A Czech mayor’s refusal to endorse Beijing’s One China policy potentially sets a high bar as Western powers grapple with how to respond to allegations of excessive use of violence by police against Hong Kong protesters and the implications of leaked documents detailing a brutal crackdown in China’s north-western province of Xinjiang. Prague mayor Zdenek Hrib...
As Ekal Vidyalaya, the informal rural and tribal school system that strives to take education to the last child in the remotest village and hamlet, opens its 100,000th One Teacher School in Sonegarh, Surat district, Gujarat, today (December 6), the dreams of a whole generation of rural children have already taken wing. An independent venture of volunteers ...
Governments across the globe have been as ineffective in meeting the needs of their citizens as Italy was in preventing Venice, its crown jewel, from flooding. In 2003, as water levels began to rise across the globe, the Italian city’s government initiated an ambitious engineering project to protect its hundred plus islands from flooding. Sixteen years later...
While the EU and United States have all but abandoned nuclear energy as a future power source, with almost no new reactors being built and existing ones being decommissioned, Russia has quietly emerged as the world’s leading builder of peaceful civilian nuclear power plants. Now the Russian state nuclear company, Rosatom, has completed the first commercial f...
The perfidious power play in Pakistan has attained a notorious, dishonourable status. Gen. Qamar Bajwa continues as chief while the Imran Khan government is left to grapple with the directions given by the Supreme Court of the country. This web of deceit smelled rotten right from the word go and has, not surprisingly, left the main protagonists (Khan and Baj...
The defining feature of today’s geopolitical reality is the reorganization of global order with new alignments, new divisions and new forces replacing former norms. At the turn of the century, the situation on the international stage became shaky and unstable, with massive shifts occurring in the structure of interstate relations. As China began gaining more...
The formation of Shiv Sena-Nationalist Congress Party-Congress government in Maharashtra is a fraud on the people of the state and a travesty of their verdict. Never was the politics of power, the hankering after pelf, patronage and office, more visible to the common man in all its stark nakedness. The Bharatiya Janata Party had a chance of shining in solita...
Saudi efforts to negotiate an end to the Yemen war in a bid to open a dialogue with Iran could call into question continued Gulf support for US President Donald J. Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against the Islamic republic. Saudi officials hope that talks mediated by Oman and Britain between the kingdom and Houthi rebels will lead to a revival of stalled...
In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena which fought the recent Assembly election jointly with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), broke ranks immediately thereafter and has now decided to go with the anti-Hindu Congress party and its adjunct, the grotesquely misnamed Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), on the whim of a self-appointed leader whose only goal is to see this...
The international press reports the events in Bolivia with caution. It describes the overthrow of President Evo Morales, evokes yet another coup d’état, but fails to identify what is really happening. It does not see the emergence of a new political force, hitherto unknown in Latin America. For Thierry Meyssan, if the continent’s religious authorities do not...
Mass anti-government protests in several Arab countries are turning into competitions to determine who has the longer breath, the protesters or the government. In Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq, countries in which the leader was either forced to resign or has agreed to step down, authorities appear to be dragging their feet on handovers of power or agreed transit...
Farmers’ bodies are concerned that the proposed draft Seeds Bill 2019 and Pesticide Management Bill 2019 could weaken farmers’ rights and increase corporate control over seed, as the definition of “farmer” has been tweaked to include traders and corporations as farmers. The original definition of farmer excluded any individual, company, trader or dealer who ...
He’s back. With a bang. Only two days after his release from a federal prison in Curitiba, southern Brazil, following a narrow 6×5 decision by the Supreme Court, former President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva delivered a fiery, 45-minute long speech in front of the Metal Workers Union in Sao Bernardo, outside of Sao Paulo, and drawing on his unparalleled politic...
For 18 years, we have been debating the strange evolution of the media, which seems to place less and less value on facts. We attribute this phenomenon to their democratization through social networks. It would be because from now on any person can become a journalist, that the quality of information would have collapsed. The right to speak should therefore ...
Of course, I have read the Saker’s article, “A few short comments about the Fascist coup in Bolivia”, posted on November 12, as well as most of the comments. However, the predominant assessment did not satisfy me. Considering that my knowledge of the situation in South America is quite rudimentary and that my ideas were not clear enough, I was not prepared t...
The Jawaharlal University is ideally situated to make a contribution by addressing some important problems like the water crisis and air pollution. Instead its students seem engaged in anarchic activities, in causes that serve the interests of anti-national forces like the Jihadis and Naxalites. It might lead to the university being shut down, leaving...
The recent visit to Srinagar in the recast Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir by European Union parliamentarians received disproportionate attention as the complete merger of the erstwhile kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir with India continues to rattle critics of the central government. Mercifully, Ladakh, which achieved its long-sought separation from J&K Sta...
Presidents Donald J. Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a plateful of thorny issues on their agenda when they met in the White House this week [November 14, 2019]. None of the issues, including Turkey’s recent invasion of northern Syria, its acquisition of a Russian anti-missile system and its close ties to Russia and Iran, appear to have been resolved durin...
Since the partition, the India-Pakistan relationship is marked by continuing mistrust, unresolved issues, broken promises and unending conflicts. In between, any thaw in this relationship is viewed with much excitement and hope in the country. But this time the opening of the Kartarpur Corridor between the two countries evoked mixed response. The reason for ...
Mahant Avaidyanath was prophetic when he said “Ayodhya mein Ram mandir ka nahi, Hindu rashtra ka shilanyas hua hain,” after Rajiv Gandhi allowed the foundation-laying ceremony to be performed at the Ram Janmabhoomi complex in late 1989. The last millennium opened with wanton destruction of Hindu temples at the hands of fanatic invaders. In a...