Islamabad: At least 15 Hindu students were injured after being allegedly attacked by the Islami Jamiat Tulba (IJT) activists on Monday in Punjab University’s new campus when they were celebrating Holi, Dawn reported.
A number of videos surfaced on the social networking platform which showed that Hindu communities were being attacked by the IJT even after the students got permission from the administration for the celebration of Holi.
An application had been filed with the police for the registration of a case against the attacker.
Some other videos also showed that the security guards were carrying batons and beating the students and they were running from the scene, reported Dawn.
Talking about the incident, Sindh Council General Secretary Kashif Brohi said that the members of the Hindu community and the council had organised a Holi celebration after getting permission from the university administration.
He said the IJT activists started hurling threats after students had posted invitations for the Holi celebration on their Facebook page.
He said on Monday morning the members of the Sindh Council and Hindu community gathered outside PU law College to celebrate the Holi when the IJT activists carrying guns and batons attacked them.
Brohi further added that the students later gathered to protest outside the vice chancellor’s office when the security guards came there holding batons and started beating them.
He said the security guards also bundled four to five students into their vans, not allowing them to record their peaceful protest, according to Dawn.
He said an application was submitted to the administration and police for case registration against the IJT activists and security guards for torturing them.
However, IJT spokesperson Ibrahim Shahid told Dawn that they did not stop the Hindu community members from celebrating Holi. He further stated that the attackers might have used their name but the IJT will not. The IJT will ensure equality for minority community members to hold their religious events.
He said the security guards might have attacked the students and IJT had nothing to do with it.He said they were holding Dars-i-Quran on the campus and were not present there. A PU spokesman said action would be taken against the students involved in attacking minority community members, reported Dawn.
The plan gives Norfolk Southern President and CEO Alan Shaw something to present to senators when he appears before the Senate EPW Committee Thursday — but it’s not likely to satisfy Democrats on the panel.
Most of the six-point plan to be announced Monday involves improving the equipment Norfolk Southern uses along tracks to help sense when a train’s wheels are overheating, including boosting the number of detectors and reviewing how far apart they’re spaced. The railroad also says it wants to seek industry consensus on standards for this equipment, which now are determined by individual companies. And it says it wants to accelerate research on a new automated inspection technology.
In a statement accompanying the plan, Shaw said the preliminary findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency probing the disaster, made it clear that “a comprehensive industry effort” was needed to improve safety and that Norfolk Southern is “not waiting to take action.”
But that list of actions falls far short of the changes the Biden administration is seeking — such as upgrading to a faster braking system, providing more notification to communities about hazardous materials traveling through their areas and paying workers sick leave.
The Department of Transportation has said it also doesn’t just want railroads to upgrade their automated track inspection equipment. It also wants them to stop seeking to cut back on human inspections.
The Biden administration has asked Congress to make a series of additional changes as well, including increasing the current $225,000 cap on fines for safety violations.
Raising the cap is one of the provisions included in a bill introduced last week by a bipartisan group of senators, including the delegations from Ohio and Pennsylvania where the impacts of the derailment were felt. That bill would also subject more trains that carry hazardous materials to safety regulations designed to protect communities, and would require at least two crew members on board each train — changes the railroads have fought hard to prevent.
The bill also would mandate that railroads have detectors for overheating wheels every 10 miles of track — not every 15, as included in Norfolk Southern’s action plan.
Norfolk Southern hasn’t specifically discussed the bill or DOT’s requests beyond saying that the “rail industry needs to learn as much as we can from East Palestine,” as the company said in a statement to POLITICO.
“Norfolk Southern has committed to working with industry to develop practices and technologies that could help prevent an incident like this in the future,” the statement read. “This incident requires a broad industry response, and we will also work with the owners of the rail cars on the integrity and safety of the equipment we use.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The eleven Juventus players presumably on the pitch total 319 years, with an average age of 29 years. Grenade front: 274 years overall, for an average age of 24.9 years
The Old Lady, in name and in fact, against Giovin Torino: this too will be the derby of the Mole number 156. This is certified by the probable formations, whose numbers are pitiless: the eleven black and whites presumably in the field total 319 years, with a average age of 29 years.
