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Times Top10: Today’s Top News Headlines and Latest News from India & across the World

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Times Top10: Today’s Top News Headlines and Latest News from India & across the World

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5 THINGS FIRST

PM Modi to virtually inaugurate and lay foundation of Shrimad Rajchandra Mission projects in Gujarat; Lok Sabha to consider Bill to curb piracy in the high seas; Supreme Court to resume hearing Shiv Sena split case; Mamata Banerjee likely to visit Delhi on four-day tour; Delhi HC to hear Umar Khalid’s bail plea in the Delhi riots case

1. Law to protect your data goes back on waitlist
1. Law to protect your data goes back on waitlist
  • Back to square one: Five years after the Modi government began the process for enacting a law to protect personal data, it withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill from Parliament on Wednesday. This happened as a joint parliamentary committee suggested 81 changes to it.
  • What’s in it: The Bill sought to regulate how an individual’s data can be used by companies and the government. It defined personal data as information that contains features to ascertain a person’s identity.
  • The problem: The Bill allowed government agencies to access identifiable information, which the parliamentary panel and the Opposition found as giving sweeping powers to the government under opaque conditions, citing national security.
  • The law, had it been enacted, would reportedly have required big social media platforms — like Facebook and Twitter — to offer an identity-verification option, a potentially precedent-setting effort to rein in the spread of “fake news”.
  • The journey: The government appointed a committee under retired Supreme Court Justice BN Srikrishna to study and recommend a draft data protection bill. The Committee submitted its report in 2018. The government tabled the Bill in 2019.
  • Disapproval: The government’s Bill deviated so much from the committee’s recommendations that Justice Srikrishna decried it as “Orwellian”. Parliament forced it to be sent in 2020 to the standing committee, which submitted its report in 2021, recommending 81 amendments and more than 150 corrections and improvements. Among the changes it recommended was dropping “Personal” from the Bill’s title.
  • Why junk the Bill? In February this year, the Economic Times reported that the government was considering bringing a new data protection bill as the joint parliamentary panel suggested so many changes that it would change the original draft of the government, which could legally only tweak the recommended Bill.
2. Who decides what are ‘freebies’?
2. Who decides what are ‘freebies’?
Observing that “no political party would oppose freebies”, the Supreme Court (SC) on Wednesday directed “all the parties to make suggestions” for constituting an expert body comprising stakeholders like the Niti Aayog, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Law Commission, Finance Commission as well as members of the ruling and opposition parties to give suggestions to curtail election time freebies.

What the SC said

  • Terming the suggestion of directing the Election Commission of India (ECI) to frame a model manifesto — in which parties will have to disclose the source of funding for their freebies — as “empty formalities”, the SC made it clear that “this is a serious issue and the ECI and government can’t say that we can’t do anything into this” and “they have to consider the issue and give suggestions.”

What the Centre said

  • Observing that “these populist promises have an adverse effect on voters”, the Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta, who was representing the Centre added that offering freebies “is how we head towards economic disasters” and asked that the “ECI should apply (its) mind.” Which was ironic since the BJP, the ruling party at the Centre, was the forefront of offering election time freebies during the assembly polls in five states earlier this year, including in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Punjab.

How much do they cost

  • The BJP, which returned to power in UP, had offered free electricity for irrigation, two crore smartphones and tablets for students and two free cylinders to Ujjwala beneficiaries for Holi and Diwali every year — all of which are expected to cost the exchequer Rs 26,000 crore.
  • The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which had promised a largesse of 300 units of free power to every household during campaigning in Punjab, implemented it after coming to power in the state, from July 1 — with the estimated cost to the state being an additional power subsidy of over Rs 14,000 crore, taking its total power subsidy bill to Rs 25,000 crore.

But are freebies free?

