday held wide-ranging talks with his South Korean counterpart Park Jin to take forward the special strategic partnership between the two countries, especially in areas of trade and defence.
The two foreign ministers also deliberated on the Ukraine conflict and the overall situation in the Indo-Pacific, a region that has witnessed growing Chinese military assertiveness.
Park is on a two-day visit to India.
On the bilateral side, the Jaishankar-Park talks covered cooperation in areas of trade and investments, defense, science and technology, energy, space, semiconductors, emerging technologies and cultural exchanges.
“I’m really very glad to have the opportunity to take forward our special strategic partnership. This is also the 50th anniversary of the establishment of our diplomatic relations,” Jaishankar said in his opening remarks at the meeting.
“And you come at a very good time, because our trade is very good, our political relations are very cooperative,” he said.
In his opening remarks, Park referred to the commonalities between the two sides and their commitment to the Indo-Pacific. “We are both exemplary democracies, vibrant economies and cultural powers and we are both committed to contributing to a free, open, peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region,” he said. “In this way, South Korea and India are natural partners and I have a strong belief that the special strategic partnership between our two countries is the strongest partnership in the Indo-Pacific region,” the South Korean foreign minister said.
Park also spoke about India’s “increasingly pivotal role” in the international stage and that the country is is set to further impact the world as the president of the G20.
“India has also demonstrated to the world its cultural prowess with the recent Oscar win, and I must say the ‘Naatu Naatu’ song and dance has captivated the world,” he added. In a Twitter post, Jaishankar described the talks as “warm and wide-ranging”.
“Noted steady progress in our ties. Discussed political contacts, trade & investments, defense, S&T, energy, space, semiconductors, emerging technologies and cultural exchanges,” he said.
“Also shared perspectives of our neighborhoods, our visions and policies in the Indo-Pacific and the Ukraine conflict. Agreed to cooperate closely on global and multilateral issues,” he said.
Before meeting Jaishankar, Park called on Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar.
On Saturday morning, Park will leave for Chennai.
“I know tomorrow you’re visiting the Hyundai plant in Chennai. So that itself, Hyundai in many ways is a symbol of the relationship that we have,” Jaishankar said in his opening remarks.
“We have also expanded our relationship today to cover the economic development cooperation fund; we are doing projects under that,” he said
Johannesburg: South Africa said Friday that the UAE has turned down its request to extradite two brothers from the wealthy Indian-origin Gupta family to face trial in the country on fraud and corruption charges.
The three Gupta brothers, Ajay, Atul and Rajesh, are wanted in South Africa for their alleged roles in the looting of billions of rands from state enterprises. They are alleged to have used their closeness to former president Jacob Zuma to do this.
The South African government last year submitted a formal extradition application to the United Arab Emirates for Rajesh Gupta and Atul Gupta.
The family fled to Dubai five years ago as the net closed in on them following Zuma’s ousting by his own African National Congress when he refused to step down.
Justice Minister Ronald Lamola says his government is “shocked and dismayed” after the UAE declined the request
Lamola said he only learnt about the decision after his office enquired with the local UAE embassy, which said that they had received a note verbale stating this.
“We learnt with shock and dismay that the extradition hearing had been concluded in the Dubai courts on February 13, 2023, and our extradition request was unsuccessful,” Lamola said.
“The reasons provided are of a technical nature, and fly in the face of (earlier) assurances given by the UAE authorities that our request meets their requirements,” he said.
Lamola said the decision would be appealed.
Legal experts however said such an appeal would be to no avail, as the Gupta brothers are believed to now be in Switzerland.
Originally from Saharanpur in India, the Guptas built an empire in the IT, media and mining industries after first arriving in the country to start a shoe shop soon after Nelson Mandela was released from 27 years as a political prisoner to become the first democratically-elected president.
