Srinagar, Feb 20: The ban on stone quarrying in Jammu & Kashmir since 2016 has devastated thousands of households who relied on the business for a living.
Although the Lieutenant Governor-led administration reduced sanctions on stone quarry activities in 2021 by allowing the owners to lift only piled-up loose material, those associated with the business say there isn’t much to celebrate as they have apprehensions that the stockpiles will be depleted in a couple of years.
Bashir Ahmad, president United Quarry Association told the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) that after the 2016 ban, their survival has become difficult, and that the lifting of restrictive sanctions does not guarantee them a safe business.
“Before the ban, there were around 400 stakeholders associated with stone quarrying; now with the ban in place, more than 40 percent have closed down the business,” Bashir said.
He said the government in 2021 allowed the lifting of loose material but that too came with a condition to supply only to government contractors. There should be the complete lifting of the ban on our work, he urged.
The Association president said that after the permission for the lifting of loose material was given, a quarry owner can hardly lift 4 to 5 loads a month.
“The loose stone material that naturally fell down is not going to survive for long; it will drain out by the end of the next year or so, which will signal the complete shutdown of the business. We are currently in such poor financial shape that we are unable to even plan for new businesses,” he said.
According to Bashir, they also discussed a rehabilitation programme with the government that involved moving to a different location, but that plan was never carried out.
Another stone quarry owner, Naseer Ahmad, said his family has gone through mental stress. “We had taken loans against the business,” he said. “We were happy doing our business, everything was going smooth, and then there was a sudden ban.”
Naseer said they were never taken on board by the authorities. “What can we do now as we have families to feed; banks are after us as they are not ready to waive off our loans. Where shall we go in these conditions,” he said.
Ahmad claimed that after the ban on stone quarry works, the families associated with the business are struggling to make their livelihoods as their children were also in this business.
Following the ban on stone quarry works in 2016, numerous protests and pressers were held by the stone quarry owners and their workers demanding the lifting of a complete ban on the functioning of stone quarries—(KNO)
Deutsche Lufthansa AG, commonly shortened to Lufthansa, is the flag carrier of Germany.
Frankfurt: An IT breakdown at Lufthansa on Wednesday caused flight delays and cancellations at major German airports, upending the travel plans of thousands of passengers.
Since Wednesday morning, planes and passengers have been jammed in Frankfurt and Munich airports because the computer systems for check-in and boarding, among other things, were no longer operational, Xinhua news agency reported.
“During construction work in Frankfurt, fiber optic cables belonging to a telecom service provider were damaged, causing an outage of Lufthansa’s IT systems at Frankfurt Airport,” Lufthansa tweeted.
⚠️Important information on flight disruption: As of this morning the airlines of the Lufthansa Group are affected by an IT outage, caused by construction work in the Frankfurt region. Unfortunately, this has led to flight delays and cancellations. We are working on –
“Flight operations are expected to stabilize in the early evening,” it added.
Due to the serious IT glitch at Lufthansa, German air traffic control is no longer routing aircraft to Frankfurt Airport to prevent the hub from filling up, said an air traffic control spokesman. The planes will be diverted to other airports such as Nuremberg, Cologne or Dusseldorf.
At least 6,000 children from Ukraine have attended Russian “re-education” camps in the past year, with several hundred held there for weeks or months beyond their scheduled return date, according to a new report published in the US.
Russia has also unnecessarily expedited the adoption and fostering of children from Ukraine in what could constitute a war crime, the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab report found. The report was funded by the US state department.
Since the start of the war nearly a year ago, children as young as four months living in the occupied areas have been taken to 43 camps across Russia, including in Moscow-annexed Crimea and Siberia, for “pro-Russia patriotic and military-related education”, said the report.
In at least two of the camps, the children’s return date was delayed by weeks, while at two other camps, the return of some children was postponed indefinitely.
Russian authorities sought to provide a pro-Moscow viewpoint to children through school curricula as well as through field trips to patriotic sites and talks from veterans, the report found.
Videos published from the camps by the occupying regional authorities show children in the camps singing the Russian national anthem and carrying the Russian flag. In separate videos, teachers, employed to teach the children, talk about the need to correct their understanding of Russian and Soviet history.
