Ex-Bengaluru top cop B Bhaskar Rao to join AAP
Bengaluru, Apr 3: Senior IPS officer B Bhaskar Rao, who recently resigned from service, will be joining Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in New Delhi on Monday.
The Karnataka government has accepted the resignation of Rao, who until recently served as Additional Director General of Police (ADGP), Railways.
He will join AAP in the presence of Deputy CM of Delhi Manish Sisodia, party sources said.
Rao, who had previously served as Bengaluru city police commissioner, had submitted his resignation to the state government in September 2021.
He is a native of Bengaluru, and his joining AAP comes as the party prepares to contest and make its presence felt in the state, during Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and 2023 assembly polls.
Let the Truth be known. If you read VB and like VB, please be a VB Supporter and Help us deliver the Truth to one and all.
Jailed Palestinian writer wins International prize for arabic fiction
Abu Dhabi: Palestinian author Basim Khandaqji, who has been imprisoned by Israel since 2004, has been named the winner of the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for his novel “A Mask, the Colour of the Sky”.
Khandaqji’s publisher Rana Idriss, of the Lebanon-based Dar al-Adab publishing house, accepted the award on his behalf at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi.
The book tells the story of Nur, an archaeologist living in a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah, who adopts a “mask” when he finds a blue identity card belonging to an Israeli in the pocket of an old coat.
Born in Nablus, Khandaqji has been imprisoned by Israel since he was 21 years old. He studied political science at Al-Quds University from prison with a thesis on Israeli studies and has published several poetry collections and novels.
In an interview in January, Khandaqji’s brother said his family had not been able to speak with him for four months, a problem many Palestinians held in Israeli prisons have faced since October 2023.
Khandaqji wrote the award-winning book in prison in 2021, when he would manage to write about two pages each day between 5am and 7am, although “very often, the papers are taken from him and destroyed by the guard”, his brother said.