“We have complied with every letter of the extradition treaty that we have between ourselves and the UAE authorities. To ensure this compliance, we have even allowed the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to go to the UAE for engagements with their counterparts before the papers were submitted,” Lamola said at a media briefing.
“The Central Authority in the UAE and the prosecution in the UAE confirmed that all our papers are in order. So from our side, we have complied and that is why we are bemused by this judgement that cites technicalities. We find it shocking,” he added.
Lamola said that even if there was a technical issue, the UAE should have sought clarity from South Africa in line with Article 17 of the UN Convention Against Corruption, which requires consultation with the applicant country before a decision is taken.
“We still intend to engage with our counterparts in the UAE to ensure that the decision of the court is promptly appealed, as well as to devise other mechanisms to deal with the matter. That discussion must also preserve the integrity of our bilateral relations,” Lamola said.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Jaipur: Service provided by Hindu spiritual gurus in the four southern states is much more than that done by missionaries, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said on Friday.
Addressing a Rashtriya Seva Sangam event of the RSS, he said, “Service leads to the formation of a healthy society. If any section of the society is deprived, it has to be lifted for the betterment of the country.”
“Generally, intellectuals of the country mention missionaries for their service. But, the service provided by Hindu spiritual gurus in four southern states is more than that done by missionaries,” Bhagwat said.
New Delhi: South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin will undertake a two-day visit to India from Friday with an aim to make “substantive progress” in the special strategic partnership between the two countries.
Jin is scheduled to hold wide-ranging talks with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar in Delhi on Friday evening.
The South Korean foreign minister is also scheduled to call on Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar.
On Saturday morning, he will leave for Chennai.
“The upcoming meeting is the first one between the two ministers as they mark the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Korea and India this year,” a South Korean foreign ministry spokesperson said.
“In the meeting, the two sides will discuss ways to make substantive progress in the Special Strategic Partnership between Korea and India, which is a key country in the region that shares values with Korea,” the official said.
The two sides are expected to review the overall situation in the Indo-Pacific.
Mumbai: Film actor Samantha Ruth Prabhu has come down to Mumbai for the promotion of her upcoming film ‘Shaakuntalam’.
As the barrier between north and south films has been diminishing over the years, Samantha told ANI, “There’s no wall between North and South films now. I don’t want to engage in any debate over this. As an actor, it gives me immense pleasure that I can work in films across languages. Nowadays, audiences also watch movies from different languages.”
‘Shaakuntalam’ is based on a popular Indian play ‘Shakuntala’ by Kalidasa. Shakuntala was the wife of king Dushyant and the mother of emperor Bharata.
The Pan-India mythological romantic drama will be out in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada. Asked about the movie, Samantha said, “It’s a love story. And love is like a universe in itself. Our cultural heritage is rich. And the story of this film is inspired from one of our oldest classics. Apart from the story, the movie has high-level graphics and special effects.”
Dev Mohan has been paired opposite Samantha. Expressing her feeling, she said, “I am excited as well as a bit nervous. The budget of the film is quite high. But I feel, audience will love the movie.”
Samantha was recently seen in the sci-fi thriller film ‘Yashoda’ which received positive responses from the audience.
She will be next seen in an upcoming romantic film ‘Khusi’ opposite Vijay Deverakonda and in the action thriller web series ‘Citadel’ alongside Varun Dhawan.
Washington: The death count from devastating and destructive tornadoes that scrapped the American South and Midwest had risen to 32, while parts of the Southern Plains braced for the possibility of their own round of severe weather, according to CNN.
The storm, which broke into America’s houses, came on Friday and till now, had crushed homes and businesses, ripped roofs off buildings, splintered trees and sent vehicles flying.
In Wynne, Arkansas, where four people have been killed, was cleaved in half by one such tornado, leaving a line of destruction from the city’s western limit to its eastern, according to Mayor Jennifer Hobbs, who told CNN Sunday and added, “We’re just gonna need all the help that we can (get) to help these families recover”.
