Patna: A day after three persons of a family lost their lives and two others injured in a blast in Bihar’s Gaya, the Indian Army on Thursday held that there was no firing practice session in Deuri-Dumri range in the district on the day in question.
In a statement, the army clarified that there was no mortar firing practice in Deuri-Dumri range in Gaya on the day of Holi, and it will cooperate with the investigating agencies. It has also expressed deep condolences to the family members of those who lost their loved ones in the Wednesday accident.
The villagers of Guler Bind claimed that there was firing practice in the Deuri-Dumri range and one shell fell in the adjoining village and exploded. Due to the explosion, three persons lost their lives and two others were seriously injured in this incident.
As per the army statement, whenever a firing session was to be held in the range, the local range officer takes prior permission from the district administration and alerts the villagers residing in the surroundings of the range. As there was no firing practice scheduled on March 8, the local army official did not take permission from the district administration.
The statement further said that there is a suspicion of blind mortar shells were accumulated at the place for trading and termed it a wrong and dangerous practice. There is also a possibility that a mortar shell fell earlier and was found by anyone leading to an explosion on March 8, it added.
The villagers have shown the round circle pit having the size of mortar shell but if a mortar shell explodes, it does not leave such a signature on the soil, it said.
Terming the incident “unfortunate”, the army has expressed deep sorrow and condolences to the family members of the victims and said that it is ready to help the district administration as well as the villagers.
It’s clear the push is already getting traction. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), joined by nine other Republicans who will be in a position to grill Powell this week, told the Fed chair in a letter Friday that there’s no reason to hike capital requirements for the banks.
“Nobody is going to miss the point of this letter, which is hammering Jay Powell to testify the way Wall Street’s biggest banks want him to testify, with the suggestion that there will be political consequences if he doesn’t do that,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of the watchdog group Better Markets.
In a financial policy space where crypto has become the bright, shiny object for Congress, the hearings are poised to reveal how much juice the big bank lobby still has in Washington. For Powell, it’s a test of whether he wants to take on Wall Street in addition to the battle he’s waging on inflation. The banks have framed the potential increase in regulation as a threat to the economy because they say it would force them to retrench in the services they provide — a familiar lobbyist talking point that may have new political salience as the U.S. stares at a potential recession.
“In response to higher capital requirements, banks have two choices,” JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum said last week, summing up the banks’ case at a Washington symposium hosted by the Bank Policy Institute trade association. “We can charge higher prices or we can do less lending. Both of those choices are ultimately bad for consumers and businesses.”
Barnum’s appearance in Washington was part of a broad lobbying effort by the industry to grab the attention of policymakers. The Bank Policy Institute, the Financial Services Forum and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association have been flooding email inboxes for weeks with arguments against raising capital requirements, in addition to closed-door meetings with lawmakers and their staffs. It’s the industry’s top issue in Washington this year.
The calibration of bank capital requirements has major ramifications for the economy. It requires regulators to strike a balance between preventing a financial crisis — which could be triggered by an unforeseen event, like a pandemic — while not limiting banks so much that it crimps economic growth.
“Every decision a bank makes first factors capital costs or benefits,” Federal Financial Analytics managing partner Karen Petrou, who advises lenders on policy, wrote last month.
The largest banks in the U.S. were subject to higher capital requirements after the 2008 global financial crisis, as regulators around the world sought to protect taxpayers from having to bail out the industry again during a future meltdown. Banks survived the depths of Covid-19, armed with bigger capital buffers and buoyed by a flood of government rescue money across the economy.
The issue is returning to the top of banks’ agenda again because U.S. regulators are in the process of finalizing the last piece of the post-2008 capital rules, with a proposal expected by the summer.
But the Fed in the last couple of months has upped the ante.
Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr, a Biden-appointed official who is the central bank’s point man on regulation, triggered the banking lobby late last year when he announced plans for a “holistic” review of bank capital. He also signaled that he already had a view that the current rules aren’t strong enough.
“History shows the deep costs to society when bank capital is inadequate, and thus how urgent it is for the Federal Reserve to get capital regulation right,” Barr said in December. “In doing so, we need to be humble about our ability, or that of bank managers or the market, to fully anticipate the risks that our financial system might face in the future.”
The lenders are complaining that Barr should be more transparent about the process, though he has taken time to speak with bank executives. Barr said in December that any rule changes would be subject to public notice and comment.
“It is an internal process,” said Kevin Fromer, who represents executives of the largest U.S. banks as CEO of the Financial Services Forum. “We, as well as the rest of the public, are outside looking in.”
