World News

A CONTROVERSY over the installation of a Mahatma Gandhi statue in Leicester has divided the local populace with a section of the residents believing soccer legend Gary Lineker deserved the honour - he being a local hero.

The controversial 'points based system' for awarding visas to foreign workers from outside the European Union came into effect in Britain on Friday. It will be fully operational by the end of the summer.

Three polls now show Barack Obama is neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton in Texas. He has ended a 10 percentage point deficit in less than a fortnight in the US's second-largest state. Obama's most fervent support base remains middle-class whites and black Americans.

The investigation into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, took a new turn on Monday, with Mohammed Al Fayed, the father of Dodi Fayed, who was killed along with Diana in the car crash in August 1997, insisting that Diana was indeed pregnant when she died.

AN INDIAN who brought race charges against his former employer - car giant Honda - has been awarded Pound 64,000 as damages by a Bristol tribunal. Kamlesh Shah, 30, quit his job at Honda UK's plant in Swindon last year after a supervisor called him a 'f***ing Indian'.

The starting of a new post-graduate degree course by Oxford University for the study of "Contemporary India" reiterates the huge interest in the country's rapid growth.

Britain's junior Environment Minister Phil Woolas has sparked a fresh row by his comments on Monday that inbreeding among immigrant communities was responsible for a growth in birth defects.

Pakistan has supplanted India as the South Asian point of pontification in Washington. Benazir Bhutto's assassination helped. So did the general US view that New Delhi had lapsed into paralysis. 'India is the country that can't say Yes to America,' joked one State Department official. Or say 'no' or even, 'perhaps'.

Nearly 17,000 South Asian women have been subjected to honour related violence in Britain, says a new study by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO). They have been beaten up, pressured to an extent that they have committed suicide, or even murdered by their relatives in a bid to prevent them from following their romantic inclinations.

The radical Finsbury Park cleric Abu Hamza Al Masri, 49, who was sentenced to a seven-year jail term here on charges of providing support to Al Qaeda, is to be extradited to the US, where he could be jailed for life.

If John McCain wins this year's US presidential race, it will mean, among other things, the first South Asian in the White House. McCain's youngest daughter, Bridget, 16, is of Bengali descent - a Bangladeshi orphan adopted by the family.

DOCTORS FROM India, South Africa and other Commonwealth countries won't be allowed any more into Britain's National Health Service. The move is being seen as an attempt to preserve health service jobs for British graduates.

It's on television, in the newspapers, in web space and in museums - yet another gift of India, which the west has only been too happy to lap up.Weekend classes in London on Tantric sex are doing brisk business and charges for a training weekend has been steadily on the rise - costing anything between Pound 200 and Pound 450.

Much of the world is bemused by the savagery of the competition in the US presidential nomination race over smallish states like South Carolina and Florida. South Carolina saw mudslinging, overlaid with racial issues, between Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The going got tough in Florida as well, especially between Republican candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Fifteen British hotels have won the coveted Michelin award this year - and Quilon in London, set up by the Taj Group, is one of them.

The desire to become immortal and have a site dedicated to one's name by 'friends' has lead to suicides of seven young people – a recent cult that's making its presence felt on the World Wide Web.

Police have no suspects so far in the murder of Abhijeet Mahato, the 29-year-old engineering doctoral candidate at the elite Duke University found shot dead on Friday night. Police in the North Carolina city of Durham said only their forensic teams had picked up some clues after searches on Saturday. They also said it did not appear to be a case of 'gang violence'.

The launch of a website to persuade CNN anchorman and anti-outsourcing critic Lou Dobbs to run for the White House could make call centres an election issue. The surprise, if anything, is how little a ripple outsourcing has made despite nearly a year of pre-election campaigning.

If you have the equivalent of Pound 1 million (Rs 8.5 crore) in the bank, you can settle in Britain even if you cannot speak English. All those coming to work in Britain from outside the European Union are normally required to be proficient in English in order to get a visa. But if you are worth more than a million pounds, the condition will be waived for three years.

Admirers of the most famous United States critic of outsourcing have launched a campaign to persuade him to run for the White House. The Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee called on 62-year-old CNN anchorman Lou Dobbs to consider a run for the US presidency.