Congress nuances its stand on Rahul's leadership

NEW DELHI: A day after announcing that he will lead the campaign in 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Congress today nuanced its stand saying it will fight the polls under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.

"I think party spokesperson P C Chacko has already clarified...Sonia Gandhi is our leader and President of the Congress Party. She will continue to be President.

"We are going to fight the 2014 elections under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi", party spokesman Rashid Alvi said here today.

The remarks are significant as Chacko had said yesterday that Rahul Gandhi will lead UPA's campaign in the 2014 elections and take up an "important responsibility " in the party "very soon".

To a query on what will be the role of Sonia Gandhi after Rahul takes up a party position, Chacko had said "she is the President now. She will be the patron. She will be the supreme leader of the party".

Earlier in the day, Chacko clarified that the role of Rahul Gandhi in the next Lok Sabha elections will be decided by the Congress general secretary and Sonia Gandhi at an appropriate time.

The AICC spokesman said "I did not mean any decision has been taken in this regard when I said Rahul Gandhi will be leading the next election campaign."

He said he had made the remarks in response to questions by mediapersons and these "should not be interpreted as any decision having been taken".

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U.K. Dash for Shale Gas a Test for Global Fracking

Thomas K. Grose in London

The starting gun has sounded for the United Kingdom's "dash for gas," as the media here have dubbed it.

As early as this week, a moratorium on shale gas production is expected to be lifted. And plans to streamline and speed the regulatory process through a new Office for Unconventional Gas and Oil were unveiled last week in the annual autumn budget statement by the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne.

In the U.K., where all underground mineral rights concerning fossil fuels belong to the crown, hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, could unlock a new stream of government revenue as well as fuel. But it also means that there is no natural constituency of fracking supporters as there is in the United States, birthplace of the technology. In the U.S., concerns over land and water impact have held back fracking in some places, like New York, but production has advanced rapidly in shale basins from Texas to Pennsylvania, with support of private landowners who earn royalties from leasing to gas companies. (Related: "Natural Gas Stirs Hope and Fear in Pennsylvania")

A taste of the fight ahead in the U.K. came ahead of Osborne's speech last weekend, when several hundred protesters gathered outside of Parliament with a mock 23-foot (7-meter) drilling rig. In a letter they delivered to Prime Minister David Cameron, they called fracking "an unpredictable, unregulatable process" that was potentially toxic to the environment.

Giving shale gas a green light "would be a costly mistake," said Andy Atkins, executive director of the U.K.'s Friends of the Earth, in a statement. "People up and down the U.K. will be rightly alarmed about being guinea pigs in Osborne's fracking experiment. It's unnecessary, unwanted and unsafe."

The government has countered that natural gas-fired power plants would produce half the carbon dioxide emissions of the coal plants that still provide about 30 percent of the U.K.'s electricity. London Mayor Boris Johnson, viewed as a potential future prime minister, weighed in Monday with a blistering cry for Britain to "get fracking" to boost cleaner, cheaper energy and jobs. "In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news," he wrote in the Daily Telegraph. (Related Quiz: "What You Don't Know About Natural Gas")

Energy Secretary Edward Davey, who is expected this week to lift the U.K.'s year-and-a-half-old moratorium on shale gas exploration, said gas "will ensure we can keep the lights on as increasing amounts of wind and nuclear come online through the 2020s."

A Big Role for Gas

If the fracking plan advances, it will not be the first "dash for gas" in the U.K. In the 1980s, while Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher battled with mining unions, she undercut their clout by moving the nation toward generating a greater share of its electricity from natural gas and less from coal. So natural gas already is the largest electricity fuel in Britain, providing 40 percent of electricity. (Related Interactive: "World Electricity Mix")

The United Kingdom gets about 10 percent of its electricity from renewable energy, and has plans to expand its role. But Davey has stressed the usefulness of gas-fired plants long-term as a flexible backup source to the intermittent electricity generated from wind and solar power. Johnson, on the other hand, offered an acerbic critique of renewables, including the "satanic white mills" he said were popping up on Britain's landscape. "Wave power, solar power, biomass—their collective oomph wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding," he wrote.

