SRINAGAR: The gruesome murder of a 30-year-old woman in Soibug, Budgam, has left Kashmir in shock and terror. The young lady was supposed to be a bride later this year but the police could not locate her body in a single piece. They assembled it from different places as the killer mason had chopped her body into various pieces.
Thousands of people came out in protest after a local young lady’s body was located by police in piecemeal at different places. She was kidnapped on March 7, and the body pieces were recovered on March 12, morning. The accused, a tile mason, has been arrested. Protesters were seeking him to be hanged.
The incident happened on March 7, when the victim, went for computer coaching in Soibug but never returned home. After graduation, she was picking computing skills from a local computer coaching centre to become employable. She was the eldest of three siblings.
“She was supposed to return home by 3 pm but she did not,” one of her relatives said. “The family waited till late in the evening after failing to locate her at the institute, which by then, was closed.”
Her brother, Tanveer Ahmad Khan, reported her missing to the Police Post Soibug on March 8, as they failed to locate her, and an investigation was initiated.
According to the victim’s family, she was engaged by choice and was not in any kind of relationship.
“We did all the basic investigations from all angles and then we started looking at suspects,” SSP Budgam Tahir Geelani told reporters. After interrogating several suspects, the police arrested a tile mason, identified as Shabir Ahmad Wani, son of Abdul Aziz Wani, a resident of Mohanpora Ompora. The 45-year-old married man had worked as a tile mason in the victim’s house and was given free space to work as the family treated him like a brother. A master mason, residents said he had been working in the area for a long time and was reputed to be a good tile mason.
For all these days, Shabir proved a hard nut. “Finally last (Saturday) night, he admitted to the killing,” Gilani said. The police stated that during interrogation, Shabir Ahmad Wani confessed to kidnapping and murdering the victim. He chopped off her head, sliced her body into pieces, and dumped them at different spots in Budgam to hide his crime. On his disclosures, police recovered one part of her body from the railway bridge and another from Sebdan. “The investigations are still at initial stage and we have secured the crime scene,” Gilani said. The police remained tight-lipped over the motive of the murder indicating the investigations are still in progress.
Gilani said the mason had buried her skull in his courtyard. The arms and legs were located in a water tank not far away from his home. The rest of the body was buried near the railway bridge at Sedna, the officer said. “He had used a knife to chop off her body,” the officer said.
Interestingly, Shabir is a married and settled man with two kids. It was not immediately known if he had sought her hand in marriage earlier. The family said she was getting married in August to a person of her choice.
The news of this heinous crime spread like wildfire, and protests erupted in various places, including Budgam. The locals and family members are urging the LG Governor administration and SSP Budgam to hang the culprit as a lesson for those who dare to commit such crimes.
This brutal incident has shocked and traumatized the entire community, and people are wondering who will be the next victim. SSP Budgam, Syed Tahir Geelani, stated that further investigation into the case is ongoing.
Details regarding the murder reveal that the victim’s family became suspicious of Shabir Ahmad Wani’s involvement in the crime as he had gone missing after the victim’s disappearance. They informed the police, who subsequently began their investigation.
During the investigation, the police found evidence that led them to suspect Shabir Ahmad Wani’s involvement in the murder. They detained him for interrogation, during which he confessed to the crime.
The police have since arrested Shabir and charged him with murder. They have also recovered all of the victim’s body parts from different locations in Budgam.
The incident has raised concerns about the safety of women in the region, with many calling for stricter laws and harsher punishments for those who commit such heinous crimes. The local authorities have assured the community that they will take all necessary steps to ensure the safety and security of the residents.
Police have handed over the body parts to the family for burial. However, the elders ensured that close family members could not access the mutilated body. For most of the day, the debate amid massive protests was about how to manage the burial of the sliced body. People were crying over the gory state of mind of the killer. Her family was inconsolable.
Hyderabad: Fans of Bollywood, take note! Kiara Advani is teaming up with Tollywood superstar Ram Charan once more for his upcoming film RC15, which is being directed by none other than acclaimed filmmaker Shankar. Ever since the movie was announced last year, fans and movie buffs have been eargerly waiting for all the new updates about it.
Latest update is about the newly wed Kiara’s huge remuneration for RC 15. Well, buzz in the industry has it that the actress is charging around Rs 4 crore for this project.
According to sources, the talented actress has already shot a significant portion of the film and will resume filming very soon. With the stakes high for RC15, especially given that it is Ram Charan’s follow-up after his epic blockbuster with RRR, fans are eager to see this dynamic actor return to the big screen once again.
