Hyderabad: Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) is intensifying measures to control the dog menace in the city by amping up the Animal Birth Control operations and Anti Rabies Vaccinations (ABC and ARV).
The corporation on Wednesday has announced its decision to engage eight additional private veterinarians besides the existing 16 veterinarians.
The name of ‘Dog catching squad’ has been changed to ‘GHMC dog birth control unit’.
An Additional 20 dog-catching vehicles will be added to the existing fleet of 30. The GHMC workers will extend their operations to catch dogs into the evenings.
Distribution of pamphlets, serving notices to meat shop owners and hotels, and conducting awareness campaigns involving the Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs), slum and town-level federations as well as self-help groups are among other measure being taken to curd the incidents of dog-bites in the city.
To this effect, GHMC had served notices to about 4001 establishments including meat shops and hotels, instructing the managements not to dispose garbage in public places.
Awareness programs have been conducted for over 2.28 lakh students from 1066 schools along with 1111 RWAs, slums and town-level federations.
Visitors move in the battery operated vehicle in Zoo park in Hyderabad on Sunday. (Photo
Visakhapatnam: The Indira Gandhi Zoological Park (Vizag Zoo) on Wednesday unveiled 10 battery-operated vehicles for hire, to enable visitors to explore the zoo with ease, curator in-charge G Mangamma said.
Inaugurated by Chief Conservator of Forests Srikantha Natha Reddy, the e-vehicles will usher in an eco-friendly mode of transportation for visitors to explore the zoo in a sustainable manner, eliminating the need to combust fossil fuels.
“The introduction of battery vehicles is another step in this direction, and we are confident that it will make a significant difference in reducing the carbon emissions of the park,” Reddy said in a statement issued by the zoo.
Equipped to carry up to 10 people, the battery operated vehicles can help visitors avoid walking long distances. The vehicles can be hired at the main entrance or at the Sagar beach road gate.
SRINAGAR: The Regional Transport Officer (RTO), Syed Shahnawaz Bukhari advised the public not to enter into any commercial contract with any vehicle owner for a vehicle that does not have a commercial permit.
As per the public notification issued by RTO Kashmir, all the government departments, PSUs, Banks, Educational Institutions and individuals not to hire any private vehicles as a Taxi and not to enter into any commercial contract with any vehicle owner for a vehicle that does not have a Commercial permit and that does not sync with the stated law and rules under the MVA, 1988.
“Multiple complaints have been registered in this office claiming that some private vehicles are being used as Taxis, including by the government departments,” the notice reads.
The notice reads that Section 66 of the Central Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 provides that ‘no owner of a motor vehicle shall use or permit the use of the vehicle as a transport vehicle in any public place whether or not such vehicle is actually carrying any passengers or goods, save or accordance with the conditions of a permit granted or countersigned by a Regional or State Transport Authority or any prescribed authority authorizing him the use of the vehicle in that place in the manner in which the vehicle is being used’.
“Section 53 of the Central Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, inter alia, also provides for suspension of Registration Certificate if there are reasons to believe that a vehicle has been, or is being, used for hire or reward without a valid permit,” it said.
It added that according to norms, all outsourced vehicles used by the government departments are required to be registered in commercial category.
The notice further reads the Drawing and Disbursing Officers are strictly advised not hire any private vehicle that is not registered under commercial category.
The Regional Transport Officer (RTO), Syed Shahnawaz Bukhari has appealed the people, government departments and others not to hire any private vehicles as Taxi that doesn’t have a commercial permit.
In this regard, RTO, Kashmir, has issued a public notice, a copy of which is in possession of Asian News Hub (ANH).
“Multiple complaints have been registered in this office claiming that some private vehicles are being used as Taxis, including by the government departments,” the notice reads.
