For many years now, STRATFOR has been carefully following the evolution of “Lashkar-e-Taiba” (LeT), the name of a Pakistan-based jihadist group that was formed in 1990 and existed until about 2001, when it was officially abolished. In subsequent years, however, several major attacks were attributed to LeT, including the November 2008 co
The Himalayas are being pounded again. Timber was stolen first; medicinal and aromatic herbs next. Now power projects are stealing water, the lifeline for 30 million mountain folks and 3 billion in the Himalayan-water-dependent nations, as far as Vietnam. [1] As South Asian and Chinese governments felt the heat of electricity shortage, the Hi
More than 10 years ago, before 9/11, Goldman Sachs was predicting that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) would make the world economy’s top ten -- but not until 2040. Skip a decade and the Chinese economy already has the number two spot all to itself, Brazil is number seven, India 10, and even Russia is creeping closer. In pur
Palestine’s move to become an independent state has benefitted from the growing BDS movement, as the world wakes up the enormous and unjust suffering of the Palestinian people, writes Eric WalbergA new Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) campaign was launched this summer by the United Church of Canada, which will try to persuade six companies
Several events have conspired to create apprehensions about the report the Union Home Ministry-appointed interlocutors will submit regarding Jammu and Kashmir. As some dangerous formulations can be argued to fall within the purview of the constitution, and the valley is excited over the recent ‘private’ visit of a former executive of Oc
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Hari Om
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26 Sep 2011
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As the Union Home Ministry-appointed interlocutors for Jammu & Kashmir, namely, Dileep Padgaonkar (head), Radha Kumar, and M.M. Ansari, complete their year-long tenure and prepare to submit their report, there are deep misgivings among various sections, particularly the ravaged and exiled Kashmiri Pandit community, regarding their ultimate solu
Autumn in the Middle East hasn’t the melancholy connotations you attach to it in the North. For you, this is the season of dying; maple leaves turn purple and geese fly south. For us, this is the jolly season of awakening after stupefying summer heat; grass hatches again on the burned-to-reddish-brown lawns and trees are heavy with ripe figs
The persistence of pro-democracy protests in Bahrain in the face of brutal repression may be giving Washington second thoughts about its unwavering support for the royal rulers of the strategically important Persian Gulf kingdom. Are we about to witness a cosmetic ‘regime change’ – not so much for the genuine sake of democratic ri
The Obama administration is intent on applying supply side principles to get the American economy out of the present recession, but supply side principles are based on the belief that if thegovernment cuts taxes on the wealthy, they will invest their savings in new factories, that newly hired workers will increase employment, and that more output w
Events during the past few months provide an example of just how manipulated the mainstream Media has become. We have been repeatedly told that Muammar Qaddafi has raped, brutalised and beggared the people of Libya. Qaddafi has rather bizarre clothes sense, bad hair and appears to indulge a little nepotism, but much of what is believed by the chatt
“Sonia Gandhi resurfaces in Delhi after a prolonged absence. By way of Munh dikhai, people of this country will have to shell out Rs. 3.14 extra for every litre of petrol,” said a popular relay SMS. The faint humour only served to sharpen the outrage underlying the message. The outrage is wholly understandable. Pricing of petroleum prod
It’s a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called “the arc of instability.” It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and
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Roy Tov
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22 Sep 2011
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For a long while, things were static in Israel; the Warring Family got richer by the day while all others slaved. Many years ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir created an odd doctrine that can be summarized as “Let’s Wait;” unable to speak since 2002 due to Alzheimer’s, he has become its living testimony. With the fatal
When I visited Europe in 2008 and before, the idea that Europe was not going to emerge as one united political entity was regarded as heresy by many leaders. The European enterprise was seen as a work in progress moving inevitably toward unification - a group of nations committed to a common fate. What was a core vision in 2008 is now gone. What wa
As a political manoeuvre to outclass BJP veteran L.K. Advani, who on 8 September unilaterally announced a nation-wide yatra against corruption, which many viewed as a last ditch claim to premiership in the event of mid-term polls, the Gujarat chief minister’s 13 September declaration of a three-day fast can be admired as a swift remedy for a
EU beekeepers gain in genetic contamination caseOn Sept. 6, the European Union’s top court paved the way for farmers and beekeepers to recoup losses when their crops or honey become genetically contaminated from neighboring GM fields. The European Court of Justice ruled that all food products containing GMOs – whether intentional or not
Learning a lesson from crop failures attributed to climate change, Nepal’s women farmers are discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks. “I had a crop failure two years ago,” says Shobha Devkota, 32, from Jibjibe village in Rasuwa, a hilly district in central Nepal which
Even as the Congress-led UPA daily increases the economic burdens of the common man, and moves with furtive determination to allow foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail, which could potentially disturb livelihoods of millions of traders across the country, there is no meaningful debate – either in public or in Parliament – over the
After cynically campaigning for office on a platform of transparency and open government, President Barack Obama is presiding over the biggest assault on the US Constitution in American history, implementing outright treasonous programs that even the Bush/Cheney Administration failed to push through. And the model that Obama and his minions a
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Hari Om
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16 Sep 2011
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28 Comments
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“The interlocutors are discussing their proposals by taking into account ‘Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India in 1947, the 1952 Delhi Agreement, Sheikh-Indira accord of 1975 and Achievable Nationhood of People’s Conference chairman Sajjad Gani Lone. Obviously, all legal documents defining the Centre-State relations would
The legendary colonial administrator, Col. Sleeman, while travelling through the nawabi territory of Oudh [Awadh] in 1849-50, was surprised to see at Bahraich both his Hindu and Muslim soldiers offering obeisance at a shrine built in memory of a general of Mohammad Ghazni. On enquiry, he found that this alien Muslim general was responsible fo
