Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee cautions banks on asset quality

NEW DELHI: Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has cautioned all staterun banks and financial institutions on the deterioriating asset quality. "They (banks) should exert themselves to devise suitable strategies for containing and rolling back non-performing assets ," he said. 

Mr Mukherjee on Friday did the annual review of the performance of public sector banks and financial institutions. The finance minister also assured the private sector of enough liquidity in the market and said that the government, which has Rs 4.17 lakh crore borrowing plans for 2011-12 , does not intend to elbow them out. "So far the borrowing programme is concerned, always we match it in such a way that the others in the market of borrowing are not elbowed out," he said. 

Mr Mukherjee expressed his satisfaction on the 22.44% credit growth recorded by the staterun banks in 2010-11 but cautioned on the moderation in the last quarter. Credit growth has moderated largely because of the hike in interest rates due to the tight monetary policy regime followed by the RBI since March 2010. 

Further banks have been more cautious in lending to certain sector such as real estate and power due to rising bad loans in these sectors. RV Verma, chairman of National Housing Bank , which is also the sectoral regulator for all housing finance companies, said that due diligence is very necessary while advancing credit to commercial real estate sector as high interest regime is pushing up project costs and hence there is greater chances of default. Mr Mukherjee expressed confidence in the resilience of Indian banks and advised banks' chairmen to undertake a comprehensive capital planning exercise, particularly in view of the Basel III capital adequacy benchmarks.

Atlantis Astronauts to Inspect Shuttle Heat Shield After Final Launch

The space shuttle Atlantis' astronauts will carefully inspect their orbiter's heat shield today (July 9) to make sure it wasn't damaged during the shuttle's final launch Friday (July 8).
Atlantis lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on the 135th and final mission of NASA's 30-year space shuttle program. The orbiter is now playing catch-up with the International Space Station, where it plans to dock on Sunday (July 10).
Commander Chris Ferguson and his four-person crew will spend their second day in space conducting a detailed scan of the thermal insulation tiles on Atlantis' underbelly and wings to make sure they weren't damaged during launch.



The inspection has been a routine precaution taken on every mission after the space shuttle Columbia and its seven astronauts were destroyed in 2003 because of damage to that orbiter's heat shield. The protective tiles on the shuttle are necessary to shield the orbiter from the intense heat of re-entry to Earth during landing.
Preliminary analysis of footage from Atlantis' 11:29 a.m. EDT (1529 GMT) blastoff did not indicate any major cause for concern, NASA officials said. But the inspection should provide more detailed readings to ensure the orbiter was not dinged by falling ice or foam debris from the shuttle's huge external fuel tank. [Video: Last Launch Of Shuttle Atlantis]  
The Atlantis astronauts are scheduled to begin the scan at 8:19 a.m. EDT (1219 GMT), after waking up at 3:59 a.m. EDT (0759 GMT). The spaceflyers will use a 50-foot (15-meter) sensor-tipped inspection pole attached to the end of the shuttle's robotic arm to inspect the spacecraft. Images and videos will be sent down to engineers at NASA's mission control center in Houston for review.
Flying along with Ferguson on the mission are pilot Doug Hurley and mission specialists Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim. Each astronaut is a veteran and each has been to the space station before.
"Now, the configuration has changed a little bit over the years, so I think we’re all eagerly anticipating seeing what the space station looks like today," Ferguson said in a preflight NASA interview.
The primary goal of Atlantis' final mission is to deliver 9,500 pounds (4,318 kilograms) of spare hardware and supplies to outfit the International Space Station for the years ahead, after the shuttles retire. After this mission, NASA is mothballing Atlantis, Discovery and Endeavour to work on developing new spaceships to carry humans to an asteroid and Mars.
"It's a very busy mission," said Magnus in a preflight interview. "Our prime job is to take tons of logistics up to space station and get it up there while we still have the huge cargo-carrying capacity of the shuttle available."
This STS-135 mission is Atlantis' 33rd flight after nearly 26 years of operation. The shuttle is slated to land on July 20 and then be retired to the Visitor's Center at Kennedy Space Center.

Betty Ford, former first lady, dies at age 93

Betty Ford, a self-proclaimed "ordinary" woman who never cared for political life but made a liberating adventure out of her 30 months as first lady, died Friday at age 93. Details of her death and where she died were not immediately available.

"I decided that if the White House was our fate," she once said of Gerald Ford's brief presidency, "I might as well have a good time doing it."

To the surprise of some and the consternation of others, Ms. Ford evolved as an activist first lady whose non-threatening manner coupled with her newfound celebrity provided the women's movement with an impressive ally. Undaunted by critics, she campaigned for ratification of the ill-starred Equal Rights Amendment, championed liberalized abortion laws and lobbied her husband to name more women to policymaking government jobs.

"Perhaps it was unusual for a first lady to be as outspoken about issues as I was, but that was my temperament, and I believed in it," she said in an interview at her Rancho Mirage (Riverside County) home in 1994. "I don't like to be dishonest, so when people asked me, I said what I thought."

For . Ford, a frank, plain-spoken Midwesterner, going public became a pattern of action that would also punctuate her post-White House years. In 1978, she disclosed that her use of alcohol and mood-altering prescription drugs had become a serious dependency.

In what she has described as a painful "intervention" when her family confronted her with her problem, she agreed to enter the drug and alcohol rehabilitation program at Long Beach Naval Hospital. Of that experience came the momentum to establish the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, a live-in treatment program for alcoholics and drug abusers.