It added that Section 66 of the Central Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 provides that ‘no owner of a motor vehicle shall use or permit the use of the vehicle as a transport vehicle in any public place whether or not such vehicle is actually carrying any passengers or goods, save or accordance with the conditions of a permit granted or countersigned by a Regional or State Transport Authority or any prescribed authority authorizing him the use of the vehicle in that place in the manner in which the vehicle is being used’.
Section 53 of the Central Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, inter alia, also provides for suspension of Registration Certificate if there are reasons to believe that a vehicle has been, or is being, used for hire or reward without a valid permit,” it said.
It added that accordin g to norms, all outsourced vehicles used by the government departments are required to be registered in commercial category.
“Now, therefore, this is for notice of the general public, all government departments, PSUs, Banks, Educational Institutions and individuals not to hire any private vehicles as a Taxi and not to enter into any commercial contract with any vehicle owner for a vehicle that does not have a Commercial permit and that does not sync with the stated law and rules under the MVA, 1988. In particular, the Drawing and Disbursing Oficers are advised not hire any private vehicle that is not registered under commercial category. Strict action will be taken in case of violation in this regard,” the notice added.
SRINAGAR: Amid growing resentment and widespread protests by the JKSSB aspirants over latter’s purported hiring of ‘blacklisted’ APTECH company for conducting various written examinations, Democratic Progressive Azad Party (DPAP) patron Ghulam Nabi Azad slammed the authorities for allowing a previously blacklisted agency to operate in Kashmir.
Speaking to media on the sidelines of a function in Sopore , Azad alleged that all the recruitment agencies in Jammu and Kashmir choose to conduct exams through the companies which otherwise have already been rejected and blacklisted by many states. “The trend to hire such companies has resulted in the postponement of exams many times in the last 5 years, something that hasn’t happened in the last 75 years.”
“At a time when thousands of youth are facing trouble in getting jobs, it is beyond one’s understanding as to why the authorities are hiring these blacklisted companies and end up putting the careers of youth at stake” , Azad said, adding, ironically why such blacklisted agencies are being allowed in JK only.
“The government should properly investigate such agencies for the sake of the careers of youth”, he said.
Pertinently, several political leaders, cutting across the party lines have backed the protests by job aspirants and have sought disallowance of the APTECH Company to hold any exams in Jammu and Kashmir. (GNS)
Abu Dhabi: The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation said private sector companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) need to hire more Emiratis by July 1 or face fines.
The Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation sent out a reminder informing private sector companies that they have less than four months to achieve the new targets or face fines.
By the end of 2022, UAE companies have been instructed to ensure that at least 2 per cent of employees are Emiratis.
This number should increase by another 2 per cent each year until it reaches 10 per cent in 2026.
However, a UAE cabinet decision changed the rule earlier this year.
The annual emirate target is now divided throughout the year by 1 per cent in the first six months of the year and the other 1 per cent in the second half.
MoHRE tweeted, “A UAE Cabinet resolution on modifying the mechanism for achieving Emiratisation targets at private sector companies with 50 employees or more came into force.”
“The overall mechanism for achieving the targeted Emiratisation rates has not changed; it became semi-annual instead of annual. Companies with 50 employees or more are required to achieve an increase of 1 per cent of skilled jobs every six months and reach a growth rate of 2 per cent by the end of the year,” MoHRE adds.
MoHRE continued, “The annual 2 per cent Emiratisation growth for skilled jobs in 2022 for private sector companies and the 10 per cent goal for 2026 have not been changed in this resolution,”
“The resolution aims to accelerate achieving Emiratisation targets and employing UAE nationals in the private sector throughout the year,” MoHRE added.
A UAE Cabinet resolution on modifying the mechanism for achieving Emiratisation targets at private sector companies with 50 employees or more came into force. What is highlighted in this resolution? pic.twitter.com/GxDwcdoSIi
— وزارة الموارد البشرية والتوطين (@MOHRE_UAE) March 4, 2023
Currently, companies that fail to meet the targets will be fined 6,000 Dirhams (Rs 1,33,389) per month or 72,000 Dirhams (Rs 16,00,668) per year. The fine will be paid in one installment.
