Latest news with #Fema
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Business Standard
3 days ago
- Politics
- Business Standard
SC rejects Lalit Modi's plea seeking BCCI to pay ₹10.65 cr ED penalty
The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a plea by former cricket administrator Lalit Modi, who had sought a direction to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to pay a ₹10.65 crore penalty imposed on him by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (Fema), reported news agency PTI. A bench comprising Justices PS Narasimha and R Mahadevan upheld the Bombay High Court's earlier decision, which had rejected Modi's petition and imposed costs, but clarified that Modi may pursue appropriate civil remedies if he chooses. Bombay HC called petition frivolous and misconceived The case stemmed from a December 19, 2023, ruling by the Bombay High Court, which dismissed Lalit Modi's plea as 'frivolous and misconceived' and directed him to pay ₹1 lakh to Tata Memorial Hospital within four weeks. The high court held that the Fema penalty had been imposed on Modi in his personal capacity and not in connection with any public function or statutory duty. Therefore, the court found no legal basis for asking the BCCI to bear the penalty on his behalf. Modi had argued that during his tenure as BCCI vice-president and chairman of the Indian Premier League (IPL) governing council, the board was bound to indemnify him under its internal regulations. He maintained that the penalty arose from actions carried out in his official capacity. No writ against BCCI under Article 12 The high court also observed that despite this legal position being well established, Modi filed the petition in 2018 seeking a writ remedy that was not available in law.
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom'. Its moderators say it's not for everyone
The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we're lucky to get hours. For many, the only sane solution is to stop reading the news altogether – advice often shared by therapists, self-help books and even newspaper articles. But to bury your head in the sand until the day the apocalypse arrives at your doorstep is not necessarily the most tranquil, nor moral, of postures. In the sprawling Reddit community r/collapse, people instead try to stare unblinkingly at the unravelling of civilization. For the roughly half a million members here, many of whom joined in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and two Donald Trump inaugurations, the arc of history feels more like a freefall. This June, r/collapse was busy discussing the developing conflict between Iran and Israel, as well as 'wet bulbs' (a far more humid and deadly type of heatwave), the millions of air conditioners being bought in India as temperatures rise and Trump's plan to end Fema. But one of the top posts tackled a more specialist topic: declining levels of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic. 'As if the North Atlantic fisheries wasn't in bad enough shape from overfishing of cod, now the base of the entire food chain has observed to be getting smaller each year for the past 60 years,' the poster wrote. A commenter added: 'Ocean acidification/die off is terrifying. Even if we solve all the other collapse problems (and we almost certainly can't) the oceans dying means the atmosphere becomes depleted of oxygen and poisonous. If humans survive those scenarios, life on Earth would more resemble that of a moon colony.' Much informed panicking ensued. There are lots of places on the internet, and especially on Reddit, that collate news stories around a theme: r/UpliftingNews, r/LateStageCapitalism and r/nottheonion (which posts news so ridiculous it seems like satire) to name few. But r/collapse is much more than a collation of links for people to feel outraged and nihilistic or warm and fuzzy about. What's striking about r/collapse is the clear-eyed, unemotional tone in which posts are written: neither pessimistic nor hopeful, just peering through the window at a relentless decline. 'We are not an activist subreddit,' one moderator, a retired history teacher, told me. 'We filter out people who want to organize and protest. We are also not inclined towards accelerationism, we're not seeking doom. We accept that perhaps it's going to happen, but it's not a conspiratorial subreddit. It's basically logic, rational and scientific.' That is thanks in part to r/collapse's 30 fairly active moderators – among them neuroscientists, environmental scientists, chemical engineers, government auditors and history teachers – who intensively maintain the subreddit as relatively objective a resource as possible. They even have a separate page, called r/collapse_wilds, for posts removed by the moderation team, usually because they did not provide high quality enough evidence. When a new moderator applies, the existing group screens them for mental health issues and ability to handle consistently distressing content, as well as overt political bias. It might sound like a lot of red tape to help run a subreddit, but when you realize what it takes to drench yourself in fatalistic topics day in, day out, you start to understand that a collapse moderator is a special kind of person. I spoke with 10 such moderators on a video chat, just as the national guard and marines were sent to quell Ice protests in Los Angeles. All are men based in North America, polite and turn-taking, though most insisted on remaining anonymous so their online roles wouldn't interfere with their real world positions. In their roles, they take the existential questions of civilization collapse seriously: What exactly constitutes collapse? Are we already experiencing it? Why aren't people reacting more strongly to its likelihood, and does either humanity or technology have the ability to prevent it? Practical questions, too: where is the best place to live, the most helpful job to have, as collapse happens? They wrestle with whether too much Trump news is distracting, and painstakingly debate posts about the morality of having children and population growth, which they say is the most controversial topic among the community. Each post from a user must come with an accompanying statement explaining why it's related to collapse that the moderators assess; sometimes it seems more like they're overseeing a grant application process rather than an online forum. The work is often philosophical in nature. 