Israeli Forces Attempt to Arrest two-year-old Palestinian Child

By Linah Alsaafin
04 April, 2012
Electronic Intifada

Mo’men Shtayeh probably owns a John Cena shirt, the WWE wrestler who the Palestinian kids hero worship, their shrill voices echoing in neighborhood streets of Cena’s catchphrase, “You can’t see me!” accompanied with waving a hand in front of their faces.

Mo’men Shtayeh has seen and knows too much. There is a chance—nay, a probability— that due to witnessing the Israeli army’s brutality and severe oppression in his village of Kufr Qaddoum, Mo’men might have grown up to be a warmongering Islamist (or perveresly, a Tea Partier).

Mo’men Shtayeh represents a threat to the security of the Israeli racist occupying state. Apparently, it is well known that due to his savvy nature, Mo’men has been involved in drawing up specialized blue prints to attack enemy bases.

So it all makes perfect sense that the most moral army in the world, the Israeli Defense Forces, the 4th strongest army, the upholders of the beacon of democracy and godly light, tried to arrest Mo’men on Monday, April 2nd.

The thing is, Mo’men is 2 and a half years old.

Murad Shtayeh, the coordinator of the popular resistance committeee in Kufr Qaddoum and the father of little Mo’men, told the Electronic Intifada that heavily armed Israeli soldiers raided his house on Monday at 5:30pm. Two soldiers remained outside, two others went in the house, shouting they were going to arrest Mo’men.

“Mo’men was going inside the house,” Murad said, “when the soldiers suddenly took off from where they had been standing.They came running to the house like they were in a marathon, very fast and urgent, like a bunch of crazies.”

The soldiers claimed that Mo’men had, not a nuclear warhead, or a submachine gun, but the most dangerous item in the world- a slingshot.

“Of course Mo’men didn’t have a slingshot in his hands!” scoffed Murad. “And even if he did, so what? He’s a kid.” For crying out loud.

The soldiers were adamant that Mo’men hand over his slingshot (which he doesn’t own) because he was using it to aim at the soldiers. What’s more, they wanted Mo’men to hand himself over to them too.

Bashar Shtayeh, Murad’s cousin was also present at the scene. “The soldiers in the house drew their weapons and pointed them at the family,” he said, “threatening them that they would not leave unless Mo’men was handed over to them.”

A loud angry arugment persisted for half an hour between Murad, other villagers who had come to see what the commotion was all about, and the soldiers. The soldiers then left, having cemented yet another moral meltdown in the occupation’s history. Not that they had morals in the first place.

But what of the toddler? Needless to say, Mo’men was terrified by the ongoings around him.

“What can I say, of course he’s affected by this,” Murad said. “He was very scared. He’s doing slightly better now.”

Kufr Qaddoum began its weekly popular resistance protests in June 2011, against the encroaching illegal settlement of Qedumim that is built on the village’s land and to open the main village road that leads directly to Nablus.

The Israeli oppression against Kufr Qaddoum doesn’t just happen on Fridays. It occures on a daily basis.

“Obviously, they thought this stunt- whether carried through or not- would serve as a punishment for us, but the truth is that it will not deter us from our protests,”Murad declared.

“Every day and night we have 5 to 7 soldiers in the village harrassing us. Sometimes they come in with their dogs and fetch cars and houses. Yesterday (Tuesday) at 9:30pm the soldiers set up a checkpoint on one of the inner streets of the village.”

Mo’men Shtayeh, your little 2 and a half year old self highlighted the absurdity, the idiocy, the shameful nature of the Israeli occupying army. May the force of John Cena be with you

A ten-year-old Indian school girl’s Nuclear Nightmare

Internationally recognized symbol. Deutsch: Gefahrensymbol für Radioaktivität. Image:Radioactive.svg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Down To Earth

Author(s): Latha Jishnu
Date: Apr 5, 2012

Varshini, 10, speaks for a new generation that is against nuclear energy

Varshini, a fifth standard student, has a question for the prime minister. Why does he want to expose her and her village to radiation risks? Photographs by Amirtharaj StephenIn the gathering dusk, the open ground in Kudankulam village is filling up slowly. There is an inter-faith meeting to protest against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) that has come up just 2 km away and is all set to start operations. While the women are the first to arrive, many with their school going children in tow, the men drift in after work. The meeting of Muslim, Christian and Hindu priests is yet another rallying point against the contested power project, a long drawn out struggle that has been projected in the national media as a Church-sponsored campaign.