Children were also given training in firearms, although Nathaniel Raymond, a Yale researcher who oversaw the report, said there was no evidence they were being sent back to fight.
“Mounting evidence of Russia’s actions lays bare the Kremlin’s aims to deny and suppress Ukraine’s identity, history, and culture,” the US state department said in a statement. “The devastating impacts of Putin’s war on Ukraine’s children will be felt for generations.”
US state department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters the report “details Russia’s systematic, government-wide efforts to permanently relocate thousands of Ukraine’s children to areas under Russian government control via a network of 43 camps and other facilities.
“In many cases, Russia purported to temporarily evacuate children from Ukraine under the guise of a free summer camp, only to later refuse to return the children and to cut off all contact with their families.”
The report called for a neutral body to be granted access to the camps and for Russia immediately to stop adoptions of Ukrainian children. The report said that Putin aides have been closely involved in the operation, especially Maria Lvova-Belova, the presidential commissioner for children’s rights. It quoted her as saying that 350 children had been adopted by Russian families and that more than 1,000 were awaiting adoption.
Russia’s embassy in Washington responded to the report’s findings on Telegram, saying, “Russia accepted children who were forced to flee with their families from the shelling,” and, “We do our best to keep underage people in families, and in cases of absence or death of parents and relatives – to transfer orphans under guardianship.”
The report said some parents were pressured to give consent to send away their children, sometimes in the hope they would return. Others, the report said, “are sent with the consent of their parents for an agreed duration of days or weeks and returned to their parents as originally scheduled”.
The report -which was compiled with the help of satellite imagery and public accounts – said that the number of children sent to the camps is “likely significantly higher” than the 6,000 confirmed.
Researchers spoke to the parents of children who had attended the camps or were being kept there, as well as to children who had attended. “After calling the camp director, one mother was allegedly told that children could not be returned because, ‘There is war there.’
There is little information on the explanation given to children regarding delays in their return. An official at the Medvezhonok camp told a boy from Ukraine that his return was conditional: the children would be returned only if Russia recaptured the town of Izium, the report said. Another boy was told he wouldn’t be returning home due to his “pro-Ukrainian views”, the report said.
Some parents were told that their children will be released only if they physically come to pick them up. Relatives or people given power of attorney were not allowed to pick up the children. Travel from Ukraine to Russia is difficult and expensive, and men between the ages of 18 and 60 are forbidden from leaving the country, in effect meaning only the mothers of the children may retrieve them.
“A significant portion of these families are low-income and have not been able to afford to make the trip. Some families were forced to sell belongings and travel through four countries to be reunited with their child,” the report found.
One of the camps is located in Magadan oblast, roughly 6,230km (3,900 miles) from Ukraine. This puts it “roughly three times closer to the United States than it is to the border of Ukraine,” the report said.
Raymond said that Russia was in “clear violation” of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians during war and called the report a “gigantic Amber alert” – referring to US public notices of child abductions.
The Russian activity “in some cases may constitute a war crime and a crime against humanity”, he told reporters.
Ukraine’s government recently claimed that more than 14,700 children had been deported to Russia, where some had been sexually exploited.
Additional reporting by Isobel Koshiw and AFP
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Peshawar: Thousands across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) took to the streets to record their protest against increasing lawlessness and terrorism in the region, demanding that the vulnerable police force be armed to the teeth, local media reported.
They were holding white flags and demanding strict action against terrorism, The Express Tribune reported.
Civil society member, lawyers, political workers and the general public attended the protests held at Peshawar, Bajaur, Dir Upper, Dir Lower, Bannu, DI Khan and other key cities.
They said the police have been in the vanguard of terror fight and they should be protected and equipped properly to combat the menace effectively, The Express Tribune reported.
The rallies come as Pakistan has been hit by a wave of terrorism, mostly in K-P, as also in Balochistan and the Punjab town of Mianwali, which borders K-P. A terror attack also reached as far as the peripheries of Islamabad.
