ABRACADABRA

Teacher can push you off roof if you do not clean classroom

Lahore: A 14-year-old Pakistani girl was allegedly pushed by two of her teachers from the rooftop of a school building in the Punjab province for refusing to “clean the classroom”, a media report said.

   Fajjar Noor, a class 9 student, is battling for life at Ghurki Hospital, Lahore. She has got multiple fractures and her spinal cord is also broken. “My class teacher Bushra and Rehana ordered me to clean the classroom, as today (May 23) was my turn to do so. I told them that I was not feeling well and I would do it some other day. On this they took me to another room and started slapping me. Then they took me to the rooftop and ordered me to clean it (roof). When I argued, they pushed me from the rooftop,” said Noor.

  The incident took place at the City District Government Girls School, Kot Shahabdin, Shahdara and the teachers have been booked for attempted murder.

   “Two teachers – Rehana Kausar and Bushra Tufail – first inflicted corporal punishment on Fajjar Noor and then took her to top floor of the building and pushed her down,” Punjab Secretary of Education Allah Bakhsh Malik said.

   The incident took place on May 23 but the school administration and some other officials kept it secret from the education department, he said.

   “We came to know about the incident. A departmental inquiry has been launched and the matter has also been referred to the Chief Minister's Inspection Team for a thorough probe,” Malik added.

   “The Chief Minister has immediately placed District Education Authority Chief Executive Officer Ehsan Malik, Deputy DEO Tayyaba Butt and Head-mistress Naghmana Irshad under suspension for hiding the incident. Both teaches have also been suspended and they will be proceeded under the Punjab Employees Efficiency and Disciplinary Act,” he said.

Indian border on Spain-Morocco road

New Delhi: A glittering picture of an awe inspiring landscape – what looks like brightly lit frontier area – appears in the Home Ministry’s new annual reports border floodlighting chapter. But this image is from the Spain-Morocco border over 7,100 km away, clicked by a Spanish photographer.

The latest in the series of government bloopers appears on Page 40 of the Home Ministry 2016-17 annual report, boasting of how the government had completed floodlighting of nearly 1,944 km of the sanctioned 2,044 km along the International Border in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat. The floodlighting of the borders is aimed at curbing infiltration attempts and cross-border crimes, it said.

The project has been completed in Punjab, Rajasthan and Jammu where lights have been installed along the 495 km, 1022 km and 186 km stretches respectively. The pending 100-km stretch is in Gujarat where restoration work on a damaged floodlight area is underway.

The details are followed by the brightly yellow-lit picture – captioned: “Floodlighting along the Border” – of a long stretch of road that ends at a sea shore. One wonders where is the sea shore in Punjab, Rajasthan or Jammu and Kashmir.

Perhaps in Gujarat?

But then the landscape doesn’t look like an Indian border and the caption also doesn’t specify where and when the picture was taken. There is no credit for the photographer who had clicked it or any website where it had been down-loaded from.

The bloomer was first reported by an online media platform “Alt News” that tracks fake news circulated on special media networks and other media platforms.

Digging a bit deeper and doing an image search on Google revealed that the picture is of the tiny border stretch between Morocco and Spain (http://www.panoramio.com/m/photo/84403) clicked in 2006 by Spanish photographer Javier Moyano.

Spain in Europe and Morocco in Africa are separated by the Strait of Gibraltar – a narrow strait that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

This is not the first time that a blooper has been committed in the name of government achievements.

In 2015, the Press Information Bureau of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting shared a picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi visiting flood-hit areas of Chennai.

The picture showed a seated Modi looking – through the circular windowpane of a chopper – at rooftops and submerged streets.

However, it appeared that the image was a photo-shopped version of an earlier snap which in fact showed Modi surveying a flood-hit area which had hazy exteriors and the submerged expanse of Chennai.

An embarrassed PIB promptly deleted the picture, but offered no explanation for the blooper. – IANS.

Tax Man wants Property Tax from Dead

Rennes: Combining the old adage about death and taxes, French authorities have sent a demand for property duties to a dead woman – addressed to her grave in a small town in Brittany.

The mayor of the seaside town of Sarzeau said he had received a letter from the public finance office to a dead resident, addressed to “grave 24, row E, cemetery road”, his secretary told AFP.

The town’s treasurer Christophe Libre told the Ouest France regional newspaper it was a demand for property taxes. “Unfortunately it’s not the first time we’ve had this sort of letter from the public finance center in Vannes,” Libre told the paper. Vannes is the nearest large town to Sarzeau.

He said it could have been a “joke from someone doing the change of address,” or “one of the heirs who didn’t want to pay the property tax”.