'People say that this is one of the least religious times in human history, but I think that's completely false,' said Etienne, a moderator who is based in Ontario with a background in cognitive science and neuroscience. 'Most of us have strong, strong faith in the myth of technological progress. Most people associate thinking about collapse with pessimism because you're questioning the orthodoxy of our modern religion, which is faith in progress. And I think once you've made peace with the myth that we all grew up with being scientifically false, then you go through the stages of grief, then you build some psychological resilience to live in the world.' The group says that when the media or academia write about collapse issues, they often try to end on an optimistic note, so as not to depress the reader. 'It's really hard to find a mainstream publication that doesn't end an article about, say, renewable energy, with a section that says: 'things are difficult but let's have hope' and 'it's just a matter of building more solar panels,'' Etienne said. He cited reports, including an impactful study by Simon Michaux commissioned by the Finnish government, that say it's simply impossible to replace energy with renewable sources at scale. 'But we find there's much less coverage of that – of using less energy and degrowth.' The moderators also say that people who are concerned about societal collapse tend to think it'll come suddenly with a nuclear bomb or terrible pandemic. The subreddit is of a different mind. One moderator, an engineer who preferred to remain anonymous, explained the tenets of r/collapse like this: 'In the long term, it's going to be very difficult for us to maintain this very complex industrial society. We're looking at a type of simplification of industrial civilization. I think most of our members think this is what collapse is, which is why almost half of the members, when asked when they think collapse is going to happen, said that it's already happening. 'This is the idea of catabolic collapse: that what we're living through is a series of crises, sometimes followed by momentary resolution, but the long-term trend is downturn. It's not going to be a sudden event that's everything in a single day, which I think people like preppers are more accustomed to thinking.' Every week, r/collapse puts out a special newsletter called Last Week in Collapse, a one-stop shop for everything that has gone wrong in the world. Its author is an international affairs researcher, who requested anonymity because their background might 'color the reader's interpretation of the events'. They're not part of the moderation group, but began writing the roundup in 2021, inspired by what they had seen on the subreddit. 'It was part of a process of making sense of the storm of news around us – almost a form of writing therapy,' they told me over email. 'It is so easy to get lost or distracted by the next thing that we forget the big picture. So I decided to start organizing and summarizing other stories because I believed it would help other collapsologists and observers zoom out and take it all in.' It makes for a pretty brutal read. This week's newsletter, for example, began with a newly published study of tree rings that suggested 'irreversible large-scale forest loss' in the Amazon; featured a study saying climate change could reduce crop yields across the US and Europe 40% by 2100, which one scientist likened to 'everyone on the planet giving up breakfast'; touched on counterintuitive research showing that some glass bottles contain up to 50 times more microplastics than plastic bottles or metal cans; and reported that this is 'the sixth consecutive year that global peacefulness has deteriorated' per the Global Peace Index. These were just a few of around a hundred links. 'Collapse is hard to deny when it's all laid out for you every week,' says the author. Readers are now able to spend just five or 10 minutes reading one email 'and be kept abreast on all the latest doom'. I ask what differentiates just bad news from a news story that is actually about collapse. 'I have found that it helps to imagine likely realities for humanity, position your perspective in the future, and then look backwards for the telltale signs and milestones of future collapse,' the author says. 'What factors and events will seem obvious to someone living 50 or 100 years from now? We can look back at the 1930s today and the road to WWII seems much clearer. Scientists are publishing under-appreciated studies every day, and their relevance is fairly obvious. Yet our attention lies elsewhere entirely.' A weekly roundup does seem like a useful alternative to completely ignoring society's downfall. But if things are as bad as r/collapse believes them to be, does it do us any good to inundate ourselves with news of the end of everything? Aren't we just increasing our personal suffering without making anything better? 'Yes, I sometimes wonder about the overall mental impact of Last Week in Collapse,' says its author. 'I know some people find it to be valuable, informative and even soothing. Others can't bring themselves to read it. It's not for everyone, and that's fine. To paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in collapse, but collapse is interested in you.' To that end, the subreddit provides online mental health resources as well as a separate community, r/CollapseSupport, where people talk about their struggles. 