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/ 10 October 2005
The official death toll from Japanese encephalitis in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh reached 1Â 058 on Monday after 12 more children died from the mosquito-borne disease, officials said. The worst outbreak of the fatal illness in nearly two decades had been expected to peter out with the onset of winter, but about 350 people are still in state-run hospitals.
Indian cricket captain Sourav Ganguly may be forgiven for thinking fate is against him. Dogged by bad form and a spat with his coach, he now has to overcome injury before answering his critics. Laid low with a tennis elbow, it will now be all the more difficult for him to save his captaincy as well as his place in the side, and the 33-year-old admits he has a battle on his hands.
A Finnish man and his Indian girlfriend were arrested in India after neighbours complained that they were playing pornographic movies with the volume turned up too loudly, a police officer said on Wednesday. Exhibiting pornography and possessing pornographic materials are illegal in India.
At least 18 people were killed and scores injured on Monday when a speeding passenger train derailed and slammed into a brick cabin at a railway station in central India, police and railways spokespersons said. ”Casualty figures will increase as we find more bodies,” a railways spokesperson said.
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/ 24 September 2005
Indian cricket captain Sourav Ganguly said on Saturday that a spat with coach Greg Chappell should stay between the two men and should not be allowed to drag down the team ahead of a busy international schedule. The coach-captain spat worsened on Friday when Chappell reportedly said in an e-mail sent to the Indian cricket board that he believed Ganguly was no longer fit to lead the side.
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/ 22 September 2005
An Indian newspaper advertisement that suggested parents would be blamed if they failed to buy pepper spray to deter rape attacks on their daughters was withdrawn on Thursday after a women’s group protest. The advertisement in several daily newspapers for Knockout pepper spray asked readers: "Tomorrow if your daughter gets raped who is to be blamed? The rapist or you?" and recommended the spray as a deterrent.
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/ 22 September 2005
At least 64 people died and hundreds of thousands were displaced after powerful storms left a trail of devastation across the Indian and Bangladeshi coasts in the Bay of Bengal, officials said on Wednesday. The southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh bore the brunt of the storms, which killed 58 people in the region.
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/ 21 September 2005
A court in India’s western desert state of Rajasthan fined an Israeli couple $22 for kissing in public after their wedding ceremony at a revered Hindu pilgrimage site, reports said on Wednesday. The court in Pushkar imposed the 1 000 rupee fine on the couple, identified as Opez Alone and Selev Kermit, for "committing an act of indecency".
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/ 21 September 2005
At least 31 people were killed and about 62 000 left homeless when heavy rains pounded coastal areas of India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal, reports said on Wednesday. All the deaths occurred in India’s southern Andhra Pradesh state, which bore the brunt of Tuesday’s storms.
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/ 16 September 2005
United States experts arrived on Friday to help Indian firefighters battle a major blaze at a burst oil well which was sending smoke and flames shooting into the sky, forcing the evacuation of thousands of residents. Hundreds of firefighters worked through the night but failed to put out the blaze near Dikom, 520km east of Assam state’s main city Guwahati.
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/ 15 September 2005
An explosion and fire at a fireworks factory on Thursday killed at least 32 people in the eastern Indian state of Bihar, news reports said. The toll was expected to rise as rescue workers continued to remove bodies from the rubble and battle the blaze at the plant and three of its warehouses.
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/ 14 September 2005
South African cricketers Herschelle Gibbs and Nicky Boje will not be offered an amnesty from police investigations into match-fixing if they tour India for a one-day series in November. Delhi police charged Gibbs and Boje, along with South African captain Hansie Cronje, with match-fixing during a tour of India in 2000.
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/ 13 September 2005
An Indian national on death row in Pakistan convicted as a spy and for setting bombs that killed several people, could get mercy from the victims’ families, Pakistan’s foreign minister said in an interview broadcast on Tuesday. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri said that the fate of Sarabjit Singh could be decided by the relatives of those killed.
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/ 12 September 2005
The death toll from an outbreak of Japanese encephalitis in northern India rose to 664 on Monday with 18 more deaths as doctors appealed for more ventilators to save the lives of young patients. On Sunday, a state government spokesperson said more than 2 400 patients were lying in hospitals, often two to a bed.
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/ 5 September 2005
The death toll from Japanese encephalitis rose to 460 in a northern Indian state after 28 more people died overnight from an outbreak of the mosquito-born disease, officials said on Monday. More than 500 patients, mostly children, were being treated in government hospitals across Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state and among its poorest.
