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The El Salvador government headed by its colorful president Nayib Bukele adopted bitcoin as the legal tender with effect from 7 September 2021. At the UN General Assembly later that month, Bukele stood at the podium and took a selfie. Turning to the audience he said, “A couple of images on Instagram have a greater impact than any speech in this assembly.”

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The return of Kodiyeri Balakrishnan as the secretary of the Kerala CPI(M) is the best thing that has happened to the party, which is plagued by a plethora of problems.

At current value, the students of the world would lose their lifetime earning to the tune of $17 trillion, which far exceeds the $10 trillion estimated a year ago, indicating that the global education crisis due to closure of schools during the COVID-19 pandemic is far worse than expected.

Will the Congress Party perish as West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and others believe? Even in the past, many had predicted the end of Congress, but it had survived many onslaughts. The latest was in 1998 when Sonia Gandhi emerged Sphinx-like to revive it and rule from 2004- 2014. The 2014 Lok Sabha results gave the Congress 12 crore votes, though seat-wise, it got only 52. Even in its second successive defeat in 2019, the party retained a solid block of 20 percent votes. The Gandhi family is complacent, believing that the voters will get disenchanted with Narendra Modi sooner than later and return to the Grand Old Party. No doubt they live in a fool’s paradise as there is an urgent need to revive the party. Undoubtedly, the Congress Party faces a leadership crisis and challenges from many sides.

Reds is a grand-scale historical drama based around the life and career of John Reed, a North American journalist who travelled to Russia to chronicle the Revolution. Based on his firsthand observations, Reed wrote Ten Days That Shook the World, his 1919 classic account of the events of the Revolution which took place two years prior.

On December 1, the Special National Investigation Agency (NIA) Court in Mumbai rejected the plea of Anand Teltumbde, who was seeking temporary bail of 15 days to meet his mother and family after the recent death of his brother Milind Teltumbde in an alleged encounter with the security forces. Anand Teltumbde is an accused in the Bhima Koregoan violence and conspiracy case and is currently lodged in Toloja jail as an undertrial prisoner.

The struggle of the civilian population of Myanmar against the ruling military junta has reached a new phase following the conviction of the leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) Aung San Suu Kyi to four year jail term which was later cut to half. This first verdict after the coup organised by the army generals on February 1 this year against the NLD government, signals the stiffening of the attitude of the opposition against the ruling clique and the little possibility of any dialogue in the immediate future between the military and the forces of opposition.

A number of Tamil filmmaker are telling Dalit stories anew these days, what has changed here is the perpetrator –not the traditional upper caste landlord –it is the state. The state is the people’s opponent, using a colonial, outdated instrument of oppression, the police.

In the 1965 India-Pakistan war, the Indian army faced lots of problems and serious setbacks because of lightening raids by Hurs. It is a sect of Sufis headed by Pir Pagara who has good numbers of adherents in the Sindh province. The Pakistan Army used these irregular but ferocious fighters to good effect and the Indian side saw the capture of several posts in Rajasthan area. The tactics used by the Pak side were very similar to what they have done in the past too. Some professional soldiers of the Pak Army leading irregulars as they did in 1947-48 operations in Jammu and Kashmir.

Even while struggling economically during the Covid 19 pandemic, Bangladesh has eclipsed India in terms of per capita GDP earnings, achieving a major milestone. Its growth story does not end here: IMF and other agencies estimate that it will stay ahead of India for the next five years or so. The reason: despite a decline, its GDP growth was higher than in other countries in South Asia during the pandemic and the trend would continue in the medium term barring unforeseeable eventualities.