Hooch kills at least 39 in UP, U’khand

SAHARANPUR/GORAKHPUR/HARIDWAR/DEHRADUN: At least 39 people died and several more were in a critical condition in several villages of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand after they consumed country liquor between Wednesday and Thursday, officials in both states said on Friday.

The deaths were reported between Thursday and Friday from villages in Haridwar district of Uttarakhand, and Saharanpur and Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh.

At least one of the sources for the poisonous liquor may have been in Saharanpur, with officials in Uttarakhand saying they had detained four people who smuggled pouches of it from the UP town.

“The liquor was smuggled into these villages from its source in Saharanpur. So far, we have got some inputs about the villages in Saharanpur where this spurious liquor is being manufactured. We have already sent a team there which is investigating with Saharanpur police as deaths were reported from there also,” said senior superintendent of police, Haridwar, Janmejay Khanduri.

The number of dead in Uttarakhand was put at 13 while 40 others were in hospital.

Saharanpur, bordering Uttarakhand, reported 18 deaths. WASHINGTON: Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man and the owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, accused American Media Inc (AMI), a company with longstanding ties with US President Donald Trump, of trying to blackmail him with his intimate photos and private text messages.

In a blog post, Bezos wrote that AMI, which publishes t he National Enquirer, threatened to make public his photos and text messages with a former news anchor with whom he was allegedly in an extramarital relationship. Bezos shared the emails with the threats in the blog post.