The leader of India’s ruling party, Sonia Gandhi, was recovering yesterday after undergoing “successful” surgery for an undisclosed medical condition in the US, a spokesman said.
“The surgery is over,” Congress Party spokesman Janardhan Dwivedi said, adding that the “surgeon had indicated that the operation was successful.”
The 64-year-old Gandhi, widely seen as India’s most powerful politician, was recovering in an intensive care unit. The name and location of the hospital has not been released.
“As this is a personal matter that pertains to her health and medical treatment, her family requests that her privacy be -respected,” Dwivedi said.
India’s Tehelka news magazine said on microblogging site Twitter that Gandhi was admitted on Thursday to New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the world’s largest private cancer center, according to the hospital Web site. The Congress Party broke the surprise news of Gandhi’s impending surgery on Thursday morning and has since blocked all queries regarding the nature of her illness.
The Italian-born Gandhi is the widow of assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and wields enormous influence from her key power-broking position as Congress Party president.
In her absence, she appointed a four-member group to handle the day-to-day running of the Congress Party — including her son Rahul Gandhi, who is tipped as a future prime minister.
The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has ruled India for most of its post-independence history, with three members of the family becoming prime minister.
Sonia Gandhi holds total sway within the Congress and is credited with crafting the strategies that gave the party back-to-back general election victories in 2004 and 2009.
An expected absence of two to three weeks means she will miss a crucial session of parliament for the scandal-plagued government, which intends to introduce draft laws on a range of key areas, including corruption, land acquisition and food security.
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency
ISSUE: Some foreigners seek women to give birth to their children in Cambodia, and the 13 women were charged with contravening a law banning commercial surrogacy Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday thanked Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni for granting a royal pardon last year to 13 Filipino women who were convicted of illegally serving as surrogate mothers in the Southeast Asian kingdom. Marcos expressed his gratitude in a meeting with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet, who was visiting Manila for talks on expanding trade, agricultural, tourism, cultural and security relations. The Philippines and Cambodia belong to the 10-nation ASEAN, a regional bloc that promotes economic integration but is divided on other issues, including countries whose security alignments is with the US or China. Marcos has strengthened