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With each movement of the little hand, British Prime Minister Theresa May’s self-imposed deadline to deliver a renegotiated Brexit deal before Parliament seems less likely—the UK government doesn’t even expect any EU concessions by the deadline. And the palpable fear of a no-deal withdrawal grows with each passing day.

The spectre of Anastas Mikoyan, the renowned leader of Soviet era did haunt the incredible round of negotiations at the President Hotel in Moscow on 5 and 6 February on modalities of withdrawal of foreign (not just American) troops. Participants in the consultations included representatives from India, Iran, China and states of Central Asia.

So, the CAG will “save” Rafale-hit Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Monday, the CAG’s report on Rafale was handed to President Ramnath Kovind. It was to be tabled in Parliament Tuesday. Without doubt it will give hunky-dory status to the Rafale deal. Congress President Rahul Gandhi, producing an email that “identifies Modi as Anil Ambani’s middleman”, calls the report “Chowkidar’s Auditor-General report”, his party expressing "no-confidence" in the report.

It all boils down to Narendra Modi – the man, the Prime Minister, the Chaiwala. From Rahul Gandhi to Chandrababu Naidu to Arvind Kejriwal and Farooq Abdullah, everybody is making the mistake of publicly shaming Modi, forgetting that the man soaks in the humiliation and feeds on disgrace to work wonders to build his stock in the public eye. Attacking Modi with pejoratives has time and again boomeranged.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has taken charge as the Congress General Secretary responsible for Eastern Uttar Pradesh last week. The state is not new to her as she has campaigned earlier also in some parts apart from looking after her mother Sonia Gandhi’s constituency Rae Bareilly and her brother Rahul Gandhi’s constituency Amethi for years. Home to 80 Lok Sabha seats, UP sends the highest number of lawmakers to Parliament, making it a key electoral battleground.

With India becoming the world’s youngest country with an average age of 29, the demographic dividend can be reaped with right training and education of our youthful population to face the challenges of the 21st Century world, which leaves much to desire. Under the current NDA Union Government, the overall quality and standards of education have waned, with reduced budgetary allocation from primary to the higher education and the highest ever shortages of faculty and teachers, growing lack of right infrastructure, swerving of universities from the hotbeds of argument, debate, uncloured mind and dissent to centres of conformity (regimentation of Sangh Pariwar ideology), causing a big hit to standards of excellence in education so much so that employability of our graduates has come down to five per cent from 10 percent as per a NASSCOM survey done earlier for the Union Government.

Despite higher economic growth, the slowdown in industrial investment in the last five years is a major concern. New projects are fewer. While the government is busy selling its stake in the country’s most reliable public sector enterprises, the private sector is not investing enough in the areas such as infrastructure, large-scale industry, housing, manufacturing, mining and metals. The domestic manufacturers are struggling to fully utilise their existing capacities in the face of growing imports. The record foreign direct investment in the last four years had little impact on the manufacturing sector as a substantial part of it went into merger and acquisition (M&A) of Indian companies by foreign investors. It may not be that the government is unconcerned. But, it actions or policies have failed to deliver.

From the eye-popping report published in The Hindu, it is now clear that the PMO was, in fact, in “parallel negotiations” with the French government over the Rafale deal, and that Defence Ministry officials had raised strong objections to this, saying that it had “weakened the position of the MoD and the Indian Negotiating Team seriously”. This note from the defence secretary was dated November 24, 2015.

CHANDIGARH: Giving a major fillip to its efforts to check stubble burning and boost the renewable energy sector, the Punjab Government led by Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh on Monday signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Virgo Corporation for a Rs 630 crore Biofuel project, for which technology will be provided by the US giant Honeywell.

Is it possible that the president of the United States could be involved in a scandal that includes threats by a notorious tabloid to release salacious photos of Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post? A question like that would itself long have been regarded the stuff of a scandal sheet but, unfortunately these days, it’s one that now needs to be asked.