Prayagraj: Efforts are now being made to free the Kasari-Masari graveyard, said to be the ‘family graveyard’ of slain gangster Atiq Ahmad, from the control of a close relative.
The graveyard’s Mutawalli (caretaker) had made several complaints to authorities at the time but to no avail.
Now, after Atiq’s death and with his gang on the run, the graveyard committee authorities hope that the land will be freed from illegal occupation of his relative.
Sources said that nearly half the graveyard land was grabbed on which Atiq’s relatives are running a construction material business and is even using it as a garage and a shed for labourers.
An investigation is now underway to identify the Waqf properties illegally occupied by Atiq and his associates, said a senior district administrative official.
The graveyard, a portion of which Atiq’s relative has illegally grabbed, is registered as Chhoti Karbala Qabristan (property number I-1657) under the Uttar Pradesh Shia Central Board of Waqf, said the graveyard’s present Mutawalli Amir Alvi.
He said: “The committee made its last complaint about the grabbing of graveyard land in 2021 to the Chief Minister and Prayagraj administrative officials. However, no action was taken in this regard. Complaints were also made to local police officials. We also spoke to Atiq’s kin and requested him to vacate the land but he refused.”
However, a senior police official said that no complaint had been received over the issue in the recent past.
“If we get a complaint, we will probe the issue and do the needful,” he added.
Locals said that the graveyard was not encroached upon all at once, but the man first grabbed a small portion of it around 12 years back. He gradually started encroaching upon larger portions of it.
He used to threaten locals and graveyard committee authorities in the name of Atiq Ahmed when they raised objections.
Chandigarh: The Punjab government has informed the Akal Takht that 348 of the 360 people taken into preventive custody during a police crackdown against radical preacher Amritpal Singh have now been freed.
The Akal Takht Jathedar’s personal secretary Jaspal Singh on Thursday said a message was received from the state government that the rest would also be released soon.
Earlier this week, Akal Takht Jathedar Giani Harpreet Singh had given an ultimatum to the state government to release all Sikh youths held during the police crackdown against Amritpal Singh and his aides.
The Jathedar had also condemned the state government for invoking the National Security Act against a few people during the police crackdown.
A few days prior to the Jathedar’s ultimatum, the Punjab Police had said that out of those detained, nearly 30 were hardcore criminals. The rest would be released after verification, a senior police official had said.
Meanwhile, police have stepped up security in and around Amritsar and Bathinda amid reports that Amritpal Singh may surrender after entering any of the two Sikh shrines the Golden Temple in Amritsar or the Takht Sri Damdama Sahib in Bathinda.
Vehicles are being checked at several places in other districts, including Hoshiarpur, in search of the head of ‘Waris Punjab De’.
Amritpal, who has been on the run since March 18 when the police crackdown was launched, appeared in a video on Wednesday.
In the undated clip, he urged the Akal Takht to summon a “sarbat khalsa” a congregation of Sikhs to discuss issues concerning the community.
The Punjab Police on Tuesday night launched a massive search operation in a Hoshiarpur village and many adjoining areas following inputs that radical preacher Amritpal Singh and his aides could be in the area.
“For the prisoners, it’s good. For the country, it sucks,” said Eddy Acevedo, a Republican former Capitol Hill staffer who has helped craft U.S. policy on Nicaragua over the past seven years. “Ortega just deported his whole opposition. What happens if this gets replicated in other countries?”
The U.S. will keep on or possibly intensify the pressure campaign on Nicaragua, maybe adding new sanctions, say Biden administration officials. Yet America is struggling to protect and promote democracy not just in Nicaragua but across Latin America. Democracies in Peru and Brazil have wobbled. Relations with Mexico are strained. These diplomatic challenges for Washington come at a time when China and Russia, its chief global rivals, are making in-roads in the region.
“We’re already seeing a troubling drift toward authoritarianism and deliberate attacks on democratic institutions in Nicaragua’s neighbors, such as Guatemala and El Salvador,” said Rebecca Bill Chavez, a former Defense Department official in the Obama administration.
