Monthly Archives: May 2022

Two of the major cases awaiting Supreme Court decisions involve opposite sides of the same coin. A New York case involves the power of the states to regulate guns; a Mississippi case involves the power of the states to regulate abortions.Many of those who support the power of the state in one situation oppose it in the other because the politics point in opposite directions.

There are constitutional differences between the cases, but there also are similarities. Both should be considered in a nonpartisan manner.

New Yorks gun caseinvolves a construction of theSecond Amendment, which guarantees that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. But it guarantees that right in the context of a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state. The juxtaposition of the right to bear arms with a well-regulated militia strongly suggests that the Constitutions framers intended the bearing of arms to be well regulated, as a militia would be.The Framers could simply have articulated the right as absolute (in the way theFirst Amendmentdoes) without preceding it by a limiting reason.

Accordingly, there is a strong constitutional argument that the states which in colonial times had the power to regulate their militias maintain the power to regulate gun ownership and use. This view is strengthened by theTenth Amendment, which relegates to the states or to the people all the powers not specifically delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it.

Thus, the issue of state power to regulate guns under the Second Amendment is squarely before the court. So, too, is the issue of state power to regulate abortions.

Unlike arms, abortion is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution.But theFourth Amendmentdoes guarantee the right of the people to be secure in their persons.This surely has some implication for the right of women to decide whether or not to bear a child. The state may well have the power to regulate abortion to some degree but, as with guns, the issue before the Supreme Court is howmuchpower does the state have?

Here theNinth Amendmentcomes into play.It says that the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.The people include pregnant women, and the question is whether the Ninth Amendment, taken together with the Fourth Amendment, accords pregnant women some degree of control over their persons.Although the Fourth Amendment does not mention the word privacy, it uses a word that commonly included what we now regard as the right of privacy namely, security.

Most Americans believethat a woman should have control over her pregnant body during the early months of her pregnancy but not during the late months.They recognize that a fetus is not like an appendix, which can be removed simply at the will of the person and their doctor. The fetus is asomething; even at its earliest stage, it is a potential life.

When exactly it becomes an actual life, subject to legal protection against abortion, is a complex matter of science, morality and religion.For most Americans, it is a matter of degree but for some, on both sides of the political spectrum, it is not. For deeply religious Catholics and evangelicals, life begins at conception, and there is no matter of degree involved; they regard the earliest fetus as no different than a child. For some advocates of a womans right to choose, that choice extends even to the end of pregnancy; they regard the fetus as constitutionally indistinguishable from an appendix which a woman can simply chose to remove at any stage.

In the abortion case before the Supreme Court, the issue presented is whethera Mississippi statutewhich prohibits abortion after 15 weeks is constitutional if a state decides on that cutoff.The issue before the court, therefore, isnotwhether Roe v. Wade should be overruled but whether it should be limited to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.

If theleaked draft opinionby Justice Samuel Alito turns out to be the final majority decision, the court would have reached out to decide an issue not properly before it. Such a decision would constitute judicial activism and would violate the constitutional limitations on the courts to decide only cases and controversies that are properly before them. Courts, including the Supreme Court, have no constitutional authority to render advisory opinions on issues that are not necessary to decide in order to resolve the specific case.

In these two controversial cases, the current court is likely to decide in favor of more state power to regulate abortions than guns.This may reflect the political leanings of the justices as much as neutral constitutional principles regarding the allocation of power and rights among the states, federal government, courts and people.

Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus for Harvard Law School, is the author of numerous books, including The Case Against the New Censorship, and The Case for Color-Blind Equality in an Age of Identity Politics. Follow him on Twitter@AlanDersh.

Read more from the original source:
What powers do states have to regulate guns and abortions? - The Hill

Council chambers are expected to be open to public attendance in June with the Zoom hybrid option remaining available.

The Winters City Council held its regularly scheduled meeting on May 17. The hybrid meeting was held in council chambers for council members and city staff while the public was able to attend via Zoom.

The city has been working with a citizen volunteer to connect council chambers with the necessary technology to conduct hybrid meetings. Over the past few meetings, the bugs have been getting worked out and for the first time since the pandemic, council members met in person.

The Winters City Council meets at 6:30 p.m. on the first and third Tuesday of the month. Public will be able to attend in person on Tuesday, June 7 or view via Zoom. Information on how to attend is available on the City of Winters website on the City Council page.

