Srinagar/Doda, Apr 4 (PTI) Three more bodies were recovered today from debris of the houses that collapsed in landslides caused due to incessant rains in Jammu and Kashmir, officials said.

With the recovery of the bodies, toll in two separate incidents of mudslide has increased to 20.

Search and rescue workers retrieved the body of seven- year-old boy Ahmad Hajam from the debris of a house at village Laden in Chadoora tehsil this morning, a police official said, with this toll increased to 16.

Laden village witnessed landslide caused by heavy rains on intervening night of Sunday and Monday. Rescue parties immediately swung into action and recovered 15 bodies of two families from the debris of the house swallowed by earth. The boy had remained untraced.

The operation ended with the recovery of the body of the missing boy from the debris, the official said.

Meanwhile, two more bodies were recovered today from the debris of the collapsed house, which was yesterday hit by a massive landslide triggered by incessant rains in Doda district. Three persons were still missing.

“Rescuers today recovered two more bodies from the debris of the house that collapsed under a massive landslide in Diwalkund in Dessa belt of Doda district yesterday,” Senior Superintendent of Police Doda, Javed Naseeb Manhas told PTI.

With the recovery of two more bodies, he said, the total bodies recovered since yesterday has risen to four.

“Two bodies were recovered yesterday. Three people who are also feared dead, continue to be trapped under the debris of the house which has come under around 18 feet of mud and slush,” he said, adding a joint rescue operation by Police, Army and civil administration was under way.

“Continuous rainfall has been creating hurdles in the operation as the area is prone to more landslides. It is a remote area which lacks road accessibility thus making the movement of heavy machinery impossible”, he said.

The house of one Jodh Ram had collapsed yesterday after being hit by a massive landslide burying the debris under more than 18 feet of mud and slush.

Chennai, Apr 4 (PTI) An assistant professor of Annamalai University at Chidambaram is among six persons arrested in connection with theft of answer sheets in the varsity.

C Bhaskaran, an Assistant Professor of History and five others, all office attendants, were arrested on Thursday on a complaint from the university after it was noticed in February that answer papers were missing from the varsity’s strong room.

The gang allegedly retrieved the papers from the strong room using duplicate keys and handed them over to students to rewrite correct answers in return for money, police said.

A probe is on to ascertain if more persons were involved in this matter, police said.

Deoria (UP), Apr 4 (PTI) Over Rs two crore went missing from a branch of the Central bank of India on Ansari road in Kotwali area here.

Chest incharge of the bank Vinod Kumar Singh said that Rs 2.77 crore was missing, Superintendent of Police Manoj Kumar said.

He said the policeman who was posted as guard at the bank was also missing.

On March 31, the bank employees instead of keeping the money in the chest, had put it in a box and left for the day, the SP said.

He said that features of the man seen in the CCTV footage matched with that of the missing policeman.

Two bank employees were also being said to be missing, Kumar said, adding, the matter is being investigated.

Bengaluru, April 4 (PTI) With the land bill emerging as a common anti-government plank for the opposition, BJP today vowed to take on the “disinformation campaign” being run by the Congress and other parties by reaching out to farmers in every village and explaining to them all aspects of the bill.

The controversial bill was discussed in detail on the concluding day of the two-day National Executive meeting and formed a part of the party’s political resolution adopted there.

An elaborate power-point presentation on the issue was made at the meet and a booklet titled ‘Information to Counter Disinformation (placing facts before the people)’ was released as the party sought to rally its cadre around in support of the bill which is pending in Parliament.

“We will not allow the disinformation campaign which is baseless…The disinformation campaign by the opposition will be met with…The party will reveal the facts at every village and tell people that we have come with a law that is in favour of farmers and people.

“All party members would be going out to explain the public on the contents of the land bill. The intention of the government is to help farmers,” Union minister Nirmala Sitharaman told reporters.

Asked if national executive members expressed concern over any aspect of the bill, she said “chinta (concern), if there is any, is about the disinformation campaign?.

She said the party will engage with allies like Shiv Sena and SAD, which have expressed serious reservations, and added that the party’s intention was to take everybody on aboard and not to hurt anyone.

“When we are willing to engage with the opposition then why would not we engage with our own allies,” she said.

Cairo, Apr 3 (PTI) A Bollywood musical extravaganza?is being presented in Egypt?as part of the third edition of the ‘India by the Nile’ festival.

“No Indian festival is complete without a?Bollywood?song and dance performance.?Bollywood?Love Story last year was an instant hit and received great reviews. This year we are bringing ‘Bollywood?Musical ? A Tale of Love, Passion and Revenge’ themed on?Amitabh?Bachchan’s?most important roles,” said the Ambassador of India to Egypt, Navdeep Suri.??

‘India by Nile’ is the largest foreign cultural festival in Egypt since the?25 January?Revolution that topped former president Hosni Mubarak.

The musical performed in Cairo at the Opera House from 1-2 April and will be staged tonight before travelling to Alexandria on April 6-8.

“Bollywood?Extravaganza”?features a love story that is set against the backdrop of the colorful world of?Bollywood and with the help of more than 35 dancers.

Bachchan, 72, inaugurated the festival last Monday during his visit to Egypt.

Panaji, Apr 3 (PTI) An alert Union HRD Minister Smriti Irani today raised an alarm after she spotted a hidden camera at an outlet of a leading garment store that was pointed towards the trial room she used while trying out some clothes after which Goa police registered a case of voyeurism.

