Spotlight – Link Punjabi

Bharat Jodo Yatra enters Palakkad district

Editor — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 07:41:53 +0000

PALAKKAD: The Congress party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra resumed its journey on Monday from Shornur in Kerala’s Palakkad district with hundreds of party workers accompanying Rahul Gandhi in the walk.
The morning leg of the march, which entered its 19th day, will cover 12.3 km and halt at Pattambi.
The Congress party tweeted that the yatra entered Palakkad district with “excitement and hope”.
“…And we can’t wait to start this journey with you,” it said in the tweet.

Hello Palakkad,#BharatJodoYatra comes to you with excitement and hope. And we can’t wait to start this journey wi… https://t.co/U4B0Yk68Ve

— Congress (@INCIndia) 1664152200000

Senior Congress leader K Muraleedharan and Leader of Opposition in Kerala Assembly V D Satheesan joined Gandhi in the morning session of the yatra.
Hundreds of people waited on both sides of the road to meet Gandhi. A group of young girls presented the Congress leader with a framed drawing of himself.
“Couldn’t have asked for a better start to the Padyatra. The young minds are coming out in large numbers to bless @RahulGandhi Ji and all the Padtyatris. We owe them a brighter future. Towards achieving our goal. #BharatJodoYatra,” the party said in a tweet along with a photo of the young girls holding Gandhi’s drawing.
The Congress leader will garland a Mahatma Gandhi statue on the way to Pattambi, the party said. The yatra will resume at 5 pm and conclude at Koppam, it said.
The Congress party’s 3,570 km and 150-day long foot march started from Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu on September 7 and will conclude in Jammu and Kashmir.
The yatra, which entered Kerala on the evening of September 10, will go through the state covering 450 km, touching seven districts in 19 days before entering Karnataka on October 1.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

One farmer dying every hour in BJP rule: Congress

Editor — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 12:46:06 +0000

NEW DELHI: The Congress on Tuesday held the policies of the ruling BJP dispensation responsible for farmers’ suicides in the country, claiming that one farmer died by suicide every hour.
Addressing a press conference in the wake of a September 17 suicide of Pune-based Dashrath Lakshman Kedari, Congress spokesperson Supriya Shrinate said the farmer, in his suicide note, held “the BJP government’s policies responsible for his death and noted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was concerned only with himself”.
“Dashrath Lakshman Kedari in his suicide note said he did not have any money to pay back his loans and was ending his life due to helplessness. He sought reasonable MSP (Minimum Support Price) for farm produce as a farmers’ right and blamed the policies of the incumbent government for his decision to end life,” Shrinate said.
She said as many as 10,881 people involved in agriculture died by suicide in 2021, which was 6.6 per cent of 1,64,033 suicide deaths last year.
“This means, every day 30 farmers are dying by suicide and every hour more than one farmer is dying,” she said.
Citing the National Crimes Record Bureau data, she said more than 53,881 farmers killed themselves between 2014 and 2021, which translates to 21 deaths daily.
Shrinate said it was ironic that 2022, the year by which the government had promised to double the income of farmers, was actually witnessing “barely Rs 27 average income” for them.
“Who is responsible for the dire straits of Indian farmers? The policies of this government,” the Congress leader said.
She also recalled the death of over 700 farmers during the year-long farmers agitation against the three agricultural reforms laws to allege the “government’s apathy towards farmers and the farm sector”.
Further, she said the government’s remarks before the Supreme Court that payment of MSP over and above 50 per cent of the cost to farmers would distort the market, and that the Centre’s decision not to procure the produce if state governments bought them above the MSP clearly went against the farmers.
The Congress leader said the government had “looted the farmers” by increasing diesel prices, imposing a range of GST on farm products — five per cent on fertiliser; 18 per cent on insecticides, 12 per cent on farm equipment, and 18 per cent on tractors, “pushing the production cost to Rs 25,000 per hectare.”
Quoting data from the National Sample Service Organisation, Shrinate said the average daily earnings of farmers now stood at Rs 12 as against the average loan of Rs 74,000.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

WHO: New Covid cases, deaths keep falling nearly everywhere

Editor — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 15:08:50 +0000

GENEVA: The number of new coronavirus cases and deaths reported globally continued to fall nearly everywhere in the world in what the World Health Organization described as a “welcome decline” at a media briefing on Wednesday.
The UN health agency said there were 4.5 million new Covid-19 cases reported last week, a 16% drop from the previous week. Deaths were also down by 13%, with about 13,500 fatalities. WHO said Covid-19 infections dropped everywhere in the world while deaths decreased everywhere except for Southeast Asia, where they climbed by 15% and in the Western Pacific, where they rose by 3%.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that with the coming onset of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and the possible emergence of a more dangerous new Covid-19 variant, experts expect to see a spike in hospitalizations and deaths. Tedros said vaccination rates, even in rich countries, were still too low, noting that 30% of health workers and 20% of older people remain unimmunized.
“These vaccination gaps pose a risk to all of us,” he said. “Please get vaccinated if you are not and a booster if it’s recommended that you have one.”
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration cleared its first update to Covid-19 vaccines on Wednesday, booster doses that target today’s most common omicron strain. Authorities said shots could begin within days.
Until now, Covid-19 vaccines have targeted the original coronavirus strain, even as wildly different mutants emerged. The new US boosters are combination, or “bivalent,” shots. They contain half that original vaccine recipe and half protection against the newest omicron versions, called BA.4 and BA.5, which are considered the most contagious yet.
Earlier this month, Britain decided it would offer adults 50 and over a different booster option from Moderna, a combo shot targeting that initial BA.1 omicron strain.
On Friday, the European Medicines Agency will consider whether to authorize the combination Covid-19 vaccine including BA.1 made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Another version of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine incorporating the BA.5 subvariant of omicron is also under review by the EU regulator.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

