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Archives for May 2015

Rupee breaches 64 against dollar for first time in 20 months

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BLACK-MONEY

The rupee breached the 64 per dollar mark to hit its lowest in 20 months on Thursday. It last traded around these levels in September, 2013.

At the day’s low, the rupee hit 64.25 per dollar, down 71 paise or over 1 per cent against Wednesday’s close of 63.54 per dollar. It is now on course to for a sixth straight day of fall.

Experts say sustained capital outflows in equities and bonds have pressured the rupee, which was the best-performing emerging market currency in 2014.

Foreign institutional investors have sold a total of around Rs 13,500 crore in the last 14 sessions (excluding the Sun Pharma-Daiichi deal). They have also been net sellers in the debt market too. FIIs seem to be pulling out money from India over tax notices demanding a Minimum Alternate Tax on capital gains made during previous years.

“I think the real reason is MAT, which has created a sort of fear in the minds of FIIs… The strangest part is the demand has been raised for last seven years, which has not made a good impression,” said currency expert AV Rajwade.

Increased demand for dollar from importers and banks also weighed on the rupee, forex dealers said.

Traders told Reuters that the uptick in non-deliverable forwards traded in Singapore was hitting sentiment for the rupee and prompting custodian banks to sell the currency. The one-month non-deliverable forex (NDF) was at 64.35/35 versus Wednesday’s close of 64.02.

Most emerging Asian currencies lost ground on Thursday as a global bond rout lifted government bond yields across the region.

As of 2:45 p.m., the rupee traded at 64.16 per dollar. The Sensex was down 205 points to 26,513, while the Nifty traded 72 points lower at 8,025.

(Agencies)

11 killed in West Bengal firecracker factory blast

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Police said all the victims were staff members of the factory where the blast occurred shortly before 10 pm last night.

Firecracker Factory

Midnapore: At least 11 people were killed and four others injured in an explosion in a firecracker factory at Pingla in West Midnapore district, the police said on Thursday.

“So far 11 bodies were recovered. Four others were injured and hospitalised,” district Superintendent of Police Bharati Ghosh told PTI.

On the reason behind the blast, she said, “We are looking into it. Probably something went wrong during manufacturing of crackers.”

Police said all the victims were staff members of the firecracker factory where the blast occurred shortly before 10 pm last night. The fire has been put out.

(PTI)

Key posts vacant as government wants to 'grab' land from common people: Rahul Gandhi

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Rahul Gandhi

New Delhi: Stepping up his attack on the Modi government, Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi today questioned why it was keeping the posts of RTI commissioner, Lokpal and Chief Vigilance Commissioner vacant.

Gandhi also reiterated his “suit-boot” barb, saying the government kept the posts vacant as it wanted to “grab” land from common people on behest of its “industrialist friends”.

“Our government fought for transparency. The appointments to the post of RTI commissioner, Lokpal and CVC are not being done by the government and the posts are lying vacant.

“That’s because the ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’ wants to grab land from the people on the behest of its few industrialist friends and give entire power to them,” he told reporters outside the Parliament.

His attack came on a day Congress President Sonia Gandhi accused the government of making a “blatant U-turn” on the issue of transparency and charged it with “deliberately” keeping the posts of Chief Information Commissioner, CVC and Lokpal vacant.

“Information delayed is information denied. This is simply not acceptable. Protecting wrongdoers cannot be part of any government ethos,” she said, recalling Modi’s promises of transparency and good governance.

(PTI)

Bengaluru: Lokayukta files FIRs against Yeddyurappa, Kumaraswamy

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This Nov. 2007 photo shows Kumaraswamy and Yeddyurappa coming out of Raj Bhavan after meeting the then Governor Rameshwar Thakur. File Photo: Bhagya Prakash K, The Hindu

This Nov. 2007 photo shows Kumaraswamy and Yeddyurappa coming out of Raj Bhavan after meeting the then Governor Rameshwar Thakur. File Photo: Bhagya Prakash K, The Hindu

Bengaluru: The Karnataka Lokayukta Police has filed FIRs against former Chief Ministers B S Yeddyurappa and H D Kumaraswamy in a land denotificaton case, charging them under the Prevention of Corruption Act and several IPC provisions, including criminal conspiracy and cheating.

Both leaders have been accused of denotifying land at Matadahalli Layout in R T Nagar here, with Vimala, the mother-in-law of Kumaraswamy, and her son T S Channappa, also being named in the FIRs, Lokayukta Superintendent of Police Sonia Narang said here.