Four staff members of the Fabindia showroom at the upmarket boutique chain at Candolim near here were detained for questioning following a complaint by BJP MLA Michael Lobo who was called by Irani after the incident. The Minister along with her businessman husband Zubin Irani are on a private visit to Goa.

Irani came across the camera when she was in the showroom to buy clothes and immediately protested, alerting her husband, said Superintendent of Police (North) Umesh Gaonkar.

She then called Lobo, who lodged an First Information Report (FIR).

Gaonkar said four staff members of the showroom were detained and that objectionable images were seen from the recordings of the hidden camera that was seized by police.

Footage from the camera, installed four months ago according to staff at the store, was being recorded in a computer in the manager’s office, Lobo said, adding that it held many recordings of people changing in the trial room.

“When we went through the hard disk and computer to check the recordings we saw everything. All things were getting recorded over there when anybody was changing clothes. From the level of stomach till above everything was getting recorded,” he said, adding, “This is mischief… Somebody has been watching the recording.”

Police have already sealed the shop and is inspecting the showroom. The CCTV camera was installed on a wall, against a foot-high ventilation gap on the side of the trial room cubicle.

“A case has been filed under section 354 C (voyeurism) and 509 (intrusion into privacy) of Indian Penal Code against employees who were monitoring the cameras. We are analysing the entire data,” Gaonkar said. Goa Chief Minister.

Kabul (AFP) – In a grimy Kabul street, the director gives the order to roll the cameras, and filming starts on a remarkable new TV drama that boldly challenges taboos about women in conservative Afghanistan.

Shereen, the star, enters the scene and buys a few things from street vendors when suddenly her husband, a possessive and brutal man, grabs her.

But tough, no-nonsense Shereen won’t back down and a row ensues.

“Shereen’s Law”, due to be aired on Afghan TV before the end of the year, tells the story of a 36-year-old woman who brings up three children on her own while forging a career as a clerk at a court in Kabul.

Such a character is already shocking in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society where most women are confined to lives of menial domesticity.

But the show deliberately ramps up the impact. Shereen fights corruption, harassment, and rape, and tries to divorce her husband, whom she wed in a forced marriage.

More than 13 years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains deeply wedded to traditional customs and its airwaves have never hosted anything like this before.

“It is the first such drama — that is about women, that is about empowering women, that is about the struggles of women in Afghanistan,” Leena Alam, the Afghan actress who plays Shereen, told AFP.

– Giving women a voice –

Women in Afghanistan still suffer brutal violence on a daily basis. On March 19 a young woman was beaten to death and her body burned in central Kabul for allegedly burning a Koran.

Defying entrenched conventions in such a country comes with a risk, as Alam — who moved to the US as a child with her family before returning in 2007 — admits.

“It’s a bit dangerous, even for myself. Yesterday we were shooting outside. When… I’m waiting for the shot I’m always scared that somebody may throw acid on me or somebody may hit me with a knife,” she said.

Casting the show was not easy — several actors said no to a storyline they found just too challenging. One, who played a lawyer friend of Shereen, was forced to pull out because her husband was unhappy with the show.

As well as portraying a strong female character, the series attacks the Afghan judicial system, where rampant corruption is hidden behind a wall of silence.

“It takes a lot of courage to write something like this and it takes a lot of courage to play something like Shereen,” Alam, a producer who has also appeared in several Afghan films, said.

“But I think it’s time, after more than 30 years, to move on and educate people and give them the information as bluntly as Shereen.”

Apart from the exterior street scenes, the show’s action takes place in a studio with sets decked out to look like a courtroom, Shereen’s house and legal offices.

No detail has been missed, from the portrait of President Ashraf Ghani in the courtroom to the stapler on Shereen’s desk.

Director and writer Max Walker, an Australian who came to work in Afghanistan, says he took advice in advance on how to avoid drawing too much attention from conservative clerics.

“There’s been an enormous consultation, an enormous review of the script and of the whole storytelling process to make sure that it raises these issues, but it doesn’t raise them so bluntly and so offensively that it’s going to make the programme go off air,” Walker said.

Under the Taliban’s hardline 1996-2001 regime, television was banned, but now 58 percent of homes have a set, according to the Asia Foundation development organisation.

“Shereen’s Law” will face tough competition for viewers from popular imported Turkish and Indian soap operas.

Frenchwoman Anne Jasim Falher, the founder and head of consultancy firm ATR in Kabul and a long-term observer of Afghan society, says television has a role to play in changing attitudes.

“Television has allowed people to shake things up on forced marriage, probably also on violence against women and violence within families,” she said.

The 12 45-minute episodes are being made by the Tolo television channel, one of the big successes of Afghanistan’s new media scene, largely funded by foreign donors when it was launched in 2004.

The Moby group, which owns Tolo, claims a pioneering role for itself, notably for being the first Afghan channel to have female and male presenters alongside one another.

“You have to cross the barriers sometimes and you have to do something where you give the voice to the women,” Moby’s director of programming Massoud Sanjer told AFP.

“Afghanistan is a country where if you tell directly people ‘do this’, they won’t do it. But if you just give them a reason, make them think themselves, they will do it.

“So a TV show will definitely help the men who are the dominant power of the society to think that a woman is also part of this country, a woman is part of their lives, and a woman is part of their family.”