The collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago was followed by the rise of two unnoticed but related phenomena: first, the West pushed the liberalization agenda on nations that had hitherto resisted integration with its market economy; second, the United States and Europe rapidly demolished the welfare state they had erected after World War II.&n
Over the past decade, the South China Sea has become one of the most volatile flashpoints in East Asia. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan each assert sovereignty over part or all of the sea, and these overlapping claims have led to diplomatic and even military standoffs in recent years. Because the sea hosts numerous isla
America’s children were depressed. They needed antidepressants. It was GlaxoSmithKline to the rescue. Paxil was never approved for use by anyone under 18, but GlaxoSmithKline had 1,900 sales reps visiting doctor’s offices, and pushing the drug for kids. The international pharmaceutical giant took top-prescribing psychiatrists to pr
It was big news when court documents were unsealed revealing a whistleblower lawsuit accusing drug giant Merck of fraud and lying about the true efficacy of its mumps vaccine. Just about every media, large and small, picked it up and the world was abuzz about the hundreds of millions of dollars the lawsuit claimed Merck had defrauded from the US go
Since reassuming his post as Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin has lost no minute in addressing the most urgent geopolitical threats to Russia internationally. Not surprisingly, at the center of his agenda is the explosive situation in the Middle East, above all Syria. Here Putin is engaging every imaginable means of preventing a further det
All Asians are children of the Himalayas – children born around a civilization that encompasses the mighty rivers of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Shanghai, and Mekong, etc, all supplied by the mighty mountains. There are two daughters: one on the west, mother India, and one on the east, the middle kingdom China. Both these civilizations have had
This is a story of two letters and two Britains. The first letter was written by Sebastian Coe, the former athlete who chairs the London Olympics Organising Committee. He is now called Lord Coe. In the New Statesman of 21 June, I reported an urgent appeal to Coe by the Vietnam Women’s Union that he and his IOC colleagues reconsider their deci
The Russian government has finally caught on that its political opposition is being financed by the US taxpayer-funded National Endowment for Democracy and other CIA/State Department fronts in an attempt to subvert the Russian government and install an American puppet state in the geographically largest country on earth, the one country with a nucl
As it becomes increasingly clear that last week's “surge” by NATO-backed so-called “Free Syrian Army” terrorists was a failed psychological operation, coordinated with meticulously timed assassinations the day of the UN Security Council vote designed to stampede the Syrian government out of power, the FSA's foreign sponsors
In March 2011, Japan’s east coast was hit by the largest earthquake ever recorded. The earthquake was accompanied by a monster tsunami. What followed was devastation over a large swath of land, the death of thousands, and the destruction of a part of the region’s physical infrastructure. Since then, Japan has begun to recover, but
For Hindus the Vedic Agama connection is sacred because the Veda is the inspired vision of the Rishis, they are eternal and not of human origin (apaurusheya), and the Agamas represent the continuation of that vision in ritual, murtis, temples, sacred texts. This has been the historic practice of Hindus and is ongoing in the subcontinent. The Agama
The decision to name Pranab Mukherjee as the Congress Party’s presidential candidate was taken after much deliberation. There were umpteen indications that neither Washington, nor London, nor the international bankers, cared much for Mukherjee as the Finance Minister. They needed someone else. Someone like Deputy Chairman of Pl
At the third meeting of the so-called Friends of Syria in Paris on July 6, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proved once again that diplomacy is to the United States what refined dining etiquette is to a jackal. The third such meeting, earlier versions were held in “post-revolution” Tunisia and in Turkey, a NATO member with military
The United States and its European NATO allies along with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and of course Israel, are now in a state of undeclared war against Syria, as part of their ultimate goal of containing Iran. That is, until they gather more coalition partners to take on Russia and China. The United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has unsubtly