The value of monthly fines imposed on private sector entities will gradually increase at a rate of 1,000 Dirhams (Rs 22,231) per year until 2026.
Talent from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) remains in high demand by companies based abroad, as global recruitment continues to grow, according to Deel’s State of Global Hiring Report.
Deel tracked about 260,000 employment contracts in 160 countries during the period from January to December 2022.
The top four countries, which employ the majority of workers from the UAE, are the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Canada, and Israel.
Most popular jobs being hired from UAE are
Most of the companies related to information technology, financial services, marketing and advertising take UAE workers on board. More importantly, senior management roles, such as managing partners and executives, are also beginning to gain popularity in the four countries as confidence in remote hiring continues to grow.
The Deel study found that 37.6 per cent of employees in the UAE are between the ages of 25 and 34; 28.7 per cent were between the ages of 35 and 44; and 25.1 per cent belong to the age group from 16 to 24 years.
Are you up to date on the State of Global Hiring? 🌐📊
This report covers insights from January to December 2022 and is our third semi-annual and the first edition that provides a year-long view of trends in the global workforce. Here’s what we found: https://t.co/qgdK5JvgQm pic.twitter.com/l1GoXg9bhu
New Delhi: About 92 percent of Indian recruiters express optimism about hiring in the first half of 2023 while only 4 per cent of recruiters predicted layoffs during the first six months, a new report said on Thursday.
According to Naukri.com, around 46 percent of recruiters expect new and replacement hiring, 29 percent expect only new job creation, and 17 percent are looking to maintain their headcount.
With the ever-increasing demand for tech skills, maximum hiring is expected for IT roles.
However, the report states that business development, marketing, HR & administration, and finance are among the other functional areas where significant hiring is expected in the first half of 2023.
Meanwhile, about 62 percent of employers across India intend to hire freshers during January-June 2023, according to employment services provider TeamLease.
Despite the global downturn, the intent to hire freshers for Indian employers has increased by 3 percent (62 percent) from July to December 2022 (59 percent).
“Even in the face of a global muted sentiments around team hiring, a large number of Indian employers have expressed their intention to hire freshers; some to create a long-term supply channel whereas others to replace their expensive resources with fresh trainable talents,” said Shantanu Rooj, Founder & CEO TeamLease EdTech.
Cloud developers, investment banking associates, cybersecurity engineers, marketing analysts, social media specialists, content writers, campaign associates, microbiologists and Biomedical engineers have emerged as top roles in freshers’ hiring.
Moreover, the report mentioned that the top three industries with the most robust intent to hire freshers are IT (67 percent), ecommerce & technology startups (52 percent) and tTelecommunications (51 percent).
Amongst the Tier I cities, Bengaluru comes at the top with maximum openings for freshers at 75 percent, followed by Mumbai (56 percent), and Delhi (47 percent).
At first glance, the Twitter user “Canaelan” looks ordinary enough. He has tweeted on everything from basketball to Taylor Swift, Tottenham Hotspur football club to the price of a KitKat. The profile shows a friendly-looking blond man with a stubbly beard and glasses who, it indicates, lives in Sheffield. The background: a winking owl.
Canaelan is, in fact, a non-human bot linked to a vast army of fake social media profiles controlled by a software designed to spread “propaganda”.
Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims, which controls more than 30,000 fake social media profiles, can be used to spread disinformation at scale and at speed. It is sold by “Team Jorge”, a unit of disinformation operatives based in Israel.
Tal Hanan, who runs the covert group using the pseudonym “Jorge”, told undercover reporters that they sold access to their software to unnamed intelligence agencies, political parties and corporate clients. One appears to have been sold to a client who wanted to discredit the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), a statutory watchdog.
