Macron vows to rebuild Notre-Dame within five years
Paris: French President Emmanuel Macron vowed Tuesday to rebuild Notre-Dame cathedral "within five years", after a fire that toppled the steeple of the 850-year-old landmark and caused major damage to the roof.
"We will rebuild the cathedral even more beautifully and I want it to be finished within five years," Macron said in a televised address to the nation a day after the blaze. "And we can do it." But he also warned: "Let us not fall into the trap of haste."
Macron said that the dramatic fire had brought out the best in a country that has been riven with divisions.
"What we saw last night in Paris was our capacity to mobilise and to unite," the 41-year-old leader said in the solemn address from his office in the presidential palace.
France had over the course of its history seen many towns, ports and churches go up in flames, he said.
"Each time we rebuilt them," he said, adding that the cathedral inferno had shown that "our history never stops and that we will always have trials to overcome."
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Voting begins for high-stakes civic polls in Maharashtra; all eyes on big battle for Mumbai
Mumbai (PTI): Voting in 29 municipal corporations across Maharashtra began on Thursday morning with spotlight on Mumbai, where the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance is locked in an intense battle with the reunited Thackeray cousins for control of India's largest and richest civic body.
Polling for 2,869 seats spread across 893 wards in these municipal corporations began amid tight security at 7.30 am and will conclude at 5.30 pm. A total of 3.48 crore voters are eligible to decide the fate of 15,931 candidates.
In the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), whose annual budget is over Rs 74, 400 crore, 1,700 candidates are vying for 227 seats in elections being held after nine years, after a four-year delay. More than 25,000 police personnel have been deployed across Mumbai to oversee elections.
Except for Mumbai, the other urban bodies have multi-member wards. Vote count will take place on January 16.
These are the first BMC polls since the 2022 split in the Shiv Sena when Eknath Shinde, now Deputy Chief Minister, broke away with a majority of the party’s MLAs and allied with the BJP to become the chief minister.
The undivided Shiv Sena held sway over India's richest civic body for 25 years (1997-2022).
In a significant political turn of events ahead of the elections, estranged cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray, who head Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS, respectively, reunited last month after two decades in their bid to consolidate Marathi votes even as rival NCP factions forged a local alliance in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
The Congress, once a formidable political force in Maharashtra, has asserted its presence in Mumbai by stepping out of the shadow of its Maha Vikas Aghadi allies - Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP).
The grand old party has joined hands with Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) and the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh in the state capital.
Elections to the 29 municipal corporations are being held after a gap of several years, with terms of most of them having ended between 2020 and 2023. Of these, nine fall in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), the most urbanised belt in India.
Voting is underway in the following municipal corporations: Mumbai, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Navi Mumbai, Vasai-Virar, Kalyan-Dombivli, Kolhapur, Nagpur, Solapur, Amravati, Akola, Nashik, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Pune, Ulhasnagar, Thane, Chandrapur, Parbhani, Mira-Bhayandar, Nanded-Waghala, Panvel, Bhiwandi-Nizampur, Latur, Malegaon, Sangli-Miraj-Kupwad, Jalgaon, Ahilyanagar, Dhule, Jalna and Ichalkaranji.