History’s bookends: Putin reversed many Gorbachev reforms

Editor — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 15:02:47 +0000

NEW YORK: One stood for freedom, openness, peace and closer ties with the outside world. The other is jailing critics, muzzling journalists, pushing his country deeper into isolation and waging Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.
Such are history’s bookends between Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president.
In many ways, Gorbachev, who died Tuesday, unwittingly enabled Putin. The forces Gorbachev unleashed spun out of control, led to his downfall and the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Since coming to power in 1999, Putin has been taking a hard line that resulted in a near-complete reversal of Gorbachev’s reforms.
When Gorbachev came to power as Soviet leader in 1985, he was younger and more vibrant than his predecessors. He broke with the past by moving away from a police state, embracing freedom of the press, ending his country’s war in Afghanistan and letting go of Eastern European countries that had been locked in Moscow’s communist orbit. He ended the isolation that had gripped the USSR since its founding.
It was an exciting, hopeful time for Soviet citizens and the world. Gorbachev brought the promise of a brighter future.
He believed in integration with the West, multi-lateralism and globalism to solve the world’s problems, including ending armed conflicts and reducing the danger of nuclear weapons.
In marked contrast, Putin’s worldview holds that the West is an “empire of lies,” and democracy is chaotic, uncontrolled and dangerous. While mostly refraining from direct criticism, Putin implies that Gorbachev sold out to the West.
Returning to a communist-style mindset, Putin believes the West is imperialistic and arrogant, trying to impose its liberal values and policies on Russia and using the country as a scapegoat for its own problems.
He accuses Western leaders of trying to restart the Cold War and restrain Russia’s development. He seeks a world order with Russia on equal footing with the United States and other major powers, and in some respects is trying to rebuild an empire.
Gorbachev sometimes bowed to Western pressure. Two years after U.S. President Ronald Reagan implored him to “tear down this wall” in a speech at the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev did so, indirectly, by not intervening in populist anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe. The dropping of the Iron Curtain and end of the Cold War followed.
At home, Gorbachev introduced two sweeping and dramatic policies — “glasnost” or openness — and “perestroika,” a restructuring of Soviet society. Previously taboo subjects could now be discussed, in literature, the news media and society in general. He undertook economic reforms to allow private enterprise, moving away from a state-run economy.
He also loosened up on the dreaded police state, freed political prisoners such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, and ended the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power. Freer foreign travel, emigration and religious observances were also part of the mix.
Putin has veered away from Gorbachev’s changes. He focused on restoring order and rebuilding the police state. An increasingly severe crackdown on dissent has involved jailing critics, branding them traitors and extremists, including for merely calling the “special military operation” in Ukraine a war. He sees some critics as foreign-funded collaborators of Russia’s enemies.
In his quest for control, he’s shut down independent news organizations and banned human rights and humanitarian organizations. He demands complete loyalty to the state and emphasizes traditional Russian family, religious and nationalistic tenets.
Gorbachev’s leadership was not without failures. His more liberal policies were uneven, such as a bloody 1991 Soviet crackdown on the independence movement in the Soviet Baltic republic of Lithuania and the attempted early coverup of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.
By 1988, he realized that trying to hide bad events wasn’t working, so when a massive earthquake hit Armenia in December 1988, he opened the borders to emergency international help and allowed transparency about the destruction.
After nearly a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, Gorbachev ordered the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, entered into multiple arms-control and disarmament agreements with the United States and other countries, and helped end the Cold War. For those efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.
But at home, Gorbachev’s economic reforms didn’t go well. Freeing industries from state control and allowing private enterprise too quickly and haphazardly created widespread shortages of food and consumer goods, worsened corruption and spawned a class of oligarchs.
The burgeoning independence movements in Soviet republics and other problems so angered Communist Party hard-liners that they attempted a coup against him in August 1991, further weakening his grip on power and leading to his resignation four months later.
In the end, many in Russia felt Gorbachev had left them with broken promises, dashed hopes and a weakened, humiliated country.
One who felt that way was Putin. For him, much of what Gorbachev did was a mistake. The biggest was the Soviet Union’s collapse, what Putin called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
The Soviet Union was disrespected, defeated and broken into pieces – 15 countries. For Putin, it was also personal, because as a KGB officer stationed in East Germany, he watched in horror as massive crowds staged the popular uprising that led to the removal of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s reunification, at one point besieging his KGB office in Dresden.
To this day, Putin’s perceptions about threats to his country and popular revolutions color his foreign policy and his deep mistrust of the West. They underpin his decision to invade Ukraine on Feb. 24.
As one justification for the war, he cites what he believes was a broken U.S. promise to Gorbachev – a supposed 1990 pledge that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe. U.S. officials have denied making such a pledge, but Putin believes NATO’s expansion, and specifically the prospect of neighboring Ukraine joining the alliance, pose an existential threat to Russia.
Critics allege that Putin distorts the facts and ignores local sentiments to claim Ukrainians want to be liberated from the Kyiv government and align with Moscow.
He has also embarked on a massive effort to modernize and expand Russia’s military might, moving away from arms-control accords that Gorbachev agreed to.
Putin’s war in Ukraine, his human rights violations and the 2014 annexation of Crimea have drawn massive international sanctions that are reversing the cultural and economic ties that Gorbachev fostered. But for a few allies, Russia is isolated.
While one might expect Gorbachev to have been more critical of Putin, he did condemn NATO’s eastward expansion and said the West bungled the chance offered by the Cold War’s end. He even supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
But in many other ways, the historic bookends between the two leaders are far apart.
Before Gorbachev rose to power, Reagan in 1983 famously branded Russia an “evil empire.” Five years later, he recanted the description at a summit with the Soviet leader.
Fast forward to today, when the current US president, Joe Biden, has called Putin a “killer,” a “butcher” and a “war criminal” who “cannot remain in power.”
The Cold War that Gorbachev helped end is back.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Jharkhand crisis: Selective leaks from governor’s office creating chaos, say UPA MLAs

Editor — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 14:17:14 +0000

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NEW DELHI: A delegation of JMM and Congress MLAs met Jharkhand governor Ramesh Bais on Thursday amid uncertainty over chief minister Hemant Soren‘s political future in the state.
The meeting comes days after the Election Commission recommended Soren’s disqualification in a letter to the governor over an office-for-profit case.
The group of MLAs requested the governor to declare his opinion on the matter, saying that speculations on Soren’s fate has encouraged the destablisation of a democratically-elected government.
The legislators also expressed “shock” over the “selective leaks” from the governor’s office on Soren’s disqualification as a legislator.
The delegation, in its representation to Bais, said such leaks created “chaos, confusion and uncertainty”.
It asserted that disqualification of the CM as MLA will not affect the government, as the ruling JMM-Congress-RJD coalition enjoys an absolute majority in the 81-member House.
In the Jharkhand assembly, the ruling alliance has 30 MLAs of JMM, 18 MLAs of Congress and one MLA of RJD.
Following a petition by the BJP seeking Soren’s disqualification from the assembly, the Election Commission sent its decision to Bais on August 25.
Though the EC’s decision is not yet made official, there was a buzz that the poll panel has recommended the chief minister’s disqualification as an MLA.
The Raj Bhavan is yet to announce anything on this matter. This has led to growing uncertainty among the ruling coalition about Soren’s future.
(With inputs from agencies)

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Russia launches war games with China amid tensions with US

