Male, Feb 28: Maldives State Health Minister Dunya Maumoon, niece of President Abdulla Yameen, resigned from the Cabinet after the arrest of her father and appealed the international community to support the Maldivian people in overcoming the political crisis plaguing the island nation.
Dunya’s father, former President of the Maldives Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and brother Ahmed Faaris Maumoon
were arrested on charges of trying to topple the Yameen government.
Dunya has been under fire for working with the government while her father and brother are in police custody after a state of emergency was declared in the country.
She today resigned from the Cabinet, calling upon the international community to support the Maldivian people in overcoming the political crisis and to help build a stronger democratic system.
“I have refused to be bullied by different political forces and I remain strong and stand by my convictions,” she said in her resignation letter.
Her father, Gayoom, is Yameen s half-brother and ruled the country for 30 years until 2008. He was arrested at his residence early this month.
He is not just my father, but the father of the nation, who has built this country and has earned the respect and love of the people, she said in the letter.
Male, which has seen several political crises since the ouster of its first democratically-elected president Mohamed Nasheed in 2012, plunged into chaos early this month when the Supreme Court ordered the release of nine imprisoned Opposition politicians, maintaining that their trials were “politically motivated and flawed”.
Yameen has refused to obey the court orders and declared a state of emergency in the country.
New Delhi Feb 28: Opposition party members of Parliament’s joint committee on a proposed land acquisition Act today said the government was not serious about the bill as members from the ruling BJP were skipping the panel’s sessions.
The meeting of the Joint Committee on the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (Second Amendment) Bill, 2015, was postponed due to lack of quorum, as only six out of the 31 members of the panel were present for discussions today.
“The moral of the story is that the bill is now dead. The government started this bill with a lot of fanfare but it is dead,” an Opposition member said.
TMC leader Derek O’Brien, who is also a member of the panel, said the meeting was called off and even ruling BJP MPs were missing.
They have lost the plot, O Brien tweeted, adding that the panel, chaired by a BJP MP, was woefully short of quorum .
Only six of the 31 members were present, he said. Even BJP members ditch,” he tweeted.
BJP MPs on the panel, however, said they were attending the meetings regularly, and asserted that the progress of its work to review the proposed legislation was satisfactory.
Opposition members claimed the panel had met only a few times.
The majority of the panel members are from the ruling BJP. Many of them claimed that barring a few misses, they were regular in attending the meetings.
MPs from several Opposition parties were skipping the meets, they claimed.
In May 2015, the bill was referred to the 30-member joint committee of Parliament after the government faced strong opposition from various political parties in the two Houses.
The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition Rehabilitation and Resettlement (second) Amendment Bill seeks to alter an Act brought by the previous Congress-led UPA government in 2013.
New Delhi, Feb 27: With the aim of helping the states affected by natural calamities, the government on Monday approved the monetary assistances of Rs 5,981.5 crore to nine states, which were badly hit last year.
Home Minister Rajnath Singh chaired the a meeting of the High Level Committee (HLC) here for Central Assistance to the States.
The HLC approved assistance of Rs 1711.66 crore in respect of state of Bihar, Rs 1055.05 crore for Gujarat, Rs 169.63 crore for Kerala, Rs 420.57 crore for Rajasthan and Rs 133.05 crore for Tamil Nadu.
For Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Chhattishgarh, the committee gave its approval of Rs 420.69 crore, Rs 838.85 crore and Rs 395.91 crore, respectively.
It also gave an assistance of Rs 836.09 crore to Madhya Pradesh.
Except Kerala, Chhatishgarh and Madhya Pradesh all states were badly affected by floods in 2017. The southern state was given grant in respect to Cyclone Ockhi.
Madhya Pradesh and Chhatishgarh were affected by Kharif drought.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba and senior officials from home, finance and agriculture ministries and NITI Aayog attended the meeting.
Hyderabad, Feb 27: Nearly three crore fake and duplicate ration cards have been cancelled during the three years of the NDA government, CR Chaudhary, Union Minister of State for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution said today.
It had also saved the country Rs 17,000 crore every year during this time, he added.
Linking the ration card to the holder’s Aaadhaar number had allowed the government to clean up the system, the minister said.
He was speaking at the 21st National Conference on e-Governance here.
“Out of 23 crore ration cards in the country, 82 per cent (19 crore) are linked with Aadhaar. We have removed 2.95 crore fake or duplicate ration cards in the country in the past three years which has resulted in a saving of Rs 17,000 crore annually. It has ensured that food grains are being delivered to the rightful person,” he informed.
Chaudhary said that e-governance could help in increasing the ease of doing business in the country which, in turn, would help attract foreign investment.
Telangana’s Minister of IT and Industries, KT Rama Rao, who also addressed the conference, said that 4,500 “Me-Seva” centres in the state were handling 1.5 lakh transactions every day.
He informed that these centres had completed 10 crore transactions since they began seven years ago.
He added that an upgraded version of the project, covering 180 government services, would be launched soon.
He informed that 6,000 clearances had been given to industries under the state industrial policy called TS-iPass, and this involved an investment of Rs 1.2 lakh crore and had the potential to create three lakh jobs.
