ISI: Essential for National Interest

By Sajjad Shaukat

To defend the country and protect the people from external and internal threat is the primary aim of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) at this critical juncture, while Pakistan has been facing multiple subversive acts being conducted by the foreign enemies.

No doubt, every country has a superior intelligence agency to protect the national interest of the state. American CIA, Russian KJB, British MI-6 etc. might be cited as an instance. Just like other spy agencies, ISI keeps a vigilant eye on the borders, assesses the nefarious designs of the enemies and counters anti-Pakistan schemes.

Despite its limited resources, ISI has proved the most effective intelligence agency in safeguarding the national interests of Pakistan. It is owing to its accurate information and excellent performance that this agency has irked the eyes of India, Israel and the US which leave no stone unturned in raising false allegations against it as part of their unfinished agenda against Pakistan. While tarnishing the image of ISI, secret agencies of these countries, RAW, Mossad and CIA have been acting upon their anti-Pakistan plan.

Hyderabad riots: Blame game begins in Congress

IANS

Hyderabad: In a major embarrassment for the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh, a section of its leaders from Telangana have openly charged their own party colleagues from two other regions of being involved in the communal riots in Hyderabad.

Congress MP from Nizamabad Madhu Yashki Goud has said that the riots were a conspiracy by leaders from Andhra and Rayalaseema regions as those opposing the demand for statehood to Telangana had been warning Muslims that communal tensions would rise in the separate state.

“It is a conspiracy similar to the one against Chenna Reddy’s government to remove him from power,” said Yashki referring to the 1990 communal riots of Hyderabad. Rivals of former chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, both within the Congress and in the opposition, had alleged that he was behind the riots to dislodge Reddy from power.

Child labour in Gujarat’s cottonseed farms

Labour contractors and large landowners continue to employ children, often exposing them to vulnerable situations. Extreme poverty in Rajasthan’s tribal districts fuels the practice.

Pradeep Baisakh

In 2006 July a group of 19 adolescent boys and girls from Kherwada block of Udaipur district were hired through a middleman to work in a cottonseed farm in Mehsana district of Gujarat. There, according to the older girls in the group, the owner of the farm and his partners sexually harassed three of them. When the girls resisted, some of the group members including one girl were severally beaten and thrown out of the field. With no money in their pockets, the group had to walk back for three days and two nights to reach home.

Approximately one lakh children from the tribal-dominated southern districts of Rajasthan are trafficked to northern Gujarat to work in cottonseed fields every year. For many years now, there have been reports of sexual harassment, physical and mental torture, long hours and harsh conditions of work, low wages, as well as unsafe and unhygienic living conditions on these farms. Every year there have been cases of deaths of children; in 2009 there were as many as 11 such reports. Some of these are from snake bites and exposure to pesticides; but more gruesome than these are the rape-and-murder reports.

High incidence of child labour

India is the biggest cotton producing country in the world. Three states – Gujarat, Maharastra and Andhra Pradesh – contribute three-fourths of the total cotton production in the country. Gujarat is also among the leading cottonseed producing states in the country. Since much of the work in cottonseed farms is carried out manually, a large workforce is engaged in the work, primarily cross-pollination of seeds. It is estimated that about 2.5 lakh labourers are employed in about 25,000 acres of farm under cottonseed production in the state.

Air India Losses Plane Mess

A PARLIAMENTARY PANEL SAYS THE MERGER OF AIR INDIA WITH INDIAN AIRLINES IS A DISASTER. BUT MINISTER PRAFUL PATEL IS DEFIANT AND WANTS TO SINK MORE MONEY INTO IT, REPORTS SHANTANU GUHA RAY

THREE YEARS ago, on March 19, 2007, Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation Praful Patel announced his mega plan of being a game changer in the Indian skies by merging the state-owned Indian Airlines (then a profitable venture) and the perennially lossmaking Air India.