Consent Calendar highlightsBlue Oak Park: Resolution 2022-41 was approved appropriating $27,165 from the Park and Recreation Capital Fund to the Per Capita Grant Fund, increasing the fiscal year 2021-22 operating budget to complete the Blue Oak Rehabilitation Project. The project experienced cost changes not anticipated when the project was approved.

Pathway lighting was installed in the park, but, to energize them an unanticipated agreement between the City and PG&E was necessaryand added $14,770 to the cost of the project. Additionally, the amount from Ample Electrics bid to carry out the work rose $12,395.

CPA Auditing Services: Resolution 2022-42 approved a three-year, $125,500 professional services auditing agreement with the Sacramento CPA firm of Mann, Urrutia & Nelson.

The firm responded to a request for proposals and was chosen over Van Lant & Frankhanel, which has provided the city auditing services over the past eight years.

Assistant City Attorney: Resolution 2022-44 approved the fourth amendment to the contract with Best, Best & Krieger, LLP, designating Martin de los Angeles as assistant city attorney.

De los Angeles was introduced at the meeting and works in the firms Walnut Creek office as part of the firms municipal law practice group.

Illegal Fireworks & Social Host Liability: Ordinance 2022-04 was adopted adding a social host liability ordinance in an effort to curtail the use of illegal fireworks.

Each year Safe and Sane fireworks are legal in Winters from noon on June 28 through noon July 6. The ordinance grants law enforcement, fire and code enforcement personnel the ability to issue administrative citations holding the owner, possessor or host of a gathering on public or private property responsible for the discharge of illegal fireworks. Persons cited under the proposed ordinance are subject to a $1,000 fine.

Road Rehabilitation Project List: Resolution No. 2022-43 was approved for the 2022-23 Street Rehab Project to rehabilitate stretches of roadway on Caselli Court, Lauren Court, Moody Slough Road, Neimann Street and Hemenway Street.

The city foresees receiving $144,500 in fiscal year 2022-23 from the SB1 Fund obtained from a state gas tax, transportation improvement tax and vehicle registration taxes. Once approved by the California Transportation Commission, these funds are to be combined with Gas Tax and Transportation Development Act funds to finance the project.

Facility lighting upgrades: Resolution 2022-40 was presented and approved for two professional services agreements with Ecogreen Solutions to convert to LED lighting and add new fixtures at the public safety facility ($267,900) and other sites ($172,330).

The upgrades are to improve energy efficiency and will be financed through a PG&E program. Once the loans are repaid over an approximate eight-year period the city anticipates an annual savings of $33,000.

PresentationsCouncil received two presentations: one from Yolo Animal Services and the second from the newly-commissioned Winters Natural Resources Commission.

Management Analyst Joanne Van Hoosear presented on behalf of the Yolo Animal Services Joint Powers Agreement (JPA). She discussed the JPA and outlined baseline services, development, expense, jurisdiction and costs incurred from the $3 million 2021-22 budget.

Natural Resources Commission Chair Kurt Balasek reviewed the recent NRC formation and its evolution from the Putah Creek Commission. Balasek said the NRC serves the City of Winters as a source of scientific and technological expertise.

The NRCs initial workplan proposal to council includes continued monitoring of Putah Creek, updating the citys master tree plan, seeking funding for air quality monitors, work with fire safe councils, water quality and reuse and reducing light pollution.

UpcomingIn her May 20 update, City Manager Katheleen Salguero Trepa informed the community that Tuesdays Planning Commission meeting included the Citys first Capital Improvement Program.

According to Trepa, the CIP must be reviewed by the Planning Commission for General Plan consistency. The complete CIP budget and operating budget will be presented to City Council at the June 7.

Trepa asked residents not to enter active construction sites.

These sites are potentially dangerous for those not authorized to enter, and trespassers may be cited, Trepa said.

Three Oaks Park remains closed while the developers contractor continues to work on bringing the landscaping up to standards.

Trepa gave kudos to the Project Playground coordinators and to the volunteers who braved the heat last Wednesday morning to spread the new chips around.

It takes a village and we at City Hall certainly appreciate the partnership to help this treasured community asset stay in pristine condition, Trepa said.

