Says upcoming G 20 event would position J&K tourism on a global platform
Srinagar, May 6 (GNS): Secretary Tourism & Culture, Dr. Syed Abid Rasheed Shah today directed constitution of helpline cum grievance redressal facility at TRC Srinagar /Jammu for tourists. He announced a regular monthly stakeholder consultation with the office bearers of various trade bodies of tourism sector to identify areas for improvement and devise strategies to overcome any challenges.
The directions were issued today during a marathon meeting-cum-interaction the Tourism Secretary had with the stakeholders of the tourism industry to discuss and evaluate the existing facilities, identify areas for improvement as well as address any issues affecting the sector.
Director, Tourism, Kashmir, Raja Yaqoob and other officers of Tourism Department were present on the occasion.
Dr. Abid highlighted the need for continuously upgrading facilities and services at tourist locations to meet evolving traveler expectations and attract more tourists towards Jammu & Kashmir. He emphasized the significance of maintaining world-class facilities and services at tourist destinations to attract more domestic and international visitors towards the region.
The Tourism Secretary also highlighted the role played by tourism in economic growth and employment generation and said that there is need for constant evaluation and improvement in facilities at tourist destinations to stay competitive in the global tourism landscape.
Examining different issues and problems faced by the sector, the Secretary specifically directed strict enforcement of rates and tariffs for the tourism services at tourist destinations for which he directed the Enforcement wing of the Department to carry regular and routine checks to look into any kind of overcharging, touting or cheating by any service provider. He also directed installation of display boards at prominent tourist destinations regarding rates and rules of different tourism services.
During the meeting, the Tourism Secretary also spoke about the Government’s commitment to develop and promote the tourism sector as a vital contributor to the local economy adding that the tourism sector is poised to achieve new heights and contribute significantly to the region’s economy in coming days. He also emphasized on the significance of collaboration and cooperation between the stakeholders and the Department to create a vibrant and inclusive tourism industry that benefits both the tourists and the local community.
Referring to the upcoming G20 event in Kashmir, Dr. Abid said that the upcoming Tourism Working Group meeting under the aegis of G20 will get the local tourism industry a big boost and it would position J&K’s tourism industry appropriately on the global canvas.
The meeting brought together key players from the tourism industry, including representatives from hotels, tour operators and other related organisations associated with the travel trade and hospitality sector besides senior officers of the Tourism Department.
During the meeting, the stakeholders held extensive discussions with the Tourism Secretary and his team of officers. They gave numerous suggestions for devising effective solutions and strategies to ensure the sustainable growth of the sector and brought many issues into the notice of the Tourism Secretary.(GNS)
SRINAGAR, MAY 06: Secretary Tourism & Culture, Dr. Syed Abid Rasheed Shah today directed constitution of helpline cum grievance redressal facility at TRC Srinagar /Jammu for tourists. He announced a regular monthly stakeholder consultation with the office bearers of various trade bodies of tourism sector to identify areas for improvement and devise strategies to overcome any challenges.
The directions were issued today during a marathon meeting-cum-interaction the Tourism Secretary had with the stakeholders of the tourism industry to discuss and evaluate the existing facilities, identify areas for improvement as well as address any issues affecting the sector.
Director, Tourism, Kashmir, Raja Yaqoob and other officers of Tourism Department were present on the occasion.
Dr. Abid highlighted the need for continuously upgrading facilities and services at tourist locations to meet evolving traveler expectations and attract more tourists towards Jammu & Kashmir. He emphasized the significance of maintaining world-class facilities and services at tourist destinations to attract more domestic and international visitors towards the region.
The Tourism Secretary also highlighted the role played by tourism in economic growth and employment generation and said that there is need for constant evaluation and improvement in facilities at tourist destinations to stay competitive in the global tourism landscape.
Examining different issues and problems faced by the sector, the Secretary specifically directed strict enforcement of rates and tariffs for the tourism services at tourist destinations for which he directed the Enforcement wing of the Department to carry regular and routine checks to look into any kind of overcharging, touting or cheating by any service provider. He also directed installation of display boards at prominent tourist destinations regarding rates and rules of different tourism services.
During the meeting, the Tourism Secretary also spoke about the Government’s commitment to develop and promote the tourism sector as a vital contributor to the local economy adding that the tourism sector is poised to achieve new heights and contribute significantly to the region’s economy in coming days. He also emphasized on the significance of collaboration and cooperation between the stakeholders and the Department to create a vibrant and inclusive tourism industry that benefits both the tourists and the local community.
Referring to the upcoming G20 event in Kashmir, Dr. Abid said that the upcoming Tourism Working Group meeting under the aegis of G20 will get the local tourism industry a big boost and it would position J&K’s tourism industry appropriately on the global canvas.
