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In this Issue:

• Earthquake in Afghanistan: When Customs Kill More Than the Quake | S N Tripathy
• Trump’s Tariffs have Exposed India’s Strategic Weaknesses | Arun Kumar
• The Spectre of Crisis in Moradabad | Arup Kumar Sen
• Disaster Management (Amendment) Act, 2025 – Disowning the Constitutional Duty | Rajan Kshirsagar
• For the state, Umar Khalid and others are worse than heinous criminals | Faraz Ahmad
• Devolution to Panchayats in the States: Experiences of Three Decades | Mahi Pal
• Dadabhai Naoroji at 200: The Grand Old Man Who Exposed an Empire’s Loot | Santhosh Mathew
• Regulating AI in Indian Social Science Research, Teaching and Publications: Balancing Innovation and Ethics | Adfer Rashid Shah
• The Dark Side of Meme Culture: Arjun Kapoor’s Trolling and the Game of Traction | Kaleem Ullah Fasihi
• Crossroads of Conflict: Chittagong and Rakhine Province in Turmoil | Manas Mukul Bandyopadhyay
• USSR: G. T. Myasnikov’s 1921 memo to the Central Committee | Jairus Banaji
• 1980 KGB Memo Regarding the Planning of a Demonstration in Memory of John Lennon

BOOKS

• Book Excerpt: The Himalayan Blunder that Began in the 1960s
• Review of The Lion of Naushera | M.R. Narayan Swamy

IMAGE & SOUND

• Cartoon: If Only We had Learned of Drainage from our Past, Our Cities Wont be Drowning Today | Sandeep Adhwaryu in the Times of India
• Photo: Workers at Beijing petrol refinery by Liu Heung Shing, (1980)
• Music: Electric Sanj by Ustad Noor Bakhsh from Balochistan
• Video: How to Survive Authoritarianism: Interview with Arundhati Roy
• Video: Constitution, democracy under attack in Kashmir – Interview with Comrade Mohammad Yousuf Tarigami

Editor’s Picks:

• In Rahul’s Call For ’Vote Adhikar’, an Echo of Mahatma Gandhi’s Struggle For Voting Rights of Indians
• An EPIC exclusion
• Irrational model
• Undemocratic: Urdu Orgs Condemn Deferment of Javed Akhtar Event After Islamic Groups’ Protests
• Banke Bihari corridor shows how urban planning bodies are being harnessed to drive religious tourism
• Suicides among Kerala’s public servants
• The Dubai of South America’: how the promise of riches from lithium mining turned to dust in Bolivia
• Critical Theory and Radical Psychoanalysis: Rethinking the Marcuse-Fromm Debate
• Ghana: The Victors and the Spoils
• When Scythe Met Stone:: The October Revolution and the Factory Committees
• Palestine recognition: the principle the EU has been stuck on for decades
• Global Call From Scientists to End the Crisis in Gaza
• Video of Speech by Natasa Pirc Musar, the President of Slovenia on Gaza
• L-theanine: Can a compound in tea lower anxiety and help you focus?

Books of Note:

• Polish Sexual Revolutions: Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain by Anna Dobrowolska (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2025 https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198962878.001.0001; Print ISBN: 9780198962885)
• Comrades and Comebacks: The Battle of the Left to Win the Indian Mind | Indian Political History, Left-Wing Ideologies, Freedom Struggle to 21st Century Politics by Saira Shah Halim (Penguin Books)

Source: MAINSTREAM