  • Not really — since the money to fund those freebies usually comes from the state’s coffers, which depend on the taxes collected. In effect, the people fund their own ‘freebies’.
3. Is SC stamp on ED powers ‘dangerous’?
3. Is SC stamp on ED powers ‘dangerous’?
  • Challenging SC verdict: At least 17 Opposition parties released a statement calling the Supreme Court judgement, upholding the powers of the ED in the money laundering law, the PMLA, as “dangerous”. The 2019-amendment to the PMLA gave more powers to the ED.
  • The Supreme Court dismissed nearly 250 petitions, backed by the Opposition parties, alleging that the law had become a tool of political vendetta by the government. Some of the parties plan to move the SC for a review.
  • Change in script: A little later, news came that the ED had sealed the office of the Young Indian Limited, the company that runs the National Herald newspaper, the Congress’s mouthpiece. This came a day after the ED raided the offices of National Herald in Delhi and 11 other locations in the alleged money laundering case. The ED action followed extended questioning of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi.
  • Congress HQ garrisoned: Sealing of the Young Indian office also saw unusually heavy deployment of police and paramilitary forces outside the Congress headquarters and adjacent 10, Janpath, which is the residence of Sonia Gandhi in Delhi. Later, the Congress said forces were also deployed outside 12, Tughlaq Road, the residence of Rahul Gandhi, who was in Karnataka on Wednesday.
  • ‘Government scared’: The Congress called the ED action and deployment of force preventing the party members from entering the party headquarters as “vendetta politics”. Congress’s Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Jairam Ramesh said the government is scared over the party’s call for a nationwide protest in Delhi against unabated rise in prices, levying GST on essential items and “an epidemic of unemployment” on Thursday.
4. Can rebel MLAs escape disqualification?
4. Can rebel MLAs escape disqualification?
India’s top court on Wednesday asked the Shiv Sena faction led by Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde to redraft his submissions on petitions filed by the rival Uddhav Thackeray group on constitutional issues arising due to the recent political crisis in the state.

Petitions

  • The Supreme Court was hearing petitions filed by the Sena and its rebel MLAs on constitutional issues of splits, merger, defection and disqualification.

The Thackeray faction

  • Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Thackeray faction, said the MLAs who have sided with the Shinde camp can save themselves from disqualification under the tenth schedule of the Constitution only by merging the splinter group with another party.
  • They have no other defence available, Sibal told the court. “Once you have been elected it does not mean the umbilical cord with the political party is severed and that you have nothing to do with your political party,” Sibal argued.

The Shinde faction

  • Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for the Shinde faction, said the anti-defection law is not a weapon for the leaders who have lost the numbers to lock their members.
  • “It is not a case of defection. Today it is the case of intra-party rebellion and nobody has given voluntary membership from the party,” he said.
  • After hearing the submissions, the bench said it would hear the matter on Thursday.
6. Once BJP’s poster boy, now Mamata’s minister
6. Once BJP’s poster boy, now Mamata’s minister
Nine MLAs, including Babul Supriyo, took oath as ministers in West Bengal on Wednesday, in a major reshuffle of chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s cabinet that came amid her party, the Trinamool Congress (TMC), facing the heat over the arrest of senior minister Partha Chatterjee by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with the school jobs scam.

New faces

  • Besides Supriyo, Snehasis Chakraborty, Partha Bhowmik, Udayan Guha and Pradip Majumdar were sworn in as cabinet ministers at Raj Bhavan by Governor La Ganesan.
  • Birbaha Hansda, a tribal leader, and Biplab Roy Chowdhury took oath as ministers of state with independent charge. Tajmul Hossain and Satyajit Barman were sworn in as ministers of state.

From BJP to TMC

  • Supriyo has had a roller-coaster ride, from being a popular playback singer to BJP’s poster boy in West Bengal to joining the TMC government.
  • He started off as a city banker who rose to be a BJP minister at the Centre after a chance meeting with yoga guru Ramdev, but suddenly found himself out in the cold after losing an assembly election from Tollygunge last year by a huge margin of 50,000 votes.
  • However, Supriyo bounced back to win the prestigious Ballygunge constituency in April for the TMC, which he joined in September 2021 in a surprise move.
7. ‘It may take 500 years to dispose off all pending cases’
7. ‘It may take 500 years to dispose off all pending cases’
Noting that “the sheer volume of pendency…is creating an impediment”, Supreme Court judge Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul warned that “if every case has to be tried till the end, if every first appeal has to be heard by the courts, if every matter transcends itself into coming to the Supreme Court, 200 years, 500 years will also not see the end of this litigation.”