On 18 October 2020, the ICO ruled that the government should reveal which companies were awarded multimillion-pound contracts to supply PPEafter being entered into a “VIP” lane for politically connected companies. “This is politically motivated, it’s clear!” Canaelan lamented on Twitter two days later.
‘Team Jorge’ unmasked: the secret disinformation team who distort reality – video
That comment was part of a chorus of disapproval generated by the bots, who seemed aghast. “Information Commissioner tries everything to destroy the government,” one said, while another described the ruling as a “desperate act”.
All of the “replies” under that and other tweets were united in their outrage at the ICO, which they described as “a waste of time” and “lame”. As the replies continued, they became more trenchant, making wild and false accusations against the ICO about bribes, corruption and links to the far right.
Others just seemed nonplussed by the ICO’s insistence on transparency over the government’s pandemic procurement. “This is so typical from the UK …” one bot opined, “focusing on the wrong things.”
It is not known who commissioned Team Jorge to unleash the bots on the ICO, or why. Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment but said: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.”
The ICO campaign appears to have been relatively short-lived compared with others around the world that reporters have been able to link to Team Jorge’s Aims software, which is much more than a bot-controlling programme.
Each avatar, according to a demonstration Hanan gave the undercover reporters, is given a multifaceted digital backstory.
Aims enables the creation of accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts.
Hanan told the undercover reporters his avatars mimicked human behaviour and their posts were powered by artificial intelligence.
Using the Aims-linked avatars revealed by Team Jorge in presentations and videos, reporters at the Guardian, Le Monde and Der Spiegel were able to identify a much wider network of 2,000 Aims-linked bots on Facebook and Twitter.
Quick Guide
About this investigative series
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The Guardian and Observer have partnered with an international consortium of reporters to investigate global disinformation. Our project, Disinfo black ops, is exposing how false information is deliberately spread by powerful states and private operatives who sell their covert services to political campaigns, companies and wealthy individuals. It also reveals how inconvenient truths can be erased from the internet by those who are rich enough to pay.The investigation is part of Story killers, a collaboration led by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
The eight-month investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017. Hours before she was murdered, Lankesh had been putting the finishing touches on an article called In the Age of False News, which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India. In the final line of the article, which was published after her death, Lankesh wrote: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. I wish there were more of them.”
The Story killers consortium includes more than 100 journalists from 30 media outlets including Haaretz, Le Monde, Radio France, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media, Die Zeit, TheMarker and the OCCRP. Read more about this project.
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We then traced their activity across the internet, identifying their involvement in what appeared to be mostly commercial disputes in about 20 countries including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Panama, Senegal, Mexico, Morocco, India, the United Arab Emirates, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Ecuador.
The analysis revealed a vast array of bot activity, with Aims’ fake social media profiles getting involved in a dispute in California over nuclear power; a #MeToo controversy in Canada; a campaign in France involving a Qatari UN official; and an election in Senegal.
Tal Hanan. Photograph: .Source: Haaretz/The Marker/Radio France
Do you have information about Tal Hanan or ‘Team Jorge’? For the most secure communications, use SecureDrop or see our guide.
One of the Aims-backed campaigns targeted a Monaco-based superyacht company, accusing it of having direct links to several Russian oligarchs who were subject to sanctions.
We also identified real-world events that appeared to have been staged to provide ammunition that could be leveraged in social media campaigns. One case involved a fake protest staged outside a company headquarters on Regent Street, central London.
Three masked activists in baseball caps, sunglasses and masks filmed themselves waving placards. A similar leafletting campaign was staged near the Eiffel Tower in Paris, before being circulated on social media by Aims bots. It is not possible to know who the clients were in any of the campaigns, or even what their objective was.
However, what seems clear is that the avatars peddling propaganda are doing so with the help of stolen photographs of real people.
The photo of a beaming man on Canaelan’s Twitter bio, the Guardian has established, was taken from the real Twitter page of Tom Van Rooijen, 25, a freelance Dutch journalist living in the Netherlands.
