Ankara: Turkey has launched a temporary salary support scheme and banned job cuts in southern provinces hit by the devastating February 6 earthquakes that killed over 42,000 people in the country as well as in Neighbouring Syria, an official gazette said.
The government will provide salary support for employers in provinces under the state of emergency to partially cover the wages of their workers.
Employers will be able to benefit from the allowance if their workplaces are “heavily or moderately damaged”.
In addition, the government also banned layoffs in the earthquake zone, except for reasons of not complying with the rules of morality and goodwill, closure of the workplace, and expiry of the employment contract, said the report.
The move aims to safeguard workers and businesses in the region from the economic impact of the devastating earthquakes.
The earthquakes could cost up to $84 billion, or about 10 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to a report from the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation (TURKONFED).
A total of $70.7 billion of financial damage will result from housing loss, $10.4 billion from national income loss and $2.9 billion from loss of working days, the TURKONFED said in its preliminary report issued four days after the quakes.
The 10 quake-hit provinces, where some 13.5 million people lived, account for 9.3 per cent of the country’s GDP and 8.7 per cent of Turkey’s total exports, with cereals, pulses, oil seeds and their products, steel, agricultural products, textiles and raw materials, and ready-made clothing products as the leading export items from the region.
However, given a mass exodus from the disaster region, it is unlikely for the factories in the region to find enough workers even if they are able to resume production.
In the southern province of Mersin that neighbours the disaster-affected region, 47 institutions and NGOs made a joint statement on Wednesday, saying the population of the province increased by 40 per cent in two weeks because of migration after the earthquake.
“There are 70,000 families coming from the quake region, and an estimated 40,000 will stay here,” Vahap Secer, Mayor of Mersin Metropolitan Municipality, said in a statement, calling for housing projects in his province too.
Turks have already been struggling for several years with rampant inflation and currency turmoil.
The massive earthquakes hitting the country on February 6 have further added to their woes.
(Except for the headline, the story has not been edited by Siasat staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
In Georgia, legislators want to create a prosecutorial oversight commission that could discipline or remove local prosecutors who demonstrate a “willful and persistent failure to perform his or her duties.”
A bill introduced in the South Carolina House would give the state attorney general the power to prosecute abortion cases — something currently under the purview of local district attorneys.
And in Indiana, proposed legislation would allow a legislatively appointed special prosecutor to enforce laws when a local prosecutor declines to do so.
The mounting tension between Republican lawmakers and local prosecutors over abortion is one part of a broader fight over diverging approaches to criminal justice — seen in recent battles over drug laws, property crimes and other offenses. As more prosecutors, particularly in progressive metropolises in red states, win elections by breaking with the decadeslong tough-on-crime mindset and running as a check on GOP lawmakers, conservative state officials say they now need to rein in their excesses.
“Whatever issue we’re talking about — whether it’s marijuana, abortion, enforcing homicide statutes, enforcing whatever the law is — the law is on the books, and the law is supposed to be applied equally across the board among our citizens,” said Republican Indiana Sen. Aaron Freeman, who is sponsoring the special prosecutor bill. “If we’re just going to basically ignore the Constitution and our republic and just do whatever the hell we want, well, that’s a society that scares the hell out of me.”
GOP officials are also exploring nonlegislative tactics. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democrat, over his public pledge not to bring charges under the state’s 15-week abortion ban. Warren sued in federal court to be reinstated, and while the judge agreed that DeSantis’ action violated the state’s constitution, he ruled that only a state court could reverse the governor’s decision.
The moves have left local prosecutors chafing at what they see as encroachment on their executive branch powers, tactics that Warren called “ridiculous” and “undemocratic.”
“It’s a political war being waged against people for speaking their minds,” he said.
Nonpartisan legal groups view this trend as a threat to prosecutors’ ability to use their best judgment on which cases are worth pursuing and how to allocate their offices’ finite resources to best serve the community that elected them.
“The individual exercise of discretion is the foundation of our legal system. This is a huge overreach by the legislatures,” warned David LaBahn, president and CEO of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. “When we’re looking at a series of cases — and this is not hypothetical, it’s very real, because we’re dealing with backlogs in so many places right now — should they investigate a phone call from someone saying they think someone had an abortion, versus a documented homicide or case of child abuse? If you have limited resources — should you pour everything into the first one? Of course not! That’s why you have discretion.”
