REUTERS (Reuters) – As India’s power minister stood up to address parliament one day last May, the chamber was plunged into darkness and a roar of laughter went up.

Rolling power cuts are part of daily life in India, where energy production falls far short of the demands of a fast-growing economy and an increasingly affluent population, but blackouts for two days this week across a vast swathe of the country were no laughing matter.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – The drought threatening India due to elusive monsoon rains will make it politically harder for the government to raise prices of subsidised fuel, delaying a reform urgently needed to rein in the country’s fiscal deficit, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, told Reuters.

So far India’s monsoon rains are 22 percent below average and are unlikely to pick up enough to avert a drought, which could dent both crop output and rural incomes and increase reliance on subsidised fuel such as diesel to irrigate farmland.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Forty-eight hours into the bloody assault on Mumbai in November 2008, smoke was billowing from the wreckage of the Taj Mahal hotel and commandos were flushing out the last gunmen holed up in the opulent landmark of India’s financial capital.

A short distance away in the city’s southernmost peninsula, security forces were still battling at Nariman House, a Jewish centre where two of the Islamist militants had taken half a dozen people hostage, including a rabbi and his pregnant wife.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Forty-eight hours into the bloody assault on Mumbai in November 2008, smoke was billowing from the wreckage of the Taj Mahal hotel and commandos were flushing out the last gunmen holed up in the opulent landmark of India’s financial capital.

A short distance away in the city’s southernmost peninsula, security forces were still battling at Nariman House, a Jewish centre where two of the Islamist militants had taken half a dozen people hostage, including a rabbi and his pregnant wife.

GOLAR PARA, Bangladesh (Reuters) – At first, the boat bobbing in the water in the middle of the night appeared to be empty. But when Bangladeshi villagers took a closer look, they found a baby too weak to cry, a refugee from marauding mobs in Myanmar apparently abandoned by her family.

The cleft-lipped infant, just weeks old, is among hundreds of Rohingya Muslims who fled this month’s sectarian violence in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, packing themselves into rough wooden boats and heading for the shores of neighboring Bangladesh.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – It had been another brutal day for the rupee on the foreign exchanges as India’s economic crisis escalated and, travelling home from a visit to Myanmar last week, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh summoned journalists on his plane for a briefing.

The one statement he had prepared for the media that night, however, concerned allegations of corruption levelled against him and his cabinet ministers – not the economy.

NEW DELHI (Reuters) – It had been another brutal day for the rupee on the foreign exchanges as India’s economic crisis escalated and, travelling home from a visit to Myanmar last week, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh summoned journalists on his plane for a briefing.

The one statement he had prepared for the media that night, however, concerned allegations of corruption leveled against him and his cabinet ministers – not the economy.

COLOMBO (Reuters) – He was pardoned by the president and released from jail, but Sri Lankan former army chief Sarath Fonseka had nothing but scorn for the government on his first day of freedom and vowed to fight for its downfall.

The ex-general said it could take 5 to 10 years to change the political culture of the island nation but he was determined to join forces with opposition parties even if the terms of his release prevented him from standing for office.

COLOMBO (Reuters) – He was pardoned by the president and released from jail, but Sri Lankan former army chief Sarath Fonseka had nothing but scorn for the government on his first day of freedom and vowed to fight for its downfall.

The ex-general said it could take 5 to 10 years to change the political culture of the island nation but he was determined to join forces with opposition parties even if the terms of his release prevented him from standing for office.

COLOMBO, May 22 (Reuters) – Sri Lanka’s central bank expects
recent measures it has taken to boost the rupee will help
the currency recover to below 125 to the U.S. dollar, but it is
not targeting a particular level, Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal
told Reuters on Tuesday.

The rupee is hovering around 129-130 despite a warning from
the Treasury Secretary last month that the authorities would
intervene in the market if it did not appreciate to 125.