Sections 13 (i) (c) and (d) and 13 (ii) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, pertaining to criminal misconduct by public servants have been invoked against Yeddyurappa and Kumaraswamy, Narang said.

Denotification is a process of returning government land acquired for a project to private parties.

The process gathered pace after Kumaraswamy put up the files, and the land was denotified by Yeddyurappa as Chief Minister in 2010, social activist Jayayakumar Hiremath, who is the complainant, charged.

JDS leader Kumaraswamy, predecessor to Yeddyurappa, had headed a BJP-JDS coalition government.

Yeddyurappa had denotified one acre and 11 guntas (1/40th of an acre) of land, which was originally owned by Thimmareddy, Nagappa and Muniswamappa, Hiremath charged.

He also alleged that Bangalore Development Authority had acquired the land for forming a layout Mathadahalli for which it issued the preliminary notification in 1976.

The land was taken into possession in 1988 after final notification and compensation paid to land losers subsequently, Hiremath said.

Besides these, charges under Sections 401 (criminal breach of trust by public servant), 418 (cheating with knowledge that wrongful loss may ensue to person whose interest offender is bound to protect), 420 (cheating), and 120 B (Punishment of criminal conspiracy) of Indian Penal Code have also been slapped against them.

(PTI)

I still watch Salman Khan’s movies; No benefit for me if he is punished, says victim

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abdullah-rauf-shaikh

Mumbai: “Compensation matters more than conviction,” say the victims of the 2002 hit-and-run case in which Bollywood star Salman Khan has been sentenced to five years in jail.

Abdullah Rauf Shaikh, who lost a leg in the accident, said, “Nobody came to visit me in the last 13 years. I am forced to do petty jobs to support my family and face a lot of problems.” “However, I have no hard feelings for him (Salman).

I still watch his movies,” he said, adding they were not pressurised by anyone. “Compensation matters more than conviction, my health and work suffered,” Shaikh said.

“If Salman is punished, I will not be benefited in any way as neither my leg will heal nor my problems would go away. Instead if they compensate us then we do not have any problem,” he said, recalling that he was 22 years old when he lost his leg in the incident.

The wife of Nurullah Mehboob Sharif, who died in the accident, said, “We were told we will get a compensation of Rs 10 lakh, but what will we do of that amount at this time of inflation.” She said that she would be benefited if her son gets a job.

(PTI)

Mumbai Indians peaking at right time: Skipper Rohit

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Mumbai Indians

Mumbai: Mumbai Indians’ (MI) skipper Rohit Sharma on Tuesday said with four back-to-back victories, the side has got the momentum and is peaking at the right time for the later part of the Indian Premier League (IPL).

After Yuvraj Singh’s late blitz helped Delhi Daredevils post 152/6, Ambati Rayudu and Rohit Sharma displayed excellent batting skills to help Mumbai reach 153/5 in 19.3 overs, registering a five-wicket win here.

“We are peaking at the right time. We are not thinking about the table right now as it’s very complicated and very tight. Every team is close to each other,” Rohit said at the post-match press conference.

“What happens at the end of May 17 is important. We are focusing and trying to take each game at a time. It is important we stay in the present and think about the next game.”

Mumbai have suffered a jolt ahead of their next match against Chennai Super Kings on Friday in Chennai as their Sri Lankan pace spearhead Lasith Malinga will not travel with the team. Sri Lankan players are barred from playing at the venue.

“We will surely miss him. He has been a crucial member of our team. His absence will be felt. This gives an opportunity to someone else to come and prove,” Rohit said.

For Mumbai, off-spinner Harbhajan Singh (2-11) and Sri Lankan pacer Lasith Malinga (2-33) were the main wicket-takers against Delhi.

Speaking on Harbhajan’s performance, the skipper said, “He has been bowling superbly right from the start of the season. He is an experienced player and knows how and when to bowl what.

“He is taking wickets, keeping runs in check, feels good as a captain.”

(IANS)

SC orders Bengaluru civic body polls in three months

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BBMP-BUILDING

Bengaluru: The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed the Karnataka government to conduct elections to the Bengaluru civic body within three months.

Setting aside the Karnataka High Court’s April 24 ruling, which ordered that the civic polls be held in six months (by October), the apex court told the state election commission to conduct elections in 198 civic wards across the city by July 18, as the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) was superseded on April 18, four days before its five-year term was to lapse.