Pleading for plea

  • Batting for the concept of plea bargain — much prevalent in the US — and which he said was available within the legal framework in India, Justice Kaul recommended combining it with mediation to ensure faster disposal of civil and criminal cases resulting from family disputes.
  • Lamenting about “the mindset of the prosecution” as “also the mindset of all our brethren at times”, he called on both the judges and the defence to create awareness about the facility of plea bargaining — opining that an accused who has actually committed an offence would prefer opting for a plea bargain in order to avoid prolonged litigation.
  • Conceding that it may not be an ideal solution, Justice Kaul admitted that “we are not in a position to give some kind of an ideal solution, but give a practical solution to the whole problem.”

A mountain of pendency

  • According to a statement by Law Minister Kiren Rijiju in the parliament earlier this year in March, there were more than 4.70 crore pending cases — 47,012,190 — across all the courts in the country.
  • Of these, 5,957,454 cases were pending in the 25 high courts across the states, with the maximum cases — nearly 10 lakh — pending in the Allahabad High Court, followed by the High Court of Rajasthan with over 6 lakh pending cases and the Bombay High Court with just under 6 lakh pending cases.
  • And what about the Supreme Court? As of August 1, 71,411 cases were pending in the country’s highest court.
8. Routine PLA drills or a prelude to war?
8. Routine PLA drills or a prelude to war?
  • US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday left Taiwan after a visit that heightened tensions with China, saying that she and other members of Congress in her delegation showed they will not abandon their commitment to the self-governing island.
  • Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its territory, vowed to take “strong and resolute” countermeasures against the US and Taipei for violating the one-China principle.
  • The Chinese military on Wednesday conducted a series of naval-air joint drills around Taiwan amid speculation that it may be attempting a blockade of the self-ruled island. Taiwan decried the actions, saying they violated the island’s sovereignty.
  • The PLA drills, including live fire, are to start on Thursday and will be the largest aimed at Taiwan since 1995, when China fired missiles in a large-scale exercise to show its displeasure at a visit by then-Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui to the US.
  • Using live fire in a country’s territorial airspace or waters is risky, Arthur Zhin-Sheng Wang, a defence studies expert at Taiwan’s Central Police University told the Associated Press, adding “this can possibly be seen as an act of war, according to international rules of engagement”.
9. Curious case of ‘spiked’ needle attacks across Europe
9. Curious case of ‘spiked’ needle attacks across Europe
  • Women targeted: Multiple countries in Europe have reported hundreds of attacks on women by needles suspected to have been spiked. Britain, France and Spain have witnessed a surge in spiked needle attacks on women in crowded clubs. The Spanish police have begun investigating a string of similar cases over the past few weeks.
  • Similar pattern: Almost in all cases, the victims of the spiked needle attack have been young women, partying in clubs or in a crowded place. The accounts given by the victims are similar from Britain to France. It goes like this: a young woman is out partying when she feels a needle prick in the arm or leg. She then becomes dizzy or drowsy.
  • For how long: The first string of spiked needle attacks was reported from Britain in 2021. France reported these attacks earlier this year. Now, Spain has launched a probe into a series of attacks — the first case having been reported during the popular Pamplona bull running festival. These cases have been reported on social media or to the police by the victims.
  • No drugs or sexual assault: The needle attacks raised fears that the attackers could be sexual predators be behind this. But the police are yet to find any trace of drugs or other toxic materials from the samples taken from the victims. No case of related sexual violence has been reported either till date. A couple of victims tested positive for GHB, a depressant.
  • Agencies clueless: In hundreds of cases in Britain and France, despite probe by police and other agencies, no one knows who were the people behind these needle attacks or what were the purpose for such attacks.
Answer to NEWS IN CLUES
Answer to NEWS IN CLUES

OPEC. The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) along with non-OPEC countries, under the collective umbrella of OPEC+, agreed on a crude oil production increase of 1 lakh barrels per day from September — far less than the 6 lakh barrels per day of output increase added in July and August. While OPEC was formed in 1960, OPEC+ came into being in 2016.

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Written by: Rakesh Rai, Tejeesh Nippun Singh, Jayanta Kalita, Prabhash K Dutta
Research: Rajesh Sharma



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