India using Kashmir to oppose Silk Road project: Chinese media

March 30, 2017

Beijing, Mar 30: India sees China's Silk Road initiative as a geopolitical competition and is using the Kashmir issue as an "unfounded excuse" to oppose the ambitious project, Chinese state media today alleged and asked New Delhi to "abandon" its "cliche mentality".

"The official reason the Indian government rejected the offer to join the initiative (Silk Road) is that it is designed to pass through Kashmir. However, it is just an unfounded excuse as Beijing has been maintaining a consistent position on the Kashmir issue, which has never changed," one of the two articles on India by state-run Global Times said.

China1"India sees the Belt and Road initiative as a geopolitical competition," the article said, criticising India for hindering Beijing's push into South Asia and the world with multi-billion Silk Road project which is also known as the 'Belt and Road' (BR).

"Whether to continue to boycott or join the Belt and Road remains a conundrum for New Delhi," it said adding that, India is the only one which can help itself. The article said that India should give up its "biased" view on the BR initiative. "It is high time to abandon the cliche mentality of associating everything with geopolitics.

India will surely see a different world if it does," the article said. Referring to India's reservations to attend the BR summit called by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the article said it may be an "embarrassing occasion" for India as the meeting is backed by "China's peripheral countries, notably Russia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Pakistan".

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently said 20 heads of state will attend the summit, together with over 50 leaders from international organisations, over 100 ministerial officials and more than 1,200 guests from around the world.

The article referred to a comment by Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar during his visit here last month to co-chair the upgraded India-China strategic dialogue, saying India is examining China's invitation to attend the summit and "how a country whose sovereignty has been violated can come on aninvitation".

In the meantime, however, state-run Chinese media stepped up campaign to pressurise India to join the summit. China apparently is keen about India's participation in the summit as the project struggled to make headway in the region except the USD 46 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) where both Beijing-Islamabad are putting all efforts to show early harvest.

Media reports here said that Xi plans to invite his US counterpart Donald Trump to attend the meeting during their first summit early next month in Florida. BR consisted of maze of roads, including CPEC, Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic (BCIM) Corridor and 21st Maritime Silk Road besides road network to connect China with Eurasia.

The article also said, "it seems that the mainstream opinion throughout India is that the connectivity brought about by BR initiative is geopolitically significant. Therefore, India cannot allow the initiative to expand further into South Asia".

"This could also explain why the BCIM has seen no progress since its proposed by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in 2013, and also why New Delhi has been keen on Japan's investment in the Iranian port of Chabahar," it said.

"New Delhi may also feel embarrassed as Moscow has actively responded to the Belt and Road initiative and will build an economic corridor with China and Mongolia," it said, adding Russia and Iran seeking to join the CPEC putting "India in a more awkward position".

It said, "Beijing has expressed, on various occasions, its anticipation to see New Delhi join the grand project and to make concerted effort with India in building economic corridors involving China, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar".

Another article in the same daily said a "benign" competition between India and China may help development in South Asia but they should avoid "cut-throat" rivalry. "The so-called dragon-elephant contention is perhaps a blow against strategic mutual trust between Beijing and New Delhi, but may be conducive to development in South Asia," it said.

Accusing India of not being "generous" to its neighbours, it said "a yawning infrastructure funding gap in South Asian countries creates space for China and those nations to strengthen economic cooperation".

"Bangladesh and China signed 27 deals worth billions of dollars during President Xi Jinping's visit last year," it said, adding China's BR initiative has received an increasing amount of attention from Bangladesh.

"Only by investing more resources in regional integration and extending the benefits from India's rapid economic growth to other South Asian countries can New Delhi maintain its influence in the region," it said.

"Benign competition between China and India will be conducive to development in South Asia. The question remaining is how to avoid cut-throat competition as Beijing and New Delhi jostle for influence. India and China should seek common ground while strengthening cooperation with South Asian countries to promote regional integration," it said.

