Blending diplomacy with sports, Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman presented a tennis racquet embossed with signatures of leading national players to his Indian counterpart S.M. Krishna, an ardent tennis fan. Presenting the racket to Mr Krishna at a joint press conference after wide-ranging talks here, Mr Lieberman, also Israel’s deputy prime minister, spoke in a lighter vein about Mr Krishna’s passion for tennis. Krishna was pleasantly surprised. He was also presented an intricately designed plaque that commemorates the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between India and Israel.
The 79-year-old Mr Krishna is known to play tennis whenever he can find time, specially when he is visiting Bengaluru, the IT hub whose transformation he presided over as the chief minister of Karnataka.
He is the life-long president of the All Indian Lawn Tennis Association and president of the Karnataka Tennis Association. Last year, Mr Krishna extended his stay in London to watch tennis at Wimbledon. Mr Krishna Monday began a two-day visit to Israel, the first by an Indian foreign minister to that country in the last 11 years.
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Bihar ngos under scanner
anand s.t. das
patna, JAN. 10
The role of NGOs working with the Bihar government’s health department to facilitate and promote family planning operations has come under the scanner following revelations that dozens of these surgeries in a rural area were conducted by quacks fraudulently and under life-threatening conditions.
The police in the poverty-stricken northern Araria and Purnea districts were on Tuesday looking for the directors of the NGO, Jai Ambe Welfare Society, which had organised a health camp in Araria where sterilisation surgeries were performed on as many as 53 village women in just about two hours by three quacks on Saturday evening. The three men working with the NGO — Gopal Jha, Ramanand Jha and Prakash Jha — were arrested on Monday.
The poor women were made to undergo the surgeries without anesthesia and were given expired medicines not meant to be administered. They were paid much less than the `600 promised to each of them.
When some of them developed complications and were hospitalized, their relatives complained to Araria SP Shivdeep W. Lande, who raided the camp.