SRINAGAR: Group Captain Suman Roy Chowdhury, then Chief Operations Officer of Srinagar Air Force Station, has been dismissed by a General Court Martial (GCM) in Delhi for a missile attack on a friendly Mi-17 helicopter on February 27, 2019. The attack resulted in the death of six Air Force personnel and a civilian. The incident took place a day after the Indian Air Force carried out an airstrike in Balakot, Pakistan, reported The Tribune.
As per The Tribune, The GCM held Group Captain Chowdhury guilty on five of the nine charges. He was held guilty of not obeying the general order issued by Air Headquarters, dated July 14, 2017, which required all aircraft operating north of latitude 3200 N to operate with Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) on. He permitted Mi-17 to get airborne from Srinagar without the IFF on. He was held guilty of assigning an inbound flying object to the missile unit at 10:10 am on February 27, 2019, at 23 km from the Srinagar base for engagement by the Mission Commander, Command and Control Unit of 2258 Squadron. As a consequence, the assigned flying target, which actually was friendly copter Mi-17, was shot down by a Spyder missile at 10:14 am. The mishap caused a loss of Rs 133.31 crore to the state.
The court-martial found Wing Commander Shyam Naithani, who was the Senior Air Traffic Control Officer at the time of the incident, not guilty on four charges and gave him a severe reprimand for one charge.
The findings of the GCM and the sentence were subject to confirmation by the IAF Chief, according to Air Force officials. The High Court had allowed the GCM to pronounce the findings against Group Captain Chowdhury but ordered that these must not be given effect till the disposal of the case before it. The High Court is yet to dispose of the case, The Tribune reported.
The missile attack on the friendly Mi-17 helicopter resulted in the death of Squadron Leaders S Vashisht and Ninand M, Sergeant VK Pandey, Sergeant Vikrant Sahrawat, Corporal Pankaj Kumar, Corporal D Pandey, and Kifayat Hussain Ganie, a civilian on the ground and resident of Budgam district.
Group Captain Chowdhury had urged the GCM not to proceed with the pronouncement of the sentence till the case was in the High Court. His counsel Captain Sandeep Bansal (retd) said they would challenge the decision before the High Court.
Gangtok: The Joint Action Committee (JAC) on Sunday urged the people of the state to stay indoors on Monday to protest against the attack on its general secretary in Singham.
JAC vice president Passang Sherpa told reporters that colleague was attacked brutally by some goons in Singham town while he was mobilising the people for the JAC’s call for a peaceful rally against the expansion of definition of Sikkimese people in the Union Finance Act, 2023 passed by Parliament recently.
“We are urging the people of Sikkim to stay indoors tomorrow as a mark of protest against the brutal attack on the JAC general secretary Keshav Sapkota in Singham town yesterday,” Sherpa said.
He lashed out at the Sikkim Krantikari Morcha government for the “prevailing lawlessness” in Sikkim as the voices of opposition was being “stifled by force and violence”.
He said the denial of permisson to take out a peaceful rally in the state capital on Monday in protest against expansion of definition of Sikkimese people and attack on Sapkota proved the charge of prevalence of “lawlessness” in Sikkim.
“We wanted to protest in a democratic way but the administration not only denied permission for the rally, but did not act in time to prevent attack on our office bearer by some goons,” he said.
On the present condition of the injured JAC general secretary, Sherpa said that he was admitted in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the Central Referral Hospital and undergoing treatment for multiple injuries.
Earlier in the day, former Chief Minister and Sikkim Democratic Front (SDF) President Pawan Kumar Chamling visited CRH and met the injured JAC office bearer and enquired about his health condition.
Meanwhile, the Sikkim Police arrested 11 more people in connection with the attack on Sapkota, an officer said.
The officer said that an investigation was underway and the culprits will be brought to justice.
Jerusalem: A tourist was killed and five other tourists were injured on Friday night during a shooting and run-over attack in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, Israeli authorities said.