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Agencies
March 29,2020

A shrimp seller at the wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan believed to be the centre of the coronavirus pandemic, may be the first person to have tested positive for the disease, a media report said on Saturday.

The report by the London-based Metro newspaper said that 57-year-old woman, named by the Wall Street Journal as Wei Guixian, was selling shrimp at the Huanan Seafood Market when she developed what she thought was a cold last December.

Chinese digital news outlet, The Paper has said that she may be epatient zero'.

Wei was told by doctors her illness was "ruthless" and other workers at the market had come to the Wuhan Union Hospital with the same symptoms, the Metro newspaper report quoted the outlet as saying.

"Every winter, I suffer from the flu, so I thought it was the flu," the woman was quoted as saying by The Paper news outlet.

The shrimp seller added that she believed she contracted the coronavirus from the shared toilet in the market.

She said the fatal disease would have killed fewer people if the government had acted sooner.

Wuhan Municipal Health Commission has confirmed that Wei was among the first 27 people to test positive for the coronavirus.

It said she was one of 24 cases with direct links to the market, the Metro newspaper reported.

Though Wei may be "patient zero", it does not mean she is the first person to have contracted the virus, added the Metro report.

Chinese researchers have claimed that the first person diagnosed with the airborne virus had no contact with the seafood market and was identified on December 1, 2019.

Wei was later quarantined when a connection was made between the bug and the market before recovering in January.

As of Saturday, the global number of coronavirus cases stood at 104,837 with 27,862 deaths, according to the latest update by the Washington-based Johns Hopkins University.

The US has the highest number of cases at 104,837, followed by Italy 86,498 and China 81,948.

Italy has recorded the highest number of fatalities with 9,134 deaths, followed by Spain and China, at 5,138 and 3,299, respectively.

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News Network
April 28,2020

Geneva, Apr 28: The global death toll from the novel coronavirus has increased over the past 24 hours by nearly 5,000 to top 198,000, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

According to the latest WHO data, 85,530 new cases of infection have been registered globally over the past day, with 4,982 deaths.

The overall number of COVID-19 cases worldwide increased to 2,878,196 and the death count reached 198,668.

There are 1,359,380 confirmed cases and 124,525 deaths in Europe.

The number of cases in the Americas total 1,140,520, with 58,492 deaths.

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Agencies
March 1,2020

Washington, Mar 1: The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed a fine of over $200 million for all major US mobile carriers for selling the location data of customers to some agencies.

The Federal Communications Commission today proposed fines against the nation's four largest wireless carriers for apparently selling access to their customers' location information without taking reasonable measures to protect against unauthorised access to that information. As a result, T-Mobile faces a proposed fine of more than $91 million, AT&T faces a proposed fine of more than $57 million, Verizon faces a proposed fine of more than $48 million, and Sprint faces a proposed fine of more than $12 million, the FCC said in a statement on Friday.

The Enforcement Bureau of FCC opened this investigation after reports surfaced that a Missouri Sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, used a "location-finding service" operated by Securus, a provider of communications services to correctional facilities, to access the location information of the wireless carriers' customers without their consent between 2014 and 2017.

"American consumers take their wireless phones with them wherever they go. And information about a wireless customer's location is highly personal and sensitive. The FCC has long had clear rules on the books requiring all phone companies to protect their customers' personal information. And since 2007, these companies have been on notice that they must take reasonable precautions to safeguard this data and that the FCC will take strong enforcement action if they don't. Today, we do just that," said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

"This FCC will not tolerate phone companies putting Americans' privacy at risk."

The FCC also admonished these carriers for apparently disclosing their customers' location information, without their authorisation, to a third party

The four major US carriers mentioned sold access to their customers' location information to "aggregators," who then resold access to such information to third-party location-based service providers (like Securus).

Although their exact practices varied, each carrier relied heavily on contract-based assurances that the location-based services providers (acting on the carriers' behalf) would obtain consent from the wireless carrier's customer before accessing that customer's location information.

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