Canaelan’s Twitter bio (left) was taken from the real Twitter page of Tom Van Rooijen, a journalist in the Netherlands. Photograph: Twitter
Informed about the identity theft by the Guardian, Van Rooijen said he felt “quite uncomfortable” seeing his face beside a tweet expressing views he disagreed with. “I give a lot of workshops to school classes about news, media, journalism and fake news. I teach children weekly that their identity can be stolen by a Twitter bot,” he said. “I never thought my own identity would be stolen by a bot.”
Van Rooijen is likely to be among tens of thousands of unsuspecting victims whose images have been harvested by Team Jorge.
Other techniques are also used to lend the avatars credibility and avoid the bot-detection systems created by tech platforms. Hanan said his bots were linked to SMS-verified phone numbers, and some even had credit cards. Aims also has different groups of avatars with various nationalities and languages, with evidence they have been pushing narratives in Russian, Spanish, French and Japanese.
Those involved in the ICO campaign had been made to seem British, retweeting news articles from the Guardian, BBC, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph. They showed an interest in the royal family, Glastonbury and Liz Truss’s performance as foreign minister, and posted lighthearted jokes about British weather and food, as well as scenic photos from Wiltshire and Yorkshire.
Those backgrounds provided some credibility when, later, they suddenly began expressing views about the UK’s data watchdog.
Twitter declined to comment. Meta, the owner of Facebook, this week took down Aims-linked bots on its platform after reporters shared a sample of the fake accounts with the company. On Tuesday, a Meta spokesperson connected the Aims bots to others that were linked in 2019 to another, now-defunct Israeli firm which it banned from the platform.
“This latest activity is an attempt by some of the same individuals to come back and we removed them for violating our policies,” the spokesperson said. “The group’s latest activity appears to have centred around running fake petitions on the internet or seeding fabricated stories in mainstream media outlets.”
For all of their apparent sophistication, some Aims avatars betrayed giveaways. One of the Twitter bots involved in UK campaigns alongside Canaelan was “Alexander”, whose profile picture showed a young man with a sculpted beard in a white beanie hat. The background: orange tulips beside a chirpy slogan “Be happy”.
And his profile bio consisted of two short sentences that hinted at an interest in falsehoods – and how to make them convincing: “The difference between fiction and reality?’ Fiction has to make sense.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Mumbai: Pakistani actor Adnan Siddiqui has slammed ‘Mission Majnu’ starring Sidharth Malhotra for ‘misrepresentation’ of Pakistanis in the movie, which he tagged as ‘distasteful’ and ‘factually incorrect’ and slammed it for ‘poor story, poorer execution, poorest research’.
Adnan took to Instagram to share his thought. The actor, who has worked in the Hindi film ‘Mom’ starring late actress Sridevi, wrote: “How much misrepresentation is too much misrepresentation? Bollywood has the answer. I mean come on, yaar with all the money you have, hire some good researchers to do homework on us. Or allow me to help.”
He shared Pakistanis “don’t wear skull caps, surma and tawiz”, which Sidharth was seen donning to play his character Tariq in the film directed by Shantanu Bagchi.
Siddiqui wrote: “Make sure to take notes – no, we don’t wear skull caps, surma, tawiz; no, we don’t ask janab about their mijaz; no, we don’t go around throwing adaab.”
He added: “There’s so much in #MissionMajnu that’s distasteful & factually incorrect. The hero’s saviour complex would’ve accentuated more if the villain was shown at par. A weak antagonist embellishes even weaker protagonist.”
He said “Poor story, poorer execution, poorest research. Next time, come and visit us. We are good hosts. Will show you how we look like, dress up and live.”
The film, which released on Netflix, follows Amandeep Singh IPS, a RAW field operative who heads to Pakistan on an undercover mission to investigate about Pakistan’s involvement in creating nuclear weapons.