A look at the crowd gathered at Kudankulam ground dispels the notion instantly. The village, unlike the fishing hamlets which have been in the forefront of the anti-nuclear protests since August 2011, is inland, predominantly Hindu and a somewhat late entrant in the campaign against KKNPP. Its 12,000 residents proclaimed their anger and disillusionment with the project in 2007 soon after the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL), the state-owned entity that sets up nuclear projects in the country, held a public hearing on the environment impact assessment report for the third and fourth reactors. In all, KKNPP is scheduled to have six reactors, each of 1,000 MWe, and the first of these was scheduled to go critical in December 2011 until the public protests put paid to that.

Earlier, there had been a day-long puja at the ancient shrine of Vishwamitra in Vijayapathy village some 4-5 km away where devotees had prayed for the success of their campaign against KKNPP and, more interestingly, for the promotion of renewable energy sources. You could call it clever strategy by leaders of the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE); they used the festivities associated with Vishwamitra’s anusham (birth star) to spread their anti-nuclear message. But there were no speeches, no rallies as people lined up at the freshly white-washed temples—there is another dedicated to Ganesha in this hamlet—to make their offerings.

In Kudankulam, however, it is clearly a campaign event with speeches and songs making overtly political statements. Cynicism and hope hang in the air. Pushpa, 33, listens to the men on the dais with half an ear while carrying on a conversation with her two friends and this correspondent. The women are all homemakers but well educated, it turns out. Why are they against KKNPP? “We don’t want to become the victims of a nuclear accident,” she says. But nuclear accidents are rare, I respond, playing devil’s advocate. “Perhaps. But we don’t want our children to be exposed to a Fukushima. India is not Japan which is an advanced society. Can you imagine what would happen here and in all the surrounding villages if there was a leak in the Kudankulam reactor? All that strontium and radioactive iodine will cause cancer and kill us. This is a death zone.”

It is true that initially Kudankulam village had no problem with Russian project. They sold land to NPCIL and hoped for jobs and better things to happen. Recalls S Sivasubramanian: “I sold three acres of my farmland to NPCIL in 1984-85; we used to grow paddy and cashew. The compensation was a pittance but every time we were told that the area would become a mini-Singapore.” But the jobs never came, nor did the promised development. When KKNPP announced that two more reactors would be built and held its public hearing in July 2007, the sentiment had turned completely against the project. Around 5,000 people had turned up for the hearing, requiring the Tirunelveli district collector to throw a massive police cordon around the town.

That’s history now. Today the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan has hardened the mood and the nuclear establishment has to deal with a better educated and better informed neighbourhood.

Read fulla rticle here

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Why Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer to Global Warming

AlterNet / By Christian Parenti

There is no “nuclear renaissance” and there won’t be: it just doesn’t make sense economically.
April 4, 2012

Despite the triple meltdown at Fukushima—which has driven tens of thousands of Japanese from their homes, cast radioactive fallout across the U.S., and will likely cost the Japanese economy ¥50 trillion, or $623 billion—many desperate Greens now embrace nukes. They include Stewart Brand and George Monbiot. What drives these men is panic—a very legitimate fear that we will trigger self-fueling runaway climate change.

Part of this green embrace of the atom is a macho performance of seriousness. Nuke hugging demonstrates a technophilic resolve, manly determination to muscle through. The semiotics of the green nuke huggers’ message is clear: “I am a man, an adult, ready to do whatever it takes to fight climate change. I have put aside childish utopianism and even endorsed this most dangerous, capital intensive, and war-tainted of technologies: atom smashing.”

So far, so very brave.

However, back in the real world, nukes face nearly insurmountable economichurdles. Never mind the issue of safety, economic factors—capital costs, construction cost, availability and prices of special metals and engineering expertise, and profitability—are the real issue. Economics will determine the future of atomic power—or rather, already have. And here is the takeaway: there will be no nuclear future.

For more than a decade, the atomic power industry and many in government have promised us a “nuclear renaissance.” A whole new fleet of atomic power plants, new high-tech third and fourth generation reactors, are supposed to be coming online.

Well, where is it? Climate change is kicking in; science tells us we need to make drastic cuts starting now. If nukes are to ride to the rescue, we need a few on the horizon now.

But the new fleet of reactors has not been built and won’t be, because Wall Street won’t fund them. The only way nukes get built is with real or de facto socialism. The public sector has to pick up the tab, either during construction or after the fact, when bankrupt utilities get bailed out.