The rest is here:
Council meetings will open in-person to public in June, keep hybrid option - Winters Express

A man placing a tap in a phone, 1968. (Photo by MPI / Getty Images)

In 1965, a private investigator named Harold Lipset appeared before a Senate subcommittee and took a sip from a martini. That part was a little unusual, but it was what the glass contained that shocked lawmakers. The pimento in the facsimile of an olive concealed a miniature recording device; the toothpick was an antenna. Near the end of his testimony, Lipset played back his own opening statement. He had been recording the whole time. BOOKS IN REVIEW

Lipset, who was known for such stunts (hed once recorded a naked man in a bathhouse by bugging a bar of soapthough, for the record, his pry martini did not actually contain gin or vermouth), was there at the invitation of Missouri Senator Edward V. Long, who was pushing for an end to the congressional gridlock over privacy legislation. Three years later, a watershed law was passedbut instead of securing the privacy of Americans, it gave police at the state and federal level the legal right to wiretap them. That provision reshaped the relationship between law enforcement and private citizens and laid the foundations, both legally and socially, for our current surveillance state.

According to Brian Hochmans The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States, Americans have held many attitudes toward surveillance over the years. The latest, which has calcified since police wiretapping was enshrined into law in 1968, is indifference. Wiretapping was once seen as extraordinary: Americans in the early 20th century considered it a dirty business. Then some attitudes shifted, and by the postwar era, many private citizens were already using freelance tappers in divorce disputes. (Hochman drops the astonishing tidbit that in the 1950s in New York, Private ears tapped more lines to monitor cheating spouses than their counterparts in law enforcement did to gather criminal evidence.) By the 1960s, Americans were divided, with law-and-order conservatives arguing that police needed the right to surveil and progressives pushing to protect privacy.

The fraught relationship between privacy and security is at the crux of The Listeners, which covers the history of eavesdropping from the Civil War to 9/11. Throughout that long history, the threatreal or imaginedof crime almost invariably took priority over civil liberties. Racist dog whistles shaped surveillance laws in 1968, and people of color historically bore the brunt (and still do) of police surveillance.

Hochman does not address our current world of digital surveillance beyond a handful of brief passages that bookend his study. Though he discusses certain laws, especially those from the 1990s, that laid the groundwork for phone surveillance, he declines to explore explicit parallels; rather, he focuses on the analog past. As he writes in his introduction, I leave it to the reader to decide whether that past can help us find a way out of our current predicament. His thoughts on the matter would have been welcome, too.

Instead, Hochman bases much of his analysis on the changes in public opinion in the 20th century. But who exactly this public opinion represents is not always clear. Our historical amnesia, Hochman argues, prevents us from seeing that digital surveillance didnt always seem so pervasive and routine. Pervasive and routine for whom? Who comprises us?

Its worth asking because Hochman concerns himself with the type of surveillance that stretches its tendrils into ordinary peoples liveswhat he calls the prosaic dimensions of eavesdropping. Although a few hardboiled detectives and operatives appear in these pages, for the most part the book is a history of people intersecting with wiretaps and the law. Hochman has a strong eye for amusing, illustrative characters (such as Lipset), which provides welcome color to his explanations of thorny legal cases. Current Issue

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Throughout the 20th century, new ways to talk on the phone meant new ways to bug. Lawmakers were generally not as agile as motivated criminals in catching on to technological developments (especially when physical wiretaps gave way to stand-alone bugging devices and wireless phones). New devices led to legal questions both procedural and profound: Do police need a warrant to tap a suspected Soviet spy? Are clandestinely gathered communications admissible in a court of law? Does a recording of your voice count as property under the Fourth Amendment? Can a man bug his spouse if shes using his phone for deleterious ends?

Before 1968 especially, wiretapping laws were a morass. Even when such laws were on the books, their confusing wording caused interpretative chaos. In a particularly infamous example, a single word wreaked havoc for decades: and.

In 1934, Congress passed the Federal Communications Act. Section 605 of the law, which addressed wiretapping, contained the line: No person not being authorized by the sender shall intercept any communication and divulge or publish. Yet that and could be read two ways. In the first interpretation, the line was tantamount to a blanket ban on wiretapping; in the second, it meant that it was only illegal to wiretap if you also shared the recording. In 1937, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the first interpretation. But despite that ruling, Hochman writes, the section continued to prove nothing short of catastrophic when it came to preventing wiretapping. The whole thing was so muddled as to be rendered meaningless. In the absence of federal regulations, jurisdictions developed their own laws in response to local preferences and influences.

Cities and states had their own patchwork regulations, although these too were only inconsistently followed. Police often had a gentlemans agreement with local phone companies that enabled them to tap lines without producing a paper trail.

