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China has worked hard for months to make the first G-20 Summit under its leadership a landmark event to achieve revival of global growth and trade - in a more challenging environment post-crisis with low incomes and rising inequality across nations. Globalisation itself is in peril.

You thought that it is India which commits such crimes as imposing retrospective taxes running into ten years or more. Think again. It is the holiest of holies of so-called tax conservatives, the European Union and OECD countries, that are now imposing two decades old retrospective tax claims.

Giving a big push to the joint collaboration in the energy sector will be getting major focus in the discussions Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be holding with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the bilateral summit in October this year in New Delhi. This will be the 17th bilateral summit between India and Russia and the visit of the Russian President has been preponed to coincide with the BRICS summit in Goa on October 15 and 16 when the Russian President will be present.

BHOPAL: Many important leaders and functionaries of the BJP and the RSS launched severe criticism on the functioning of the Shivraj Singh government. Those who vied with each other in criticising the BJP led Madhya Pradesh government included BJP members of parliament and representatives of various organisations affiliated to the RSS. The occasion was the recent two day meeting summoned by the RSS to get feedback about the BJP ministry.

India and the US has given a concrete shape and face to their newly evolved companionship by signing the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) that will allow the two countries to provide logistics support to each other’s fighter planes, warships and personnel. Indian defence minister Manohar Parrikar who is in USA has accomplished the task of signing the LEMOA as promised to the US defence secretary Ashton Carter during his visit to Delhi in April.

It is a safe bet that no government will withdraw any of the laws which ostensibly exist to protect the nation from internal and external threats, but are nearly always misused.

Much noise is being made over the Australian media expose’ of the 22,000-page knowhow and secret data leakage of the state-of-the-art Scorpene stealth submarines, which are being built in India’s Mazagon Dockyard under a collaboration agreement with the French supplier. The foreign publication has threatened to expose more. The French designer has gone to the court. However, this is not for the first time that a highly guarded defence technology transfer by an overseas armament manufacturer and supplier to India became a public knowledge through the media. In the mid-1980s, under Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership, the German technology to build HDW submarines, also in the Mazagon Docks, which India purchased at huge cost those days, was reported as ‘already sold and transferred’ with other sensitive documents to South Africa. The HDW submarine deal caused a huge embarrassment to Rajiv Gandhi and his government not for the knowhow leakage alone, but also for a kickback allegedly received by those involved in the purchase deal, including the prime minister. Tragically, the government said it was unaware of both the developments before they were exposed in the overseas media.

India witnessed 721 communal strives in 2015, in which 97 persons lost their lives and 2264 people injured compared to 95 dead and 1921 injured during 2014. However, no major communal riots occurred during 2015, according to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The communal situation across the country, by and large, was under control.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The stay granted by the Kerala High Court on the recent Government order asking the Commissioner for Entrance Examinations to carry out allotments to all seats in private self-financing medical colleges is no setback for the Government as is being made out to be.

The Awami National Party which has only one elected representative in the 366-member National Assembly of Pakistan with just one percent of votes in the last parliamentary elections, held in 2013, continues to remain the main target of the Talibans in the latter’s protracted assassination campaign. Hundreds of ANP leaders and cadres were killed during the last seven years but the ANP’s intrepid opposition to the politics of individual terrorism shows no sign of fading out.