As recently as 2000, Great Britain was self-sufficient in natural gas because of conventional gas production in the North Sea. But that source is quickly drying up. North Sea production peaked in 2000 at 1,260 terawatt-hours (TWH); last year it totaled just 526 TWh.

Because of the North Sea, the U.K. is still one of the world's top 20 producers of gas, accounting for 1.5 percent of total global production. But Britain has been a net importer of gas since 2004. Last year, gas imports—mainly from Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands—accounted for more than 40 percent of domestic demand.

The government hopes to revive domestic natural gas production with the technology that has transformed the energy picture in the United States—horizontal drilling into deep underground shale, and high-pressure injection of water, sand, and chemicals to create fissures in the rock to release the gas. (Related Interactive: "Breaking Fuel From the Rock")

A Tougher Road

But for a number of reasons, the political landscape is far different in the United Kingdom. Britain made a foray into shale gas early last year, with a will drilled near Blackpool in northwest England. The operator, Cuadrilla, said that that area alone could contain 200 trillion cubic feet of gas, which is more than the known reserves of Iraq. But the project was halted after drilling, by the company's own admission, caused two small earthquakes. (Related: "Tracing Links Between Fracking and Earthquakes" and "Report Links Energy Activities To Higher Quake Risk") The April 2011 incident triggered the moratorium that government now appears to be ready to lift. Cuadrilla has argued that modifications to its procedures would mitigate the seismic risk, including lower injection rates and lesser fluid and sand volumes. The company said it will abandon the U.K. unless the moratorium is soon lifted.

A few days ahead of Osborne's speech, the Independent newspaper reported that maps created for Britain's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) showed that 32,000 square miles, or 64 percent of the U.K. countryside, could hold shale gas reserves and thus be open for exploration. But a DECC spokeswoman said "things are not quite what it [the Independent story] suggests." Theoretically, she said, those gas deposits do exist, but "it is too soon to predict the scale of exploration here." She said many other issues, ranging from local planning permission to environmental impact, would mean that some tracts would be off limits, no matter how much reserve they held. DECC has commissioned the British Geological Survey to map the extent of Britain's reserves.

Professor Paul Stevens, a fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, said the U.K. is clearly interested in trying to replicate America's shale gas revolution. "That's an important part of the story," he said, but trying to use the American playbook won't be easy. "It's a totally different ballgame." In addition to the fact that mineral rights belong to the crown, large expanses of private land that are commonplace in America don't exist in England. Just as important, there is no oil- and gas-service industry in place in Britain to quickly begin shale gas operations here. "We don't have the infrastructure set up," said Richard Davies, director of the Durham Energy Institute at Durham University, adding that it would take years to build it.

Shale gas production would also likely ignite bigger and louder protests in the U.K. and Europe. "It's much more of a big deal in Europe," Stevens said. "There are more green [nongovernmental organizations] opposed to it, and a lot more local opposition."

In any case, the U.K. government plans to move ahead. Osborne said he'll soon begin consultations on possible tax breaks for the shale gas industry. He also announced that Britain would build up to 30 new natural gas-fired power plants with 26 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. The new gas plants would largely replace decommissioned coal and nuclear power plants, though they would ultimately add 5GW of additional power to the U.K. grid. The coalition government's plan, however, leaves open the possibility of increasing the amount of gas-generated electricity to 37GW, or around half of total U.K. demand.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that Europe may have as much as 600 trillion cubic feet of shale gas that could be recovered. But Stevens said no European country is ready to emulate the United States in producing massive amounts of unconventional gas. They all lack the necessary service industry, he said, and geological differences will require different technologies. And governments aren't funding the research and development needed to develop them.

