Archives for December 2018

With an eye on pacifying edgy MLAs with JD(S), Congress government, the Karnataka cabinet is all set to induct new ministers on Saturday.

Wheels for the much-expected cabinet expansion were finally set rolling after Congress president Rahul Gandhi gave the go-ahead for the induction of six new faces and the replacement of two ministers in the JD(S)-led coalition government in Karnataka, according to a report. Chief Minister HD Kumaraswamy is expected to meet Governor Vajubhai Rudabhai Vala at 11 am to inform him of the government’s decision and schedule a swearing-in ceremony for the to-be ministers.

MTB Nagaraj, Raheem Khan, E Tukaram and PT Parameshwara Naik are among the six leaders whose names are understood to have been finalised after discussions with state leaders in a meeting.

Congress Legislature Party leader Siddaramaiah, Pradesh Congress president Dinesh Gundu Rao, Deputy chief minister G Parameshwara, and Congress general secretary in-charge of Karnataka KC Venugopal were present in the meeting. Besides inducting six new faces, the sources said the Congress chief is understood to have approved dropping two ministers — Municipal Administration minister Ramesh Jarkiholi and Forest minister R Shankar — from the cabinet.

Jarkiholi, who has been allegedly hobnobbing with BJP leaders, will be replaced by his brother Satish Jarkiholi, whereas Shankar’s portfolio will be handed over to CS Shivalli from Kuruba community. Shankar, an Independent MLA from Ranebennur too had in the past interacted with the BJP ahead of the Karnataka government formation.

In the meeting, the Rahul gave the green signal for appointing Congress leaders V Muniappa as political secretary and Ajay Singh as state representative in the national capital.

Meanwhile, the cabinet expansion bore clear footprints of Siddaramiah’s influence. The Congress leader pressed for induction of more ministers from constituencies in Mumbai-Karnataka and Hyderabad-Karnataka, besides batting for the inclusion of two Kuruba, reported in media.

The sources said the swearing-in ceremony of new members will take place depending on the availability of the governor.

According to the pact reached between the two partners at the time of formation of the coalition government in May, there are at present six vacant ministerial positions left for the Congress and two for the JD(S).  The cabinet expansion is expected to pacify members of the Congress camp who have become restless following its repeated postponement.

PTI

Police said the bus carrying college students and teachers drove off a highway in a mountainous area.

A bus carrying college students and teachers veered off a highway in a mountainous area of southwestern Nepal and plunged into a river, killing at least 21 people and injuring 15 others, officials said.

The bus was returning to the town of Ghorahi from an educational trip to Dang district when the accident took place on a road near Tulsipur town on Friday, police officer Prem Bahadur Shahi said.

“It plunged about 700 meters below the road. We have found the bodies of 13 men and three women so far,” he said.

Those injured in the accident were being treated at a local hospital, Shahi said, adding that at least two of them were in a critical condition.

Reuters news agency reported that the rescue operation was difficult since the crash site is situated in a remote area, around 400km west of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.

The students and instructors were from Krishna Sen Ichhuk Polytechnic Institute and were visiting a farm in a nearby district as part of their botany field trip.

Road accidents are common in mountainous Nepal, which in recent years has seen a drive to build roads connecting remote regions to towns and cities across the country.

Twenty people were killed last week when a mini-truck skidded off the road in Nuwakot district in central Nepal.

Several Indian government agencies have been armed with sweeping powers to intercept, monitor and decrypt information from any computer in the country, a move that critics say aims to make India the next “Big Brother state”.

After India’s Home Ministry issued a notification on Thursday authorising 10 agencies with the power to tap, intercept and decrypt all personal data on computers and networks in India, opposition parties said the government is attempting to create a “surveillance state”.

Among the agencies that are now enabled to exercise these snooping powers are the Research and Analysis Wing, the main foreign-intelligence gathering body, and the Intelligence Bureau report directly to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Congress party chief Rahul Gandhi said this move showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi is “an insecure dictator”.

Converting India into a police state isn’t going to solve your problems, Modi Ji.

It’s only going to prove to over 1 billion Indians, what an insecure dictator you really are.N

India’s Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the move will help track “terrorists”.

“How else will terrorists who use technology extensively be traced? Otherwise, the terrorists will use IT, but the intelligence and investigative agencies will be crippled,” Jaitley tweeted.

‘No safeguards’

Privacy advocates argue that widespread government surveillance of this kind will have a “chilling effect” on democratic debate and dissent. In the world’s largest democracy, data security and privacy regulations are still to be framed.

Even though the orders are supposed to target everyone, most analysts say they could possibly be used to crackdown on critics, rights campaigners and political opponents ahead of a general election that’s slated early next year.O

“This would make data collection from critics and political opponents easier. This will facilitate targeted raids against the opposition and critics. In its ambition, this is similar to America’s spy programme PRISM. Indians need to press for surveillance reform urgently to protect us from a police state,” Srinivas Kodali, an independent security researcher in Hyderabad, told media .

Interception of phone calls was already authorized for certain federal agencies under India’s Telecom Act.

The absence of any oversight mechanism for such interception by federal agencies gives them untrammeled power, according to some analysts.

“This notification gives powers to a host of agencies with minimal oversight. There are no safeguards as to how this collected data will be dealt with, so concerns of civil society are not unwarranted. Governments once they are given unbridled power of this kind, end up almost routinely abusing it,” Sanjay Hegde, a supreme court lawyer, told media.

Indian intelligence agencies report straight to the prime minister and the home minister without any parliamentary or judicial oversight. On Friday opposition parties disrupted parliament, asking questions about the new notification.

Social media sites were also abuzz with criticism against the government move. While the Internet Freedom Foundation of India posted a “red alert” about the notification, a security researcher, who tweets under the pseudonym Elliot Alderson, described it as “a sad day for India”.

