Ambala: The Haryana Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (HSGMC) elections would be held from 8am to 5pm on Jan 19 next year. The commissioner of gurdwara elections in Haryana announced the schedule on Tuesday. Nominations can be filed from Dec 20 to 28 and scrutiny of papers will be done on Dec 30, according to the notification. The counting of the votes will take place immediately after the completion of the election. Several Sikh organisations of Haryana, including Haryana Sikh Ekta Dal, Sikh Samaj Sanstha and others, had been demanding elections to the Sikh body. The state govt had nominated second ad hoc panel in mid-Aug after the tenure of first one nominated on Dec 1, 2022, for 18 months was over. There are some conditions as per the HSGM Act, 2014, for a person to be elected as member of the committee, including that he/she should be an Amritdhari (initiated) Sikh, be able to read or write Punjabi in Gurmukhi script, not a “patit” who trims/shaves his beard or hair, not alcohol or intoxicant or halal meat consumer and not a paid servant of gurdwara and others. The candidates filing their nomination are required to deposit feet of Rs 5,000 to the returning officer before the last date of nomination. The polling will be conducted using the electronic voting machines (EVMs). There are a total of 41 wards in Haryana where elections would be held. After the Haryana assembly led by Congress govt with Bhupinder Singh Hooda as its chief minister passed Haryana Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (HSGMC) Act, 2014, on July 11, 2014, the HSGMC supporters had started a movement to take control of historical and other gurdwaras in the state. The HSGMC Act, 2014, was notified by Haryana legal and legislative department on July 14, 2014, the validity of which was challenged with a civil writ petition in the Supreme Court on Aug 6, 2014, by Harbhajan Singh Masanan, a Kurukshetra-based member of Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), Amritsar. The top court had then stayed the matter with status quo. The SGPC had also filed a petition challenging the HSGMC Act We also published the following articles recently BJP nominates former NCW chairperson Rekha Sharma for Rajya Sabha from Haryana Rekha Sharma, former NCW Chairperson, has been nominated by the BJP for Haryana's Rajya Sabha seat. The election is scheduled for December 20, and Sharma is expected to win due to BJP's assembly majority. This seat became vacant after Krishan Lal Panwar resigned to contest the assembly elections. Sharma's Rajya Sabha term will be approximately four years. Voter list changes till Dec 23 for Haryana civic polls Gurgaon district administration has announced the schedule for finalizing the voter list for the upcoming municipal elections. Citizens can register, make corrections, or request deletions until December 23rd. A preliminary voter list will be available on December 17th for review. Sukhbir Badal continues services as 'sewadar' at Anandpur gurdwara Sukhbir Singh Badal, Shiromani Akali Dal leader, continued his religious service at Takht Sri Kesgarh Sahib amidst tight security, just two days after a foiled assassination attempt at the Golden Temple. Badal, performing 'seva' as part of a religious penance, was targeted by Narain Singh Chaura, a suspected Pakistan-trained terrorist with a history of militancy. Stay updated with the latest news on Times of India . Don't miss daily games like Crossword , Sudoku , and Mini Crossword .
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Abortion has become slightly more common despite bans or deep restrictions in most Republican-controlled states, and the legal and political fights over its future are not over yet. It's now been two and a half years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door for states to implement bans. The policies and their impact have been in flux ever since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Here's a look at data on where things stand: Overturning Roe and enforcing abortion bans has changed how woman obtain abortions in the U.S. But one thing it hasn't done is put a dent in the number of abortions being obtained. There have been slightly more monthly abortions across the country recently than there were in the months leading up to the June 2022 ruling, even as the number in states with bans dropped to near zero. “Abortion bans don’t actually prevent abortions from happening,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a public health social scientist at the University of California San Francisco. But, she said, they do change care. For women in some states, there are major obstacles to getting abortions — and advocates say that low-income, minority and immigrant women are least likely to be able to get them when they want. For those living in states with bans, the ways to access abortion are through travel or abortion pills. As the bans swept in, abortion pills became a bigger part of the equation. They were involved in about half the abortions before Dobbs. More recently, it’s been closer to two-thirds of them, by the Guttmacher Institute. The uptick of that kind of abortion, usually involving a combination of two drugs, was underway before the ruling. But now, it's become more common for pill prescriptions to be made by telehealth. By the summer of 2024, about 1 in 10 abortions was via pills prescribed via telehealth to patients in states where abortion is banned. As a result, the pills are now at the center of battles over abortion access. This month, for prescribing pills to a Texas woman via telemedicine. There's also an effort by Idaho, Kansas and Missouri to and treat them as and a push for the federal government to start enforcing a to ban mailing them. Clinics have closed or halted abortions in states with bans. But a network of efforts to get women seeking abortions to places where they're legal has strengthened and travel for abortion is now common. The Guttmacher Institute found that more than twice as many Texas residents obtained abortion in 2023 in New Mexico as New Mexico residents did. And as many Texans received them in Kansas as Kansans. Abortion funds, which benefitted from in 2022, have helped pay the costs for many abortion-seekers. But some funds have had to . Since the downfall of Roe, the actions of lawmakers and courts have kept shifting where abortion is legal and under what conditions. Here's where it stands now: Florida, the nation’s third most-populous state, on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy on May 1. That immediately changed the state from one that was a refuge for other Southerners seeking abortion to an exporter of people looking for them. There were about there in May compared with the average for the first three months of the year. And in June, there were 35% fewer. While the ban is not unique, the impact is especially large. The average driving time from Florida to a facility in North Carolina where abortion is available for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is more than nine hours, according to data maintained by Caitlin Myers, a Middlebury College economics professor. The bans have meant clinics closed or stopped offering abortions in some states. But some states where abortion remains legal until viability – generally considered to be , though there’s no fixed time for it – have seen . Illinois, Kansas and New Mexico are among the states with new clinics. There were 799 publicly identifiable abortion providers in the U.S. in May 2022, the month before the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. And by this November, it was 792, according to a tally by Myers, who is collecting data on abortion providers. But Myers says some hospitals that always provided some abortions have begun advertising it. So they’re now in the count of clinics – even though they might provide few of them. How hospitals handle , especially those that threaten the lives of the women, has emerged as a major issue since Roe was overturned. President Joe Biden's administration says hospitals must offer abortions when they're needed to prevent organ loss, hemorrhage or deadly infections, even in states with bans. Texas is challenging the administration’s policy and the this year declined to take it up after the Biden administration sued Idaho. More than 100 pregnant women seeking help in emergency rooms and were left unstable since 2022, The Associated Press found in an analysis of federal hospital investigative records. Among the complaints were a woman who of Texas emergency room after staff refused to see her and a woman who gave birth in a car after a North Carolina hospital couldn't offer an ultrasound. The baby later died. “It is increasingly less safe to be pregnant and seeking emergency care in an emergency department,” Dara Kass, an emergency medicine doctor and former U.S. Health and Human Services official told the AP earlier this year. Since Roe was overturned, there have been 18 reproductive rights-related statewide ballot questions. Abortion rights advocates have prevailed on 14 of them and lost on four. In the , they amended the constitutions in five states to add the right to abortion. Such measures failed in three states: In Florida, where it required 60% support; in Nebraska, which had competing abortion ballot measures; and in South Dakota, where most national abortion rights groups did support the measure. AP VoteCast data found that more than three-fifths of voters in 2024 supported abortion being legal in all or most cases – a slight uptick from 2020. The support came even as voters supported Republicans to control the White House and both houses of Congress. Associated Press writers Linley Sanders, Amanda Seitz and Laura Ungar contributed to this article.Market Drama: Stocks Hold Steady! Inflation Data Looms Large