Beijing, Feb 26: In an unprecedented move, China’s ruling Communist Party today prepared the ground for President Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely after the end of his second term in 2022 as it proposed to remove presidential term limits from the party’s Constitution.
The CPC Central Committee proposed removing the clause that the President and Vice-President “shall serve no more than two consecutive terms” from the country’s Constitution, state-run Xinhua news agency reported today.
The removal of the term limit, which is expected to be endorsed by the Plenum of the party to be held tomorrow would give 64-year-old Xi, regarded as the most powerful leader in modern China, a limitless tenure.
Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin who was in power from 1993 to 2003 and Hu Jintao from 2003 to 2013 stepped down as the General Secretary of the party as well as the president after widely followed rule as well as a convention of two terms to promote collective leadership system in the one-party state.
If China pushes ahead with the proposal, Xi would become the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, who ruled for more than three decades through 1976.
President Xi, who is also the general secretary of the CPC and chairman of the Central Military Commission, began his second five-year tenure last year, following a national Congress of the CPC.
A seven-man leadership committee unveiled last year included no potential successor, raising the prospect that Xi intends to govern beyond his second term.
Since then, all organs of the party have declared him as the topmost leader of the party setting aside the principle of collective party leadership that was followed in the last three decades.
The CPC Central Committee also today proposed writing Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era into the country’s Constitution.
This would make Xi the only leader after Mao and his predecessor Deng Xiaoping whose thoughts were written into the Constitution. It would place him above the rest of the leaders of the party.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an American scholar on China who moved closely with Chinese leaders and scholars for decades, told PTI earlier that the inclusion of Xi’s thoughts in the Constitution and his “core leadership” status conferred on him by the party previously put him “substantially ahead of others” in the party.
Besides the two-term rule, top Chinese leaders also followed a convention of retiring after 68 years.
With the status of “core leader” and his name written into the Constitution, the retirement age limit is not expected to be applicable to Xi. As per the existing convention, he is due to retire after 2022. Observers say as “core leader” Xi could continue as General Secretary of the CPC.
The new amendment to the Constitution removing the two term rule would clear the last impediment for him to continue as the president for an unprecedented third term after 2022.
Since Xi took over power he consolidated his hold on power with massive anti-graft campaign in which over a million officials from the top to bottom were punished.
Balasore (Odisha), Feb 24: India successfully test-fired the nuclear-capable ‘Dhanush’ ballistic missile with a strike range of 350 kms from a naval ship off Odisha coast, defence officials said.
The surface-to-surface missile, a naval variant of the indigenously-developed ‘Prithvi’ missile, was test-fired from the ship positioned near Paradip in the Bay of Bengal at around 10.52 am, the officials said.
‘Dhanush’ missile is capable of carrying a payload of 500 kg and hitting both land and sea-based targets, the sources said, adding that its trial was carried out by the Strategic Force Command (SFC) of the defence forces.
‘The missile launch was part of training exercise by the SFC of Indian Navy,’ one official said.
Describing the test launch as ‘a complete success’, the officials said all mission objectives were met during the trial.
‘The missile launch and its flight performance were monitored from DRDO telemetry and radar facilities in the Odisha coast,’ they said.
The single-stage, liquid-propelled ‘Dhanush’, has already been inducted into the defence services. It is one of the five missiles developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) under the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP).
New Delhi , February 23 :Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has issued Show Cause Notices to the auditors of Punjab National Bank (PNB) and Gitanjali Gems in connection with the Rs. 11300 crore scam.
The statutory body has also summoned the deputy general manager of PNB and sough related documents in the said fraud.
“The Deputy General Manager, PNB has been summoned in terms of powers as vested in Section 21C of the Chartered Accountants Act 1949 to appear and produce a copy of FIR, all related documents in the said fraud, give details of the modus operandi used in the fraud,” the ICAI said in a statement.
The ICAI has also written letters to Security and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Punjab National Bank(PNB), urging them to share details of Rs. 11300 crore PNB scam.
In the letter dated February 15, the statutory body also asked the agencies and PNB to share reports or findings in respect of the said alleged fraud including the copies of the specific findings in respect of the involvement of any Chartered Accountant or firm of Chartered Accountants.
Further, the ICAI has also written to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) requesting them to provide the list of the corporate borrowers of public sector banks having an outstanding loan amount of Rs. 2000 crores and above.
The Disciplinary Directorate of ICAI has also started its investigation into the matter as per the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949 and rules framed thereunder.
ICAI has also written to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs requesting to prevail upon SEBI, CBI, ED and PNB to share their findings with ICAI to enable it to accelerate the action against any Chartered Accountants who have played any role in this fraud.
The ICAI has also set up a high power group to study the systemic issues in the PNB matter and suggest remedial measures and improvement in the banking system, and any other matter incidental thereto.
New Delhi, Feb 23: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has arrested Rotomac pens Directors–Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul Kothari in Rs 3,695-crore bank loan default case, sources in the agency said on Thursday.
The probe agency on Thursday arrested Vikram Kothari and Rahul Kothari, both Directors of M/s Rotomac Global Pvt Ltd, Kanpur (UP), in an on-going investigation of a case on allegations of cheating a consortium of 7 banks, sources said.