In a welcome development for India’s beleaguered forces that are fighting the Naxal-Maoist menace across several states, women cadres have begun to revolt and speak out against the gender abuse by the armed insurgents. Young Shobha Mandi (also known as Uma and Shikha), barely 23, surrendered to the police on Aug. 27 after seven years as a bus
The film Pollock directed by Ed Harris, who plays the title role (2000) on the relatively short (1912-1956) and not so eventful but symbolically significant life of American painter Jackson Pollock, provides a vivid picture of a period in recent history which continues to heavily influence most of our (Western) cultural reality. Pollock is sho
The US ended the four-day Invincible Spirit joint military exercise with South Korea on July 28, which consisted of 20 warships and submarines, 200 aircraft and 8,000 troops “in the sea, shore and the skies” [1] of South Korea and in the Sea of Japan near the coasts of North Korea and Russia. On the same day the Taiwan News ran a
“From a historical perspective, the US has continuously found enemies and waged wars. Without enemies the US cannot hold the will of the whole nation,” concluded Chinese Air Force Colonel Dai Xu, after perusing the 2010 US defense report. He points to the attempt to turn the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) into an Asian N
Enough of boring stuff of Afghan stiffs and Pentagon staffs! Not a minute too early, when we were about to succumb to boredom of approaching rainy autumn, we were hit by the new release of …the latest Sex Scandal …as no doubt the story of Julian Assange’s escapades in Sweden will be known once it inevitably makes its way into
[On Aug. 24, a self-appointed ‘people’s tribunal’ headed by Mr A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court, declared that the ‘victims’ of the 2008 violence in Kandhamal, Orissa, continue to suffer intimidation, and demanded state government protection for them. He wanted a special investigation team to re-exam
Last month’s five-day (July25-29) visit to India by Myanmar head of state General Than Shwe - and the attention paid to the visit by the Manmohan Singh government - was watched with a bit of heartburn by the jaundice-eyed Western powers. The refrain of the Myanmar-hating “democracy-preachers” was, how could Ind
The Remarkable Model of the Commonwealth Bank of AustraliaThe current credit crisis is basically a capital crisis: at a time when banks are already short of the capital needed to back their loans, capital requirements are being raised. Nearly a century ago, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia demonstrated that banks do not actually need capital to m
After the tremendous coup of Wikileaks, this semi-clandestine site and organisation, which had recently brought to public knowledge so many government crimes through so many hundreds of thousands of documents (with even more on the way), has predictably come under attack. Not only from Pentagon hacks, but also from various bodies we would expect to
On Tuesday [Aug. 10], the Fed announced that it will reinvest the proceeds from maturing mortgage-backed securities (MBS) into US Treasuries. The process is called Quantitative Easing. In theory, Q.E. increases inflation expectations so that consumers spend more and rev up the economy. That’s the theory. But adding to bank reserves when
Thirty Years of Duplicity, and Counting...“Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism’s face And the international wrong.” (W.H. Auden, 1907-1973, writing in 1939) Twenty years ago this August, with a green light from America, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He had walked in to possibly the biggest trap in modern history, unlea
Three interlocking crises are striking Russia simultaneously: the highest recorded temperatures Russia has seen in 130 years of recordkeeping; the most widespread drought in more than three decades; and massive wildfires that have stretched across seven regions, including Moscow. The crises threaten the wheat harvest in Russia, which is one of
In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting,
It is August 2010, which is the month when the last US combat troops are scheduled to leave Iraq. It is therefore time to take stock of the situation in Iraq, which has changed places with Afghanistan as the forgotten war. This is all the more important since 50,000 troops will remain in Iraq, and while they may not be considered combat troops, a g
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Hari Om
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22 Aug 2010
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Don’t trust the respective leadership of the RSS and the BJP when they aver that they are committed to the national cause in Jammu & Kashmir. They are not committed to anything they say publicly. The overt and covert activities suggest that the Parivar is contemplating a major mischief to hit the Indian nation below the belt and negate al
The Kerala political establishment is fervently doing what it can and more to save the skin of infamous terrorists and local Muslim women are fighting home-grown Talibans to stay dignified. Common folk in Kerala in particular and India in general have become apparently insensitive, if not repellent, to the current political imbroglio. Ordinary peop
Since BP announced that CEO Tony Hayward would receive a multi-million dollar golden parachute and be replaced by Bob Dudley, we have witnessed an incredibly broad, and powerful, propaganda campaign. A campaign that peaked this week with the US government, clearly acting in BP’s best interests, itself announcing, via outlets willing to allow
The Big Things That Matter and the Little Things That AnnoyI write about major problems: the collapsing US economy, wars based on lies and deception, the police state based on “the war on terror” and other fabrications such as those orchestrated by corrupt police and prosecutors, who boost their performance reports by convic
In an Independence Day-eve bonanza, Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah announced that his government will recruit 50,000 youths in the next few months, and pitched for restoration of autonomy to the state to bridge the “trust deficit” between the people and the Centre. The Chief Minister proclaimed that people in Jam
The real story of Wikileaks has clearly not yet been toldSince the dramatic release of a US military film of a US airborne shooting of unarmed journalists in Iraq, Wiki-Leaks has gained global notoriety and credibility as a daring website that releases sensitive material to the public from whistleblowers within various governments. Their latest
Unless President Obama just cannot hear or face reality, he should realize by now that it is Summer of 2010, and whatever inspired the nine years of blood-spilling in Afghanistan, that the war is over. What remains is more killing of Afghan civilians, and American soldiers who were led to this vast killing field, to kill in order not to be killed.