Lahore: Chaos descended upon the Gaddafi Stadium, which was hosting a PSL cricket match, after a group of journalists were denied entry to the venue by police officials for wearing masks in solidarity with the slain journalist Arshad Sharif.
Sharif, 49, a former reporter and TV anchor with ARY TV, was shot dead in Nairobi on October 23 last year under mysterious circumstances, sending shockwaves across Pakistan.
On Sunday, television anchor Imran Riaz and his friends donning masks with the picture of Sharif were stopped by police from entering the Gaddafi Stadium, the venue of a PSL-8 match, despite having tickets.
The situation quickly escalated after Riaz and his friends began to chant slogans to show their solidarity with Sharif.
Video clips showed police officials and the journalists engaged in heated arguments after the police surrounded them and asked them to surrender their masks before entering the stadium.
In the video, a police inspector was seen shouting to the journalists that wearing the mask showing the face’ of Sharif on the premises of the stadium was a clear violation of the regulations of the Pakistan Cricket Board.
Soon, a scuffle broke out between the police officials and the journalists.
“By wearing Arshad Sharif’s masks, we wanted to show solidarity with him and his family and seek justice for him,” Riaz was quoted as saying by the Dawn newspaper.
In August last year, Sharif was booked on charges of sedition for interviewing former Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s close aide Shehbaz Gill.
In the interview, Gill criticised the Shehbaz Sharif government for trying to pitch Khan against the country’s powerful Army. Sharif subsequently fled the country.
A month after he left Pakistan, ARY TV fired Sharif, saying he had repeatedly criticised the military on social media in violation of the company’s policy.
In October last year, he was shot dead in Nairobi, in what the Kenyan authorities claim was a case of “mistaken identity.”
But in December last year, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ordered the federal government to constitute a special Joint Investigation Team (JIT) to probe the case after the initial investigation revealed the murder was “premeditated.”
Sharif was awarded the Pride of Performance’ in 2019 by Pakistan President Arif Alvi.
Chandigarh: Two gangsters, involved in the killing of Punjabi singer Sidhu Moosewala, succumbed to injuries following in a major clash of gangsters in Goindwal jail in Punjab’s Tarn Taran district on Sunday, officials said.
The deceased were identified as Mandeep Singh, alias Toofan, and Mohan Singh, alias Manmohan Singh. A third jail inmate, Keshav, was also critically wounded in the clash. He was admitted to Guru Nanak Dev Hospital in Amritsar.
All three of them have been accused in the Moosewala murder killing.
Toofan was arrested by the anti-gangster task force in September last year. He was also wanted in the killing of another notorious gangster, Ranbir Singh, in a hospital in Amritsar.
Shubhdeep Singh Sidhu, popularly known as Sidhu Moosewala, was shot dead in Punjab’s Mansa district on May 29, 2022.
The clash in jail comes two days after self-styled globe-trotting Sikh preacher Amritpal Singh, who just came to the limelight after returning from Dubai, when his supporters, carrying swords and arms, clashed with the police and forcefully laid a siege on a police station in Ajnala, which led to a scuffle and injuries to several police personnel in Amritsar district.
Telangana: A clash broke out between the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) and Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) members at Hyderabad Central University on Friday, sources said.
Some students were also injured in the clash incident which broke out during students’ union election held on Friday night, said sources.
ABVP members alleged that SFI did violence against the tribal students of ABVP and used sharp objects like knives to attack them.
According to the ABVP members, tribal students and their members were beaten up by the SFI activists for not supporting their party.
Taking to Twitter ABVP tweeted, “SFI has unleashed violence against the tribal students and karyakartas”>karyakartas of ABVP HCU. They used sharp objects like knives. We condemn this attack against our karyakartas”>karyakartas. @ABVPVoice @ABVPTelangana.”
SFI members alleged that ABVP knew that they were going to get defeated in the student union election and that’s the reason they attacked and provoked the student community.
