Haryana pineline scam: Deputy commissioner orders FIR against 5 govt officials, many others

CHANDIGARH: Jhajjar deputy commissioner, AjitBalajiJoshi, has ordered registration of an FIR against around a dozen persons, including five agriculture department officials, in the subsidy scam related to laying of underground pipelines.

Joshi told The Times of India on Saturday that they have also sought comments from the agriculture department in the matter. FIR has been sought against former assistant soil conservation officer Neena Sehwag, agriculture inspector Jagbir Singh, agriculture development officer Jain Singh Mann, accountant Satya Prakash, another employee Dharmpal, some farmers and officials of a Charkhi Dadri-based private firm for alleged involvement in the scam, he said.

The action follows an inquiry conducted by Jhajjar city magistrate, who detected that over Rs 1 lakh subsidy was claimed by five farmers in connivance with officers of agriculture department and the private firm. "There is possibility of more such cases coming to light," the inquiry report maintained.

According to official records, over Rs 25 crore was disbursed to 444 farmers as subsidy through the firm, for installing underground pipelines for irrigation purposes in Godhi village of Jhajjar district. The agriculture department has ordered physical verification in all these cases.

A retired agriculture economist, Ram Kanwar, had recently alleged a Rs 200 crore scam in subsidy to farmers by the agriculture department, for installation of sprinkler sets and laying underground pipelines. However, the department has been denying the scam.

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Pictures We Love: Best of January

Photograph by Dieu Nalio Chery, AP

The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck near Port au Prince, Haiti, in January 2010 so devastated the country that recovery efforts are still ongoing.

Professional dancer Georges Exantus, one of the many casualties of that day, was trapped in his flattened apartment for three days, according to news reports. After friends dug him out, doctors amputated his right leg below the knee. With the help of a prosthetic leg, Exantus is able to dance again. (Read about his comeback.)

Why We Love It

"This is an intimate photo, taken in the subject's most personal space as he lies asleep and vulnerable, perhaps unaware of the photographer. The dancer's prosthetic leg lies in the foreground as an unavoidable reminder of the hardships he faced in the 2010 earthquake. This image makes me want to hear more of Georges' story."—Ben Fitch, associate photo editor

"This image uses aesthetics and the beauty of suggestion to tell a story. We are not given all the details in the image, but it is enough to make us question and wonder."—Janna Dotschkal, associate photo editor

Published February 1, 2013

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Gun Violence 'Depletes Precious Natural Resource'












It took the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, to prompt lawmakers to call for stricter gun legislation. But the reality is that in a city like Chicago, where 515 murders took place last year and more than 100 shooting incidents have occurred since January 1, gun violence is an ongoing issue and it has been for years. Only, these shootings have become so common that they don't make national headlines.


"We lost a classroom full of children in Connecticut which sparked national outrage that needs to be translated into action, but in Chicago, we sometimes lose a dozen or more young people every weekend," Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Illinois), who serves the Chicago area, said in a statement. "Too many bullets and too many guns are killing the next generation and we have got to make it stop."


Gutierrez, like many others, believe that any debate about gun violence shouldn't just take into account mass shootings that make headline news. It should also consider the chronic gun violence that takes place on a daily basis across the U.S.


In Chicago's case, many of the victims are young minorities growing up in poor, gang-ridden neighborhoods on the south and west side of the city.


Just earlier this week a 15-year-old girl who performed at President Barack Obama's recent inauguration was gunned down, The Washington Post reported.


The teen, Hadiya Pendleton, was hanging out in a park with about a dozen other young people when she was shot. Two other victims were reportedly wounded. By all accounts she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Reports indicate that the gunman was not even aiming at her.


And Pendleton is just the latest example. Chicago police officer Ron Holt lost his son, Blair, to gun violence in the spring of 2007. The 16-year-old was shot and killed while riding a bus after school.


Holt now works with young people in the community, particularly minorities at an increased risk of engaging in dangerous behavior, to encourage them to focus on their education instead of turning to violence.


"I explain to them that if they continue to ascribe to this diabolical idea of resolving conflict with firearms they're depleting the most precious natural resource in the community, and that is them," Holt said.


What's clear is that the root of the gun problem is not just the guns. There are several factors that play a role, many of which are rarely discussed. For example, for minority youth living in urban communities characterized by poverty, violence, particularly gun violence, tends to be chronic. And the groups largely impacted tend to be African American and Hispanic.


A lot of that has to do with acculturation, according to Rahsmia Zatar, executive director of Strong Youth, a gang prevention and intervention organization. There is a sense that it's difficult to move beyond one's cultural sphere.


As a result, minorities often tend to gravitate toward other young minorities in similar situations, and turn to violence to gain a sense of control, however false it really is.






Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo







"It's easy to fall victim to feeling a sense of empowerment through violence," Zatar said. "They feel they have limited opportunities and they don't have a sense of 'I can achieve,' [or] that there is something here for me that's better."


