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The relentless spurt in global crude prices breaching 80 dollars per barrel in recent days and the concomitant inexorable increase in domestic petrol and diesel prices have once again highlighted how brittle is India’s energy security and how precious little the authorities had done to bring the situation to this brink! It is easier for former Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram to shoot off a series of tweets that it is possible to cut up to 25 rupees per litre (as the government saved 15 rupees on every litre of petrol due to fall in crude oil prices with the Centre putting additional tax of 10 rupees) in taxes but it will cheat the people by cutting price by one or two rupees. It may be recalled that when global crude prices crashed a couple of years ago, coinciding with the return of the NDA to power in 2014, the government raised the excise duty on fuel as many as nine times between November 2014 and January 2016. Apart from the oil bonanza it was able to reap because of reduced import prices, the economy’s macroeconomic fundamentals too saw robust developments with a distinct improvement in current account deficit (CAD) owing to the steep fall in crude import bill.

After China clamoured for retaliation against USA’s tariff imposition, almost threatening of a global trade war, it decided to import substantially more from USA. The trade negotiations between the two countriesended last week, with China declaring its honest intent to increase US imports and the world breathed a sigh of relief that the trade war was averted.

A Hong Kong-based English daily reported last week that the Chinese are digging for gold and other minerals at Lhunze, which is right on the border of Arunachal Pradesh that the Chinese call ‘South Tibet’. Nobody can object to the Chinese prospecting for minerals in their own land. But what is a matter of immediate concern for India is that development of infrastructure etc. is taking place at a breakneck speed at Lhunze, which is a garrison town of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.

Both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin badly needed the informal summit. If India needed a positive move towards strengthening bilateral relations, Russia desired a clear assurance about firming up of cooperation, including in defence,as well as global issues of common concern.

We may be on the cusp of a “second industrial revolution”, says an IMF working paper released recently. It has been predicted on the basis of advances in artificial intelligence and robotics. The authors have concluded, “automation is good for growth and bad for equality”. The real wages fall in the benchmark model in the short run and eventually rise, but “eventually” can easily take generations, the paper warns.

With Muslims fasting and generally comatose during the month of Ramzan, authorities in China have told mosques in China to raise the national flag to promote the spirit of patriotism. There are 20 million Muslims in China and they are, apart from the Uyghur, the quietest Muslims on the planet, keeping to the mosque-compound and offering Namaz prayers at appropriate intervals, their lives clockwork and no cow vigilante to fear for. Ideal. Jannat!

It is rare. It is deadly. It’s called the Nipah Virus! The fruit-bat borne virus has already killed 11 in Kerala’s Kozhikode and Malapuram districts after the first three deaths in a family were diagnosed as Nipah, the name that spells panic. One of the 11 dead was a nurse named Lini. Her body was cremated without much ado by the government and her home quarantined, cordoned off by the authorities. In the United States, they would have called in the National Guard!

Venezuela’s incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, of the United Socialist Party, won a new six-year term, according to preliminary results announced Sunday night by the National Election Council (CNE). Most of the right-wing opposition to the leftist government had boycotted the election, but some oppositionists broke with this plan and ran their own campaigns. These efforts did not, however, prosper.

In the last decade, India has emerged as the world’s most dynamic lab for stability-enhancing innovations that support a more inclusive economy, according to The Atlas of Innovation for Economic Stability published today by international NGO FHI 360 with support from The Rockefeller Foundation. The result of a global research and crowdsourcing effort, the Atlas features more than sixty innovations from around the world that help individuals, households, communities, and countries continue to survive and prosper even in the face of economic volatility.

What the Karnataka election has shown is that neither Narendra Modi’s oratory nor Amit Shah’s organizational micromanagement is enough at a time of an ebbing tide for the BJP. The exposure of the inadequacies of these two seemingly invulnerable weapons cannot but be of concern to the party when it faces three more crucial assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.