John Cena apologises for Taiwan gaffe

Professional wrestling and F9 star John Cena has had to make a public apology to millions of Chinese fans after calling Taiwan a ‘country’, saying the comment was not appropriate. China regards Taiwan a breakaway region and has never ruled out reunification.

BEIJING:

that the power is without judicial oversight and hence, there is no “guarantee against arbitrary State action”. If Whatsapp adds these features, the company said, it could put journalists and civil and political activists at risk.

Taking another ground to challenge Rule 4(2), Whatsapp has said that the provision was not backed by any statutory power since Section 79 of the IT Act only allows the Union government to prescribe “due diligence” guidelines that intermediaries must observe to maintain their exemption from liability for third-party content.

“However, Impugned Rule 4(2) seeks to impose obligations that fall far outside ‘due diligence’, as it forces fundamental alterations to Whatsapp by breaking end-to-end encryption and changing the fundamental nature of the service that people love and use today in India and across more than 100 countries,” it maintained.

The petition sought annulment of the rule also on the ground that it ran counter to the intent of the IT Act which sought to promote “uniformity of the law” with other nations with respect to “alternatives to paper-based methods of communications”.

Raman Chima, Asia Pacific policy director at Access Now, said Whatsapp needs to do better in its practices to protect and safeguard the interests of its users — including reconsidering its data sharing with Facebook and changes to its privacy policy. “The present legal challenge does reflect [Whatsapp is] prioritising safeguarding its users’ security and privacy from an overbroad, unlawful, and dangerous government mandate. The government’s insistence on ending traceability has to be seen against the broader context of shrinking civic space, where exceptions carved out in laws are weaponised and selectively applied against dissenters and at-risk communities,” he said.

A second expert said there are questions over the legality of the rules. “The IT Rules go far beyond the scope of the IT Act. The traceability requirement unreasonably enhances the scope of obligations under the parent legislation. Section 69 of the IT Act provides the power to seek technical assistance for securing access, interception, decryption or monitoring of information stored in computer resource. The IT Rules, however, may require changes to the technical architecture of messaging platforms which would affect the privacy and security of all users across the board,” said Tanmay Singh, associate litigation counsel at the Internet Freedom Foundation.

He added that weakening encryption by mandating traceability would undermine the privacy and security of all users and that even if there are ways to enable traceability without breaking end-to-end encryption, it would still amount to weakening the very purpose of encryption.

NS Nappinai, Supreme Court lawyer and founder of Cybersaathi, said: “The government seems to have modified its stance. Till now they were categorically saying they were not asking Whatsapp to break encryption. Whereas this press release does not say that.”

“Whatsapp is pitching its claim too high by weighing in only on the aspect of breaking encryption. According to me that’s likely to boomerang,” she said, adding that the government too has more to answer for.

“Similarly, the government is not clarifying when and how tracing is mandated. That is, at the time the message is sent or when notice is received? This is likely to be the crux of the issue in deciding constitutionality according to me. For, if it’s at the time of sending messages that would not be sustainable at all. If it’s at the time of notice subject to all other due processes being followed, it cannot be said to be unsustainable. Providing this info is anyway contingent on the messages being on Whatsapp servers, which they have claimed will not be available after one month. Then where’s the disproportionality? Or breaking encryption?”

ing -- a rest cure to recover from a spot of high blood pressure. After the meeting, Doreswamy became a follower of Gandhi.

Six years later, he was at the forefront of the Quit India movement in the state. “During the Quit India Movement, I helped organise a strike by all major cloth mills in the city -Binny Mills, Minerva Mills and Raja Mills, especially since they were stitching parachute cloth, used by the British in the Air Force during the war,” he recounts in his memoir “Nenapina Suruli Teredaga”, which translates as memories unravelled.

He was jailed for 17 months between December 1942-May 1944 for this, but for Doreswamy, jail was a learning experience.

“I learnt a lot during my time in the jail and it was a university for me. I learnt Hindi and Tamil. I even became good at volleyball during that time. We used to get lectures on politics from great leaders,” he said during the interview.

After his release, he became the editor of “Pouravani” newspaper, which was promptly banned by the Mysore government for its forthright editorials, pushing him to publish and distribute it underground.

From Vinoba Bhave’s Bhoodan movement in the 1950s to Jayaprakash Narayan’s Sampoorna Kranti movement in the 1970s to the India Against Corruption movement in the 2010s, Doreswamy was part of the several movements that followed. He was even jailed during the Emergency for writing a letter against then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

“After the Emergency was announced, I wrote a letter to Indira Gandhi, saying she was a dictator. In the letter, I threatened to go from village to village and mobilise the people against her dictatorship. Soon after that, I held the first meeting in Gandhi Bazar (in Bengaluru). I was arrested. But I was in jail only for four months,”he recounted during the interview.

In recent years, he was part of the protests against the Kaiga nuclear plant in north Karnataka and also part of the movement to get land rights for landless farmers across the state. A vocal critic of the current Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, he came out of the streets to protest the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the new farm laws.

He was convinced that things would change.

“Nothing is permanent,” he said in the interview when asked about the policies of the current BJP government. “There will be ups and downs. During the freedom struggle there was Gandhi, during the emergency there was JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) and then Anna Hazare also came, even though he was misguided later. If not a leader, there will be a movement that takes on what is wrong in our country.”

The centenarian was also a big believer in the young. When asked about the future of the movements he was part of, he had said: “Today’s young people are smart and wise. The young people of the country have always fought for the right causes. They know what should be done and no one can stop them.”

It was almost as if he were passing on the baton.

have done so using a boat.

The Antiguan government has said on several occasions that it is ready to extradite Choksi to India, for which the process is already going on.

His extradition case as well as revocation of citizenship by Antigua is currently being pursued in a court there, which he has challenged.

Choksi, who sought refuge in Antigua after allegedly cheating Punjab National Bank of ₹13,578 crore along with his nephew Nirav Modi, and fleeing India in 2018, left his home on Sunday to go for dinner at a well-known restaurant in the southern part of the island and was never seen again. His car was found in Jolly Harbour, a popular nightspot in the 280 sq km island with a population of less than 100,000 people.

WHATSAPP HAS CLAIMED IN ITS PLEA THAT THE NEW GUIDELINES TRAMPLE UPON PRIVACY OF USERS