The incident occurred in the bars and restaurants area along Tel Aviv’s seaside promenade, Israel’s Magen David Adom rescue service said in a statement, adding the victim was a man in his 30s.
Three of the injured tourists sustained moderate wounds, while the other two were lightly injured, Xinhua news agency reported, citing the statement by the rescue service.
According to a police statement, the assailant rammed his car into passers-by before stepping out and starting to shoot. He was shot dead by a police officer at the scene.
The attacker was identified as an Arab citizen of Israel from Kafr Qasim, east of Tel Aviv, state-owned Kan TV news reported.
Also on Friday, two British-Israeli sisters, respectively aged 16 and 20, were killed in a drive-by shooting in the northern West Bank, and their mother was critically injured, according to Magen David Adom.
Following the attack in Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the border police and military to call up reserve forces “in the wake of terrorist attacks”, according to a statement issued by his office.
The attack occurred amid escalating violence between Israel and the Palestinians, triggered by Israeli raids on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, a flashpoint holy site in East Jerusalem, earlier this week.
Hyderabad: A 37-year-old man from Husnabad town died on Friday, reportedly of cardiac arrest while preparing to bowl in a local cricket tournament.
Shanigaram Anjaneyulu, a resident of Sundagiri, Chigurumamidi mandal, Karimnagar district, is married and has two children. According to the reports he suffered a cardiac arrest as he was about to bowl and collapsed on the ground.
Despite performing CPR, and calling an ambulance, the people around him could not revive him. He was rushed to the government hospital of Husnabad where he was declared dead by the doctors.
Damascus: Israel launched a fresh missile attack against military sites in the central Syrian province of Homs after midnight Sunday, the state TV reported.
Syrian air defenses were triggered by the attack, intercepting some of the missiles, according to the report.
The pro-government Sham FM radio said that four soldiers were wounded in the attack, which hit a military base in the western countryside of Homs, Xinhua News Agency reported.
It was Israel’s third attack against Syrian military sites since Thursday.
The stated concern is that because TikTok’s parent company is Chinese owned, the government in Beijing could ultimately access data on hundreds of millions of American users. As FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government — and it, to me, it screams out with national security concerns.” The other concern held by some critics is that the Chinese government could use TikTok’s algorithms to barrage American users with disinformation and propaganda, potentially creating domestic havoc in the United States.
These issues can’t be dismissed out right, but they are almost certainly overblown, according to security experts.
The data of TikTok users — age, region, passwords, names, buying habits — is no different than that collected by countless online merchants and other social media sites. While that data is private and encrypted, much of it can either be scraped anonymously (and often is for use in the vast and profitable commercial data market) or already accessed by cyber spy agencies. User data isn’t particularly secure anywhere. Whatever the Chinese government wanted to glean from TikTok users, it likely can glean anyway, regardless of where that data is stored.
Then there’s the chaos engine theory — that TikTok on instructions from the Chinese government could sow confusion in domestic politics or promote a certain ideology in the United States. It has echoes of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which naturally causes some alarm. But while a foreign government can try to use social media to spread disinformation and spur division, the net effect of that in the context of so much other noise in the cyber world is unclear. Could it amplify an already fractious political climate? Maybe, but almost certainly not on its own and not in any clear directional way, and that assumed full and total control of TikTok by Beijing, which is something hardly anyone currently believes or alleges.
But let’s say that the Communist Party of China could and will use TikTok. Even then, banning the app is a terrible idea for the United States. Why? Because the foundational strength of the United States is that it is an open society where information can and does flow freely. Banning TikTok, a platform of often astonishingly creative and often incredibly banal content that reaches 150 million Americans, is a step back from an open society and toward a closed one.