Mayday Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee is not keen on bailing out the national carrier

The idea, based on a recommendation to the Centre by consulting firm Accenture, was to create a monolith and spread its dragnet under the cloak of the ubiquitous Maharajah, the mascot of a hospitable Indian king, across the nation and the world. But last week – ironically on the same date – a parliamentary panel declared the merger a big failure, saying it had only messed the state carriers. It added that it would be difficult to sustain the controlling company NACIL (National Aviation Company of India Limited).

Attention Deficit Democracy

By Ralph Nader
Nader.org

A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion.

One yardstick by which to measure the decay in our country’s political, economic, and cultural life, is the answer to this question: Do the forces of power, which have demonstrably failed, become stronger after their widely perceived damage is common knowledge?

Economic decay is all around. Poverty, unemployment, foreclosures, job export, consumer debt, pension attrition, and crumbling infrastructure are well documented. The self-destruction of the Wall Street financial giants, with their looting and draining of trillions of other people’s money, have been headlines for two years. During and after their gigantic taxpayer bailouts from Washington, DC, the banks, et al, are still the most powerful force in determining the nature of proposed corrective legislation.

“The banks own this place,” says Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), evoking the opinion of many members of a supine Congress ready to pass weak consumer and investor protection legislation while leaving dominant fewer and larger banks.

There was no Mandir in Ayodhya before 19th century: Prof Harbans Mukhiya

By TCN News

Rampur: “As a historian I want to say that there was no Mandir in Ayodhya at all. Before 19th century there was not even imagination about the Mandir there but only after that it was propagated. No historian has written that Mughal emperors used the means of conversion for extension of their government. It is totally baseless that they brought down thousands of Mandirs and forced people to accept Islam” said famous historian and former professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Harbans Mukhiya.

He was delivering his extension lecture today on ‘Reasons behind spread of Islam in India’ at Raza Library in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh.

Tehran snubs Delhi: Indian FM, PM trips canceled

Rupee News

Indo-Iranian relations have hit a new nadir with visits by the FM, and even the PM being canceled due to the snub from the Iranians. The relations have plummeted since Delhi stabbed Iran at the IAEA (India votes against Iran at IAEA) and then launched an Iran specific satellite for Israel.

The geopolitical situation in the Greater Middle has changed. All the countries of the region are tired of Bharati (aka Indian) machinations and like all her neighbors are weary of Bharati hegemony.

Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan have already made decision on the dispensation in Kabul. That agreement was signed between the three countries in Teheran. That agreement was then taken to all the immediate neighbors of Afghanistan and it was endorsed in Istanbul (sans India). Those two agreements were instrumental in getting 62 countries to consecrate the Pakistani point of view of talking to the Taliban and putting in place a broad based Pakhtun government in Kabul which would not be inimical to Islamabad.

‘India plans 52 projects to control Pakistan’s water’

BUREWALA - Chairman Indus Water Treaty Council Hafiz Zahoor-ul-Hassan Dahr has said that previous 131 rounds of talks between Pakistan and India under Indus Water Treaty bore no fruits and the latest dialogue would meet the same result.

He also warned that Pakistan could become another Somalia and Ethiopia.

Talking to ‘The Nation’ on Monday, Zahoor pointed to various projects launched by India to divert the water flow of three rivers entering Pakistan from Occupied Kashmir and said these projects were aimed at controlling the water of Chenab, Jhelum and Indus rivers, which were illegal and a clear violation of Indus Water Treaty. He said India was constructing 52 illegal dams, including five large ones, of which as many as 32 small dams had already been completed while 12 others would be finalised in 2014.

Air Force works to instill ‘warrior culture’ in drone crews

New training aims to get personnel to feel they are constantly in combat, even if they are operating the Predators and Reapers flying over Afghanistan from the Nevada desert.

A Reaper drone comes in for a touch and go landing during a training program at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, to prepare more pilots for an expanded use of drones in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times / June 14, 2009)

By Julian E. Barnes

Reporting from Washington – As part of an effort to extend the military’s “warrior culture” to unmanned planes, the Air Force is overhauling how it trains the crews that operate its rapidly growing fleet of Predators, Reapers and other remotely piloted aircraft.

The changes in training will affect hundreds of personnel who fly the unmanned aircraft remotely over war zones from distant bases and control their powerful cameras and targeting systems.

