Latest news with #ETO
The Print
3 days ago
- The Print
GST inspector held in Haryana's Palwal while accepting bribe: Anti-Corruption Bureau
Faridabad (Hry), Jun 2 (PTI) The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) in Faridabad arrested a female GST inspector of the office of the Palwal district excise and taxation commissioner on Monday while she was allegedly accepting a bribe of Rs 5,000 in lieu of issuing a GST number to a complainant, an official said. According to a statement issued by the ACB, accused Sumitra was also arrested in Panipat in 2022 while accepting a bribe of Rs 2 lakh, along with co-accused ETO Roshan Lal. A senior ACB officer said in the Panipat case, a chargesheet was filed against both the accused in July 2022 and the matter is still sub-judice.
Hindustan Times
15-05-2025
- Hindustan Times
Amritsar hooch tragedy: Two suppliers held from Delhi as toll rises to 23
Amritsar : Punjab Police on Wednesday arrested two accused from New Delhi's Model Town in connection with the sale of spurious liquor that claimed 23 lives in villages of Majitha sub-division in Amritsar district over the past two days. The Amritsar rural police arrested Ravinder Jain and his son Rishabh Jain from the national capital for supplying raw material to one of the main accused, Sahib Singh. Punjab director general of police Gaurav Yadav posted on X: 'One of the main accused, Sahib Singh, was in contact with Rishabh Jain, as revealed through his WhatsApp chat history. It is suspected that Sahib Singh received methanol consignment from Jain, which was used to manufacture the spurious liquor in Punjab. An FIR has been registered under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the Excise Act, and investigations are underway to uncover other linkages in this illegal network'. Later, addressing a press conference, DIG (border range) Satinder Singh said: 'So far, 18 persons have been nominated in this case and 16 accused have been arrested. Delhi-based father-son duo cannot be spared as they are selling a chemical which could claim anybody's life. They are considered a major part of the entire racket. Sahib Singh paid ₹35,000 to Jain to purchase a 600-litre consignment of methanol which was to be used to prepare spurious liquor.' Till Tuesday, 21 deaths were reported, but two more victims succumbed on Wednesday, taking the toll to 23. Both the deceased belonged to Bhangwan village. Most of the victims were daily-wagers from Bhangali, Patalpuri, Marari Kalan, Talwandi Khumman, Karnala, Bhangwan and Threawal villages. Husband of Ninder Kaur, who used to sell the illicit liquor and is one of the accused in the case, also died after consuming spurious liquor, said the DIG. 10 accused sent to 2-day police remand Ten accused, who were arrested on Tuesday, were produced in a local court and were sent to two-day police remand, said officials. A police probe revealed that methanol — a chemical used in industrial products —was procured in bulk online to prepare the toxic brew. Methanol is a light, colourless organic chemical compound which is poisonous when ingested and is illegally added to alcoholic beverages as a cheaper alternative to ethanol, which is the normal consumable alcohol. Four officials, including Majitha deputy superintendent of police (DSP) and the local excise and taxation officer (ETO), were placed under suspension on Tuesday for negligence. Chief minister Bhagwant Mann on Tuesday met the victim families and announced a compensation of ₹10 lakh for the families of the deceased and said that the state government would bear the expense of education of the children of the victims. Two cases have already been registered at Majitha and Kathunangal police stations in Amritsar rural under Sections 105 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 103 (murder) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and relevant sections of the Excise Act and the SC/ST Act.
