Category Archives: هنرمند خبر

The outage will start at 2 pm Friday due to “tie-in and emergency maintenance work at Gulshan DRS”, according to Titas Gas Transmission and Supply Company.

The disruption will affect industrial, commercial, CNG, captive and residential customers in Gulshan-1, Gulshan-2, Banani, Natunbazar, Baridhara and adjoining areas until 5 pm, the state utility said in a statement.

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Seoul, September 25

North Korea expressed regret on Friday that it shot dead a missing South Korean to prevent the spread of coronavirus, the South’s national security adviser said, amid a growing political and public backlash.

North Korea’s United Front Department, in charge of cross-border ties, sent a letter to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s office a day after Seoul officials said North Korean soldiers killed a South Korean before dousing his body in oil and setting it on fire.

The rare message came as Moon faced intense political fallout over the incident, which coincided with a renewed push for policy to engage Pyongyang.

The letter cited North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as saying he was “sorry” that the incident disappointed the South Korean public and should not have happened, Moon’s security adviser Suh Hoon said.

The soldiers fired more than 10 shots at the man, a South Korean fisheries official who went missing this week after he did not reveal his identity and tried to flee, Suh said, citing the letter.

But the letter said they burned a floatation device he was using, according to their anti-virus manuals, and not his body.

“The troops could not locate the unidentified trespasser during a search after firing the shots and burned the device under national emergency disease prevention measures,” Suh told a briefing, referring to the letter.

The shooting shocked many South Koreans and triggered a fierce backlash from opposition lawmakers, prompting Moon to issue an unusually stringent response calling it “unpardonable”.

In 2008, North Korean troops shot to death a South Korean tourist who strolled into an off-limits area while staying at a North Korean resort complex, resulting in a halt of inter-Korean tourism projects. Moon has pledged to reopen the tour programmes.

The military announced the fishery official’s death a day after Moon proposed a new regional disease control and health initiative including North Korea to cope with crises like the coronavirus and strained ties with Pyongyang.

“Moon and Kim have recently exchanged letters to share hopes to rebuild relations after tackling the coronavirus,” Suh said. Reuters

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India’s largest bank SBI saw the largest reduction in the number of cases related to loan fraud.(Bloomberg image)

The cases related to bank loan frauds have significantly decreased in the financial year 2019-20 even as the bank credit has increased on-year. There has been a steep reduction in the occurrence of bank frauds, with the amount involved in loan-related frauds declining steeply to 0.15 per cent of total advances of PSU banks in FY 2019-20. The number of loan-related frauds also fell to 292 in the last fiscal year, Anurag Thakur, MoS, Ministry of Finance, said in a reply to a question in Lok Sabha. It is to be noted that in the fiscal year 2018-19, the State Bank of India alone dealt with 259 cases related to loan fraud.

India’s largest bank SBI saw the largest reduction in the number of cases related to loan fraud. After 284 cases in FY18 and 259 cases in FY19, the number of cases rolled down to a mere 48 in FY20. Cases in Syndicate Bank also fell from 138 in FY18, to 59 in FY19, and further to 20 in the last fiscal. However, UCO Bank and Punjab and Sind Bank saw a sudden uptick in the cases related to loan fraud. 

Two banks with highest cases of loan fraud in FY20

UCO Bank saw the highest, 64 cases of loan-related bank frauds in the year. The cases in UCO Bank steeply surged from 14 in FY18 and 8 in FY19. Similarly, such cases in Punjab and Sind Bank rose from 6 in FY18 to 2 in FY19 and further to 23 in FY20. 

Altogether, a sharp reduction in loan fraud is attributed to increased vigilance by the banks. “Comprehensive steps taken to check bank frauds and strengthening of monitoring of the banking mechanism have led to this reduction,” the government said. The framework for timely detection, reporting, investigation, etc, relating to large value bank frauds to PSU banks for dealing with suspected frauds involving a sum of over Rs 50 crore has helped in the early detection of loan fraud. 

Further, the enactment of the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018 to provide for attachment of property of a fugitive economic offender, confiscation of such offender’s property, and disentitlement of the offender from defending any civil claim has generated a sense of fear in fraudsters. The empowerment of the heads of PSU banks to issue requests for issuance of look-out circulars has also helped in the early detection of suspected transactions.

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The authorities are set to table its plans to the Election Commission for scrutinising and determining the fee, Brig Gen Mohammad Sidul Islam, director-general of National Identity Registration Wing, said in a virtual media briefing on Thursday.