Barr isn’t the only threat. Banks expect the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which is also led by a Biden appointee, is going to push for stricter rules as well. Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who leads Congress’s Fed oversight, has long argued for higher capital requirements and may provide political cover.
Now the big banks and their allies in Congress want to know whether Powell plans to defer to his colleagues or will intervene.
Scott, who is seen as a likely 2024 GOP presidential candidate, told Powell with fellow Republicans Friday that it was “incumbent on you” to oversee the capital review launched by Barr. They warned Powell against violating a 2018 law that eased bank regulations. And they echoed points made by the banking industry about the potential impact on borrowing costs, investment and the competitiveness of U.S. markets.
“We have received the letter and plan to respond,” a Fed spokesperson said.
It’s unclear where Powell will come down on the issue. But during the Trump administration, he responded to calls by big banks to lower their capital requirements by saying that the levels were “about right,” and he dismissed suggestions that strict regulations were hurting their ability to compete with foreign banks. He supported moves to loosen rules around the edges.
The Republican-led House has made the issue a priority as it ramps up scrutiny of the Biden administration. Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), who leads the subcommittee overseeing the Fed, said in a statement that he is planning “vigorous oversight” of the capital review. He will be one of the lawmakers grilling Powell this week.
“I am particularly focused on preventing regulators from imposing excessive requirements that would sideline capital as we continue to battle forty-year high inflation,” Barr said.
Kelleher’s group Better Markets is pushing back, arguing that capital standards should be raised to protect the economy from bank failures and taxpayer-funded bailouts.
“Congress’s job is to ask questions,” he said. “But their job isn’t to try and basically work the refs by trying to bully them into an outcome that is not actually data-driven or risk-driven.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Srinagar, Feb 17: Srinagar Police on Friday clarified that no incident of firing on any individual took place anywhere in the district and the miscreants involved in creating panic in Qamarwari area will be caught soon.
A police spokesman in a statement issued to the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) said that there is still confusion in some quarters of the media about the incident in Qamarwari yesterday morning, it is clarified that no incident of firing on any individual took place anywhere in Srinagar.
“There was a sound heard after which a search operation was launched which is routine in suspicious circumstances. Some media houses are quoting an unverified mischievous claim on telegram channel wherein name of one revenue official is mentioned,” police said.
It said during in-depth investigation it came to fore that neither any such person works in the revenue department nor any such firing incident has taken place.
“Investigation in the case is in full swing and miscreants involved in creating panic in Qamarwari area will be caught soon,” police said—(KNO)
Barragán’s actions surrounding the Usyk firing are prompting anger from within the group and skepticism that she will be able to lead it going forward, according to more than a dozen people interviewed. Both people who confirmed the Hispanic Caucus’ imminent meeting on its chair described it as a potential step toward seeking her removal after Barragán’s axing of its top adviser left the influential Democratic group without any staffers at the start of a new Congress — alarming lawmakers and aides alike.
The turmoil also threatens to hurt the Hispanic Caucus’ engagement on issues important to the communities its members represent, because the executive director works with the chair to set the group’s priorities. In addition, the staffing change and resulting controversy over Barragán’s move could also distract the group from working on policy at a time when its members are preparing for intense negotiations this Congress on immigration in the Republican-controlled House.
“Jacky is no longer with the CHC. We wish her well in her future endeavors. We do not comment on internal confidential personnel matters,” Barragán told POLITICO in a statement on Thursday. Asked on Friday to comment on the news of a virtual meeting to discuss her leadership of the caucus, Barragán’s office did not respond.
The Hispanic Caucus’ vice chair, Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), is considered next in line to run the CHC. His office did not respond to a request for comment on Barragán’s alleged management issues.
Usyk, a well-respected Hill veteran who declined to comment for this story, rose up through the ranks of Democratic offices before coming to the Hispanic Caucus. She served most recently as a top leadership aide to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and worked previously for Rep. Tony Cárdenas (D-Calif.), who’s now in Hispanic Caucus leadership as well.
The harsh scrutiny of Barragán comes at the outset of her tenure as CHC chair, a position that she won unopposed after its previous chair, Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), was term-limited out of the job. Her personal office ranked third for highest turnover rate of any House office from 2001 to 2021, according to the nonpartisan tracking site Legistorm.
Dear White Staffers, an Instagram account popular with Hill aides, first posted about Usyk being fired Thursday night and POLITICO confirmed the news shortly after.
