Archives for 2022

Parmesh S Jain

The West Division police of Magadi road police on Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old conman who had cheated a gold smith and escaped with five gold necklaces worth over 16 lakh .

The accused has been identified as, Farhan Abbas a native of Gauribidanur.

Senior officer told media persons,Sohidul Mondal,a jewel maker registered a cheating case against a person and his associates who escaped with five necklace worth Rs.16 lakhs he stated in his statement that he had ordered to make five necklaces on December 31.

Mondal agreed and sent the order through his two employees to the accused shop on Thursday to deliver the order (January 6),and get the money.

Mondal said the person asked the two employees to sit at the shop and on the pretext of getting the necklace okayed from his customers,he took the valuables necklaces weighing 311 grams and escaped.

After waiting for over four hours,the two employees informed Mondal who tried to call the accused on the phone but it was not reachable.

Realising that he had been duped,Mondal approached the police and registered a complaint.

Based on the complaint,Magadi road police inspector, Sreenivas GT,and special crime squad of ACP,Vijayanagar rushed to the spot and after inspecting the spot and collecting information from the two employees.

A special team was formed under the leadership of Inspector, Sreenivas GT,and team swung into action the team gathered the technical details and tracked down Abbas to his home town.

The team immediately picked the accused and during investigation the accused confessed the crime and a detailed investigation by the team it has revealed that,the accused posing as jewelers tried to dupe jewellers in Cubbonpet,but it did not materialize . 

Changing the plan,the accused rented out a shop in Rajajinagar 5th block under the name Vasundhara jewellers by paying an advance amount of Rs.2,50,000 to the shop owner and fixed monthly rental of Rs.23,000. 

The accused even bought a few second hand furniture to set up the looks of the shop before approaching to lure the goldsmith and get the jewels from him.

It was a meticulous plan of the accused who did not want to leave a single clue before fleeing with the gold.

But a small mistake made by one of the accused led the police to track down the accused Farhan Abbas from his hometown in Alipura in Gauribidanur.

The police team recovered 116 grams of gold valuables worth Rs.5 lakh from him while efforts are on to track down two of his associates who are on the run and special team is on the job to nab them a case has been registered in Magadi road police station and further investigation is on.

Finally Bengaluru Police Commissioner,Kamal Pant has appreciated Addl CP West,Sandeep Patil,DCP West,Dr Sanjeev M Patil,ACP, Nanjundegowda K,PI,Sreenivas GT,PSIs,as,Srinivas Doddamani,Prasanna N,ASIs,as,Narasimhamurthy,Mahadevaiah,Kumaraiah DS,and Guruswamy and ACP Crime squad, as,Krishnappa,Basavarajappa,Dinesh,Naveen Kumar,Ranganath,Shivaraju,KS,Anand,Nikhil and other staff has been appreciated for their excellent and meticulous investigation in nabbing the conman who duped a gold maker and escaped with gold ornaments and a special reward will be given to the whole team for their exemplary work he added.

Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Narottam Mishra

Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh government has started the process to replace with Hindi the Urdu, Farsi (Persian) and other non-Hindi words being used by the state police in various proceedings.

Madhya Pradesh Home Minister Narottam Mishra had last month announced to replace the words from other languages which are not in use with Hindi in the police proceedings.

The Madhya Pradesh Police Headquarters issued a letter on Tuesday asking senior police officers from various districts to submit suggestions within seven days about replacing non-Hindi words in the official lexicon.

The directive said that a Hindi word lexicon is to be prepared so that these words can be used in police proceedings in future.

New Delhi: Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav’s daughter-in-law Aparna Yadav joined the BJP on Wednesday.

She joined the party in the presence of Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya and and its state chief Swatantra Dev Singh.

She is married to Prateek Yadav, son of Mulayam Singh Yadav’s second wife while SP president Akhilesh Yadav is his son from the first marriage.

Aparna Yadav said she has always been impressed with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and added that the nation’s interest has always been her priority.

There had been much speculation about her joining the BJP, and the development highlights the rift in the SP’s ruling family at a time when Akhilesh Yadav has been working to rally the party’s base in the run up to the state assembly polls.

The BJP may field her in the polls, sources said.

Aparna Yadav had contested the 2017 assembly polls on the Samajwadi Party ticket from Lucknow Cantt but had lost to BJP’s Rita Bahuguna Joshi, now a Lok Sabha member.

Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh will be held in seven phases beginning from February 10.

New Delhi: With 2,82,970 new coronavirus infections being reported in a day, India’s total tally of COVID-19 cases rose to 3,79,01,241, which includes 8,961 cases of the Omicron variant, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Wednesday.

The active cases have increased to 18,31,000, the highest in 232 days. The active cases stood at 18,95,520 on May 31 last year. The death toll has climbed to 4,87,202 with 441 fresh fatalities, the data updated at 8 am stated.

There has been an 0.79 per cent increase in Omicron cases since Tuesday, the ministry said.

Experts said it is not possible to undertake genome sequencing of each and every sample but stressed that the current wave is largely being driven by the Omicron variant.