Globally, the track record for efforts to produce shale gas is mixed:

• In France, the EIA's estimate is that shale gas reserves total 5 trillion cubic meters, or enough to fuel the country for 90 years. But in September, President Francois Hollande pledged to continue a ban on fracking imposed last year by his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Poland was also thought to have rich shale gas resources, but initial explorations have determined that original estimates of the country's reserves were overstated by 80 percent to 90 percent. After drilling two exploratory wells there, Exxon Mobil stopped operations. But because of its dependence on Russian gas, Poland is still keen to begin shale gas production.
• South Africa removed a ban on fracking earlier this year. Developers are eyeing large shale gas reserves believed to underlie the semidesert Karoo between Johannesburg and Cape Town.
• Canada's Quebec Province has had a moratorium on shale gas exploration and production, but a U.S. drilling company last month filed a notice of intent to sue to overturn the ban as a violation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
• Germany's Environment Ministry has backed a call to ban fracking near drinking water reservoirs.
• China drilled its initial shale gas wells this year; by 2020, the nation's goal is for shale gas to provide 6 percent of its massive energy needs. The U.S. government's preliminary assessment is that China has the world's largest "technically recoverable" shale resources, about 50 percent larger than stores in the United States. (Related: "China Drills Into Shale Gas, Targeting Huge Reserves")

This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

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Royal Hoax: Station to Give $500K to Nurse's Family

The Australian radio station that employed the DJs who prank-called the London hospital where Kate Middleton was being treated has cancelled their show and will donate at least $500,000 to the grieving husband and children of the nurse who took the call and later apparently killed herself.

Australia's 2Day FM released a statement today saying it hopes to "help [Jacintha] Saldanha's family with the support they need at this very difficult time."

After days of suspended advertising, the radio station at the center of a global firestorm announced it will resume airing commercials Thursday. All its profits for the rest of the year will go directly to the family of the unsuspecting nurse at the center of that joke.

The Sydney-based station also issued a company-wide suspension of prank calls after the nurse who initially answered the hospital call was found dead.

Saldanha's husband and two teenage children met with officials at the hospital Monday, and spoke publicly for the first time, although via a member of the British Parliament.

Royal Hospital Hoax: End to Shock-Jock Pranks? Watch Video

Australian DJs Apologize in Wake of Nurse's Suicide Watch Video

"This is a close family," Keith Vaz said. "They are devastated by what has happened. They miss her every moment of every day.

Although radio pranks have been a staple of shock DJs for years, DJs Mel Greig and Michael Christian of Australia's 2Day FM might have crossed the line last week when they pranked the hospital, prompting the question of whether this is the end for radio pranking.

"Entertainers try to use real-life everyday circumstances and try to find humor in them," Radio DJ J Niice of B96 in Chicago, who does regular pranks on his show, told ABC News.

DJ Niice says his station has no intentions of pulling the plug on prank calls because it doesn't need to.

Based on U.S. law, such calls only become problematic when any resulting damage or injury could have been foreseen.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was famously pranked while running for vice president by a notorious Montreal-based comedy duo, who pretended to be then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

"You know, I see you as a president one day," one of them told Palin, to which she replied with a giggle, "Maybe in eight years.'"

A prank caller even managed to make his way through security to speak to Tony Blair while he was still British prime minister. But it was no laughing matter in 1998 when Opie and Anthony, DJs from a Boston radio station, were fired for telling listeners on April Fools' Day that the city's mayor had died in a car accident.

While the Australian DJs' show has been terminated, it's still unclear whether they will be.

They could face criminal charges if police determine their call was illegally recorded. And the same joke at which they initially laughed is now the reason for their tears.

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Obama heads to Michigan seeking support for fiscal plan

President Obama is traveling to an auto plant in Michigan on Monday to drum up support for his plan to avoid the “fiscal cliff,” in part by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.                                  

Obama plans to help announce a new $100 million investment at Detroit Diesel, a Daimler-owned truck engine plant in Redford Township, Mich., as part of the White House’s public relations campaign to build support for his fiscal plan.

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US, UK shareholders 'now to pay if bank fails'

LONDON: British and US banking regulators proposed on Monday a joint strategy to ensure that the bankruptcy of big banks won't spark a chain reaction of contagion throughout markets.

The two bodies, acting on behalf of the two largest financial centres in the world, stressed that under the proposals, shareholders and not taxpayers would bear the full costs, and top managers would be sacked.