Editor — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 14:15:58 +0000

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MOSCOW: Russia on Thursday launched weeklong war games involving forces from China and other nations in a show of growing defence cooperation between Moscow and Beijing, as they both face tensions with the United States.
The maneuvers are also intended to demonstrate that Moscow has sufficient military might for massive drills even as its troops are engaged in military action in Ukraine.
The Russian Defence Ministry said that the Vostok 2022 (East 2022) exercise will be held until September 7 at seven firing ranges in Russia’s Far East and the Sea of Japan and involve more than 50,000 troops and over 5,000 weapons units, including 140 aircraft and 60 warships.
Russian General Staff chief, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, will personally oversee the drills involving troops from several ex-Soviet nations, China, India, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Syria.
The Defence Ministry noted that as part of the maneuvers, the Russian and Chinese navies in the Sea of Japan will “practice joint action to protect sea communications, areas of marine economic activity and support for ground troops in littoral areas.”
Beijing sent more than 2,000 troops along with more than 300 military vehicles, 21 combat aircraft and three warships to take part in the drills, Chinese news reports said.
China’s Global Times newspaper noted that the maneuvers marked the first time that China has sent forces from three branches of its military to take part in a single Russian drill, in what it described as a show of the breadth and depth of China-Russia military cooperation and mutual trust.
The drills showcase increasing defense ties between Moscow and Beijing, which have grown stronger since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine on February 24.
China has pointedly refused to criticize Russia’s actions, blaming the US and NATO for provoking Moscow, and has blasted the punishing sanctions imposed on Moscow.
Russia, in turn, has strongly backed China amid the tensions with the US that followed a recent visit to Taiwan by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Putin has drawn parallels between US support for Ukraine and Pelosi’s trip, describing them both as part of alleged efforts by Washington to foment global instability.
Alexander Gabuyev, a political analyst who closely follows Russia-China ties, noted that “it’s very important for Beijing to show to the US that it has levers to pressure America and its global interests.”
“The joint maneuvers with Moscow, including the naval drills, are intended to signal that if the pressure on Beijing continues it will have no other choice but to strengthen the military partnership with Russia,” Gabuyev said.
“It will have a direct impact on the interests of the US and its allies, including Japan.”
He noted that the Kremlin, for its part, wants to show that the country’s military is powerful enough to flex its muscle elsewhere despite the campaign in Ukraine.
“The Russian leadership demonstrates that everything goes according to plan and the country and its military have resources to conduct the maneuvers along with the special military operation,” Gabuyev said.
The exercise continues a series of joint war games by Russia and China in recent years, including naval drills and patrols by long-range bombers over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea. Last year, Russian troops for the first time deployed to Chinese territory for joint maneuvers.
China’s participation in the drills “aims to deepen pragmatic and friendly cooperation between the militaries of the participating countries, enhance the level of strategic cooperation among all participating parties, and enhance the ability to jointly respond to various security threats,” Chinese Defence Ministry spokesperson Col. Tan Kefei said last week.
Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have developed strong personal ties to bolster a “strategic partnership” between the former Communist rivals as they both are locked in rivalry with the US.
Even though Moscow and Beijing in the past rejected the possibility of forging a military alliance, Putin has said that such a prospect can’t be ruled out. He also has noted that Russia has been sharing highly sensitive military technologies with China that helped significantly bolster its defense capability.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Congress president’s election mired in controversy as leaders question voters’ list

Editor — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 14:58:00 +0000

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NEW DELHI: The election to the Congress president’s post is getting mired in one controversy or the other with each passing day. In the latest row, senior party leaders have questioned the constitutionality of the voters’ list.
After veteran Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad’s resignation on August 26 and the continuous frontal attack on party leader Rahul Gandhi since then, a couple of senior leaders of the organisation have raised questions over the very veracity of the electoral roll for the president’s election scheduled to be held on October 17.
Two Congress Lok Sabha MPs – Manish Tewari from Sri Anandpur Sahib in Punjab and Karti Chidambaram from Sivaganga in Tamil Nadu – on Wednesday alleged that the party’s presidential election could not be held in a free and fair manner without a transparent and well-defined electoral roll.
In a series of four tweets, Tewari, a grassroots leader, asked a few questions from Madhusudan Mistry, the chairperson of Congress’s central election authority (CEA) which is overseeing the election of party president.
Tewari said, “With great respect @MD_Mistry ji, how can there be a fair and free election without a publicly available electoral roll? Essence of a fair and free process is (that) names and addresses of electors must be published on @INCIndia website in a transparent manner. You are quoted as saying, ‘the list is not made public but if a member of our party wants to check, they can check at the PCC office. And, of course, it will be given to the candidates once they file their nomination papers’.”
Tewari told Mistry that the party’s highest decision-making body Congress Working Committee (CWC) has announced the schedule of party president’s election, not to 28 pradesh Congress committees (PCCs) and 8 territorial Congress committees (TCCs).
He asked, “Why should someone have to go to every PCC office in the country to find out who the electors are? This does not happen in a club election also with great respect.”
The former Union minister appealed to Mistry to make the voters’ list public. “In the interests of fairness and transparency, I urge your good self to publish the entire list of electors on @INCIndia website. How can someone consider running if he/ she does not know who electors are? If someone has to file his/ her nomination and gets it proposed by 10 Congresspersons, as is the requirement, CEA can reject it (by) saying they are not valid electors,” Tewari added.
Tewari is a member of G-23, a group of 23 Congress leaders who had written a letter to Sonia Gandhi in 2020 demanding internal reforms in the party. He has been demanding transparency, accessibility and an overhaul of the manner in which the party’s top leadership functions.
Karti Chidambaram, son of former Union finance minister P Chidambaram, also questioned the validity of the voters’ list.
In a tweet, Karti said, “Every election needs a well-defined and clear electoral college. The process of forming the electoral college must also be clear, well defined and transparent. An ad hoc electoral college is no electoral college.”
In another tweet, he said, “Reformists are not Rebels.”

Reformists are not Rebels.

— Karti P Chidambaram (@KartiPC) 1661923321000

Replying to other tweets, Karti said, “Can anyone tell the world who are all eligible to vote and on what basis they became eligible?… Absolutely we must have primaries in every constituency, but for that we need a defined and transparent members list. Today we claim we have membership numbers which no one has ever verified.”
Tewari agreed with Karti. Tagging the latter’s tweet, he said, “My colleague in Parliament @KartiPC is spot on. For any election to be kosher, the electoral college must be constitutionally constituted. I read in the papers @AnandSharmaINC had articulated this widely shared concern in the CWC and he even publicly confirmed that he had raised it.”

MyColleague in Parliament @KartiPC is spot on. For any election to be kosher the electoral college must be constitu… https://t.co/EXb7ASslli

— Manish Tewari (@ManishTewari) 1661925098000

With questions being raised about the constitutionality of the voters’ list, the election of the president may itself become controversial.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

‘Burning with pain’: Pakistan floods threaten major health crisis

Editor — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 08:49:36 +0000

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SUKKUR: At a charity clinic in a southern Pakistani village, dozens of people affected by relentless rains and floods crowd around the door waiting to talk to a volunteer doctor.
The village of Bhambro is in a poor district of Sindh province, hard-hit by record floods that have destroyed more than a million homes and damaged critical infrastructure including health facilities across the country.
Bhambro is surrounded by vast stretches of flooded farmland, its streets full of mud and strewn with debris and manure — conditions ripe for outbreaks of malaria, cholera and skin diseases such as scabies.
“Skin diseases are the main problem here because of dirty, stagnant water and unhygienic conditions,” said Sajjad Memon, one of the doctors at the clinic, which is run by the charity Alkhidmat Foundation.
He used the flashlight on his mobile phone to examine patients, who were mostly reporting scabs and rashes on Tuesday.
Many had made their way to the clinic walking barefoot through filthy floodwater and mud.
“My child’s foot is burning with pain. My feet too,” said Azra Bhambro, a 23-year-old woman who had come to the clinic for help.
Abdul Aziz, a doctor in charge of Alkhidmat’s clinics in the area, told AFP that cases of scabies and fungal infections were on the rise.
Scabies outbreaks are common in crowded places with tropical conditions — such as flood relief camps and shelters — and can lead to severe itching and rashes, according to the World Health Organization.
Memon told AFP that many of the patients at the clinic could not afford to purchase shoes.
The millions of people affected by the floods face major health hazards including potentially deadly diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, the WHO warned in a statement Tuesday.
Sindh province, in Pakistan‘s south, has been hit particularly hard, with vast swathes of land under water and many villagers forced to head to large cities for shelter, food aid and medical assistance.
The health threat is even greater in areas such as Bhambro, where health services were already limited, and for the tens of thousands who are taking shelter in crowded relief camps.
“Ongoing disease outbreaks in Pakistan, including acute watery diarrhoea, dengue fever, malaria, polio, and Covid-19 are being further aggravated, particularly in camps and where water and sanitation facilities have been damaged,” the WHO said.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Long way to go before India reverses pre-Covid ‘Modi slowdown’: Congress