The meeting brought together key players from the tourism industry, including representatives from hotels, tour operators and other related organisations associated with the travel trade and hospitality sector besides senior officers of the Tourism Department.
During the meeting, the stakeholders held extensive discussions with the Tourism Secretary and his team of officers. They gave numerous suggestions for devising effective solutions and strategies to ensure the sustainable growth of the sector and brought many issues into the notice of the Tourism Secretary.
Tax filing season is approaching and with it, the time to carefully review every detail and ensure that the information is correctly submitted to the Tax Administration Service (SAT). But what about the myths that have been created around this process? How to distinguish truth from fiction?
Myth 1: The SAT has the obligation to return the balance in favor if you present your annual declaration.
The reality is that the SAT is only obliged to make the refund if your return meets the necessary requirements for it, including the correct presentation of the information and compliance with all tax requirements.
Myth 2: If your colleague in the same salary range got paid back, you will have to get paid back too.
Each statement is unique and must be evaluated on an individual basis. Your partner may have had more deductions than you, resulting in a return in their favor. Therefore, it cannot be assumed that if someone else received a return, they will also get you.
Myth 3: You can get a credit balance without personal deductions and tuition incentives.
This is a myth that has been widely spread. The reality is that to obtain a credit balance, you need personal deductions and tuition incentives, among other options that you can apply to your return.
Myth 4: If you paid interest for a mortgage loan, the SAT will return it to you.
Although you may be able to get deductions for mortgage interest, this does not guarantee that the SAT will return the full amount you paid in interest.
Myth 5: The SAT will return the balance in favor in less than 5 days, regardless of the deadlines established by law.
The tax return process can take several weeks or even months, depending on the number of returns that the SAT has to review. Therefore, it is important not to rely on a fixed deadline and to be prepared to wait as long as it takes.
Myth 6: Changing your bank account and going back to make your annual declaration will return you twice as much.
This is a myth that can lead you to commit tax fraud. The SAT has the necessary mechanisms to detect this type of actions, and if it detects them, you could face legal consequences.
Read more:
SAT: What you should know about the annual tax return
What happens if I do not file my 2023 declaration? Check the fines and avoid them
Myth 7: There is an accountant who charges cheaply and always generates a credit balance.
Hiring an accountant who promises guaranteed returns can be dangerous. Be sure to look for an experienced professional with good references.
Myth 8: If you file your return at 00:01 you will be one of the first to receive the refund.
The moment in which you present your declaration does not influence the return process. The important thing is to present the correct information and comply with all tax requirements.
Myth 9: When filing your return you will always get taxes in favor.
It depends on the information you provide on your return and the deductions you apply.
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( With inputs from : pledgetimes.com )
Regular readers will know that I find video games’ ability to pull people together to be one of the most interesting things about them. I have a weakness for stories about outsiders finding each other, and games make that happen with charming regularity. I once wrote about a long-distance couple who stayed connected by playing Dark Souls, wrestling with that game’s opaque online matchmaking to ensure that they could always find each others’ summon signs, hidden in a nook behind a wall or under a distinctive vase. And I’m fascinated by how Eve Online has attracted a particular flavour of person – usually science-fiction-obsessed, very often in some position of power in real life – to create an intergalactic community that mimics the economics and power structures of our own, but with extra skullduggery.
Online gaming has brought us so much in this regard: people have formed lifelong friendships through all kinds of video games, from World of Warcraft to No Man’s Sky. Twitch is part of this continuum, too – streamers don’t just play games for an audience, they create communities, where relationships can then form.
I experience the social aspect of games on a smaller, more intimate scale. Aside from a brief Guild Wars obsession as a teen, I’ve never been into online multiplayer. For whatever reason, I don’t connect with people in those worlds, behind screen-names – but I have spent most of my life playing games with people in real life in front of the same screen. The re-emergence of GoldenEye 007 this month has reminded me just how vital that kind of multiplayer has been in my personal gaming history.
When I was little, I played video games with my brother on the family SNES and N64. In the tiny under-stair room our parents let us plaster with adverts and posters torn out of video game magazines, we would diligently enter a co-op cheat code so that we could play Diddy Kong Racing together, one of us waiting near the finish line to sabotage our competitors with rockets while the other flew past in first place. We played Smash Bros and Mario Party together – and developed a quite nasty rivalry in Mario Tennis.
When I was a teenager I’d rope in my friends, hauling TVs around the house to facilitate 16-player Halo LAN parties when I got my hands on an Xbox. On one glorious evening in 2004, I managed to get enough people, Game Boys and link cables in the same room to play four-player Zelda on the Gamecube, and it was an absolute riot. At university, Guitar Hero always came out at parties (and Rock Band, and DJ Hero, and whatever other music game enjoyed a brief flush of popularity as Activision milked the genre dry).