Deaths have been confirmed across a wide swath of states, with multiple victims reported in Arkansas, Indiana and Tennessee, where the statewide death toll rose to 15 Sunday, officials said.
Three of the deaths were in Memphis: Two children and one adult were found dead after police responded to calls about trees that had fallen on homes, the Memphis Police Department said in a news release.
After the report of various tornadoes in Arkansas, the governor declared a state of emergency Friday afternoon after officials said one person was killed in North Little Rock and two died in Wynne. A state of emergency was also declared in Missouri in response to severe weather, CNN reported.
On Friday night in northern Illinois, a person was killed and 28 others were hospitalized after the roof collapsed at a theatre in Belvidere with 260 people inside, told the fire chief, Shawn Schadle, reported New York Times.
Roughly 150 miles to the east of Sherman, in Sullivan Country, Ind., three people were also killed after a tornado touched down, according to Sgt. Matt Ames with the Indiana State Police.
In addition to Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana and Tennessee, tornadoes were reported to the National Weather Service across Wisconsin, Iowa and Mississippi. As the storm system moved eastward early Saturday, tornado warnings remained in place for parts of Alabama and Georgia, according to the National Weather Service.
An overnight tornado, which makes people most prone to extensive damages, levelled much of Rolling Fork, Mississippi, where estimated maximum winds of 170 mph roared.
President Biden on Friday visited Rolling Fork, the Mississippi community hit hardest by the tornadoes last week. Tornadoes killed 13 people and destroyed homes and businesses in Rolling Fork and in surrounding Sharkey County.
Residents of Wynne, a community of about 8,000 people 50 miles west of Memphis, Tennessee, woke Saturday to find the high school’s roof shredded and its windows blown out. Huge trees lay on the ground, their stumps reduced to nubs. Broken walls, windows and roofs pocked homes and businesses.
Debris lay scattered inside the shells of homes and on lawns: clothing, insulation, toys, splintered furniture, a pickup truck with its windows shattered.
Ashley Macmillan said she, her husband and their children huddled with their dogs in a small bathroom as a tornado passed, “praying and saying goodbye to each other, because we thought we were dead.” A falling tree seriously damaged their home, but they were unhurt.
“We could feel the house shaking, we could hear loud noises, dishes rattling. And then it just got calm,” she said.
Recovery was already underway, with workers using chainsaws and bulldozers to clear the area and utility crews restoring power.
Nine people died in Tennessee’s McNairy County, east of Memphis, according to Patrick Sheehan, director the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency.
“The majority of the damage has been done to homes and residential areas,” said David Leckner, the mayor of Adamsville.
Gov. Bill Lee drove to the county Saturday to tour the destruction and comfort residents. He said the storm capped the “worst” week of his time as governor, coming days after a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people including a family friend whose funeral he and his wife, Maria, attended earlier in the day.
“It’s terrible what has happened in this community, this county, this state,” Lee said. “But it looks like your community has done what Tennessean communities do, and that is rally and respond.”
Jeffrey Day said he called his daughter after seeing on the news that their community of Adamsville was being hit. Huddled in a closet with her 2-year-old son as the storm passed over, she answered the phone screaming.
“She kept asking me, ‘What do I do, daddy?’” Day said, tearing up. “I didn’t know what to say.”
After the storm passed, his daughter crawled out of her destroyed home and over barbed wire and drove to nearby family. On Saturday evening, baby clothes were still strewn about the site.
In Memphis, police spokesman Christopher Williams said via email late Saturday that there were three deaths believed to be weather-related: two children and an adult who died when a tree fell on a house.
Tennessee officials warned that the same weather conditions from Friday night are expected to return Tuesday.
In Belvidere, Illinois, part of the roof of the Apollo Theatre collapsed as about 260 people were attending a heavy metal concert. A 50-year-old man was pulled from the rubble.