Editor — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 07:35:00 +0000

NEW DELHI: Ahead of the release of GDP numbers for the April-June quarter, the Congress on Wednesday said the figure could show a jump and turn out to be a headline grabber but the real growth is lower than in 2018.
Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said there is still a long way to go before India reverses the pre-Covid “Modi slowdown”.
“Jumla Alert: Apr-Jun 2022 quarterly GDP figure later today could show a jump from a year ago. This headline-grabbing number will be due to low-base effect,” the Congress general secretary said on Twitter.
“Real GDP in Apr-Jun 2021 was lower than in Apr-Jun 2018! A long way to go before we reverse the pre-Covid Modi slowdown,” Ramesh also said.
The GDP numbers for the April-June quarter of 2022-23 are likely to be released on Wednesday by the government.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Mikhail Gorbachev ended Cold War but presided over Soviet collapse

Editor — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 02:47:50 +0000

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LONDON: Lauded in the West as the man who helped bring down the Berlin Wall and end the Cold War without bloodshed, Mikhail Gorbachev was widely despised at home as the gravedigger of the communist Soviet Union.
The former Soviet president, who died on Tuesday aged 91, set out to revitalise the sclerotic Communist system through democratic and economic reform; it was never his intention to abolish it.
But he unleashed forces beyond his control, and found himself occupying a shrinking middle ground between diehards intent on preserving centralised power and separatists set on dismantling it.
In August 1991 he survived a shambolic coup by hardliners that fell apart after three days – but his authority had been fatally undermined. Four months later his great rival, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, engineered the break-up of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev found himself out of a job.
“In this sense, I feel that Gorbachev is a tragic figure, similar in many ways to Shakespeare’s King Lear,” said Valery Solovei, close to Gorbachev’s inner circle in the 1980s and an ally after his fall. “This is a man who ruled a superpower – but by the end of his reign, the state had disappeared.”
After decades of Cold War tension and confrontation, Gorbachev struck nuclear arms deals with the United States and brought the Soviet Union closer to the West than at any point since World War Two.
But he saw that legacy destroyed in the final months of his long life, as President Vladimir Putin‘s invasion of Ukraine brought Western sanctions crashing down on Moscow, and politicians in both Russia and the West began to speak openly of a new Cold War – and the risk of a nuclear World War Three.
Break with the past
The ex-farm worker with the rolling south Russian accent and distinctive port-wine birthmark on his head gave notice of his bold ambition soon after winning a Kremlin power struggle in 1985, at the age of 54.
Television broadcasts showed him besieged by workers in factories and farms, allowing them to vent their frustrations with Soviet life and making the case for radical change.
It marked a dramatic break with the cabal of old men he succeeded – remote, intolerant of dissent, their chests groaning with medals, dogmatic to the grave. Three ailing Soviet leaders had died in the previous 2-1/2 years.
Gorbachev inherited a land of inefficient farms and decaying factories, a state-run economy he believed could be saved only by the open, honest criticism that had led so often in the past to prison or labour camp. It was a gamble. Many wished him ill.
With his clever, elegant wife Raisa at his side, Gorbachev at first enjoyed massive popular support.
“My policy was open and sincere, a policy aimed at using democracy and not spilling blood,” he told Reuters in 2009. “But this cost me very dear, I can tell you that.”
His policies of “glasnost” (free speech) and “perestroika” (restructuring) unleashed a surge of public debate arguably unprecedented in Russian history.
Moscow squares seethed with impromptu discussions, censorship all but evaporated, and even the sacred Communist Party was forced to confront its Stalinist crimes.
Chornobyl disaster
Glasnost faced a dramatic test in April 1986, when a nuclear power station exploded in Chornobyl, Ukraine, and authorities tried at first to hush up the disaster. Gorbachev pressed on, describing the tragedy as a symptom of a rotten and secretive system.
In December of that year he ordered a telephone to be installed in the flat of dissident Andrei Sakharov, exiled in the city of Gorky, and the next day phoned him to personally invite him back to Moscow. The pace of change was, for many, dizzying.
The West quickly warmed to Gorbachev, who had enjoyed a meteoric rise through regional party ranks to the post of General Secretary. He was, in the words of British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “a man we can do business with”. The term “Gorbymania” entered the lexicon, a measure of the adulation he inspired on foreign trips.
Gorbachev struck up a warm personal rapport with Ronald Reagan, the hawkish US president who had called the Soviet Union “the evil empire”, and with him negotiated a landmark deal in 1987 to scrap intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
In 1989, he pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, ending a war that had killed tens of thousands and soured relations with Washington.
Later that year, as pro-democracy protests swept across the Communist states of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, the world held its breath.
With hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops stationed across Eastern Europe, would Moscow turn its tanks on the demonstrators, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968?
Gorbachev was under pressure from many to err on the side of force. That he did not may have been his greatest historic contribution – one that was recognised in 1990 with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Reflecting years later, Gorbachev said the cost of trying to prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall would have been too high.
“If the Soviet Union had wished, there would have been nothing of the sort and no German unification. But what would have happened? A catastrophe or World War Three.”
August coup
At home, though, problems mounted.
The glasnost years saw the rise of regional tensions, often rooted in the repressions and ethnic deportations of the Stalin era. The Baltic states pushed for independence and there was trouble also in Georgia, and between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, a leading reformist ally, resigned dramatically in December 1990, warning that hardliners were in the ascendant and “a dictatorship is approaching”.
The following month, Soviet troops killed 14 people at Lithuania’s main TV tower in an attack that Gorbachev denied ordering. In Latvia, five demonstrators were killed by Soviet special forces.
In March 1991, a referendum produced an overwhelming majority for preserving the Soviet Union as “a renewed “federation of equal sovereign republics”, but six of the 15 republics boycotted the vote.
In the summer, the hardliners struck, scenting weakness in a man now abandoned by many liberal allies. Six years after entering the Kremlin, Gorbachev and Raisa sat imprisoned at their Crimean holiday home on the Black Sea, their telephone lines cut, a warship anchored offshore.
The “August coup” was mounted by a so-called Emergency Committee including the KGB chief, prime minister, defence minister and vice president. They feared a complete collapse of the Communist system and sought to prevent power from draining away from the centre to the republics, of which the biggest and most powerful was Yeltsin’s Russia.
The putschists ultimately failed, assuming wrongly that they could rely on the party, army and bureaucracy to obey orders as in the past. But it was no outright victory for Gorbachev.
Yeltsin’s moment
Instead it was the burly white-haired Yeltsin who seized the moment, standing atop a tank in central Moscow to rally thousands against the coup. When Gorbachev returned from Crimea, Yeltsin humiliated him in the Russian parliament, signing a decree banning the Russian Communist Party despite Gorbachev’s protestations.
In later years, Gorbachev dwelt on whether he could have averted the events that ultimately triggered the Soviet Union’s collapse, described by Putin as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.
Had he been reckless in leaving Moscow that hot August, as coup rumours swirled?
“I thought they would be idiots to take such a risk precisely at that moment, because it would sweep them away too,” he told the German magazine Der Spiegel on the 20th anniversary of the coup. “I’d become exhausted after all those years … But I shouldn’t have gone away. It was a mistake.”
Personal revenge may have mingled with politics when in late 1991, at a secluded country house, Yeltsin and the leaders of the republics of Ukraine and Belarus signed accords that abolished the Soviet Union and replaced it with a Commonwealth of Independent States.
On December 25, 1991, the red flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time and Gorbachev appeared on national television to announce his resignation.
Free elections, a free press, representative legislatures and a multi-party system had all become a reality under his watch, he said.
“We opened up to the world, renounced interference in other countries’ affairs and the use of troops beyond our borders, and were met with trust, solidarity and respect.”
But the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the first Communist state and a nuclear superpower that had sent the first man into space and cast its influence across the globe, was no more.
Child of Stalinism
Born into famine on March 2, 1931, in a hut in the village of Privolnoye in the southern region of Stavropol, Gorbachev was, like millions of Russians, baptised into the Russian Orthodox faith despite the official atheism of the Soviet era.
The arrests of family members in Josef Stalin’s 1930s purges gave Gorbachev a lifelong wariness of the abuse of power. But he embraced the party, working hard to secure a coveted place at Moscow State University.
He became a Central Committee member at 40 and a full Politburo member in 1979, thanks to the patronage of ideological puritan Yuri Andropov, the KGB secret police chief.
Andropov took power in 1982 on the death of Leonid Brezhnev, who had for 18 years led Moscow through a gentle decline that reformers branded the “era of stagnation”.
On his death 15 months later, Gorbachev was passed over for aged Brezhnev ally Konstantin Chernenko. Only when Chernenko died after barely a year in office did the younger man’s reforming ambitions win out.
That Gorbachev’s achievements were not appreciated at home should perhaps have been no surprise. Russia can deal harshly with reformers.
Hardliners accused him of destroying the planned economy and throwing aside seven decades of Communist achievements. To liberal critics, he talked too much, compromised too much, and balked at decisive reforms.
As Moscow’s control ebbed, ethnic tensions broke out that were to erupt into full-scale wars in places such as Chechnya, Georgia and Moldova after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Three decades later, some of those conflicts remain unresolved. Thousands were killed in late 2020 when war broke out again between ethnic Armenian and Azerbaijani forces over the mountain enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
After the fall
With his Nobel prize in hand and his stellar reputation abroad, Gorbachev gradually settled into a second career. He made several attempts to found a social democratic party, opened a think-tank, the Gorbachev Foundation, and co-founded the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, critical of the Kremlin to this day.
In 1996, he put his popularity to the test by running for president. But Yeltsin won decisively, and Gorbachev secured a dismal 0.5% of the vote.
Increasingly frail in later years, Gorbachev spoke out to voice his concern at rising tensions between Russia and the United States, and warned against a return to the Cold War he had helped to end.
“We have to continue the course we mapped. We have to ban war once and for all. Most important is to get rid of nuclear weapons,” he said in 2018.
His tragedy was that in trying to redesign an ossified, monolithic structure, to preserve the Soviet Union and save the Communist system, he ended up presiding over the demise of both.
The world, however, would never be the same.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