The first wave of nuclear reactor construction peaked after the Arab oil embargo of 1973. The logic was geostrategic energy security, not cost-efficient electrical production. Japan and France built the most. Then came the Three Mile Island accident. Suddenly, the industry was subject to a more rigorous safety regime. With that costs rose precipitously, wiping out 90 percent of projected profits of theU.S. nuke industry. Hundreds of planned plants in the United States were canceled. In the United States and the United Kingdom, cost overruns on nuclear plants helped bankrupt several utility companies.

In February 2002, the Bush administration tried to jump-start nuclear construction with its “Nuclear Power 2010 Program,” a package of subsidies and streamlined planning procedures. Obama has continued this with more generous support for the nuclear industry. It was expected that these incentives would lead to at least one “Generation III+” unit being operational by 2010. That has not happened.

Work has finally begun on a two-reactor plant in Georgia. But already there are conflicts between the utility, Southern Company, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Moreover, this project is going forward only because the utility, operating on a cost-plus basis, can pass on to rate payers all of its expense overruns. This is because the Southeast power market was the only U.S. region never deregulated.

In Western Europe, nuclear economics are also a mess. Only two “Generation III+” reactors are under construction. The plant closest to completion is the 1,600-megawatt European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) at Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. It was scheduled to take four years and cost about $5 billion. But now construction will take at least eight years and is 68 percent over budget, at a projected final cost of $8.4 billion.

The other EPR under construction is in Flamanville, France. It began in 2007 and is now two years late and at least 50 percent over budget. In the best case scenario, it will open in 2012, also massively over cost.

China has also cut back its nuke program, based almost entirely on the old generation two style plants. If the Chinese nuke program is fully built out the share of nukes in their overall power mix will go from less than 2 percent to less than 5 percent of all Chinese power.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy gives 2021 as the earliest possible date for a fourth-generation nuclear plant to open. No American nuclear plant has yet been built on time or within budget, so the forecast may be rather optimistic.

An authoritative study by the investment bank Lazard Ltd. found that wind beat nuclear and that nuclear essentially tied with solar. But wind and solar, being simple and safe, are coming on line faster. Another advantage wind and solar have is that capacity can be added bit by bit; a wind farm can have more or less turbines without scuttling the whole project. As economies of scale are created within the alternative energy supply chains and the construction process becomes more efficient, prices continue to drop. Meanwhile, the cost of stalled nukes moves upward.

The World Watch Institute reports that between 2004 and 2009, global electricity from wind (not capacity, but actual power output) grew by 27 percent, while solar grew by 54 percent. Over the same time, nuclear power output actually declined by half a percent.

What would a nuke build out really cost? Mark Cooper, senior fellow for economic analysis at the Vermont Law School, has found that adding 100 new reactors to the U.S. power grid would cost $1.9 to $4.1 trillion, and that would take at least a decade to do.

In a comparative analysis of U.S. states, Cooper found that the states that invested heavily in nuclear power had worse track records on efficiency and developing renewables than those that did not have large nuclear programs. In other words, investing in nuclear technology crowded out developing clean energy.

Only when clean technologies—like wind, solar, hydropower, and electric vehicles—are cheaper than other options will the world economy make the switch away from fossil fuels. Right now, alternatives are slightly cheaper than nukes, come on line faster, and are growing robustly.

Nuclear power is not only physically dangerous—it is also economically wasteful. If the nuke huggers are so brave and serious they must begin to explain why, after a decade of billions in subsidies being on offer, there is no wave of construction underway. If the nuke renaissance is to begin, who will fund it? And who will build it in time to stave off climate tipping points? How long will it take? Thus the quip “Atomic power is the fuel of the future”—and always will be.

We have already wasted a decade on this blather and hype. Being manly is not enough. Realism is also required.

Christian Parenti is the author of “The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq” (New Press) and a visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture and Politics.

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Living in a nuclear hell

By Charles Stratford , Aljazeera

The town of Muslymovo has to be one of the saddest places on earth. The thousands of people who have little choice but to live here, on the banks of the Techa river not far from Russia’s southern border with Kazakhstan, are the victims of a nuclear disaster that began more than six decades ago.

They are still suffering with the consequences of life next door to the Mayak nuclear plant – still dying from the radiation-related illnesses that have claimed the lives of so many before them.

Mayak was constructed in the 1940s. Our driver knew how to avoid checkpoints. We stuck a small camera on our windscreen and drove to within a hundred metres of the plant gates.

It’s like a city. Families work and live here. Teenagers chased each other in the snow just beyond the fence.