The familiar menace of US war drums have resumed at a fevered pitch, as Iran finds itself once again firmly within the Pentagon’s cross hairs. According to multiple reports, the US is currently in the midst of a massive military build-up in the Persian Gulf on a scale not seen in the region since prior to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.&nb
The purpose of this paper is to identify the structural faultlines in the report on Jammu and Kashmir that the Group of Interlocutors has submitted to the Government of India. Written in carefully chosen words, the report has a hidden agenda. A detailed exposition of the recommendations envisaged by the report as well as its hidden agenda will be t
For the Government and people of Nepal, the issue of over 100,000 Bhutanese refugees has become and remains a matter of great concern. For the Government of Nepal, the need to make all arrangements for the refugees for so many years now, poses a serious challenge. We have taken up the matter with concerned governments and multilateral agencies for
In the early 1990s, several thousands of Bhutanese residents in southern Bhutan were ethnically cleansed by the authorities under the provisions of the amended Citizenship Act of 1985, because they followed the Hindu religion and culture, and had mixed Himalayan ethnicity, with one parent of Nepali origin. Nepal, like India, shares common Hindu and
The stories of our ancestors, the Nepali-speaking predominantly Hindu people, can be remembered from as early as 1624 AD. Since then at least, we have lived in Bhutan as Gorkhas; then in 1958 we were officially designated as Lhotshampas, Bhutanese citizens living in the southern part of the country. Bhutan’s first organized census
An issue pertaining to the crisis of Bhutanese refugees in Nepal that is even less known to the outside world concerns the persecution of the Sharchokpa tribe, who are also Buddhists. The Sharchokpa tribe inhabits eastern Bhutan, and the members are predominantly followers of the Nyingmapa tradition of Mahayana Buddhism. The Sharchokpa believe that
According to combined public reports, 14-16 of the largest “universal banks” in the world are now under investigation by US and European authorities for rigging the LIBOR interest rates to their profit and the world's economies’ loss. These are Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC, RBS, Credit Suisse, UBS, Deutschebank, Rabobank, Dexiabank, Cit
According to the Hindu panchang, the month of sawan which along with bhadon comprises India’s monsoon season, began on July 4; rains drenched this parched city on July 5. Was the monsoon on time, or ‘delayed’ as the Met Office kept lamenting? The Union Ministry of Agriculture was clueless how to reassure farmers who sowed the khar
The people of the world should be very thankful to Syria. For in this agonizing time, the conflict-torn country is revealing an important truth. From the bloodshed, ravages and mayhem that the Syrian people are enduring, the world is empowered to see with crystal clarity a crucial fact - the fact of who, and what, is the real cause of violence. And
The current unrest in Balochistan centers around forced disappearances, kidnappings, targeted killings, assassinations and terrorism. However, these are merely the tactics of a much broader, more geopolitically complex war in which the United States and its Western allies are engaged. Though seemingly insignificant against the backdrop of all
Birds and bees are something most of us take for granted as part of nature. The expression “teaching about the birds and the bees” to explain the process of human reproduction to young people is not an accidental expression. Bees and birds contribute to the essence of life on our planet. A study by the US Department of Agriculture estim
What is common between a Turkish wheat farmer in Central Anatolia who applies 100 kg per hectare of zinc sulphate (a branded and very expensive fertilizer carrying the “micronutrient” zinc) to “correct” the “acute” zinc deficiency in his soil, and a Haryanvi wheat farmer who applies 100 kg of diammonium phosphoru
George Santayana wisely said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Oblivious to history and its lessons, America and its Western allies are repeating their actions of the 1950’s – that of imposing oil embargo on Iran. The American-led alliance has forgotten the past. Iran remembers. When under the
What if Syrian President Bashar al Assad really goes? There is an assumption in the West that the way to win a strategic victory over Iran and improve the human rights situation inside Syria is to remove the Syrian leader. It is true that Iran's prospects of keeping Syria as its own Mediterranean outpost are probably linked with the survivability o
