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NEW DELHI — Voters went to the polls in New Delhi on the first major day of India’s marathon national election Thursday, with the capital a key battleground for a new anti-corruption party which shot to fame last year.

Almost a fifth of the parliament’s 543 seats are up for grabs on Thursday, the third of nine phases of voting in the world’s biggest election that will end when results are published on May 16.

As well as the capital and its 17-million residents, ballots were cast in densely populated rural constituencies in northern India where the Hindu nationalist frontrunner Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is expected to poll strongly.

But Thursday was of particular importance for the 18-month-old anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) which triumphed in the Delhi state election last December and is now contesting more than 400 parliamentary seats nationally.

Seen as a potential challenge to India’s established political parties earlier this year, there were signs of disillusionment among some early voters after AAP’s troubled time running the Delhi government.

The party has struggled to shake the “quitter” tag used by critics following the dramatic resignation of party chief Arvind Kejriwal just 49 days after he came to office as the capital’s chief minister.

“We need stability. So I won’t waste my vote on him,” Jitender Singh, a 38-year-old rickshaw driver in a purple turban, told AFP in the old part of the city. “For now it is Modi, Modi, Modi for me. For the country actually.”

Polarising figure 

He was referring to BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, the controversial hardline Hindu nationalist tipped to become prime minister at the head of a coalition led by his party.

His links to anti-Muslim riots in his home state of Gujarat and his uncompromising public statements make him a polarising figure, particularly for religious minorities.

But many voters have been swayed by his promises of economic development, strong leadership and clean government after a decade of rule by the scandal-tainted Congress Party and the Gandhi political dynasty.

Kedarnath Agarwal, a 79-year-old speaking as shopkeepers rolled up their shutters and the first voters trickled into a nearby polling station, said he would abandon Congress for the first time in 50 years.

“All my hopes are pinned on Modi. He is a real leader, strong, decisive and experienced — that’s what we need this time,” he said.

The 63-year-old politician made headlines Thursday after declaring for the first time that he was married, ending one of the biggest mysteries about his closely guarded private life.

Media reports had previously described how he walked away from a marriage arranged by his parents when he was a child, but this has never been confirmed by the man himself who has portrayed his single status as a virtue while campaigning.

Riot victims 

In Uttar Pradesh state, a key battleground that sends 80 MPs to parliament, voters in an area hit by religious riots last August also went to the polls, including those still living in refugee camps.

The riots left more than 50, mostly Muslims, dead and tore apart communities in the district of Muzaffarnagar, with local politicians facing charges of inciting the violence.

The unrest is seen as having polarised the electorate in Uttar Pradesh along religious lines, with the BJP seen as benefiting from greater support from Hindus while secular-rooted parties promise to protect religious minorities.

“I will commit suicide, kill my children but not vote for Modi. He is so ferocious,” Adisa Khatoon, a 35-year-old mother from one of the camps, told AFP.

The BJP has fielded two candidates from the area who have been charged with inciting the attacks which drove 50,000 people from their homes.

Elsewhere on Thursday, a second attack by Maoist rebels targeting security forces guarding pollings booths left two paramilitary policemen dead in eastern Bihar state, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

On Wednesday, three policemen were killed in the insurgency-wracked central state of Chhattisgarh, parts of which were poll-bound on Thursday.

Back in Delhi, early voting took place peacefully and slowly after authorities declared a public holiday, with voters making their way to polling stations in bright spring sunshine.

Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi, dressed in a green sari, and her son Rahul, who is leading campaigning for a national election for the first time, cast their votes on Thursday morning.

The first two rounds of voting in India took place Monday and Wednesday in the remote northeast of the country where only 12 constituencies went to the polls.

PERTH, Australia — The hunt for “pings” from the missing Malaysian airliner’s black box narrowed in the remote Indian Ocean on Thursday after fresh signals were detected, raising hopes that wreckage will soon be found.

With the beacon on Flight MH370’s data recorders due to fade more than a month after the Boeing 777 vanished, the Australian-led search continued trawling for signals, seeking to pinpoint an exact location before sending down a submersible to take a look.

The Perth-based Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) announced Thursday that the search area off western Australia had been significantly pared down to 57,923 square kilometres, 10 times smaller than its previous size.

The Australian ship Ocean Shield, bearing a special US Navy “towed pinger locator”, is now focused on a far smaller area of the Indian Ocean 2,280 kilometres northwest of Perth where it picked up two fresh signals Tuesday.

Those transmissions matched a pair of signals logged over the weekend.

“When you put those two [sets of pings] together, it makes us very optimistic,” US Seventh fleet spokesman commander William Marks said, adding that the search was getting “closer and closer”.

“This is not something you find with commercial shipping, not something just found in nature — this is definitely something that is man-made, consistent with what you would find with these black boxes.