‘38% of suicides in 2021 were by daily-wagers, self-employed’

Editor — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 01:33:15 +0000

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NEW DELHI: Daily wagers and the self-employed constituted nearly 38% of persons who died by suicide in 2021, according to NCRB. The share of these two categories of people in total number of suicide deaths has consistently increased since 2018 — from 32% to 35%, and from 36% to 38% — and even the actual number of such fatalities has gone up during these four years from 43,276 to 62,215.
The comparative study of the suicide data of 2018-2021 period shows there was a spike in the number of daily wage workers taking their own lives by 39% during this period — from 30,127 to 42,004. In the last two years, one in every four suicide victims was a daily wage earner. Data shows suicide by daily wage workers was maximum in Tamil Nadu and the three other states that reported high number of such fatalities were Maharashtra, MP and Telangana. If the data of suicide of daily wage workers is compared between 2014 and 2021, then the number of such deaths has more than doubled during these eight years.
So far as the suicide of self-employed persons were concerned, the comparison of the figures show that such fatalities have gone up from 13,149 in 2018 to 20,213 during 2021, an increase of nearly 54%. The category of self-employed persons include vendors and tradesmenAs per reports, the number of vendors dying by suicide has increased by nearly 40%, from 3,230 in 2018 to 4,532 during the last year. Similarly, the number of tradesmen (small businessmen) dying by suicide went up from 2,615 in 2018 to 3,699 in 2021. The main reasons for suicide across all categories across these years have been family problems, illness, love affairs and marriage-related issues.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Trump calls for revolt in FBI over raid on his home

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 20:46:26 +0000

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WASHINGTON: Former US President Donald Trump on Tuesday virtually called for a revolt in the FBI over the raid on his home in Florida to retrieve classified White House documents amid warning from a key political ally there would be “rioting in the streets” if he is prosecuted for the matter.
In what critics termed as an incendiary call on his social media platform Truth Social aimed at driving a wedge within the government, Trump suggested FBI agents who disagreed with the raid go “nuts” and “make America great again.”
“When are the great Agents, and others, in the FBI going to say ‘we aren’t going to take it anymore,’ much as they did when James Comey read off a list of all of Crooked Hillary Clinton’s crimes, only to say that no reasonable prosecutor would prosecute.,” Trump said.
“The wonderful people of the FBI went absolutely “nuts,” so Comey had to backtrack and do a FAKE INVESTIGATION in order to keep them at bay,” he continued. “The end result, we won in 2016 (and did MUCH better in 2020!). But now the ‘Left’ has lost their minds!!!”
A little later, he re-upped the message, exhorting, “FBI, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Trump’s call came hours after US Senator Lindsey Graham, one of his more ardent supporters, said there will be “rioting in the streets” if Trump is prosecuted. Graham later denied his remark constituted incitement or threat.
Trump essayed a similar double edged call against the Biden administration last week, prompting the Washington Post to editorially accuse him of “summoning the mob.”
A Trump lawyer reportedly delivered what it said was a “sinister” message to the Justice Department: “President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is ‘angry.’ The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.”
The paper compared Trump’s strategy to the “madman theeory of foreign policy” adopted by Richard Nixon when he directed aides to suggest to his counterparts overseas that they might not be able to control a volatile and reckless president.
“Now, Donald Trump and his defenders are using a version of that gambit to deter the Justice Department from prosecuting the former president, arguing that going after Trump would dangerously incite his already angry followers,” it said.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Imran Khan raises Rs 5 billion for Pak flood victims through international telethon