17 Indians get death penalty in United Arab Emirates

Deutsche Presse-Agentur

New Delhi - A court in the United Arab Emirates has sentenced 17 Indian nationals to death for killing a Pakistani man in an attack last year, news reports said Tuesday.

The murder took place in Sharjah, an emirate north of Dubai, in January 2009 following a dispute over an illegal liquor business, the Times of India reported.

A shariah court, which applies Islamic law, sentenced the 17 men to death after evidence, including DNA tests, showed they had stabbed the victim to death, the report said.

The convicted men are aged between 17 and 30 years.

It was the highest number of death sentences handed down at one time in the Emirates, the PTI news agency reported.

Appeasing India likely to be US miscalculation

THE DAWN

The usual tirade of Anti-Pakistan venom continues to flow from the sensational Indian media. The latest rhetoric is based upon its chagrin at Washington for not succumbing to Delhi’s blackmail and not accepting its pontificating on Afghanistan.

Dialogue with Pakistan ‘very successful, much broader’: US

WASHINGTON: The US had a ‘successful’ strategic dialogue with Pakistan this week, which characterised a “much different, broader relationship based on mutual interest and respect,” the US State Department said on Friday. “We have gone beyond the security lens that had been and remains a key component, but not just now the only lens through which you can evaluate the US-Pakistani relationship,” State for Public Affairs Assistant Secretary PJ Crowley said. He was speaking a day after the US, led by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Pakistan, led by Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, concluded two days of extensive discussions on advancing partnership between the two countries. The civilian component of the strategy is geared towards identifying ways to meet the needs working with Pakistan. app

Obama Team Is Divided on Anti-Terror Tactics

WASHINGTON – Senior lawyers in the Obama administration are deeply divided over some of the counterterrorism powers they inherited from former President George W. Bush, according to interviews and a review of legal briefs.

In defending Guantánamo, the Bush administration said the president could imprison people without trial as wartime detainees.

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

The rift has been most pronounced between top lawyers in the State Department and the Pentagon, though it has also involved conflicts among career Justice Department lawyers and political appointees throughout the national security agencies.

Pakistan in ‘civil nuclear deal’ with China

Two plants with a capacity of 640 megawatts to be set up in Chashma
China to provide 82% of total $1.912bn financing

By Sajid Chaudhry

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has entered a civil nuclear deal with China for the establishment of two nuclear power projects of 640 megawatts in Chashma, Daily Times has learnt.

The breakthrough deal – under which Pakistan would be provided a loan, technology and installation facilities – was finalised ahead of the latest round of the Pak-US strategic dialogue, as the federal cabinet granted financial approval at a meeting on March 24.

Sources privy to the deal said the federal cabinet had approved an inter-government framework agreement on the financing of ‘Chashma Nuclear Power Project 3′ and ‘Chashma Nuclear Power Project 4′ with China.

Hindu-Muslim clashes injure scores in India

Associated Press

Authorities fired tear gas and warning shots and swung batons Monday to disperse crowds of angry Hindus and Muslims who attacked each other.

The rioters attacked each other with stones and clubs in southern India, where more than 75 people have been injured.

Communal rioting broke out Saturday in Hyderabad, capital of southern Andhra Pradesh state, and about 1,600 paramilitary soldiers and police have been deployed to calm the situation, A.K. Khan, city police commissioner, told reporters.

Hyderabad has a population of 8 million, nearly 40 percent Muslims. The last major Hindu-Muslim rioting in Hyderabad took place in 1990, killing 200 people. The city had been mostly peaceful since then.

Pakistani Taliban ready for Osama’s plan

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - After a successful series of meetings in Washington last week, the United States and Pakistan have deepened their strategic relationship aimed at broad-based military cooperation for an American victory in Afghanistan. A dialogue process has also been set up with a handpicked team of the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), the second-largest force in the Pashtun-dominated south of Afghanistan after the Taliban.

United States President Barack Obama flew to Afghanistan at the weekend in a surprise visit to impress on President Hamid Karzai that effective political policy is needed to reinforce the military campaign against the Taliban-led insurgency this summer.