The top court’s ruling came on a bunch of petitions filed by the state election commission, NGO Namma Bengaluru Foundation, two former BJP corporators C.K. Ramamurthy and B. Somashekar and Rajya Sabha independent member Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

“The state government was using both its trifurcation proposal and dissolution of the civic body as a brazen excuse to delay the elections by six months,” Chandrasekhar said in a statement in Bengaluru.

The legislative assembly on April 20 passed by voice vote a bill to amend the Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act, 2015 to bifurcate or trifurcate the BBMP.

Terming the apex court order a victory for democracy and the nine million denizens of Bengaluru, Chandrasekhar said the state government’s attempt to split the BBMP and delay its polls was against the constitutional provision of Article 243-U that mandates urban local bodies to conduct elections every five years.

The state government also assured the apex court of not splitting the BBMP till elections were held in the next three months.

The amended bill was, however, referred to a select committee of the state legislative council (upper house) by its chairman D.H. Shankaramurthy on April 27 as demanded by the opposition BJP and the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) members.

The BBMP was expanded in 2007 by including seven city municipal councils and one town municipal council and 111 surrounding villages to increase civic wards to 198 from 100 earlier.

(With inputs from IANS)

Connect the world or capture It? Critics raise alarm over Facebook's spurious Internet.org

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Facebook service promises free web access for the developing world, while threatening the privacy and rights of hundreds of millions worldwide

Internet.org is already available to 800 million people in nine countries across Africa and Southeast Asia.

Internet.org is already available to 800 million people in nine countries across Africa and Southeast Asia.

by Lauren McCauley, Common Dreams

Privacy rights and open internet advocates are sounding the alarm after Facebook on Monday announced changes to its “free” Internet for the developing world, dubbed Internet.org, which critics say threatens to make the social networking company the de facto Internet “gatekeeper” for hundreds of millions worldwide.

Branded as an initiative to “connect the two thirds of the world that doesn’t have internet access,” Internet.org will reportedly work with local telecom providers to provide free Internet access to a handful of pre-selected websites—including Facebook—as well as others related to “health, education, communication, finance, jobs and local information.” The application has already launched in a number of African and Southeast Asian countries, as well as Colombia in South America.

Internet.org has previously come under fire for violating the principle of net neutrality because it only offers access to certain websites. In India, a number of major publications including the Times of India media group have withdrawn from the site in protest.

In response to that critique, in a video address on Monday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced a new platform model, under which Facebook will offer “an open program for developers” to create “very simple and data efficient” sites to be among those offered to Internet.org users.

“Giving people more choice over the services they use is incredibly important,” Facebook said.

However, this new platform is even worse, argues Josh Levy, advocacy director for the digital rights group Access.

The change, Levy writes at Wired on Tuesday, “sets Facebook up to serve as a quasi-internet service provider—except that unlike a local or national telco, all web traffic will be routed through Facebook’s servers. In other words, for people using Internet.org to connect to the internet, Facebook will be the de facto gatekeeper of the world’s information.”

Considering the market that Internet.org hopes to reach, that amounts to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. On April 17, Zuckerburg said that more than 800 million people in nine countries, including Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, already have access to the site.

In addition, Levy warns that by excluding commonly used security protocols, such as SSL and TLS, in their criteria for potential developers, Internet.org threatens to “undermine the security” of their users.

Further, Facebook’s new platform “lacks transparency,” as it has failed to disclose important policy details regarding the storage of and government requests for user data.

As Vice journalist Jordan Pearson points out, because Internet.org user access will be routed through Facebook’s servers, the company will “get a huge amount of insight into users’ online activity.” What’s more, Internet.org users will be subject to Facebook’s data policy, which leaves open the possibility for their information to be shared with advertisers as well as the Facebook’s partner organizations.

“However they may want to present Internet.org, Facebook are not in the business of philanthropy, they’re in the business of making money,” Paul Bernal, professor of technology law at the UK-based University of East Anglia, told Pearson. “With Internet.org that means two things: capturing a market, then using that market. They want people to be hooked in, and then their data is, effectively, controlled by Facebook. In the current era, if you can control someone’s data, you have a huge amount of control over them.”

Four sentenced to death over brutal Afghan mob killing

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Afghan court begins ruling on woman’s murder case, sentencing four men to death by hanging and eight others to jail.

Prosecutors alleged Farkhunda was beaten to death in an attack sparked by a bogus accusation she had burned a copy of the Quran [AP]

Prosecutors alleged Farkhunda was beaten to death in an attack sparked by a bogus accusation she had burned a copy of the Quran [AP]

by Al Jazeera

An Afghan court has sentenced four men to death by hanging for their roles in the mob killing of a woman in March.

