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New Delhi: Defending champions Chennai Lions take on Puneri Paltan in the opening match of the Ultimate Table Tennis (UTT) Season 4 at the Balewadi Sports Complex in Pune on July 13.

History repeats. And this time it has repeated itself in Manipur. India’s northeastern state is ablaze, and only four days back the house of Union minister R K Ranjan Singh was burnt to ashes in full view of the security forces and state police. More than 150 Kukis and Meitei have been killed in the month-long ethnic clashes and in firing by the security forces. However, oblivious to the enormity of the situation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is flying to USA on a “peace mission”, to work out a solution to end the bloody war that has been going on between Ukraine and Russia for well over one year.

During the past few weeks, Narendra Modi Government’s decisions and peace-promoting initiatives relating to the Manipur ethnic riots have only rekindled old controversies, instead of helping to defuse the volatile situation. Worse, most communities whether tribal or non tribal, now seem sceptical of the centre’s intentions and long term objectives in the troubled region.

It may be to the credit of the Indian National Congress and of Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao, who served as the country’s ninth prime minister from 1991 to 1996, for taking the initiative to pass the Constitution Amendment (73rd and 74th) Acts. The 73rd Amendment empowered state governments to take steps that would lead to formalisation of the Gram Panchayats and help them operate as units of self-governance. The 74th Amendment introduced a new part namely, Part IXA in the Constitution, which deals with the issues relating to municipalities.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP are reassessing their 2024 Lok Sabha poll strategy to perform a hat trick. As the Opposition parties try to build a united platform against the BJP, it has become necessary for BJP to begin negotiations with its erstwhile allies and find new partners.

In a country, where corruption is rampant, one question that is often asked: is the public grievances redress mechanism effective. India may claim to be the largest democracy in the world with widespread freedom to question the authority when they go wrong. In reality, does it work in true sense of the term or the authorities use it as a potent weapon to dodge the public to redress their grievances rather than solving them. The general impression is that in India public grievance mechanism is pretty bad and the voice of the people and their genuine grievances are hardly heard by the government.

He’s a political outsider running on a progressive platform who narrowly won a mayoral election against a well-connected, business-friendly, Republican-backed Democrat. His opponents are in hysterics. And now that he’s in office, he’ll have to face down a hostile political establishment, which will likely try to derail most of his proposed agenda for the city.

Deaths linked to heatwave conditions or exacerbated by it causing about 100 deaths within a span of few days in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar must be taken as wake-up call for India, for it requires urgently putting in place the heat action plan for health to save human lives, rather than denying by government as it has unfortunately happened in Uttar Pradesh, where the government reprimanded and even replaced the doctor who said that the patients died of heatstroke.

In the past too Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav had experimented with several types of coalitions, in 2017 aligning with Congress and in 2019 luring the BSP of Mayawati, but none of the coalitions to defeat the BJP worked. Once again he has floated the idea of a new nature of coalition, PDA (Pichade, Dalit and Alpasankhyak), just ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections to defeat the BJP led NDA in Uttar Pradesh.

Arguments, debates and surprises spun on Russia circumventing the fall out of US led western sanctions and hoping for a bounce back in the economy. About 37 countries have imposed sanctions on Russia since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.