Nicaragua is a test case. Washington has devoted a lot of effort both to weaken and sway the Ortega regime, but has come short of its goals — a situation likely being watched by others in the region.
Some of the prisoners now released in America are urging the Biden administration to keep up the pressure on the dictatorship they hope to weaken from abroad.
“We were not the most important part of the story,” said the newly freed Juan Sebastian Chamorro, a former Nicaraguan presidential candidate. “The most important part of the story is that there are no liberties in Nicaragua. There’s no freedom. There’s no democracy.”
A bad relationship turns toxic
U.S.-Nicaragua links began unraveling more than a decade ago as it became clear that Ortega — a former rebel who fought another Nicaraguan dictator — wouldn’t leave the presidency. Relations worsened over the past five years as Ortega and Murillo strengthened their grip.
The Trump administration imposed economic sanctions and other penalties, mainly targeting individuals such as Murillo, in 2018, a year when the regime brutally cracked down on widespread protests.
In June 2021, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told his Nicaraguan counterpart that the United States could ease up on those penalties if Nicaragua were to move back toward democracy and improve its human rights record. (Abuses such as torture and extrajudicial executions in Nicaragua may constitute crimes against humanity, a U.N. investigative panel said earlier this month.)
Blinken’s message failed to sway the ruling power couple. Over the next few months, Ortega and Murillo imprisoned more dissidents ahead of an election.
The U.S. responded by slapping sanctions on a Nicaraguan state-owned mining company and banning visas for hundreds of Nicaraguan officials and their relatives. Biden also issued orders in October that authorized his administration to impose future sanctions on various economic sectors in Nicaragua, as well as trade and investment.
This was a major threat because it would, effectively, circumvent a trade deal between the United States, Nicaragua and a number of other countries. The United States is Nicaragua’s largest trading partner.
A no-brainer operation
On Jan. 31, Murillo called U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Kevin Sullivan and urged him to get in touch with the foreign ministry for a matter that could improve ties.
Ten days later, the 222 prisoners landed in the Washington area. According to three U.S. officials familiar with the issue, Nicaragua demanded nothing in return.
Biden aides saw taking the prisoners as a humanitarian no-brainer — so non-controversial that it was largely handled at the assistant secretary level, according to a senior National Security Council official. Biden was kept apprised throughout, a second senior NSC official said. The NSC officials, like other U.S. officials quoted, were granted anonymity to describe sensitive diplomatic matters.
Multiple U.S. departments were involved in the logistics, including screening the prisoners for security risks and preparing mental health services for those who might need them. They rejected a handful of people on the original list of 228. Two people, including Catholic Bishop Rolando Alvarez, declined to go to the United States.
Biden administration officials knew that Ortega and Murillo could benefit by putting distance between themselves and their rivals. But the opposition hadn’t been able to do much inside Nicaragua because all the key figures were in prison.
One of the prisoners described being awakened by guards in the early morning on Feb. 9 and told to dress and be ready in 10 minutes. The prisoner and fellow detainees then boarded buses with windows covered by bars and wood. They were told to keep their heads down and mouths shut.
Toward the end of the road trip, guards on the bus handed the prisoners papers to sign. It was dark and some prisoners were reluctant to sign a document they could barely see. The guards told them that if they didn’t sign, they wouldn’t be able to leave the country. That was the first clue many prisoners had that they could soon be free.
Once the prisoners were let off the buses, they saw they were on the tarmac of the airport, next to a massive plane. “We saw a box on the tarmac that had the passports of all of us — new Nicaraguan passports,” said the former prisoner, who was granted anonymity to protect their family in Nicaragua. “This was quite an operation.”
Searching for rifts
The prisoner release could be a sign of dissension within the ruling ranks. A video said to be from late December appeared to show Ortega and Murillo parting after a disagreement, spurring ongoing speculation about a rift between the pair. After the release of the prisoners to the United States, Ortega appeared to suggest the idea came from his wife.
Reports last spring that Laureano Ortega, the child thought most likely to succeed the ruling couple, had reached out to U.S. officials about sanctions relief also led to questions about potential tensions within Nicaragua’s elite. This all comes amid speculation that Daniel Ortega’s health is failing and a lack of clarity about how loyal his supporters are to his wife.
