Congress workers and activists in Orissa have been asked not to raise slogans in the name of state leaders or local leaders in a meeting or a rally.

Congress MLAs will meet governor today to demand action in the matter

The opposition in the state assembly staged a walkout from the house on Tuesday, demanding the resignation of minister of state for higher education and woman and child welfare, Maya Kodnani, for her alleged involvement in the 2002 Naroda Patia massacre. MLAs from the Congress will meet governor Naval Kishore Sharma on Wednesday to seek his intervention in the matter and to pressure the government into removing Kodnani and take strong action against her.

Fashion designer and politician Shaina NC to campaign widely in Guj to woo youth

The BJP has a design to thwart the Congress's attempt to steal all the glamour this election season. Mumbai-based fashion designer Shaina NC, the first in the league of Bharatiya Janta Party's youth icons of the country, will campaign extensively in Gujarat on college campuses and interact with focused urban groups ahead of the Lok Sabha elections. The Congress has a similar plan — its glam-gun is Rahul Gandhi. Daughter of former sheriff of Mumbai Nana Chudasama, Shaina visited Ahmedabad on Sunday to attend a meeting of Young Presidents' Organisation at a farm house in the outskirts of the city. 

Vote-on-account for '09-'10 to be tabled tomorrow

The state government would be tabling the 'vote-on-account' for the financial year 2009-10 on lines of the union government's interim budget in the assembly session scheduled to begin on Wednesday. The vote-on-account will be tabled on Thursday. 

The state government is coming out with a vote-of-account because the Centre has not yet declared the tax structure and budgetary initiatives due to the upcoming Lok Sabha elections this year.

Sources said the budget for the new fiscal is expected to be tabled only in July after the parliamentary elections and the new government at the Centre comes out with the 2009-10 budget. 

Berlin  - A major study of 30 nations has come to the surprising conclusion that it is not rich countries which are proving best at beating poverty, but the well-governed, democratic states.

Norway won first place in the study, the Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI), published Tuesday by the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Germany, with other Scandinavian nations, New Zealand, Canada and the Netherlands near the top in most categories.

Not only were their democracies robust, but they also posted good results in employment, education and environmental protection.

Brussels  - The European Union should ease its rules to allow new members to swap their national currency for the euro more rapidly, Hungary's prime minister said Tuesday.

"The best protection against foreign-exchange problems is to join the eurozone ... We should see how the steps towards the euro could be made quicker," Ferenc Gyurcsany told journalists in Brussels.

In particular, countries which have met the EU's strict rules on inflation and budget discipline should be allowed to join the single currency without having to spend two years in the preparatory Exchange Rate Mechanism 2 (ERM 2), he said.