New Delhi : An ordinance to extinguish the liability of the government and the RBI on the demonetised high denomination notes is likely to come up before the Union Cabinet .
Sources in the government said the ordinance is being brought as it was found to be necessary to prevent future litigations against the government for junking Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes.
Seeking to prevent harassment and any ambiguity, a proviso would be added to ensure that certain category of people can still deposit the old notes in RBI branches between December 31 and March 31 next, they said.
The category may include people in armed forces, people who were abroad and ordinary citizens who can explain that the money is part of their legitimate income and they could not deposit it in banks due to some reasons.
The government is also mulling imposing penalty on people for possessing certain quantity of old notes after December 30 but there is no confirmation.
In 1978, a similar ordinance was issued to end the government’s liability after Rs 1,000, Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000 notes were demonetised by the Janata Party government under Morarji Desai.
The government had, while announcing the demonetisation of the old currency on November 8, allowed holders to either exchange them or deposit in bank and post office accounts.
While the facility to exchange the old notes has since been withdrawn, depositors have time till Friday to deposit the holding in their accounts.
New Delhi, Dec 27 : Licences of around 20,000 of 33,000 NGOs have been cancelled by the government after they were found to be allegedly violating various provisions of the FCRA, thus barring them from receiving foreign funds.
This was conveyed to Home Minister Rajnath Singh during a review of the Foreigners Division of the Home Ministry here today.
Giving a detailed presentation, Home Ministry officials said after cancellation of FCRA licences of around 20,000 NGOs, only 13,000 NGOs in the country are legally valid now to receive foreign funds.
The exercise of reviewing the working of the NGOs was started about a year ago and the process is still continuing, official sources said.
Among the 13,000 valid NGOs, around 3,000 have submitted applications for renewal while Ministry of Home Affairs received 2,000 new applications for registration under the FCRA for the first time.
An additional 300 NGOs are currently under prior permission category but not registered under the FCRA.
However, FCRA licences of around 16 NGOs were renewed by the Home Ministry under the “automatic” route and all the cases were reviewed thoroughly and except in two cases, 14 NGOs have been put under the prior permission category while papers of the two NGOs are under examination.
As per FCRA, if an NGO is put under prior permission category, it is barred to receive foreign funding from abroad without taking permission from the Home Ministry.
Backed by ships, helicopters and drones, Russian rescue teams searched Sunday for victims after a Russian plane carrying 92 people to Syria crashed into the Black Sea shortly after take off. Investigators said they are looking into every possible cause for the crash, including a terror attack.
All 84 passengers and eight crew members on board the Soviet-built Tu-154 plane operated by the Russian military are believed to have died when it crashed two minutes after taking off at 5:25am in good weather from the southern Russian city of Sochi.
More than 3,000 people — including over 100 divers flown in from across Russia — worked from 32 ships and several helicopters to search the crash site, the defence ministry said. Drones and submersibles were also being used to help spot bodies and debris. Powerful spotlights were brought in so the search could continue around the clock.
Emergency crews found fragments of the plane about 1.5 kilometres (1 mile) from shore. By Sunday evening, rescue teams had recovered 11 bodies and transport minister Maxim Sokolov said fragments of other bodies were also found.
Asked if a terror attack was a possibility, Sokolov said investigators were looking into every possible reason for the crash.
The plane belonging to the defence ministry was taking its world famous choir, the Alexandrov Ensemble, to a New Year’s concert at Hemeimeem air base in Syria’s coastal province of Latakia. Those on board also included nine Russian journalists and a Russian doctor famous for her work in war zones.
Russian President Vladimir Putin went on television to declare Monday a nationwide day of mourning.
“We will conduct a thorough investigation into the reasons and will do everything to support the victims’ families,” Putin said.
The Black Sea search area — which covered 10 square kilometers (nearly 4 square miles) — was made more difficult by underwater currents that carried debris and body fragments into the open sea.
Sokolov said the plane’s flight recorders did not have the radio beacons common in more modern aircraft, so locating them on the seabed was going to be challenging.
The Tu-154 is a Soviet-built three-engine airliner designed in the late 1960s. More than 1,000 have been built, and they have been used extensively in Russia and worldwide. The plane that crashed Sunday was built in 1983, and underwent factory check-ups and maintenance in 2014 and earlier this year, according to the defence ministry.
