The India-Iran-Afghanistan trilateral would be a momentous development even if it did not coincide with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s convincing victory in Assam and gains in other States. The Chabahar port and connectivity project leapfrogs Pakistan’s implacable opposition to an Indian presence in Afghanistan and will transform the Iranian port into India’s ...
Hindutva-baiters have a deeply entrenched image of pro-Hindutva individuals and organisations in their minds. Sadly for them, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar refuses to be strait-jacketed into that image. Their refrain is that Hindutva and rationalism are mutually incompatible values. However, the fact is that they can neither endure Savarkar’s rationalism nor...
Will the men voting for Mrs Clinton end up in Hell? I am not sure. We know that women who vote for a male candidate have a special place in hell, as the old Jewish feminist lady divined, and she should know. It is not only Madeleine Albright looks like a creature from hell, she also belongs there, for her justification of murder of half a million Iraqi child...
After presenting the true story of the murder of four brothers who fought for the protection of temple land, the Hindu Munnani’s documentary presents the gruesome murder of a temple manager who fought against the attempt to convert the samadhi of a sant into a dargah.
The samadhi of a sant, Sarveswara Baba, is situated in Kruthalapuram village adjacent to...
Being at the Kumbh is a privilege, as well as a responsibility. Since ancient times the Kumbh was an occasion where spiritual personalities guided lay people on the dharmic way of life, and fearlessly and honestly conducted debates about truth. Today, the world is interconnected. It means that the debates on truth need also to take note of the truths that ar...
Forget Damascus and forget President Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power – the real battle for Syria is being played out in the northern city of Aleppo, where Turkey dared dream it would revive its empire of old. Ankara here is in for a rude awakening!
So rude in fact that Turkish President Recep Erdogan is contemplating a military incursion into Syria – a move...
Washington and Moscow have managed to maintain their agreements on Syria after John Kerry assured his Russian opposite number that the weapons sent by the Pentagon to Al-Qaïda and Daesh in April had been delivered to honour an old programme which is now abandoned. We are moving towards the end of the Geneva negotiations, and the resumption of intra-Syrian di...
Love Your Leader: People call Kim III “The Marshal” and express towards him, as for his father and grandfather, the emotions usually reserved for a deity. This is shocking for us, but not unusual in Asia. Before 1945, the neighbouring Japanese, people of great culture and refinement, worshipped their Emperor as the Supreme Deity, and even now some of them co...
Feet on the Ground: DPR Korea is thoroughly demonised. It is supposed to be the poorest country (Wikipedia); hell on earth, its national airline “the world’s worst”, its cities shambles. The demonisers did a good service for N Korea as my expectations were so low that I immensely enjoyed every minute and every meal. Actually Air Koryo, the native airline, is...
Kim’s Double-Breasted Jacket: A colossal mass demonstration, well-choreographed to the level of ballet but with tens of thousands of participants in the centre of Pyongyang, completed and sealed an important and unusual political event in this remote and isolated land of North Korea – the Party Congress. The demo has been followed by a show so big that it co...
The Instructional Quality Commission, California Board of Education (CBE), has permitted some opinionated scholars to make a series of errors and omissions, including seeking to change the name of ‘India’ to ‘South Asia’ in all school textbooks of California. The move has naturally triggered a raging debate.
The issues involved are simple. Some communist an...
Would those who commit murder for wearing religious marks spare those who raise their voices for the cause of temples? Posing this question, the documentary presents the gruesome murder of four brothers who attempted to protect the temple in their home town.
Tenkasi, the second largest town in Tirunelveli district, is a ‘Municipality’, located close to Cour...
In the art of communication, terminology is most important and has a big impact. A partisan idea or process can for a while be presented as the most benevolent and liberating with the choice of appealing and attractive terminology. “Globalisation” is a word with tremendous attraction and appeal as its meaning is impressive and sensible, with a promise of hop...
These days, US foreign policy is often contradictory, as we can see in Syria, where troops trained by the Pentagon are fighting troops trained by the CIA. And yet it remains perfectly coherent on two points – to divide Europe between the European Union on one side and Russia on the other – and to divide the Far East between the Association of Southeast Asian...
The “green revolution” that India has been following for several decades has contributed an enormous amount of greenhouse gases, mainly nitrous oxide (N2O) and methane (CH4), to the atmosphere. A single molecule of nitrous oxide, a by-product of urea usage, when released through a process of denitrification, stays in the atmosphere for 150 years, and has fiv...
‘‘He who controls what you eat also controls you’’ – Thomas Sankara, the late revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso.
