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We, the people are squabbling on many a matter. There’s rancor in the air. Telecast minute by minute. There’s the fracas surrounding the drug business in Bollywood: Whether narcotic drugs are consumables? And should some narcotics be made legal? Like marijuana in the United States. ‘Make ganja legal’ is a clarion call. Everybody in UP and Bihar get high on Ganja. Sadhus and sanyasinis in the lower reaches of the Himalayas.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The National Investigation Agency(NIA) has come under tremendous pressure in the wake of the NIA court in Kochi seeking clarification on whether it had evidence to prove the terrorism angle in the gold smuggling case.

The chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath deserves kudos for his brazen boldness to trample and discard the façade of minimum morality, social and political decency and instead of acting against the Hathras rape accused threatening the political forces and persons who have been protesting against the heinous crime, to deal with them with ‘heavy hand’.

The death of a 19-year old Dalit girl due to brutal gang-rape and torture in Hathras and the way the Uttar Pradesh police and administration have handled provide a horrifying yet instructive tutorial on the nature of the Adityanath regime in UP.

Kolkata is in a rare radiance as the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2020 to Sir Roger Penrose, emeritus professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, UK, and Honorary Fellow and alumnus of St John’s College Cambridge for the discovery that “black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”. He shares the award with Reinhard Genzel of Max Planck Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics, Garching, Germany and University of California, Berkeley, USA, and Andrea Ghez, University of California, Los Angeles, USA for the “discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.” Half of the prize money, 10 million Swedish kronor, is to go to the British mathematical physicist.

On October 3 this year, many Germans, party leaders, and media pundits above all, recalled October 3, 1990, when their dreams of a unified Germany became reality. They celebrated with speeches, fireworks, and beer, and vibrant voices, resounding tutti with the “Deutschland über alles” anthem, sung since that date thirty years ago from the western Rhine to the eastern Oder!

On September 23, 2020, Parliament passed the three anti-farmer agriculture bills and then on the same day approved the three anti-working class amendments in labour laws tabled as three Labour Codes. One labour Code had been earlier passed in August 2019. Thus, the government has completed its agenda of agriculture reforms and labour reforms for which the capitalist class had been yearning for many years.

Rape has been a weapon to throttle the voice of protest and in the true sense the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath has been resorting to the same tactics to silence his critics and political opponents when he blamed political parties and civil society organisations for attempting to create a caste divide in the aftermath of the Hathras gang-rape.

Modi bashing is a favourite pastime for Rahul Gandhi. He has been doing that as a daily routine to the point of sounding monotonous. But he has said a few home truths about the Modi government, which unfortunately do not receive the attention that these deserve, mostly due to the repetitiveness.

New Delhi: Former hockey captain Dhanraj Pillay feels that the national women’s team has the potential to have a podium finish at the Tokyo Olympics.