Mayak is surrounded by silver birch forests. Signs by the road warn people not to enter the woodland or pick the wild mushrooms. Mayak once provided the Soviet Union with around 40 per cent of the world’s weapons-grade plutonium.

The country’s first atomic bomb was built here. Between 1949 and 1951, the plant dumped hundreds of tonnes of highly radioactive waste into the nearby Techa.

Hundreds of villages were resettled but incredibly, four remain in the contaminated area. Residents don’t know why they were never moved.

Many people we spoke to say they are being used as human guinea pigs. They talk of a secret government experiment looking at the effects of radiation exposure on humans.

They say they have to go to a hospital in Chelyabinsk, the regional capital around 50km away, for treatment of the various radiation related illnesses they suffer.

One woman described her visits.

“They must have tested new drugs on us. You come from the hospital where you spend a month then get sick for a month at home. They don’t treat you. They hurt you. They don’t say anything.”

Some of the old Muslymovo village has been moved in recent years but to a place which is only a less than a half hour walk from the highly radiation polluted river.

The Geiger counter readings we took by the river showed radiation levels 50 times higher than the level experts say is safe for humans.

Our driver, who himself suffers chronic radiation illness pointed to a car tyre frozen solid in icy marsh. He said if we tested our Geiger counter there we would get a reading at least three times higher than the one we had.

There were no barriers or fences to keep people out. And there were footprints in the snow everywhere. A rusty sign warned people not to enter or pick the berries.

But fishermen still come here. In the summer children still swim.

Most people in the village know the dangers but seem resigned to their fate. They don’t have the money to move to a safer place. Many others seem ignorant of the risks.

“We get sick and many get cancer because of the atoms”, said one woman, “we can’t stop our children from swimming in the river”.

The government says the resettlement programme is complete.

It gave some of the Muslymovo residents the choice of around $35,000 to find a new home of their choice or be moved to a house on the new site 2km from the river.

Most say the sum was never enough to afford a home further away.

They say a lot of money which was supposed to go towards building new homes was stolen by contractors or officials.

Most of the residents we spoke to complain of the Radon gas which they claim seeps from the soil and into their homes.

“Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” says one man. “It’s only 2km to the river. We are still in radioactive territory. There is radioactive Radon gas in the houses. We think this was arranged to embezzle the money.”

“We bought soil from the old place. When we moved here they didn’t tell us it was dangerous here. They found Radon gas later when the houses were already built.”

Russia’s state nuclear agency Rosatom has launched an inquiry into claims the money was stolen. The investigation continues.

Residents complain their new homes are poorly insulated against the brutal winter cold that can reach lows of minus thirty degrees.

“You cannot treat people like this. After we suffered from the radiation river and now they move us here to unsuitable houses, to this land. People are tired – tired of the fighting,” said one man.

Most of the children in this area suffer some form or other of radiation related illness.

Symptoms of Chronic radiation sickness include recurrent infections, swellings, anemia, unhealed wounds, hair loss and bruises. Long term exposure to high rates of radiation causes birth defects and cancer.

Locals call it the “river sickness”.

The boy in our report with the growth on his neck is 17 years old.

He has eight brothers and sisters. They all suffer from radiation related illness.

His mother says she took him to the local doctor to get his neck checked.

She says the doctor told her the lump would disappear. She says her son was never even offered a biopsy.

This, in a place where people have died of cancer for decades. An area that has some of the highest levels of radiation pollution in the world.

“We are afraid, the consequences are terrifying. But where can we move to?” she said.

So many people we spoke to kept asking the same thing “Why haven’t we been moved further away from the river?”

The government says it recognises that thousands of people still live in the contaminated zone.

It offers the insultingly meagre sum of around $4 a month compensation. It offers approximately $30 a month towards medical costs.

We tried speaking to local government health workers.

We waited five hours to speak to the doctor in our report.

When he did finally show up, he seemed embarrassed – as if he wanted to answer our questions but couldn’t.

The conversation he had on the phone which we secretly filmed is evidence there’s perhaps much the government doesn’t want outsiders to know.

And then there are the hundreds of families that were never moved at all. Not even the 2km up the road to the new village.

We met 87-year-old Ekaterina. Her family was originally from Germany.

During World War Two, Stalin moved thousands of Germans living in Russia as far away from urban areas as he could.

Ekaterina and her family were moved to one of the villages near Mayak.

In 1957, when an explosion at a plant storage tank forced an evacuation of the area she and her family were relocated again.

They were moved to Muslymovo next to the radiation polluted river. Fifty years later she is still there.

