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.
April 27,2022: Russia halted gas supplies to Poland under the Yamal contract on Wednesday, data from the European Union network of gas transmission operators showed, in a deepening of the rift between the West and Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom informed the two EU and NATO member nations that gas supplies will be suspended starting Wednesday, their governments said.
The suspensions would be the first since Putin’s announcement last month that “unfriendly foreign buyers” would have to transact with Gazprom in rubles instead of dollars and euros. Only Hungary has agreed to do so, with other countries rejecting the demand as an unacceptable, one-sided breach of contracts and a violation of sanctions.
The move will be a grave concern to those countries who are the most heavily dependent on Russian gas, such as Germany, but at a hastily arranged press conference, Polish ministers said they had sufficient supplies to weather an interruption while accusing Gazprom of a breach of contract.
April 18,2022: The death toll from Pakistani military air strikes in the eastern Afghanistan provinces of Khost and Kunar has jumped to at least 47, officials said on Sunday, as Islamabad urged Kabul to act against militants launching attacks from Afghan soil.
Border tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan have risen since the Taliban seized power last year, with Islamabad claiming militant groups are carrying out regular attacks from Afghan soil.
The Taliban deny harbouring Pakistani militants, but are also infuriated by a fence Islamabad is erecting along their 2,700-kilometre (1,600-mile) border.
Aprl15,2022:Pakistan’s powerful military has dismissed deposed Prime Minister Imran Khan’s accusation that the United States had conspired to topple him in a parliamentary vote of confidence.
Khan, 69, who led the South Asian country of 220 million people for three and half years, accused Washington of backing his removal because he had visited Moscow against US advice. Washington has denied the charge.
Khan met Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24, the day Russian forces invaded neighbouring Ukraine.
Khan initially blocked the no-confidence motion, saying a forum of civil and military leaders, the National Security Committee, had endorsed the alleged conspiracy.
The military’s spokesman, Major General Babar Iftikhar, denied that the country’s National Security Committee, a forum of civil and military leaders, had endorsed the alleged conspiracy.
“You can see clearly whether there’s any word of conspiracy in that statement. I don’t think so,” he told a news conference about an NSC statement this month which had expressed concern about non-diplomatic language used in a cable from a “foreign country”, widely assumed to mean the US, about the no-confidence vote.
Pakistan’s lower house of parliament eventually voted in favour of removing Khan from office on Sunday.
Opposition parties and analysts have said the military helped Khan win the election in 2018, which both have denied, but that support waned after a falling-out over the appointment of the country’s next intelligence chief late last year.
Mar 08,2022: The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs on Friday accorded its approval for supply of fortified rice throughout the Targeted Public Distribution System, Integrated Child Development Services, Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman-PM POSHAN and Other Welfare Schemes in all States and Union Territories by 2024. It will be implemented in a phased manner.
Briefing media in New Delhi after the Cabinet meeting, Information and Broadcasting Minister Anurag Thakur said, said, Food Corporation of India and State Agencies are already engaged in procurement of fortified rice and so far nearly over 88 LMT of fortified rice has been procured for the supply and distribution. Mr. Thakur said, the entire cost of rice fortification of around two thousand 700 crore rupees per annum to be borne by the Centre.
Mar 09,2022: Western powers on Tuesday warned Russia against wrecking an almost completed deal on bringing the United States and Iran back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord, as Iran’s top negotiator was set to return from consultations in Tehran.
Eleven months of talks to restore the deal which lifted sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its nuclear program have reached their final stages.
But they have been complicated by a last-minute demand from Russia for guarantees from the United States that Western sanctions targeting Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine would not affect its business with Iran.
U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said Russia was seeking to reap extra benefits from its participation in the effort to restore the nuclear agreement, but it will not succeed.
Iran’s top negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani is due back in Vienna on Wednesday after unexpectedly returning to Tehran on Monday for consultations, an Iranian and a European official said.
The talks’ coordinator, Enrique Mora of the European Union, said on Monday the time had come for political decisions to be taken to end the negotiations.
“The window of opportunity is closing. We call on all sides to make the decisions necessary to close this deal now, and on Russia not to add extraneous conditions to its conclusion,” Britain, France and Germany said in a joint statement to the U.N. nuclear watchdog’s 35-nation Board of Governors.
Iran has sought to remove all sanctions and it wants guarantees from the United States that it will not abandon the agreement once more, after then-U.S. President Donald Trump walked out of the deal in 2018 and reimposed sanctions.
Diplomats have said until now that several differences still needed to be overcome in the talks, including the extent to which sanctions on Iran, notably its elite revolutionary guards, would be rolled back and what guarantees Washington would give if it were to again renege on the deal.
Two Western officials said there was now a final text on the table and those issues had been resolved.
While they couldn’t rule out further last-minute surprises, they said the last big open question was whether Russia’s demands were manageably narrow and limited to nuclear cooperation spelled out in the agreement, as Moscow’s envoy to the talks has told other parties, or much broader, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has described them.