L A T E S T      N E W S

AI pilots to call off strike

NEW DELHI: Agitating Air India pilots on Tuesday told the Delhi High Court that they will call off their 58-day-long strike with immediate effect.

The pilots also told Justice Reva Khetrapal through their counsel Geeta Luthra that they would join duty in 48 hours by giving joining reports, whereas those pilots whose services were terminated during the strike would submit reports expressing their willingness to join duty.

The pilots decided to call off their strike after the Air India management assured the court that it would consider the grievances of the pilots “sympathetically”.

“Serious efforts have been made to settle dispute and the counsel for the parties have assured the court that their respective clients will be extending full cooperation in this regard.

“The senior counsel (Ms. Luthra) appearing for the pilots has said that her clients will immediately call off the strike and join their duties in 48 hours, by giving joining reports or the report expressing their willingness to join the duty.

“The AI management shall sympathetically consider the grievances of the pilots including the aspect of reinstatement of those pilots who were terminated as a consequence to their strike,” Justice Khetrapal said while disposing of the pilots’ plea for a direction to the management to take back 101 sacked pilots, including 10 office bearers of the Indian Pilots Guild.

The court in its order directed the pilots as well as the management to appear before the conciliator, Chief Labour Commissioner N.K. Prasad, on July 5 at 4.30 p.m.

The pilots had on Monday moved the court saying they were ready to end their strike if their sacked colleagues are taken back and their union gets back the recognition. — PTI

New Delhi: Separatists from Kashmir, including Hurriyat Conference, will be meeting visiting Pakistani Foreign Secretary Jalil Abbas Jilani on Tuesday, ahead of his talks with his Indian counterpart Ranjan Mathai tomorrow.

An invitation was sent to moderate Hurriyat Conference faction led by Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and JKLF chief Yasin Malik while a telephone call was made to the hardline faction of Hurriyat Syed Ali Shah Geelani.

Geelani said he had received a telephone call from the Pakistan High Commission inviting him for consultation with the visiting Pakistani Foreign Secretary.

The new High Commissioner designate Salman Bashir will also be present at the meetings.

Mirwaiz had said that he would be leading an eight-member delegation to meet the Pakistani Foreign Secretary and hold consultations on the Kashmir issue.

"After all Kashmir is the main issue between India and Pakistan and needs serious discussions," he said.

Mathai will hold talks with his Pakistani counterpart in New Delhi on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss peace and security, including CBMs, Kashmir and promotion of friendly exchanges.

Mumbai: The CBI is likely to file its first chargesheet in the Adarsh housing scam on Tuesday against some of the members of the upscale society, 18 months after a case was registered in this connection. The scam had fuelled a political storm in Maharashtra that led to the resignation of Ashok Chavan as chief minister. Chavan is among the 14 accused in the case in which Union ministers Vilasrao Deshmukh and Sushilkumar Shinde are also under the scanner.

According to official sources, a chargesheet would be filed on Tuesday, a day before the case comes up before Bombay high court which is hearing a bunch of public interest litigations seeking the court's supervision of the probe.

The CBI on June 18 had assured the high court that it would file a chargesheet in the case before July 4 as the agency had to take prior sanction from the government to prosecute bureaucrats.

It was expected that the first chargesheet may not name any bureaucrat or public servant as the high court had suggested to the CBI that it could first file chargesheet against those accused for whom sanction was not required.

New Delhi: The Thorat committee appointed by the government to review NCERT's political science textbooks for schools has said that textbooks should remove cartoons with negative references to politicians, reports said.

The committee also pointed out that textbooks carry too many caricatures of the Nehru-Gandhi family and said that these had to be deleted.

Totally the committee recommended the modification of 36 of the 176 cartoons in textbooks for classes 9-12.

The government has set up a panel headed by former UGC chairman SK Thorat in the wake of the cartoon row to review NCERT's political science textbooks for schools.

The committee reviewed Class 11 to 12 social science/political science textbooks of NCERT to identify educationally inappropriate material in them.

The members of the committee are AS Narang (School of Social Sciences IGNOU), Patricia Mukhim (the editor Shillong Times and social worker), Prof MSS Pandian, Abha Malik (teacher of social science of Sanskriti School) and Saroj Yadav (head of department of education in social science, NCERT).

Thorat, who is now the chairman of Indian Council of Social Science Research will is the chairman of the committee.

The committee was set up following uproar over the cartoon of BR Ambedkar in NCERT textbooks in May.