Bengaluru, Jan. 31: Former Prime Minister and JD(S) supremo H.D. Deve Gowda is often referred to as the “Son of the Soil”. Quite literally. His love for land dates back to the 1960s when he pulled strings to acquire tens of acres of government land by claiming to be a landless farmer and later to transfer the grant land to his kith and kin. Documents made available to this newspaper reveal that Mr Gowda and his family are involved in over 20 such fraudulent transactions.

New Delhi, Jan. 31: A 25-year-old worker died at a Delhi Metro construction site in west Delhi when a steel barricade, which was being removed by a crane from the site, fell on him.

New Delhi, Jan. 31: The heirs of the late Gayatri Devi, former maharani of Jaipur, have approached the Delhi high court to get back 800 kg of gold seized by the government in 1975 after her husband, the late Maharaja Sawai Man Singh, failed to declare it to the income-tax authorities as stipulated by the Gold Control Act 1968.

Srinagar, Jan. 31: In the fourth such incident in the past fortnight, Kashmiri separatist militants gave the security forces the slip after engaging them in a fierce gunbattle in the northwestern town of Sopore, 48 km from here, early on Sunday.

New Delhi, Jan. 31: Doctors at the All- India Institute of Medical Sciences said “everything is all right” with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after a routine medical checkup there Sunday.
A series of cardiovascular tests were conducted on the 77-year-old leader, as a followup to his coronary bypass surgery a year ago, and everything was found normal.
Dr Singh was back home by evening and will keep his normal schedule on Monday.

Age Correspondent

In this video grab provided by APTN, a Russian-made Sukhoi T-50 prototype fifth-generation stealth fighter is seen during a test flight near the Siberian city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia, on Friday. Russia’s new fighter made a successful maiden test flight on Friday. Under an agreement signed in October 2007, India has also joined the FGFA project by taking a 50 per cent stake. For the IAF, a lighter, two-seater version is to be developed. PHOTO: AP

Coast Guard personnel demonstrate their skills during “Coast Guard Week” celebrations off the Chennai coast on Friday.  PHOTO: PTI

Mumbai, Jan. 29: The Reserve Bank of India on Friday surprised all financial pundits and the stock market by hiking the cash reserve ratio (CRR) from 5 to 5.75 per cent of their total deposits. This will pull Rs 36,000 crores cash out of the banking system in two stages from February 13. The repo (the rates at which banks borrow from the RBI) and the reverse repo rates (the rate that RBI pays for money taken from the banks) have been left unchanged so that the growth process is not disturbed.

New Delhi, Jan. 29: A day after Union home minister P. Chidambaram said a mechanism to look into the Telangana issue will be announced next week, speculation was rife in political circles that Justice B.N. Srikrishna (Retd) could head the committee.
However, AICC sources said no names have been finalised and a decision in the matter is likely in a couple of days. Congress sources said this committee is likely to comprise three to five persons.

New Delhi, Jan. 29: An unidentified person opened fire just a few hundred metres from the Prime Minister’s residence early on Thursday and managed to flee despite the heavy security in the national capital due to Republic Day celebrations, according to a complaint filed with the police by the chief of security of a major Delhi hotel.