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The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank last week sparked a number of debates. Was SVB “too big to fail?” Was the Biden administration response a “bailout?” Are the libertarian-leaning tech CEOs hypocrites? Is this a sign that the Fed’s interest rate hikes should come to an end?

The grand old organization of Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) concluded its three- day 15th national conference successfully in Daltonganj in Jharkhand deciding to preserve communal harmony, unity in diversity and peace throughout the country. The conference also highlighted that it is the need of the hour to speak out the truth so that the nation’s composite social fabrics and constitutional values would remain intact through intensifying art and cultural activities of IPTA at district, state and national levels.

There is nothing mysterious about the reasons for the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank and the Signature Bank in the United States. There is also nothing mysterious about why the entire banking system of the capitalist world has come under a cloud: once some part of the system collapses, the other parts of it get saddled with “toxic” assets, which are nothing else but the liabilities of the collapsed part of the system, and hence become subject to a “domino effect”. The real issue is: how did US capitalism get into a situation where its banking system came under such severe strain? Since the collapse of these banks, especially of the SVB, is not an internal phenomenon but is reflective of a systemic contradiction, what exactly is this contradiction?

Barely thirteen months before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which together contribute 120 seats out of the total of 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the political campaigning and organizational activities are most manifest in the BJP camp while the Bihar Mahagathbandhan parties as also Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh are still not equally active.

What is ‘understanding’ an utterance and what is ‘misunderstanding’? The answer is obvious – if someone understands exactly the same as to what was uttered is ‘understanding’ and if someone derives any other meaning is ‘misunderstanding’. Congress MP Rahul Gandhi’s conviction for two years of imprisonment with a fine of Rs 15,000 is clearly a case of ‘misunderstanding’ his utterance which was in fact targeted against Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a public servant who love to be called himself Pradhan Sevak of the Country, but not understood as such by one complainant BJP MLA and former minister of Gujarat Purnesh Modi and Chief Judicial Magistrate of Surat H H Varma.

“The proletariat will win. Capitalism will be defeated. Death to Imperialism!” Read Shaheed Bhagat Singh, wearing a red scarf, from a telegram message that was to be sent to the Third International on the occasion of Lenin’s death anniversary in 1930.This gesture made by Bhagat Singh not only underlined the international unity of the communist movement but also highlighted the core of his ideology, around which he wanted to build a free India and a prosperous world.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is no longer a Member of Parliament. Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla took the decision to disqualify the Gandhi Family scion following his conviction in a case of criminal defamation, with two-year jail sentence. Less than two years of jail and he wouldn't have ended up in this mess. But, irony of irony, it was Rahul Gandhi who tore up an ordinance to amend the law drafted by the Manmohan Singh government. The disqualification came the day after a Surat court convicted Rahul Gandhi. Rahul Gandhi was given the option to "apologise", but he refused. The Congress had called the verdict "infirm, erroneous and unsustainable".

The petition moved jointly by 14 leading opposition parties to the Supreme Court seeking its intervention in the ‘misuse’ of central investigation agencies by the Narendra Modi government against the leaders of the non-BJP parties, has big political significance in the present phase of political turmoil in the country. The immediate provocation for this hurriedly drafted petition was the conviction of the Congress MP Rahul Gandhi by the Surat Court over a four year old defamation case, but it was the culmination of great discontent felt by all the non-BJP parties in the last four years of the Modi rule since the second consecutive BJP win in 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Later in the day, the announcement by the Lok Sabha secretariat about disqualification of Rahul Gandhi as a Lok Sabha member, has given a new dimension to the petition.

It’d been hanging over France’s retirement reform fight from the beginning — a reminder that, come hell or high water, President Emmanuel Macron intended to have his way.

In what can be termed a historic move, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against the Russian President, Vladimir Putin and the Russian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Maria Lvova-Belova. This is the first time that an arrest warrant against a head of the State of a permanent member of the United Nations (UN) Security Council has ever been issued, and only the third time that a serving president of a country has been the target of such an arrest warrant. The earlier cases were against Omar al-Bashir (Sudan) and Muammar Gaddafi (Libya).