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On the third anniversary of the military coup in Myanmar, a joint statement from the European Union, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States condemned the ongoing violence and human rights abuses perpetrated by the military regime. The statement released by Global Affairs Canada highlighted the devastating impact of the coup. Thousands of civilians have been jailed, tortured, and killed. Its military rule has caused the widespread destruction of infrastructure and the displacement of millions of people, it said.

“Our Prime Minister firmly believes, we need to focus on four major castes,” said Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Interim Union Budget 2024-25 speech – Garib (poor), Mahilayen (women), Yuva (youth), and Annadata (Farmer). Their needs, their aspirations, and their welfare are our highest priority, she claimed. However, in reality, as the budget papers reveal, it was an utter lie, advocacy of the just opposite of what the government did, a mere reverse psychology. The reality is, they suffered the worst in the last 10 years of Modi rule, but on the eve of Lok Sabha General Election 2024, Government just needed to pacify them for their votes.

After Hemant Soren, will it be the turn of Arvind Kejriwal. Both of them Chief Ministers who became targets of the Enforcement Directorate. The Jharkhand Chief Minister got arrested and had to resign. Hemant Soren says he will fight to win; fighting words, but the writing is on the wall. Problem is, the Modi government is whittling opposition Chief Ministers one after another and leaving them in Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra’s wake.

The European Union nations which talk of liberty and democracy and consider themselves as superior to others including the US in terms of protection of human rights have shown their true colour in the current Israel-Hamas war which is continuing for nearly four months.

There are well-known problems associated with the concept of gross domestic product as well as with its measurement. The inclusion of the service sector within GDP is something that Adam Smith would have objected to on the conceptual grounds that those employed in this sector constituted “unproductive workers”; certainly in the former Soviet Union and East European socialist countries, it was not the GDP but the gross material product excluding the service sector that was considered the relevant measure.

The interim Budget 2024 has not made mention of any measure or recommendation to address the very serious bottleneck that has been gripping India’s maritime trade for weeks now—the Red Sea crisis! This crisis is also known as the United States-Iran proxy war that began on October 19, 2023, when the Houthis from Yemen launched a series of attacks targeting southern Israel and the ships in the Red Sea which it claimed were linked to Israel.

In the 1964 James Bond movie, ‘Goldfinger’, the bad guy, Auric Goldfinger, realized he could not just steal the huge amount of gold in Fort Knox, a famous US Army post in Kentucky, known primarily for housing a large portion of the USA’s gold reserves. So, he planned to use a nuclear device to irradiate it to make the gold useless, which would make his own gold more valuable.

The Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the request of former Chief Minister of Jharkhand, Hemant Soren, and directing his lawyers Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Manu Singhvi to approach the Jharkhand High Court for bail, has certainly not come as a big shock. What was still surprising though was the reluctance of the top court to look at the appeal that the ED was deliberately infringing upon his privacy and right to personal liberty.

Bihar chief minister and JD(U) leader, Nitish Kumar, has somersaulted again. After leaving the BJP and forming a Mahagathbandhan government with the RJD in August 2022, Nitish has now defected back to the side of the BJP.

In the middle class residential areas of Kolkata and people are seen animatedly discussing the strained relation between Mamata Banerjee and Rahul Gandhi and also trying to decode the reasons for Mamata’s obstinacy towards Congress, especially her intransigent attitude towards Rahul. Her outright denial of the relevance of the Congress in Bengal and refusal to have any kind of relation with it has raised many improbable questions.