“So we are looking pretty good now.”

He told CNN he expected the pings to last “maybe another day or two”.

No floating debris from the aircraft, which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people aboard, has yet been found despite days of exhaustive searching by ships and aircraft from several nations.

Renewed optimism 

Officials had feared that the signals which were initially picked up might not be detected again, particularly since the batteries on the “black box” tracking beacons have a normal lifespan of about 30 days.

Australia confirmed Wednesday that the first signals were consistent with black box recorders.

JACC chief Angus Houston said the high-tech underwater surveillance was meant to define a reduced and more manageable search area in depths of around four kilometres, but he acknowledged that time was running out.

“I believe we are searching in the right area but we need to visually identify the aircraft before we can confirm with certainty that this is the final resting place of MH370,” he said Wednesday.

Houston again urged against unduly inflating hopes, for the sake of the families of missing passengers and crew who have endured a month-long nightmare punctuated by a number of false leads.

But he voiced renewed optimism.

“They [experts] believe the signals to be consistent with the specification and description of a flight data recorder,” he said.

No other ships will be allowed near the Ocean Shield as it must work in an environment as free of noise as possible, but up to 10 military aircraft, four civil planes and 13 ships were to take part in surface searches in the region on Thursday, the JACC said.

Houston said it would not be long before a US-made autonomous underwater vehicle called a Bluefin-21 would be sent down to investigate.

“I don’t think that time is very far away,” he said.

The pinger locator can search an area six times that which can be scanned by the Bluefin-21’s sonar.

In Malaysia, Home Minister Zahid Hamidi said there was “no conclusive evidence yet” from the continuing investigation into what caused the plane to divert from its Kuala Lumpur-Beijing route.

Zahid, who oversees law enforcement, said around 180 people had been interviewed, including relatives of passengers and crew as well as airline ground staff and engineers.

“We are filtering all the information. When the evidence is conclusive then we will let the media know about it,” he said.

A number of theories have been put forward to explain MH370’s baffling disappearance.

They include a hijacking or terrorist attack, a pilot gone rogue or a sudden catastrophic event that incapacitated the crew and left the plane to fly for hours until it ran out of fuel in its suspected Indian Ocean crash site.

But no evidence has emerged to bolster any theory.

MOSCOW — Dragging much of Europe into his fight with Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged European leaders Thursday to quickly help Ukraine settle its gas debt to Russia to prevent an imminent shutdown of Russian natural gas supplies to the continent.

Putin’s letter to 18 leaders, released Thursday by the Kremlin, is part of Russia’s efforts to retain control over its struggling neighbour, which is teetering on the verge of financial ruin and is facing a pro-Russian separatist mutiny in the east.

A large Russian military buildup alongside the Ukrainian border has also raised fears that the Kremlin could use the tensions in eastern Ukraine as a pretext to invade, following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea last month.

Putin’s move raises the spectre of a new gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine that could affect much of Europe. In 2009, Moscow turned off supplies to Kiev, leading to the shutdown of Russian gas moving across Ukrainian pipelines to other European countries.

The amount that Putin claims Ukraine owes is growing by billions every day. In the letter, Putin said Ukraine owes Russia $17 billion in gas discounts and potentially another $18.4 billion incurred by Ukraine as a minimal take-or-pay fine under their 2009 gas contract.

He added, on top of that $35.4 billion, Russia also holds $3 billion in Ukrainian government bonds.

The amount is far greater than the estimated $14 billion bailout that the International Monetary Fund is considering for Ukraine.

Putin warned that Ukraine’s mounting debt is forcing Moscow to demand advance payments for further gas supplies. He warned that if Ukraine failed to make such payments, Russia’s state-controlled gas giant Gazprom will “completely or partially cease gas deliveries”.

Putin told the leaders that a possible shutdown of Russian gas supplies will increase the risk of Ukraine siphoning off gas that intended for Europe and will make it difficult to accumulate sufficient reserves for next winter. He urged quick talks between Russia and European consumers of Russian gas to prevent a looming shutdown of supplies.

“The fact that our European partners have unilaterally withdrawn from the concerted efforts to resolve the Ukrainian crisis, and even from holding consultations with the Russian side, leaves Russia no alternative,” Putin said.

He said Russia may decide to help its struggling neighbour “not in a unilateral way, but on equal conditions with our European partners”.

“It is also essential to take into account the actual investments, contributions and expenditures that Russia has shouldered by itself alone for such a long time in supporting Ukraine,” he wrote in the letter. “Only such an approach would be fair and balanced and only such an approach can lead to success. “

Putin has been tightening the economic screws on the cash-strapped Kiev government since it came to power in February, after Ukraine’s Russia-leaning president fled the country after months of protest.

Starting this month, Russia state energy giant Gazprom scrapped all discounts on gas to Ukraine, meaning a 70 per cent price hike that will add to the debt figure.