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In 1959, a lawyer named Samuel Dash made a splash in Washington with his bombshell report The Eavesdroppers, which was funded by a grant from the Ford Foundationaffiliated Fund for the Republic, on the state of surveillance in America. Dash broke with previous analyses, which tended to blame individual wiretapping agents or the vulnerability of phone systems, to point a finger at the incoherent laws around surveillance in the United States. Hochman explains that, in Dashs view, wiretapping law was a legal no-mans land, and the contradictions in wiretapping policy were exacerbating the nations looming privacy crisis. Such revelations were not merely a policy concernthey raised real questions about American values. What kind of a society allowed police to wiretap in open defiance of state and federal laws?

With his report, Dashwho later served as chief counsel to the Watergate Commissionhelped provoke a momentous swing in popular perception during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hochman writes.

The Eavesdroppers proved to be divisive. A vocal contingent saw the report as an attack on police and their law enforcement tools. One Brooklyn district attorney fretted that wiretapping bans would give criminals carte blanche in their operations. He suggested that what wiretapping really needed was a rebrand. Rather than calling it eavesdropping, which sounded nefarious, he suggested that a new name be adopted to indicate that it was actually the use of scientific devices to fight crime.

It was against this backdrop that Senator Long, who had invited Lipset to perform his martini stunt, attempted to push legislation that would ban police wiretapping. He had reason to be optimistic that his Right to Privacy Act of 1967 would pass: President Lyndon Johnson had expressed an interest in curbing wiretapping in his State of the Union address that year, in which he called for an end to all wiretapping except when the security of the nation itself is at stake.

Then came the long, hot summer of 1967. Unrest in American cities over the next year provided an opening for law-and-order politicians to make dog-whistle calls about wiretapping as a riot prevention tool. Conservatives in Congress, led by the hardline segregationist John L. McClellan, added police wiretapping authorization to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. Few lawmakers saw the wisdom in impeding the most sweeping public safety measure to come out of Washington in decades, Hochman observes, especially after Robert F. Kennedys assassination. Johnson, although he had already announced that he would not run for reelection against the Republican challenger, Richard Nixon, nonetheless caved. For elected officials, an aversion to wiretapping proved less powerful than racist rhetoric in a fraught moment. The omnibus bill passed, and Long found himself politically radioactive.

Title III, the part of the act that concerned wiretapping, was monumental (and continues to loom large in privacy law today). In an interesting compromise, it both criminalized private-sector tapping and legalized police tapping. The bill included some guardrails, including that police needed to attempt other means of gathering evidence before starting a tap and, notably, that they needed a warrant in most cases (though McClellan squeezed in an exception for 48 hours of unwarranted surveillance in emergencies). Privacy advocates cheered the private-sector restrictions, but the allowances for the police exceeded even Longs worst fears. Yet soon, Hochman argues, No one seemed to care. Again: No one?

Police wiretapping exploded in the following years. Warrants for tap and bug installations increased fivefold at both the state and federal level. Hochman cites compelling evidence of shifts in public opinion here: According to a 1974 Chicago Tribune report, nearly 70 percent of Americans condoned the use of electronic surveillance by the police when done with a proper warrant (up from the 46 percent who had felt that way in the late 1960s, according to a Gallup poll). Almost overnight, Hochman concludes, what was embattled became mundane.

Wiretapping was not an investigative panacea, however, and it was enormously resource-intensive. After an attempt to surveil Teamsters president Roy L. Williams in the late 1970s cost more than $1 million and ensnared the calls of more than 2,000 people in its dragnet, some questioned whether wiretapping was really the most efficient use of government funds.

Then the War on Drugs provided the perfect justification. Law enforcement around the country claimed that sophisticated drug-trafficking syndicates required intensive surveillance. The wiretap had a comeback in the 1980s, and Black communities were harmed the most. Once again, arguments about the costs of electronic surveillance would disappear when African American voices were caught on the line, Hochman notes.

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People of color continued to be the targets of unequal surveillance in the decades to come. In what was a transparent product of the drug wars racial geography, Hochman writes, in 1995 the FBI called for a tiered system of surveillance that would allow one out of every 100 phones to be tapped in certain urban areas. This schema was rescinded after a public backlash. But it illustrates how deeply the surveillance of Black people was embedded in policy at every level of government (even beyond the well-known operations like COINTELPRO, which Hochman mentions briefly). The specter of police wiretapping was a reality of everyday life for many people in Bill Clintons tough on crime America.

Buried in a major 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), was a provision that would have profound effects as surveillance technology evolved: Phone companies had to comply with court orders to grant the government access to call location data. Cell phones were turned into surveillance beacons. Hochman writes that this would have consequences for the balance between privacy and surveillance that no one, not even the industry at the center of the controversy, could have anticipated.

