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KOLKATA: In West Bengal, it is Ms. Mamata Banerjee and the Trinamool Congress calling the shots these days, and the ruling Left front has been reduced to be a mute spectator.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES - Ministers from the six countries of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) are holding a 16th Ministerial Meeting in Ha Noi, Viet Nam on 20 August 2010 to discuss a new 10-year (2012-2022) framework for regional cooperation.

The Cassandras have proved right. The Commonwealth Games have turned into a gigantic multi-billion rupee racket, under which Delhi's landscape is recklessly ripped up, inappropriate and wasteful projects are shamelessly promoted, public funds massively looted, workers sadistically brutalised, the poor summarily evicted, and human rights egregiously violated—supposedly to enhance India's global image in pursuit of hollow notions of prestige. The CWG, far grander than the Asian Games of 1982, will be monumentally irrelevant to the future of sports. But they will leave a toxic legacy of empty public coffers, disused stadia, and a battered mass of underprivileged people.

The scandals affecting the IPL were a sign that India is unable to hold a major sporting event without the organizers being tainted by corruption. Now, the Commonwealth Games fiasco has shown on an even bigger scale how difficult it is for those in charge to escape the stigma of sleaze.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES - The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will provide loan assistance to the Republic of the Marshall Islands to help to achieve long-term fiscal sustainability and to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the public sector.

DAR ES SALAAM - In a bold effort to save one of the world's rarest amphibians from extinction, one hundred Kihansi spray toads (KST) have been flown home to Tanzania after being painstakingly reared at the Bronx Zoo and The Toledo Zoo working in close partnership with the Tanzanian government and the World Bank.

New York: Efforts to promote direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are nearing a turning point, a senior United Nations official said today, underlining that success hinges on continued regional and international support.

New York: The United Nations today unveiled a decade-long push to raise awareness and mobilize action to fight desertification, which threatens the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people in 100 countries.

With 16 months left for the Punjab Assembly elections, Punjab's political scenario is undergoing two significant changers. First is the launching of intensive efforts by the Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and his Deputy Chief Minister son Sukhbir Singh Badal to erase the widely prevalent impression about the Akali-BJP government's being non-performer and misgoverned. Second is that the deeply divided state Congress leaders have virtually stopped publicly squabbling, obviously on the party high command's diktat, though the party continues to be in hibernation.

NEW DELHI: The sharp exchanges between the ruling BJP and the Opposition Congress in the Karnataka Assembly, thankfully, brought into the national focus the illegal mining and export of millions of tonnes of iron ore and the involvement of the State BJP Cabinet Ministers in this mining game. More importantly, it also focused on the role of the mining mafia in iron ore mining, the mega-profits earned by them at the cost of state revenues and so on.