Hindustan Times
14-05-2025
- Hindustan Times
Amritsar hooch tragedy: Two suppliers held in Delhi as toll rises to 23
Punjab Police on Wednesday arrested two accused from New Delhi's Model Town in connection with the sale of spurious liquor that claimed 23 lives in villages of Majitha sub division in Amritsar district over the past two days. The Amritsar Rural police arrested Ravinder Jain and Rishabh Jain from the national capital for supplying raw material to one of the main accused, Sahib Singh. Punjab director general of police Gaurav Yadav posted on X, 'One of the main accused, Sahib Singh, was in contact with Rishabh Jain, as revealed through his WhatsApp chat history. It is suspected that Sahib Singh received a consignment from Jain, which was used to manufacture the spurious liquor in Punjab. An FIR has been registered under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the Excise Act, and investigations are underway to uncover other linkages in this illegal network.' The police have already arrested 10 people, including the kingpin, in the incident. Till Tuesday, 21 deaths were reported, but two more victims succumbed on Wednesday, taking the toll to 23. Both the deceased belonged to Bhangwan village. Most of the victims were daily-wagers from Bhangali, Patalpuri, Marari Kalan, Talwandi Khumman, Karnala, Bhangwan and Therewal villages. A police probe revealed that methanol -- a chemical used in industrial products -- was procured in bulk online to prepare the toxic brew. Methanol is a light, colourless organic chemical compound which is poisonous when ingested and is illegally added to alcoholic beverages as a cheaper alternative to ethanol, which is the normal consumable alcohol. Four officials, including Majitha deputy superintendent of police (DSP) and the local excise and taxation officer (ETO), were placed under suspension on Tuesday for negligence. Chief minister Bhagwant Mann on Tuesday announced a compensation of ₹10 lakh for the families of the deceased and said that the state government would bear the expense of education of the children of the victims. Two cases have been registered at Majitha and Kathunangal police stations in Amritsar Rural under Sections 105 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) and 103 (murder) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and relevant sections of the Excise Act and the SC/ST Act.
Express Tribune
03-05-2025
- Business
- Express Tribune
ETOs fail to meet property tax targets
The Rawalpindi Excise, Taxation and Narcotics Control Department has failed to achieve its tax targets for commercial and residential properties, with the Rawalpindi division's property tax shortfall exceeding 55 per cent. Punjab DG Excise and Taxation Muhammad Umer Sher has taken strict notice of the failure to meet the property tax target and has issued show-cause notices to the Excise and Taxation Officers of three zones in Rawalpindi district and a total of 7 ETOs in the districts of Jhelum, Attock, Murree and Chakwal. The department has also initiated strict action under the Punjab Efficiency and Accountability Act (PEDA), which could lead to the termination of the services of the officers who failed to meet the tax targets. This has caused a stir among the officers and field staff, including field inspectors and other employees. The property tax target for Tax Zone 1 under ETO Tahir Mehmood was Rs1220.367 million, but only Rs412.349 million have been collected so far. Similarly in Tax Zone 2 under ETO Waseem Haider, the target was Rs1653.476 million, with Rs470.752 million collected. In Tax Zone 4 ETO under Muhammad Umar Farooq, the target was Rs368.983 million, against which Rs94.884 million has been collected. In Zone 5 under ETO Ahmad Shehbaz, the target was Rs3740.393 million, but only Rs516.153 million were collected. In District Attock under ETO Farrukh Saeed Butt, the tax target was Rs313.956 million, with Rs142.500 million collected. In Jhelum, ETO Muhammad Munawar Hassan's target was Rs374.141 million, against which Rs207.777 million collected. In District Chakwal, ETO Zafar Ishaq's property tax target was Rs278.524 million, with Rs127.101 million collected. In Malka Kohisar District Murree, ETO Gul Sher Khan's target was Rs277.768 million, but only Rs54.487 million were collected. In mid-May, the Director General of Excise Taxation will visit Rawalpindi Division to review the progress toward meeting the targets. Strict departmental action will be taken against all ETOs, Excise Inspectors, and field staff who fail to meet their targets.