Though he does not go on to outline those consequences, CALEA (as well as its limitations in the face of encrypted technology) loomed large in cases like the FBIs 2016 attempts to compel Apple to unlock the phone of a gunman involved in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. It would have been fascinating to read Hochmans analysis of how CALEAs provisions intersected with this case, but as he writes in the opening line of his epilogue, Our story ends in 2001.

Hochman spends only about a page in the epilogue outlining the Patriot Act and surveillance capitalism since 2001. He quickly retrains his attention on his true subject: wiretapping. The good old-fashioned wiretap continues to thrive in American law enforcement today, he writes. The use of wiretaps under Title III is apparently more than three times higher than it was in the 1980s and 90s. Police continue to surveil communities of color extensively and to marshal resources toward surveilling drug operations specifically: As of 2014, nearly 90 percent of the wiretap work in the United States was drug-related. Hochman adds that today, debates about wiretapping happen largely on the margins or in the wake of scandals like the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks.

After decades of controversy, Hochman shows, the use of wiretaps became institutionalized in the 20th century. But he only scratches the surface of how private companies in more recent decades, enjoying a lax regulatory environment, have encoded surveillance tracking into the structure of apps as well as the Internet itself.

We are now living in the world that the wiretap (and the chaotic, inconsistent legal responses to it) built. In recent years, surveillance technology has once again evolved faster than regulations. Congress has yet to pass comprehensive privacy legislation to regulate how apps collect user location data, leaving corporations free to monetize your every move and federal agencies free to track immigrants.

In a passage about phone bugging in the 1950s and 60s, Hochman writes: The ambiguity of the law made state and federal officials much less equipped to keep pace with the developments that ensued. The same can still be said today.

Continued here:
What Was the Wiretap? - The Nation

By Dianne Anderson

Sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits shrouding the Orange County District Attorneys office have the local National Action Network chapter pushing harder this last week to get Black and Brown voters to mail in their Primary ballot.

At stake, Darlene Futrel said the numbers with Spitzer at the helm show a pattern of upcharging Black people and undercharging if at all white people.

Futrel, president of the National Action Network Orange County Chapter, demanded Spitzer resign two months ago on the heels of reported racist statements and data showing race bias in sentencing.

NAN OC and other Orange County organizations met at Attorney General Rob Bontas Office with a letter written by the ACLU calling for an investigation. Among several groups that signed in support include The Peace and Justice Law Center, Transforming Justice, Orange County United Communities for Peace, and Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative.

Futrel said that although Spitzer is downplaying allegations, she feels that voters wont be deceived.

If you dont know the facts, he will convince you otherwise, thats what a litigator does. They convince you to believe the story, whether its the truth or not, said Futrel,

Some of the controversies are around a December 3 memo obtained by ABC Eyewitness News released by former Senior Assistant D.A. Ebrahim Baytieh detailing a discussion Spitzer had with eight prosecutors last October regarding sentencing for Jamon Buggs, a Black man accused of a double homicide. In seeking the death penalty, Baytieh described Spitzers comments about whether Buggs was dating a white woman, and that Black men choose white women to get ahead in life.

After releasing that memo, Baytieh was fired from Spitzers office for allegedly improperly handling evidence on a prior unrelated case.

A statement by Spitzer attempted to address the remarks after they surfaced.

I am not perfect, but an inartful comment during an hours-long debate in a double murder case is not reflective of my core beliefs or the years I have spent fighting to make our society more equitable and our communities safe for everyone, Spitzer had said in a statement as reported by Stacy Brown with the Black Press USA.

Futrel also shed light on the so-called OCDAs SPIT & ACQUIT program, which she describes as an invasive and illegal practice of DNA profiling. She feels that genetic surveillance is a violation of civil and Fourth Amendment rights.

[Its by] collecting DNA from anyone charged with a misdemeanor and in some cases upcharging a simple traffic violation to a misdemeanor for the sole purpose of scaring you into providing them with your DNA in exchange for dismissing trumped-up charges, she said.

Another case in point shows how justice is based on race in the county, Futrel added. Tatiana (Tia) Turner, a Black activist who tried to flee from a mob of white supremacists during a peaceful march in Yorba Linda, is being charged with attempted murder.

She said no charges have been filed against Don Wallace, a white man, who deliberately drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors.