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/ 4 September 2005
At least 24 security personnel were killed in a landmine blast triggered by Maoist rebels in the central Indian Chattisgarh state, police said on Sunday. Militants blew up a patrolling vehicle in the Dantewada district, 400km south of state capital Raipur, late on Saturday night, officers at district police headquarters said.
Japanese encephalitis has killed 14 more people in northern India, taking the death toll from the mosquito-borne disease to 267, officials said on Tuesday. The new deaths were reported since Monday in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state and one of its poorest.
India’s cricket selectors want Sachin Tendulkar so badly that they will go to any length to have the master batsman back at the crease. The five selectors have provisionally included Tendulkar in the squad for next month’s two Test matches in Zimbabwe even before the batsman has begun training after elbow surgery.
With 63 more deaths in and around the western Indian city of Mumbai, the death toll due to leptospirosis and other water-borne diseases brought on by floods has climbed to 233, a local news agency report said on Monday. A senior health official told the PTI news agency that there are signs of the outbreak abating.
Heavy overnight rains hit the western Indian city of Mumbai, disrupting relief work in monsoon floods that have already claimed more than 1 200 lives nationwide. Schools, colleges and educational institutions were closed as incessant rains since Sunday evening threw life out of gear in Mumbai.
Workers began a massive clean-up and rescuers searched for survivors under mountains of debris in western India after record monsoon rains claimed 920 lives, officials said on Saturday. Mumbai received 944,2mm of rainfall in a one-day period ending mid-morning on Wednesday.
Intense clashes between troops and Islamic militants holed up in the heart of Indian Kashmir’s summer capital of Srinagar continued into Saturday, leaving dozens of civilians trapped, police said. The fighting, which started on Friday, has left two security-force personnel dead and 20 others injured.
The number of people killed in record monsoon rains in west India climbed to almost 900 on Friday after a stampede sparked by rumours of a burst dam in a Mumbai township and a landslide in a village, police said. ”We are now confirming that the number of dead in Mumbai is 370,” said AN Roy, police chief of the western commercial hub.
At least 245 people have died in landslides and building collapses in western India following the heaviest rains recorded to date in the country, a government minister and police said on Thursday. Meanwhile, 351 workers were rescued from a blazing Indian offshore oil platform but at least 10 people died, a minister said on Thursday.
A major fire was raging on Wednesday at an offshore oil drilling platform in the Arabian Sea owned by India’s state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, the country’s oil minister said. He said as many as 200 to 300 people could have been working on the platform.
At least 99 people were reported killed and more than 100 trapped as India’s worst day of rainfall on record triggered landslides and building collapses in the western state of Maharashtra, a government official said on Wednesday. Mumbai, India’s commercial hub, was paralysed by 24 hours of pounding monsoon rains.
The strongest rain recorded to date in India shut down the financial hub Mumbai, snapped communication lines, closed airports and marooned thousands of people, officials said on Wednesday. As many as 87 people have been reported killed and another 130 are feared buried in landslides, said authorities and news reports.
At least 57 people were killed on Tuesday in one of the worst floods and landslides in the western Indian states of Maharashtra and Goa, news reports said. With the deaths, the toll from heavy monsoon rains in India since the end of June has touched 348. More than two million people have been displaced in nearly a dozen states.
After yet another huge earthquake and a tsunami scare overnight, some residents of India’s battered Andaman and Nicobar islands say they have had enough and are planning to move. On Sunday, an earthquake that the United States Geological Survey said measured seven on the Richter scale shattered the tranquillity of residents.
India’s supreme court has banned the honking of horns, playing loud music and bursting firecrackers after nightfall in the country’s expanding residential areas. Noise pollution is a growing blight in India, where limited space means flats and houses are built inches apart.
Millions of Indians may sleep easier after the Supreme Court banned loud music, firecrackers and the honking of vehicle horns at night. The court ban — issued on Monday and posted on Tuesday — prevents horns from being sounded between 10pm and 6am, and bans firecrackers, loud music and parties between the same hours.
Police in India’s eastern state of Orissa rounded up about 200 people watching a porn movie in a cinema hall and made them do 10 sit-ups in public as punishment, a report said on Monday. They were also made to take a public vow never to watch a sleazy movie again, the <i>Hindustan Times</i> daily said.