After its former policy director recently departed to run another Hill group that represents younger Americans, Usyk’s firing leaves the CHC with no employed staffers as of Friday. The group had been set to bring on a new communications director next week, but it is unclear whether that aide, Bianca Lugo Lewis, will start the job as planned. Lugo Lewis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There is some ambiguity in the group’s bylaws about its chair’s ability to unilaterally fire staffers. One of the people familiar with the group’s dynamics who confirmed its meeting on Barragán also told POLITICO that the chair is given authority to hire staff but less clear power over dismissals.
Another two people familiar with the situation said Barragán sought counsel from the House’s lawyers before making the decision.
Barragán has a reputation of being a strict boss who struggles with high turnover in her office, a dozen current and former Hill staffers told POLITICO. Just a few years ago, during her first term, she had conversations with party leadership because of her staff churn, according to two separate people familiar with that situation.
The office of then-Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who likely took part in those conversations with Barragán, declined to comment, citing its policy on addressing private member-to-member conversations.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
There is no evidence the wind work and whale deaths are linked. But Clean Ocean Action, a 40-year-old nonprofit, believes the two things happening at once may be more than just a fluke.
Real or rhetorical, the claim is stirring a new political debate.
The group, which has been one of the few environmental organizations to criticize offshore wind, is using the whale deaths to push for a halt of offshore wind development until officials can figure out what is going on. Its message is spreading.
Clean Ocean Action is now a strange bedfellow with conservative media figure Tucker Carlson, six Republican lawmakers in the New Jersey Legislature who represent coastal districts and Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), who co-chairs the congressional offshore wind caucus and is its only Republican member.
Carlson is running a series of segments called “The Biden Whale Extinction.” In mid-January, he called wind energy “the DDT of our time” and a guest on the show said, without offering specific evidence, that wind developers’ survey ships were “carpet bombing the ocean floor with intense sound” that would confuse whales.
Van Drew has called on Gov. Phil Murphy to pause offshore wind activity in New Jersey.
“Since offshore wind projects were being proposed by Governor Murphy to be built off the coast of New Jersey, I have been adamantly opposed to any activity moving forward until research disclosed the impacts these projects would have on our environment and the impacts on the fishing industry,” Van Drew, whose South Jersey district includes several coastal counties, said in a statement.
Murphy, like the president, has made offshore wind a key component of his clean energy plans.
At least one moderate Democrat is expressing hesitation, too. New Jersey state Sen. Vin Gopal, who represents part of coastal Monmouth County, said he’s “very concerned” about any ties between wind and the whales.
The political headache couldn’t come at a worse time for the offshore wind industry, which is already struggling to finance wind farms, including Ocean Wind 1, which would be New Jersey’s first.
Biden has set a national goal of 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, enough energy to power 10 million homes, and Murphy set a state level goal of 11 gigawatts by 2040. To achieve these goals, developers in New Jersey and other states will need to quickly install hundreds of giant wind turbines miles off the coast. So far, just one major project in the region, the South Fork wind farm in New York, has broken ground.
Clean Ocean Action Executive Director Cindy Zipf said she has no evidence to tie the whale deaths to offshore wind, beyond that there is an unprecedented number of whales dying on beaches and an unprecedented amount of offshore wind work getting underway. But there’s also no evidence to prove there isn’t a connection.
For years, Zipf’s group has argued the federal government has skimped on monitoring new wind infrastructure planned for the ocean and isn’t certain of the effect sonic mapping of the ocean floor and an increase in ship traffic will have.
Wind supporters from the New Jersey chapters of the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters say talk of a connection with whales is baseless and no reason to stop the development of clean energy. They say an already-warming ocean is a known threat to whales and clean power from wind energy could help stop climate change.
Federal regulators from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management gave offshore wind supporters a hand by telling reporters last week that there is no evidence construction would exacerbate or compound whale deaths. The kind of sound surveys being done by offshore wind companies has not been linked to stranded whales, they said.
BOEM has been monitoring an unusual number of whale deaths since 2016 and found that about 40 percent of the animals they examined were struck by some ship or entangled in fishing gear. Those sorts of threats are old but may become more common because whales are following their prey closer to shore — something that may be a result of climate change.
There are no wind farms off the New Jersey coast yet, though surveys of the seafloor using sound have been conducted.
Worries that sonic mapping might be affecting whales’ navigation are overblown, said Erica Staaterman, an expert at the federal government’s Center for Marine Acoustics. Staaterman said during the call with reporters that there’s a “pretty big difference” between the relatively brief and targeted sound mapping used by offshore wind and the very loud sounds used by oil and gas companies to take measurements deep beneath the seafloor.
She didn’t make it explicit, but there is a political point there: if conservative media is so concerned about the whales, why are they opposed to offshore wind but pushing offshore drilling?