Ortega and Murillo were once leaders in the Sandinista rebel movement, helping topple the dynastic autocracy of Nicaragua’s Somoza family. Today, they have turned into what they once loathed, their critics say.
After revoking the citizenship of the exiled dissidents, at least one of whom also has American nationality, Nicaragua’s government also stripped 94 other people of their Nicaraguan passports. Many of the latter are activists living outside the country.
Limits of U.S. power
The regime’s recent actions prompted countries such as Spain, Argentina and Chile to offer citizenship to those affected. U.S. officials, meanwhile, argued the regime squandered the goodwill it had gained by freeing the prisoners.
Still, America’s options in Nicaragua are limited.
Increasing sanctions pressure could damage Nicaragua’s economy and worsen the migration crisis in the hemisphere.
Ortega and Murillo have other potential options for international support — Russia and China. The regime supports Russia’s war in Ukraine and has permitted Moscow to place troops and military equipment on its soil. In late 2021, Nicaragua switched its diplomatic recognition away from Taiwan in favor of Beijing, in a sop of the Chinese.
Hawkish figures such as former Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton have called Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela the “troika of tyranny” because of their repressive rule. The United States has taken particularly harsh measures toward each, with little success.
The Cuban communist regime has survived decades of U.S. sanctions. Biden has yet to embrace a brief diplomatic flowering of relations with Havana that began under then-President Barack Obama but was ended by then-President Donald Trump.
The Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro, too, has weathered years of sanctions and other U.S. pressure. A U.S.-backed opposition effort to overthrow Maduro has largely fizzled in the past six months, and the dictator appears secure.
Some of the former Nicaraguan prisoners already are in touch with each other, looking at uniting around a common platform to oppose Ortega and Murillo from exile. “This is one of the mistakes Ortega made — he made us closer,” said Chamorro, the former presidential candidate.
Yet diaspora-led opposition movements are rarely successful, noted Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America analyst with Chatham House.
Such campaigns “don’t command the resources, they don’t command diplomatic legitimacy … they’re often very fractious,” Sabatini said. Inside Nicaragua, “there’s not going to be a popular uprising that unseats Daniel Ortega at this point. There can’t be. There’s no one to lead it.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Bhopal: A Bhil tribal family living in a remote village in Madhya Pradesh’s Khandwa district had reasons to cheer on Monday as they received their elder son – Raju Laxman Pindare – at the Wagah border.
Raju (35), who was in jail in Pakistan since July 2019 after inadvertently entering the neighbouring country, was handed over to the Khandwa police a week after he was handed over to the Indian authority by Pakistan.
A team of Khandwa district police along with his two family members, who had left for Amritsar on Saturday, is likely bring back Raju to Bhopal via Delhi from where he would be taken to his village in Khandwa, where the villagers are ready to welcome.
The moment has come as early Holi for not only the Pindare family, but for the entire Bhil community.
“The return of my son has brought Holi early for all of us. We had lost all hopes of seeing him again. But god, the local administration, police and the media ensured his return from Pakistan jail after over three years,” said Raju’s father Laxman Pindare, who till a few days back was running from pillar to post to get his son back home.
During Congress’ Bharat Jodo Yatra’s Madhya Pradesh leg, Laxman Pindare tried to meet Rahul Gandhi to seek his help, but he could not meet the former Congress President.
“We received information about his release from Pakistan jail from the Khandwa district administration four days back. Before leaving for Amritsar, I talked to Raju over the phone,” Raju’s younger brother Dilip Pindare told IANS over phone.
In July 2019, Pakistan claimed to have arrested an Indian identified as Raju Laxman Pindare for ‘spying’ on a nuclear facility in Dera Ghazi Khan district in Pakistan Punjab.
Pakistan had also claimed that Raju was arrested while entering the DG Khan district from Balochistan. Raju was released after he completed his prison sentence on February 14.