LaBahn noted the wave of bills also threatens the “jury standard” — the metric local prosecutors use to decide which cases they could reasonably expect to win at trial with a jury selected from their local community.
“And the standard is not ‘a jury in the most conservative county in Texas,’” he stressed. “It’s a jury in the place that elected you.”
Some district attorneys caught in this fight argue there aren’t any crimes for them to prosecute even if they wanted to do so, citing preliminary data showing that almost no doctor-administered abortions have taken place in their states since the bans took effect.
Others, however, say they wouldn’t take up a case even if there were violations of their state’s anti-abortion laws. More than 80 district attorneys from 29 states signed a pledge a month after Roe was overturned to “refrain from using limited criminal legal system resources to criminalize personal medical decisions.”
Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who runs Fair and Just Prosecution, the group that wrote the pledge, said prosecutors have the right to make that call.
“They want to focus on serious and violent crimes and not spend time investigating and prosecuting people who are making a health care decision,” she said. “They don’t want to turn miscarriages into crime scenes.”
Yet GOP lawmakers and their anti-abortion allies, many of whom believe terminating a pregnancy is murder, said prosecutors are violating their oaths of office — and the separation of powers — by saying they either won’t prosecute or will deprioritize prosecuting entire categories of crimes, instead of evaluating each case on its merits.
Under the bill introduced by Texas Sen. Mayes Middleton, prosecutors could face removal if they “categorically or systematically” refuse to bring charges for certain offenses, including abortion and some property- and election-related crimes. Attorneys could also be penalized for “categorically or systematically” not seeking the death penalty for capital offenses.
“It’s up to our district attorneys to enforce all of our laws, whether they like them or not,” Middleton said. “If they have a policy of not prosecuting crimes of violence, including our laws against abortion, then it subjects them to removal from office … This bill classifies abortion as a crime of violence, taking a life.”
GOP lawmakers have said that DAs who are unhappy with their state’s laws should run for the Legislature instead of using their office as a check on lawmakers.
“I think we all probably need to sit down and watch ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’” said Freeman, the Indiana senator.
Anti-abortion groups have coalesced behind the bills that go after prosecutors, arguing that state bans are meaningless unless they’re backed by the threat of enforcement.
“You have to have a penalty to serve as a deterrent,” said Rebecca Parma, senior legislative associate for Texas Right to Life. “We see how the abortion industry is pivoting since Dobbs and we need to respond as a state to make sure abortion stays fully prohibited. We’re seeing groups illegally shipping abortion pills into our state — trafficking pills across the border. And we have the phenomenon of abortion ships right off our coast. We need to hold people accountable for illegally aiding and abetting.”
Parma added that anti-abortion groups believe it’s not enough to target pr
osecutors, and that they’re working now with lawmakers in Texas to revive the system in place before the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, that allowed individuals to sue anyone they suspect of helping someone obtain an abortion, with a $10,000 reward if the suit succeeds.
“We can’t depend solely on the state and elected officials,” she said. “Removing a bad DA who will only be replaced by another bad DA is not going to solve the problem. We need another tool in our belts.”
The fights over prosecutorial discretion are not new — there were clashes in California a century ago over gambling — and not confined to abortion. In the past few years, bills have been introduced in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia to circumvent or penalize prosecutors who decline to bring charges on a range of offenses, from murder to marijuana possession.
And while most of the concerns about attacks on prosecutorial discretion have surfaced from the left, the issue can cut both ways. In Wisconsin, several local prosecutors are defending the state’s 1849 near-total abortion ban against a lawsuit filed by Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, arguing the state is infringing on their powers of prosecutorial discretion by pushing the courts to rule the law unenforceable. Several conservative state leaders have also, in recent years, said they would not enforce federal laws and regulations they disagree with — such as vaccine mandates.
Yet legal experts say the mounting calls on the right to force more abortion-related prosecutions is where “the rubber meets the road.”
“State legislators watch each other,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director of the Public Rights Project that supports progressive DAs. “And because there’s been so much noise around these bills in Texas, we expect to see these threats emerging in a lot of significant states.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Kathmandu: The Nepali government has banned the import of fresh roses from countries like India and China ahead of Valentine’s Day, according to a media report on Friday.