The alacrity with which both houses of the American Congress passed the border security bill speaks volumes about the arrogance, recklessness, insensitivity and opportunism of the US establishment in its dealings with India. If President Barack Obama signs it into a law, as he is likely to, it will be a retrograde step for Indo-US relationship.&nbs
The political situation in the Kashmir Valley, which continues to witness relentless separatist-sponsored violence and attacks on security forces, remains extremely fluid. For a while it did seem that the Chief Minister might put in his papers. But regardless of how long he now continues in office, Mr Omar Abdullah will be heading a lame duck regim
The primary constraint to India’s emergence as a Superpower is simply that this is not the natural culmination of a diligently pursued national quest for affirmation and assertion of the civilisational identity and ethos of this ancient land, now a modern nation-state. The idea of an economically rising India as an emerging superpower &
The truth and dimensions of the scenario facing India at this crucial juncture are far too many to be ignored, particularly in the State of Jammu & Kashmir. The rabble rouse of the Valley-based politicians and the agitational terror-ways of the mauling crowds are by no means a response to governance, but a serious well planned strategy executed
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Hari Om
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14 Aug 2010
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The people of Jammu province, who constitute nearly half of the population of the State and occupy an area almost twice that of Kashmir, are up in arms. What has put the people of Jammu and other pro-India constituencies in the State on the virtual warpath is the Prime Minister’s statement in New Delhi on August 10, to the effect that his gov
[Basharat Peer’s eminently forgettable Curfewed Night won such glowing accolades from the anti-Hindu, anti-India glitterati that yours truly was conned into buying it. Regret was swift, for the book was remarkable only for its sheer dishonesty. Very much like the current unrest in the Valley, Peer purges the brutal and forced Exodus of Kashmi
When investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker broke the story four years ago that a DC-9 (N900SA) “registered to a company which once used as its address the hangar of Huffman Aviation, the flight school at the Venice, Florida Airport which trained both terrorist pilots who crashed planes into the World Trade Center, was caught in
Indian Census of 2011 will be the largest in the world, collecting information on socio-economic characteristics including personal information linked with identity. Despite speculations before about a decade that the Census operations will possibly be replaced by massive surveys, as the task would be unmanageable in 2011, the Houselisting operatio
The Atlantists are on the ascendant these days in Moscow. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s hamburger lunch with United States President Barack Obama during his visit to Silicon Valley last month apparently left a pleasant taste in his mouth. Now relations with NATO are on the mend, as Russia plans to send 27 Mi-17 helicopters to Afghanista
Jammu makes sense of happenings The separatists’ shrills and yells that were till a few weeks ago confined to a few pockets in the Valley have now definitely descended on Delhi. Thanks to the Indian State and to some over-enthusiastic members of the capital’s ubiquitous “civil society”! To be on the side of the
For last few months it has been painful and amusing to see our leadership caught in dilemma. By this I do not mean the leadership of any particular political party or social organization, but the will and aspirations of the people as manifested in the leadership of existing political outfits and organizations. For the last few years, confusing sign
From PULSE Media: In a recent interview renowned linguist Noam Chomsky called the BDS campaign ‘hypocritical’. Jeffrey Blankfort, who is the author of an earlier important critique of Chomsky’s position on Palestine, responds: When Noam Chomsky was stopped at Jordan’s Allenby Bridge and prevented from entering the Pales
[A review of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine by Joel Kovel (2007), Pluto Press] Amazon.com likes to tell its book-buying customers which books other customers also bought who purchased the same book, and I typically glance at this unsolicited information with bemused detachment (Oh really? But do they
65 years ago, August 6 and 9, 1945: Hiroshima and Nagasaki“On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM, the nuclear bomb ‘Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000.