At the Bank of England, the deputy governor for financial stability Paul Tucker said: "The 'too big to fail' problem simply must be cured. We believe it can be and that this joint paper provides evidence of the serious progress that is being made."

The British and US authorities said in a joint statement that the financial crisis had "driven home the importance of an orderly resolution process for globally active, systemically important, financial institutions" which have foundered.

They said that their solutions, which would target the parent of any finance house in trouble, "have been designed to enable large and complex cross-border firms to be resolved without threatening financial stability and without putting public funds at risk."

They said they had borne in mind work by the G20-backed Financial Stability Board on principles for dealing with failed financial institutions.

There has been widespread criticism of the way in which Lehman Brothers investment bank was closed down, triggering a massive crisis of confidence, and that in the disruption that followed some shareholders did not carry the full brunt of the costs and some managers held on to their boardroom jobs.

In the United States and in Europe, governments had to use taxpayers' funds to provide guarantees or new capital to financial institutions in trouble. Creditors lost money but most depositors were protected.

The objective is to minimise the dangers of so-called "systemic risk", when a sudden loss of confidence threatens to trigger chaos throughout the financial system as nearly occurred in 2007.

The strategy by the Bank of England and the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is a response to the traumas and lessons of the financial crisis which followed.

The statement said that the British part of the strategy was intended to fit with the powers provided by the UK Banking Act of 2009 "and in anticipation of the further powers that will be provided by the European Union Recovery and Resolution Directive."

Britain, a member of the European Union but not of the eurozone, is campaigning hard on another front which has a bearing on bank resolution: this is progress towards an EU banking union, built initially around the 17 eurozone members with banking supervision vested in the European Central Bank.

Britain is concerned that this could become a back door way for eurozone and EU authorities to interfere in regulation of the financial sector in Britain in a way which would damage British interests.

The statement said that the proposals were based on a "top-down" strategy for dealing with financial firms in severe difficulty, whereby a single authority would apply its powers "to the top of a financial group, that is, at the parent company level" and across borders.

In the United States the measures would work in the context of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

"Such a strategy would apply a single receivership at the top-tier holding company, assign losses to shareholders and unsecured creditors of the holding company, and transfer sound operating subsidiaries to a new solvent entity or entities," said the statement.

Both the US and British approaches would "ensure continuity of all critical services performed by the operating firm(s), thereby reducing risks to financial stability."

The joint statement said: "The unsecured debt holders can expect that their claims would be written down to reflect any losses that shareholders cannot cover, with some converted partly into equity in order to provide sufficient capital."

Subsidiaries which were viable would be kept open and operating, "thereby limiting contagion effects and crossborder complications."

The statement also made clear that action to deal with financial firms in trouble "would be accompanied by the replacement of culpable senior management."

- AFP/ir

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CAPF men will now get more time with family

NEW DELHI: Faced with high attrition rate and suicides in paramilitary forces arising out of work-related stress and alienation from family, the home ministry has given its nod to a proposal to have more camps off the border and troubled areas so that personnel can have regular peace postings and be closer to their families.

The proposal sent by the Border Security Force(BSF), has not only asked for new camps at places such as Dehradun, Shimla, Ambala, Pune, Bhubaneswar and Latur, but also asked for the accommodation of families in the border areas.

Addressing the BSF personnel on its 47th Raising Day function, home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, said he was seriously looking into the matter given the tough conditions that BSF men work in.

"I am aware of the fact that BSF personnel work in extremely difficult conditions and away from their families. The personnel deployed in anti-terrorist, anti-Naxal, disaster management, border management operations and United National Peace Keeping Missions. We have seen good results from all the fronts. With a view to making force personnel work near their native places there has been a proposal to set up battalion headquarters at various locations like Dehradun, Shimla, Ambala, Pune, Bhubaneswar and Latur. MHA has given its nod for the purpose and the lands have been acquired. The proposal to construct separate family accommodations is also being considered. It will help the personnel," Shinde said.