Russia argues that a gas discount was tied to a lease for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet base in Crimea, a Ukrainian region that Russia annexed last month. And Ukraine has promised the IMF that it will cut energy subsidies to residents in exchange for the bailout. That means gas prices were set to rise 50 per cent on May 1 even before the latest salvo from Putin.

PERTH, Australia — Two fresh signals have been picked up in the search for missing Malaysian flight MH370, raising hopes Wednesday that wreckage will be found within days even as black box batteries start to expire.

Australian ship Ocean Shield detected the signals Tuesday to match a pair of transmissions picked up over the weekend that have been analysed as consistent with signals from the plane’s flight data recorder, the head of the search said.

“Ocean Shield has been able to reacquire the signals on two more occasions, late yesterday afternoon and later last night,” said Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre.

The Australian ship has now picked up four transmissions, crucial information as searchers try to pinpoint the crash zone for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.

Officials had feared that the signals which were initially picked up might not be detected again, particularly since the batteries on the black box tracking beacons have a normal lifespan of about 30 days.

The new transmissions, found in the same broad area as the previous two, lasted for five minutes and 32 seconds and about seven minutes respectively, Houston said.

“Yesterday’s signals will assist in better defining a reduced and much more manageable search area on the ocean floor,” Houston said.

“I believe we are searching in the right area but we need to visually identify the aircraft before we can confirm with certainty that this is the final resting place of MH370.”

Houston, however, again urged caution for the sake of the families of those aboard the flight which mysteriously vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and said the search for more signals would go on.

“Hopefully with lots of transmissions we’ll have a tight, small area and... in a matter of days we’ll be able to find something on the bottom that might confirm that this is the last resting place of MH370,” Houston told reporters.

Agonising wait 

For families of MH370 passengers, who marked the one-month anniversary of the plane’s disappearance on Tuesday, the suspense has been excruciating.

“Let’s wait and see. I want to see the evidence that the plane is at the bottom of the sea,” said Malaysian Tan Tuan Lay, whose daughter, 31-year-old bank employee Chew Kar Mooi, was one of the passengers on board.

“I am really sad [about]what has happened but I am prepared to accept what ever comes,” Tan said when asked to comment on the fresh signals.

Australia confirmed Wednesday that the first signals were consistent with black box recorders and that the search was narrowing.

“The analysis determines that a very stable, distinct and clear signal was detected at 33.331 kHz, and that it consistently pulsed at a 1.106 second interval,” Houston said.

“They believe the signals to be consistent with the specification and description of a flight data recorder.”

Authorities have been searching a linear arc produced from satellite data and believed to represent the last stretch of the plane’s flight path.

While China’s Haixun 01 vessel initially reported some acoustic signals at the southern end of this trajectory, these have not occurred again, Houston said.

No other ships will be allowed near the Ocean Shield, as its work must be done in an environment as free of noise as possible, but a modified RAAF AP-3C Orion was parachuting sonar buoys into the vicinity.

These will float on the surface and have a hydrophone attached dangling 305 metres below to hopefully pick up any emissions, although officials warned these could be dulled by thick silt on the seabed.

With the clock ticking on how long the black boxes could feasibly continue to transmit, Houston said it would not be long before a US-made autonomous underwater vehicle called a Bluefin 21 would be sent down to investigate.

Houston said officials were probably close to using this device because the last acoustic signal was very weak, indicating the batteries were running down.

“I don’t think that time is very far away,” he said.

Up to 11 military aircraft, four civil planes and 14 ships were searching Wednesday over a zone covering 75,423 square kilometres, Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre said.

The focus of the search area is 2,260 kilometres northwest of Perth.

The case of the missing jet has baffled aviation experts and frustrated the families of those on board, two-thirds of whom were Chinese.

Despite extensive searches on the ocean surface, no debris has yet been found, but Houston voiced optimism that the aircraft will be found “in the not too distant future”.

MURRYSVILLE, Pennsylvania — A student armed with a knife went on a stabbing and slashing spree at a high school near Pittsburgh on Wednesday morning, leaving as many as 20 people injured, including four students who suffered serious wounds, authorities said.

The suspect, a male student, was taken into custody and being questioned by police.

All of the victims were expected to survive, though a trauma surgeon at a hospital where the most seriously wounded was taken said some suffered potentially life-threatening injuries.

Not all of the 20 injured at Franklin Regional High School were cut by the knife, though most were, Westmoreland County emergency management spokesman Dan Stevens said. Some suffered scrapes and cuts in the mayhem that erupted at about 7:15am at the school in Murrysville, about 15 miles (25 kilometres) east of Pittsburgh.

One victim was an adult, authorities said, but none of the names of the victims was being released.