According to the 2011 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 30 percent of Chicago's African-American population and nearly 27 percent of Hispanics live below the poverty line. Perhaps more importantly, blacks and whites remain largely segregated, with African-Americans making up the vast majority of neighborhoods in the south, and whites comprising most of the north. Latinos are somewhat more mixed, often living in "buffer" communities between blacks and whites, which could exacerbate the pressure to conform to two cultures, neither of which is entirely comfortable.


These various enclaves also suffer from a distinct gang problem. Chicago Police Commissioner Garry McCarthy told Reuters the city is plagued by the breakup of larger more established gangs into new factions that are fighting over everything from turf to money.


Then there's the city's illicit gun issue, which is bigger than New York's or Los Angeles' despite strict laws to limit weapons. Gun shops are actually outlawed in Chicago, as are assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Handguns were even banned until 2010.


Still, in a place like Chicago it's handguns doing the most damage. According to statistics from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, most of the guns they recovered in Illinois were pistols, followed by revolvers and rifles. Machine guns come in a distant sixth.


Why so many guns? Gun laws in neighboring communities are not as strict, and firearms make their way into the city. According to a recent article by The New York Times, officials "seized 7,400 guns [in Chicago] in crimes or unpermitted uses last year (compared with 3,285 in New York City), and have confiscated 574 guns just since Jan. 1 — 124 of them last week alone."


And while Chicago residents are required to report the loss or theft of a handgun, that same law does not apply to all of Illinois, so a stolen firearm could easily make its way into Chicago without the owner ever reporting it missing.


The dynamics created in poor minority communities like those in Chicago combined with the sheer number of guns that make their way into such a city bear out in the overall statistics.


According to the Bureau of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey, African Americans were disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders between 1980 and 2008. They were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and seven times more likely than whites to commit homicides.


Latinos don't fare much better. According to the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Hispanic advocacy organization, "Today in America, every three hours a young person is killed by firearm violence. Every 14 hours, that teen or child is Latino."


Young Latinos are especially likely to be impacted by gang violence in places like Chicago. Nationally, Hispanics are also more likely than non-Hispanics to be victims of violent crimes committed by gang members.


The impact of guns on the Latino community may explain why they're inclined to favor increased gun control. According to the Pew Research Center, while 57 percent of whites think it's more important to protect the rights of Americans to own guns than to protect gun ownership, only 29 percent of Latinos feel the same way.


Holt would certainly like to see something change. Several days after his son was killed, he received a voicemail. It was then-Senator Barack Obama. The young lawmaker had called Holt to express his condolences and to promise that if there was anything he could do in the future to help curb gun violence, he was prepared to do it. The two never spoke on the phone, but Holt remembers the message.




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VA study finds more veterans committing suicide



The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans’ suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


“There is a perception that we have a veterans’ suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true,” said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. “The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it.” The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says.

As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says.

VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said his agency would continue to strengthen suicide prevention efforts. “The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” he said in a statement.

The study follows long-standing criticism that the agency has moved far too slowly even to figure out how many veterans kill themselves. “If the VA wants to get its arms around this problem, why does it have such a small number of people working on it?” asked retired Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist. “This is a start, but it is a faint start. It is not enough.”

Bossarte said much work remains to be done to understand the data, especially concerning the suicide risk among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. They constitute a minority of an overall veteran population that skews older, but recent studies have suggested that those who served in recent conflicts are 30 percent to 200 percent more likely to commit suicide than their ­non-veteran peers.

An earlier VA estimate of 18 veterans’ suicides a day, which was disclosed during a 2008 lawsuit, has long been cited by lawmakers and the department’s critics as evidence of the agency’s failings. A federal appeals court pointed to it as evidence of the VA’s “unchecked incompetence.” The VA countered that the number, based on old and incomplete data, was not reliable.

To calculate the veterans’ suicide rate, Bossarte and his sole assistant spent more than two years, starting in October 2010, cajoling state governments to turn over death certificates for the more than 400,000 Americans who have killed themselves since 1999. Forty-two states have provided data or agreed to do so; the study is based on information from 21 that has been assembled into a database.

Bossarte said that men in their 50s — a group that includes a large percentage of the veteran population— have been especially hard-hit by the national increase in suicide. The veterans’ suicide rate is about three times the overall national rate, but about the same percentage of male veterans in their 50s kill themselves as do non-veteran men of that age, according to the VA data.

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S. Korea, US in naval drill amid N. Korea tensions






SEOUL: South Korea and the United States will hold a joint naval exercise next week, a report said Saturday, a move seen as a warning to North Korea ahead of its widely-expected nuclear test.

The three-day exercise involving a US nuclear submarine and other warships will begin on Monday in the Sea of Japan (East Sea) off the South Korean port city of Pohang, Yonhap news agency reported.