Magomed Tolboyev, a decorated Russian test pilot, said the circumstances of the crash indicated that all on board had died.
“There is no chance to survive in such situation,” he said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Before Sokolov spoke to reporters in Sochi, senior Russian lawmakers had ruled out a terror attack, arguing that the military plane was tightly secured. Security is particularly tight in Sochi, which hosted the 2014 Winter Games and is regularly visited by Putin, who has a residence there.
But some experts noted that the crew’s failure to report a malfunction pointed at a possible terror attack.
“Possible malfunctions … certainly wouldn’t have prevented the crew from reporting them,” Vitaly Andreyev, a former senior Russian air traffic controller, told RIA Novosti, adding that it points at an “external impact”.
Russian planes have been brought down previously by terror attacks.
In October 2015, a Russian plane carrying mostly Russian tourists back from vacation in Egypt was brought down by a bomb over the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard. Officials said the explosive device was planted in the plane’s luggage compartment. The local affiliate of the Islamic State group claimed responsibility.
In August 2004, two Russian planes were blown up in the skies over Russia on the same day by suicide bombers, killing 89 people. A Chechen warlord claimed responsibility for the twin attacks.
In the last year, the Russian military has repeatedly flown Russian singers and artists to perform at Hemeimeem, which serves as the main hub for the Russian air campaign in Syria. This plane was carrying performers for New Year’s, the main holiday for most Russians.
The passenger list for the Sochi plane released by the defence ministry included 64 members of the Alexandrov Ensemble, including its leader, Valery Khalilov. The ensemble is the official choir of the Russian military and also includes a band and a dance company. The choir sang “Get Lucky” at the opening of the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, becoming an instant online sensation.
The damage to the choir was reported to be devastating. Viktor Yeliseyev, head of the rival choir of the Russian National Guard, said “most singers of the choir have died”.
Also on board was Yelizaveta Glinka, a Russian doctor who has won wide acclaim for her charity work, which has included missions to war zones in eastern Ukraine and Syria. Her foundation said Glinka was accompanying a shipment of medicine for a hospital in Syria.
“We never feel sure that we will come back alive,” she said when Putin presented her with an award earlier this month. “But we are sure that kindness, compassion and charity are stronger than any weapon.”
Syrian President Bashar Assad was among numerous foreign leaders who sent a condolence note to Putin, saying he received the news “with deep grief and sadness”.
In recent years, Russian airlines have replaced their Tu-154s with more modern planes, but the military and other government agencies in Russia have continued to use them. While noisy and fuel-guzzling, the plane is popular with crews that appreciate its manoeuvrability and ruggedness.
“It’s an excellent plane, which has proven its reliability during decades of service,” veteran pilot Oleg Smirnov said in televised remarks.
Still, since 1994 there have been 17 major plane crashes involving the Tu-154 that have killed over 1,760 people. Most resulted from human error.
In the latest previous deadly crash of a Tu-154, a plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others crashed in April 2010 while trying to land at a military airport in Smolensk in western Russia, killing everyone on board. Investigations by both Polish and Russian experts blamed pilot error in bad weather, but Polish authorities have launched a new probe.
Beijing, Dec 23 : China today said it has an “open attitude” to India joining the USD 46 billion economic corridor but it wants to know New Delhi’s response to a top Pakistani army general’s offer to participate in the project.
“I wonder what is India’s take on this whether this is a good sign from Pakistan,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said when asked about Pakistan Southern Command Commander Lt Gen Amir Riaz’s remarks that India should join the CPEC along with Iran, Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries and enjoy its benefits.
“On China’s part, the CEPC is a cooperation framework and we hope this programme can not only serve the interest of Pakistan but also Asia and the region as a whole,” Hua said.
She said CEPC is an important part of China’s One-Belt and One-Road (OBOR) also known as new Silk Road project.
“It is an open proposal and we are willing to work with Pakistan to discuss the participation of any third country under principle of wider consultation and joint contribution,” she said.
Asked whether Pakistan has discussed India’s participation with China, Hua said “as (whether) China has negotiated with Pakistan on this, I have nothing to offer”.