What Is The One Subject We Are NOT Allowed To Discuss? ~ Damned If I Do and Damned If I Don’tIt isn’t abortion. It isn’t illegal immigration. No, it isn’t sex either. No, it isn’t health problems, it isn’t personal finance and it isn’t marriage or anything like that. It’s not crime, fraud, war or raci
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Hari Om
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08 Aug 2010
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Union Home Minister P Chidambaram’s statement in the Rajya Sabha on Aug. 6 is nothing but a blend of contradictions and formulations which have the potential of unsettling the settled in Kashmir, and negating the supreme sacrifices our Army to preserve Indian sovereignty in Jammu & Kashmir all these 63 years of the State’s accession
On the 9th of August 1945, an all-Christian B-29 bomber crew took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with the blessings of its Catholic and Protestant chaplains. In the plane’s hold was the second of the only two nuclear bombs to ever be used against human targets in wartime. The primary target, Kokura, Japan, was clouded over, so t
One State is not an apocalyptic vision of the Last Days. It is a perfectly doable and mutually profitable development. The Jewish nationalist One-Staters should be encouraged by our side. - “No, you must finish both the meat and the vegetables; don’t pick the cheese off your sandwich and do not leave bread on the plate” - so
There has been a strong revival in recent years of support among Palestinians for a one-state solution guaranteeing equal rights to Palestinians and Israeli Jews throughout historic Palestine. One might expect that any support for a single state among Israeli Jews would come from the far left, and in fact this is where the most prominent Israeli Je
This August 6, 2010 is the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, an event that has been mythologized by millions of Americans who were happy that the awful war was finally over. Of course most Americans were also willing to swallow the post-war propaganda about the end of the war, false information that was orchestrated by a multitude of wa
On July 11, 2010, al-Malahim Media, the media arm of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), published the first edition of its new English-language online magazine “Inspire.” The group had tried to release the magazine in late June, but for some reason — whether a technical glitch, virus (as rumored on some of the jihadist mess
One may recall the oil price increase between 2006 and 2008, its fall in the later half of 2008, and subsequent rise in 2008-09. Again this provides a fascinating study to estimate the power and reach of these speculators at the global level. It may be noted that the US financial sector has begun to turn its attention from currency and stock
Press reports across the globe in the last week of July 2010 suggest that billionaire financier George Soros is in advanced talks to buy a 4 per cent stake in the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Valued at approximately US$ 35-40 million, this deal involving Soros and the country’s largest bourse has set the cat among the pigeons in several count
Was the alleged rape of an Orissa nun, following the assassination of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four sanyasis in Kandhamal on Krishna Janmasthami, Aug. 23, 2008, an afterthought by missionaries targetted by enraged Hindus? Was it a planned vengeance, aimed at garnering the international spotlight and forcing Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik to
Justice Ranganath Misra Commission report has caught the attention of the entire country. It has strengthened the demand of the Church and Christian organizations to provide reservation for Dalit Christians. They are holding rallies and meetings to pressurise the Centre to implement the Misra Commission report. The question arises whether the
9/11 was like Pearl Harbor to America, uniting many, awakening bitter skepticism in a few. Where Pearl Harbor began America’s official role in crushing the Fascist juggernaut that threatened to dominate the world, 9/11 had quite the opposite effect. America’s response to 9/11 was oppression at home and a tirade of frenzied pho
Ferghana Valley, which straddles three Central Asian nations—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan—has become the prime target of the axis of three devils—Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the drug traffickers. These forces made their move during the breakout of organized riots in southern Kyrgyzstan in early June, posing a threat to the
Geopolitics is central to Stratfor’s methodology, providing the framework upon which we study the world. The foundation of geopolitics in our time is the study of the nation-state, and fundamental to this is the question of the relationship of the individual to the nation-state. Changes in the relationship of the individual to the nation and