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Today is Day 14 of the latest flare-up in the Israel–Palestine conflict. During this fortnight, the internet has been flooded with images and videos of flattened buildings and neighbourhoods, rockets being intercepted mid-flight, gunfights, people fleeing bombings, and injured and dead babies— so many images of dead babies!

The decision of increasing minimum wages of unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers in the National Capital Territory of Delhi followed by strong criticism by Workers Unions have brought the issue of unprecedented suffering of unorganized workers again in focus.

All is not well with India’s exports this financial year and the global uncertainties has made matters worse when one reads between the lines the data of exports of goods and services in the first half of this financial year 2023-24. This meant that India’s dream of achieving $ 1 trillion exports of goods and services in next year or two will get pushed further.

Israel will likely win the Gaza war on the battlefield. Even so, it has already been defeated in the court of public opinion.

Joseph Campbell, author of "The Hero with a Thousand Faces” and scholar on comparative religions, once recounted a Japanese story. A samurai hunted down his master's killer and was about to decapitate him when the assassin spat in the samurai's face. The enraged samurai immediately returned his sword to the sheath and walked away. The reason is that he was taught by his master never to act in a fit of blind anger, as retributions should be delivered from an objective, righteous distance. Too close to and too soon after any ghastly atrocity, blood feuds like what is unfolding in Israel and Gaza may make us believe that we are heading for a ‘polycrisis’.

With signs of a wider conflict in the Middle East becoming stronger by the day, oil market analysts are keeping their fingers crossed over how the evolving scenario is going to shape the future of oil as well as the global economy.

WASHINGTON—Playing the part of classic Cold Warrior in his Thursday night Oval Office speech, President Joe Biden made a sales pitch for a permanent war economy, using democracy as a prop to convince the American people that he needed $105 billion to spend on weapons for Israel, Ukraine, and—unmentioned in his remarks—Taiwan.

On Thursday night, President Joe Biden delivered a nationally televised address making the case for an unprecedented military aid package for Israel, as well as Ukraine. Biden is requesting a whopping $74 billion to send to Israel and Ukraine, even amid scenes of mass death, humanitarian crisis, and relentless violence in the besieged Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank.

Time was when Calcutta as it was known then glorified itself in the title of ,"City of Palaces" owing to majestic buildings be it offices or grandees' mansions dotting it. Lamenting those glorious gone by days when merchant princes from the city ran the economy of the country and beyond stop during the four days of the puja as Kolkata is choc-a-bloc with palaces of cardboard and bamboo built on myriad themes ranging from the Somnath Temple to a story which fetched Ernest Hemingway a Nobel prize.

The news of the alleged beheading of Jewish babies and children by the fighters of Gaza administrator Hamas in the latest flare-up between Israel and Palestine spread like wildfire and has had a worldwide impact. However, more recent expositions have sought to establish the falsity of videos of Hamas beheading Israeli babies and using people, including children, as shields.