“I sat with him and I held his hand and I was (telling him), ‘It’s going to be OK.’ I didn’t really know much else what to do,” concertgoer Gabrielle Lewellyn told WTVO-TV.
The man was dead by the time emergency workers arrived. Officials said 40 others were hurt, including two with life-threatening injuries.
Crews cleaned up around the Apollo on Saturday, with forklifts pulling away loose bricks. Business owners picked up glass shards and covered shattered windows.
In Crawford County, Illinois, three people were killed and eight injured when a tornado hit around New Hebron, said Bill Burke, the county board chair.
Sheriff Bill Rutan said 60 to 100 families were displaced.
“We’ve had emergency crews digging people out of their basements because the house is collapsed on top of them, but luckily they had that safe space to go to,” Rutan said at a news conference.
That tornado was not far from where three people died in Indiana’s Sullivan County, about 95 miles southwest of Indianapolis.
Sullivan Mayor Clint Lamb said at a news conference that an area south of the county seat of about 4,000 “is essentially unrecognizable right now” and several people were rescued overnight. There were reports of as many as 12 people injured, he said.
“I’m really, really shocked there isn’t more as far as human issues,” he said, adding that recovery “is going to be a very long process.”
In the Little Rock area, at least one person was killed and more than 50 were hurt, some critically.
The National Weather Service said that tornado was a high-end EF3 twister with wind speeds up to 165 mph and a path as long as 25 miles.
Masoud Shahed-Ghaznavi was lunching at home when it roared through his neighborhood, causing him to hide in the laundry room as sheetrock fell and windows shattered. When he emerged, the house was mostly rubble.
“Everything around me is sky,” Shahed-Ghaznavi recalled Saturday. He barely slept Friday night.
“When I closed my eyes, I couldn’t sleep, imagined I was here,” he said Saturday outside his home.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard. On Saturday, Sanders requested a major disaster declaration from President Joe Biden to support recovery efforts with federal resources.
Another suspected tornado killed a woman in northern Alabama’s Madison County, officials said, and in northern Mississippi’s Pontotoc County, authorities confirmed one death and four injuries.
Tornadoes also caused damage in eastern Iowa and broke windows northeast of Peoria, Illinois.
The storms struck just hours after Biden visited Rolling Fork, Mississippi, where tornadoes last week destroyed parts of town.
It could take days to determine the exact number of tornadoes from the latest event, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the Storm Prediction Center. There were also hundreds of reports of large hail and damaging winds, he said.
“That’s a quite active day,” he said. “But that’s not unprecedented.”
More than 530,000 homes and businesses were without power as of midday Saturday, over 200,000 of them in Ohio, according to PowerOutage.us.
The sprawling storm system also brought wildfires to the southern Plains, with authorities in Oklahoma reporting nearly 100 of them Friday. At least 32 people were said to be injured, and more than 40 homes destroyed.
The storms also caused blizzard conditions in the Upper Midwest.
A threat of tornadoes and hail remained for the Northeast including in parts of Pennsylvania and New York.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: Authorities conducted an “encroachment removal” action at the site of an old ‘dargah’ located beside a prominent street near the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin in south Delhi on Saturday amid heavy security deployment, police said.
The dargah of Syed Abdullah urf Bhure Shah, located on a plot near the Sabz Burj — a 16th-century double-domed Mughal-era monument, is “centuries-old” and the saint is revered by people from both Muslim and Hindu communities, said Yusuf Beg, caretaker of the dargah.
A posse of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed when the action was carried out by the authorities at the site facing the busy Zakir Husain Marg.
Beg said that they themselves removed the canopy and steel barriers placed next to the graves to prevent any damage.
“A drive to remove encroachment on the pavement was carried out by the PWD. Adequate security personnel deployment was made,” a senior police officer said.
As the dargah is located in the sensitive Nizamuddin area, paramilitary personnel were also on standby and one of them carried a tear gas shell box as well.
“We have been told to ensure law and order is maintained,” a paramilitary personnel on duty said.