Producer Dil Raju is piling up the film on a grand scale, which has added to the excitement to pile up more. The film, which is directed by Shankar, will be scheduled to release during the Sankranthi season of 2024. So mark your calendars and get ready to witness the magic of Kiara and Ram Charan on the big screen once more!
Dominion’s nearly-200-page filing not only lays out a tale of rank hypocrisy, but it weaves a broader narrative about what drove the campaign of disinformation — documenting the panic inside the network’s ranks after conservative discontent over its early (and accurate) call of Arizona for Joe Biden translated into a viewership boom for its less scrupulous competitor, Newsmax, as an aggrieved Donald Trump lashed out at Fox.
“He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong,” primetime host Tucker Carlson texted his producer just two days after the election — one of dozens of frank admissions aired by Dominion.
And so fears of lost viewers and lost profits led Fox’s most powerful figures to indulge baseless claims of conspiracy and fraud and, in some cases, move to sideline news reporters who took basic steps to fact-check claims made by the likes of pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on the network’s airwaves.
In a series of text messages, Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham lambasted Powell and Giuliani for peddling conspiratorial goods without evidence. “Sidney Powell is lying. Fucking bitch,” Carlson wrote to Ingraham on Nov. 18. “Sidney is a complete nut. No one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy,” Ingraham responded.
Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch called the idea that the election was stolen “really crazy stuff.” Shortly after the election, his top execs circulated a New York Post piece urging Trump to “stop the ’stolen election’ rhetoric” and “get Rudy Giuliani off TV.” They also openly fretted about whether Hannity, Ingraham and Carlson would indulge the conspiracy theories on their shows.
Emails and texts in the filing suggest that Fox’s top executives and stars were less worried about factual accuracy than about ratings crashing after viewers who bought into Trump’s election lies began to seek out different channels that would support their biases.
While one Fox exec called Newsmax’s ratings surge “troubling” and said the channel trafficked in an “alternative universe,” they also argued that the trend “can’t be ignored.” Another said the message had been sent out internally that the network was now on “war footing.”
According to the filing, Fox — still in hot water with Trump supporters for calling Arizona for Biden — did a quick about-face to protect its brand, leaving journalists at the network who reported the truth about the election in the crosshairs:
On Nov. 9, 2020, host Neil Cavuto cut away from White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as she made unsubstantiated claims of a stolen election. “Unless she has more details to back that up, I can’t in good countenance continue to show you this,” Cavuto said on the air. For this, Fox Corp. Senior VP (and former Trump White House press aide) Raj Shah labeled Cavuto a “brand threat” in a message to top corporate brass.
Hannity and Carlson tried to get Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich fired for fact-checking a Trump tweet about Dominion and noting that there was no evidence of votes being destroyed. “Please get her fired. Seriously… What the fuck?” Carlson texted Ingraham and Hannity on Nov. 12, 2020. “It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.” Hannity exploded on top execs, including one who panicked and wrote that Heinrich “has serious nerve doing this and if this gets picked up, viewers are going to be further disgusted” with Fox. (CNN’s Oliver Darcy reported last night that Heinrich was “blindsided” by this disclosure.)
On Nov. 19, 2020, after Fox broadcasted the now-infamous Giuliani and Powell press conference about Dominion, then-White House correspondent Kristen Fisher got in trouble for fact-checking their bogus claims. Per the filing, “Fisher received a call from her boss, Bryan Boughton, immediately after in which he emphasized that higher-ups at Fox News were also unhappy with it, and that Fisher needed to do a better job of, this is a quote, respecting our audience.”
In one of the most bizarre bits, the filing reveals that Powell’s Dominion voting conspiracy came in part from an email Powell received from a tipster who claimed that former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was secretly murdered while on a human-hunting expedition — and who claimed to be “internally decapitated” (“The Wind tells me I’m a ghost, but I don’t believe it,” the tipster wrote in the email). Fox host Maria Bartiromo, who agreed to have Powell on her show after reading this email, never told viewers about the source of Powell’s claim. As Fox’s then-managing editor in Washington Bill Sammon said of the network’s coverage at the time: “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”
It all amounts to what Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple calls “the most piercing look at the internal goings-on at Fox News in its quarter-century history.” But will Dominion, which is seeking $1.6 billion from a company that the NYT says has about $4 billion cash on hand, win the suit?