Meanwhile, Raju’s mother Basanta said that he was mentally unwell and she had got information about his arrest in Pakistan through some local officials in 2019, six months after he had gone missing.
Raju used to wander here and there but it is still not known how he managed to enter Pakistan, Basanta said.
She also said the family was poor and there was no chance of her son being a spy as alleged by Pakistan authorities.
Dame Vivienne Westwood’s son has called for his mother’s “dear friend” Julian Assange to be freed during an address at the late designer’s memorial.
In a tribute delivered from the pulpit at Southwark Cathedral, the activist Joseph Corré praised his mother’s clothes, their relationship and her legacy. “To Vivienne, punk was a political idea not a social one,” he said, before criticising the “trumped up accusations from a corrupt establishment” that had meant that, despite the family’s best efforts, Assange was not present at the service.
In a memorial that was equal parts political statement and fashion veneration, several hundred guests from both camps turned up to celebrate the life and political legacy of the designer, style icon and environmental activist who died on 29 December aged 81.
Among the speakers were the former Greenpeace executive director John Sauven, who praised Westwood’s efforts to bring attention to the climate crisis and environmentalism.
Westwood’s second husband, Andreas Kronthaler, whom she married in 1993 after they met when she was teaching fashion design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where Kronthaler was a student, also spoke. Wearing a Westwood kilt suit, the designer and creative director of her company was visibly moved as he recalled their secret trysts in the late 80s.
Helena Bonham Carter also delivered a eulogy in which she described herself as a “Westwood worshipper”, and attempted to incite Kate Moss into declaring a national day of dressing up as Westwood. The actor said she had “an obscene amount of clothes, which Vivienne would not have liked with her ‘buy less’ manifesto”.
Helena Bonham Carter wore a red Westwood two-piece. Photograph: Neil Mockford/GC Images
She also recalled buying a Westwood pirate shirt aged 15 so she could look like Adam Ant, and said she always wore the designer’s coquette dresses (she owns seven) to red carpet events. “They are instant body engineering, an aesthetic protest,” Bonham Carter said. They also meant she could have “a full-fat English breakfast” before getting dressed. “If it wasn’t for Vivienne, I’d be naked.”
The Rev Andrew Nunn praised the turnout, revealing that King Charles and the queen consort had been “unexpectedly” due to attend (it is thought they cancelled on health grounds). Westwood designed her polemic God Save the Queen T-shirts in protest at the silver jubilee, but later accepted an OBE.
Sitting on the second row for perhaps the first time in their collective careers were the Vogue editor, Edward Enninful, the US Vogue editor, Anna Wintour, designers Victoria Beckham and Marc Jacobs, and Westwood muse Kate Moss. Also in attendance were Christina Hendricks in a tartan wrap coat, Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave in camel-coloured jackets, Stormzy in a black suitand Richard E Grant wearing a fascinator.
The guests mostly wore black and plaid versions of Westwood creations, though a dress code – which was sent to everyone and based on Westwood’s mantra of “If in doubt, dress up!” – was closely followed by guests in “mini-crinolines” and clan tartans, which shaped her most famous work.
Jonathan Ross wore a No Future blue jumper by Westwood, Bob Geldof was in head-to-toe Westwood beige tartan, Zandra Rhodes wore a red jumpsuit and leather jacket, and Bonham Carter came in a red Westwood two-piece she had previously worn to collect her CBE.
The cathedral was decked out in Highland-inspired bouquets dotted with mimosa. The service began with Abba’s Slipping Through My Fingers played by the Arnfield Brass, a band situated just over the river from the Derbyshire village of Tintwistle, where Westwood grew up.
In between the eulogies and tributes, Nick Cave performed a moving rendition of Into My Arms at a grand piano, and Chrissie Hynde sang Raining In My heart, which she dedicated to “her friend”. Hynde met Westwood while working at her Kings Road shop, Sex, in the early 1970s.
(From left) Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson and Nick Cave leave the memorial service. Photograph: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images
Speaking in a filmed tribute months before her death, Westwood said activism was her priority, and fashion was her therapy: “I just liked doing it,” she said. Corre also revealed that Westwood had been working on a book before her death, and that she had also become a follower of Taoism, though he added the designer “was not a religious person”.