“I can tell you that this programme is very important part of OBOR initiative and China holds an open attitude for such cooperation. We have seen reports about other countries who are willing to join the programme. We want to discuss this with wider consultants and consensus,” she said.
Hua’s comments came as the state-run Global Times carried articles suggesting that India should accept the “olive branch” offered by Lt Gen Riaz and join the project.
India’s concerns over CEPC being laid through the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is one of the three major issues bedevilled the relations between the two countries besides China blocking India s admission to Nuclear Suppliers Group, (NSG) and UN ban on JeM leader Masood Azhar.
The two countries have been holding talks on these issues and Riaz’s comments were seen by officials here as an attempt to gauge India’s reaction.
New Delhi, Dec 23 : The all-powerful GST Council today made a ‘reasonable headway’ on supporting legislations for the new indirect tax regime but its rollout from April 1 looked virtually impossible as it postponed discussion on the critical issue of administration and control of tax payers.
The panel, which met for the seventh time since the Constitutional Amendment to replace central and state taxes with a Goods and Service Tax was approved in mid-September, tweaked the periodicity of payment of compensation for loss of revenue to states for implementation of GST to bi-monthly instead of previously decided quarterly payment.
Also, the Council decided to create the kitty for the compensation ‘from any other tax’ besides the cess on luxury and sin goods it had previously approved, as states saw revenues being dented by slowdown in economic activity and resultant tax collections following demonetisation.
The GST Council will meet again on January 3-4 and take up the issue of which part of tax payers should be controlled by the Centre and who should be governed by the states after a single tax will replace levies like central excise, service tax and VAT.
The dual control is also part of the Integrated-GST legislation that Parliament needs to pass before the new regime is rolled out.
But for this stumbling block, mirror legislations of Central-GST and State-GST, that have to be approved by Parliament and state assemblies respectively, neared finality with most clauses agreed upon.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the law to provide for compensation to the states for loss of revenue was also approved by the GST Council at its two-day meeting which ended today but a final draft with legal language would be approved at the next meeting.
“I am trying my best,” he said, when asked about the April 1 rollout schedule. “I am not going to bind myself with anything. Our effort is to do it as quickly as possible and I think we are making a reasonable headway.”
Three consecutive meetings of the GST Council have not been able to take up the issue of dual control. Some states like West Bengal and Kerala want a minimum turnover criteria be fixed to decide who control which assessee, a proposal the Centre is not agreeable to because states lack expertise on levies like service tax.
“If you ask me what are the principle residuary items left, the main item of course is the IGST and dual empowerment issue. The second is the legally vetted language which will be placed in the next meeting on January 3-4,” Jaitley said, adding that the Council will take up items in each tax bracket after that. .
Facebook is making us unhappy and causing people who suffer “Facebook envy” to be particularly depressed, a study has found.
Users who took a week-long break from the social media site were found to be more satisfied with life and rated their own well-being as higher.
Those who admitted suffering high levels of Facebook envy, the tendency to be jealous of your friends’ activities on social media, benefited most from going teetotal.
“Millions of hours are spent on Facebook each day,” wrote report author Morten Tromholt.
“We are surely better connected now than ever before, but is this new connectedness doing any good to our well-being?
“According to the present study, the answer is ‘no’. In fact, the predominant uses of Facebook – that is, as a means to communicate and gain information about others, as habitual pastime – are affecting our well-being negatively on several dimensions.”
The sample size was 86 per cent female, spread across Denmark, with an average age of 34, and with an average Facebook-friends count of 350.
They were first asked to take a 15-minute pre-test which then randomly dropped them into either the treatment group – who were banned from Facebook for seven days – or the control group – who were asked to continue using it as usual.
In the post-test on the last day of the experiment, which 888 participants completed, 13 per cent of the treatment group admitted giving in and using Facebook.
The majority of these “non-compliers” claimed it was either because of an emergency or was a “habitual accident”.
In the test, the Facebook users rated their life satisfaction at 7.74 out of 10 average, but those who stayed away rated it at 8.11.
The effect of quitting Facebook on well-being was also greater for users who feel “Facebook envy” than for users who do not.
A study has also found the more time 19 to 32-year-olds spend on social media, the more likely they are to become depressed.