The Star
27-04-2025
- Science
- The Star
Chinese universities are dominating global research on chips, US report says
As the United States continues to tighten restrictions on chip exports to China in a bid to curb the country's access to advanced semiconductors, Chinese researchers have gone into overdrive. In recent years, Chinese universities have been leading the world in research on chip design and fabrication. And they are producing much of the basic research that could influence next-generation semiconductor technology – and position China ahead of the pack. From 2018 to 2023, nine of the top 10 biggest producers of English-language research on chips were Chinese institutions, according to a report released in March by the Emerging Technology Observatory at Georgetown University in Washington. Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team. Eight Chinese universities appear in the top 10 list of the most highly cited articles – or the top 10 per cent with the most citations each year in that period. Only two institutions from other countries made the two lists: the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France ranks third for total articles published, and 10th for the most citations; and the National University of Singapore ranks ninth for top-cited research. No institutions from the United States – the second largest producer of research on chip design and fabrication – made the top 10 lists for total articles published or most-cited articles. Chip research is an area of intense rivalry between China and the US as both countries try to take the lead in next-generation semiconductor technology. US-led sanctions that restrict China from obtaining high-end chipmaking tools have stymied the country's production of advanced semiconductors. But the US might not be able to retain its competitive advantage through the use of export controls, the authors of the ETO report told Nature. ETO lead analyst Zachary Arnold told the journal the research mainly captured emerging chip technology rather than commercial advances, and the analysis on global chip research did not take into account internal industry research or patents. In growth areas of chip research – such as computing architecture inspired by neurons or optical computing that uses light rather than electrons to carry information – China was leading the way in terms of number of papers published, according to Arnold. So which Chinese institutions are publishing the most research, and who are the scientists behind the country's drive to build advanced chips? Chinese Academy of Sciences Based in Beijing, the academy is the largest research organisation in the world, with institutes across China. It topped the ETO list of big hitters on chip design and fabrication research, both for total articles published and top-cited articles published from 2018 to 2023. The CAS published more than 14,300 chip-related papers in that period, with over 3,400 on the list of highly cited articles. One of the hottest areas in the field is neuromorphic computing, which aims to mimic the human brain and could revolutionise chip design by creating more adaptable and efficient processing. The CAS topped the ETO ranking for published research in the area that includes neuromorphic computing. In another area, a Chinese team reported that they had developed the world's first carbon-based microchip that can run artificial intelligence tasks. Their paper in the journal Science Advances in January said the carbon nanotube transistor chips could process data not just in ones and zeros like most modern electronic devices, but also in a third value. This ternary logic system could enable faster computation using less energy. Materials scientist and CAS member Peng Lianmao – who has been exploring carbon-based chip technology for more than two decades – was a lead researcher on the study. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences UCAS – a public university in Beijing affiliated with the CAS – ranked second on the ETO list for the total number of articles published on chip design and fabrication, with nearly 7,850. It was also second for top-cited articles with around 1,750 papers. The university was also on the ETO's top 10 list for the research area that includes neuromorphic computing and devices. A 2018 paper in the peer-reviewed journal Chemical Society Reviews about a structural analysis technique applied to graphene materials – by a team that included researchers from the CAS and UCAS – ranked fourth on the ETO's list of top-cited chip articles. Tan Pingheng from the UCAS College of Materials Science and Opto-Electronic Technology was lead researcher on the paper. Tan, whose area is semiconductor physics, has been named a highly cited scientist by analytics platform Clarivate and academic publisher Elsevier, according to his research team's website. Tsinghua University Based in Beijing and one of China's top two universities, Tsinghua also ranks among the global top 20. It placed fifth on the ETO list for published research on chips, with nearly 4,650 papers, and third on the top-cited articles list with nearly 1,280 papers. Sun Nan, an expert on semiconductors, has helped create more than 50 cutting-edge chips since he joined Tsinghua University in 2020 after spending more than a decade in the US at the University of Texas at Austin. Those chips have been used in areas like high-speed trains, electric vehicles, and the power grid. He has also been working on manufacturing issues so that chips that were previously imported can be made