
"We need thorough inquiry": KC Venugopal on Air India plane crash
Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala) [India], June 13 (ANI): Congress leader KC Venugopal on Friday said that the inquiry into the Air India flight plane crash near the Ahmedabad airport should be expedited and that there should be a clear-cut answer to why this accident happened.
Speaking with ANI, KC Venugopal described the plane crash as 'one of the most shocking incidents' and said that there should be a clear-cut answer why this accident happened.
'What happened in Ahmedabad yesterday was one of the most shocking incidents. There are no words to explain it...We need a thorough inquiry about that. I think there is an established convention to inquire about flight accidents. I think that should be expedited, there should be clear-cut answer why this accident happened. Only an inquiry can reveal this,' KC Venugopal said.
On Thursday, the Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which was bound for London from Ahmedabad, crashed shortly after takeoff. There were 242 people on board, including 230 passengers and 12 crew members.
Among the victims was former Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani.
Of the passengers, 241 died in the crash. The lone survivor, identified as Vishwashkumar Ramesh, a British national of Indian origin, sustained injuries and is undergoing treatment.
The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) on Friday confirmed the recovery of the Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR), commonly referred to as the black box, from the rooftop of a building at the site of the Air India Flight AI-171 crash in Ahmedabad.
The AAIB has launched a full-scale investigation into the crash, with over 40 staff from the Gujarat State Government joining efforts to support the Ministry of Civil Aviation teams on the ground.
The black box, a critical piece of evidence, will be analysed to determine the cause of the tragic crash.
Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital and met the survivor and other injured people.
Aircraft manufacturer Boeing also released a statement on X, saying, 'We are in contact with Air India regarding Flight 171 and stand ready to support them. Our thoughts are with the passengers, crew, first responders and all affected.'
(ANI)
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Time of India
44 minutes ago
- Time of India
INS Tamal, last Indian warship built abroad, to be commissioned in Russia on July 1
NEW DELHI: The last Indian warship to be built abroad, a 3,900 tonne multi-role stealth frigate packed with sensors and weapons like BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles, will be commissioned as INS Tamal in Russia on July 1. The Navy currently has 59 warships and vessels under construction in Indian shipyards at an overall cost of around Rs 1.2 lakh crore to add to its expanding blue-water combat capabilities. It also has the initial approval or 'acceptance of necessity (AoN)' for indigenous construction of another 31 warships, including big projects for nine diesel-electric submarines, seven new-generation frigates and eight anti-submarine warfare corvettes. "The force has fully transformed from a 'Buyer's Navy' to a 'Builder's Navy' over the years. There is no plan for an Indian warship to be constructed abroad in future," a officer told TOI. The Navy, which currently has 140 warships and submarines along with over 250 aircraft and helicopters, plans to expand to around 180 warships and 350 aircraft and helicopters by 2030. This is crucial for tackling the rapidly-growing maritime collusiveness between Pakistan and China, which has the world's largest Navy with 370 warships but is currently constrained by the 'tyranny of logistics' in the Indian Ocean Region. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Memperdagangkan CFD Emas dengan salah satu spread terendah? IC Markets Mendaftar Undo The 125-metre long INS Tamal, with extended endurance, a top speed of over 30 knots and a crew of 250 sailors, will be commissioned at a ceremony presided over by Western Naval Command chief Vice Admiral Sanjay J Singh in Kaliningrad. India in Oct 2018 had inked an umbrella agreement with Russia for four upgraded Krivak-III class frigates, with the first two to be imported for around Rs 8,000 crore. The other two, Triput and Tavasya, in turn, are being built at the Goa shipyard with transfer of technology at an overall cost of around Rs 13,000 crore. The first frigate, INS Tushil, reached her home port of Karwar from Russia in Feb. These four new warships will add to the six such Russian frigates, 3 Talwar-class and 3 Teg-class warships, already inducted from 2003-2004 onwards. Designed for blue-water operations across the spectrum of naval warfare in four dimensions of air, surface, underwater and electromagnetic, these frigates are armed with a wide array of advanced weapon systems. "INS Tamal has significant upgrades over her predecessors, punching well above her weight," an officer said. Besides BrahMos missiles, the frigate has Shtil vertical launched surface-to-air missiles, an improved A190-01 100mm gun and a new age electro-optical/infrared Sandal V system. She is also equipped with a 30mm close-in weapon system, heavyweight torpedoes, urgent attack anti-submarine rockets, apart from various surveillance and fire control radars and systems.