"It will include anti-submarine and anti-air trainings and maritime manoeuverings," a military official was quoted as saying in the report.

The exercise comes as tensions run high on the Korean peninsula, with Pyongyang threatening to carry out its third nuclear test in response to UN sanctions imposed for a long-range rocket launch it carried out in December.

The North said the launch was a scientific mission aimed at placing a satellite in orbit, but most of the world saw it as a disguised ballistic missile test.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff Jung Seung-Jo said Friday the drill aims to test combat readiness between Seoul and Washington while guarding against possible North Korean provocations involving submarines, according to Yonhap.

A 6,900-tonne US nuclear submarine USS San Francisco and a 9,800-tonne Aegis destroyer USS Shiloh were being mobilised for the exercise.

"The presence of a US nuclear submarine here would itself serve as a message to North Korea", Jung said.

North Korea has reportedly covered the entrance to a tunnel at its nuclear test site in an apparent effort to avoid satellite monitoring of its ongoing preparations for a possibly imminent detonation.

A camouflage net was placed on the tunnel entrance at Punggye-ri in the northeastern North Korea, the site of the two previous nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.

But a government source in Seoul said that increased activity had been spotted at the site, which has three tunnel entrances and multiple support buildings.

"At a tunnel in the southern part of the test site in Punggye-ri, we've found that work presumed to be part of preparations for a nuclear test has entered its final stage," the unnamed source told Yonhap on Saturday.

"The North may conduct the test at either the western or southern tunnels. But the activities spotted near the southern one could be aimed at distracting us from the more likely place of the western tunnel."

-AFP/ac



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ED raids in 3 cities, hawala money seized

JALANDHAR: The enforcement directorate (ED) conducted simultaneous raids in Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Delhi on Friday and recovered money received through hawala channels. It is learnt that the directorate also seized documents pertaining to hawala transactions running into a few hundred crores.

The raid in Jalandhar was conducted at Happy Forex Pvt Ltd in Adda Hoshiarpur in the early afternoon. The team was accompanied by a heavy posse of CRPF and Punjab Police. They conducted thorough search in the office when according to eye witnesses one person escaped with a bag from the roof of the foreign exchange company.

Though ED officials remained tight-lipped about the raids, sources revealed that these people were on ED radar for a long and were carrying out hawala transaction at the behest of some individuals as well as some companies based abroad. These hawala operators were being used for sending funds in the country for anti-national activities.

Sources disclosed it is also being investigated if these people were conducting transactions at the behest of drug lord Raja Kandhola or other drug peddlers. Kandhola is main accused in the recovery of 40kg synthetic drug ice.

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Pictures We Love: Best of January

Photograph by Dieu Nalio Chery, AP

The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck near Port au Prince, Haiti, in January 2010 so devastated the country that recovery efforts are still ongoing.

Professional dancer Georges Exantus, one of the many casualties of that day, was trapped in his flattened apartment for three days, according to news reports. After friends dug him out, doctors amputated his right leg below the knee. With the help of a prosthetic leg, Exantus is able to dance again. (Read about his comeback.)

Why We Love It

"This is an intimate photo, taken in the subject's most personal space as he lies asleep and vulnerable, perhaps unaware of the photographer. The dancer's prosthetic leg lies in the foreground as an unavoidable reminder of the hardships he faced in the 2010 earthquake. This image makes me want to hear more of Georges' story."—Ben Fitch, associate photo editor

"This image uses aesthetics and the beauty of suggestion to tell a story. We are not given all the details in the image, but it is enough to make us question and wonder."—Janna Dotschkal, associate photo editor

Published February 1, 2013

Read More..

Gov's Handling of Sandusky Case Under Investigation













The newly-elected attorney general of Pennsylvania is going after the state's governor, Tom Corbett, who was attorney general when child sex allegations against Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky were first brought forward.


Kathleen Kane, a Democrat who was sworn in as attorney general on Jan. 15, said that she will name a special prosecutor in the coming days to investigate Corbett's handling of the Sandusky case. Corbett is a Republican.


The investigation will look specifically at why it took the attorney general's office three years to bring criminal charges against Sandusky while he continued to have access to children.


"Attorney General Kane will appoint a special prosecutor to lead the office's internal investigation into how the Sandusky child abuse investigation was handled by the Office of the Attorney General," Kane's office said in a statement released today.


Corbett's attorney general's office was first notified of the allegations against Sandusky in 2008 when a high school student told his mother and school that Sandusky had molested him. The local district attorney passed the allegation on to the attorney general, then Corbett. Corbett convened a grand jury.