There is need to examine food independence of communities within the changing agricultural production techniques. It looks into the food production methods that humanity has applied from ancient times to date. It contrasts modern technological...
The Sino-Russian alliance continues to prosper and expand, even though the two countries’ governments don’t want to call it that. Since the last installment of the Moscow-Beijing Express, I could write another article about all the visits, communications, deals signed, plans made, exports and imports: http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/04/02/the-china-ru...
The BBC in its 2004 article, “Al-Qaeda’s origins and links,” would frankly admit that (emphasis added):
“Al-Qaeda, meaning “the base”, was created in 1989 as Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden and his colleagues began looking for new jihads.
“The organisation grew out of the network of Arab volunteers who had gone to Afghanistan in...
France is tired of the suffering caused by needless, baseless sanctions imposed on Russia. So, French parliamentarians have just approved a resolution not to renew sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, A number of EU states, including Greece, will support the removal of the anti-Russian sanctions at a June EU summit. And as for Germany, some experts suggest the...
The President of the United States (POTUS) is desperate. Exhibit A: His Op-Ed defending the Asian face – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – of a wide-ranging, twin-headed NATO-on-trade “pivoting”. The European face is of course the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
POTUS frames TPP – as well as TTIP – in terms of a benign expansion o...
What a week this has been for the 2016 US Presidential election primaries! The primaries brought to fore some truly unprecedented developments. Senator Bernie Sanders, who many think would not be able to win the Democratic party nomination, continued his strong performance against Hillary Clinton. The size and demography of Bernie’s supporter base – particul...
The migration crisis that marked the European Union during the second half of 2015 was created artificially. However, several groups have tried to use it, either to destroy national cultures, to recruit low-cost workers, or to justify the financing of the war against Syria. But in the end, once the wave has passed and the damage done, the problem remains, ab...
Despite the extensive amount of damage Russia and the United States have inflicted upon ISIS in Iraq and Syria, this terrorist organization seems to be determined to recover from its losses. The Times notes that according to its sources in the Islamic State, an emergency mobilization has been declared across all the territories occupied by ISIS. Under these ...
In the end, the pilot documentary titled, “Tamil Nadu in the Grip of Jihad” says that 134 Hindus who opposed the Islamic terrorism and questioned the injustices committed against Hindus have been brutally murdered so far in the State. Out of the 134 murders, 12 murders have been documented in detail in the movie, clearly establishing the growth of fundamenta...
Sri Lanka PM’s visit to China: Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s four-day visit to China from April 6 to 9 had kindled a lot of interest as Colombo-Beijing relations had taken a downturn after his government came to power. An article on the eve of Sri Lanka Prime Minister’s visit published in the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times emphasized...
It stinks worse than a surfeit of skunks crashing a Texas Fourth of July picnic. Look at even the superficial facts of the so-called “Panama Papers.”
A Munich Germany mainstream pro-NATO newspaper editor we are told gets an anonymous gift of alleged files of thousands of high net worth tax dodgers from around the world. To read the front pages of major main...
In less than a month the third Russia-ASEAN summit will be held in the city of Sochi. It will mark the twentieth anniversary of partnership between Russia and the countries of this organization. It should be noted that in recent decades ASEAN states have shown a breathtakingly rapid and sustained economic growth. It won’t be an exaggeration to state that tod...
President Obama is racing forward to establish his imperial legacy throughout Russia, Asia and Latin America. In the last two years he has accelerated the buildup of his military nuclear arsenal on the frontiers of Russia. The Pentagon has designed a high tech anti-missile system to undermine Russian defenses. In Latin America, Obama has shed his shallow pre...
Yahya Al-Shoghri, filmed while being executed by Islamic State in Raqqa in 2014, repulsed orders to chant “long live the caliphate” as his dying words and retorted “it will be erased.” This epitomized the Syrian resistance to the terror backed by Western and Gulf States for regime change; in the April 13, 2016 parliamentary election (as per four-year schedul...
The United States feigned surprise during the simulation of an attack by the Russian aviation against the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea. And yet, as we have reported, Russia already has the capacity to block the ship’s Communications & Commands, and did so, observes Manlio Dinucci, because the ship was in the process of violating the Intermediate-Range N...
The famous Hollywood adage – ‘nobody knows anything’ – seems to perfectly apply to the current turbulence in the oil market. So in an effort to clarify where the global oil economy is heading to, let’s engage in a Battle of the Oil Analysts.
Relying on these Oil Analysts (OA) does not necessarily mean you will be handed straightforward answers, but perhaps ...