The ceremonial parade on the occasion of force's 47th raising day had to be postponed from December 1 to Monday following the demise of former Prime Minister IK Gujral on November 30.

The home minister decorated four BSF personnel with President's Police Medal for Gallantry and eight personnel with President's Police Medal for Distinguished Services.

A colourful parade of BSF's camel contingent and its dog squad along with daredevil feats by motor-cycle borne personnel were special attractions of the programme.

The force is at present without its regular chief following superannuation of UK Bansal late last month.

Special DG BSF, Arvind Ranjan, currently in-charge of the force, highlighted the tough challenges being faced by the personnel during the course of their duty.

"Since the raising of the force, over 1,600 bordermen have laid down their lives in the service of the nation. Over 6,300 personnel have suffered grievous injuries or have been disabled in the line of duty. These sacrifices remain a perennial source of inspiration for all the bordermen," Ranjan said.

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Plants Grow Fine Without Gravity

When researchers sent plants to the International Space Station in 2010, the flora wasn't meant to be decorative. Instead, the seeds of these small, white flowers—called Arabidopsis thaliana—were the subject of an experiment to study how plant roots developed in a weightless environment.

Gravity is an important influence on root growth, but the scientists found that their space plants didn't need it to flourish. The research team from the University of Florida in Gainesville thinks this ability is related to a plant's inherent ability to orient itself as it grows. Seeds germinated on the International Space Station sprouted roots that behaved like they would on Earth—growing away from the seed to seek nutrients and water in exactly the same pattern observed with gravity. (Related: "Beyond Gravity.")

Since the flowers were orbiting some 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the Earth at the time, the NASA-funded experiment suggests that plants still retain an earthy instinct when they don't have gravity as a guide.

"The role of gravity in plant growth and development in terrestrial environments is well understood," said plant geneticist and study co-author Anna-Lisa Paul, with the University of Florida in Gainesville. "What is less well understood is how plants respond when you remove gravity." (See a video about plant growth.)

The new study revealed that "features of plant growth we thought were a result of gravity acting on plant cells and organs do not actually require gravity," she added.

Paul and her collaborator Robert Ferl, a plant biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, monitored their plants from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using images sent from the space station every six hours.

Root Growth

Grown on a nutrient-rich gel in clear petri plates, the space flowers showed familiar root growth patterns such as "skewing," where roots slant progressively as they branch out.

"When we saw the first pictures come back from orbit and saw that we had most of the skewing phenomenon we were quite surprised," Paul said.

Researchers have always thought that skewing was the result of gravity's effects on how the root tip interacts with the surfaces it encounters as it grows, she added. But Paul and Ferl suspect that in the absence of gravity, other cues take over that enable the plant to direct its roots away from the seed and light-seeking shoot. Those cues could include moisture, nutrients, and light avoidance.

"Bottom line is that although plants 'know' that they are in a novel environment, they ultimately do just fine," Paul said.

The finding further boosts the prospect of cultivating food plants in space and, eventually, on other planets.

"There's really no impediment to growing plants in microgravity, such as on a long-term mission to Mars, or in reduced-gravity environments such as in specialized greenhouses on Mars or the moon," Paul said. (Related: "Alien Trees Would Bloom Black on Worlds With Double Stars.")

The study findings appear in the latest issue of the journal BMC Plant Biology.

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Royal Hoax: DJs 'Shattered' After Nurse's Suicide

The two Australian radio DJs who prank-called the London hospital where Kate Middleton was being treated last week said they were "shattered" and "gutted" after the nurse who answered their call apparently killed herself.

Shock jocks Mel Greig, 30, and Michael Christian, 25, cried as they spoke to Australia's Channel 9 overnight in their first public interview since Jacintha Saldanha, 46, the nurse who last week connected the pair to the duchess' room, was found dead Friday morning.

"I'm shattered, gutted, heartbroken," Christian said. "Mel and myself are incredibly sorry for the situation and what's happened. I had the idea. … It was just a simple harmless phone call. It was going to go on for 30 seconds. We were going to get hung up on."

