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New Delhi: Ace goalkeeper Savita was on Saturday retained captain of the 18-member Indian Women’ Team for the Hockey Olympic Qualifiers scheduled to be held in Ranchi from 13th to 19th January.

New Delhi: It was disappointing opening and closing of 2023 for Indian men's hockey as they put up a poor show and again failed to take advantage of being hosts of the World Cup at Bhubaneswar-Rourkela in January and closed by finishing fourth in five nation tournament at Valencia. However, in between the Harmanpreet Singh-led side managed to turn things around with stellar performances in the Asian Champions Trophy Chennai and a Gold medal at the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, ending a 9-year wait to stand on top of the podium.

The INDIA alliance meeting in Delhi is broadly an effort at political resuscitation. For three months, the opposition formation had virtually suspended such strategic level dialogue, as the Congress prioritised the assembly elections. Talk of crucial loss of momentum. INDIA’s leading partner Congress stands devastated after losing in three states to the BJP, reinforcing perception of BJP’s dominance of the crucial Hindi belt. The scale of the mountain the opposition is forced to climb appears quite forbidding. So let’s start with a few points of consolidation for the opposition.

Economic forecasting is always hazardous. It is more so in the current scenario. There are always any number of uncertainties about the future. But currently these are multifarious. No one really knows, including the dramatis personae, what will happen in the next week, let alone in course of the coming year.

It is election year for the Indian economy and the footnote to the robust economic performance would pinpoint the risks of freebies and subsidy politics impacting growth. The pressures are expected to pinch hard from mid-year onwards as the drivers of growth would shift gears down by at least a couple of levels. Increased allocation for food support programmes, cooking gas subsidy and rural employment plans has already been indicated.

The catchline “Phir Aayega Modi” of the saffron ecosystem needs correction. It portrays him as a visionary who will return to usher India to a new and affluent ecosphere — purely as a device to strengthen the perception that Modi is the only saviour. Therefore, people must elect him. But scratch a little more and out pops reality, the catchline is nothing other than perception management, it’s got nothing to do with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s skills-set.

Number of Bank frauds in 2022-23 in India reached 13,576 as against just 4306 in 2013-14, and has even broken the record of the last year in only first six months of the current financial year 2023-24 when the fraud cases have already risen to 14,483. Obviously, UPA government was no match to the NDA government led by PM Narendra Modi in banking frauds, though PM Narendra Modi has promised during his election campaigns that he would give a corruption free India.

Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the leader of Palestine Islamic Jihad, the second most significant militant Gazan group, arrived in Cairo this week for carefully timed talks with Egyptian intelligence chief General Abbas Kamel. A Palestinian source said Al-Nakhalah was discussing an end to the Gaza war that would involve an exchange of prisoners, the withdrawal of Israeli forces, and reconstruction of the devastated territory. On the table was a three-stage Egyptian proposal that falls short of mutually exclusive Israeli and Palestinian demands.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The central investigating agency, the enforcement Directorate (ED), which is on a rampage against the Pinarayi Vijayan-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) Government in Kerala, suffered a highly embarrassing double defeat in the Kerala High Court.

Famous as the first ‘Showman’ of Indian cinema, had Raj Kapoor been alive today, he would have celebrated in grand style his turning 100 this month. Facing the movie cameras after putting on the grease-paint and an attire which was a take on that of the inimitable Charlie Chaplin, he essayed the part of a hero when the country had just assumed its seat among newly independent nations.