May 10,2022: China’s government on Monday asked India to carry out investigations “in accordance with laws”, following claims of coercion from smartphone maker Xiaomi during ongoing investigations into its financial practices.
India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Saturday said claims of Xiaomi India’s officials that their statements were taken “under coercion” were “untrue and baseless”. It noted it had recorded statements from Manu Kumar Jain, former head of Xiaomi India and current Global VP, as well as Chief Financial Officer Sameer Rao.
The ED said the last statement from them was recorded on April 26 while the order to seize the company’s assets was passed three days later. “No complaint was filed by them at any point of time during recording of statements at various occasions,” the agency said, adding that “it appears that allegation now made after passage of substantial time is an afterthought.”
The Karnataka High Court on Saturday stayed the April 29 order, under which ₹5,551.27 crore was seized under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, the Press Trust of India reported.
“The Chinese government always asks Chinese companies overseas to operate in accordance with laws and regulations,” spokesperson Zhao Lijian said. “In the meantime, we firmly support Chinese companies in protecting their lawful rights and interests. We hope the Indian side can provide a fair, just and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies making investment and operating in the country, and conduct investigation and law enforcement in accordance with laws and regulations so as to beef up the international community’s confidence in investment.”
Xiaomi India, in a court filing, claimed that its officials were threatened with consequences if they did not submit compliant statements, allegations that the ED has rejected.
The company’s operations in India have been under investigation over remittance payments which authorities said were illegal. Xiaomi, however, has maintained the payments were royalties. A hearing in the case is set for later this week.
May 08,2022: Russia’s most senior lawmaker on Saturday accused Washington of coordinating military operations in Ukraine, which he said amounted to direct U.S. involvement in military action against Russia.
“Washington is essentially coordinating and developing military operations, thereby directly participating in military actions against our country,” Vyacheslav Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel.
Washington and European members of the transatlantic NATO alliance have supplied Kyiv with heavy weapons to help it resist a Russian offensive that has resulted in the occupation of parts of eastern and southern Ukraine but failed to take Kyiv.
However, the United States and its NATO allies have repeatedly said they will not take part in fighting themselves, in order to avoid becoming parties to the conflict.
U.S. officials have said the United States has provided intelligence to Ukraine to help counter the Russian assault, but have denied that this intelligence includes precise targeting data.
Volodin, speaker of the lower house of parliament, the Duma, is a prominent advocate of what Moscow calls its “special operation” in Ukraine to degrade its southern neighbour’s military capabilities and root out what it calls fascist elements holding sway over the government and military.
Ukraine and the West say the fascist allegation is baseless, and that Russia has carried out an unprovoked act of aggression. The conflict has killed thousands in Ukraine, and more than five million people have fled the country.
May 6,2022:In an effort to fight cybercrime, India is enacting a new policy that’ll require VPN providers to collect and turn over user data, including the IP addresses assigned to customers.
The policy is meant to bolster the powers of the country’s national agency, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), which deals with cybersecurity incidents.
“During the course of handling cyber incidents and interactions with the constituency, CERT-In has identified certain gaps causing hindrance in incident analysis,” India’s government said in adopting the new policy last week.
The new regulations call for VPN providers to log and store the following information from customers for at least five years:
Name, email address and phone number
The customer’s purpose for using the VPN service
The IP addresses allotted to the customer and the IP address the customer used to sign up with the service
The “ownership pattern” of the customer
Such information could help India unmask cybercriminals who use VPNs for malicious activities. But it also risks compromising the privacy of all other users on the VPN service, including what websites they’ve been visiting. As a result, the new policy threatens to undermine a key selling point to using a VPN, which are often promoted as tools to protect your digital privacy.
May 06,2022: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday apologized to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s claims earlier this week that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was partially Jewish and that Jews themselves are some of the worst anti-Semites, according to the Israeli government, comments that sparked an outcry from Israeli leaders who accused Lavrov of blaming Jews for the Holocaust.
During a phone call with the Russian leader, Bennett accepted Putin’s apology and thanked him for “clarifying” Russia’s attitude toward the Jewish people and the Holocaust, the Israeli government said in a statement.
A readout of the meeting from the Kremlin does not mention an apology from Putin, but says Russia recognized the significance of Isreeli Independence Day, which the country celebrated on Wednesday and Thursday, and noted that 40% of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were citizens of the USSR.
The phone call comes after several Israeli politicians, including Bennett and Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, slammed Lavrov after he told an Italian TV show Sunday that some of the “worst anti-Semites are Jews” in an attempt to justify Russia’s claims it is trying to de-Nazify Ukraine, a country with a Jewish president.
In a response, the Russian Foreign Ministry on Tuesday accused Lapid of supporting the “neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv.”
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“This is an unforgivable and scandalous comment, a terrible historical error and we expect an apology. Hitler was not of Jewish origin and the Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest form of racism against Jews is blaming the Jews themselves for antisemitism,” Lapid said in response to Lavrov’s remarks.
KYIV,May03,2022: Efforts to evacuate more civilians from the devastated Ukrainian port city of Mariupol ran into delays on Monday (Apr 2) and hundreds of people remained trapped in the Azovstal steel works, the last stronghold of resistance to the Russian siege.
It was not clear what was causing the hold-up made up of civilians from the city itself.
Russian forces had on Sunday resumed shelling the steel works after an earlier convoy of buses had successfully left from that location, an aide to the mayor said.
The plight of civilians trapped in Mariupol, which endured weeks of bombardment before Russian forces captured most of it, has been a focus of humanitarian concern as the war has ground on into a third month.
Thousands are believed to have been killed and those still stuck in the besieged Azovstal complex, whose network of bunkers and tunnels has provided shelter, were running out of water, food and medicine.
“The situation has become a sign of a real humanitarian catastrophe,” Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said.
On other fronts, towns in eastern Ukraine were coming under intense Russian bombardment, a regional governor said. A Russian rocket strike hit a main bridge across the Dniester estuary just west of the port city of Odesa in southwest Ukraine, authorities said.