“Condemn the brutal attack by ABVP goons on SFI comrades today, on the night of the union election polling day, SFI comrades were brutally attacked by ABVP goons inside the Men’s hostel F. The incident started with ABVP members in a drunken state abusing and targeting our comrades,” SFI said in a tweet.
Condemn the brutal attack by ABVP goons on SFI comrades Today, on the night of the union election polling day,SFI comrades were brutally attacked by ABVP goons inside the Mens hostel F. The incident started with ABVP members in a drunken state abusing and targeting our comrades. pic.twitter.com/jKPCVUzqh2
The drunken ABVP goon attacked comrades and broke the glass doors. Our comrades were assaulted with sharp glass pieces and cycles lying in front of the hostel, SFI tweeted.
Hyderabad, Telangana | Students of ABVP & SFI clash at Hyderabad central university over student union elections. ABVP alleged that SFI students inflicted violence against the tribal students of ABVP & used sharp objects to attack them. pic.twitter.com/4j2i2Koz7U
The SFI members who got attacked were shifted to the hospital, SFI said.
SFI members further urged the student community to stand united against this hooliganism and said, “ABVP, fearing a defeat in the election is trying to attack and provoke the student community. ABVP has been resorting to violence since UGBM fearing an utter defeat in the SU 2023 polls.”
Chandigarh: Carrying swords and arms, supporters of Khalistan sympathiser Amritpal Singh, chief of the Waris Punjab De group, on Thursday clashed with police and forcefully seized a police complex in Punjab’s Amritsar district to demand the release of their activist within 24 hours.
Khalistan supporter Amritpal Singh worked in transport business in Dubai & came back only in 2022 and became head of ‘Waris Punjab De’ organization.
Today, mob attacked Ajnala police station in Amritsar, Punjab & demanded the release of Lovepreet Toofan (close aide of Amritpal). pic.twitter.com/yV9RYFlGMA
Six policemen were injured amid the protests and were admitted to a hospital.
The protesters were staging a demonstration in Ajnala town against the arrest of Amritpal Singh’s aide Lovepreet Toofan.
To defuse the tension and in view of the situation’s sensitivity, Police Commissioner Jaskaran Singh told the media that the protesters have given enough proof that Lovepreet Toofan is innocent. “The SIT (Special Investigation Team) has taken note of it. These people will peacefully disperse now, and the law will take its course,” he said.
A case was registered against Amritpal Singh and his supporters for allegedly kidnapping and thrashing a resident of Chamkaur Sahib in Ropar district.
Videos and photos shared on social media showed crowd of protesters outside the police station, while the cops tried to control the crowd.
“The FIR was registered only with a political motive. If they don’t cancel the case in one hour, the administration will be responsible for whatever happens next,” Amritpal Singh, who had recently reportedly issued a threat to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, saying he will meet the same fate as that of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
The Waris Punjab De is an organisation of radicals founded by activist Deep Sidhu, who died in a road accident in February last year.
New Delhi:: The chairman of the BCCI’s national selection committee Chetan Sharma landed in a major soup after he disclosed behind-the-scenes talks regarding team selection and also made startling revelations on star batter skipper Viral Kohli’s alleged feud with former Board president Sourav Ganguly, to a television channel, during a sting operation aired Tuesday.
Sharma claimed that the alleged strained relationship between Ganguly and Kohli involved ‘ego issues’.
The chief selector claimed that Kohli had started considering himself “bigger than the Board” and had tried to “hit back” at the former BCCI president as he felt that Ganguly had removed him from ODI captaincy.
“When the player becomes popular, he considers himself to be bigger than the Board and thinks that nobody can touch him. He feels that cricket in India would stop without him. But has that ever happened? Some of our biggest cricketing stars came and went but cricket remained the same. So he (Kohli) tried to hit back at the (former) president at that time. It was a damaging controversy. It was a classic case of a player going against the BCCI. The president represents the BCCI, isn’t it? As to whose fault it was will be judged in time but it was an attack on the BCCI. All our players are discouraged from doing this because the loss will be theirs as everyone will go against them even if the president is at the fault. There has to be some respect for the chair,” said Sharma during the sting operation.
