Nasheman News : A three-member Pakistani delegation will leave for India on Sunday to inspect hydro-power projects in the Chenab basin in Jammu and Kashmir.

The team of experts will be headed by Pakistan’s Commissioner for Indus Waters Syed Mehr Ali Shah, reports Dawn news.

“We are going to India on Sunday via the Wagah border,” Shah told Dawn on Saturday.

The general tour for inspection of Indian hydro-power projects by Pakistan experts was finally confirmed by the New Delhi’s Commissioner for Indus Waters Pradeep Kumar Saxena in a letter earlier this month.

The team will inspect the projects from January 28 to 31 and will return to Pakistan on February 1.

According to Shah, the tour was not limited to only the 1,000 MW Pakal Dul and the 48 MW Lower Kalnai. The team might also visit Ratle and other hydro-power projects.

As a result of the 115th meeting of the Permanent Commission for Indus Waters (PCIW) in Lahore last August, India had scheduled inspection of the projects by Pakistani experts first in September and then in October.

But it was postponed.

Nasheman News :  Indian American Senator Kamala Harris has officially kicked off her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination at a rally where she warned that the US and the world were at “an inflection point” in history and called on all Americans to “speak the truth about what’s happening”.

Harris announced her official bid to run for President in 2020 on January 21. 

Before a crowd of more than 20,000 people in her hometown Oakland, Harris on Sunday threaded together a biography from her years in the Bay Area with her work as a prosecutor and a senator, and set those details against a broader populist vision about “running to be President of the people, by the people and for all people”, reports The New York Times.

“We are at an inflection point in the history of our world,” she said at the rally. 

“We are at an inflection point in the history of our nation. We are here because the American dream and our American democracy are under attack and on the line like never before… When we have leaders who bully and attack a free press and undermine our democratic institutions, that’s not our America.”

Harris, 54, who became the first Indian American and the second black woman to serve in the US Senate when she took office in 2017, has joined the most diverse field of Democratic candidates in history for the presidential bid.

During her 35-minute speech, she also discussed racism, police shootings and the impact of police brutality, The Washington Post reported.

“Too many unarmed black men and women are killed in America. Too many black and brown Americans are being locked up,” the Senator said. 

“Our criminal justice system needs drastic repair. Let’s speak that truth.”

Harris framed her campaign as a response to President Donald Trump, highlighting how he has divided the country and attempting to make the case that she would unite it.

“People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other,” she said. 

“But that is not our story. That is not who we are. That’s not our America. You see, our United States of America is not about us versus them. It’s about ‘we, the people’.”

She mocked Trump’s foreign policy, saying: “We have foreign powers infecting the White House like malware.” 

The Senator pledged that if she is elected President, she “will always speak with decency and moral clarity and treat all people with dignity and respect. I will lead with integrity. And I will tell the truth.”

Harris will have to first win the Democratic Party nomination next year battling several candidates, including Tulsi Gabbard, the first Hindu elected to Congress, Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Housing Secretary Julian Castro.

Nasheman N ews :  China on Thursday was non-committal on the news reports about President Xi Jinping travelling to India in the next two months.

“It’s quite interesting. I am not aware of that, but China and India are friendly neighbours and we attach importance to maintaining high-level exchanges,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said when asked at the regular briefing about the reports.

“The leaders of the two countries also maintain friendly communications and exchanges,” Hua added.

A Japanese news outlet had reported that Xi might travel to India as early as February or after the Chinese Parliament session in March.

“Xi intends to visit India as early as February in a move seen at countering Washington’s increasingly antagonistic trade policy and aggressive Indo-Pacific diplomacy,” a report in the Nikkei Asian Review said.

“Xi hopes to visit ahead of India’s general elections due by May. An Indian source said the visit would be in February at the earliest, but a Chinese source said it will be after China’s National People’s Congress in March,” said the report.

Talking to IANS in Beijing, a diplomatic source denied that such meeting would happen before India’s general elections. Another source pleaded ignorance about the matter.

During the ice-breaking one-on-one summit at Wuhan in April last year, Modi had proposed to Xi a similar meet in India in 2019. The proposal was accepted by the Chinese side.

In Wuhan, Modi and Xi came to agree on a lot of issues and pledged to keep their disputed border quiet and let not the issues affect other aspects of the bilateral ties.

Since the summit, the ties between India and China have been on the upswing with a slew of high-level visits by both sides. In fact, the Chinese envoy Luo Zhaohui last year said that New Delhi and Beijing were in the best phase of their relationship.

Nasheman News : US former Secretary of State John Kerry has said if he can speak to President Donald Trump directly, he would tell him to “resign”.

Trump was supposed to attend the World Economic Forum here to deliver an address, but he pulled out because of the partial government shutdown that has become the longest in US history. 

