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Digboi, Assam: Ahmedabad’s Anshul Patel hogged the limelight with a sizzling first round of nine-under 63 to lead by three shots at the 21st edition of the Indian Oil SERVO Masters Golf at the Digboi Golf Links here on Wednesday.

The Pandora Papers has unveiled the story of offshore companies created within Dubai’s corporate enclave casting fresh light on Dubai’s rise as one of the world’s financial capitals— and on the UAE’s role as a nexus for money laundering and other financial crimes.

China has edged well ahead of India in addressing Bangladesh’s core concerns and offering substantive overall assistance to the smaller country. Bangladesh has formally approached China to participate in its ambitious ‘Teesta River Comprehensive Management and Restoration project’ following India’s failure to implement an in-place water sharing agreement.

Sardar Basant Singh was barely 13 when Pakistanis attacked the border villages of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in September 1947. The invaders, who were led by the Pakistani army, captured several villages and towns. But QilaDarhal, Basant’s village near Nowshera town in Jammu region, held out. Basant still remembers the heroic resistance put up by about 50 villages, who kept the invaders at bay for 54 days – from September 4 to October 28—until Jammu and Kashmir acceded to the Indian Union and the Indian Army joined the battle. The feat has not many parallels in Indian history.

We have just seen last week as to how the blame game played by the NarendraModi led BJP and the ArvindKejriwal led AAP in the National Capital Territory Delhi did not help deal with pollution in the Yamuna river water, though their rules contribute 80 per cent of the pollution within 22 km stretch of the river. Blames were leveled even against other states – Haryana and Utter Pradesh – the river passes through. The same blame game is repeated again for severe air pollution now while the national capital is gasping for breath. Obviously, it will also fail to improve the air quality as we have seen in the case of Yamuna water pollution. We actually need concrete action, not the blame game by the ruling establishments to shift their responsibilities on others, the Supreme Court of India said.

For the first time, the Trinamool Congress, CPI(M)-led Left Front and Indian National Congress together protested against the Union ministry of home affairs’ arbitrary extension of the territorial jurisdiction of the Border Security Force through a notification on 11 October from 15 km to up to 50 km from the international border. The resolution was passed in the West Bengal Legislative Assembly under Rule 169 for legislative assemblies, with 112 Trinamool Congress MLAs voting for it and 63 BJP legislators against. The extension of the territorial jurisdiction of BSF is interference in the internal matters of the state, which will destroy the federal structure of the country, it stated.

So, there is now one more reason why you should be born a chaiwala’s son with a free pass to travel on all trains passing through the little railway station not far from where you rest your tired head every night. You, of course, can aspire to be Prime Minister. Now, there’s the added attraction of landing on an e-way in an IAF C-130 J Super Hercules aircraft!

If you can’t fight the enemy, join them. This is an adage that has found expression at different points of history and by different authors. This best describes the predicament of central banks when it comes to cryptocurrencies. One can only sympathise with them as the digital currency ecosystem is targeting to replace exactly the central banks. But central bankers around the world are reconciling themselves with the new reality and exploring the possibility of working together with the decentralised monetary system, the very antithesis of whatever today’s central banks are and what they want things to be like.

The McKinsey Co. report on the national wealth of the first ten countries of the world could not have come at a better time than the past Monday for the Chinese leader XiJinping. The long-awaited virtual summit between China and US was taking place between him and the US President Joe Biden and by that time China surpassed the USA in national wealth, defying all the earlier projections made by the World Bank, or Morgan Stanley which indicated a timeline of minimum 2035. By the end of 2020, China’s national wealth totalled $120 trillion as against $90 trillion of USA. The gap is quite wide.

Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has galvanised the rank and file of her party to take on BJP and make significant impact in the assembly polls. There is a realisation in Congress that the party may not get a good number of seats but it would gain in the number of votes in every constituency and ultimately prepare for Lok Sabha polls in 2024.