Defamation cases have a high bar, and Dominion will have to prove “actual malice” — that the network peddled information it knew was erroneous, or was “reckless” in not doing its homework to ensure it was accurate.
In a statement, Fox News did not directly dispute any of the facts aired in Dominion’s filing, but said the company “mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context, and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”
A spokesperson also said Dominion “refused to agree to allow FOX to make its response to that motion public,” and that “the reason for Dominion’s refusal will be clear when the public response is finally released on February 27.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
A team of Israeli contractors who claim to have manipulated more than 30 elections around the world using hacking, sabotage and automated disinformation on social media has been exposed in a new investigation.
The unit is run by Tal Hanan, a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces operative who now works privately using the pseudonym “Jorge”, and appears to have been working under the radar in elections in various countries for more than two decades.
He is being unmasked by an international consortium of journalists. Hanan and his unit, which uses the codename “Team Jorge”, have been exposed by undercover footage and documents leaked to the Guardian.
Hanan did not respond to detailed questions about Team Jorge’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”
‘Team Jorge’ unmasked: the secret disinformation team who distort reality – video
The investigation reveals extraordinary details about how disinformation is being weaponised by Team Jorge, which runs a private service offering to covertly meddle in elections without a trace. The group also works for corporate clients.
Hanan told the undercover reporters that his services, which others describe as “black ops”, were available to intelligence agencies, political campaigns and private companies that wanted to secretly manipulate public opinion. He said they had been used across Africa, South and Central America, the US and Europe.
One of Team Jorge’s key services is a sophisticated software package, Advanced Impact Media Solutions, or Aims. It controls a vast army of thousands of fake social media profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram and YouTube. Some avatars even have Amazon accounts with credit cards, bitcoin wallets and Airbnb accounts.
The consortium of journalists that investigated Team Jorge includes reporters from 30 outlets including Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País. The project, part of a wider investigation into the disinformation industry, has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
Quick Guide
About this investigative series
Show
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.
Investigative journalism like this is vital for our democracy. Please consider supporting it today.
The undercover footage was filmed by three reporters, who approached Team Jorge posing as prospective clients.
In more than six hours of secretly recorded meetings, Hanan and his team spoke of how they could gather intelligence on rivals, including by using hacking techniques to access Gmail and Telegram accounts. They boasted of planting material in legitimate news outlets, which are then amplified by the Aims bot-management software.
Much of their strategy appeared to revolve around disrupting or sabotaging rival campaigns: the team even claimed to have sent a sex toy delivered via Amazon to the home of a politician, with the aim of giving his wife the false impression he was having an affair.
The methods and techniques described by Team Jorge raise new challenges for big tech platforms, which have for years struggled to prevent nefarious actors spreading falsehoods or breaching the security on their platforms. Evidence of a global private market in disinformation aimed at elections will also ring alarm bells for democracies around the world.
Tal Hanan and his colleagues met reporters at an office in Modi’in, about 20 miles outside Tel Aviv. Photograph: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France
Do you have information about Tal Hanan or ‘Team Jorge’? For the most secure communications, use SecureDrop or see our guide.
The Team Jorge revelations could cause embarrassment for Israel, which has come under growing diplomatic pressure in recent years over its export of cyber-weaponry that undermines democracy and human rights.
Hanan appears to have run at least some of his disinformation operations through an Israeli company, Demoman International, which is registered on a website run by the Israeli Ministry of Defense to promote defence exports. The Israeli MoD did not respond to requests for comment.
Given their expertise in subterfuge, it is perhaps surprising that Hanan and his colleagues allowed themselves to be exposed by undercover reporters. Journalists using conventional methods have struggled to shed light on the disinformation industry, which is at pains to avoid detection.
The secretly filmed meetings, which took place between July and December 2022, therefore provide a rare window into the mechanics of disinformation for hire.
Three journalists – from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker – approached Team Jorge pretending to be consultants working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying an election.
The encounters with Hanan and his colleagues took place via video calls and an in-person meeting in Team Jorge’s base, an unmarked office in an industrial park in Modi’in, 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.
Hanan described his team as “graduates of government agencies”, with expertise in finance, social media and campaigns, as well as “psychological warfare”, operating from six offices around the world. Four of Hanan’s colleagues attended the meetings, including his brother, Zohar Hanan, who was described as the chief executive of the group.
