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The Guardian,  Facebook and the analytics company that worked with Donald Trump’s election team have come under mounting pressure, with calls for investigations and hearings to explain a vast data breach that affected tens of millions of people. In Britain, the head of the parliamentary committee investigating fake news accused Cambridge Analytica and Facebook of misleading MPs after revelations in the Observer that more than 50m Facebook profiles were harvested and used to build a system that may have influenced voters in the 2016 presidential campaign. The Conservative MP Damian Collins said he would call the heads of both companies, Alexander Nix and Mark Zuckerberg, to give further testimony. His intervention came after a whistleblower spoke to the Observer and described how the profiles, mostly of US voters, were harvested for Cambridge Analytica, in one of Facebook’s biggest ever data breaches. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg finally addresses Cambridge Analy...

Reuters, MARCH 19, 2018 NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices slipped on Monday as Wall Street slid more than 1 percent and energy market investors remained wary of growing crude supply, although tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran gave prices some support. Brent crude futures LCOc1 dropped 16 cents, or 0.2 percent, to settle at $66.05 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures CLc1 fell 28 cents, or 0.5 percent, to end at $62.06 a barrel. “The equity markets are certainly a driving factor behind this slide today,” said Brian LaRose, technical analyst at United-ICAP in Jersey City. “Since the open, they have been hit pretty hard,” he said. Wall Street’s main indexes fell more than 1.5 percent as investors worried about a potential trade war and as Facebook shares dragged down the tech sector. Oil prices have been increasingly moving in tandem with equities. Strong demand, however, prevented oil from sliding further, said Phil Flynn, analyst at Price Futures Group in...

The Telegraph India, By KM Ramesh, March 19, 2018 Bangalore : Former cricketer Rahul Dravid has lodged a police complaint accusing a Bangalore-based deposit-mobilisation firm of cheating him out of Rs 4 crore. Police sources said Dravid's complaint names the Vikram Investment Company, its managing director Raghavendra Srinath and his associates. Raghavendra and associates Nagaraju, Narasimhamurthy, Prahalad and Sutram Suresh, a former sports journalist, had been arrested last Monday, March 12. They were sent to judicial custody on Saturday. Sources said that according to Dravid's complaint, lodged with Sadashivnagar police station on Friday, Sutram had contacted and persuaded him in 2012 to use investment options offered by the company. After Dravid received good returns in 2015, he invested a further Rs 20 crore and received returns of Rs 16 crore in 2017, a police source said quoting from the complaint. Dravid has complained that he received no more returns a...

Business Standard, March 18, 2018 Myanmar's de facto leader  Aung San Suu Kyi was pressed about the Rohingya crisis at an ASEAN summit in Sydney Sunday, but the regional bloc stressed it could not intervene and "force an outcome". Suu Kyi has been under intense global criticism for her public silence amid a brutal military crackdown that has forced nearly 700,000 of the Muslim-minority Rohingya to flee Myanmar's Rakhine state for Bangladesh. The humanitarian crisis was one of the key topics at a three-day special summit between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Australia. "We discussed the situation in Rakhine state at considerable length today," Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said at the closing press conference. " Aung San Suu Kyi addressed the matter comprehensively, at some considerable length herself. "It's certainly an issue that has been discussed and it ...

The Financial Express, By Bloomberg, March 18, 2018  Shortly after a $2 billion bank fraud was uncovered last month at India’s state-owned Punjab National Bank, a picture emerged of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with the alleged fraudster. The photo showed Modi posing at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Jan. 23 with a large business delegation that included billionaire jeweler Nirav Modi, who is at the center of the unfolding scandal. That was enough for opponents and even one of Modi’s coalition partners to question the prime minister’s commitment to rooting out corruption — a key part of his pitch to voters. Government officials said the jeweler was just part of a separate, non-official business delegation, and that the prime minister had only stopped by for a photo. Still, the scandal may already be having an impact: On March 14, Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party lost three by-elections in the populous and politically crucial states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. While...

Business Standard, ANI  |   New Delhi,  March 19, 2018 The Enforcement Directorate, on Sunday, seized Nirav Modi's Solar Power Plant in Ahmednagar and 134 acres of land as liquefiable assets in connection with the Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud scam. The ED had earlier provisionally attached 21 immovable properties worth Rs. 5.24 billion, belonging to the absconding jeweller and companies controlled by him. According to the sources in the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), the passports of Gitanjali Gems Chairman and Managing Director Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi, his nephew, have been revoked, as they have failed to respond to the MEA's show cause notice. Modi and Choksi, who had acquired letters of undertaking (LoUs) to avail credit from various sources, are wanted in India for their alleged involvement in siphoning off money from the PNB to the tune of more than US $ 1.8 billion. The scam, allegedly started in 2011...

Dawn, March 19, 2018 In the run-up to the FATF measures against Pakistan and after the furore it caused in the country, it was always apparent that true progress in a state takeover or shutting down of the operations of all banned militant groups and their affiliated networks would depend on sustained, national action across the various tiers of the state. Earlier this month, the Secretary of Interior Arshad Mirza said before a Senate standing committee that the process of taking over the assets of the JuD and its sister organisation the Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation had yet to be completed. It is hoped then that the KP government has moved in coordination with the interior ministry and security agencies to put the country further in compliance with its legal and international obligations. The era of obfuscation and delay must well and truly be left behind. A problem that is apparent with the currently evolving approach against militant and extremist networks, however, i...

Dawn,  March 18, 2018 Major General Asif Ghafoor, the director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), in an interview with  Gulf News  expressed confidence that the Pakistani Army has eliminated all terrorist havens from its soil. The spokesperson of the army's media wing pointed out that the "well-planned and executed military campaign" to rid the country of the menace of terrorism did not come cheap. "All this has come at a huge price. Besides cost in blood of over 750,000 Pakistanis, there has been a loss of more than $123 billion to the national exchequer," the interview, published on Sunday, quoted him as saying. "Pakistan has fought a successful war against terrorism — a war which entered Pakistan through the 2,611-km scantily manned Pak-Afghan border when US-led coalition forces started military operations in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda," he told the publication, reiterating, "There are no more organised sanctua...