October 2024 – Bhartiyanews24x7

25Oct

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Culture

The Pannun plot | Operation Mess-Up

In what is proving to be a major embarrassment for the Indian intelligence establishment, an officer once serving in one of its agencies has been caught with the proverbial smoking gun in the plot to kill the Khalistani separatist and Sikhs For Justice founder Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York in June 2023. A superseding indictment filed by the US Department of Justice (USDoJ) in a US District Court in New York on October 18 charged Vikash Yadav a.k.a. Vikas a.k.a. Amanat and his associate Nikhil Gupta a.k.a. Nick with murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder and money laundering in the Pannun case. Yadav, a former officer of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), is said to have been working with RAW, or the Research and Analysis Wing, at the time. To make matters worse, the 18-...

Stolen Defence lands | The property mafia

18Oct

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Stolen Defence lands | The property mafia

In February 2024, Colonel Anuj Antal, the administrative commandant of the army cantonment in the border town of Ferozepur, Punjab, wrote to then governor Banwarilal Purohit, seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) enquiry and the registration of an FIR against district revenue officials for forging records pertaining to 15 acres of land belonging to the military. His allegation: that the piece of land outside the cantonment known as Jahaz Ground—once an emergency airfield for the Indian Air Force (IAF) used as camouflaging ground for weaponry during the 1962, 1965 and 1971 wars—had been sold off to private individuals, compromising security near the India-Pakistan border. This is not an isolated incident, across India, land owned by the armed forces—spread across prime locat...

Ratan Tata (1937-2024) | Titan who dared to dream big

11Oct

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Ratan Tata (1937-2024) | Titan who dared to dream big

A colossus cannot be captured in a portrait, for he carries the landscape with him. Ratan Naval Tata could not only see into the distance but also attain to the wingspan required to reach there. He was also one who dared to compose dreams on an epic scale but knew how to symphonise all the nuances to turn them into material reality. Yet he always cloaked his greatness with a rare humility and compassion. “I would like to be remembered as a person who was responsible for some change in the way we look at things,” he said in a rare interaction with the media in 2021. And then he added, “As the innovator of something that people thought was unviable and not possible.”Ratan Tata, 86, who died late evening on October 9 in Mumbai following age-related illness, was all that and much, much more. H...

Israel pager attack | Now cyber kinetic warfare

5Oct

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Israel pager attack | Now cyber kinetic warfare

On September 17, around 3.30 pm Beirut time, thousands of pagers used by members of the Hezbollah, the Shia militant group, started exploding across Lebanon. The explosions killed 11 and injured 2,700. The next day, it was the turn of walkie talkies they used to blow up, killing over 20 and injuring 450 people. The mass electronic sabotage, presumed to have been orchestrated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) along with the country’s spy agency, Mossad, represents a new chapter in electronic warfare. The pager/ walkie talkie attacks raise the spectre worldwide of the potential widespread weaponisation and targeting of personal gadgets. Though putting explosives in phones and detonating them is an old art in the secret agent’s toolbox, what makes the alleged Israeli attack unique is the dee...