Because it isn’t clear why the whales are dying, the absence of evidence is being used as evidence of regulatory absence.
“It doesn’t seem to me that they have conducted very much review of anything, which is what we’re calling for,” Zipf said in an interview after the media briefing by federal regulators.
Other environmental groups like the Sierra Club have been scrambling to tamp down the speculation and undo the notion that offshore wind is killing whales. At the same time, they’re trying to point out hypocrisy among offshore wind’s foes.
“I wouldn’t call for commercial shipping to stop because I know it’s unreasonable. It’s trade. I know it’s not going to stop,” New Jersey Sierra Club Director Anjuli Ramos-Busot said in an interview. “So I find it unreasonable to call for the pause or moratorium on offshore wind — which is going to save us all.”
Last year, the East Coast’s largest port, the Port of New York and New Jersey, saw nearly 3,000 ships come and go, a figure that vastly undercounts all the ocean traffic in the region and dwarfs the number of vessels that have anything to do with offshore wind.
In New Jersey, Murphy’s offshore wind hopes are already meeting headwinds because of basic economics.
Orsted, the Danish developer behind what would be New Jersey’s first offshore wind farm, said late last year it’s worried about making money on the project and other large projects approved in other states.
The state Board of Public Utilities, which controls Orsted’s return on the project, has received well over 100 public comments since December opposing offshore wind and citing whale deaths.
Wind supporters point out that some of the opposition to offshore wind is coordinated and involves misinformation supported by fossil fuel interests.
At a press conference organized by the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters and the Sierra Club, Jody Stewart of the New Jersey Organization Project, a group formed after Hurricane Sandy to help with recovery and to protect shores from extreme weather, said if there is any investigation it should be of the coordinated industry campaign to “stir up opposition among locals.”
“They’re the ones taking this narrative of whales dying because of offshore wind and running with it — not regular people, not people who live here,” she said.
That’s a harder criticism to pin on Clean Ocean Action, which was founded to fight ocean dumping and does beach cleanups, opposes offshore drilling and helped block liquefied natural gas facilities along the New Jersey coast.
There is some evidence, from inland waterways, that the federal government has advanced wind-related projects without fully exploring the threat new shipping routes pose to wildlife.
Last summer, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network alleged federal fisheries officials ignored how construction and operation of a New Jersey port being created to help the wind industry could harm fish, especially a rare type of Atlantic sturgeon in the river. In an email later obtained by the group, federal officials appeared to acknowledge they hadn’t used the best available information about how boats might kill river sturgeon. But that didn’t halt construction at the wind port.
Privately, offshore wind supporters wonder if Clean Ocean Action’s argument is more about NIMBYism than environmentalists.
Zipf rejects this.
“Clean Ocean Action’s mission is solely to protect the ocean, that is our mission, and, you know, being a voice for the ocean oftentimes makes us a lone voice for a period of time until others understand the scope and the threat to the ocean is a threat to us all,” she said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
SRINAGAR: Jammu and Kashmir Police on Saturday launched a probe into a firing incident near the house of a former MLA in Poonch district.
Police said there were reports of some 12 bore gunshots having been fired towards the house of former MLA Choudhary Muhammad Akram in Lassana village of Surankote area.
“Since the house is in the vicinity of a forest, it could be shots from a hunter’s gun those hit a street light near the outer wall of the MLA’s house.”
“There was no damage. We have taken cognisance of the incident and started investigation,” the police said. (IANS)
Jammu, Jan 21: Police on Saturday launched investigations amid reports of damage to a streetlight and splinters marks on wall of a house of a former MLA at Lassana in Surankote area of Poonch district.
Official sources told GNS that house belongs to ex-MLA Surankote Choudhary Mohammad Akram and falls close to a jungle area.
They said preliminary investigations suggest that splinter marks on wall were caused by pellets from a 12-bore rifle. “Further investigations are underway,” the said. While no one was injured in the incident, it has led to panic among locals.
A police officer told GNS that investigators are inquiring all possible angles. ” Since the house is in close vicinity of a jungle, it could be case of hunter shots hitting the house or there could be other possibilities. We are investigating all angles.” (GNS)
Former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan was injured in firing during his rally in Gujranwala in Pakistan’s Punjab province and was rushed to a hospital. He was moving inside an SUV while having his right leg wrapped.
When Imran Khan was speaking from atop a container truck to address his ongoing “long march” to Islamabad against the Shehbaz Sharif government, the attacker, who has since been apprehended, opened fire at him from below.
About 200 kilometres from Islamabad, the incident occurred nine months after he was unseated from office for losing the trust of the army establishment.
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