In his initial pitch to the potential clients, Hanan claimed: “We are now involved in one election in Africa … We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates … You follow the leads. [We have completed] 33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful.” Later, he said he was involved in two “major projects” in the US but claimed not to engage directly in US politics.
It was not possible to verify all of Team Jorge’s claims in the undercover meetings, and Hanan may have been embellishing them in order to secure a lucrative deal with prospective clients. For example, it appears Hanan may have inflated his fees when discussing the cost of his services.
Team Jorge told the reporters they would accept payments in a variety of currencies, including cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, or cash. He said he would charge between €6m and €15m for interference in elections.
Quick Guide
The undercover footage
Show
What is this undercover footage?
Disinformation operatives work under the radar. To find out more about ‘Team Jorge’, an Israel-based unit selling hacking and social media manipulation services, three journalists went undercover. They posed as consultants, working on behalf of a client in a politically unstable African country who wanted to delay a forthcoming election. The reporters secretly filmed several meetings with the group’s leader, Tal Hanan, who uses the alias ‘Jorge’, and his associates between July 2022 and December 2022.
Who is in the footage?
The footage captures Hanan, as well as his brother, Zohar Hanan, and other associates of Team Jorge. Faces of reporters have been blurred. The meetings took place on video calls, when Hanan and his colleagues gave slideshow demonstrations of their services, and in person, at Team Jorge’s office in an industrial park 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.
Who did the secret filming?
It was secretly filmed by three reporters from media outlets working in a consortium investigating disinformation: Gur Megiddo (TheMarker), Frédéric Métézeau (Radio France) and Omer Benjakob (Haaretz). The video was then shared with more than 25 other media outlets in the consortium, including the Guardian and Observer. While the Guardian and Observer were not involved in the undercover filming, they are publishing the material because of the strong public interest justifications for doing so.
What is Team Jorge’s response?
Tal Hanan did not provide a detailed response to questions from the Guardian. He said: ‘To be clear, I do deny any wrongdoing.’
However, emails leaked to the Guardian show Hanan quoting more modest fees. One suggests that in 2015 he asked for $160,000 from the now defunct British consultancy Cambridge Analytica for involvement in an eight-week campaign in a Latin American country.
In 2017 Hanan again pitched to work for Cambridge Analytica, this time in Kenya, but was rejected by the consultancy, which said “$400,000-$600,000 per month, and substantially more for crisis response” was more than its clients would pay.
There is no evidence that either of those campaigns went ahead. Other leaked documents, however, reveal that when Team Jorge worked covertly on the Nigerian presidential race in 2015 it did so alongside Cambridge Analytica.
Alexander Nix, who was the chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, declined to comment in detail but added: “Your purported understanding is disputed.”
Team Jorge also sent Nix’s political consultancy a video showcasing an early iteration of the social media disinformation software it now markets as Aims. Hanan said in an email that the tool, which enabled users to create up to 5,000 bots to deliver “mass messages” and “propaganda”, had been used in 17 elections.
“It’s our own developed Semi-Auto Avatar creation and network deployment system,” he said, adding that it could be used in any language and was being sold as a service, although the software could be bought “if the price is right”.
Team Jorge’s bot-management software appears to have grown significantly by 2022, according to what Hanan told the undercover reporters. He said it controlled a multinational army of more than 30,000 avatars, complete with digital backstories that stretch back years.
Demonstrating the Aims interface, Hanan scrolled through dozens of avatars, and showed how fake profiles could be created in an instant, using tabs to choose nationality and gender and then matching profile pictures to names.
“This is Spanish, Russian, you see Asians, Muslims. Let’s make a candidate together,” he told the undercover reporters, before settling on one image of a white woman. “Sophia Wilde, I like the name. British. Already she has email, date birth, everything.”
Hanan was coy when asked where the photos for his avatars came from. However, the Guardian and its partners have discovered several instances in which images have been harvested from the social media accounts of real people. The photo of “Sophia Wilde”, for instance, appears to have been stolen from a Russian social media account belonging to a woman who lives in Leeds.
The Guardian and its reporting partners tracked Aims-linked bot activity across the internet. It was behind fake social media campaigns, mostly involving commercial disputes, in about 20 countries including the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Senegal, India and the United Arab Emirates.
This week Meta, the owner of Facebook, 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.”
In addition to Aims, Hanan told reporters about his “blogger machine” – an automated system for creating websites that the Aims-controlled social media profiles could then use to spread fake news stories across the internet. “After you’ve created credibility, what do you do? Then you can manipulate,” he said.
