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New Delhi: It turned out to be a day of mixed fortunes for India shuttlers, as Commonwealth Games Champion Lakshya Sen made his third successive semifinal, but HS Prannoy failed to cross quarter final hurdle and in-form doubles duo of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty's unbeaten 12-match winning spree came to an end in the Japan Badminton Open in Tokyo on Friday.

BHOPAL: “Ninety six hours – two visits by Home Minister Amit Shah” It is obvious Amit Shah does not want that 2018 is repeated in 2023 Assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh. That is why he is paying special attention to the state. He reached Bhopal in the late Wednesday evening, held closed door meetings with top leaders till past mid-night. Then next day held face to face consultations with selected leaders including Chief Minister Shiv Raj Singh Chouhan and then left for Delhi. There are reports that he would again visit Bhopal on Sunday. Obviously he does not want BJP to lose like it lost in 2018 assembly elections and then he had used muscle and money power to get power from backdoor by organizing defections from the Congress.

No one can guarantee that the Narendra Modi government will not reappear before the Supreme Court just ahead of September 15, the latest expiry date, requesting for yet another extension to the top cop of the country, the Enforcement Directorate chief S K Mishra, on the plea of protecting and preserving the national interest and foil the evil designs of some countries to show India in poor light.

ON April 3 this year, the minister of state for planning, Rao Inderjeet Singh, said in the Rajya Sabha that the government had no data after 2011-12 for estimating poverty, and therefore had no idea how many people had been lifted out of poverty since then. On July 18 however the UNDP announced that between 2005 and 2019, India had lifted 415 million persons out of poverty; it had of course no information for the post-pandemic period, but for the pre-pandemic period what it said generated much hype. What was missed in this hype however was not only that the UNDP’s concept of poverty was vastly different from what is usually meant by the term, but also that the UNDP concept is neither theoretically robust nor statistically well-founded. The euphoria created by it was simply false.

Supreme Court Justice B R Gavai is busy, perhaps the busiest justice. Very recently he asked to be recused from Rahul Gandhi’s defamation/ conviction case citing long-standing family links with the Congress. Now, he was part of the special bench that has given Director, Enforcement Directorate, Sanjay Kumar Mishra, further extension for the onerous task of saving India from international humiliation.

THE new blockbuster film on Oppenheimer has brought back the memories of the first nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It has raised complex questions on the nature of the society that permitted such bombs to be developed and used and the stockpiling of nuclear arsenals that can destroy the world many times over. Did the infamous McCarthy era and hunting for reds everywhere have any relationship with the pathology of a society that suppressed its guilt over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, substituting it instead with a belief in its exceptionalism? What explains the transformation of Oppenheimer, who had emerged as the “hero” of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, to a villain and then forgotten?

As Rajasthan is approaching closer to Vidhan Sabha election later in 2023, political rhetoric is rising to higher pitches. CM Ashok Gehlot has clearly been playing a politics of human development to counter the BJP’s politics of communal hatred. Nevertheless, politics of development is always better than the politics of hatred.

India will launch the PSLV-C56 rocket on July 30, carrying the DS-SAR satellite from Singapore and six other co-passenger satellites. The launch is scheduled for 6:30 am from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

With the death of Adolfo Gilly on July 4, 2023, the Latin American left didn’t just lose one of its most lucid Marxist thinkers. It also lost a man who directly experienced many of the region’s key events of the past seventy years, from the Bolivian Revolution of the 1950s to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the guerrilla movements of the 1960s to the Zapatista rebellion of the 1990s. His trajectory embodied the kind of roving internationalism that was such a distinctive feature of the region’s radical movements in the twentieth century. After his death, Mexican journalist Luis Hernández Navarro called him “the last of the Mohicans,” and it is hard not to feel that, as well as an individual loss, Gilly’s passing represents the closing of a remarkable chapter in the life of the Latin American left.

KOLKATA: In Assam, the job security of Bengali teachers working in many schools has been endangered by the circulation of widespread reports of organised corruption in the state Education sector of West Bengal. Many of these teachers — local Assam media estimates put their number in hundreds — are degree holders from different educational institutions in Bengal.