Scroll.in
an hour ago
- Scroll.in
What two deaths say about ‘peninsular' India's insular view of the North East
In June, North East India witnessed two related deaths: Raja Raghuvanshi from Indore was murdered in Meghalaya and Roshmita Hojai, a woman from Assam's Dimasa tribe, drowned in Rishikesh in Uttarakhand. The North East link was common to both incidents but most media outlets in peninsular India had widely contrasting reactions. Racist stereotypes emerged first. A national daily declared Meghalaya as a region of ' crime-prone ' hills with no mention of how many murders or other crimes had been committed in an area where tourism is central to the local economy. One crime was all it took for mainstream and social media to condemn Meghalaya's residents as 'criminals', without bothering to mention that the villagers around Sohra, where Raghuvanshi was murdered by the wife he had recently married and her accomplices, held a candlelight vigil to mourn the killing of a complete stranger. This piece of yellow journalism is what the ToI is reduced to? Armchair reportage at its worst.. Disgusting and slanderous.. — patricia mukhim (@meipat) May 29, 2025 On the other hand, newspapers devoted a two-inch column to Hojai, who was aspiring to be a civil servant, and added that two men accompanying her were detained for questioning. There was a complete absence of journalism on how the life of a young woman was nipped in the bud. These contrasting reactions are not exceptions. Stereotypes abound in peninsular India about the people of the North East as 'terrorists', 'secessionists' and immoral women. Every few months, there are reports of women from the northeastern states were molested in Delhi. After one attack, a message was circulated in one of the universities that the women were assaulted because they do not dress like Indians. In December 2021, when security forces gunned down six young men returning home from daily wage work in Mon in Nagaland, social media groups were filled with messages that the men were secessionists who deserved to die. For over six decades, much of the North East has been under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, which gives extraordinary powers to the security forces. It grants the forces the impunity to gun down innocent people, as they did in Nagaland, if they claim to have done it in good faith on the line of duty. I have heard a few who call themselves human rights activists and oppose the murder of civilians in the rest of India saying that the stringent law is needed in the North East because of secessionism. This assertion is rarely backed by an effort to find out how many 'secessionists' there are or why there are conflicts in the region. The 'conflict zone' itself is an exaggerated stereotype. The more than 45 million people of the North East live with the disadvantage of distance with peninsular India, which they call the 'mainland' because of its insular view of their region. This distance and relative isolation are physical as well as psychological and political. For the British colonial regime, the North East was used as an isolated buffer zone between the rest of India and China and Burma. That isolation has continued after Independence. Decades after three wars were fought in the region in the 1960s – against China in 1962, Pakistan in 1965 and following the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 – the North East continues to be a buffer zone for national security. Most North Easterners feel that peninsular India, which views itself as the 'mainstream' centered on the Gangetic Valley Hindu dominant-caste male culture, does not understand them and that 'mainstream' India stops at Kolkata. To most 'mainstream' Indians, the North East is a vague territory between Kolkata and Myanmar about which they know little. One murder case involving both victim and perpetrators from a different state. Case worked out swiftly. And still Meghalaya is continuously trying to bolster confidence about state being a safe tourist destination. — Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) June 18, 2025 During the last decade, this 'distant land of conflicts' has become 'the land of injustice' for the lakhs of immigrants excluded from the National Register of Citizens – like in Assam. But for that the North East rarely enters mainstream Indian thinking. Even the national anthem exalts 'Vindhya, Himachala, Yamuna, Ganga' and ignores the Brahmaputra, which is longer than the Ganga, is the fifth largest river in the world and confers an identity on the North East. But it is not an all-India sacred river. Efforts are being made of late to confer some sacredness on it but by connecting it to the Ganga, not in its own right. Another verse of the national anthem includes 'Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkala, Vanga', in other words, an Aryan-Dravidian India in which the people of the North East do not exist. Lakhs of people from the region are forced to go to 'mainland' India because of the high unemployment and poor education infrastructure of the North East. Because of their Mongoloid features, they are often referred to as 'chinki', a pejorative and racist term for the 'enemy' Chinese. Women among them often face sexual harassment because of their looks and their being perceived as open to sexual advances. These stereotypes have had disastrous consequences in times of crisis. In 2020, after the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in China and later spread globally, there were reports of North East people in peninsular India being harassed, evicted from housing or denied entry because of their 'Chinese' features. A group of Naga students was refused entry to a mall in Mysuru, as were two Manipuri students in Hyderabad. A nurse in Bengaluru reported that a child ran away from her screaming 'coronavirus'. Alana Golmei, who hails from Manipur and lives in Delhi, said that on three different occasions when she and a companion from Meghalaya entered the National Council of Educational Research and Training campus, staff taunted them with 'coronavirus'. The pandemic of racism endures even after the real one subsided. For 'mainstream' India, with its insular outlook and geographical distance from the North East, most conflicts in the region appear to 'secessionist'. Instead, it must recognise that the people of the region are searching for an identity of their own, within the Indian nation and not by joining the 'mainstream' that equates national unity with uniformity. They demand unity in diversity that respects their specificity. They want national security to mean the security of their people while belonging to a pluralist India that respects the ethnic specificity, culture, religion, language and worldview in which they find their identity. That is the pluralistic India mandated by the Constitution and it is time that the North East experiences it as well. The two deaths are an opportunity for peninsular India to look at North East India afresh.