‘I will show you how safe Telegram is’
No less alarming were Hanan’s demonstrations of his team’s hacking capabilities, in which he showed the reporters how he could penetrate Telegram and Gmail accounts. In one case, he brought up on screen the Gmail account of a man described as the “assistant of an important guy” in the general election in Kenya, which was days away.
“Today if someone has a Gmail, it means they have much more than just email,” Hanan said as he clicked through the target’s emails, draft folders, contacts and drives. He then showed how he claimed to be able to access accounts on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app.
Tal Hanan. Photograph: Source: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France
One of the Telegram accounts he claimed to penetrate belonged to a person in Indonesia, while the other two appeared to belong to Kenyans involved in the ongoing general election, and close to the then candidate William Ruto, who ended up winning the presidency.
“I know in some countries they believe Telegram is safe. I will show you how safe it is,” he said, before showing a screen in which he appeared to scroll through the Telegram contacts of one Kenyan strategist who was working for Ruto at the time.
Hanan then demonstrated how access to Telegram could be manipulated to sow mischief.
Typing the words “hello how are you dear”, Hanan appeared to send a message from the Kenyan strategist’s account to one of their contacts. “I’m not just watching,” Hanan boasted, before explaining how manipulating the messaging app to send messages could be used to create chaos in a rival’s election campaign.
“One of the biggest thing is to put sticks between the right people, you understand,” he said. “And I can write him what I think about his wife, or what I think about his last speech, or I can tell him that I promised him to be my next chief of staff, OK?”
Hanan then showed how – once the message had been read – he could “delete” it to cover his tracks. But when Hanan repeated that trick, hacking into the Telegram account of the second close adviser to Ruto, he made a mistake.
After sending an innocuous Telegram message consisting only of the number “11” to one of the hacking victim’s contacts, he failed to properly delete it.
Hanan sent a Telegram message consisting only of the number 11 to one of the hacking victim’s contacts. Photograph: Haaretz/TheMarker/Radio France
A reporter in the consortium was later able to track down the recipient of that message and was granted permission to check the person’s phone. The “11” message was still visible on their Telegram account, providing evidence that Team Jorge’s infiltration of the account was genuine.
Hanan suggested to the undercover reporters that some of his hacking methods exploited vulnerabilities in the global signalling telecoms system, SS7, which for decades has been regarded by experts as a weak spot in the telecoms network.
Google, which runs the Gmail service, declined to comment. Telegram said “the problem of SS7 vulnerabilities” was widely known and “not unique to Telegram”. They added: “Accounts on any massively popular social media network or messaging app can be vulnerable to hacking or impersonation unless users follow security recommendations and take proper precautions to keep their accounts secure.”
Hanan did not respond to detailed requests for comment, claiming that he needed “approval” from an unspecified authority before doing so. However, he added: “To be clear, I deny any wrongdoing.”
Zohar Hanan, his brother and business partner, added: “I have been working all my life according to the law!”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Mumbai: As the latest season of Bigg Boss finally got concluded, fans are curious to know the total earnings of the winner, MC Stan. The rapper emerged as the winner of Bigg Boss 16, beating out other popular contestants Shiv Thakare and Priyanka Chahar Choudhary.
Stan won a shining trophy, one i10 car and Rs 31L as prize money. In this write-up, let’s have a look at how much he earned in total from the reality show.
MC Stan’s Bigg Boss 16 Remuneration
According to reports, MC Stan charged Rs 7L per week to stay inside Bigg Boss 16 house. He was one of the highest paid celebrity contestants on the Salman Khan-hosted show. The show came to an end after 19 weeks. So, his total remuneration for 19 weeks stand at around Rs 1.33cr. If we add his prize money, then the number goes up to Rs 1.64cr.
Fans are eagerly waiting to see what projects the rapper will take up next, and his success in the entertainment industry is sure to be something to watch out for.
Mumbai: As the latest season of Bigg Boss finally got concluded, fans are curious to know the total earnings of the winner, MC Stan. The rapper emerged as the winner of Bigg Boss 16, beating out other popular contestants Shiv Thakare and Priyanka Chahar Choudhary.
Stan won a shining trophy, one i10 car and Rs 31L as prize money. In this write-up, let’s have a look at how much he earned in total from the reality show.