The active cases comprise 4.83 per cent of the total infections, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate has decreased to 93.88 per cent, the ministry said.

An increase of 44,952 cases has been recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours.

India’s COVID-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 2020, 30 lakh on August 23, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on September 16. It went past 60 lakh on September 28, 70 lakh on October 11, crossed 80 lakh on October 29, 90 lakh on November 20 and surpassed the one-crore mark on December 19. India crossed the grim milestone of two crore on May 4 and three crore on June 23.

New Delhi/Davos; It is not possible to end the COVID-19 virus as such viruses never go away and end up becoming part of the ecosystem, a top WHO official said on Tuesday but asserted that it is possible to end this year the public health emergency caused by COVID-19 with a collaborative approach to fix inherent inequities in the system.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s online Davos Agenda 2022 summit, the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme Executive Director Michael Ryan said what needs to be done is to ensure a really low level of disease incidence with the maximum vaccination of the entire world population.

“That will be the end of the public health emergency in my view and that would be an end to this pandemic,” he said while adding that there was a chance to achieve it this year itself.

The worldwide spread of the deadly virus, which was first reported in China’s Wuhan in late 2019, has seen more than 33 crore confirmed cases globally and over 55.5 lakh deaths so far.

The World Health Organization (WHO) had declared the outbreak a ‘public health emergency of international concern’ on January 30, 2020, and a pandemic on March 11, 2020.

However, the emergence of its fast-spreading Omicron variant, resulting in the re-introduction of national lockdowns, travel bans and quarantines in various parts of the world, has reinforced the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We won’t end the virus this year. We may never end this virus. Pandemic viruses end up becoming part of the ecosystem,” Ryan said.

“What we can end is the public health emergency this year, but the issue is about deaths, about hospitalisations and about the destruction of social, economic and political systems that have caused the tragedy. The virus is just a vehicle,” he said.

The WHO official said it is the reaction of the society to the virus that caused the tragedy as he blamed “the inequity including in access to health facilities and all those long-standing social inequities and those huge inequities not just between countries but also the internal inequities within countries”.

“Yes, we have a chance to end this public health emergency this year if we do right things to fix these inequities. But the reality is this tragedy will continue,” he said.

Ryan also sought to warn against an emerging narrative on whether the COVID-19 pandemic is on its way to becoming endemic in nature.

“Endemic just means it is here forever. Even endemic diseases kill hundreds of thousands of people and we should not think that a pandemic becoming endemic is the good thing,” he added.

Speaking at the same session, Oxfam International Executive Director Gabriela Bucher said it is possible to end the pandemic if we overhaul the model radically to ensure a truly equitable distribution.

Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, said the definition of the pandemic is evolving every day. “I am not an expert, but there will be a point when we reach a certain level of vaccination, hopefully by the end of this year, when everyone is double or triple vaccinated, then probably we can say that. And also that would depend on what kinds of new variants emerge and hospitalisation levels remaining under control,” he added.

He was replying to a question on whether an end to the pandemic could be in sight.

Seth F Berkley, CEO of Gavi vaccine alliance, said the COVAX programme has been successful, but not without its speed bumps along the way.

The WHO has also been criticising the unequal distribution of vaccines and has been asking manufacturers and other countries to contribute to COVAX, the UN-backed programme for supplying vaccines to poor countries. So far, it has delivered 1 billion doses.

According to WHO, 36 of its 194 member countries have vaccinated less than 10 per cent of population and 88 have inoculated under 40 per cent.

Poonawalla, whose Serum Institute of India has been a key member of GAVI alliance, said his company is ready to support the pool towards reaching global vaccine equity.

John Nkengasong, Director of Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said greater cooperation and greater solidarity will be the way forward if we want this pandemic to end.

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi

New Delhi: A group of prominent civil society members on Tuesday questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “silence” over alleged hate speeches against Muslims at the Haridwar Dharam Sansad and demanded “exemplary” action by the government against those involved.

The Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy (IMSD) in a statement signed by 278 people, including lyricist Javed Akhtar and actor Naseeruddin Shah, said that “no Indian ought to be surprised by the shocking silence” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi despite growing demand nationally and internationally that he must speak, and his government must act in “exemplary fashion” against members of the Dharam Sansad who have called for a “genocide of Indian Muslims”.

“The PM’s silence speaks volumes, is nothing short of a mockery of Indian democracy, a violation of the Indian Constitution which the PM has sworn to uphold during his swearing in…. His ‘maun’ (silence) is inexcusable,” the statement said.

“In his first term as Prime Minister, Modi had promised ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’ to all Indians. He went a step further in his current second term with the assurance of ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas’. That these were/are nothing but insincere and hollow slogans is more than evident from the way Indian Muslims continue to be hounded, wounded and lynched,” the group said.

The signatories of the IMSD statement include journalists, lawyers, academicians, civil society activists and members of the film fraternity.

Some participants at the Dharam Sansad held in Haridwar from December 17-19 have been accused of delivering highly provocative speeches against Muslims.