The NID wing has already received 730 applications from the four countries in which it has opened the NID service.

The coronavirus pandemic broke out right after the wing took an initiative to enrol expatriate Bangladeshis to vote online in November, said Islam.

As of now, the authorities have received 48 applications from Malaysia, 39 from Saudi Arabia, 530 from the United Arab Emirates and 121 from the United Kingdom, he added.

In order to issue smart cards overseas, the authorities still need to implement several measures and to expedite the process, migrants have urged the government to apply a fee for the services, according to him.

Citizens in the country received their NID smartcards for free when it was first introduced. The government subsequently fixed a fee for services like correction or drawing a duplicate card.

“Our expatriates said they don’t want anything for free but want to pay for it. Therefore, only a token fee will be applied,” the director-general said.

“The amount collected will not go to the commission fund but to the national treasury. The commission will discuss the issue in its next meeting on Sept 28.”

The NID service was introduced in Malaysia for migrant Bangladeshis in November last year. Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda inaugurated the service in the UK in February.

To register as a voter, migrants can fill up a form online at services.nidw.gov.bd.

The initiative to collect ‘biometric’ information through the embassies hit a snag after the coronavirus pandemic struck.

The authorities plan to resume the NID service abroad soon.

Applications from migrants are being scrutinised, said the EC officials.

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Brussels, September 25

European governments will pay claims above an agreed limit against AstraZeneca over side-effects from its potential COVID-19 vaccine, under different terms to a deal struck with Sanofi, an EU official told Reuters.

The deals reflect different strategies by two of the world’s top drugmakers for protecting themselves as a debate rages about liabilities for vaccines aimed at ending the pandemic.

AstraZeneca has secured the European Union’s backing in a confidential agreement which reflected the lower price sought by the British drugmaker, the official said.

“If a company asks for a higher price, we don’t give the same conditions,” said the official, who was involved in the talks but declined to be identified as the contracts are confidential.

Unexpected side-effects after a drug has regulatory approval are rare, but the speed at which a COVID-19 vaccine is being pursued increases the risks of unforeseen conditions.

The deal with AstraZeneca, which shifts some of the risks involved in the roll-out of a vaccine to taxpayers, was struck in August and its liability clauses have not previously been reported.

Under the deal, AstraZeneca would only pay legal costs up to a certain threshold, the official said, declining to elaborate on how the costs would be shared with individual European governments or the cap.

The financial shield would cover both legal costs and potential compensation, which is rarer but potentially a much bigger outlay in the event of something going wrong. In return for the higher price paid for its vaccine, French drugmaker Sanofi, which is working with GlaxoSmithKline as a partner, did not get any liability waiver.

Spokespeople for AstraZeneca, Sanofi and the European Commission declined to comment on the specifics of the deals.

When asked about AstraZeneca’s relatively low price, a spokesman reiterated the company’s pledge to share the vaccine widely and not to turn a profit from it during the pandemic.

Under the AstraZeneca deal, EU countries have agreed to pay 2.5 euros ($2.92) per dose, while Sanofi has negotiated a price at around 10 euros, the official said.

Side-effects

As part of the supply deals, the only two sealed so far by Brussels, the EU has also made a non-refundable downpayment of 336 million euros to AstraZeneca to secure 400 million doses, proportionately lower than the 324 million euros it paid to Sanofi to secure 300 million doses.

The EU official told Reuters that the contract with AstraZeneca included a narrow definition of side-effects that could limit the possibility of claiming compensation although the company remains liable for its vaccine.

The deal with AstraZeneca was negotiated before it paused late-stage trials of its vaccine candidate this month after a British volunteer developed neurological symptoms. Trials have resumed in Britain but not in the United States.

EU governments would share compensation costs only if unexpected side-effects emerged after the AstraZeneca vaccine was approved.

Liability has been a key stumbling block in talks with other COVID-19 vaccine makers, EU officials have said, as companies fear they risk larger legal costs than they usually face when vaccines are developed in much longer trials.

A European Commission spokesman said advance purchase deals “provide for member states to indemnify the manufacturer for certain liabilities incurred under specific and strict conditions” but “liability still remains with the companies”.

This means it would be the firm’s responsibility to defend its shot in the courts.

Drugmakers have called on EU regulators to set up a Europe-wide compensation scheme, while patients’ organisations are calling for an EU-wide fund financed by pharmaceutical firms that would compensate for unexpected side-effects.