MMOs like Minecraft have largely replaced local co-op and split-screen gaming. Photograph: Mojang
Back in 2013, I was running Kotaku UK, the anarchic games site I edited before I came to the Guardian. The brilliant times I’d had with local multiplayer games growing up inspired me to start up Kotaku game nights, where we’d bag up PlayStations and controllers and drag ’em all down to the pub, throwing events with a local fighting game community. Total strangers would bond over pints and left-field multiplayer classics such as Nidhogg, or Sportsfriends, or that reliable old standby, Mario Kart 8; downstairs people would compete in Smash, Street Fighter and Tekken tournaments. (In 2015 we brought Kotaku game nights to Glastonbury, in a gaming tent in Shangri-La; unfortunately this did not go quite as expected, as we became the de facto creche for free-roaming gangs of performers’ children. But still, it was a moment.)
I loved watching how people interacted over those games in the real world. Anyone who still thinks that gaming is an antisocial pastime should step into one of the many gaming bars and cafes that exist these days and see how they bring people to tears of communal laughter.
Now, my kids and I play Switch games together; I’ve managed to get my six-year-old into Kirby’s Forgotten Land, and I get to be his guide and helper, sitting right beside him. When my teenage stepson was the same age, I introduced him to Minecraft, and all he wanted to do for a few months was play it together. I well remember the pang of sadness I felt when he started preferring to play it online with his friends instead.
No doubt this is an age thing; today’s teens memories of playing Fortnite or Minecraft with their friends online as children will presumably be just as redolent for them as my memories of split-screen multiplayer. Because games are still a relatively young medium – it’s been 50 years since Pong – and online gaming is even younger, we’re only just starting to see the generational differences in how we connect through them. But at the risk of sounding like my mother worrying that text messaging was going to stop us all from being able to hold real conversations with each other: I really hope we never lose split-screen multiplayer, and the in-person connection that it fosters.
What to play
Metroid Prime Remastered. Photograph: Nintendo
Sticking with the nostalgic theme of this week’s issue, Nintendo announced a remaster of the peerlessly atmospheric Metroid Prime last week – and then released it immediately online. Hurray! This is one of the greatest works of sci-fi in this medium, no joke. Stripped of her powers, you guide bounty hunter Samus Aran through forsaken space-places but despite what it looks like, it isn’t actually a first-person shooter. It’s an adventure; you’re an archaeologist, a puzzle-solver, a documenter. I’d forgotten just how good Metroid Prime was in the decades since I first played it, and I’m delighted to report that the overhaul of the visuals and controls makes it even better. It’s pricey for a rerelease at £34.99, but great.
Available on: Nintendo Switch Approximate playtime: 15 hours
What to read
Axios reports that the people who worked on the original Metroid Prime, released in 2002, aren’t properly credited in the rerelease, and have been expressing their frustrations about it.
Double Fine has put out a massive 22-hour-long documentary series on the making of its superb Psychonauts 2, based on six years’ worth of footage. Watch the trailer: the entire series is a huge time commitment, but this is the kind of end-to-end insight into game development that we just simply never get.
I’m not quite sure how to put this, but the developers of The Witcher 3 appear to have accidentally incorporated a fan-made mod giving its female characters realistic genitalia and pubic hair into December’s PS5/Xbox Series X version of the game. And the creator of that mod is mad because he claims they didn’t ask permission. Just a normal day in game development …
A book recommendation from our well-read games correspondent Keith Stuart: Player vs Monster – The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity by Jaroslav Švelch. MIT Press publishes lots of fascinating books on video game theory and this is the latest – a thorough study of monsters in video games, looking at their historic sources, design conventions and the fears they exploit. Intellectual but accessible, and filled with examples from Golden Axe to Shadow of the Colossus.
As well as announcing and releasing a remaster of Metroid Prime, Nintendo showed off new footage from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Pikmin 4 in last week’s Nintendo Direct, and also announced that Game Boy and GBA games are now playable on Switch, among rather a lot else (here’s the rundown). Tears of the Kingdom showed Link riding around on a cobbled-together wagon thing that strongly recalls niche vehicle experimentation game Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts, which is not something I had on my 2023 bingo card.
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What to click
TechScape: How Nintendo’s stayed the most innovative tech company of our time
A beautifully preserved slice of video game history – Toaplan Arcade Shoot ’Em Up Collection Vol 1 review
The Last of Us recap episode five – all hell breaks loose
Can The Super Mario Bros Movie end 30 years of terrible video-game films?
Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard purchase will harm UK gamers, says watchdog
Question Block
Rocket League. Photograph: Psyonix
Writing this week’s newsletter has made me realise that my knowledge of multiplayer bangers is stuck in about 2015, so this time around, I have a question for you, readers: what are your favourite split-screen or party games? What are the proven favourites, and which new ones are making a mark?
I’ll start with my own out-of-date recommendations from my days running pub game nights: dicey competitive fencing in Nidhogg and its sequel; flipping narwhals around in Starwhal; offbeat riffs on various sports in Sportsfriends; Lethal League, an indie baseball fighting game; jelly-baby wrestling in Gang Beasts; cute pixel battles with archery and magic in Towerfall: Ascension; and the all-time greatness of Rocket League (above), football with RC cars. Oh, and Nintendo Land. Mario Chase is an underrated work of genius.
Send your picks to pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Hyderabad: Two train services have been cancelled between Kacheguda and Nizamabad stations on February 11 informed the South Central Railways on Friday.
Due to a traffic block, train no 07596 from Kacheguda to Nizamabad and train no 07593 from Nizamabad to Kacheguda services for this Saturday have been cancelled. This has been done to facilitate the clearing up of traffic blocks, according to a press release on Friday.
Emily Berret, who was an aide to Pelosi on Jan. 6, testified that the desk in the famous picture was hers, and she described the horror she experienced when she saw the image on the news while on lockdown with the speaker.
Barnett remained stoic as the verdict was read shortly before noon Monday. His partner, Tammy Newburn, was flanked in the public gallery by the mother of Ashli Babbitt — who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she sought to breach the House chamber on Jan. 6 — and the mother of Enrique Tarrio, who was at the same moment in a courtroom two floors below facing charges of seditious conspiracy. Also seated alongside Newburn was Nicole Reffitt, the wife of Jan. 6 defendant Guy Reffitt, who is serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence.
Barnett took the stand in his own defense, contending that he was “pushed” into the Capitol by the Jan. 6 mob and then roamed around looking for a bathroom until he stumbled into Pelosi’s suite. He said he took the envelope because he had bled on it and viewed it as a “biohazard.” He left an American flag on a side table inside the office as well. He said that he was angered by police actions outside the Capitol, disoriented after being maced in the rotunda and made overheated statements in the moment.
After he got home to Arkansas, Barnett quickly turned himself in, but claimed he lost his phone shortly after he arrived, and the Hike N Strike weapon was similarly missing.
Prosecutors forcefully rebutted Barnett’s contentions in tense cross-examination that caused Barnett to grow frustrated in front of the jury. Barnett described himself as a “fucking idiot” who made intemperate comments but said he shouldn’t be held criminally responsible for his actions.
They noted that he angrily berated Capitol Police officers inside the rotunda after leaving Pelosi’s suite, appearing to beckon the mob forward as he demanded the officers retrieve his misplaced flag. Though he didn’t deploy his stun weapon, prosecutors say its presence at his side presented a threat, and the jury agreed.
Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Barnett vowed to appeal the verdict and said he had “absolutely not” received a fair trial, chiefly because he faced a jury in liberal-leaning Washington, D.C.
“I think the venue should have been changed. This is not a jury of my peers. I don’t agree with that decision. But I do appreciate the process. And we are surely going to appeal,” Barnett said.
The prosecution asked U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to jail Barnett pending sentencing, but Cooper declined, allowing Barnett to remain under home detention until his sentencing, set for May 3.
While Barnett wasn’t accused of any violence on Jan. 6, prosecutors asking for Barnett to be put behind bars on Monday said the situation in Pelosi’s office could’ve been much worse if she’d been in her office when rioters like Barnett reached it.
“We can only imagine what would have happened if she had been there at that time,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison Prout said.
Prout said Barnett lied when he took the stand last week and hasn’t taken responsibility for his actions. “Since the trial testimony last week, the defendant has been tweeting and has expressed no remorse for his conduct,” she said.
A defense attorney for Barnett, Joseph McBride, noted that Barnett has been on pretrial release since April 2021 without notable incident. “It doesn’t make sense to throw him in jail at this moment,” McBride said.
Barnett insisted to reporters that he had expressed remorse, but he declined to say exactly what he regretted.
McBride and his co-counsel, Brad Geyer, also defended the defense’s unusual tactic of laughing during portions of the government’s case. McBride said it was an appropriate reaction to prosecutors seeking to leverage some of McBride’s more outlandish political statements.
“We think that it’s absolutely objectionable, and ridiculous that a man could be on trial, and possibly be sentenced to the rest of his life in prison, and have tweets used against him — some political tweets,” McBride said. “So, we made a conscious decision to laugh at that because, at the end of the day, we don’t believe that that stuff had any place in this trial.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