She breaks down in tears when we ask her how she survives. She says she was never able to have children. Her husband died years ago.

“Many people have died of cancer in this area. People are always sick. I want to move but I was never asked. I don’t understand why.”

Between 2001-2004 up to 40 million cubic meters of more radioactive slush ended up in the Techa river. The government acknowledges this as fact.

A criminal investigation was launched.

In 2005, prosecutors moved to charge the head of the Mayak Nuclear plant.

He was convicted but soon after pardoned in a general amnesty to commemorate the 100th year anniversary of the Russian parliament.

“Anonymous takes down Modi” – Time Poll 2012 to 6th position, HOW ?

If we reduce No votes from Yes Votes , Modi came down to 6th Position now
 Narendra Modi recieved  More No Votes than Yes votes today is last day of poll, April 6th 2012.

Anonymous is a world wide community currently acting against SOPA/PIPA/ACTA, All their acts were based on peer pressure
They have not ” HACKED” the time webiste and poll as beinga Alleged by Narendra Modi supporter.

ZIMPLE logic

The  Anonymous Facebook  Page- https://www.facebook.com/OffiziellAnonymousPage,  have 440K fans, and not a single announcement, appeal to vote for TIMES POLL.

Similarly their twitter Handle  @anonops has 302,456 Followers and officially they are not promoting and if they were then they ought to get at least 20 Lakhs votes by now. So its all SUPPORT.

   “Anonymous takes down  Narendra Modi” headlines, 

Anonymous                     358300                              22626
Narendra Modi                  240171                               147742

The faceless distributed hacker group who initiated Denial of service attacks on Companies who worked against
Internet Democracy . They took down visa , master card, amazon and paypal websites as a visible example of peer protest against their undemocratic practices .

Age: Indeterminate

Occupation: Shadowy, loose-knit cadre of hackers

Anonymous isn’t a person. It’s not even a group of people in any well-defined sense. But if you tick off the thin-skinned, ad hoc network of hackers who collaborate under the Anonymous moniker, get ready for trouble. Members have reportedly attacked sites ranging from the Vatican’s to those of major companies such as PayPal and Sony; they apparently released 75,000 credit-card numbers belonging to customers of research firm Stratfor. Arrests of dozens of suspected participants in multiple countries haven’t shut down the leaderless organization.

Get your r democratic clickin finger going,
 Time to tell the old mainstream, who will be the new mainstream. 

ANONYMOUS IS NUMBER 8 , LET US REPLACE MODI at no 1 ,

24 HOURS AND TICKING ;-), The poll CLOSES APRIL 6TH 2012

CLICK TO VOTE FOR ANONYMOUS HERE

HELP ME MAKE THIS  POST VIRAL NOW…………………………………………………………………..

For Immeditae Release- Juveniles attempt to commit suicide in Karnataka

Date: 05 April 2012

PRESS RELEASE

Karnataka: Juveniles attempt to commit suicide – administration of juvenile justice remains deplorable

NEW DELHI: The Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) in its report, “The State of Juvenile Justice in Karnataka”
(http://www.achrweb.org/reports/india/JJ-Karnataka-2012.pdf), released today stated that the administration of juvenile justice remains deplorable and children incarcerated in congested and appalling living conditions have been attempting suicide. On 31 January 2012, three juveniles lodged in the Government Remand Home for Boys and Girls at
Madivala attempted suicide inside the Home by consuming pesticide and needed hospitalisation.

Though Karnataka has established Juvenile Justice Boards (JJB) in 28 out of 30 districts, the cases pending before the JJBs are not regularly heard in clear violation of Section 14(2) of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000. As of 10 February 2012, there were about 2,500 cases pending under the Juvenile Justice Act in Karnataka and 1,567 cases were pending as of December 2011 in Bangalore Urban district alone.

Instead of increasing vigilance over the Observation Homes, Special Homes and Children’s Homes, which have become centres of abuse, the State government of Karnataka in October 2010 put the most regressive condition that “members of the Child Welfare Committees cannot visit child care institutions, when they are not holding a sitting, without prior permission of the heads of these institutions”.

In a number of juvenile justice homes, no inspection has taken place during 2009-2011 according to information obtained under the Right to Information Act, 2005. No inspection took place in the Balakara Bal Mandir, Gulbarga; Children Home for Boys, Chikmagalur; Government Observation Home (Boys), Gulbarga; Government Observation Home, Dharward;
Government Juvenile Home for Boys at Bagalkot; Government Juvenile Home for Girls at Bagalkot; and Balamandir for Boys, Belgaum during 2009 to 2011.