Dr. Chris Kaufman, the trauma director at Forbes Regional Medical Centre, the closest hospital, said two victims were in surgery and one was awaiting surgery. All three were all stabbed in the torso, abdomen, chest or back, which he called "significant injuries".

Seven teens and one adult were listed in serious condition at Forbes Hospital, West Penn Allegheny Health System spokeswoman Jennifer Davis said. They ranged in age from 15 to 60, and some were in surgery, she said. A ninth victim, a 15-year-old girl, was in good condition at another hospital, Davis said.

Twelve of the victims were sent to four hospitals, a spokeswoman said. She said hospital officials were still gathering information on their conditions and identities, including the patients' ages.

The suspect was being questioned by county detectives and police. Stevens said the suspect used a knife, though he didn't say what kind and said it wasn't immediately clear why the student attacked the others.

One student told WTAE he saw "students holding their stomachs, bleeding." That student wasn't sure how the assailant was stopped, but said at some point, a fire alarm was activated and said, "As soon as we heard the fire alarm was pulled we went outside."

Speaking outside the school, Morris Hundley said his 14-year-old daughter, Morriah, called him Wednesday morning in tears. Hundley came to the school still wearing his slippers, hoping for more information.

"My first thoughts were I think we need to home school now that this has happened," Hundley said. "The words can't describe how I feel. I'm just thinking of the victims."

Gov. Tom Corbett ordered state police to assist local investigators.

"I was shocked and saddened upon learning of the events that occurred this morning as students arrived at Franklin Regional High School. As a parent and grandparent, I can think of nothing more distressing than senseless violence against children. My heart and prayers go out to all the victims and their families," Corbett said in a statement.

School officials and Murrysville police didn't immediately return calls seeking further details, but the school issued a bulletin on its website saying: "A critical incident has occurred at the high school. All elementary schools are canceled, the middle school and high school students are secure."

PERTH, Australia — Search crews in the Indian Ocean failed to pick up more of the faint underwater sounds that may have been from the missing Malaysian jetliner’s black boxes whose batteries are at the end of their life.

The signals first heard late Saturday and early Sunday had sparked hopes of a breakthrough in the search for Flight 370, but Angus Houston, the retired Australian air chief marshal leading the search far off western Australia, said listening equipment on the Ocean Shield ship has picked up no trace of the sounds since then.

Finding the sound again is crucial to narrowing the search area so a submarine can be deployed to chart a potential debris field on the seafloor. If the autonomous sub was used now with the sparse data collected so far, covering all the potential places from which the pings might have come would take many days.

“It’s literally crawling at the bottom of the ocean so it’s going to take a long, long time,” Houston said.

The locator beacons on the black boxes have a battery life of only about a month — and Tuesday marked exactly one month since the plane vanished. Once the beacons blink off, locating the black boxes in such deep water would be an immensely difficult, if not impossible, task.

“There have been no further contacts with any transmission and we need to continue [searching] for several days right up to the point at which there’s absolutely no doubt that the batteries will have expired,” Houston said.

If, by that point, the US Navy towed pinger locator has failed to pick up more signals, the sub will be deployed. If it maps out a debris field on the ocean floor, the sonar system on board will be replaced with a camera unit to photograph any wreckage.

Earlier, Australia’s acting prime minister, Warren Truss, had said the Bluefin 21 autonomous sub would be launched on Tuesday, but a spokesman for Truss said later the conflicting information was a misunderstanding and Truss acknowledged the sub was not being used immediately.

Houston earlier said the two sounds heard Saturday and Sunday are consistent with the pings from an aircraft’s black boxes.

Defence Minister David Johnston called the sounds the most positive lead and said it was being pursued vigorously. Still, officials warned it could take days to determine whether the sounds were connected to the plane that vanished March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing with 239 on board.

“This is an herculean task — it’s over a very, very wide area, the water is extremely deep,” Johnston said. “We have at least several days of intense action ahead of us.”

Houston also warned of past false leads — such as ships detecting their own signals. Because of that, other ships are being kept away, so as not to add unwanted noise.

“We’re very hopeful we will find further evidence that will confirm the aircraft is in that location,” Houston said. “There’s still a little bit of doubt there, but I’m a lot more optimistic than I was one week ago.”

Such optimism was overshadowed by anguish at a hotel in Beijing where around 300 relatives of the flight’s passengers — most of whom were Chinese — wait for information about the plane’s fate.

One family lit candles on a heart-shaped cake to mark what would have been the 21st birthday of passenger Feng Dong, who had been working in construction in Singapore for the past year and was flying home to China via Kuala Lumpur. Feng’s mother wept as she blew out the candles.

A family member of another passenger said staying together allowed the relatives to support one another through the ordeal. “If we go back to our homes now it will be extremely painful,” said Steve Wang. “We have to face a bigger pain of facing uncertainty, the unknown future. This is the most difficult to cope with.”