'Can't stop thinking about the children', 'feeling completely hopeless' and 'scared to death for everyone' are three recent post titles. Most of the moderators say that the thing they've found most helpful in dealing with the onslaught of information is moderating itself, and connecting with people who have similar concerns across the world: debating but also sharing cat photos and having meaningful discussion about how to lead a meaningful life in the end times. But they're aware they're not always the most fun people at a party. 'I don't want to be right about this sort of situation,' said one of the moderators, an electrical engineer from the midwest. 'But if you're open-minded and you're considerate of sources, and you're approaching it from a very methodical fashion, there is much cause for concern. Working through that grief was trying. I think there's a lot of people that come to this community that maybe had my same perspective, and if I can at least help a few of those folks work through that, or come to their own peace, that adds some small iota of value to the internet space at large.' And that would be a vaguely uplifting note to end this article on, but as I'm hearing, that's the coward's way out. The truth is not all the people behind r/collapse feel like they're necessarily helping. As the author of Last Week in Collapse put it to me, there's probably no way out of the collapse: 'I do not believe we will ultimately innovate or vote ourselves out of our situation. I predict humanity is in for a polluted future of climate emergencies, famines, wars and scarcity before the end of this century. And heatwaves, civil conflicts, breakdown of ocean currents, disease, poverty, overpopulation, drought and more. So I feel a certain sense of duty to inform those who are interested, but it's probably healthier to 'chop wood, carry water' than to spend too much time following the world's problems. Most people can't really stop the machine anyway.'
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Business Standard
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
ED questions Yuvraj Singh, Urvashi Rautela in endorsements of betting apps
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is expanding its investigation into the illegal online betting platforms and is now shifting its focus to endorsements made by former film celebrities and cricketers, according to a report by NDTV Profit. As part of the ongoing investigations into promotional links with banned betting platforms, including 1xBet, FairPlay, Parimatch, and Lotus365, the agency questioned former Indian cricketers like Harbhajan Singh, Suresh Raina, and Yuvraj Singh, along with actors like Sonu Sood and Urvashi Rautela. Citing an ED official, the report added, "These betting platforms are using surrogate names like 1xbat and 1xbat sporting lines in advertising campaigns. The ads often include QR codes that redirect users to betting sites, blatantly violating Indian law." While notices have been issued to some of the celebrities, others are yet to receive them, the official added. The report said that these platforms often promote themselves as skill-based gaming platforms but operate on luck-based outcomes, by using rigged algorithms that categorise them as gambling operations according to Indian law. The report suggests that initial findings show that these endorsements violate several Indian laws, including the Information Technology (IT) Act, the Foreign Exchange Management Act (Fema), the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), and the Benami Transactions Act. It further stated that such endorsements also violate the advisories that have been issued by the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Earlier in March this year, actors from the Telugu industry, including Rana Daggubati, Prakash Raj, Vijay Devarakonda, Manchu Lakshmi, and Nidhi Agarwal, were booked for allegedly promoting betting apps, according to a report by Telangana Today. Illegal gambling platforms' business
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
Man responsible for US disaster response ‘didn't know it was hurricane season'
The acting head of Fema told colleagues he was not aware America had a hurricane season, according to a report. Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) were left baffled when David Richardson, who has led the agency since early May, said he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season during a briefing on Monday, according to four sources familiar with the situation. The US hurricane season officially began on Sunday and lasts through November. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast last week that this year's season is expected to bring as many as 10 hurricanes. A spokesman for the department of homeland security (DHS) which oversees Fema insisted Mr Richardson was joking when he made the remark. Mr Richardson said during the briefing that there would be no changes to the agency's disaster response plans despite having told staff to expect a new plan in May, the sources told Reuters. There is mounting concern that the departures of a raft of top Fema officials, staff cuts and reductions in hurricane preparations have left the agency ill-prepared for a storm season forecast to be above normal. Hurricanes kill dozens of people and cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually across the US every year. The storms have become increasingly more destructive and costly. A DHS spokesman said: 'Despite mean-spirited attempts to falsely frame a joke as policy, there is no uncertainty about what Fema will be doing this hurricane season. 