Thursday Titbits

Some news on this Thursday of April 2018:

1. So in the end IPL blinked, and bowed down to pressure from political parties and announced shifting of Franchisee Chennai Super Kings (CSK) matches out of Chennai. The cricket lovers of this city which waited for two years to see the IPL matches, has been left disappointed. The remaining home matches of  CSK have been shifted to Pune. According  to me the decision for choosing Pune as their alternative home city, must have been influenced by the fact that many players of team CSK were playing for Rising Pune Supergiant for last 2 year, when CSK was under ban. Naturally the shifting decision has been taken to avoid confrontation with political leaders of Tamil Nadu. As mentioned by blog earlier, generally IPL management do not want to confront with political parties. And the other main reason being, that Chennai city police said that they would be unable to provide security in the situation when workers of political parties start agitating in the city and near stadium. So the loss is for the cricket lovers of Chennai and great financial loss to Tamilnadu Cricket association, who manages the stadium.
2. So Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook finally admitted it was mistake of their company which led to data leaks to company like  Cambridge Analytica.  He further added that he wants to “make sure that we do everything to protect the integrity” of elections across the world including India. He also admitted that they come up short in stemming misinformation and subversion of electoral process. His admission of guilt and weakness and pledge to rectify the same is particularly relevant in India.  Mark made all these statements during his testimony before the US Congress, which lasted more than 7 hours.Among the step Facebook has taken- to forestall manipulation of election is to deploy new artificial intelligence tools that do a better job of identifying the fake accounts that may be trying to interfere in elections or spread misinformation. Indirectly he acknowledged that even few elections in the past in India were also compromised. So what ever was being circulated in social and other media few months back that Congress has used services of some sister company of  Cambridge Analytica is bound to be true. The BJP national spoke person yesterday made a statement that Congress  should come clean and admit that they have used the services of the said company. So wait and watch for further development.
3. You all will recall few months back four Judges of Supreme Court (SC) came in the open and made statement against Chief Justice of India (CJI) regarding allotment of cases to judges of SC. Yesterday, while hearing of Public Interest Litigation(PIL) by advocate Ashok Pande on the same subject,the SC bench consisting of CJI Dipak Misra, AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud, said it was unimpeachably ruled by earlier by a five judge bench that the CJI is master of the roster and had the sole discretion of deciding the composition of benches and assigning cases. As per repository of  constitutional trust, the CJI is an institution in himself. It was further ruled that there was no concept of junior or senior SC judges and all are equally competent to decide any case allotted to them by CJI. Indirectly it was mentioned that CJI is first among equals. Slamming the petitioner’s attempt  to classify senior or junior judges according to date of their taking oath in the SC. To hold otherwise would be cast reflection on the competence and ability  of other judges , if we say  some type of cases should be allotted to the judges who took oath earlier. The bench further added that ” The SC has been authorised under article 145 to frame rules of procedure, and the petitioner is not entitled to seek a direction that benches of SC should be constituted in a manner suggested by petitioner”.

Waiting for your feed backs/comments/view.