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(Reuters) - An Uttar Pradesh state minister has said bureaucrats can steal a little as long as they work hard - sparking national outcry in a country whose ruling class has long been mired in corruption scandals.

"If you work hard, and put your heart and soul into it ... then you are allowed to steal some," Shivpal Singh Yadav told a gathering of local officials in comments caught on camera. "But don't be a bandit."

The comments on Thursday were caught by a local TV camera and then played on newscasts across the country. Yadav, a minister for public works who belongs to the state's ruling Samajwadi Party, quickly sought to control the damage, calling a news conference to explain that the comments had been taken out of context and that he had been discussing how to combat corruption.

"In that event the media was not allowed in, I don't know how they sneaked in. And if they had sneaked in, the whole discussion should have come out in the press, not just part of it," he said on Friday.

Uttar Pradesh, which is bigger than Brazil by population, was earlier governed by 'Dalit Queen' Mayawati. She has been criticized for spending millions of rupees on building statues of herself and buying diamond jewelry despite widespread malnutrition and poverty in her state.

Yadav's nephew is Akhilesh Yadav, Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, who came to power earlier this year proclaiming an end to corruption in the state.

Foreign-educated Akhilesh Yadav, who is state's youngest chief minister, had projected himself as an agent of change, even though members of his party have been involved in criminal investigations.

Last year, millions of middle-class urban Indians protested against corruption swirling around the government. But even though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government has been mired in massive graft scandals the anti-corruption protests have now lost momentum.

FORT LEE, N.J. — An athlete competing in the Ironman U.S. Championship in New York City and New Jersey died Saturday after having a medical problem during the swimming portion of the grueling triathlon, race officials said.

The competitor "experienced distress" during a 2.4-mile swim in the Hudson River at the start of the all-day competition, a publicist for the race organizers said. The course ran along the New Jersey shoreline, just north of the George Washington Bridge.

The swimmer was pulled out of the water and taken to a hospital in nearby Englewood Cliffs, N.J., but did not survive. The organizers said the cause of death is unknown. An autopsy is planned.

New York City police said the contestant was a 43-year-old man. His name has not yet been released.

"On behalf of all of us in the triathlon community, we mourn his death and send our condolences to his family and loved ones," organizers said in a statement.

Contestants in the race followed their swim in the Hudson with a 112-mile bicycle ride through the suburbs, and then a 26.2-mile marathon that finished at Manhattan's Riverside Park.

Jordan Rapp, a winner of multiple Ironman titles, won the race in an unofficial time of 8 hours, 11 minutes and 18 seconds.

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Associated Press

NEW YORK — Columnist and TV host Fareed Zakaria has apologized for lifting several paragraphs by another writer for use in his column in Time magazine. His column has been suspended for a month.

Zakaria said in a statement Friday he made "a terrible mistake," adding, "It is a serious lapse and one that is entirely my fault."

In a separate statement, Time spokesman Ali Zelenko said the magazine accepts Zakaria's apology, but would suspend his column for one month, "pending further review."

"What he did violates our own standards for our columnists, which is that their work must not only be factual but original; their views must not only be their own but their words as well," Zelenko said.

Media reporters had noted similarities between passages in Zakaria's column about gun control that appeared in Time's Aug. 20 issue, and paragraphs from an article by Harvard University history professor Jill Lepore published in April in The New Yorker magazine.

In Zakaria's column, titled "The Case for Gun Control," he began one paragraph with the sentences: "Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA, documents the actual history in 'Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.' Guns were regulated in the U.S. from the earliest years of the Republic."

A corresponding passage in Lenore's New Yorker essay, titled "Battleground America," begins: "As Adam Winkler, a constitutional-law scholar at U.C.L.A., demonstrates in a remarkably nuanced new book, 'Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America,' firearms have been regulated in the United States from the start."

In Zakaria's statement, he apologized "unreservedly" to Lepore, as well as to his editors and readers.

Besides serving as an editor-at-large at Time, Zakaria is a Washington Post columnist and the host of CNN's foreign-affairs show, "GPS."