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 14:25:04 +0000

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ISLAMABAD: Former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan has raised Rs 5 billion through an international telethon for the people affected by the devastating floods in the country, according to a media report on Tuesday.
Khan, the Chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party said during the telethon held on Monday that the objective was to raise funds for the flood victims as no government alone could deal with such a catastrophe.
Earlier, the Pakistan government had launched an international appeal seeking funds for relief and rehabilitation for flood-hit people and restoration of damaged infrastructure.
“The entire country has been affected by this [flood]. As per the initial assessment, losses of over Rs1,000 billion were incurred due to floods and over 1,000 people have died so far,” Khan was quoted as saying by The Express Tribune newspaper.
He said he received a lot of calls from Pakistanis, including expats who wanted to help the flood victims.
The former premier said people can donate to two bank accounts opened by the Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) governments. The funds will be spent to help the flood-hit people across the country, he assured.
The country-wide death toll has touched 1,136 as of Monday, with over 1,634 injured and 33 million displaced, according to the latest data issued by the National Disaster Management Authority.
The Federal Minister of Planning and Special Initiatives Ahsan Iqbal also said that the initial economic losses from floods in Pakistan could reach at least USD 10 billion, adding that the unprecedented floods caused by abnormal monsoon rains have washed away roads, crops, infrastructure, and bridges, affecting over 33 million people.
The monsoon season runs from July to September in Pakistan. This year monsoon and pre-monsoon rains broke the 30-year record in Pakistan and the NDMA data shows that the 30-year average rain was 130.8 millimeters but the rainfall in the 2022 season was 375.4 mm.
Iqbal added that it might take five years to rebuild and rehabilitate the nation of 200 million people, which will be facing an acute challenge of food shortage, according to the paper.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Biden to ask Congress for approval of USD 1.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan: Reports

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 04:32:16 +0000

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WASHINGTON: The Biden administration plans to ask Congress to approve a USD 1.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan that includes hundreds of missiles for fighter jets and anti-ship systems, according to media reports.
Sputnik News Agency reported that the sale would include 60 anti-ship Harpoon missiles, 100 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, and a surveillance radar contract extension.
China carried out its largest war games around Taiwan after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the self-governed Island earlier this month. This trip was the highest-ranking US official to visit the island in 25 years.
China responded by conducting military drills for multiple days near the island after she left.
Taiwan had proposed a budget of USD 17.3 billion in defence for 2023, a 14.9 per cent increase from this year’s total allocation, weeks after China started its military drill around the self-ruled island country post the visit of US House Speaker.
Responding to reports about a potential US arms sale to Taiwan, the Chinese Embassy in Washington said that the US must immediately stop selling weapons to the island.
“The US side needs to immediately stop arms sales to and military contact with Taiwan, stop creating factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and follow through on the US government statement of not supporting ‘Taiwan independence,'” embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu said, as per Sputnik News Agency.
The spokesperson also said US arms sales to Taiwan gravely violate the one-China principle and Beijing will continue to take resolute and strong measures to firmly defend Chinese sovereignty and security interests.
Meanwhile, two United States Navy warships entered the Taiwan Strait in the first such transit since China staged unprecedented military drills around the island.
On Sunday, the guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville were making their voyage “through waters where high seas freedoms of navigation and overflight apply in accordance with the international law,” the US 7th Fleet in Japan said in a statement as quoted in CNN.
A 110-mile strait is a stretch of water that separates the democratic self-ruled island of Taiwan from mainland China.Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan despite China’s ruling Communist Party never having controlled the island — and considers the strait part of its “internal waters.”

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

‘It felt like my insides were crying’: China Covid curbs hit youth mental health

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 03:56:44 +0000

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HONG KONG: Zhang Meng had a breakdown last December. The 20-year-old found herself sobbing on the stairs of her dorm, driven to despair by repeated Covid lockdowns of her university campus in Beijing.
The lockdowns had meant she was mostly confined to her room and unable to meet up with friends. There were also strict curbs on when she could visit the canteen or take a shower. Describing herself as someone who craves in-person social interaction, Zhang said the restrictions had “removed the safety net that was holding me up and I felt like my whole being was falling down”.
That month, she was diagnosed with major depression and anxiety.
Yao, also 20 and who asked that his first name not be used, had his first breakdown in high school where he was a boarder, unable to understand why lockdown policies were so tough. He said that one day he had to take refuge in a school toilet, crying so hard “it felt like my insides were crying.”
In early 2021 while at university in Beijing, unable to shake that depression and also unhappy he had not taken the courses he wanted to for fear of upsetting his father, Yao attempted suicide.
China has employed some of the world’s harshest and most frequent lockdown measures in its determination to stamp out every Covid outbreak, arguing it saves lives and pointing to its low pandemic death toll of around 5,200 to date.
It’s an effort it has shown little sign of abandoning, but the policy’s impact on mental health alarms medical experts and as Zhang’s and Yao’s experiences have shown, it is already taking its toll.
“China’s lockdowns have had a huge human cost with the shadow of mental-ill health adversely affecting China’s culture and economy for years to come,” argues a June editorial in the British medical journal the Lancet.
In particular, experts fear for the mental health of teenagers and young adults, more vulnerable because of their age and lack of control over their lives, and who have to contend with far greater education stresses and economic pressures than earlier generations.
The number of young people affected is potentially huge. Some 220 million Chinese children and young people have been confined for prolonged periods due to Covid restrictions, the Education Ministry estimated in 2020. It did not respond to a Reuters request for an updated figure and comment on the topic.
Kids under pressure
The Covid curbs have sometimes forced young people into extreme situations.
During Shanghai’s two-month draconian lockdown this year, for instance, some 15 to 18-year-olds had to isolate by themselves at hotels as they were not allowed to return home.
“They had to cook for themselves and didn’t have people to talk to so it was actually very hard for them,” said Frank Feng, deputy principal at Lucton, an international school in Shanghai, told Reuters.
While data examining youth mental health in China and the impact of lockdowns and the pandemic is sparse, what there is is grim.
Around 20% of Chinese junior and senior high school students learning remotely during lockdowns have experienced suicidal ideation, according to a survey of 39,751 pupils conducted in April 2020 that was published in the U.S. journal Current Psychology in January. Suicidal ideation is sometimes described as when a person thinks they would be better off dead, though the person may not have at the time intent to commit suicide.
More broadly across age groups, searches for “psychological counselling” on Chinese search engine Baidu more than tripled in the first seven months of 2022 compared to the same period a year earlier.
For many teenagers, Covid lockdowns have come during critical exam years. If the stigma of being infected is not enough, desperation to avoid missing a life-changing exam due to either catching Covid or, much more commonly, being considered a close contact has many families isolating for months ahead of exam periods, teachers said.
Exacerbating that academic pressure are dismal job prospects. While overall unemployment stands at 5.4%, the rate for urban youth has soared to 19.9%, the highest level on record, as corporate hiring withers due to the pandemic and regulatory crackdowns on the tech and tutoring sectors.
Most students are also only children due to China’s 1980-2015 one-child policy and are conscious they will have to help support their parents in the future.
According to a Fudan University survey of around 4,500 young people this year, some 70% expressed varying degrees of anxiety.
The pandemic and lockdowns are also thought to be fuelling disaffection with the intense pressure to get ahead in life, symbolised by the so-called “lying flat” movement that last year gained huge social media traction in China as many young people embraced the idea of doing the bare minimum to get by.
A two-decade toll?
For its part, the Education Ministry has launched a raft of measures to improve mental health for students during the pandemic, including the introduction of mandatory mental health classes at colleges and a drive to ramp up the country’s number of school counsellors, therapists and psychiatrists.
But mental health has gained attention in China only in the last 20 years and the ministry’s efforts to install counsellors in schools are relatively new. Most schools would not have had one last year. Guidelines it published in June 2021 call for a ratio of at least 1 counsellor per 4,000 students nationwide.
State media have also taken up the topic.
A June 6 article in the China Daily that focused on the mental health impact of Covid curbs on vulnerable groups including teenagers quoted Lu Lin, president of Peking University’s Sixth Hospital, as saying that Covid’s “toll on people’s mental health could last over two decades”.
Data from early 2020 shows that a third of residents who isolated at home had experienced conditions such as depression, anxiety and insomnia, he said.
Lu estimated most would recover after an outbreak subsides but 10% would be unable to completely return to normal, noting he had teenage patients who had developed gaming addiction, had trouble sleeping and continued to be downcast and reluctant to go outdoors.
For Zhang, lockdowns and her subsequent depression have completely shattered her worldview. Once satisfied with her plans to study Chinese language and literature, disillusionment with how lockdowns have been managed has sparked interest in studying abroad.
“I was quite patriotic when I graduated from high school…this feeling is slowly disappearing. It’s not that I don’t trust the government anymore, it’s more of a feeling that the smell of masks and sanitiser has penetrated deep into my bones.”

