NATIONAL NEWS
A) Supreme Court expresses anguish over the plight of children orphaned by COVID-19.
The Supreme Court on Friday said precious time was being lost as children orphaned, abandoned and traumatised by the Covid-19 pandemic were starving without food on the streets of this large country. The apex court ordered district authorities across the country to immediately fan out and identify these children in need of care and provide them with basic needs like food, shelter and clothes. Days are passing by without children getting any food. Hope you will understand [to the Centre and the State governments] the agony these children are undergoing on the streets. We do not know the age of these children starving on the streets or how many of them are there in such a large country, a visibly anguished Justice L. Nageswara Rao, accompanied by Justice Aniruddha Bose on the Bench, said. Justice Rao said the actual number of children abandoned or orphaned may be much more than what has been cited in official and news reports. Bhati and advocate Swarupama Chaturvedi, for the National Commission for the Protection of Child Rights, said the Commission had an online portal ‘Bal Swaraj’ wherein district authorities could individually upload the figures of orphans and children in need of care and protection within their respective jurisdictions. District authorities have already been given the password to operate the portal. The court directed the district authorities in every State to upload the details of children who were orphaned and in a position requiring care and protection after March 2020, the month when the pandemic began in India. The court asked the States to separately provide the facts and figures of such children by Sunday evening. The court scheduled a hearing on Tuesday. The hearing on Friday was based on an urgent application filed by the amicus curiae, advocate Gaurav Agrawal, who placed on record a report in The Hindu about the plight of children during the pandemic. Agrawal said the pandemic has wreaked havoc in the lives of many children who had either lost both parents or guardians to the virus. He said, quoting the newspaper report, that there has been a marked increase in child trafficking, especially of girls. Agrawal said the government had an obligation to protect children.
B) The current rate of vaccination guarantees a third wave, which will be much worse: Rahul Gandhi.
In a virtual press conference, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi today said that the current rate of vaccination will guarantee a third Covid-19 wave and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, through his nautanki [theatrics], has created space for the virus to evolve and spread in India. He also lambasted Modi for not having understood the virus, for not having a vaccination strategy, and for waiting till 2021 to order vaccines when he could have done it last year. He also attacked the Prime Minister for deprioritising India’s needs by exporting millions of vaccines before a sufficient number of Indians could be vaccinated. Gandhi also claimed that the Covid-19 mortality figures put out by the Centre were big lies. Though Modi was worried about his image, it is gone; it’s dead, he said. He also accused the government of shutting down the feedback and information system. The pressure against social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook should be viewed in that context, he observed. Mr Modi is responsible for the second wave of Covid-19; it’s a result of his ‘nautanki’ [theatrics] and lack of his responsibility. It’s time for him to be a leader, display leadership skills and show courage and not come out with excuses and blame others, he said. The Prime Minister doesn’t think strategically. He is an event manager. He thinks one event at a time. You don’t need events now as events will kill people, you need a strategy. The aim of the strategy should be to shut the space for corona, he noted. With only 3 % of India’s population fully vaccinated and 97 % potentially exposed to the virus, the situation was alarming not just to the country but a ‘liability to the entire planet. As the virus mutated very fast, there could come a time when even vaccines may not be as effective as they were now. If 50-60% of India’s population was vaccinated, then the threat of a third wave would greatly subside and certainly won’t be a fourth or fifth wave, he said. You are the Prime Minister, the buck stops with you, Gandhi said, adding, Did Chhattisgarh export vaccines? No, the Prime Minister of India exported vaccines. Because he fundamentally misunderstood what is going on. The government may believe that their fight against coronavirus involved a fight with its political rivals as well, but the Opposition parties were actually a warning system. The tragedy is that the government is not understanding the nature of what they are fighting. The government is under the impression that they are fighting the Opposition. When it comes to corona, we are on the government’s side, he pointed out.
C) Narada case: All four TMC leaders get interim bail.
Four West Bengal leaders, including two Ministers, who were arrested by the CBI in the Narada case, were granted interim bail by a five-judge Bench of the Calcutta High Court on Friday on a personal bond of ₹2 lakh each. One of the conditions of the bail granted by the Bench of Acting Chief Justice Rajesh Bindal and Justices I.P. Mukerji, Harish Tandon, Soumen Sen and Arjit Banerjee was that the accused persons shall not give any press interview or make any public comments in connection with the cases pending in this court or in the trial court, pertaining to the alleged offence concerning themselves or any other co-accused. The aforesaid accused persons shall make themselves available for interrogation in the course of further investigation, if any, of the alleged offence, as and when required by the CBI. Considering the lockdown imposed in the State of West Bengal, the interrogation may be carried out by virtual mode, the order said. The CBI arrested Ministers Firhad Hakim and Subrata Mukherjee, MLA Madan Mitra and former Minister Sovan Chatterjee on May 17 and they were granted bail by a Special CBI court the very same day. But it was stayed by a Division Bench of the High Court. The court later placed them under house arrest and constituted the five-judge Bench. The matter will now come up for hearing on May 31.
D) More pre-term babies during the second wave, say doctors in Bengaluru hospital.
