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People on both sides of the border were relieved. The four-day-long military engagement between India and Pakistan came to a close on the late afternoon of May 10. Despite this, gunshots were heard late in the night. But later, the DGMOs of both countries confirmed that the ceasefire has held and war clouds have receded for now.

Prime Minister Modi’s rightwing Hindu nationalist party, guided by its moral compass, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has limited time to wrest Pakistan Occupied Kashmir from Pakistan, only a billion years! A supercomputer simulation by researchers at Japan’s Tohoku University came to the conclusion that life on earth will last for only a billion more years! Is that time enough for the RSS/BJP to snatch PoK from Pakistan?

The Supreme Court Bench comprising of Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice Mahadevan had earlier turned down the request of the Government of India to send the case relating to assent to bills by governors and president to a larger Constitution Bench on the ground that it involved ‘substantial questions of law’. Nevertheless, the Bench went ahead and announced its final verdict imposing deadline on governors and president on assent on bills.

Portugal, a very important member of the European Union with a strong economy, is going for national elections next Sunday, May 18 to elect its 230 member Parliament. The 2025 elections will be the third one in the last three years showing the fragility of the coalition governments. No single political party is in a position to get majority in Parliament on its own.

The new Covid death data, released recently by the government, reveals everything that confirms what was feared at the time of the pandemic – a massive mismanagement on the part of the government. The new data from the Civil Registration System (CRS), published on May 7, show that about 21 lakh more deaths were registered in 2021, the year of the deadly Delta wave of Covid-19, compared to 2020. This number is about six times the official Covid 2019 death figure. In 2021, the data given by the union government was 3.32 lakh.

Soon after organizing a 90 day truce last week end at Geneva through three day intensive talks between top officials of the United States and China, President Donald Trump is on a three nation tour covering Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE to pursue his deal making focusing on both trade and security. Simultaneously, the Chinese President Xi Jinping is wooing the Latin American countries to support him in his bid to restore the rule based international order on trade and tariffs.

Sweet and short: that aptly describes Chief Justice Sanjeev Khanna’s stewardship of the Supreme Court. In a time when judicial personalities often become larger than the institution, Justice Khanna offered a quiet, yet powerful contrast. His tenure followed that of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud, and together, the two presented an almost poetic inversion. While Chandrachud assumed office with an imposing reputation, he departed with much of it questioned; Khanna, on the other hand, began with modest public recognition but left behind a reputation both dignified and deeply respected. Chandrachud made his presence felt in speeches and interviews, his thoughts often aired in public forums beyond the courtroom, whereas Justice Khanna let his verdicts speak—and they did, resoundingly. Where one chased headlines, the other created them through the sheer weight of judicial reasoning, not personality.

The Indian Air Force is drawing kudos from all flying quarters except from fly-by-night operators in the Pakistani media and Pakistani intelligentsia along with retired Pakistani diplomats and Pakistani generals, for laying waste nine Pakistan Air bases and downing hundreds of Turkiye drones, in the "4-Day War" between the two nuclear armed neighbours, which Pakistan never fails to mention in any of its references to India, whether it is to the USA or to China or Turkiye, two countries which are "true friends" of Pakistan.

At a time when RSS-BJP clan has been politically opposing everything foreign in the name of Hindutva nationalism, designating a new date by PM Narendra Modi led government for celebrating Ayurveda Day on 23 September in the Gregorian Calendar in place of celebrating it traditionally on Dhanteras, the day of appearance of the physician of gods Dhanvantari as per Hindu Calendar, it clearly signals a shift in Hindutva politics, exposing the ideological contradictions within RSS-BJP clan, and perhaps the drifting apart of the RSS and BJP leaderships.

The ILO Convention On Domestic Workers (C189) was adopted in 2011 with India supporting it. Over a decade later, India continues to debate ratifying the convention despite being the largest employer of domestic workers across the world. Estimates vary that there are as many as between twenty-five and eighty million domestic workers in India. The main reason for non-ratification, as cited by the government of India, is that our existing legal framework does not provide the protections required under C189, particularly regarding the equal treatment of domestic workers with other workers in the country.