While the Osama killing has been depicted by Washington as “fully consistent” with the laws of war, within Pakistan it has evoked a negative response across the board. Some of the criticism stems from the fact that Pakistan fears retribution by the jihadists. The Lahore-based news daily, The Daily Times, made that clear in a May 3 edito
The May 2 killing by US Navy Seals of the notorious al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, at his residence next door to Pakistan’s principal military academy, PMA, in Abbottabad, may not have a direct impact on the ongoing nine-year-old US/NATO military operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, but it could very well change the
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Hari Om
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13 Sep 2011
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14 Comments
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In the interregnum between May 2004 when the Congress-led UPA first came to power, to the present September 2011, India has suffered umpteen attacks at the hands of Islamic radicals, mostly trained and funded and backed by Pakistan and its dreaded Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). Now, there are enough home-grown terrorists to serve as handmaidens
As Christian evangelists intensify efforts to bring India under their sway, their brethren in the south are trying to (mis)use current excavations at Pattanam to revive the myth of Apostle Thomas arriving in the country in the first century AD and establishing a fledgling community. They are trying to link the ancient port of Muziris with Pattanam
Fear of unrest and hunger for profit are sparking massive acquisitions of farmland. A 21st-century land rush is on. Driven by fear and lured by promises of high profits, foreign investors are scooping up vast tracts of farmland in some of the world’s hungriest countries to grow crops for export. As the climate changes and populations
"The world suffers a lot. Not because of the violence of bad people, but because of the silence of the good people!" Napoleon (1769 - 1821) Their business is war and oppression yet the US and NATO leaders and the mainstream media [MSM] announced that democracy is back in Libya and the long feast can begin. A nation of simple tribal communities,
The draft of the Food Security Bill is yet to be discussed in Parliament. There has been much discussion on it in the National Advisory Council (NAC), chaired by Ms. Sonia Gandhi. One could find votaries of all hues and fierce arguments have been put forth on its various provisions. The extreme has been the recently released letter to the
Dozens of United States diplomatic cables released in the latest WikiLeaks dump on Wednesday [24 Aug] reveal new details of the US effort to push foreign governments to approve genetically engineered (GE) crops and promote the worldwide interests of agribusiness giants like Monsanto and DuPont. The cables further confirm previous Truthout
Various scientific analyses conducted by recognized experts and published in peer-reviewed professional journals have established that high doses of the military explosive thermite, mixed with sulphur, were found in the ruins of the World Trade Centre, whose controlled demolition took place in a manner consistent with the effect of strategically po
The “mysteries” surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks and many other momentous events in modern American history seem to be bottomless. After so many layers have been peeled, one sees that so many more remain. Many insufficiently informed people think that those who believe in “conspiracy theories” fail to explain why n
“Trying to outdo the mainstream media by throwing a few million bucks around is like trying tooutshine the sun with a flashgun” “(Jimmy) Walter famously offered a $1 million cash reward to any engineer or scientist in the world who could prove, in an academic technical paper, that the three towers (WTC 12, 2 and 7) could hav
September 11, 2011 will be the 10th anniversary of the sudden collapse and pulverization of three World Trade Center (WTC) towers (1, 2 & 7), only two of which were hit by planes. The main structure that were not reduced to fine powder were 47 massive steel core columns, each 100 stories tall, that were sectioned by highly explosive thermite cu
September 11, 2011 will be the 10th anniversary of the sudden collapse and pulverization of three World Trade Center (WTC) towers (1, 2 & 7), only two of which were hit by planes. The main structure that were not reduced to fine powder were 47 massive steel core columns, each 100 stories tall, that were sectioned by highly explosive thermite cu
In a few days it will be the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001. How well has the US government’s official account of the event held up over the decade? Not very well. The chairman, vice chairman, and senior legal counsel of the 9/11 Commission wrote books partially disassociating themselves from the commission’s report. T
The Ramlila ground that had been spruced up at public cost for a private groups public tamasha, has now been cleaned up again at public cost. However, during the tamasha, while its principal nayak ostensibly fasted, his followers feasted – and questions were and are and continue to be asked about where the money came from, not just for the fo
The economic religion of Consumptive Inequality has entered what some of its parishioners call a Great Recession while non-believers see it as a recurring cycle, this time in perhaps more deadly fashion than any since the 1930s. The global economy is in turmoil with the only debate being whether it can survive with major reforms or needs to be radi
The proposed Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice & Reparations) Bill is a draconian law that is constitutionally untenable because it aims at taking away from Hindus the Right to Equality before law, an inviolable fundamental right enshrined in Article 15 of the Constitution. Section 3B of the proposed law
Some years ago, in the Indian site www.bharat-rakshak.com, this columnist had written of the NATO militaries as resembling an army of simians. Such a force - if let loose within a confined space – can create immense damage, but are unable to clean up the resultant mess. This is precisely what the world has witnessed in Iraq. Despite more than
US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday and Thursday [24-25 Aug. 2011] expose the close collaboration between the US government, top American politicians and Muammar Gaddafi, who Washington now insists must be hunted down and murdered. Washington and its NATO allies are now determined to smash the Libyan regime, supposedly in the inter
There are many reasons for the Anna Hazare drama at Ramlila Maidan, which finally concluded with the government getting the fast called off on a mere verbal assurance to ‘look sympathetically’ at the demands made. One of the deeper reasons was the UPA’s colossal corruption which caused such public revulsion that the Con
The war in Libya is over. More precisely, governments and media have decided that the war is over, despite the fact that fighting continues. The unfulfilled expectation of this war has consistently been that Moammar Gadhafi would capitulate when faced with the forces arrayed against him, and that his own forces would abandon him as soon as they saw