More pregnant women appear to be testing positive for Covid-19 and developing complications during the ongoing second wave. As a result, gynaecologists in Karnataka are seeing a rise in pre-term deliveries and stillbirths. Although there is no statewide data available as yet, doctors said they are seeing many pregnant women reporting severe breathing problems. There is a rapid deterioration in the condition of such patients making urgent intervention and premature births inevitable, they said. A premature/pre-term delivery is one in which the baby is born before the 37th week of pregnancy. Patients and their families too readily give consent for a premature delivery, when the situation demands urgent intervention. If such patients need to be put on ventilators or require pruning, anaesthetists and treating physicians recommend that the deliveries be conducted before starting the treatment. We had to do this in 45 of the 276 positive women who delivered in our hospital since March, said D Tulasi Devi, Medical Superintendent of Hajee Sir Ismail Sait (HSIS) Gosha Hospital, Bengaluru. This State-run hospital is a dedicated Covid-19 facility for pregnant women. A total of 524 pregnant women had been admitted here since March. Among these, 276 women delivered at the hospital and the rest who were in their first or second trimesters were treated and discharged. Five of the 45 women who delivered pre-term succumbed to Covid-19. The hospital has seen a total of 22 maternal deaths during the second wave so far. While five were the ones who delivered pre-term, three died after giving birth at 32 weeks. The remaining 14 mothers, who had come with severe Covid-19 complications and precariously low oxygen saturation levels, died despite intervention. Chikkanarasa Reddy, professor of Paediatrics, Bowring and Lady Curzon Medical College and Research Institute, said although seven of the babies born to these COVID-positive mothers tested positive, all of them have recovered.
E) NCB arrests Sushant Singh Rajput’s flatmate Siddharth Pithani from Hyderabad.
The Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) on Friday arrested Siddharth Pithani in Hyderabad for his alleged involvement in the drugs procurement case linked to the death of Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput. Confirming the arrest, a senior NCB official said Pithani would be produced before a competent court later on Friday. The accused, a flatmate of the actor, was among the four persons who were present at Sushant’s Mumbai residence when his body was found on June 14 last year. In the same case, the NCB earlier arrested several persons, including Sushant’s girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty, her brother Show, Sushant’s housekeeping manager Samuel Miranda and staff member Dipesh Sawant, drug peddlers. The NCB has instituted the case based on the initial information shared by the Enforcement Directorate on text exchanges among the suspects and its own preliminary findings. Sushant’s death is being probed by the CBI, which took over the case from the Patna Police in August last year.
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
A) Germany recognises colonial killings in Namibia as genocide.
Germany has agreed to officially recognise the colonial-era killings of tens of thousands of people in Namibia as genocide and to spend a total of 1.1 billion euros ($1.3 billion), largely on development projects. The accord with Namibia announced Friday is the result of more than five years of talks on the events of 1904-1908, when Germany was the southern African country’s colonial ruler. Historians say German Gen. Lothar von Trotha, who was sent to what was then German South-West Africa to put down an uprising by the Herero people in 1904, instructed his troops to wipe out the entire tribe. They say that about 65,000 Herero were killed and at least 10,000 Nama. In the light of Germany’s historical and moral responsibility, we will ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement. Our aim was and is to find a joint path to genuine reconciliation in remembrance of the victims, he said. That includes our naming the events of the German colonial era in today’s Namibia, and particularly the atrocities between 1904 and 1908, unsparingly and without euphemisms. We will now officially call these events what they were from today’s perspective: a genocide. Germany says that representatives of the Herero and Nama were involved in the negotiations, though Berlin’s direct dealings have been with the Namibian government. Talks between Germany and Namibia opened in 2015, more than a decade after a 2004 visit to Namibia in which then-Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul offered Germany’s first apology for the killings, which she said were what today would be labelled as genocide. Maas said that as a gesture of recognition of the incalculable suffering, Germany plans to support Namibia and the descendants of the victims with a 1.1 billion-euro rebuilding and development program in whose design and implementation the communities affected by the genocide will take a decisive role. At the same time, he said that legal claims to compensation cannot be derived from this. That reflects Germany’s position that the Genocide Convention of 1948 cannot be applied retroactively, and that its liability is political and moral rather than legal. The projects Germany agreed to fund are expected to stretch over a 30-year period and will cover areas such as land reform, including land purchases, agriculture, rural infrastructure, water supply and vocational training. They will be separate from continuing development aid to Namibia.
B) As India watches keenly, Sri Lanka seeks FDI in Port City.
Sri Lanka on Friday invited international investment into the Colombo Port City that it described as a fully Sri Lankan project, while official sources in New Delhi said they were keeping a close eye on the project and its security implications. If it is only a commercial venture then that is their (Sri Lanka’s] choice. We will continue to engage Sri Lanka while watching our national interest, said a government source in New Delhi, awaiting the final version of the Bill whose blueprint the Sri Lankan Parliament’s Speaker signed on Thursday. The ‘Colombo Port City Economic Commission Act’ is yet to be made public. Addressing concerns around the recently passed legislation on laws governing the Colombo Port City, which critics fear might be a Chinese enclave in the Sri Lankan capital, a team of government Ministers said the China-backed $1.4 billion. Port City, pitted as a financial hub, had the potential to create 83,000 jobs and bring in up to $15 billion in investments. Constitutional experts and opposition legislators argue that the 269-acre financial hub, coming up on reclaimed land adjoining Colombo’s seafront, would enjoy, besides a tax-free status, immunity from Sri Lankan law. Sections within Sri Lanka, including the political opposition, trade unions and the influential Buddhist clergy, see it as a threat to Sri Lanka’s sovereignty. Apart from the high geopolitical stakes in the big-ticket investment project in the strategically located island nation, the Colombo Port City has sparked a raging debate within the country over its China policy. Instances of official signage excluding Tamil, an official language, while including Mandarin, drew wide criticism from the public. China has been among the top lenders to Sri Lanka, especially since the pandemic struck, offering a $1 billion in loan and a nearly-S 1.5 billion currency swap facility. Earlier this week, Sri Lanka’s Cabinet awarded a project to build an elevated highway in the capital’s suburbs estimated to cost S 1 billion to the State-owned China Harbour Engineering Corporation (CHEC), on a Build-operate-transfer basis, for 15 years.