FULL COVERAGE: Royal Baby

The host of the "2Day" FM radio show pretended to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, asking for an update on Middleton's condition when they called up King Edward VII Hospital in central London. With no receptionist on duty overnight, Saldanha answered the prank call and put it through.

"It was just something that was fun and light-hearted and a tragic turn of events that I don't think anyone had expected," Christian said.

A Current Affair/ABC News

Jacintha Saldanha Dead: Could DJs Face Charges? Watch Video

Jacintha Saldanha Outrage: DJs Responsible for Prank Are in Hiding Watch Video

Saldanha was found dead Friday morning after police were called to an address near the hospital to "reports of a woman found unconscious," according to a statement from Scotland Yard.

Investigators have not said how she might have killed herself.

Greig cried today when asked about the moment she heard of the death of Saldanha, a mother of two.

"It was the worst phone call I've ever had in my life," she said through tears. "There's not a minute that goes by that we don't think about her family and the thought that we may have played a part in that is gut-wrenching."

The DJs said they never expected to get through to Middleton's nurse and assumed "the same phone calls had been made 100 times that morning," Christian said.

Grieg said, "We wanted to be hung up on with our silly voices and wanted a 20-second segment to air of us doing stupid voice. … Not for a second did we expect to even speak to Kate or even have a conversation with anyone at the hospital. We wanted to be hung up on."

The global backlash against the duo has been fierce, from online death threats to calls for prison time. Their radio station has announced it is banning phony phone calls altogether, and suspending advertising indefinitely.

Max Moore-Wilton, the chairman of Southern Cross Austereo, said in a letter Sunday to Lord Glenarthur, chairman of King Edward VII's Hospital, that the company is reviewing the station's broadcast policies, the AP reported.

"I can assure you we are taking immediate action and reviewing the broadcast and processes involved," Moore-Wilton said in the letter. "As we have said in our own statements on the matter, the outcome was unforeseeable and very regrettable."

Greig and Michael have been taken off the air, silenced indefinitely.

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Mandela "comfortable" after night in hospital

JOHANNESBURG: Nelson Mandela is comfortable, after a restful night in hospital for tests, the South African government said Sunday as the former president spent his second day in hospital.

President Jacob Zuma visited the country's first black president and said he had found him "comfortable, and in good care."

It was the second time the 94-year-old and increasingly frail Mandela had been hospitalised this year. While officials are trying to allay fears over his health, they are not releasing any details of his condition.

"I think he has had a restful night, the doctors are comfortable about it, they are continuing monitoring," Mac Maharaj, Zuma's spokesman and a former fellow prisoner with Mandela, told AFP.

The tests and medical attention were consistent with his age, he added.

Medical experts say there is nothing out of the ordinary for a person of Mandela's age to require in-patient attention from time to time.

"We need to understand that he is 94 years old, and that his state of health is not genuinely of a good quality, and that from time to time he is admitted to hospitals," Mark Sonderup, vice chairman of the South African Medical Association told AFP.

The anti-apartheid hero and Nobel Peace Prize laureate was flown from his home village of Qunu in the southeast of the country to a hospital in the capital Pretoria on Saturday.

The once spry boxer, who stayed fit during his 27 years in prison by doing calisthenics in his cell, has grown increasingly frail. But his stature as one of the world's most famous and loved public figures remains undimmed.

"We wish him as speedy recovery," said Ntanyongwana Mdzeki, an octogenarian neighbour of Mandela in Qunu village. "We still need him to be around because he changed our lives."

Mandela's former political colleague Ahmed Kathrada, another apartheid-era prisoner, also wished Mandela a speedy recovery.

"Even in such mundane times as routine hospital visits, you allow South Africans from across the length and breadth of this country to unite in concern for you," said a statement by the Kathrada foundation.

Keith Khoza spokesman of the ruling ANC party, which Mandela once led, said the party wished him well.

"He is in perfect health," he added. "Everything is well. It's just that he has to undergo these regular check ups."

Officials have refused to give more details about his condition or say in which hospital he is being treated.

