Saravanan's Blog

Source:  http://www.skynews.com.au/topstories/article.aspx?id=790040&vId= 'Height of callousness?' South African prosecutors have charged 270 mine workers with the murder of 34 striking colleagues shot dead by police, in a decision panned as 'madness'. Police said they acted in self defence when they opened fire on workers at a platinum mine outside Rustenburg, northwest of Johannesburg, on August 16 killing 34, after a stand-off that had already killed 10 including two police officers. The incident was the worst day of police violence in South Africa since the end of white-minority apartheid rule in 1994. Prosecuting authorities said the 270 detained workers would face trial for the murder of their colleagues. 'T he court today charged all the workers with murder, under the common purpose law,' the spokesman for the prosecutor's office Frank Lesenyego said. He did not give details saying they would be revealed in court next week. J u...

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/7589582/Ships-ignored-survivors-pleas Asylum seekers who were plucked from the sea as their friends drowned around them say five ships passed them during their two days in the ocean but refused their pleas to stop to help. Muhammad Zahir, 25, told reporters on the dock at the Indonesian port of Merak that, as 150 refugees floated in the ocean, one boat came close enough for the crew to speak to them, only to say they would not pick them up. The refugees, all Hazaras from Afghanistan and Pakistan, told traumatic stories of watching relatives die in the ocean after their flimsy vessel sank and the Indonesian crew swam away. Mr Zahir said his brother and his sister, Hameeda, had both died, along with perhaps 10 other women and children. " My sister, she was 29 years old. I was about to help her. But inside the water without any facilities, how could we help her? I was like, 'No, please don't go'." "People are gon...

http://focustaiwan.tw/ShowNews/WebNews_Detail.aspx?ID=201208300033&Type=aIPL Taipei, Aug. 30 (CNA) Taiwan believes the United States' decision to officially use the Japanese name for the disputed Tiaoyutai Islands is unrelated to the islands' sovereignty and does not signify a U.S. stance, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) said Thursday. Under the premise that the U.S. says it does not take a position on the uninhabited rocky islands, the government believes the name does not imply a U.S. stance on sovereignty of the islands, MOFA spokesman Steve Hsia said at a regular media briefing. The U.S. has called the islands in the East China Sea, which are claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan, the Senkaku Islands. The U.S.' official name of the islands has come to the forefront in recent days as tensions over the territorial dispute between China and Japan have escalated. Addressing the U.S.' consistent statement that the island chain falls under t...

Pic courtesy: www.newshopper.sulekha.com Omar Abdullah with Family Source: http://kashmirhumanrights.blogspot.in/2012/08/terrifying-generation.html   Omar Abdullah owes it to his own future to regain the lost confidence of his nearest next-generation      It was Tufail Mattoo's martyrdom that defined the 2010 summer uprising in the Kashmir Valley and, two years later, it is the terrified look of Faizan Ahmed Sofi in police custody that defines the undiluted cruelty of the state and the regime. Obviously, nothing has changed since the time when Tufail, carrying his school bag on way to his home, was felled by indiscriminate police firing that eventually went on to score a dubious 'century' of casualties. It may be only a coincidence but it is gruesome enough that a flowering generation of Kashmiri youth happened to be at the receiving end of state terrorism under a regime headed by one from their nearest older generation. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah's p...

Pic courtesy: http://www.topnews.in Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/article3799589.ece?homepage=true by PRATIM RANJAN BOSE The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) on coal block allotment to private parties amounts to a very damaging accusation of financial irregularity. Unlike some other scams — such as the much-publicised securities scam, fodder scam or even the latest 2G scam — where a section of the business and politics class stood to gain, ‘coalgate’ can unsettle the high and mighty across the board. Hence, there are strong doubts about whether the beneficiaries of this staggering scam will ever be taken to task. The indications were clear in the rejoinder issued by the Union Coal Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal last week, elaborating the roadblocks in introducing competitive bidding for block allotment. HOW IT HAPPENED States such as Rajasthan, Chhatisgarh and West Bengal have opposed a bidding process, Jaiswal said. This has left t...

Source: http://links.org.au/node/2997 By  Leonard Gentle , director of the International Labour Research and Information Group (South Africa) PIC courtesy:  http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/51945 August 23, 2012 --  ILRIG  -- The story of Marikana has so far been painted shallowly as an inter-union spat. In the first few days after the  August16 police killing of  34 striking mineworkers , employed by the Lonmin mining corporation, and the shock and horror of watching people being massacred on TV, there have correctly been howls of anger and grief. Of course no one wants to take responsibility because to do so would be to acknowledge blame. Some pundits have even gone the way of warning at anyone “pointing figures” or “stoking anger”. That buffoon, African National Congress Youth League leader Julius Malema, stepped forward as if scripted, and promptly lent credibility to those warnings. So South African President Jacob Zuma’s setting up of a...

Source: http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=86618 The Department of   Electronics and Information Technology ( DeitY ), Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has approved and notified two important frameworks to ensure effective  citizen engagement and communication with  all stakeholders using  various offline  as well as online channels including Social Media.             As more and more  projects  are  getting implemented, an increasing need has been felt for wider and deeper participation of an engagement with all stakeholders especially public at large to ensure that citizen centricity  is maintained in all projects.  To enable and support this goal, the Citizen Engagement Framework for e-Governance Projects has been developed for all government agencies.  There is now a   con...

Pic courtesy:  http://www.eutimes.net By Andrei Mikhailov Source: http://english.pravda.ru/russia/economics/16-08-2012/121899-kursk_nato-0/ August is a black month for the Russian Navy. On August 12, 2000 the nuclear submarine "Kursk" sank, on August 30, 2003 submarine "K-159" sank in the Barents Sea, on August 7 of 2005 bathyscaphe "AC-28" almost sank off the coast of Kamchatka. The loss of "Kursk" 12 years ago still causes heated discussions: how could this happen? At the time, "Pravda.Ru" was one of the first (if not the first) of the Russian media outlets that published the most horrible theory of death of the missile submarine a year after the tragedy. A group of Russian 'conceptual' scientists thought that the submarine was killed by a collision with a foreign military submarine, presumably American. They say the report turned up on the desks of the top officials of the country. However, there has been no re...

Source:  http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/featurenews/view/1220919/1/.html TOKYO: The governor of Tokyo wants to buy them, Taiwan says it would like them back and China has made  their return a national priority. But for the Kurihara family, the islands Japan knows as Senkaku are just a bit of land they would really rather sell. "The conflict is escalating more and more," Hiroyuki Kurihara told AFP in an interview  about the islands, known in China as Diaoyu, where Japanese nationalists landed Sunday after a similar venture by pro-Beijing activists. All 14 involved in that action were deported Friday in an apparent bid by Tokyo to head off a potentially destabilising row with Beijing. "We are worried that the government cannot cope with the situation over the islands," said Kurihara. His powerful merchant family are the legal owners of four of the five islands in the Senkakus, an archipelago some 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles) from Tokyo b...