Facebook, which had 1.79 billion monthly active users in the third quarter of this year, rolled out emoji reactions in January to sit alongside its famous “Like” button.
“To make things clear, if one is a heavy Facebook user, one should use Facebook less to increase one’s wellbeing,” added Mr Tromhalt.
Brenda Wiederhold, editor-in-chief of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, said the study showed Facebook “lurking” may cause negative emotions.
Independent report.
Kolkata, Dec 22 : The ED today attached assets to the tune of Rs 1,250 crore, including eight hotels and a Rolls Royce luxury car, in connection with its money laundering probe in the Rose Valley chit fund scam case where thousands of people were allegedly cheated in West Bengal and Odisha.
Officials said the agency issued a provisional attachment order for seizing hotels of the group located in Jaipur (Rajasthan), Port Blair (Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Panaji (Goa), Haridwar (Uttarakhand), Ranchi (Jharkhand), Silchar (Assam) and Kolkata (two hotels) and a fleet of a dozen cars which included a Rs 5-crore worth Rolls Royce.
“The deed value of the attached assets is about Rs 465 crore but the market value of the same is Rs 1,250 crore. The attachment order has been issued,” they added.
The agency had registered a criminal FIR against the firm, its Chairman Gautam Kundu and others in 2014 under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
Kundu was last year arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) from here and he is currently in judicial custody.
The agency has earlier issued four attachment orders in this case for assets worth over Rs 500 crore and separate ED charge sheets have been filed in courts in Kolkata and Bhubaneswar.
An attachment order under PMLA laws is aimed to deprive the accused from getting benefits of their ill-gotten wealth.
It had, hence, registered a criminal FIR against the firm and its owners in 2014 under PMLA.
The ED, under criminal provisions of the PMLA, had earlier attached 2,631 bank accounts of the Rose Valley group containing Rs 295 crore.
The group had allegedly floated a total of 27 companies for running the alleged chit fund operations out of which only half-a-dozen were active.
It is alleged that the firm had floated the scheme by promising inflated returns on investments between 8 and 27 per cent to gullible investors in various states.
The company had allegedly promised astronomical returns to depositors on land properties and assets and bookings done in the real estate sector. It is alleged that the company had made “cross investments” in its various sister firms to suppress its liabilities towards investors.
SEBI had probed the company before ED and CBI registered cases against the group.
The ED has pegged the total volume of the alleged irregularities at Rs 15,000 crore.
Scientists have discovered what appears to be a fundamental reason why people are dyslexic.
Using MRI scans to monitor the brains of people who present with the condition, and those who don’t, researchers found a “really pronounced” difference in responses to a series of visual and audio cues.
The researchers were surprised to find such a broad range of effects but speculated that dyslexia only shows itself when people try to read because this is a relatively demanding task.
While humans have evolved to be skilled verbal communicators, writing is a relatively recent occurrence in our history, particularly as something that most people in society do.
One of the researchers, Professor John Gabrieli, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: “You learn something upon the initial presentation that makes you better able to do it the second time, and the ease is marked by reduced neural activity. Because you’ve done something before, it’s easier to do it again.”
Scans of the brains of people with dyslexia showed this adaptation process was not as effective – their brains were more exercised to understand the same information, the academics reported in the journal Neuron.
Speaking to The Independent, Professor Gabrieli said: “There are different ways to struggle to read, but for many individuals with dyslexia, we suspect this might be the route pathway – the beginning would be this broader reduction in [brain] plasticity that only manifests itself when the demands for plasticity are highest.”
He added the study suggested a potential new way to alleviate effects of dyslexia by artificially increasing the plasticity of the brain.
However Prof Gabrieli said the techniques used to do this – involving electromagnetic stimulation of the brain – were at an experimental stage and had not been tried for the condition.
“We’d love if it would have implications for helping people, but we know that’s far away,” he said.
Prof Tyler Perrachione, of Boston University – the lead author of the study – said: “Adaptation is something the brain does to help make hard tasks easier [but] dyslexics are not getting this advantage.
“I am surprised by the magnitude of the difference. In people without dyslexia, we always see adaptation, but in the dyslexics, the lack of adaptation was often really pronounced.”