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

2 die, 5 injured in Phoenix shooting rampage; suspect dead

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 03:10:42 +0000

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PHOENIX: Two people were killed and five injured — including two police officers — when a man armed with a semi-automatic rifle and wearing tactical gear began a seemingly random attack in Phoenix on Sunday night before killing himself, authorities said.
Phoenix police identified the man on Monday as 24-year-old Isaiah Steven Williams. They said he was found to have a single gunshot wound to the head, consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot wound although the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office will determine the cause of death.
It wasn’t immediately clear Monday where Williams lived and if he had a criminal record.
Police said Williams was wearing a ballistic vest with steel plates in the front and back, a ballistic helmet, a gas mask and knee pads and was armed with a semi-automatic rifle along with several incendiary devices and multiple magazines for the rifle.
“Kevlar helmet, tactical vest, high-powered rifle – this individual was set on doing damage to our community,” Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams said Monday.
Police said they received a call about shots fired in the north-central part of the city around 8:30 p.m. Sunday.
As officers arrived, a man immediately opened fire on several fully marked patrol SUVs. Four patrol cars were riddled with bullets. One officer was struck by a bullet in the shoulder and a second officer was hit by shrapnel in multiple places including the face.
Police said the officer wounded by shrapnel was able to get out of his car and return fire before other officers came to his aid to remove him from the area for medical treatment. Other officers began evacuating nearby businesses and bringing community members to a safe place.
The officer shot in the shoulder was hospitalized in stable condition, according to police.
Other officers began evacuating nearby businesses and bringing community members to a safe place.
Police said preliminary investigative information, along with surveillance video from nearby businesses, showed the suspect leaving a room at a motel in the area and begin shooting at random. The man was seen firing his rifle into the motel then turning the rifle on a car pulling into the parking lot.
A man and woman inside that car died on the scene from gunshot wounds, according to police who have not released the victims’ names yet.
The suspect also was seen throwing a Molotov cocktail at a restaurant window. It did not ignite. It was about that time that officers began to arrive and were fired upon.
Surveillance video shows the suspect making his way through the parking lot and then falling to the ground.
Three bystanders in various locations around the shooting scene were injured by flying gunfire, treated at hospitals and released.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives announced it is assisting in the investigation of the shootings.
“Once again, this is another example of gun violence in our community,” police Chief Jeri Williams said. “How many more officers have to be shot? How many more community members have to be killed before those in our community take a stand? This is not a Phoenix police issue, this is a community issue. If not now, when?”

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

IMF board approves release of over $1.1 billion bailout funds: Pakistan finance minister

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 02:24:37 +0000

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ISLAMABAD: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) board on Monday approved the seventh and eighth reviews of Pakistan‘s bailout programme, the country’s finance minister Miftah Ismail said, which will release $1.17 billion in funds to the cash-strapped country.
“The IMF Board has approved the revival of our EFF program. We should now be getting the 7th & 8th tranche of $1.17 billion,” Ismail said on Twitter.
The IMF’s resident representative in Islamabad did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Now, Nitin Gadkari’s ‘use-and-throw’ remark stirs talk of barb at BJP

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 02:21:59 +0000

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NAGPUR: Union minister Nitin Gadkari‘s remark at an event in Nagpur last weekend about the importance of not adopting a “use-and-throw attitude” to relationships had the political grapevine linking it to his omission from BJP‘s top decision-making bodies.
“Human relationships constitute the biggest strength of a business, social work or politics…In your good or bad days, once you hold the hand of a friend, you should never let go of it,” he told a gathering of entrepreneurs at the Young Presidents Organisation’s newest South Asia chapter in Vidarbha.
The speech, a video of which has since been widely circulated, was punctuated with Gadkari’s trademark homilies. “Being successful and happy individually has no meaning. But being successful as a team is truly meaningful, because your co-workers of all ranks are a happier lot because of the collective success,” he said. While reminiscing about the old days with his friend and former Congress functionary Shrikant Jichkar, Gadkari said he had been offered an opportunity to join the party when he was a student leader, to which he responded by saying he would “rather jump into a well”.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

UN Chief Appeals For “Restraint” In Iraq Amid Political Unrest

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 02:19:48 +0000

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The situation escalated sharply after Moqtada Sadr’s supporters stormed the government palace on Monday.

United Nations:

UN chief Antonio Guterres on Monday called for “restraint” in Iraq and asked all parties to “take immediate steps to de-escalate the situation” as Baghdad’s Green Zone descended into chaos, according to his spokesman.

The secretary-general “has been following with concern the ongoing protests in Iraq today, during which demonstrators entered government buildings,” Stephane Dujarric said in a statement.

“He appeals for calm and restraint, and urges all relevant actors to take immediate steps to de-escalate the situation and avoid any violence,” Dujarric added.

“The Secretary-General strongly urges all parties and actors to rise above their differences and to engage, without further delay, in a peaceful and inclusive dialogue on a constructive way forward.”

Baghdad’s Green Zone was rocked by violence Monday after powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr said he was quitting politics, sparking chaos in which 15 of his supporters were killed.