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First Post
an hour ago
- First Post
Are divisions in the EU deepening over Israel?
Cracks within the EU widen as member-states disagree over how to approach the tensions in West Asia. While some EU nations are calling out Israel's conduct in Gaza Strip and Iran, others emphasise that the Jewish nation has the right to defend itself read more French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noel Barrot, British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul and European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, talk over lunch at the offices of the honorary Consul of the Federal Republic of Germany in Geneva, Switzerland during a meeting of European foreign ministers on Friday. Reuters As the tensions in West Asia continue to escalate, a major division has emerged over how the European Union should respond to Israel's war in Gaza and its ongoing conflict with Iran. The decision became more apparent after the regional body released a report which suggested that Israel was breaching human rights obligations in the Gaza war. The document obtained by Reuters stated that Israel's conduct in Gaza and the West Bank was a 'moral and methodological failure.' The review report was sent to the EU officials ahead of a foreign minister's meeting on Monday. Soon after it was released, Israel slammed the report, noting that it had failed to consider Israel's challenges and was based on inaccurate information. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD 'The Foreign Ministry of the State of Israel rejects the document … and finds it to be a complete moral and methodological failure,' they said in a statement, adding that it should be dismissed entirely. The European Union have remained largely divided over Israel's conduct in West Asia. While countries like the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Sweden push for punitive action, others notably Germany, Hungary and Austria resist citing strategic ties, historical responsibilities and political caution. The division is becoming more severe over how the bloc is reacting to Israel's operation in Iran. On Gaza Earlier this year, the European Commission launched an investigation into whether Israel may have breached its human rights obligations under the association agreement after a majority of EU countries called for a review of Israeli conduct amid the humanitarian crisis. The findings of the report turned out to be one of the most contentious foreign policy decisions facing the EU. The body is also concerned after US President Donald Trump decided to drag the United States into the conflict by striking Iran's three nuclear facilities . On Monday, the findings of the report will be presented by Kaja Kallas, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs to the ministers from EU governments. The bloc will then decide what steps can be taken over the matter. According to Politico, potential actions range from 'doing nothing' to limiting trade with Israel and even suspending the entire agreement. However, that would require a unanimous agreement from the bloc's 27 countries, which is quite unlikely to happen. On Iran Not all EU nations believe that Israel's attack on Iran is legal under international law. Last week, the regional bloc issued a statement calling 'on all sides to abide by international law, show restraint and refrain from taking further steps which could lead to serious consequences such as potential radioactive release," Euro News reported. One of the major points of contention was whether in the statement the EU should state 'Israel has a right to defend itself' in the context of its attacks against Iran. Around 15 member states including Austria, Czechia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands wanted to add the line but it was not agreed unanimously. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Meanwhile, other countries noted that it wasn't sufficiently mentioned that Israel has the right under international law to launch its offensive against Iran. It is pertinent to note that According to international law, and the UN Charter, a state may exercise its right to self-defence in case of an armed attack or imminent attack. Any necessary action should also be proportionate. Hence, it remains unclear whether Europe would ever be united on the question of Israel.