That is why the United States mulling a TikTok ban is a very different thing than, say, India, which has already barred TikTok. The government of Narendra Modi in India has been tightening its censorship in multiple spheres, and its moves against TikTok and other Chinese apps are part of a broader attempt to control information. The United States, however, has a rich tradition of free speech and has erected a legal apparatus designed to protect it and encourage the open flow of information. It’s not just the First Amendment to the Constitution and subsequent court cases and precedent designed to bolster the right of free expression; it’s the implied link between a healthy, robust democracy and the ability to communicate all ideas, even ones that many find wrong and reprehensible, without fear of censorship or government suppression.
The Chinese government holds no such values, and indeed it believes that information should first and foremost serve the interests of the state. Yes, the Chinese constitution does provide for the right of free speech but not if such speech “undermines the interests of the state.” Free speech in China is not seen as a key pillar of societal strength; it is provisional and valuable only insofar as it does not challenge the primary of the Communist Party.
The United States, by contrast, has championed an open society as the ultimate guarantor of human liberty and prosperity, and as one of the most robust checks on the untrammeled exercise of government or corporate power. We can debate if openness and free speech do in fact serve those functions, but they at the very least make exercising control more difficult. And the sheer noisy vibrancy of American society has been a notable contrast to many other countries over time and one of the hallmarks of a democracy that has allowed individuals to say and do what they choose.
That has, in turn, been the fuel for a rich culture of innovation and creativity, scientifically and artistically, including the invention and commercialization of the cyber world that we all now inhabit. TikTok may be a Chinese app, but it is built on American innovation.
But if TikTok as a social media app par excellence is in essence a manifestation of American strength, banning TikTok is in essence a mimicking of Chinese policy. China has created its own internal intraweb and erected its “Great Fire Wall” to keep unwelcome information out of the public sphere. The Chinese government, with its legion of censors, polices what can be said and how, and punishes those who deviate too far from accepted parameters. That has only increased after the country’s “zero-Covid” policies that relied on mass surveillance of smart phones to control the movement of Chinese citizens. The efforts to control 1.5 billion people, what they say and how they say it publicly, are one way that the party retains control in China. It is a source of their strength.
The United States will never be able to compete with China in censoring information, nor should it. But it could undermine its own vitality as an open society if it heads down the path of trying to ban apps in the name of national security. The wave of blacklists and McCarthy era crackdowns on Americans who professed Communist and even socialist beliefs and sympathies did not make the United States more secure in the early days of the Cold War; it made the country more paranoid and brittle, undermined creativity and the free flow of scientific information and briefly threatened to undermine the stability of the very government agencies such as the State Department and the Defense Department that were tasked with preserving national security.
America does not do suppression of free speech particularly well, which is a good thing. And we should not optimize for a future where we do it better by making a new go at censorship. For the United States, the risks of TikTok are far outweighed by the risks of banning TikTok.
[ad_2]
#Opinion #Extraordinarily #Misguided #Attack #TikTok
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
New Delhi: Opposing petitions seeking validation of same-sex marriages, Muslim body Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind has moved the Supreme Court saying they are an attack on the family system and in complete contravention of all personal laws.
Seeking intervention in the batch of petitions pending before the top court, the organisation also cited the Hindu traditions, saying the aim of marriage among Hindus is not merely physical pleasure or procreation but spiritual advancement.
It is one of the sixteen ‘sanskars’ in Hindus, the Jamiat said. “This concept of same-sex marriage goes to attack the family system rather than making a family through this process,” Jamiat said.
The top court on March 13 had referred the pleas seeking legal validation of same-sex marriages to a five-judge Constitution bench for adjudication, saying it is a “very seminal issue”.
A bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud said the submissions on the issue involve an interplay between constitutional rights on the one hand and special legislative enactments, including the Special Marriage Act, on the other.
In its petition, Jamiat said, “The nature of prayers in the present petition is in complete contravention of the established understanding of the concept of marriage in all personal laws between a biological man and a biological woman and thus intends to rake up the very core, i.e., the structure of a family unit prevailing in the personal laws system.”