Unprecedented scenes in Pakistan. Police in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa protest against the Pakistan ISI hand in the Peshawar mosque bombing which killed more than 100 and injured more than 150. Most of those killed were policemen. Pak Cops turn against own security/intel agencies. pic.twitter.com/nTRTU1FO9D
On January 30, a powerful explosion ripped through a mosque in Peshawar’s Red Zone area where between 300 and 400 people – mostly police officers – had gathered for prayers. The suicide blast blew away the wall of the prayer hall and caused the inner roof to collapse in which 101 people, mostly policemen, were killed.
January was the deadliest month since 2018, in which 134 people lost their lives – a 139 per cent spike – and 254 received injuries in at least 44 terrorist attacks across the country, The Express Tribune reported.
On Friday, several rallies organised by local rights organisations were held in K-P’s Shangla district. The leadership of different political parties, including the PTI, PPP, Awami National Party (ANP) and others, had addressed the rallies.
Thousands of Israelis protested in several cities against the new government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, on Saturday, January 28, 2023, for the fourth week in a row, Anadolu Agency reported.
The protests against the Netanyahu government, held in the several cities including— Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba.
According to Israeli Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), about 40,000 demonstrators participated in Kaplan Street and Habima Square in Tel Aviv, while about 13,000 people demonstrated in Haifa.
Hundreds participated in front of the Israeli President’s house in Jerusalem, and thousands participated in a demonstration in front of the municipal building in Herzliy.
مصادر عبرية: “آلاف الإسرائيليين يتظاهرون في مدينة حيفا رفضًا لحكومة بنيامين نتنياهو”. pic.twitter.com/cGab09rExJ
The protestors held the Netanyahu government responsible for the recent operations against the Israelis.
Tel Aviv police were on high alert for fear of a possible attack on the protestors who had gathered in the thousands. The protestors demanded Netanyahu’s resignation because of his prosecution in corruption cases.
Saturday’s protests is the fourth in a row that the Israeli opposition organizes on a weekly basis, in protest against the judicial reform plan presented by Yariv Levin, Minister of Justice in Netanyahu’s government, earlier this month.
The plan includes government control of the Judge Appointment Committee, and an unprecedented reduction in the powers of the Supreme Court.
As per media reports, the opposition describes the plan as a judicial coup and says it represents the beginning of the end for Israeli democracy, which Netanyahu denies and says it comes to restoring balance between the three authorities in his entity.
The newly formed coalition government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was sworn in at the Knesset on Thursday, December 29, 2022.
Israeli media announced, on Saturday, January 28, 2023, that two settlers were seriously injured, in a shooting in the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem.
This comes hours after eight people were killed, including the perpetrator of the attack, Khairy Alqam, in Jerusalem, and at least 6 others were wounded in a shooting in front of a Jewish synagogue, in Jerusalem, on Friday evening, January 27.
At least nine Palestinians, including an elderly woman, were killed in an Israeli raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank on Thursday morning.
The criticism continued even into the early 1990s, when dissatisfied families at one of the gatherings interrupted a speech by President George H.W. Bush, shouting “no more lies.”
Webb led the first MIA recovery mission into Vietnam in 1985 and steadily managed to secure more personnel and funding for the mission. He enlisted troops with a broader range of skills — from explosives experts to help navigate battlefields or crash sites littered with leftover bombs to mountaineering specialists to repel down treacherous hillsides — to carry out more recoveries, in more places. And he hired additional anthropologists, scientists, historians and genealogists.
The advance of forensic science, combined with more regular access to some of the world’s most remote locations, has increased the pace of successful recoveries in recent years — with nearly 1,300 identifications since 2015 alone.
It also meant that Webb was often away from his wife of more than 50 years, Scher, his son J.D. and daughter, Shalena.
“He was thousands of miles away, often in the middle of a jungle for weeks at a time or in a foreign country negotiating with foreign dignitaries for access to crash sites,” his daughter, Shalena, told me. “As a child, my friends would ask, ‘Where is your dad?’ and I wouldn’t know.”
In 1994, when Webb retired from active duty as a lieutenant colonel on a Friday, he returned to work the following Monday, this time as a civilian employee. He has remained ever since, filling a series of top posts, and has become a mentor for generations of military officers, enlisted personnel and scientists who have toiled alongside him. And multiple times a year he led gatherings like the one in Denver, where he methodically briefed dozens of families on the status of the searches.