The officials of the Delhi PWD could not be immediately reached for comments.
Beg and his son wept in a corner as a bulldozer removed the extracted canopy and later dug out the flooring made around the graves, which stand very close to the street.
“There are seven graves near the roadside, including that of Baba Bhure Shah and his kin. Now, the graves have all become exposed to the elements, they have ‘chadar’ over them, and in gusty wind or rain, the graves may get affected. There are a few graves on the inner side near a tree. Both Hinds and Muslims visit this dargah, and it is located near the famous Hazrat Nizamuddin dargah,” he told PTI.
The canopy carried ‘ayats’ (verses) from the holy Quran, the dargah caretaker said.
Asked what led to the action, Beg claimed that in February they were called by the district administration authorities and told about the plan to make the pavement free of any encroachment.
“These graves are a few centuries old, and we cannot move them. We do not have documentary evidence to prove its age, so action has been taken. We had already removed some of the steel grills and other structures recently, which were near the street. And, today also, we removed the canopy and steel barriers placed next to the graves ourselves. If it had been done by a bulldozer machine, it could have damaged the graves,” Beg said.
Asked about the structures that were removed by authorities during the action, he said, “A couple of rooms were demolished, and the flooring next to graves was dug up for the pavement.”
A pile of household items, an old clock, some important documents, grain bags, donation boxes, and grillwork objects lay deposited behind two small roofless rooms left as of now. Images of the holy sites of Mecca and Medina are painted on one of its walls.
Two men were seen offering the afternoon ‘namaz’ in one of the rooms as an old tree peeped from above. An ornate lamp removed from the now demolished room lay next to them.
Picking up and patting his pet cat that strolled nervously amid the pile of items, Beg said, “We call him ‘Sheru’, and he grew up amid us. He used to roam around beneath the canopy and often sat next to Baba’s grave.”
Several onlookers, including locals stood nearby, some on the road divider on the Zakir Husain Marg, as the bulldozers swung into action. The traffic was very momentarily halted on one side, near the street facing the Sabz Burj, during the course of the action.
Delhi High Court, in an order on March 14, 2022, observed that the government concerned was “duty bound” to remove all unauthorised constructions that might exist on public land.
SRINAGAR: The Muslims on Friday helped perform last rites of a Hindu who was on leave to attend first death anniversary of his brother killed by militants last year in Kakran area of south Kashmir’s Kulgam district.
Balbir Singh (55), son of Surinder Singh, who was working in Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) died last evening by cardiac arrest at his home in Karkan area of Kulgam.
He was posted at Amritsar but was on leave to attend death Anniversary of his brother who was killed by militants last year.
Balbir’s family is the only Hindu Rajput family living in the village, and today his friends and the neighbours from the Muslim community took it upon themselves to help perform the last rites.
They also shouldered his coffin and arranged wood for the cremation. “He was one of us. We never thought of him as a Rajput Hindu. We arranged everything needed for the cremation,” said Abdul Jabbar, a local resident.
Meanwhile, officials of Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) paid floral tributes to Balbir.
SRINAGAR: The Muslims on Friday helped perform last rites of a Hindu who was on leave to attend first death anniversary of his brother killed by militants last year in Kakran area of south Kashmir’s Kulgam district.
Balbir Singh (55), son of Surinder Singh, who was working in Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) died last evening by cardiac arrest at his home in Karkan area of Kulgam.
He was posted at Amritsar but was on leave to attend death Anniversary of his brother who was killed by militants last year.
Balbir’s family is the only Hindu Rajput family living in the village, and today his friends and the neighbours from the Muslim community took it upon themselves to help perform the last rites.
They also shouldered his coffin and arranged wood for the cremation. “He was one of us. We never thought of him as a Rajput Hindu. We arranged everything needed for the cremation,” said Abdul Jabbar, a local resident.
Meanwhile, officials of Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) paid floral tributes to Balbir.