About one in 10 people in the UK, some 6.3 million people, are estimated to have dyslexia.
In addition to making reading and spelling more difficult, it can affect short-term memory, maths and co-ordination. However it does not affect general intelligence or reasoning.
Dyslexia was first diagnosed in Seaford, Sussex, in 1896 as a “case of congenital word blindness” involving a 14-year-old boy called Percy.
A report in the British Medical Journal said that “in spite of this laborious and persistent training, he can only with difficulty spell out words of one syllable”.
“The schoolmaster who taught him for some years says that he would be the smartest lad in the school if the instruction were entirely oral,” it added.
However those with the condition were often dismissed as being “thick” or “lazy” and it was not until the 1970s that the role of language processing was recognised.
Professor Gabrieli said previous research had long laid that misconception to rest.
“I have colleagues who are professors who are dyslexic and who are amazing,” he said.
Dr John Rack, head of research at charity Dyslexia Action, said the researchers had come up with “some interesting findings”.
“What is particularly interesting is that better reading skills in adults and children with dyslexia were associated with greater repetition-induced neural adaptation,” he said.
“We also recognise that these results highlight a dysfunction of rapid neural adaptation as a core neurophysiological difference in dyslexia that may underlie impaired reading development and this new evidence is helping to build an understanding of the differences in brain functions which can ultimately result in a greater understanding of specific reading impairments.
“This is theoretically well-grounded research that is seeking to explain what we know to be the core issues for people with dyslexia: learning to map letters and sounds for the development of fluent reading and spelling skills. Increasing this understanding can help us to tailor our teaching interventions to be even more effective.”
Independent report.
Pakistan Navy fired a live surface-to-surface anti-ship missile along the North Arabian Sea on Wednesday and said the successful test reaffirms its commitment to safeguard maritime frontiers “against all threats”. The frontline combat unit of Pakistan Navy undertook the live firing of Surface to Surface Anti-ship missile from Sword Class frigate PNS ASLAT which was witnessed by Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Muhammad Zakaullah.
“The missile successfully destroyed its intended target with pinpoint accuracy reaffirming weapon’s lethality and offensive punch of Pakistan Navy’s Fleet,” Radio Pakistan reported. Zakaullah expressed his satisfaction on the operational preparedness of Pakistan Navy Fleet and said the Live Missile Firing “reaffirms credibility of deterrence at sea and reassures Pakistan Navy’s commitment to safeguard our maritime frontiers against all threats”. The successful conduct of missile firing also demonstrates the efficacy and lethality of modern weapon systems operated by Pakistan Navy, the report said.
Last week, Pakistan successfully test-fired an enhanced version of an indigenously-designed cruise missile that can hit targets at 700 kms with all kinds of warheads, bringing many Indian cities within its range. Named after the Mughal invader and founder of the dynasty of same name, the missile is part of Babur Weapon System version – 2 as it is enhanced version of earlier missile and incorporates advanced aerodynamics and avionics that can strike targets both at land and sea with high accuracy.
It is a low flying, terrain hugging missile, which carries certain stealth features and is capable of carrying various types of warheads, according to a press statement. The missile is equipped with state-of-the-art navigational technologies of Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM) and all-time Digital Scene Matching & Area Co-relation (DSMAC) which enables it to engage various types of targets with pinpoint accuracy even in the absence of GPS navigation. Babur weapons system is an important force multiplier for Pakistan’s strategic defence.
The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admission in medical colleges will be held in eight languages- Hindi, English, Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu- for the academic year 2017-18.
Also, the candidate qualifying NEET will be eligible for all India quota and other quotas under the State governments and Institutes irrespective of the medium taken by candidates, subject to other eligibility criteria, the Union health ministry said in a statement.
In May, Union Health Minister JP Nadda had held a meeting with the health ministers and health secretaries of 18 states/Union territories towards implementation of NEET across states.
Joint Secretary, Medical Education, AK Singhal said, “The collaborative efforts of central health ministry with the state health ministries have lead to this decision so as to bring parity for the students who have taken the state board exams.”
NEET has replaced AIPMT and has been made mandatory for admissions in all-India medical/dental colleges which means no other state can conduct its separate medical entrance.