Asked during a World Economic Forum panel on Tuesday, what he would say to Trump if he were seated across from him, Kerry gave one-word answer: “Resign”.

“He doesn’t take any of this seriously,” the 2004 Democratic nominee for President said on the panel, adding that he doesn’t think Trump had the “ability” to have deep conversations, the Washington Post reported.

The White House did not respond to Kerry’s comment, but Trump had earlier slammed the media for not understanding him and his approach to Davos.

“Last time I went to Davos, the fake news said I should not go there. This year, because of the shutdown, I decided not to go, and the fake news said I should be there. The fact is that the people understand the media better than the media understands them!” Trump tweeted before Kerry’s call to resign.

Kerry, who was Secretary of State during President Barack Obama’s second term, also criticized Trump for “his insane decision” to pull out of the Paris climate accord in June 2017, for which “people will die”.

“I wish there was a lawsuit capacity that could hold people liable for such an insane decision as he has made, which is going to cost lives,” he said. 

“People will die because of the President’s decision, and billions of dollars of damage will be done to property.”

Kerry also accused the President of lying about the consequences of pulling out of the accord. Trump claimed at the time that he was leaving to pursue “fair treatment” and so that foreign leaders would no longer “laugh at us”.

“I’m disappointed when a President of the US lies, and that was a lie — there’s no burden,” said Kerry, adding that “Paris did not place outside burdens levied by any other country on any other country”.

Nasheman News :  The number of people killed in a gas pipeline explosion in the Mexican state of Hidalgo last Friday increased to 93, the Minister of Health Jorge Alcocer said on Tuesday.

The number of the dead grew due to the severity of burns suffered by the individuals, Alcocer said at a press conference, which was also attended by Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

Another 46 people remain hospitalised including one who is “very grave with a bad prognosis,” the minister said, reports Xinhua news agency.

There have been changes in the hospitals and on Monday one more patient was transferred to a specialised burn hospital in Galveston, Texas in the US, Alcocer said.

The explosion and an ensuing blaze occurred at a pipeline spot in the community of San Primitivo in the municipality of Tlahuelilpan at around 7:00 p.m. local time (0100 GMT) on Friday.

According to the local government, between 600 and 800 people gathered at the site to collect leaked fuel with containers when the explosion took place.

Lopez Obrador said the country’s Attorney General (FGR) will be the one handling the investigation into finding those responsible and arresting them.

The accident is one of the worst tragedies caused by pipeline explosions in Mexico in recent years.

In December 2010, 30 people were killed and 52 others injured in a series of explosions at two oil pipelines in the central state of Puebla.

 Nasheman News : An Indian-origin man has been jailed for four months over 2004 hoax call about a bomb at the house of late founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Ganesan Singaravel, now 61, was sentenced on Monday after he pleaded guilty to an offence under the Telecommunications Act, The New newspaper reported on Tuesday.

A court here was told that Singaravel went to a popular spot in Orchard Tower on Singapore’s hotel belt of Orchard Road around midnight on November 13, 2004, and drank alcohol until about 4 a.m. Later, the police said they received a call from Singaravel, who made references to a bomb at Lee’s house.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Benjamin Samynathan said: “The call was made by the accused from a public phone located next to the Thai embassy. The call’s message was clearly false and the accused knew that the text of the call was false.

“A patrol car was sent to Orchard Towers to interview and arrest the accused. The accused was coherent during his interactions with the officers at the scene. Meanwhile, the officers who were already stationed at Oxley Road were told to step up patrols and be alert and vigilant,” he added.

Singaravel was charged on November 16, 2004, but while out on bail, he fled Singapore about two months later. He was caught overstaying in the US last year and told the authorities there that he wanted to return to Singapore. He was detained when he came back here on July 15 last year.

Defence lawyers said in their mitigation plea that their client was drunk when he committed the offence.

WNasheman News :Two years after taking the oath of office, US President Donald Trump has made 8,158 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post’s database.

The daily’s Fact Checker’s database analyses, categorises and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the President, it said in the report on Monday.

In 2018, he made an “astonishing” 6,000-plus such claims.

The President averaged nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in his first year in office, but he hit nearly 16.5 a day in his second year, almost triple the pace.

The Washington Post started the Fact Checker online project as part of its coverage of the President’s first 100 days, “largely because we could not possibly keep up with the pace and volume of the President’s misstatements”. 

The project’s interactive graphic displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. A reader can also search for specific claims or obtain monthly or daily totals.

According to Fact Checker, the President in his first 100 days made 492 unsupported claims. 

He managed to top that number just in the first three weeks of 2019. 

Before the midterm elections in October, he made more than 1,200 false or misleading claims.

The biggest source of misleading claims is immigration, with a tally that has grown with the addition of 300 immigration claims in the past three weeks, for a total of 1,433, the Fact Checker said.

In the President’s immigration address on January 19, the last day of his second year in office, there were 12 false or misleading claims.