Her husband, who died in 2006, was a longtime Michigan congressman who became House minority leader. He served as Richard Nixon's vice president before the Watergate scandal led him to succeed Nixon, who resigned Aug. 9, 1974, and become the nation's 38th president. Ms. Ford had not wanted her husband to be president, but once he took office, she was determined that Americans know him as one with integrity.

"I was against a pardon," she said of Ford's decision to release Nixon from his Watergate offenses, which critics viewed as a secret deal between the two men in exchange for Nixon's resignation.

Fearing the pardon would undermine Ford's still-fragile presidency, she said she argued that "it would be very detrimental." In the end, she acquiesced to Ford's rationale that he needed to "get the country going." Impeachment proceedings "would have taken months in court, and he didn't think the country could stand that kind of thing," she said. Within weeks after Watergate claimed Nixon's political life and the Fords were settled at the White House, she soared from nonentity to national heroine because of her candid disclosure that she had a nodule in her right breast and was entering Bethesda Naval Medical Command. When a biopsy showed the lump to be malignant, she underwent a radical mastectomy.

Women across the country began seeking checkups for breast cancer.

Born Elizabeth Ann Bloomer on April 9, 1918, in Chicago, she was the only daughter and youngest of three children of William Stephenson and Hortense Neahr Bloomer. When she was 2, they moved to Grand Rapids, Mich.

Her father's death by carbon monoxide poisoning in a garage accident when she was 16 came at the height of the Great Depression. By then she had an after-school job modeling in a local department store and on Saturdays gave dancing lessons in her aunt's basement. Survivors include three sons, Mike, Steve and Jack Ford; a daughter, Susan Ford Bales; and her grandchildren.

"No sense" to ex-con's shooting spree in Mich.

(CBS/AP)  

Investigators are trying to determine what led a Grand Rapids man to go on a deadly shooting spree yesterday - and to then take his own life after a tense standoff with police.

Rodrick Shonte Dantzler, a 34-year-old ex-convict, killed seven people, including two children, before killing himself inside a house where he had been holding hostages.

"We heard a gunshot and it turned out to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head," said Police Chief Kevin Belk.

Dantzler is suspected of shooting seven people to death earlier in the day in two separate locations, reports CBS News national correspondent Dean Reynolds.

Three adults and a child were gunned down in one home. In the other, two women - one of whom is believed to have been a former girlfriend of Dantzler's - and his ex's 10-year-old daughter were fatally shot.

Authorities don't have a motive for Dantzler, but say his daughter and an ex-girlfriend were among the seven people killed.

CBS Affiliate WWMT reports that Dantzler had gotten into a fight with his current girlfriend earlier Thursday and told a friend that he would "kill them all."

Mich. man kills daughter, 6 others, then himself

The names of the dead were not immediately released. Autopsies were scheduled for Friday.

Records show that Dantzler was released from state prison in 2005, after serving time for assault less than murder. A spokesman for the prison system said Dantzler had not been under state supervision since then.

Police initially got a 911 call early Thursday afternoon from someone saying that a man had admitted to killing three people, Belk said. Police went to Dantzler's home, but he wasn't there and officers couldn't find him.

It wasn't long before authorities got a call from a woman who said her relatives had been shot.

Next came a call about someone finding four gunshot victims at another house.

Officers soon found three bodies in a home on Plainfield Avenue. An hour later, they discovered the other four across town in a ranch-style house on a cul-de-sac called Brynell Court.

Two of the dead were children.

While police were investigating the seven homicides, Belk said police received a report of a "road rage" shooting.

Dantzler had apparently shot at a man through the rear window of the vehicle he was driving. Police spotted him, and began a chase that included Dantzler crashing into a patrol car in the city's downtown and exchanging gunfire with officers, during which a female bystander was shot in the shoulder.

Danztler drove a sport utility vehicle north from downtown and onto Interstate 96, crossing a grassy median and heading the wrong way down the highway while more than a dozen squad cars pursued him. Belk said he crashed the vehicle while driving down an embankment into a wooded area of the highway, which remained closed hours later.

"I look in my rearview mirror and see this big white SUV coming up behind me," said Carrie Colacchio, who lives a little more than a mile away from where Dantzler later took his three hostages. "The only way to get out of it was to push the gas pedal."

Colacchio said she couldn't turn off the road or slow down or go any other way, and she reached about 85 mph.

"I almost got smacked," she said. "I had to go up on the curb."

From the highway, Dantzler made his way toward a nearby single-family home, firing several shots as he forced his way inside and took hostages he did not know, police said. Dozens of officers with guns drawn cordoned off the neighborhood, near a small lake in the northern part of the city, as authorities shut down nearby Interstate 96.

That was around 7:30 p.m. During the next five hours, Dantzler fired sporadically at officers and inside the house. He vacillated between threatening to shoot the hostages and pleading with police to take him out, even asking negotiators whether there were snipers outside the home and where he should stand, Belk said.

"The suspect fired at our officers many times throughout the night," he said. "Even in the home, there was an exchange of gunfire. He fired as they made entry to the house."

Dantzler had been talking to police at the final location, and he'd also sent out a hostage for cigarettes and Gatorade. The conversation was apparently about surrendering but then for reasons known only to him, he turned the gun on himself.

"Obviously, we're extremely disappointed at the outcome," Belk said. "We would much rather have had the suspect surrender and have him in custody.

"It makes no sense to try to rationalize it, what the motives were. You just cannot come up with a logical reason why someone takes seven peoples' lives."