LEAD

Former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has slammed Shahbaz Sharif over conducting talks with India over Kashmir. Imran Khas said, “When those who worship money & are devoid of any ideology or belief system, are put at helm of affairs then this is the shameful result.

Not only is he clueless why our founding fathers struggled and sacrificed to achieve the dream of Pakistan; but just to get the backing of the Indian lobby he is also ready to bury the Kashmiri freedom struggle in which over 100k Kashmiris have given their lives.”

Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Wednesday held a mega rally, led by his party Bharatiya Rashtra Samiti (BRS) and attended by prominent opposition leaders from across the country, in a show of strength against NDA government. With this rally, BRS took its first major step towards bringing together like-minded parties at the national level.

At the public meet held in Khammam, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said the BJP-led government is counting its days in power. Yadav's remark was aimed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who on Tuesday gave the call to BJP leaders to prepare for the 2024 Lok Sabha election, for which only "400 days are left".

PM Modi on Tuesday asked BJP workers to reach out to the marginalised in every community and check whether the Centre's policies to provide saturation benefits have helped them all.

"Our campaigns should be designed to reach out to the most marginalised in all communities. We should do this not only for considerations of vote. We should build robust bridges with them also because there are marginalised and poor in all communities," said the PM in his valedictory address to the two-day national executive meeting of BJP.

While ANI quoted sources as saying the PM called upon BJP workers to meet "Pasmanda Muslims, Bohra community, Muslim professionals and educated Muslims", Maharashtra deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis, who briefed media about the PM's remarks, denied it. "The PM did not take any specific name but spoke about marginalised from all sections. Therefore, they are also included. His speech was not that of a politician but of a statesman," he said.

A fresh cold wave hit the national capital on Monday (January 16, 2023) with the minimum temperature at the Safdarjung observatory, the city's base station, dropping to 1.4 degrees Celsius, which is said to be the lowest in the month since January 1, 2021. The weather station at Lodhi Road, where the India Meteorological Department (IMD) headquarter is located, recorded a minimum temperature of 1.6 degrees Celsius. The minimum temperature also plunged to 2.8 degrees Celsius at Ayanagar in southwest Delhi, two degrees Celsius at the Ridge in central Delhi, and 2.2 degrees Celsius at Jafarpur in west Delhi.

The minimum temperature in Delhi has dropped by around nine notches in just two days. It was 10.2 degrees Celsius on Saturday and 4.7 degrees Celsius on Sunday.

At least 68 people were killed Sunday when an aircraft went down near the city of Pokhara in central Nepal, a government official said, the country’s deadliest plane crash in more than 30 years.

Seventy-two people – four crew members and 68 passengers – were on board the ATR 72 plane operated by Nepal’s Yeti Airlines when it crashed, Yeti Airlines spokesman Sudarshan Bartaula said. Thirty-seven were men, 25 were women, three were children and three were infants, Nepal’s civil aviation authority reported.

Search efforts were called off after dark, Army spokesman Krishna Prasad Bhandari said, and will resume Monday morning. Hundreds of first responders had been still working to locate the remaining four individuals before then, Bhandari said.