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THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Will Union Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee do justice to Kerala in the Railway Budget which is to be presented on Friday? That is the question uppermost in the minds of Keralites.

The timing of the announcement of Mukesh Ambani’s $7.2-billion stake sale in Reliance Industries’ KG Basin-and-beyond oil and gas blocks to British Petroleum was absolutely perfect – the inaugural day of the scam-hit UPA government’s budget session. It served as a great morale booster for the government, which indirectly helped the senior of the two Ambani brothers in bargaining a reasonably good price from BP in exchange of the 30 per cent stake sale in RIL for the oil and gas blocks, ahead of the all-important budget session of Parliament.

The Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has tried to pave the way for a relatively business-oriented budget session of Parliament by conceding at last the opposition demand for a Joint Parliamentary Committee to look into the 2G spectrum scandal, Government’s earlier hard line having washed out the winter session. For him, it was as necessary to salvage a Government with a sullied image to rehabilitate itself and re-establish its credentials both at home and abroad as for moving forward with an agenda of reinforced governance.

New York: Deputy Secretary-General of UN Asha-Rose Migiro today underscored the importance of education in raising the status of women in society and called for greater investment in measures to ensure gender equality, deploring the fact that two-thirds of illiterate adults across the world are female.

New York: Guinea-Bissau is countering the effects of last year’s unrest, and the United Nations is helping to promote security sector reform in a country that has been dogged by war, coups and assassinations in recent years, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in his latest report.

New York: Noting that foreign aid accounts for over 60 per cent of the development budget of the Solomon Islands, an independent United Nations expert today called on the Government and its donor partners to design a strategy to help break the cycle of aid dependency.

New Delhi: Annual Plan size for Rajasthan for the year 2011-12 was today finalized at a meeting between Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, Shri Montek Singh Ahluwalia and the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, Shri Ashok Gehlot. The Plan outlay was agreed at Rs.27500 crores.

New York: With the exponential growth in number and size at last levelling off at nearly 100,000 uniformed personnel in 15 missions, United Nations peacekeeping operations are seeking to fine-tune their work as they face a critical shortfall in helicopters, a top official said today.

New York: The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Côte d’Ivoire today deplored the excessive use of force against demonstrators in the city of Abidjan and surrounding areas over the past couple of days, saying the violence had left dozens of people dead or wounded.

Washington — Around a million women and children in the poorest rural and urban slum areas of Yemen will be the first priority of a World Bank-supported effort to decrease child mortality and increase the well being of mothers. Many of these women and children have not before been reached by any health services.