'Fema is laser focused on disaster response, and protecting the American people.' Mr Richardson's remark spurred confusion among agency staff and reignited concern about his lack of familiarity with its operations, three sources told Reuters. Mr Richardson, who has no disaster response experience, said he will not be issuing a new disaster plan because he does not want to make changes that might counter the Fema review council, the sources said. Donald Trump created the council to evaluate Fema. Its members include Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, governors and other officials. In a May 15 staff town hall, Mr Richardson said a disaster plan, including tabletop exercises, would be ready for review by May 23. The back-and-forth on updating the disaster plan and a lack of clear strategic guidance has created confusion for Fema staff, said one source. Mr Richardson has evoked his military experience as a former Marine artillery officer in conversations with staff. Before joining Fema he was assistant secretary at the department for homeland security's office for countering weapons of mass destruction, which he has told staff he will continue to lead. Mr Richardson was appointed as the new chief of Fema last month after his predecessor, Cameron Hamilton, was abruptly fired. Mr Hamilton had publicly broken with Mr Trump over the future of the agency, but sources told Reuters that Trump allies had already been manoeuvring to oust him because they were unhappy with what they saw as Hamilton's slow-moving effort to restructure. Mr Trump said Fema should be shrunk or even eliminated, arguing states can take on many of its functions, as part of a wider downsizing of the federal government. About 2,000 full-time Fema staff, one-third of its total, have been terminated or voluntarily left the agency since the start of the Trump administration in January. Despite Ms Noem's prior comments that she plans to eliminate Fema, in May she approved Mr Richardson's request to retain more than 2,600 short-term disaster response and recovery employees whose terms were set to expire this year, one of the sources said, confirming an earlier report by NBC News. Those short-term staff make up the highest proportion of Fema employees, about 40 per cent, and are a pillar of the agency's on-the-ground response efforts. Fema recently sharply reduced hurricane training and workshops for state and local emergency managers due to travel and speaking restrictions imposed on staff, according to Reuters. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
03-06-2025
- Climate
- Telegraph
Man responsible for US disaster response ‘didn't know it was hurricane season'
The acting head of Fema told colleagues he was not aware America had a hurricane season, according to a report. Staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) were left baffled when David Richardson, who has led the agency since early May, said he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season during a briefing on Monday, according to four sources familiar with the situation. The US hurricane season officially began on Sunday and lasts through November. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast last week that this year's season is expected to bring as many as 10 hurricanes. A spokesman for the department of homeland security (DHS) which oversees Fema insisted Mr Richardson was joking when he made the remark. Mr Richardson said during the briefing that there would be no changes to the agency's disaster response plans despite having told staff to expect a new plan in May, the sources told Reuters. There is mounting concern that the departures of a raft of top Fema officials, staff cuts and reductions in hurricane preparations have left the agency ill-prepared for a storm season forecast to be above normal. Hurricanes kill dozens of people and cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually across the US every year. The storms have become increasingly more destructive and costly. A DHS spokesman said: 'Despite mean-spirited attempts to falsely frame a joke as policy, there is no uncertainty about what Fema will be doing this hurricane season. 'Fema is laser focused on disaster response, and protecting the American people.' Mr Richardson's remark spurred confusion among agency staff and reignited concern about his lack of familiarity with its operations, three sources told Reuters. Mr Richardson, who has no disaster response experience, said he will not be issuing a new disaster plan because he does not want to make changes that might counter the Fema review council, the sources said. Donald Trump created the council to evaluate Fema. Its members include Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, governors and other officials. In a May 15 staff town hall, Mr Richardson said a disaster plan, including tabletop exercises, would be ready for review by May 23. The back-and-forth on updating the disaster plan and a lack of clear strategic guidance has created confusion for Fema staff, said one source. Mr Richardson has evoked his military experience as a former Marine artillery officer in conversations with staff. Before joining Fema he was assistant secretary at the department for homeland security's office for countering weapons of mass destruction, which he has told staff he will continue to lead. Cuts to Fema Mr Richardson was appointed as the new chief of Fema last month after his predecessor, Cameron Hamilton, was abruptly fired. Mr Hamilton had publicly broken with Mr Trump over the future of the agency, but sources told Reuters that Trump allies had already been manoeuvring to oust him because they were unhappy with what they saw as Hamilton's slow-moving effort to restructure. Mr Trump said Fema should be shrunk or even eliminated, arguing states can take on many of its functions, as part of a wider downsizing of the federal government. About 2,000 full-time Fema staff, one-third of its total, have been terminated or voluntarily left the agency since the start of the Trump administration in January. Despite Ms Noem's prior comments that she plans to eliminate Fema, in May she approved Mr Richardson's request to retain more than 2,600 short-term disaster response and recovery employees whose terms were set to expire this year, one of the sources said, confirming an earlier report by NBC News. Those short-term staff make up the highest proportion of Fema employees, about 40 per cent, and are a pillar of the agency's on-the-ground response efforts. Fema recently sharply reduced hurricane training and workshops for state and local emergency managers due to travel and speaking restrictions imposed on staff, according to Reuters.