Investigators have not found any explanation yet for why the plane lost communications and veered far off its Beijing-bound course, so the black boxes containing the flight data and cockpit voice recorders are key to learning what went wrong.

“Everyone’s anxious about the life of the batteries on the black box flight recorders,” said Truss, who is acting prime minister while Tony Abbott is overseas. “Sometimes they go on for many, many weeks longer than they’re mandated to operate for — we hope that’ll be the case in this instance. But clearly there is an aura of urgency about the investigation.”

The first sound picked up by the equipment on board the Ocean Shield lasted two hours and 20 minutes before it was lost, Houston said. The ship then turned around and picked up a signal again — this time recording two distinct “pinger returns” that lasted 13 minutes. That would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

The black boxes normally emit a frequency of 37.5 kilohertz and the signals picked up by the Ocean Shield were both 33.3 kilohertz, US Navy Capt. Mark Matthews said.

Houston said the frequency heard was considered “quite credible” by the manufacturer and noted that the frequency from the Air France jet that crashed several years ago was 34 kilohertz. The age of the batteries and the water pressure in the deep ocean can affect the transmission level, he said.

The Ocean Shield is dragging a pinger locator at a depth of 3 kilometres. It is designed to detect signals at a range of 1.8 kilometres, meaning it would need to be almost on top of the recorders to detect them if they were on the ocean floor, which is about 4.5 kilometres deep.

The surface search for any plane debris also continued Tuesday. Up to 14 planes and as many ships were focusing on a single search area covering 77, 580 square kilometres of ocean, said the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, which is overseeing the operation.

KIEV/DONETSK, Ukraine — Pro-Moscow protesters in eastern Ukraine seized arms in one city and declared a separatist republic in another, in moves Kiev described on Monday as part of a Russian-orchestrated plan to justify an invasion to dismember the country.

Kiev said the overnight seizure of public buildings in three cities in eastern Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking industrial heartland were a replay of events in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow seized and annexed last month.

“An anti-Ukrainian plan is being put into operation ... under which foreign troops will cross the border and seize the territory of the country,” Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk said in public remarks to his Cabinet. “We will not allow this.”

Pro-Russian protesters seized official buildings in the eastern cities of Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk on Sunday night, demanding that referendums be held on whether to join Russia like the one that preceded Moscow’s takeover of Crimea.

Acting President Oleksander Turchinov, in a televised address to the nation, said Moscow was attempting to repeat “the Crimea scenario”. He added that “anti-terrorist measures” would be deployed against those who had taken up arms.

Police said they cleared the protesters from the building in Kharkiv, but in Luhansk the demonstrators had seized weapons.

In Donetsk, home base of deposed Moscow-backed President Viktor Yanukovych, about 120 pro-Russia activists calling themselves the “Republican People’s Soviet of Donetsk” seized the chamber of the regional assembly.

An unidentified bearded man read out “the act of the proclamation of an independent state, Donetsk People’s Republic” in front of a white, blue and red Russian flag.

“In the event of aggressive action from the illegitimate Kiev authorities, we will appeal to the Russian Federation to bring in a peacekeeping contingent,” ran the proclamation.

The activists later read out the text by loud hailer to a cheering crowd of about 1,000 outside the building.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on March 1, a week after Yanukovych was overthrown, that Moscow had the right to take military action in Ukraine to protect Russian speakers, creating the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.

The United States and EU imposed mild financial sanctions on some Russian officials over the seizure of Crimea and have threatened much tougher measures if Russian troops, now massed on the frontier, enter other parts of Ukraine.

Western European governments have hesitated to alienate Russia further, fearing for supplies of Russian natural gas, much of which reaches EU buyers via pipelines across Ukraine. Ukraine’s own dependence on Russian gas gives Moscow strong leverage, especially over Ukraine’s eastern industrial areas.

Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom said it had received no payments from Ukraine for money owed for gas. It has given Kiev until midnight (2000 GMT) to reduce a $2.2 billion gas debt, although it has not said what it will do if Kiev misses the deadline. In previous years, gas disputes between Moscow and Kiev have hurt supplies to Europe.

In Vienna, Russia did not attend a meeting on Ukraine of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The US envoy to the OSCE, Daniel Baer, said Moscow needed to explain why tens of thousands of its troops were massed on the border.

NATO has halted cooperation with Russia. The Western military alliance announced on Monday it would now restrict access to its headquarters by Russian diplomats apart from Moscow’s ambassador, his deputy and two support staff.

Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said on Monday the main regional administration building in Kharkiv had been cleared of “separatists”. But police in Luhansk said protesters occupying the state security building there had seized weapons. Highway police closed off roads into the city.

“Unidentified people who are in the building have broken into the building’s arsenal and have seized weapons,” police said in a statement. Nine people had been hurt in the disturbances in Luhansk.