MC Stan’s Bigg Boss 16 Remuneration
According to reports, MC Stan charged Rs 7L per week to stay inside Bigg Boss 16 house. He was one of the highest paid celebrity contestants on the Salman Khan-hosted show. The show came to an end after 19 weeks. So, his total remuneration for 19 weeks stand at around Rs 1.33cr. If we add his prize money, then the number goes up to Rs 1.64cr.
Fans are eagerly waiting to see what projects the rapper will take up next, and his success in the entertainment industry is sure to be something to watch out for.
Abu Dhabi: Dubai is soon to have a 93km sustainable urban highway called ‘THE LOOP’.
Dubai-based sustainable city development company, URB aims to create the world’s first enclosed circular structure around the city.
The new highway aimed to connect more than 3 million residents to key services and locations within minutes by walking and cycling.
URB recently released images of ‘THE LOOP’, showing an enclosed structure that would circle the city, connecting all of Dubai’s densest areas.
Several wellness hotels can be located along its snaking structure, designed as a center for wellness tourism. The developers plan to cater to all types of travelers with luxury, mid-range and affordable hotels. There will also be fitness stations and sports fields.
The project also includes several entry and exit points to connect to different communities, public spaces and existing paths, as well as the use of “100 per cent renewable energy using kinetic energy”, while all water is recycled for irrigation.
This versatile utopia includes lush parks and vertical farming projects that help maintain food security in the surrounding areas.
The project is currently in the research and development stage, but if approved, it could form an important part of the city’s plans to reduce car dependency by enabling city dwellers to walk or bike to essential amenities within minutes of their homes.
‘THE LOOP’ project is in line with the emirate’s ambition to become a 20-minute city, allowing residents to reach destinations and necessities within 20 minutes on foot or by bike.
Dozens of asylum-seeking children have been kidnapped by gangs from a Brighton hotel run by the Home Office in a pattern apparently being repeated across the south coast, an Observer investigation can reveal.
A whistleblower, who works for Home Office contractor Mitie, and child protection sources describe children being abducted off the street outside the hotel and bundled into cars.
“Children are literally being picked up from outside the building, disappearing and not being found. They’re being taken from the street by traffickers,” said the source.
It has also emerged that the Home Office was warned repeatedly by police that the vulnerable occupants of the hotel – asylum-seeking children who had recently arrived in the UK without parents or carers – would be targeted by criminal networks.
About 600 unaccompanied children have passed through the Sussex hotel in the past 18 months, with 136 reported missing. More than half of these – 79 – remain unaccounted for.
The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, described the revelation as “truly appalling and scandalous” and called on the government to reveal how many children had disappeared and what was being done to find them.
She added: “Suella Braverman [the home secretary] has failed to act on the repeated warnings she has been given about totally inadequate safeguards for children in their care.
“It is a total dereliction of duty for the Home Office to so badly fail to protect child safety or crack down on the dangerous gangs putting them in terrible risk. Ministers must urgently put new protection arrangements in place.”
The Mitie whistleblower also described witnessing children being in effect trafficked from a similar hotel run by the Home Office in Hythe, Kent, estimating that 10% of its youngsters disappeared each week.
The child protection source said some of the children missing from the Brighton hotel may have been trafficked as far away as Manchester and Scotland. One case is under investigation by the Metropolitan police in London.
Data revealed in October showed 222 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children were missing from hotels run by the Home Office. Ministers admitted that they had no idea of their whereabouts.
Meanwhile, it has also emerged that no new guidance for police has been issued for tracking down missing asylum-seeking children, with sources saying it remains in “development”.
New data released under the Freedom of Information Act shows that newly arrived unaccompanied children spend an average of 16.5 days in Home Office hotels before being transferred into council care around the country.
When asked to comment, Brighton and Hove city council, which traditionally cares for child asylum seekers when they arrive in the UK without parents or guardians, referred queries on criminals targeting children to the police. Sussex police said queries on criminals targeting the children should be addressed to the Home Office.
The Home Office said: “Local authorities have a statutory duty to protect all children, regardless of where they go missing from. In the concerning occasion when a child goes missing, they work closely with other local agencies, including the police, to urgently establish their whereabouts and ensure they are safe.
“We have robust safeguarding procedures in place to ensure all children in our care are as safe and supported as possible as we seek urgent placements with a local authority.”
Brighton and Hove city council added: “We have been actively involved when any child is reported missing and have worked with the police and other agencies to try to trace them.”
Catherine Hankinson, National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for missing persons, said regular multi-agency meetings by police reviewed the response to every missing migrant child who had not been located.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
