Government raided top Amazon sellers Cloudtail and Appario

HT Daily News Wrap

Government raided top Amazon sellers Cloudtail and Appario , Raj Thackeray thanked UP CM Yogi Adityanath for removing loudspeakers from UP religious places, Karnataka Chief Minister Basavraj Bommai joined the chorus of voices and other top news in today's bulletin.
Karnataka chief minister Basavraj Bommai on Thursday joined the chorus of voices – which includes opposition leaders HD Kumaraswamy and DK Shivakumar – backing Kannada actor Kiccha Sudeep in a row with Bollywood star Ajay Devgn. “What Kiccha Sudeep said was correct. A regional language is the most important as a state is formed on linguistic bas(is),” Bommai told reporters, “Everyone should understand and respect what Sudeep has said.” The controversy erupted after Sudeep’s response to a question about ‘K.G.F: Chapter 2’ – a recent Kannada film – being called a ‘pan-India film’. The actor said Hindi could not be considered a national language and called on Bollywood to make films for the whole country. To this Devgn responded (in Hindi): ‘.. according to you if Hindi is not our national language, then why do you dub your mother tongue movies in Hindi… Hindi was, is and always will be our mother tongue and national language’. The government on Thursday raided top Amazon sellers Cloudtail and Appario over alleged violation of competition laws, Reuters said citing sources with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity. The raids are being conducted by the Competition Commission of India. One source said the raids – in Delhi and Bengaluru – related to CCI’s 2020 investigation, in which, Amazon and rival’s Flipkart (owned by Walmart) face accusations of anti-competitive practices like promoting preferred sellers and prioritising listings by some others. An extensive investigation last year by Reuters – based on Amazon documents – showed the retail behemoth had given preferential treatment for years to a few sellers, including Cloudtail, and used them to bypass Indian laws. Amazon has said it ‘does not give preferential treatment to any seller…’ and treats all in ‘a fair, transparent, and non-discriminatory manner’. Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray whose call to remove loudspeakers from mosques stirred the entire Hanuman Chalisa controversy in the state and elsewhere on Thursday congratulated and thanked Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath for removing thousands of loudspeakers from UP religious places, ‘specially the masjids’. “Unfortunately in Maharashtra, we don’t have any yogis; what we have are ‘bhogis’ (hedonists). Here’s hoping and praying good sense prevails,” Raj Thackeray’s message read. In the last few days, the UP government has managed to remove over 11,000 loudspeakers in religious places while the volume of another 35,000 loudspeakers has been lowered to the permissible levels. One of the first to bring down its loudspeaker was Mathura’s Sri Krishna Janmabhoomi. Elon Musk on Thursday tweeted he will next buy Coca-Cola and put the cocaine back in it triggering a frenzy on the social media platform, as much as coca-cola started trending on Twitter. In two hours, the tweet crossed 1 million likes, 200K retweets and 60K quote tweets. Musk’s tweet comes after he bought 100% stake in Twitter for $44 billion. While the tweet read like a joke, social media users are not too sure as in 2017 Musk had once casually tweeted what would be the price of Twitter. And 5 years down the line, he has proposed to buy 100% stake in the company. According to his agreement with Twitter, Musk can’t tweet anything disparaging about Twitter. Rest all is allowed and hence the richest man in the world is talking a lot about other things, including what Twitter should be like. In his vision, Twitter should encourage free speech as permitted by the law of the land; it should be politically neutral as in, it has to be equally upsetting for the far right and the far left. On the security aspect, Elon Musk wants Twitter DMs to have end-to-end encryption like Signal so that no one can spy or hack personal messages. Coming back to Coca-Cola, Musk made it clear that even if he buys the Atlanta company, it will be for the original recipe of the beverage, which had cocaine in it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said the Centre is making efforts to remove the entire northeast from the ambit of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA), which provides sweeping powers and immunity from criminal prosecution. “For long, many states in the northeast were under the ambit of AFSPA. But in the past eight years, due to permanent peace and improved law and order situation, we removed the provisions of the Act from several parts of the region,” Modi said at a public meeting at Loringthepi in Assam’s Karbi Anglong district. The killings of 14 civilians in a botched army operation in Nagaland’s Mon district in December put the spotlight back on AFSPA and renewed demands for its repeal. The Centre in March reduced the disturbed areas under the ambit of the law in the region. Modi said there has been a 75% drop in violent incidents in the northeast over the past eight years and that is why Meghalaya and Tripura were removed from the ambit of AFSPA.