Mainly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, densely populated and producing much of the country’s industrial output, has seen a sharp rise in tension since Yanukovych fled the country, and Kiev has long said it believes Moscow is behind the unrest.

Pro-Russian protesters briefly held public buildings in the east early last month and three people were killed in clashes in mid-March. But trouble had subsided until Sunday.

Unlike in Crimea, where ethnic Russians form a majority, most people in the east and south are ethnically Ukrainian, although they speak Russian as a first language. Eastern oligarchs who once backed Yanukovych have thrown their weight behind the government in Kiev, and the unrest there is a test of their ability to assert control.

Yanukovych call

Yanukovych, in exile in Russia, has called for referendums across Ukrainian regions on their status within the country.

Ukraine’s defence ministry said a Russian marine had shot and killed a Ukrainian naval officer in Crimea on Sunday night. The 33-year-old officer, who was preparing to leave Crimea, was shot twice in officers’ quarters. Ukraine has said it is pulling its troops out of Crimea after Russian forces seized it.

Yatseniuk said that though much of the unrest had died down in eastern Ukraine in the past month there remained about 1,500 “radicals” in each region who spoke with “clear Russian accents” and whose activity was being coordinated abroad. But he said Ukrainian authorities had drawn up a plan to handle the crisis.

Avakov accused Putin on Sunday of orchestrating the “separatist disorder” and promised that disturbances would be brought under control without violence. Russia’s foreign ministry complained about Avakov’s remarks and said Moscow should not be blamed for Ukraine’s internal problems.

Russia has been pushing internationally a plan proposing the “federalisation” of Ukraine in which regions of the country of 46 million would have broad powers of autonomy.

Ukraine, drawing up its own plan for “de-centralisation” in which municipalities would retain a portion of state taxes, says the Russian proposal is aimed at carving it up.

“It is an attempt to destroy Ukrainian statehood, a script which has been written in the Russian Federation, the aim of which is to divide and destroy Ukraine and turn part of Ukraine into a slave territory under the dictatorship of Russia,” Yatseniuk said.

“I appeal to the people and the elites of the east: Our common responsibility is to preserve the country and I am sure that no one wants to be under a neighbouring country,” he said.

“We have our country. Let’s keep it.”

DIBRUGARH, India — Indians began voting Monday in the world’s biggest election, which is set to sweep the Hindu nationalist opposition to power at a time of low growth, anger over corruption and warnings about religious unrest.

The 814-million-strong electorate is forecast to inflict a heavy defeat on the Congress Party which has ruled for 10 years and elect hardliner Narendra Modi from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Voting began at 7:00am (0130 GMT) in six constituencies in tea-growing and insurgency-racked areas of the northeast.

“I want the government to reduce poverty and do something for the future of my children,” said 30-year-old tea plantation worker Santoshi Bhumej at a polling station in Dibrugarh in the state of Assam.

Men and women were packed tightly into separate queues when polls opened, shuffling slowly into tightly guarded booths to press the button for their candidates on electronic voting machines.

The marathon contest, to be held over nine phases until May 12, got under way after a bad-tempered campaign which reached new levels of bitterness at the weekend.

Religious tensions, an undercurrent to the contest which has mostly focused on development until now, burst into the open on Friday when the closest aide of Modi was accused of incitement.

Amit Shah faces a judicial investigation after he reportedly told supporters to see the election as “revenge” against a “government that protects and gives compensation to those who killed Hindus”.

Rahul Gandhi, leading Congress into his first national election as scion of the famous dynasty, said Sunday a victory for Modi threatens India’s religious fabric.

“Wherever these people [the opposition BJP] go they create fights. They’ll pit Hindus and Muslims against each other,” he said.

The BJP said talk of “revenge” was normal ahead of an election and the other remarks were taken out of context.

Prime ministerial front-runner Modi, the hawkish son of a tea seller whose rise has split his party, is a polarising figure due to his alleged links to anti-Muslim riots in 2002.

Releasing the party’s delayed manifesto on Monday, which mixed promises for economic development and the protection of Hindu interests, Modi promised to improve the national mood.

“Today the country has become stagnant. It is drowned in pessimism. It needs momentum to move forward,” he said.

He has urged voters to give him a majority in the 543-seat parliament, in defiance of surveys which repeatedly show the BJP will need coalition partners when results are published on May 16.

Disgruntled voters 

In Assam, a Congress stronghold, some disgruntled voters told AFP they had been swayed by his promises of better infrastructure, strong leadership, jobs and a clean administration.

“I believe that Modi will give us a corruption-free government,” Deepa Borgohain told AFP as she complained bitterly about price rises during Congress’s rule.

Over the last decade, growth has averaged 7.6 per cent per year, yet inflation has also been high, and a sharp economic slowdown since 2012 has crippled the public finances and led investment to crash.

