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The Wire April 29, 2019 By Yoshita Singh The world is seeing a “groundswell of intolerance” and hate-based violence against people of various faiths, and this “venom” is directed at anyone considered “the other”, the UN chief has said, warning that parts of the internet were becoming “hothouses of hate”. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ remarks have come in the wake of a series of attacks against mosques, synagogues and other places of worship in the recent past, including the Easter Sunday bombings targeting three churches in Sri Lanka that killed more than 250 people. A gunman armed with a semiautomatic rifle on Sunday entered a synagogue in Poway in California, some 40 kilometres north of San Diego, yelling anti-Semitic slurs and opened fire, killing one woman, and wounding the rabbi and two others. Six people, including a pastor, were killed in an attack on a church in Burkina Faso on Sunday. Last month, 50 worshippers were gunned down at two mosques in Ch

The Print  April 30, 2019 By Amrita Nayak Dutta India has overtaken Russia to be among the world’s top-four military spenders in 2018, according to a global think-tank, which has attributed the rise in defence expenditure to tensions with China and Pakistan. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) report stated that India’s defence spending rose by 3.1 per cent to $66.5 billion. The United States, China and Saudi Arabia were the top three defence spenders of 2018, followed by India and France. In 2017, India was at the fifth spot. Russia, which occupied the fourth position in 2017, has fallen out of the top five bracket for the first time in 12 years and is now sixth. Pakistan is on the 20 th  spot in the list of 40 countries, as per the SIPRI report. The top five countries accounted for 60 per cent of global military spending, the report said. The top 15 countries in the list spent $1,470 billion in 2018, and accounted for 81 per cent of the global mi

The Indian Express May 02, 2019 By Shubhajit Roy, Sowmiya Ashok MORE THAN a month after China placed a technical hold on the listing of Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is likely to discuss the issue again Wednesday when Beijing is likely to lift the hold, sources told  The Indian Express . Advertising Three UNSC members — US, UK and France — have been pursuing the case with China over the last two months, while New Delhi has also been engaging separately with Beijing. Azhar’s JeM was behind the Pulwama terrorist attack that killed 40 CRPF personnel in February. Sources said Beijing has come around in the last two months, and the man believed to be also responsible for the terrorist attacks in Pathankot in 2016 and the Indian Parliament in 2001 is likely to be designated a global terrorist. “The UNSC 1267 sanctions committee will be meeting on Wednesday, and Beijing is likely to lift its ob

Hindustan Times May 02, 2019 By Pradip Kumar Maitra Maoist rebels triggered an improvised explosive device (IED) on Wednesday, blowing up a vehicle carrying crack C-60 commandos in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district, killing 15 of them and the driver in the deadliest attack on security forces in five years in the state. The attack was believed to be in reprisal for the killing of 40 rebels by C-60 troopers a year ago. Rebels suspected to be members of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), or CPI (Maoist), detonated the device on Dadapur road near the village of Jambhurkheda in Gadchiroli, some 250 kilometres from Nagpur, bordering Chhattisgarh. The explosion, condemned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress president Rahul Gandhi amid ongoing general elections, took place at about 11.30 pm on Maharashtra Day, almost 10 hours after Maoists allegedly torched three dozen vehicles engaged in road widening and construction work in Gadchiroli’s Kurkheda area. After burnin

Hindustan Times May 01, 2019 By Prasun Sonwalkar Indians will account for a large number of those who pass away but whose digital remains on Facebook will continue in perpetuity, raising questions of ethics and archive history, a new study at the University of Oxford says. The analysis by academics from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) predicts the dead may outnumber the living on Facebook within 50 years, a trend that will have grave implications for how digital heritage is treated in the future. The analysis predicts that based on 2018 user levels, at least 1.4 billion members will die before 2100. In this scenario, the dead could outnumber the living by 2070. If the world’s largest social network continues to expand at current rates, however, the number of deceased users could reach as high as 4.9 billion before the end of the century. The analysis titled ‘Are the dead taking over Facebook?’ published in journal ‘Big Data & Society’ sets up two potential extreme