The EU legal regime is among the least favourable to drugmakers on compensation claims, although plaintiffs have rarely managed to win as the law requires them to prove the link between an illness and a vaccine that may have caused it.

The United States has granted immunity from liability for COVID-19 vaccines that receive regulatory approval.

Meanwhile, Russia has said it would shoulder some of the legal liability should anything go wrong with the vaccine developed by Moscow’s Gamaleya Institute. Reuters

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This left users wary of their WhatsApp chats being accessible to third parties.

WhatsApp privacy: Facebook-owned instant messaging platform WhatsApp has asserted that the user chats are safe and cannot be accessed by any third party. The assertion by the instant messaging service comes as the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has summoned actresses Deepika Padukone and Shraddha Kapoor in a drug case angle that resulted from the probe into the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput. The two actresses were summoned based on their 2017 WhatsApp chats with talent agent Jaya Saha, who was also Sushant’s talent manager. This left users wary of their WhatsApp chats being accessible to third parties.

However, on Thursday, WhatsApp decided to step in to assay the fears of the users. It said that WhatsApp used end-to-end encryption for chats so that only the participants of that particular chat would be able to see the interaction. The access has been closed off even for WhatsApp.

It added that WhatsApp was guided by operating system manufacturers to undertake on-device storage, and further said that users must use all the security features that operating systems provide, including strong passwords and biometric IDs so that any third-party access to content stored on the devices could be curtailed.

Several people are of the view that the NCB accessed the chats using mobile phone cloning, a technique that has been in India for about 15 years now. In this technique, the data as well as the cellular identity of the phone being cloned is transferred or copied to a new device. While the process of cloning is illegal for individuals, authorities undertake the process through forensics to legitimately access user data. Cloning of phones can also transfer the International Mobile Station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number of the original phone to the new one, even though it is unique in nature.

Domain experts state that programming skills and a few minutes are all that are required to copy the entire data of one device to another. While earlier, such a process required physical access to the original phone, with smartphones, it is not required as a single app can get the process done, all without so much as touching the original phone. Once the cloning process is complete, the user’s WhatsApp chat backup can be accessed through Google Drive for Android phones and from iCloud for iPhone users.

This is possible because while on the phone, the WhatsApp chats are encrypted, and end-to-end encryption is done for the transmission process, the Facebook-owned company does not encrypt chat backups.

When a phone number is used to sign in to WhatsApp, the platform sends a verification code to the phone number SMS or phone call, which would theoretically be received by the cloned SIM. Apart from that, two-step verification can also be set up by users to prevent such an abuse.

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But Thursday, Amazon’s Ring division unveiled the $249 Ring Always Home Cam, a small drone that hums as it flies around houses filming everything, ostensibly for security purposes.

Amazon also introduced new Echo devices, a cloud gaming service called Luna and other products. But the home security drone stood out. The company’s promotional video highlighting the camera showed a burglar breaking into a home and getting spooked as the drone flew straight at him — “Oh, no!” he exclaimed — while the homeowner watched the encounter on his phone.

“Oh, yes,” the ad proclaimed.

Reaction to the surveillance drone was spirited — but not in the way Amazon might have hoped.

“In a country with no laws regulating digital privacy, anyone who buys this from a company with a history of privacy problems is insane,” tweeted Walt Mossberg, a longtime tech product reviewer who is a member of nonprofit News Literacy Project’s board.

Ring said the drone could be used to check whether a homeowner had left the stove on or a window open, and promised that it would record only while flying. It would also make a humming sound so it would be clear when it was filming. But privacy was still the primary concern for most flabbergasted Twitter users.

“An internet connected drone camera for your home, owned by Amazon. this definitely won’t be a privacy nightmare *at all*” one person tweeted.

“A scary step in the future of tech?” posted another Twitter user, Khoa Phan. “Like it’s cool but always eerie at the same time. Obviously there’s some concerns about privacy with Amazon. But what’s the next step after this if this is just the beginning!?”

Dave Limp, the executive responsible for Amazon’s devices, said it had made major investments in camera security, such as two-factor authentication and end-to-end encryption, that will roll out this year. “If Walt doesn’t want to buy this drone, then fine,” he said.

The product came to be because of technological advances and consumer interest in indoor security cameras, Limp said. He said sensors had become good enough and cheap enough for an indoor drone to operate safely. Amazon also found that people did not put a camera in every room for reasons like not having outlets in the right place, so the drone could fill the gap, he said.