Coupled with a widespread perception that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s second term was largely lost to indecision and scandal, Modi has tapped into a groundswell of discontent.

The election will be the biggest in history and is a mind-boggling feat of organisation as voters travel to nearly a million polling stations.

In 2009, officials walked for four days through snow to deliver voting machines in the Himalayas, while yaks, camels and even elephants were pressed into service elsewhere in the vast country.

Such is India’s population growth that 100 million people have joined the electoral rolls since the last vote five years ago. More than half of the country is aged under 25.

Modi, 20 years older than Gandhi at 63, is still expected to score strongly among the young thanks to his message of aspiration and skills over the left-leaning Congress’s pitch of welfare and fair development.

“He [Rahul Gandhi] was born with a golden spoon whereas I grew up selling tea on railway platforms. He has a well-known lineage whereas I am honest,” Modi told a campaign rally Monday.

SYDNEY/PERTH, Australia, — An Australian ship searching for a missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has picked up signals consistent with the beacons from aircraft black box recorders, in what search officials said on Monday was the most promising lead yet in the month-long hunt.

The US Navy “towed pinger locator” connected to the Australian ship Ocean Shield picked up the signals in an area some 1,680km northwest of Perth, which analysis of sporadic satellite data has determined as the most likely place Boeing 777 went down.

“I’m much more optimistic than I was a week ago,” Angus Houston, head of the Australian agency coordinating the search, told a news conference in Perth, while cautioning that wreckage still needed to be found.

“We are now in a very well defined search area, which hopefully will eventually yield the information that we need to say that MH370 might have entered the water just here.”

If the signals can be narrowed further, an autonomous underwater vehicle called a Bluefin 21, will be sent to attempt to locate wreckage on the sea floor to verify the signals, said Houston, who noted that the potential search area was 4.5kms deep, the same as the Bluefin range.

The black boxes record cockpit data and may provide answers about what happened to the Malaysia Airlines plane, which was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew when it vanished off radar on March 8, and flew thousands of kilometres off its Kuala Lumpur-to-Beijing route.

Authorities have not ruled out mechanical problems as a cause of the plane’s disappearance but say evidence, including loss of communications, suggests it was deliberately diverted.

The first “ping” signal detection was held for more than two hours before the Ocean Shield lost contact, but the ship was able to pick up a signal again for around 13 minutes, Houston said.

“On this occasion two distinct pinger returns were audible. Significantly, this would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder,” he said.

Depth is at the edge of search capability

The black boxes, thought to be lying on the ocean floor, are equipped with locator beacons that send pings but the beacons’ batteries are thought to be running out of charge by now, a month after Flight MH370 disappeared.

“We are right on the edge of capability and we might be limited on capability if the aircraft ended up in deeper water. In very deep oceanic water, nothing happens fast,” said Houston.

“This is not the end of the search. We still have got difficult, painstaking work to do to confirm that this is indeed where the aircraft entered the water.”

Alec Duncan, expert in underwater acoustics at Curtin University’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology said the lead was promising but impossible to verify without confirmed wreckage from the aircraft.

“It’s a difficult business, operating underwater and trying to detect anything in the sort of water depth that this search involves, and its impossible to be 100 per cent sure of anything until the wreckage is actually on the deck of the ship,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

A second search area was being maintained in waters where a Chinese vessel had also picked up “ping” signals during the weekend in an area more than 300 nautical miles from the latest signals.

Chinese patrol ship Haixun 01 reported receiving a pulse signal with a frequency of 37.5 kHz, consistent with the signal emitted by flight recorders, on Friday and again on Saturday.

Houston said the Chinese and Australian discoveries of pings were consistent with work done on analysing radar and satellite data but the Ocean Shield’s leads were now the most promising.

Houston on Sunday said he was comfortable with the level of cooperation between search countries, following criticisms that Australia only became aware of the Chinese find at the same time as the Xinhua state news agency filed a story from a reporter on board the Haixun.

“I’m very satisfied with the consultation, the coordination that we are building with our Chinese friends,” Houston said.

However, he added that language was sometimes an issue and he had arranged for a Chinese liaison officer to join the Australian-led coordination centre.

Malaysian authorities have faced heavy criticism, particularly from China, for mismanaging the search and holding back information. Most of the 227 passengers were Chinese.

KABUL — A bigger-than-expected turnout in Afghanistan’s presidential election and the Taliban’s failure to derail the vote has raised questions about the capacity of the insurgents to tip the country back into chaos as foreign troops head home.

The Taliban claimed that they staged more than 1,000 attacks and killed dozens during Saturday’s election, which they have branded a US-backed deception of the Afghan people, though security officials said it was a gross exaggeration.