Security appeared to have been beefed up however at 1 Military Hospital on the outskirts of Pretoria. Military police were searching the trunks of all the cars entering the hospital complex, according to an AFP photographer.

South Africa's military has in the past been responsible for Mandela's health.

The revered statesman has not appeared in public since South Africa hosted the FIFA World Cup final in 2010.

Madiba, as he is affectionately known by South Africans, has all-but retired from public life, choosing to live in his childhood hometown of Qunu in the rural Eastern Cape.

His last hospitalisation was in February when he spent a night in hospital for a minor exploratory procedure to investigate persistent abdominal pain.

In January 2011, Mandela had the country on edge when he was admitted for two nights for an acute respiratory infection. He was discharged in a stable condition for home-based care and intense medical monitoring.

Mandela has also had prostate cancer, for which he was successfully treated in 2001. He had cataract surgery in 1994, just months after he took office as president.

After years fighting white-only rule, he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the last white president, FW de Klerk, in 1993.

A year later, he crowned his long fight against minority rule by becoming the country's first black president at the end of apartheid.

The last pictures of Mandela published in the media were in August when he received a visit from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at his home.

- AFP/xq

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India misguided, paranoid over China: Guha

Shreya Roy Chowdhury, TNN Dec 8, 2012, 06.12AM IST

MUMBAI: A good half-hour into the discussion on 'India, China and the World', historian Ramachandra Guha issued a disclaimer—all the three members on the panel had been to China only once. "We should learn their language, promote quality research, and have a panel on China driven by Chinese scholars," he said. And that was the general tenor of the debate—that the Indian attitude to China was influenced by a mix of ignorance, cautious optimism about partnerships and a whole lot of misguided paranoia. "Don't demonise the Chinese, please," Guha finally said in response to a question.

"China has existed in our imaginations," observed Sunil Khilnani, professor of politics and author of The Idea Of India. "There's been very little sustained engagement with the reality of China and very little of our own produced knowledge about China." It was after the events of 1962 ('war' in the popular imagination, 'skirmish' to the scholars participating in the discussion), explained Khilnani, that a miffed India "withdrew". It's the 50th anniversary of that exchange this year, and "what we haven't been able to do is learn from the defeat", observed Khilnani. Both could have benefited from greater engagement. "China has had a very clear focus on primary education and achieved high levels of literacy before its economic rise. It has also addressed the issue of land reform," said Khilnani. Guha added that China could learn from the "religious, cultural and linguistic pluralism" in India.

But China and India weren't always so out of sync with each other. Srinath Raghavan, a scholar of military history, got both Guha and Khilnani to talk about pre-1962 relations between the two when the picture was rosier. Tagore was interested in China and so was Gandhi. Both were very large countries with large populations and shared what Guha calls a "lack of cultural inferiority". "They were both," he continued, "also heavily dependent on peasant communities." Nehru was appreciative of China's will to modernize and industrialize and its adoption of technology to achieve those ends. In turn, Chinese politicians argued for Indian independence.

Things soured more, feel both Khilnani and Guha, after the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959. "He was welcomed here as a spiritual leader but the intensification of the conflict dates to the Dalai Lama's flight," said Guha. Both Guha and Khilnani argued that Nehru's decision to not react aggressively to China's occupation of Tibet was, in the long run, the right one and prevented further "militarization" of the region. An audience member wondered if that didn't make India "China's puppet". Guha disagreed. "If there's a Tibetan culture alive today," he said, "it's not because of Richard Gere. Don't believe in the hypocrisy of the Western countries. Will they give them land, employment, dignified refuge? The Tibetans is one of the few cases in which our record is honorable."

But the difference in levels of development and the lopsided trade relations between the two countries have only fuelled the suspicions many Indians seem to harbour about China. People were worried, said Guha, even about cricket balls made in China. Audience questions reflected those worries. A member asked about China's "strategy to conquer the world" and its likely impact on India. Guha cautioned against stereotypes; Khilnani explained, "History is littered with the debris of states that have tried to dominate the world. What we're doing may be more long-lasting."

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