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If West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee does not leave any opportunity to settle political scores with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, nor does the Centre (BJP) with Banerjee. Last week, to show her annoyance, she opted out of the meeting to review the cyclone havoc in the state. In a rare violation of the protocol, Banerjee also kept the PM waiting for 30 minutes, met him briefly, and left even while the deliberations and damage assessment was on. The BJP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and some central ministers like Rajnath Singh criticized Mamata for playing petty politics.

New Delhi: Amit Panghal failed to defend his title as while Shiv Thapa lost his bid to regain the gold as the two Indians suffered identical 2-3 defeats in hard fought finals at the 2021 ASBC Asian Boxing Championships in Dubai on Monday.

Mythily Sivaraman, veteran Marxist leader, a champion of workers and women’s rights and a formidable name and popular political leader from Tamil Nadu, passed away in Chennai on Sunday. She was 84 and is survived by her husband and daughter.

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro faced calls to resign as mass protests swept more than 200 cities demanding his impeachment over the country’s coronavirus crisis.

All publicity is good publicity—so the old marketing slogan goes. Is that why Ramdev courts controversy by laughing at Covid-19 victims gasping for air on his Aastha channel? His attack on allopathic medicine as “stupid science” and false claims that “10,000 doctors have died” after two vaccine shots are recent examples. Ramdev courts controversies as it provides him free advertisements for himself and whatever he sells. Make no mistake, it is the Ramdev “brand” that sells his Patanjali products, from noodles to Ayurvedic medicines. That is what has made the Patanjali empire one of the biggest FMCG groups in the country.

It may sound ironic, but Bangladesh and China have profited substantially from the NDA Government’s cattle export ban introduced in mid 2014.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was absolutely right in his avowal that second wave of corona which consumed lakhs of innocent people happened because of Narendra Modi failing to perform his moral responsibilities.

The BJP’s opponents had easily outrun the saffron party in the last round of assembly elections, winning in three – West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu – of the four states. Even in the fourth, Assam, they performed well enough in terms of vote share if not seats with the opposition combine securing 43.5 per cent of the votes against the BJP-Asom Gana Parishad’s 44.4 per cent.

It remains a big mystery over the last seven years of the BJP rule as to why the government continues to defend an indefensible law, allowing retrospective tax demand on companies, enacted in 2012 by the previous United Progressive Alliance regime. The law was a brainchild of then union finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, who later became the President of India. Interestingly, several Congress stalwarts such as Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, P Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal, opposed the retrospective tax. Two years after BJP came to power with a massive mandate, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, known as an admirer of the late Pranab Mukherjee, himself told a foreign investors’ meet at Riyadh that retrospective taxation had been made a thing of the past.

New Delhi: Pooja Rani was the lone Indian woman pugilist to win the gold as she outpunched in-form Mavluda Movlonova to retain the title while her three other compatriots lost their final bouts at the ASBC Asian Boxing Championships in Dubai.