He further claimed that ahead of the 2022 India tour of South Africa in January, Kohli brought up the matter of being removed from ODI captaincy on purpose in front of reporters because he felt that Ganguly had played a role in removing him from leadership in the 50-over format. He also accused Kohli of lying in front of the media about being removed from ODI captaincy without any communication, in order to defame Ganguly.
“Virat was going to South Africa as captain (of the Test side). Press conferences should be about team matters and not selections. There was no need to bring up this topic (Virat being removed from ODI captaincy) during the press conference. But he did so intentionally. He felt that he had lost his ODI captaincy because of Ganguly. Ganguly hold told reporters that he had asked him not to step down (as ODI captain) but Virat claimed before the media that the president never said this to him. This created a major controversy,” Chetan said.
“Ganguly had told him once during a video conference to think it (stepping down as ODI skipper) over. But Virat did pay heed. There were nine people at the conference, including all the selectors. I am not sure if Virat heard Ganguly correctly. Ganguly later claimed that Virat lied to the media about him. As to why he did so, nobidy knows. It is his personal matter. It sparked off a controversy and matters escalated to the extent where it became an issue of a player against the Board,” Sharma said.
“Rohit Sharma had volunteered (to take over ODI captaincy). It was an ego clash. Virat felt he was removed from captaincy by Ganguly and wanted to teach him a lesson. So he made the statements to the media to defame him. But it backfired on him,” added the national selector.
He said the reason why Kohli was removed from ODI captaincy was that the Board did not want two skippers for two-white ball formats, but rather one for red-ball cricket and another for white-ball cricket.
“Removing someone from captaincy is the job of selectors. We removed him the ODI captaincy as we wanted to have one white-ball captain. This is normal procedure and even he (Kohli) knows it. After Virat announced that he was giving up the T20I captaincy, the selectors made up their minds to remove him from the ODI captaincy as well,” said Sharma.
“The Board and the selectors sits with the captain before removing him from the job. Virat knows this and this is why he felt that Ganguly had a big role in his removal from ODI captaincy. But the thinking of selectors was different. We wanted separate captains for red-ball and white-ball formats,” the chief selector added.
Chetan also shed new light inon the relationship between Kohli and current all-format skipper Rohit Sharma, who had earlier been alleged to share a strained relationship.
“There is no rift. It’s just media speculation. When there are two big leaders in a team, there could be an ego clash every now and then. It is like Amitabh Bachchan ji and Dharmendra ji. It is just ego. The media made up stories that weren’t true,” Sharma said.
The chairman of selectors further revealed that both players have supported each other in their bad times.
“Rohit had supported Virat the most when he was going through a lean run. When Rohit fell into a similar crisis of confidence with the bat, Virat supported him,” said Sharma.
Both players will be seen in action during the second Test against Australia in Delhi, which starts on February 17.
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 )
Gurugram: A man was shot at and vehicles were damaged in a clash between two groups allegedly after an inter-faith marriage in Haryana’s Pataudi area, police said on Tuesday.
On January 30, a Muslim man from Pataudi’s Baba Shah locality lodged a police complaint alleging that his 22-year-old daughter had gone missing. It was later found that she had married one Rakesh, they said.
After the wedding, Rakesh had started receiving threat calls. He informed his relatives in Rewari about the calls and they reached out to Bajrang Dal members for help. A group of men led by the outfit’s leader reached the man’s house where the clash erupted, they said.
An FIR was registered against the Muslim party under sections 148 (riots), 149 (unlawful assembly), 323 (causing hurt), 506 (criminal intimidation), 380 (theft) and 427 (causing damage) of the IPC.
Mubin Khan, a resident of the same locality, said his son Mohin, who was at a grocery shop, was shot at during firing between the two groups. His son is being treated in a private hospital in Gurugram and is still unconscious, police said.
An FIR was registered under section 307 (murder attempt) at the Pataudi police station.