Often described as the enfant terrible of the fashion world, Westwood burst on to the fashion scene in the 1970s, dressing Adam Ant and the Sex Pistols in leather jackets, pirate shirts and safety pins. She later moved into catwalk and couture, creating bustles and corsets for red carpets and celebrities, later leveraging her status to promote various causes.
Her clothes sometimes featured activist slogans, and despite participating with the fashion week calendar, she often urged her customers to buy less, not more. In a 2017 collection she showed a unisex line of trousers, hats and capes in the hope that men and women would share the same clothes.
The memorial took place at the start of London fashion week, which was dedicated to the late designer and her legacy. “Her work not only changed the fashion industry, giving birth to and defining punk, but it also drove positive change globally,” said Davina Wedderburn of the British Fashion Council. “It’s only right that we celebrate her.”
A small funeral took place on 9 January in Tintwistle. According to the Herald, the family decorated the church with Harris tweed cushions.
“She started a punk and ended a dame, without compromising an inch,” said Bonham Carter. “She was a true feminist.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Hyderabad: A migrant worker from Telangana’s Nizamabad district, who was jailed after being convicted in an alleged murder case, was released from Dubai jail after almost 14 years.
Makuri Shankar of Mendora village spent a decade of his life in Fujairah jail in Dubai and reached his home town on Friday.
He went to Dubai for employment in 2006 and worked as a foreman in a company for three years.
However, an unusual incident happened in 2009 when he was supposed to return to his native land.
A coworker of Shankar accidentally fell down from the sixth floor of an under-construction building and died. The Dubai Police after investigating the incident held Shankar responsible for the man’s death and locked him up.
Following the arrest, Shankar defended himself that he had no relation to the incident and was only carrying out his job at the site.
He justified by saying that the man had slipped and fallen by accident which was ignored by the court of Dubai which handed him a death sentence in 2013.
Shanker then appealed for a reconsideration of his punishment following which the court directed that the family of the deceased should bring an amnesty document in order to avoid the death sentence.
Shankar’s family, along with TDP leader Degam Yadagoud from Nizamabad district approached a lawyer in Dubai who revealed to them that the man who died belonged to Rajasthan.
They then approached the deceased’s family members and offered them financial assistance of Rs.5 lakh and got an amnesty paper signed by them and presented it to the Dubai court following which the court acquitted Shankar of the death penalty.
Finally, Shankar with the help of migrants’ rights activists after securing the pardon of the victim’s family reached home on Friday after almost 17 years.
Sixty-six women and children kidnapped by armed assailants in northern Burkina Faso last week have been freed, it has been reported.
The mass kidnapping was unprecedented in Burkina Faso, which is facing a violent Islamist insurgency that spread from neighbouring Mali in 2015.
On 12 and 13 January, armed men seized the women and their children while they were scouring the bush for fruit and leaves outside two villages in the district of Arbinda, in the Sahel region’s Soum province.
Security forces staged a rescue operation and found 27 adult women and 39 babies, children and young girls in the adjacent Centre-North province.
On Friday, the national broadcaster Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina (RTP) reported the group had been freed.
“They have found freedom after eight long days in the hands of their kidnappers,” an RTP presenter said.
A government source confirmed the information but did not provide any details.
Burkina Faso is one of several countries in West Africa battling an insurgency with links to al-Qaida and Islamic State.
Jihadists have occupied territory in the country’s arid and mainly rural north, killing hundreds of villagers and displacing thousands more in the process.
They have also blockaded certain areas in recent months and made it increasingly dangerous to deliver supplies to trapped citizens.
Faced with acute food shortages, many villagers have resorted to picking wild fruit, leaves and seeds to feed their families. They say venturing into the bush makes them vulnerable to jihadist attacks.
The Sahel insurgency has killed thousands of people across the region and forced more than 2.7 million to flee their homes over the past decade, according to the United Nations.
Frustration over the authorities’ failure to restore security and protect civilians were contributing factors to military coups in Burkina Faso and Mali.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