in China, according to Tsinghua. In 2023, a team from Tsinghua led by Wu Huaqiang and Gao Bin unveiled the world's first fully system-integrated memristor chip – a type of resistor, or circuit element, that limits the flow of energy and can remember the most recent value of current passed through it. This kind of chip is capable of improvement-based learning, which could help reduce the energy required for training artificial neural networks by allowing learning to occur on-chip with no external memory source. Tsinghua ranked fourth on the ETO top 10 list for research that includes deep learning and neural network-based research. University of Electronic Science and Technology of China UESTC – located in Chengdu, Sichuan province in the southwest – is sponsored by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. It ranked fourth on the ETO list for total articles, with nearly 5,240 papers published. Last year a UESTC team led by Ning Ning, head of a laboratory set up by the university and telecoms giant Huawei Technologies, said they had developed a device that could reduce the time delay of electronic warfare receivers, which could make radar signal detection much faster. UESTC researchers also made progress on building a quantum chip, with the first use of a common semiconductor to create a quantum light source. Quantum computing chips – which use quantum bits rather than the classical bits used in classical computing chips – could help solve complex problems faster than conventional computation. Nanjing University One of China's oldest universities, Nanjing is located in the capital of eastern Jiangsu province, and ranked sixth on the ETO's list for chip research, with nearly 4,250 papers published in the period. It was fourth on the top-cited articles list with 930 papers. The most cited paper on chip design and fabrication published from 2018 to 2023 – with 2,043 citations – was written by a team that included researchers from Nanjing and published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature in 2018, according to the ETO. The paper on ferromagnetism – a physical phenomenon in which certain materials like iron strongly attract each other – has implications for developing spintronic devices. The devices leverage the spin of electrons rather than electrical charge to store data and can be used as a more efficient alternative to traditional chips. Nanjing University was also on the ETO's top 10 list for published research in the area of quantum computing and quantum processors. Huazhong University of Science and Technology Located in Wuhan, in the central province of Hubei, HUST ranked eighth on the list for articles published, with just over 3,660 papers in the period. It was fifth for top-cited articles with around 890 papers. One of its newest recruits is Wang Huanyu, who was an implementation engineer for central processing units at the US headquarters of Apple from 2021 until December. He took up a job as a professor with HUST, his alma mater, in the integrated circuits school that was established in 2023. Wang helped develop some of the latest system-on-a-chip processors used in Apple's Mac computers and iPads. Other Chinese universities, including Tsinghua and Peking, have also set up integrated circuit schools to train the next generation of tech talent. Zhejiang University Zhejiang, located in the provincial capital Hangzhou in China's east, takes ninth spot on the ETO's list for published research, with around 3,580 papers, and sixth for top-cited articles, with nearly 870 papers. The university also ranks highly in two research areas that involve photonics – a branch of optics that harnesses the power of light through photons for various applications. Photonic chips use light or photons rather than electrons to process and transmit information, which travels faster and could therefore lead to higher data transmission speeds. According to the ETO, photonics are increasingly used for high-speed networking and data communication between processors. Peking University One of the top 20 universities in the world, and one of the top two in China, Peking came 10th on the ETO list for total articles, with around 3,440 papers published. The university in Beijing was eighth for top-cited articles, with 810. In February, a Peking University team led by Peng Hailin claimed to have shattered chip performance limits with a self-engineered 2D transistor that outperformed the most advanced comparable devices from Intel, TSMC and Samsung when placed under the same operating conditions. They said their device could be made using existing processing technologies, and without silicon. That is important for China since it cannot currently make the most advanced silicon-based transistors because of US-led sanctions. Also in February, an international team led by Peking researchers unveiled a 100-gigahertz all-optical chip that harnesses light rather than electricity to synchronise processors, which could unlock high-speed AI computing and next-generation remote sensing. The lead author of that paper, Chang Lin, is an assistant professor at Peking's electronics school and has been recognised for his pioneering work in integrated photonics, according to the university. He won an IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award in 2023 that recognises outstanding contributions to the field by scientists aged under 35, and has published over 30 papers in prestigious international journals. More from South China Morning Post: For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2025.