Julian Assange: I'm sure most Americans are mighty proud of the fact that Julian Assange is so frightened of falling into the custody of the United States that he had to seek sanctuary in the embassy of Ecuador, a tiny and poor Third World country, without any way of knowing how it would turn out. He might be forced to be there for years. “Th
As some 500,000 Haitians still live in displaced camps, five star hotels are being built amid shanty towns. As part of the country's “Reconstruction”, The Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund recently invested $2 million in the Royal Oasis Hotel, a deluxe structure to be built in a poverty-stricken metropolitan area “filled with displaced-pers
Some decades ago a term ‘democide’ was coined. In Latin, ‘cide’ means killing. The ‘cide’ suffix was added to the prefix ‘demo’ as in democracy. Thus democide came to mean death by the people’s elected government. Then some people came up with Kilo, Mega and Giga democide. A kilo-democidist was
Over the past week, the latest phase of US-led sanctions against Iran has dominated the media. For months, the United States has pressured countries to curtail their imports of Iranian crude oil and is now threatening to penalize banks that participate in oil deals with Iran. In keeping with the US sanctions campaign, the European Union on July 1 i
With her 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson got DDT and other synthetic pesticides banned and saved bird life. Today it is humans who are directly threatened by technologies designed to extract the maximum profit at the lowest private cost and the maximum social cost from natural resources. Once abundant clean water has become a scarce resourc
Before, if ever, Narendra Modi becomes India’s prime minister, he will have to break the stranglehold of the Muslim votebank on Indian politics. His sadbhavna yatras (goodwill missions) to win the confidence of Muslims are good as far as they go. However, even hundreds of such yatras will not take him even an inch closer to the throne of Delh
By definition, Hinduism is Vedic Agamic. The Vedic Rishis spoke of the river Sindhu, and it is best to retain the word ‘Hindu’ (the Persians having changed the word slightly) so that the historically grounded origins of Hinduism are preserved and do not get lost in a refined Vedantism. Two further questions need to be addressed: first i
Rev Annett is coming from his experience with the torture, rape, murder and genocide of aboriginal children in Canada, where as many as 50,000 kids never came out of the church-run residential schools alive. A lot of counseling that is done with traumatized survivors of abuse (which in many cases needs to be re-defined as t
By way of an introduction: Why Do We Tolerate the Destruction of Children, and Those Who Are Responsible? I wrote The Forgiveness Fallacy because my life has reached an impasse, and a crisis. Like the proverbial Job, no human answers have satisfied my grieving heart and soul – my simple “why?” All of my advocacy, “care givin
With Wednesday’s announcement of the latest findings in the search for the Higgs Boson, the elusive particle is on everyone’s mind, not only those who read Science, but newspapers as well. This kind of “fame” is rather rare, even for important discoveries. The Higgs Boson has been called, or perhaps miscalled, the “GOD
Nepal needs healers, people of moral courage to make Nepal safe. She needs leaders with common sense and decency and a commitment to the Nepalese people. Like other South Asian nations, she is resource rich, but her people are poor. Proximity to India and its ruling class keeps Nepali leaders away from their own people. India’s poor live in f
In a traditional cowboy movie, we know what to do: we look for the guy wearing the white hat to be sure who to cheer, and for the one wearing the black hat to know who deserves to die, preferably gruesomely, before the credits roll. If Hollywood learned early to play on these most tribal of emotions, do we doubt that Washington’s political sc
The harsh truth of the American economy has forced Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz to admit that conventional wisdom about ‘trickle-down economics’ is a fraud, and that a country without a viable middle-class is teetering at the edge of a precipice. This means that every nation must tax the rich in proportion to the wealth they cream off
Circulating over the web are many nauseatingly gruesome videos of cows in India being trucked to slaughter, and many revolting grisly videos of their slaughter for their meat. Their meat is commonly called “beef” and this essay raises questions of the ‘what’ and ‘where’ in India is “beef”. The opening
For a country all too familiar with military takeovers under one pretext or another, it was enough to set alarm bells ringing: Television anchorman Farrukh Pitafi reflected the exasperation of many when he tweeted: “Bhai, takeover kar lo” (“You might as well take over”). On June 19, an already stumbling Pakistan was thrown i