Hindustan Times May 01, 2019 By  Shishir Gupta A day before the February 26 air strike by India on a Jaish-e-Mohammed training facility in Balakot in Pakistan, the country’s defence ministry moved the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) for acquisition of two more PHALCON airborne warning and control systems (AWACS) aircraft from Israel to match Pakistan’s growing capabilities, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal is worth around $ 2 billion, with the radar mounted on Russian platform. With the air strike, and the dogfight between Indian and Pakistani jets the day after, highlighting the importance of aerial supremacy, the Indian Air Force plans to approach the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) after the new government takes over in late May, for the purchase of 21 upgraded MiG-29 air defence fighters from Russia to arrest the growing shortfall in fighter squadrons. This deal is expected to be worth around ₹4,500 crore. Russia has completely switched to Su-3

Firstpost, May 01, 2019  By Vivian Fernandes The Gujarat government should broker a settlement between PepsiCo and the farmers who have been sued by the food and beverages company for allegedly violating its intellectual property rights (IPR) in a registered potato variety, and not make it a nationalist versus multinational issue. This is because, if PepsiCo cannot enforce its IPR, Indian farmers will lose out in the long run. At the same time, it might be difficult for the company to prove that the farmers it has sued have committed illegality. Seeking damages of Rs 1 cr from each of them is also bad optics. According to news reports, Gujarat’s Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel has announced that the state government would intervene in the suit on behalf of the farmers. This might help the government assert its “swadeshi’ credentials and blunt the criticism it has faced from Congress leader Ahmed Patel, who has reportedly said the government must not keep “its eyes s

 The Guardian  April 29, 2019 Protests against climate change should be extended to the other greatest threat facing humanity, according to England’s chief medical officer, who says an Extinction Rebellion-style campaign is needed to save people from antibiotics becoming ineffective in the face of overuse and a lack of regulation. The threat of antibiotic resistance is as great as that from climate change, said Dame Sally Davies, and should be given as much attention from politicians and the public. “It would be nice if activists recognised the importance of this,” she said. “This is happening slowly and people adjust to where we are, but this is the equivalent [danger] to extreme weather.” Davies said efforts to combat the problem of common illnesses becoming untreatable by antibiotic medicines should be coordinated at a worldwide level in a similar way as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body of scientists set up in 1988 to tackle global warming.

Scroll.in, May 01, 2019 United Nations human rights experts on Tuesday called on the Indian government to immediately release Delhi University professor GN Saibaba, who is lodged in a jail in Maharashtra on charges of links with Maoists. The wheelchair-bound academic was arrested in May 2014, after the police in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, claimed he had links with Maoists. He was sentenced to life in prison in March 2017 and has been in the Nagpur Central Jail since. Saibaba has been placed in solitary confinement and has severe health problems, said the UN human rights experts in a press release. “Dr Saibaba’s health problems require immediate and sustained medical attention and are reaching a point of being life-threatening,” they added. The experts include special rapporteurs Catalina Devandas, Michael Forst, Dainius Pūras, Nils Melzer and Agnès Callamard. The officials said that Saibaba has been detained in “inadequate conditions of so-called ‘anda cells’, with

First Post, May 01, 2019 US sanctions on Iran could boost oil prices and inflation to a point that hurts the common person in India, the country’s ambassador to the United States said on Tuesday, after the Donald Trump administration said it would end waivers for Iran’s oil buyers. President Donald Trump’s efforts to sink Iran’s oil exports to zero will have a direct impact on India, the largest buyer of the oil after China, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, the ambassador, said at a Carnegie Endowment event. “We are apprehensive that that impact can translate into inflation, (and) higher oil prices,” that could affect the common person in India, Shringla said. Trump’s sanctions on Iran are intended to curb its nuclear and ballistic missile programme and reduce its influence in Syria, Yemen and other countries in the Middle East.Many of India’s oil refineries are calibrated to process crude oil from Iran and “it is not possible to suddenly convert those refineries (to run )some other