Mario Tama; Patrick Smith/Getty Images











Jerry Sandusky Insists Innocence Before Sentencing Watch Video









Jerry Sandusky Sentencing: Why Did He Release Statement? Watch Video









Jerry Sandusky Claims Innocence in Audio Statement Watch Video





It wasn't until 2011 that sex abuse charges were filed against Sandusky while Corbett had since become governor. Sandusky was convicted on 45 counts of sex abuse in June 2012.


The charges sent shockwaves throughout Pennsylvania, as Penn State's president, two top officials, and legendary coach Joe Paterno all lost their jobs over the scandal.


"Why did it take 33 months to get Sandusky off the streets? Was the use of a grand jury the right decision? Why were there so few resources dedicated to the investigation? Were the best practices implemented?" the statement from Kane's office read.


"At the end of this investigation, we will know the answers to these questions and be able to tell the people of Pennsylvania the facts and give them answers that they deserve," the statement said.


Describing an interview Kane gave the New York Times, the Times said Kane suggested that Corbett did not want to upset voters or donors in the Penn State community before his gubernatorial run in 2009.


Corbett has denied those suggestions. His office did not immediately return calls for comment.


Kane's office preemptively fought back against the idea that the investigation is politically motivated. Kane, a Democrat, defeated the incumbent attorney general, Linda Kelly, a Republican in November 2011. Corbett is a Republican.


"The speculation that this is about politics is insane," a staff member in Kane's office told ABC News today. "You go anywhere in Pennsylvania and anywhere across the country and you'll find individuals asking, 'why did it take three years? Why was there a grand jury? Why make these kids talk to 30 different people about what happened?"



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VA study finds more veterans committing suicide



The VA study indicates that more than two-thirds of the veterans who commit suicide are 50 or older, suggesting that the increase in veterans’ suicides is not primarily driven by those returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


“There is a perception that we have a veterans’ suicide epidemic on our hands. I don’t think that is true,” said Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist with the VA who did the study. “The rate is going up in the country, and veterans are a part of it.” The number of suicides overall in the United States increased by nearly 11 percent between 2007 and 2010, the study says.

As a result, the percentage of veterans who die by suicide has decreased slightly since 1999, even though the total number of veterans who kill themselves has gone up, the study says.

VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said his agency would continue to strengthen suicide prevention efforts. “The mental health and well-being of our courageous men and women who have served the nation is the highest priority for VA, and even one suicide is one too many,” he said in a statement.

The study follows long-standing criticism that the agency has moved far too slowly even to figure out how many veterans kill themselves. “If the VA wants to get its arms around this problem, why does it have such a small number of people working on it?” asked retired Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist. “This is a start, but it is a faint start. It is not enough.”

Bossarte said much work remains to be done to understand the data, especially concerning the suicide risk among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. They constitute a minority of an overall veteran population that skews older, but recent studies have suggested that those who served in recent conflicts are 30 percent to 200 percent more likely to commit suicide than their ­non-veteran peers.

An earlier VA estimate of 18 veterans’ suicides a day, which was disclosed during a 2008 lawsuit, has long been cited by lawmakers and the department’s critics as evidence of the agency’s failings. A federal appeals court pointed to it as evidence of the VA’s “unchecked incompetence.” The VA countered that the number, based on old and incomplete data, was not reliable.

To calculate the veterans’ suicide rate, Bossarte and his sole assistant spent more than two years, starting in October 2010, cajoling state governments to turn over death certificates for the more than 400,000 Americans who have killed themselves since 1999. Forty-two states have provided data or agreed to do so; the study is based on information from 21 that has been assembled into a database.

Bossarte said that men in their 50s — a group that includes a large percentage of the veteran population— have been especially hard-hit by the national increase in suicide. The veterans’ suicide rate is about three times the overall national rate, but about the same percentage of male veterans in their 50s kill themselves as do non-veteran men of that age, according to the VA data.

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Chua Chu Kang TC new managing agent's plans to improve services






SINGAPORE: Feedback from residents of estates managed by Chua Chu Kang Town Council will be tracked more efficiently, while officers can directly record defects into the estate maintenance system using their smartphones.

These are some of the changes planned by the town council's new managing agent, CPG Facilities Management (CPGFM).

It was appointed following an open tender and took over on 1 February from UGL Services Esmaco Operations, whose contract with the town council ended on 31 January.

CPGFM, whose contract is for four years, will manage the common property of more than 70,000 residential and commercial units in Chua Chu Kang Group Representation Constituency (GRC).

There are five divisions in the GRC - Bukit Gombak, Chua Chu Kang, Keat Hong, Nanyang and Yew Tee and Hong Kah North.

The managing agent plans to leverage technology to improve services.

Mr Zaqy Mohamad, chairman of Chua Chu Kang Town Council, said the transition and handover have been smooth and seamless.

CPGFM is a subsidiary of CPG Corporation, which was formed in April 1999 with the corporatisation of the former Public Works Department.

It is also the managing agent of Ang Mo Kio and Tampines town councils.

- CNA/ir



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