‘Vietnam War losses are still our number one priority’
The families of the missing signed in for the day-long agenda in the main ballroom, covering the agency’s field and lab work. Place settings had been prepared ahead of time, including literature about the MIA mission and case summaries of attendees’ loved ones.
“We love to have family members visit us in Hawaii,” Webb told one elderly couple attending for the first time. “We’ll give you a grand tour.”
In another room down the hall, staff swabbed family members for DNA, in the hopes of one day matching the samples to the recovered remains of their missing relatives. Webb also had a full schedule of private meetings with families in rooms across the hall, each devoted to a different conflict.
One family member came to the Doubletree even though her missing loved one had already been returned. A glimpse of Patricia Gaffney in the lobby immediately softened Johnie’s usually stoic demeanor. “Patricia is one of my first loves in this business,” he confided to me after they greeted each other. “I have had a lot of first loves.”
Gaffney was born three months after her father George was reported missing over New Guinea in 1944. When she learned Webb would be in Denver for the weekend, she didn’t want to miss a chance to see the man who was so instrumental in the return of her father’s remains in 1999.
I asked her what role Webb played in her achieving closure. “That word has never satisfied me,” she told me. “This whole thing was about opening an aperture. It was about learning about my father. We missed each other by 102 days.”
And she said it was Webb who helped her to get to know him. “Johnie has been a very important person in my life, a connection between me and my father,” she said. “He stood with me in the mortuary when I was with my father’s remains for the first time.”
For the family of Capt. Klingner, the search is still on.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Garland, at a press conference in Washington, said Hive was behind attacks in the past two years on a Midwest hospital, which was forced to stop accepting new patients and to pay a ransom to decrypt health data. While Garland did not name the hospital, the Memorial Health System in West Virginia and Ohio was attacked by Hive affiliates at the same time. Hive was also linked to an attack last year on Costa Rica’s public health service.
Hive is known to go after health care organizations, and the Justice Department, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services put out a joint alert last year warning of additional Hive attacks on health care and public health groups.
Garland said the Justice Department had assisted around 300 victims around the world since July, and stopped the payment of around $130 million to Hive.
“Cybercrime is a constantly evolving threat, but as I have said before, the Justice Department will spare no resources to identify and bring to justice anyone, anywhere who targets the United States with a ransomware attack,” Garland said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said the “disruption campaign” against Hive had taken place over the past year and a half, and involved FBI personnel gaining access to Hive’s control panels in order to give victims keys to unlock their encrypted systems. Wray pressed victims of cyberattacks to come forward and inform law enforcement, noting that only around 20 percent of Hive’s victims had done so.
“A reminder to cybercriminals: No matter where you are, and no matter how much you try to twist and turn to cover your tracks — your infrastructure, your criminal associates, your money and your liberty are all at risk, and there will be consequences,” Wray told reporters.
Hackers linked to some ransomware attacks have often been based out of Russia, including the hackers behind the 2021 attack on Colonial Pipeline, which temporarily crippled the supply of gas to the East Coast. While the Biden administration opened discussions with Moscow in 2021 about cracking down on cybercriminals based in Russia, these talks collapsed following the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year.
When asked whether Hive cybercriminals were based in Russia, Garland declined to answer, noting “we are in the middle of an ongoing investigation.”
While the dismantling of Hive’s operations is a win for the Justice Department — which launched a ransomware task force in 2021 to better prioritize investigating and bringing to justice ransomware cybercriminals — at least one expert is skeptical of its long-term impact.
“The disruption of the Hive service won’t cause a serious drop in overall ransomware activity, but it is a blow to a dangerous group that has endangered lives by attacking the health care system,” John Hultquist, the head of Mandiant Threat Intelligence at Google Cloud, said Thursday. He noted that a new competitor will likely be “standing by” to take Hive’s place.
“Actions like this add friction to ransomware operations. Hive may have to regroup, retool, and even rebrand,” Hultquist said. “When arrests aren’t possible, we’ll have to focus on tactical solutions and better defense. Until we can address the Russian safehaven and the resilient cybercrime marketplace, this will have to be our focus.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