At the end of the day, our most reliable tool for holding Todd Spitzer accountable will be our vote. Our vote is still the most powerful tool for change and the freedom to choose goes hand-in-hand. Its like trying to separate the wet from the water you cant have one without the other, Futrel said.

In another past report, the ACLU of Northern California analyzed race bias in practices and policies of the Orange County District Attorneys Office, stating that Blacks are 83.5 percent more likely than whites to be charged with a felony, regardless of age or gender.

There were persistent racial disparities across the OCDAs Offices charging practices, and Black people were more likely to be charged with a crime, more likely to be charged with a felony, and more likely to be negatively impacted by discretionary charging practices related to wobblers, enhancements, and diversion than white people, the ACLU reported.

Eugene Fields, vice chair of the Black Democrats of Orange County, said this election holds a tremendous amount of weight.

Fields, who is also on the California Democratic Party Black Caucus executive board, said people of color must show out in force so Black and Democrat candidates can have a fighting chance.

The top two vote-getters for all elected offices in the Primary will go on to compete in the November election.

Especially minority Democrats dont get out and vote because they dont feel like these elections matter to them they do, he said. Were talking here in Orange County, we can possibly vote in a new District Attorney. We could possibly flip the makeup of the Board of Supervisors in terms of having a Democratic majority.

The Orange County Black Democrats have been meeting on Zoom, and at times at a park pulling about 25-30 participants. But, he said they are asking the community to do a bigger part in the process by filling out the ballot and mailing in their vote.

Were here to help you to decide who you want to vote for, or even candidates to come and speak to us if you choose to reach out to a segment of the population you dont have access to, he said.

June 7 is the last day to vote by mail or at their polling places that open from 7:00 a.m. and close at 8:00 p.m.

Some voters will hand their ballot to the mailman, some will drive it down to the Voter Registrars office, while others like the old-fashioned way of standing in line for the I Voted sticker.

You fill it out and sign it and put it back in the mail. There is no postage that voters have to pay. There is no excuse for people not to vote, he said.

To get involved with the Black Democrats of Orange County, contact blackdemsoc@gmail.comFor more information on NAN-OC, see https://www.nan-oc.com/To see the ACLU report, https://bit.ly/3ChtqS0To see the ACLU letter, https://bit.ly/3wGYFnh

More here:
OC Groups Push Against Spitzer and to Get Out the Vote - Precinct Reporter Group

The government on Wednesday said the auction of mineral blocks has stabilized in the country as 186 mines have been put on sale so far.

Of the 186 mineral blocks, 28 were auctioned in the last two months and 46 were successfully sold in FY22, Mines Joint Secretary Veena Kumari Dermal said.

''...186 to be precise blocks are allocated through auction. I am very happy to say that out of this, 46 (mineral blocks) were (auctioned) last year, and this financial year in the first two months we have completed the auction of 28 blocks. So, the auction is stabilized in the country,'' she said during 'India Sweden Mining Day' here.

The state governments, she said, are getting a very good share of the revenue from the auctions and stressed that those states which were early birds in the whole race were really happy.

The Indian mining sector is vibrant, dynamic, and has very good players, she said, and expressed hope that ''the Swedish companies will also take part.'' Swedish companies, she said, are providing technical and automation support to the Indian mining industry.

''Hope today's meeting will help us to kick-start the cooperation and take it forward,'' she added.

Private participation in exploration is being encouraged and a very good legislative provision is made to encourage private participation in exploration also, the joint secretary said.

Swedish Ambassador to India Klas Molin said, ''India Sweden Mining Day is precisely to look at opportunities for cooperation. We have all major companies who have long experiences of working in mining in Sweden...and India here today. ''And as we speak there's a panel going on collaboration, opportunities, etc. So the day is meant to look at those opportunities and I am sure lots of tie-up and potential collaboration will follow.'' The mines ministry had earlier said that the amendment in mineral auction rules will encourage competition that will ensure more participation in the sale of blocks.

The Ministry of Mines had earlier notified the Minerals (Evidence of Mineral Contents) Second Amendment Rules, 2021, and the Mineral (Auction) Fourth Amendment Rules, 2021 to amend the Minerals (Evidence of Mineral Contents) Rules, 2015 (MEMC Rules) and the Mineral (Auction) Rules, 2015 (Auction Rules), respectively.

The amendment rules have been framed after extensive consultations with the states, industry associations, miners, other stakeholders, and the general public.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

Link:
Auction of mineral blocks stabilized in the country; 186 mines put on sale so far - Devdiscourse