“The concept of marriage between two opposite sexes is like a basic feature of the concept of marriage itself which leads to the creation of a bundle of rights (maintenance, inheritance, guardianship, custody).
“By these petitions, petitioners are seeking to dilute the concept of marriage, a stable institution, by introducing a free-floating system by introducing the concept of same-sex marriage,” the plea said.
The Jamiat said that in Muslims, marriage is a socio-religious institution between a biological man and a biological woman and any different interpretation given to the marriage shall lead to the persons claiming to be married under this category as non-adherents.
In a historic judgement on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court decriminalised consensual gay sex between adults after years of activism.
In an affidavit filed before the apex court, the government has opposed the petitions and submitted that despite the decriminalisation of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the petitioners cannot claim a fundamental right for same-sex marriage to be recognised under the laws of the country.
At the same time, it submitted that though the Centre limits its recognition to heterosexual relationships, there may be other forms of marriages or unions or personal understandings of relationships between individuals in a society and these “are not unlawful”.
It said western decisions sans any basis in Indian constitutional law jurisprudence cannot be imported in this context, while asserting that granting recognition to human relations is a legislative function and can never be a subject of judicial adjudication.
Karachi: At least four Pakistan Army soldiers were killed on Saturday in a terror attack along the Pakistan-Iran border in Balochistan’s Kech district, according to the military’s media wing.
“On April 1, 2023, a group of terrorists operating from the Iranian side attacked a routine border patrol of Pakistani security forces along the Pakistan-Iran Border in Jalgai Sector, district Kech,” an Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) statement said.
The ISPR said that “necessary contact” with the Iranian side was being made for “effective action against terrorists” on their territory and to prevent such incidents in the future.
Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah condemned the attack and paid tribute to those killed.
“The sons of the country are laying down their lives to protect their land, the whole nation salutes them, the nation is united in the war against terrorism,” he tweeted, adding that “this scourge will be eradicated”.
In January, four security personnel were killed during “terrorist activity” from across the Pakistan-Iran border in Balochistan’s Panjgur district.
The incident was condemned by Pakistan’s senior officials and the Foreign Office asked Iran to punish the culprits and ensure a thorough investigation.
SRINAGAR: The Muslims on Friday helped perform last rites of a Hindu who was on leave to attend first death anniversary of his brother killed by militants last year in Kakran area of south Kashmir’s Kulgam district.
Balbir Singh (55), son of Surinder Singh, who was working in Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) died last evening by cardiac arrest at his home in Karkan area of Kulgam.
He was posted at Amritsar but was on leave to attend death Anniversary of his brother who was killed by militants last year.
Balbir’s family is the only Hindu Rajput family living in the village, and today his friends and the neighbours from the Muslim community took it upon themselves to help perform the last rites.
They also shouldered his coffin and arranged wood for the cremation. “He was one of us. We never thought of him as a Rajput Hindu. We arranged everything needed for the cremation,” said Abdul Jabbar, a local resident.
Meanwhile, officials of Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) paid floral tributes to Balbir.
SRINAGAR: The Muslims on Friday helped perform last rites of a Hindu who was on leave to attend first death anniversary of his brother killed by militants last year in Kakran area of south Kashmir’s Kulgam district.
Balbir Singh (55), son of Surinder Singh, who was working in Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) died last evening by cardiac arrest at his home in Karkan area of Kulgam.
He was posted at Amritsar but was on leave to attend death Anniversary of his brother who was killed by militants last year.
Balbir’s family is the only Hindu Rajput family living in the village, and today his friends and the neighbours from the Muslim community took it upon themselves to help perform the last rites.
They also shouldered his coffin and arranged wood for the cremation. “He was one of us. We never thought of him as a Rajput Hindu. We arranged everything needed for the cremation,” said Abdul Jabbar, a local resident.
Meanwhile, officials of Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) paid floral tributes to Balbir.