The Plant Quarantine and Pesticide Management Centre under the Ministry of Agriculture in a notification on Thursday directed the subordinate border offices not to issue the import permit for rose flowers, citing the risk of plant diseases.
The centre banned the import of rose flowers citing special reasons in a written direction to 15 customs offices of Nepal, India, and China borders, My Republica newspaper reported.
Valentine’s Day is celebrated annually on February 14.
The notice states that roses cannot be imported from Kakadbhitta in the east to Gadda Chowki in the west and any customs points in the north.
“All the offices under the centre are requested not to issue rose flower import permits unless there is another arrangement for special reasons,” the notification said.
The Plant Quarantine and Pesticide Management Centre said that due to the risk of plant diseases, the import has been stopped for the time being.
Mahesh Chandra Acharya, information officer of the centre, said the import was immediately stopped due to the possibility of diseases and insects in the vegetable products.
“It is seen that there is a risk of disease in roses and other plants. Therefore, import is stopped for a time being as there is no proper study about such diseases,” Acharya said.
“Since the meeting of the technical committee is still pending, further decisions will be taken only after the meeting,” Acharya was quoted as saying.
According to the details of the Customs Department, Nepal imported 10,612 kg of rose flowers worth Rs 1.3 million in the first six months of the current fiscal year.
JB Tamang, the programme coordinator of the Nepal Floriculture Association (NFA), said that the government’s decision would now cause a shortage of roses in the market.
According to the NFA, nearly 300,000 sticks of rose flowers are sold in Nepal around Valentine’s Day. He said that only about 20,000 pieces of rose flowers are produced in Nepal.
Traders say almost 80 per cent of the requirement for red roses is fulfilled through imports, the Kathmandu Post newspaper reported.
According to the NFA, demand for long-stem red roses explodes to 150,000 stems on Valentine’s Day.
Most local flower growers can come up with 30,000-40,000 stems, and the rest have to be imported from India. Delhi, Bangalore, and Kolkata are the largest suppliers of red roses to Nepal.
Chennai: The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court on Tuesday directed that unauthorised and illegal fake websites running in temple names should be banned across Tamil Nadu.
The direction came on a petition seeking to block websites operating in the names of major temples in Tamil Nadu and action against the operators of those websites.
The petition, filed by Subramanian and Markandan, read, “Many people start fake websites in the name of important temples including Chennai Kapaleeswarar Temple, Madurai Meenakshi Amman Temple, Thanjai Periya Temple, Palani Murugan Temple, Srirangam Aranganathar Temple. Devottess give money thinking that the website belongs to the temple and therefore such websites should be blocked.”
“Cybercrime should find out how much money has been collected through those websites and confiscate the amount. The authorized website address of the temples should be made known to the public through the IT department,” said the bench of justices Mahadevan and Sathya Narayana Prasad.
The bench said steps should be taken to perform pujas, and donations through authorised websites. Devotees should be advised to deposit money in the temples or pay through authorised websites.
“If a complaint is received about fake websites, it should be investigated immediately and legal and criminal action should be taken against the operators of fake websites,” the bench said.
The judges stated further that Tamil Nadu temples, like Tirupati and Sabarimala shrines, should be run in a transparent manner.
New Delhi: Operation of sub-conventional aerial platforms, including UAVs, paragliders, microlight aircraft and hot air balloons, over the national capital has been prohibited from January 18 in view of Republic Day, the Delhi Police said on Monday.
The order will remain in effect for a period of 29 days till February 15, it said.
The order stated that certain criminal or anti-social elements or terrorists inimical to India may pose a threat to the safety of the general public, dignitaries and vital installations by using sub-conventional aerial platforms like para-gliders, para-motors, hang gliders, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) among others.
“Therefore, the Delhi Police has prohibited flying of sub-conventional aerial platforms over the national capital on the occasion of Republic Day and doing so shall be punishable under section 188 of the Indian Penal Code,” the order, issued by Delhi Police Commissioner Sanjay Arora, stated.
The copies of the order should be affixed on the notice boards of offices of all DCPs/additional DCPs/ACPs, tehsils, police stations and offices of the municipal corporations, public works department, Delhi Development Authority and Delhi Cantonment Board, it stated.
