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It is Russian tit for Western tat. Vladimir Putin is clearly the winner in the first round of what seems to resemble like the US-USSR cold war days. The Russian president’s combative response to the Western sanction against the country for its role in the Ukraine separatist movement is sending shivers through both the EU members and North America. Putin has warned US President Barak Obama not to mess up with nuclear-armed Russia, probably in a bid to refresh his memory of the spine-chilling Khruschev-Kennedy nuclear stand-off. In a further snub to Washington, U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has been granted a three-year residence permit in Russia. Putin said if Russia at all wanted it could take over Ukraine in a fortnight.

Within weeks of winning the Lok Sabha elections with a surprisingly large margin, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance has suffered major setbacks in Assembly byelections in four states. Of the 18 seats for which elections were held—10 seats in Bihar, three each in Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka, and two in Punjab—the NDA won only 8, down from its victory in 14 Assembly segments earlier. A majority, 10 seats, went to the Congress and its allies.

BHOPAL: While the results of the bye-polls in three assembly constituencies in Madhya Pradesh came as a setback to the Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan, his inclusion in the BJP Parliamentary Board has boosted his image as he has been placed in the company of select party stalwarts of the national level.

There was a time when Mamata Banerjee described every incident which was embarrassing for her such as rape or the deaths of infants in hospitals as either sajano ghatona (concocted event) or a Marxist conspiracy.

KOLKATA; In Bengal, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) signalled its intent to achieve national party status in September 2012, by quitting the UPA II Ministry over petrol price rise. Soon, it broke off its state alliance with the Congress. It fought the Panchayat, and Lok Sabha polls successfully on its own, amidst complaints of widespread rigging and intimidation by all opposition parties.

Uncomfortably, for the Modi Government, despite full command of power at the national level and BJP’s majoritarianism, the first 100 days have fallen short of expectations, at national or global levels, of an economic resurgence or of promise of 'change' of atmospherics towards greater transparency and accountability in governance.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: It is well and truly said that a week is a long time in politics. Hardly has a week passed since Chief Minister Oommen Chandy ‘cut KPCC president V. M. Sudheeran to size’, as his loyalists put it, in the excise policy issue, when a bolt from the blue has hit the Chief Minister in the form of a Vigilance court order in the Titanium corruption case.

With the exit of veterans, L K Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and ailing Atal Behari Vajpayee from the top policy making bodies of the BJP, hold of Narendra Modi and his protégé Amit Shah is complete over the organization. As Prime Minister Modi already holds sway over the government, there is no one to sound a note of dissent. Supporters of Modi and Shah call it a “generational shift”. The three leaders – Vajpayee, Advani and Joshi – were leading lights of the party for four decades as they built up the organization from a scratch to a ruling party at the centre with an absolute majority.

The Government of India in the Ministry of Home Affairs has set up eight specialized divisions of Ballistic, Chemistry, Explosives, Toxicology, Physics, Biology, Document and Speaker Identification/Tape Identification Unit, in its Central Forensic Science Laboratories. This is intended to promote the use of sophisticated technology in crime detection and investigation to meet the growing challenges of ever changing crime profile becoming subtle, swift, sophisticated and complicated by the day.

Some of us – either journalist Chandra Sekhar Bhattacharjee or lensman Bappaditya Bhattaharyya asked somewhat childishly, “Can you sing a few lines of one of your favourite songs Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein”. She, at 90, sang out: and all three of us were dazed at the still-retaining melody and the rare grain of vocal throw That was Preeti Banerjee who was the first to have learnt the song, Sare Jahanse Achchha, after the lyric of the great Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal was tuned into song by Pandit Ravi Sankar in 1946 at the Andheri commune of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), cultural front of the Communist Party of India. Pandit Ravi Shankar was then the music director of IPTA and was a recruit of the then general secretary of the CPI, P.C. Joshi.