According to Fact Checker, there were only 82 days or about 11 per cent of the time that there were recorded no claims. 

“These were often days when the President golfed,” it added.

Nasheman News :  Democrat Kamala Harris, the first Indian-American to serve in the US Senate, launched her campaign for the White House on Monday while appearing on ABC’s Good Morning America.

In a brief video from her campaign that was released on the social media at the same time she appeared on the show, Harris called on her supporters to join with her to “claim our future”. She made the announcement on Monday — America’s Martin Luther King Jr Day holiday — to honour the legacy of her hero.

The 54-year-old portrayed herself as a fighter for justice, decency and equality in the video. 

“They’re the values we as Americans cherish, and they’re all on the line now,” Harris said.

“The future of our country depends on you and millions of others lifting our voices to fight for our American values… That’s why I’m running for President of the US. I’m running to lift those voices, to bring our voices together.”

Harris’ announcement followed the entrance of her fellow senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York in the presidential race. 

She is the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met in Berkeley, California, at the height of the civil rights movement.

Harris said the time had come to fight against what she called “the injustices of the past two years of the Donald Trump presidency”. She has accused Trump of stoking racist and xenophobic rhetoric, while aligning his administration with white supremacists at home, and cozying up to dictators abroad.

She said that the needs of the middle class had been ignored, citing the federal shutdown over the President’s “vanity project” — a border wall — as the latest example.

The Senator had earlier turned up the heat on the President by blasting his insistence on holding out for funding for his border wall before reopening the government — comparing his behaviour to how her 11-year-old godson might have behaved with his toy train.

Harris’ campaign will be headquartered in Baltimore – giving aides an East Coast hub in a racially diverse city that has struggled with wide income disparities – and Oakland, where Harris was born to immigrant parents who came to the US to advance their academic careers, CNN reported.

She began her career as a deputy district attorney in Alameda county, California, before becoming District Attorney of San Francisco, where she focused on crime prevention. 

In 2010, she narrowly beat her Republican opponent to become California’s Attorney General. Six years later, she was elected to the Senate, where she became the second black woman ever to serve in the chamber.

Nasheman News : The border guards of India and Bangladesh are likely to hold a meeting on Monday over the 31 stranded Rohingya Muslims, stuck for the past 2 days at the zero line on Tripura frontier, a BSF official said.

“A meeting between the sector commanders of BSF (Border Security Force) and BGB (Border Guards Bangladesh) is likely to be held tomorrow (Monday) over the 31 Rohingya Muslims,” Deputy Inspector General of BSF Brajesh Kumar told the media late on Sunday.

The BSF has been providing food to the six male, nine women and 16 children on humanitarian ground.

Kumar said that already two meetings were held between the nodal officers of BSF and BGB but the issue remained inconclusive.

According to him, the Rohingyas were now staying behind the India-Bangladesh fencing at Rayermura (under Amtali police station in Sepahijala District), about 20 km south of Agartala.

The Bangladeshi media said that the BGB Commanding Officer, who is the commandant of 25 Battalion of the BGB, has alleged that the BSF have been pushing Rohingyas into Bangladeshi territory.

The BSF on Saturday had strongly refuted “unfounded allegation” claimed by BGB that the BSF have been pushing Rohingyas into Bangladeshi territory.

“On Friday night, BGB’s Lt Col Gomal Kabir informed BSF Commandant Ratnesh Kumar over phone that they have detained the 31 Rohingyas along the International Border. The BGB insisted with the BSF to take them inside the India-Bangladesh Border Fencing,” the BSF release had said.

“BSF commandant firmly denied any such attempt and refuted the allegation as published in Bangladesh media,” the release added.

It also said that during the search of the area and spot verification, there were no signs of any illegal crossing of Rohingyas from the Indian territory to Bangladesh.

Another senior BSF official said that during the past one year, 62 Rohingya Muslims had entered India (Tripura and a few other northeastern states) via Bangladesh in search of jobs and temporary works. 

However, they were pushed back following legal and security formalities.

Over 700,000 Rohingyas have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state since August 2017 after a wave of persecution and violence that the UN described as an attempt at “ethnic cleansing”. Efforts are on to repatriate them.

Tripura shares an 856-km border with Bangladesh, most of which is fenced except a stretch of nearly 20 km.

[Nasheman news] Kathmandu Nepal’s central bank has announced the ban of Indian currency notes with denominations above Rs 100.

The Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) on Sunday issued a circular for the institutions licensed by it notifying them about the ban, reports Xinhua news agency. 

Nepal’s cabinet in December had decided to ban the use of these currency notes. 

The decision to ban these notes has come a time when the NRB has requested the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) arequesting the latter to allow Nepal to use currency notes with all denominations.

Currently, only the notes with a denomination of Rs 100 and below are freely exchangeable in Nepal.