As admitted by Karnataka State government, as of December 2011 no educator was appointed in as many as 19 government runs homes out of 81 homes and the juveniles in these homes are being deprived of the right to education which is recognized as a fundamental right.

In five juvenile homes, no cook has been appointed despite being sanctioned. At Balakiyara Balamandira, Mandya, no cook has been appointed since 12 December 1996.

A large majority of the Juvenile Homes were found to be under-staffed which has negative impact on care and protection of the inmates. At the Children’s Home for Boys, Koppal, out of eight sanctioned staff only two have been appointed.

In clear violations of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice (“The Beijing Rules”) and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Karnataka Rules, 2010 which provides for segregation of the inmates on the basis of their gender, degree of offence and age (preferably up to 12 years, 12-16 years and 16 years and above) have not been complied with. The non- separation of the inmates on the basis of their age undermines the danger to juveniles of
“criminal contamination”. At Children Home for Boys, Chikmagalur, boy and girls are being kept in the same home and no inspection took place in the Home during 2009-2011!

Asian Centre for Human Rights lamented that the role of the Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Karnataka State Human Rights Commission (KSCPCR) and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has been limited to ordering the release of those illegally detained or recommending departmental action against the guilty. As
recently as 20 December 2011, KSCPCR rescued a 16-year-old boy who was illegally detained without any diary entry, handcuffed, beaten, chained and inadequately fed during his detention at the Sampigehalli police station in Bangalore following his arrest on 17 December 2011.

“Though the boy was rescued, no complaint was lodged against the accused police personnel as per Section 23 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act which provides that “Whoever, having  actual charge of, or control over, a juvenile or the child, assaults,abandons, exposes or willfully neglects the juvenile or causes or procures him to be assaulted, abandoned, exposed or neglected in a manner likely to cause such juvenile or the child unnecessary mental or physical suffering shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to six months, or fine, or with both”.

“Even a member of the Child Welfare Committee was found to abuse children.The Karnataka State Commission for Protection of Child Rights failed to respond to queries from the Asian Centre for Human for Human Rights as to the further action taken following the order of the State Government ofSeptember 2010 restraining Balakrishna Masali, a member of the Child
Welfare Committee-II of the Bangalore Urban district, from attending sittings of the Child Welfare Committee, after he was reportedly found guilty by the KSCPCR of molesting girls who were brought before him for inquiry.” – stated Mr Suhas Chakma, Director of Asian Centre for Human Rights.

Asian Centre for Human Rights urged the State Government of Karnataka to implement the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000 in letter and spirit and further recommended to the National Commission
for Protection of Child Rights to ensure the implementation of the recommendations made by ACHR.[Ends]

For any further information or clarifications, please contact Mr Suhas Chakma at 9810893440

448 mining trade licences suspended for 15 days

TNN Apr 4, 2012

PANAJI: The mines and geology department on Tuesday suspended more than 448 mining trade licences for the next 15 days pending verification of documents.

Director of mines Prasanna Acharya said, “After consulting with advocate general Atmaram Nadkarni on the suspension of trading licences, we have issued a common order under the Mining Regulation Act for the suspension to all mining traders in the state.”

The mines department has given a 15-day time limit to all traders to submit the necessary documents to show that they are genuine traders and not involved in illegal mining activities.

“We have to verify record to see who are allegedly involved in illegal mining,” Acharya said. The verification of documents will commence from Wednesday.

“If they are not found to be genuine we will have no option but to take necessary action,” said Acharya. The mining department will study the documents case by case. If the documents are not genuine then their licences will be revoked,” said Acharya. The mining department has also included the traders registered during the election period.

The department has planned to launch a software which can be used by both Goa Minerals Ore Exports Association (GMOEA) and the department to tally production and exports of iron ore from the state. “We have planned to ensure that there isn’t a single tonne’s difference between the production and exporters’ figures from the department and GMOEA from this year onwards. In a week’s time we will have the software,” he added.

The mining department is also exploring the possibility that they can act under the mining regulation to impose certain restrictions banning new trucks or fixing a deadline by which truck owners must register with the department.

“We are exploring the possibility of issuing commercial badges for mining truck drivers,” he said

The new director has also directed the mining department staff to streamline records and if necessary they can approach mines owners to get the records if they are not available with the department for certain reasons. The government also issued orders to cancel the extension of assistance technical officer of mining department Hector Fernandes.

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