Tensions have soared in Iraq amid a political crisis that has left the country without a new government, prime minister or president for months.

The situation escalated sharply after Sadr’s supporters stormed the government palace on Monday following their leader’s announcement.

By evening at least seven shells had fallen in the high-security Green Zone, which houses government buildings and diplomatic missions, a security source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

It was not immediately clear who was behind the shelling, which was followed by the sound of automatic weapons being fired in the Green Zone.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

News Courtesy: www.ndtv.com

Floods wreak havoc across Pakistan, death toll is 1,061

Editor — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 02:18:31 +0000

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ISLAMABAD: The overall death toll from floods across Pakistan reached 1,061 on Monday while rising levels of the gushing Indus river threatened more deluges in the lower-lying plains of Punjab and Sindh provinces before emptying into the Arabian Sea.
Data released by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) stated that 1,600 people were injured and more than 719,000 livestock had perished.
The floods, according to NDMA, destroyed over 3,451 km of roads, 149 bridges, 170 shops, and 949,858 houses, and swept away villages, crops and orchards spread over thousands of acres.
Pakistan finance minister Miftah Ismail said the floods have inflicted an estimated “loss of at least $10 billion” on the country.
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, said in a video posted on Twitter that Pakistan is experiencing a “serious climate catastrophe, one of the hardest in the decade”.
“We are at the moment at ground zero of the front line of extreme weather events in an unrelenting cascade of heatwaves, forest fires, flash floods, multiple glacial lake outbursts, flood events, and now the monster monsoon of the decade is wreaking non-stop havoc throughout the country,” she said.
As experts blame climate change for the flooding, people are criticising government and local authorities for allowing builders to construct hotels and houses on the banks of rivers. “These hotels and markets block the natural waterways. Much of the devastation would have been avoided if we had not blocked the paths of rivers,” said Khaista Rehman, a resident of Kalam in Swat, where floods had wiped out most of the hotels and markets that had been built on the banks of the river.
“I haven’t seen destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put it into words … it is overwhelming,” Pakistan foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari told foreign media, adding that many crops that provided much of the population’s livelihoods had been wiped out. “Going forward, I would expect not only the IMF, but the international community and international agencies to truly grasp the level of devastation,” he said.Flooding from the Swat river had affected northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where tens of thousands of people — especially in Charsadda and Nowshera districts — have been evacuated from their homes to relief camps set up in government buildings. Many have also taken shelter on roadsides, said Kamran Bangash, a spokesperson for the provincial government. Bangash said some 180,000 people have been evacuated from villages in Charsadda and 150,000 from Nowshera district villages.
The Swat river merges with the Kabul river in Charsadda and joins the Indus at a historical place where a military fort built by Mughal emperor Akbar, which had guarded the northwest of India after the 1560s until Partition, still stands.
The combined flow of the Jhelum, Ravi, Chenab, Beas and Sutlej rivers run southwest for approximately 71 km before joining the Indus at Mithankot, southern Punjab.
Millions of people await more misery as the Indus gushes towards the low-lying areas of Sindh and southern Punjab. The latest inflow and outflow levels of the Indus recorded at Chashma, Pakistan Punjab, stand at 525,362 cusecs and 519,362 cusecs, respectively.

News Courtesy: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

WHO could have sounded COVID-19 alarm ‘sooner’, says independent global panel report

Editor — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 07:25:06 +0000

Geneva: The catastrophic scale of the COVID-19 pandemic could have been prevented, an independent global panel concluded Wednesday, but a “toxic cocktail” of dithering and poor coordination meant the warning signs went unheeded.

The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) said a series of bad decisions meant COVID-19 went on to kill at least 3.3 million people so far and devastate the global economy.

Institutions “failed to protect people” and science-denying leaders eroded public trust in health interventions, the IPPPR said in its long-awaited final report.

Early responses to the outbreak detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019 “lacked urgency”, with February 2020 a costly “lost month” as countries failed to heed the alarm, said the panel.

To tackle the current pandemic, it called on the richest countries to donate a billion vaccine doses to the poorest. And the panel also called on the world’s wealthiest nations to fund new organisations dedicated to preparing for the next pandemic.

‘Delay, hesitation and denial’

The report was requested by World Health Organization (WHO) member states last May. The panel was jointly chaired by former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and former Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

The report, “COVID-19: Make it the Last Pandemic”, argued that the global alarm system needed overhauling to prevent a similar catastrophe.

“The situation we find ourselves in today could have been prevented,” Sirleaf told reporters. “It is due to a myriad of failures, gaps and delays in preparedness and response.”

The report said the emergence of COVID-19 was characterised by a mixture of “some early and rapid action, but also by delay, hesitation, and denial.

“Poor strategic choices, unwillingness to tackle inequalities and an uncoordinated system created a toxic cocktail which allowed the pandemic to turn into a catastrophic human crisis.”

The threat of a pandemic had been overlooked and countries were woefully unprepared to deal with one, the report found.

Vaccine ultimatum

The panel did not spare the WHO, saying it could have declared the situation a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) – its highest level of alarm – on 22 January, 2020. Instead, it waited eight more days before doing so.

Nevertheless, given countries’ relative inaction, “we might still have ended up in the same place”, said Clark.

It was only in March after the WHO described it as a pandemic – a term that is not officially part of its alert system – that countries were jolted into action.

As for the initial outbreak, “there were clearly delays in China – but there were delays everywhere”, she added.

Without the lag between the first identification in Wuhan and the PHEIC declaration — and then the “lost month” of February 2020 — “we believe we wouldn’t be looking at an accelerating pandemic, as we have for the last 15 or 16 months or so. As simple as that”, said Clark.

The panel made several recommendations on how to address the current pandemic.

Rich, well-vaccinated countries should provide the 92 poorest territories in the Covax scheme with at least one billion vaccine doses by 1 September, and more than two billion by mid-2022, it said.

The G7 industrialised nations should pay 60 percent of the $19 billion required to fund vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics via the WHO’s Access to Covid Tools Accelerator programme in 2021, it added.

Fellow G20 nations and others should provide the rest.

The WHO and the World Trade Organization should also get major vaccine-producing countries and manufacturers to agree on voluntary licensing and technology transfers for COVID-19 vaccines, the panel said.

“If actions do not occur within three months, a waiver of… intellectual property rights should come into force immediately.”

Invest billions, save trillions

To tackle future outbreaks and pandemics, the panel called for a Global Health Threats Council made up of world leaders, plus a pandemic convention.

The G20 should also create an International Pandemic Financing Facility, able to spend $5-10 billion a year on preparedness, with $50 to $100 billion ready to roll in the event of a crisis.

“Ultimately, investing billions in preparedness now will save trillions in the future, as the current pandemic has so clearly illustrated,” Clark told reporters.

The panel also proposed an overhaul of the WHO to give it greater control over its funding and more authority for its leadership.

Its alert system needed to be faster and it should have the authority to send expert missions to countries immediately without waiting for their green light, it added.

The panel believes their recommendations would have stopped COVID-19 from becoming a pandemic, had they been in place before the outbreak.

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