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A concerted attempt to make laws relating to content of court as a tyrannical tool to stonewall criticism of judicial decisions and the judges who deliver those decisions has not gone unnoticed. Most disturbingly, these efforts have coincided with a progressive degradation in the quality of court decisions as well as the goings on both within and outside the hallowed precincts of our judicial institutions.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has for some months been bringing out a report that monitors the impact of the pandemic on the world economy, especially the labour-hours lost because of the lockdown and their ramifications. The statistics it provides are not compilations of official data from different countries; they are based on the ILO’s own estimates made with whatever information is available from these countries. One cannot say how accurate the figures are, but they are the only figures we have, and given the meticulousness with which they are estimated, and their approximate compatibility with other data we have, we can form judgements on their basis.

The 2020 assembly election in Bihar has taken an interesting turn. The competition between top national and regional parties, the rift within existing alliances, the discourse around jobs, and most importantly, the focus on Nitish Kumar’s record have made the polls complex. Indeed, it is difficult to predict which key electoral issue is going to influence voters most deeply.

The plan has been executed with utmost precision. No amount of explanation is going to satisfy the inquisitive labour leaders of the rational for suspending the former Labour Party chief Jeremy Corbyn. Most of the independent observers and experts feel that this has been a deliberately designed to humiliate the left wingers in the Labour Party.

New Delhi: Some of the World's best long distance runners will be seen in action in the $233,270 prize money Airtel Delhi Half Marathon (ADHM) to be held in the national capital on 29th November.

The NaMo fan club may continue to sing, aided and abetted by the top brass, the paeans of praise for handling the corona pandemic by his government but paeans cannot minimize or even help him to rescue the social fabric or economic ability from the devastation his lock down caused. He had no indication of severity of the pandemic affecting India as much as it had affected lands and their people in cold weather zones above the latitude of tropics of cancer. Yet he went in for severe remedy that was to become the lethal treatment. It is hard to believe that India’s Prime Minister did not or could not assess the fatal consequences of his measure to fight the infectious pandemics to the social fabric or the economic strength of India.

LUCKNOW: The council polls for 10 seats from Uttar Pradesh exposed understands between BSP and BJP. For long, there were rumours about BSP leader Mayawati’s links with the BJP but the approaching by polls have brought about the understanding into open. Shocked by Samajwadi Party’s move to cause revolt in her party to defeat her candidate, BSP supremo announced that her party would support BJP in MLC polls in future.

The fear of losing the electoral battle has turned the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi fraught and in his desperation to retrieve the ground he had forgotten his political stature and aura and has stooped low to the level of using unpleasant jibes against the young RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav. The trends in the first phase of assembly poll in Bihar held on October 28, have unnerved the BJP leadership. Prime Minister is resorting to attacks on the opposition alliance, leader Tejashwi mentioning issues which have nothing to do with the burning issues of the day.

While analysing the features of fascism in the Italian context, Antonio Gramsci had pointed out that grounds were prepared even before the dominating forces unveiled themselves. The various democratic structures were slowly taken over. Uniformity was imposed on culture replacing its multiplicity. Efforts were made to influence the psyche of people and either win them over or do away with opposing sections. To get rid of any divergence, there were attempts made to directly eliminate them taking extreme positions or slowly usurp the hegemony manoeuvring all the way.

Ankhi Das, whose claim to fame has been publicly supporting Prime Minister Narendra Modi while steering public policy at the social media behemoth, Facebook, unproblematically asserting that “likes can get you votes” on May 17, 2014 (a day after Modi-led NDA won the Lok Sabha elections), — has quit her job. Her stepping down has come in the wake of strong questioning from the parliamentary panel about Facebook’s role in promoting hate speech peddled by ruling party apparatchiks, and after her interventions in favour of BJP legislators were exposed by international publications such as Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal, creating massive global backlash against Facebook’s unscrupulous methods putting profit above ethics.