A disclaimer at the bottom of Ring’s blog post announcing the drone said the device had not been authorised by the Federal Communications Commission — and might not ever be authorised. Ring said the drone would become available next year, but not “until authorisation is obtained.” Limp said he expected Amazon could get approval and start shipping to some people by the end of the year.

As for Bezos’ plan to have drones delivering packages? Back in 2013, he said it might happen within around five years. To date, it has not.

© 2020 New York Times News Service

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New York, September 24

Mary Trump, the niece of Donald Trump and author of a recent memoir that painted an unflattering portrait of him, sued the U.S. president on Thursday, accusing him and other family members of defrauding her out of an inheritance worth tens of millions of dollars.

The complaint accused Donald Trump, his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, and his brother Robert Trump, who died in August, of “rampant fraud and misconduct.”

She accused the siblings of seizing control of the real estate empire built by their father Fred Trump Sr, who died in 1999, and exploiting it to enrich themselves.

“Fraud was not just the family business – it was a way of life,” according to the complaint filed in a New York state court in Manhattan.

Jay Sekulow, a lawyer for Donald Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Asked for comment on the lawsuit on Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said: “The only fraud committed there was Mary Trump recording one of her relatives and she has really discredited herself.”

Trump Barry, a retired federal appeals court judge, could not immediately be reached for comment. A lawyer who represented Robert Trump did not immediately respond to a request from comment. Robert Trump’s estate was named as a defendant.

Mary Trump’s complaint has renewed attention on her uncle and his family, fewer than six weeks before Donald Trump hopes to win re-election.

Trump is separately trying to keep Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance from seeing his tax returns for a criminal probe, and faces a civil investigation by New York Attorney General Letitia James into whether he inflated asset values to obtain loans and tax benefits.

The complaint by Mary Trump, who is a psychologist, retraces some allegations in her recent tell-all: “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” She said that when her father Fred Trump Jr died in 1981, when she was 16, he left her valuable stakes in the family business that his siblings Donald, Maryanne and Robert were supposed to monitor as fiduciaries.

But she said the Trumps instead moved to siphon funds away, deceive her about what she stood to inherit, and “squeeze” her out.

Mary Trump, now 55, said the alleged fraud did not come to light until October 2018, when the New York Times reported on its investigation into tax matters involving the Trump family.

In a statement provided by her lawyer, Mary Trump said her family betrayed her by working in secret to steal from her, telling “lie after lie” about her inheritance, and “conning me into giving everything away for a fraction of its true value.” Prior to his death on August 15 at age 71, Robert Trump had led the family’s unsuccessful effort to block Mary Trump from publishing her memoir.

Reuters

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Maurices has selected TCS as its digital transformation partner to help build its greenfield IT ecosystem that will optimize more than 200 existing applications and software components

TCS share price jumped 4.4 per cent to Rs 2,435 apiece on BSE after the company announced a partnership with maurices, a women’s fashion-apparel retail chain in the US and Canada, to help create a new flexible and scalable IT landscape for the latter. Earlier this week, Tata Consultancy Services stock price hit a fresh 52-week high of Rs 2,554 apiece. Since the start of this week, IT giant has made a slew of announcements such as the strategic partnership with Morrisons, general availability of Quartz suit of blockchain, deployment of AI-Powered software and launch of a private off-grid networking platform using blockchain with Yale University. Suyog Kulkarni, Senior Analyst- IT services at Reliance Securities, expects TCS to remain a key beneficiary of buoyant tech demand given its global scale, diversified clientele and strong cash-rich balance sheet.

With today’s gain in the stock price, TCS shares have rallied 62 per cent from March lows of Rs 1,504.40 apiece. Around 10.15 AM, TCS shares traded 2.82 per cent higher at 2,397.35 apiece, as compared to a 0.70 per cent gain in the S&P BSE Sensex. Maurices has selected TCS as its digital transformation partner to help build its greenfield IT ecosystem that will optimize more than 200 existing applications and software components in the next 17 months of their transformational journey. According to the company’s press release, TCS will help maurices strategize, create and operationalize the new scalable, secure and future-proof architecture for the underlying IT infrastructure, security layer, and a new application stack, as well as remediate its technical debt.

In addition, TCS will help maurices build a brand-new data analytics platform with extensive reporting features. “We are creating a greenfield IT and Infrastructure that will lay the foundation for the growth of maurices’ business and operations. TCS being the industry leader has been chosen as our SI partner to implement the Project Split Rock, the initiative to stand up the IT Ecosystem,” said Fred Argir, Chief Information Officer & Chief Digital Officer, maurices.

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