Right to privacy

In 2017, India’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled that individual privacy is a fundamental right, a verdict that should have a significant bearing on civil rights.O

On the question of whether Thursday’s notification would withstand legal scrutiny, lawyer Hegde said “courts often tend to duck these problems involving technology when faced with a broad spectrum challenge”.

“But a particular individual whose privacy is compromised can go to court and challenge this notification,” he said.

“It does not square with the recent right to privacy ruling of the top court but very often when questions of national security are used to defend anything, the court gives greater deference to government claims than to individual rights,” he added.

The rightwing BJP government said the new powers would help to protect the country against “terrorists” and other “national security threats”. But critics say the absence of requisite oversights only heightens fears about its intentions.

Aljazeera

Nasheman News : BJP President Amit Shah on Friday hit back at Congress President Rahul Gandhi on the government order for monitoring of all computers, saying he was doing “fear-mongering” and playing with the national security.

“Yet again Rahul (Gandhi) does fear-mongering and plays politics with national security. UPA put no barriers on unlawful surveillance. When Modi government puts safeguards for citizens, Rahul cries conspiracy.

“Why are you lying so much and what is the fear that you are hiding,” he said in a series of tweets.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief also attacked the Congress saying that there were only “two insecure dictators” in the history of the country. 

“There were only two insecure dictators in the history of India. One imposed emergency and the other wanted unrestricted access to read letters of common citizens. 

“Guess who were they, Rahul Gandhi?” he said in an apparent reference to late prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. 

Shah’s remarks came soon after Gandhi called Modi an “insecure dictator”. 

Earlier, the Congress chief said: “Converting India into a police state isn’t going to solve your problems, Modi Ji. It’s only going to prove to over 1 billion Indians what an insecure dictator you really are.” 

The BJP and Congress traded barbs after the Ministry of Home Affairs on Thursday issued an order giving 10 central agencies, including the CBI, the ED and the Delhi Police among others to “intercept, monitor and decrypt any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer”.

Nasheman News : A methane gas explosion at a coal mine in the Czech Republic killed 13 miners, officials and the state-run OKD mining company said on Friday.

Thursday’s blast occurred 2,625 feet below ground at the CSM hard-coal mine near Karvina city, close to the Polish border.

OKD, the company that operates the CSM mine, said 11 of those killed were Polish miners provided by a contractor agency, while two were Czech, CNN reported.

A further 10 miners were injured in the blast, with one in a critical condition, according to the Czech national news agency CTK.

The explosion devastated large areas of the mine. OKD’s Managing Director, Boleslav Kowalczyk, said search and rescue operations had to be called off because of poor conditions in the mine.

“Unfortunately, we have reached a point where it was impossible to move forward because there was a fire raging and zero visibility,” he said in a statement.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis visited the mine with his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki.

“The blast at the CSM mine is a huge tragedy,” Babis tweeted, adding that the country’s Parliament will observe a minute’s silence for the victims on Friday.

Morawiecki called the incident “a huge tragedy for all Poles and Czechs”. 

“On this difficult day, we strongly show our solidarity and sense of national community,” he said.

The disaster is the worst mining accident to occur in the Czech Republic since 1990, when 30 miners died in a fire in another mine near Karvina.

 Nasheman News : The BJP’s plans to take out Rath yatra rallies christened ‘Save democracy rallies’ in West Bengal again hit a roadblock, with a Calcutta High Court division bench on Friday quashing the order of a single bench that gave conditional go-ahead to the programme.

The division bench comprising Chief Justice Debasish Kargupta and Justice Shampa Sarkar sent the case back to the single bench with a directive that the latter consider the intelligence inputs provided by the state agencies.

The Mamata Banerjee government had moved an appeal at the division bench against Thursday’s single bench order and sought urgent hearing.

While setting aside the single bench’s order, the division bench directed it to study afresh the 36 intelligence inputs from 31 police stations and five police commissionerates submitted by the state government before it.

The ruling came after state advocate general Kishore Dutta argued that the single bench had not considered the intelligence inputs and returned to the government without opening the sealed cover in which the inputs were given.

Dutta said the intelligence inputs had apprehended communal disturbances if the BJP’s proposed programme was given the green light.

In an interesting development, senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi pleaded as a counsel of the Director General of Police and the additional director general (law and order) and argued that the rally and the reception part of the programme would lead to huge traffic bottlenecks, inconveniencing commuters.

Sanghvi said with the BJP submitting that 1,500 people would take part in each of the three Rath Yatra rallies in the state, there would be a kilometre long bus convoy in each case, jeopardising vehicular movement. He said the police have no objection to the holding of meetings, and pointed out that nearly 2,100 such political meetings called by the saffron outfit in the last two years have got the nod in the state.

The police’s objection was about the rally and reception part of the programme that could cause traffic chaos, he argued.

On Thursday, acting on a petition filed by the BJP against the government refusing permission for the rallies, the bench of Justice Tapobrata Chakraborty had given conditional permission to the programme, saying the organisers will be liable for any untoward incident or damage to public property.

The state government had last week rejected BJP’s plea to hold the ‘Rath Yatra’, arguing there was “grave apprehension of major breach of peace and communal violence during and in the aftermath” of the programme.

The BJP had moved a single bench of the Calcutta High Court on December 17 after the Bengal government’s decision and proposed December 22, 24 and 26 as fresh dates for the three Rath Yatra rallies.

The BJP was originally scheduled to hold three Rath Yatra rallies from north Bengal’s Cooch Behar, South 24 Parganas district’s Gangasagar and Birbhum district’s temple town of Tarapith, flagged off by party president Amit Shah on December 7, 9 and 14 respectively. These rallies were meant to touch all 42 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state before converging at Kolkata in January.