There were dozens of minor roadside bombs, and attacks on polling stations, police and voters during the day. But the overall level of violence was much lower than the Taliban had threatened to unleash on the country.

And, despite the dangers they faced at polling stations, nearly 60 per cent of the 12 million people eligible to vote turned out, a measure of the determination for a say in their country’s first-ever democratic transfer of power, as President Hamid Karzai prepares to stand down after 12 years in power.

“This is how people vote to say death to the Taliban,” said one Afghan on Twitter, posting a photograph that showed his friends holding up one finger — stained with ink to show they had voted — in a gesture of defiance.

There was a palpable sense in Kabul on Sunday that perhaps greater stability is within reach after 13 years of strife since the fall of the Taliban’s hardline Islamist regime in late 2001. The insurgency has claimed the lives of at least 16,000 Afghan civilians and thousands more soldiers.

“It was my dream come true,” said Shukria Barakzai, a member of Afghanistan’s parliament. “That was a fantastic slap on the face of the enemy of Afghanistan, a big punch in the face of those who believe Afghanistan is not ready for democracy.”

And yet this could be the beginning of a long and potentially dangerous period for Afghanistan as it will take weeks if not months to count votes and declare the winner in a country with only basic infrastructure and a rugged terrain.

Although the Taliban failed to pull off major attacks on election day itself, some fear insurgents are preparing to disrupt the ballot-counting process which kicked off on Saturday night.

In the first such attack since polling closed, a roadside bomb killed two Afghan election workers and one policeman and destroyed dozens of ballot papers on Sunday, police and an election official said.

Too soon to write off the Taliban

Observers believe it is too early to conclude from the Taliban’s failure to trip up the vote that it is now on a backfoot.

More than 350,000 security forces were deployed for the vote, and rings of checkpoints and roadblocks around the capital, Kabul, may well have thwarted Taliban plans to hit voters and polling stations.

It is possible the Taliban deliberately lay low to give the impression of improving security in order to hasten the exit of US troops and gain more ground later. After all, they managed to launch a wave of spectacular attacks in the run-up to the vote, targetting foreigners, security forces and civilians.

Indeed, they remain a formidable force: estimates of the number of Taliban fighters, who are mostly based in lawless southern and eastern areas of the country, range up to 30,000.

Borhan Osman of the independent Afghan Analysts Network argues that for now the insurgency does not appear to be winning, though the Taliban might argue it has already exhausted the United States’ will to fight.

In a report late last month Osman wrote that support for the Taliban was fading in regions where they had previously counted on help from villagers, and they appeared to lack the strength to besiege major towns or engage in frontal battles.

“So far, they have rather focused efforts on hit-and-run attacks, among other asymmetric tactics, which can bleed the enemy but usually not enough to knock it down,” Osman said.

There could, though, be an opportunity for the Taliban to reassert themselves if — as happened in 2009 — the election is marred by fraud and Afghans feel cheated of a credible outcome.

Early reports would suggest that this election was far smoother than the last one. Still, there were many instances of ballot-stuffing and attempts to vote with fake cards.

Around 14 per cent of polling centres did not open, most of them in the southeast and southern provinces where the Taliban presence is strongest.

There is also a risk that if a final result is delayed for several months, a strong possibility if there has to be a run-off between the top two candidates, this would leave a political vacuum that the Taliban could exploit.

“An ambiguous electoral outcome breeds uncertainty and confusion, which can grow the gap between the government and its citizens and leave a bigger opening for the Taliban to cause trouble,” Diplai Mukhopadhyay, an Afghanistan expert at Columbia University in New York, said in an e-mail comment to Reuters.

Threat from across the border

In 2003, the then-US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld suggested that the war in Afghanistan was in a “clean-up phase”. It was soon clear, however, that the back of the insurgency was far from broken and the Taliban bounced back.

Indeed, Taliban attacks were muted during Afghanistan’s first election in 2004, when Karzai obtained a mandate for a presidency he had held on an interim basis since 2002. By early 2005, US generals were saying that the militants were on the run, only to regret their optimism later as casualties mounted.

Karzai has repeatedly accused neighbour Pakistan of being behind Taliban attacks in Afghanistan and impeding efforts by his government to thrash out a peace deal with the insurgents.

Islamabad denies that it aids insurgents fighting Kabul and says it has its hands full battling the Pakistan Taliban. But it is widely believed that the shadowy intelligence arm of Pakistan’s military has long had a relationship with militant groups, including those active in Afghanistan.

Carlotta Gall, a journalist who reported from the region for years, argued in a new book that the United States has been fighting the wrong enemy, and that it is in Pakistan where the training and funding of the Taliban and support of the Al Qaeda network has occurred.

Underlining the threat from across the border, military chiefs and security officials in the region told Reuters last month that the Taliban from both countries had secretly agreed to focus on carrying out operations in Afghanistan.