Top Congress figure lashes out at India's Rahul Gandhi

  Beleaguered Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi came under new pressure Friday when a former minister accused his aides of waging a dirty tricks campaign against her and said his Congress party was undemocratic.
Jayanthi Natarajan, environment minister in the last Congress government, said she was resigning from the centre-left party and aimed several parting
shots at the 44-year-old Gandhi who oversaw its disastrous showing in last May's general election.
In a letter to party president Sonia Gandhi -- who is also Rahul's mother -- Natarajan accused his office of "planting stories" in the media and making her a scapegoat for delays in environmentally sensitive projects.
"A hysterical, vicious, false and motivated campaign was orchestrated against me," Natarajan said at a subsequent press conference in the southern city of Chennai.
Natarajan said she had come under pressure from Gandhi while in office to hold back approval for mega projects and was then stunned to hear him publicly criticise the delays in a speech to industrialists.
"I was never a bottleneck, nor was I ever responsible for unwarranted delays in major projects, and I can prove this at any time," said Natarajan, who quit the government months before the elections, which were won by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Rahul has been heavily criticised in the media for his lacklustre leadership in the elections, in which Congress recorded its worst ever
showing and lost power to new Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP.
However few in the party have gone public in criticising either Rahul or his mother, who is the widow of the slain former premier Rajiv Gandhi.
Natarajan said there was no "inner democracy" in the party and she felt she could no longer function in such a "suffocating atmosphere".
Most analysts believe Congress is facing further humiliation in Delhi's
state elections next month when it is forecast to come a distant third behind
the BJP and an anti-corruption party that won power last time. 

NEW DELHI, Jan 30, 2015 (BSS/AFP) 

Bomb attack at Pakistani mosque kills at least 12: officials

A bomb blast at a Shiite mosque in
southern Pakistan Friday killed at least 12 people and wounded dozens more, officials said, in the deadliest sectarian attack to hit the country in more than a year.
The bomb exploded as worshippers attended Friday prayers in the town of
Shikarpur in Sindh province, around 470 kilometres (300 miles) north of
Karachi.
Pakistan has been hit by a rising tide of sectarian violence in recent years, most of it by hardline Sunni Muslim groups targeting Shiite Muslims, who make up around one in five of the population.
Sindh provincial health minister Jam Mehtab said "at least 12 people have been killed and more than 40 injured".
Shaukat Ali Memon, the medical superintendent of Civil Hospital in Shikarpur gave a death toll of 20, but there was no confirmation of the higher figure.
It is the bloodiest single sectarian attack in Pakistan since January 22 last year, when 24 Shiite pilgrims returning from Iran were killed when their bus was bombed in southwestern Baluchistan province.
Friday's attack came as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, to discuss the law and order situation in the city.
Karachi, Pakistan's biggest city and economic heartbeat has wrestled for several years with a bloody wave of criminal, sectarian and politician murders. 

KARACHI, Jan 30, 2015 (BSS/AFP) 

Greece will stay in eurozone: French PM

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls sought to reassure Chinese concerns about the eurozone today, insisting that Greece will stay part of the single currency.

"Greece will remain, must remain, in the eurozone, the new Greek prime minister has said, it can not be any other way," Valls said, referring to the radical left-wing politician Alexis Tsipras.

There was "no need to worry" about a possible Greek exit from the single currency, Valls told Chinese journalists on the second day of a three-day trip to the Asian powerhouse.
"We must help Greece out of the crisis she faces. But at the same time Greece must respect its commitments, that is how the European Union works," he continued.
Sources in Valls' entourage said that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang asked him whether Greece would leave the euro when the two met on Thursday.
The new Greek government is demanding a renegotiation of the 240-billion-euro ($269 billion) international bailout it was granted in 2010 to avoid a financial meltdown.
It has already begun to roll back years of austerity measures demanded by the EU and the International Monetary Fund in return for the money, and China itself has said it was "highly concerned" about a review of the privatisation of the port of Piraeus, where Chinese firm COSCO was one of the bidders.
Athens is hoping to cut the debt in half, but the European Union and Germany have warned that there is little support for such a move.

Valls tried to dispel concerns about the eurozone, citing a "strong partnership" between its two largest economies, France and Germany, and the expected impact of the ECB's quantitative easing measures.
"I know there are some concerns that relate to the situation of the eurozone or Europe, which remains a major trading partner," he said.

"Discussions are constantly taking place between China and the European Union, so come and invest in Europe, and in France in particular," he told Chinese businessmen. 

BEIJING, Jan 30, 2015 (BSS/AFP) -