The trial of 49 suspects, who were accused of taking part in the mob that killed the 27-year-old, known as Farkhunda, began on May 2. Nineteen police officers were among those facing charges in the trial.

Of the suspects sentenced on Wednesday, four were sentenced to death, eight were sentenced to 16 years in jail and 18 were set free due to a lack of evidence, Al Jazeera’s Jennifer Glasse reported.

The judge adjourned the case until Saturday, when the remaining 19 will be sentenced.

Prosecutors have alleged that Farkhunda was beaten to death in a frenzied attack sparked by a bogus accusation that she had burned a copy of the Quran.

Glasse said the remaing 19 suspects are policemen, but their fate is still unclear.

“The 19 men still to be sentenced are policemen and that will be the interesting part of this trial because the Afghan law number 354 makes failure to render assistance a crime here and they too could be sentenced to jail,” she said

“Earlier this week the police said in court that they tried to to do their job and called for reinforcements but reinforcements did not come. The prosecutor told the police it is their job to protect her.

“This is really a test for the justice system, this case that has captured the attention of the nation. The trial has been televised live everyday and Afghans have been watching very closely.”

The defendants have the right to appeal their sentences. The charges included assault, murder and encouraging others to participate in the assault. The police officers were charged with neglecting their duties and failing to prevent the attack.

Mujub Ullah Farkunda, Farkhunda’s brother, told Al Jazeera they were not happy with the outcome.

“They have wasted our time. The trial only happened because of pressure from the government. The real perpetrators were not there.

“The government didn’t arrest the real murderers. They arrested innocent people off the street and have hidden the real perpetrators. There were more than 100 people involved and they sentenced only 4 to death,” Mujub added.

Farkhunda’s brutal killing shocked many Afghans, though some public and religious figures said it would have been justified if she had in fact damaged a Quran. A presidential investigation later found that she had not damaged a copy of the Muslim holy book.

Her last agonising and brutal hours were captured on mobile phone cameras by witnesses and those in the mob that attacked her. The videos of the assault circulated widely on social media.

They showed Farkhunda – who, like many Afghans, went by only one name – being beaten, run over with a car and burned before her bloodied body was thrown into the river.

The incident sparked nationwide outrage and soul-searching, as well as a civil society movement seeking to limit the power of clerics, strengthen the rule of law and improve women’s rights.

Report: 38 million people are internally displaced throughout the world, Iraq hardest hit

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A photo taken on April 5, 2015 shows an internally displaced Iraqi girl at a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in the northern city of Sammara. (AFP/Mohammed Sawaf)

A photo taken on April 5, 2015 shows an internally displaced Iraqi girl at a camp for internally displaced people (IDP) in the northern city of Sammara. (AFP/Mohammed Sawaf)

by Press TV

A record 38 million people across the globe are displaced inside their own homelands due to conflicts and violence, with Iraq being the hardest-hit nation, a watchdog group reveals.

The Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) released the data in a report titled Global Overview 2015 on Wednesday.

The report said nearly one third of the internally displaced persons (IDPs), or 11 million people, were forced from their homes last year alone, with an average of 30,000 people fleeing every day.

The IDMC said the total number of those displaced around the globe in 2014 increased by 14 percent compared to the figure reported in the year before.

“These are the worst figures for forced displacement in a generation, signaling our complete failure to protect innocent civilians,” said Jan Egeland (pictured above), the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which oversees the IDMC.

“This report should be a tremendous wake-up call,” said Egeland, adding, “We must break this trend where millions of men, women and children are becoming trapped in conflict zones around the world.”

The data also showed that a staggering 60 percent of the newly displaced people last year were in just five countries, namely Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Iraqi people have been the hardest hit, with 2.2 million people forced to flee their homes to other parts of the country due to the violence by Daesh.

In Syria, some one million more people were forced from their homes last year, bringing the total number of the IDPs in the Middle Eastern countries to 7.6 million, or 40 percent of the population.

Ukraine also appeared in the IDMC’s report for the first time, with some 646,500 people internally displaced there in 2014 amid fighting between Kiev government troops and pro-Russia forces in the country’s eastern regions.

The watchdog group said the data also showed that there currently are nearly twice as many people who are internally displaced than refugees – those who flee their homeland – without giving an exact number of the refugees.

According to statistics from the United Nations, some 16.7 million people across the globe were living as refugees at the end of 2013.

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