Shobhit Mahajan; The Economic Times; December 17, 2022 At 1 am on December 5, scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US achieved a major breakthrough. For the first time they managed to squeeze out more energy from a nuclear fusion reaction than was pumped into it. Ignition,… Read More For Fusion Jam Tomorrow
NB: For any mass campaign to focus on love and harmony is a welcome change from the atmosphere of communal animus and the non-stop sneering which has become the hallmark of Indian politics under the Modi government. Thanks are due to everyone involved in the Bharat Jodo Yatra. DS The Bharat Jodo Yatra began on… Read More T. M. Krishna on Bharat Jodo Yatra
Patrick Wintour Taraneh Alidoosti, one of Iran’s most famous actors, has been detained by security forces in Tehran days after she criticised the state’s use of the death penalty against protesters. She had previously posted a picture of herself on her Instagram page in which she was not wearing the hijab and holding a piece… Read More Iranian actor Taraneh Alidoosti arrested after criticism of death penalty
Bethan McKernan in Jerusalem Late on Sunday night, like almost every other night in Jenin, the fighting started. The Israeli army said it entered the occupied West Bank city to arrest three suspected Palestinian terrorists and militants responded by throwing firebombs and opening fire. According to two members of her family, 16-year-old Jana Zakaran ventured up… Read More Fears of full-blown Israeli-Palestinian conflict grow after bloodiest year since 2005
Emine Saner It was when Mehret Biruk lost two hours of her life to Instagram that she knew the time had come to escape. What had she been looking at? She couldn’t even remember in the moments immediately afterwards. Instagram, she recalls thinking, was “winning the war on my attention”. The irony was that Biruk… Read More What it’s like to have a social media detox
Graeme Green Imagine the privilege of smelling a wonderful perfume that no one else alive on Earth has smelled before,” says the conservation photographer Eladio Fernandez. This year, Fernandez had that pleasure. After a challenging search in the cloud forests of northern Haiti, he located several Magnolia emarginata, a critically endangered tree with white flowers that hadn’t… Read More Lost and found: how a photographer sniffed out the magnolia species not seen for a century
A number of prominent journalists who have reported on Twitter and its new chief executive Elon Musk appeared to have been suspended or banned from the platform. The Twitter account for a rival social media company, Mastodon, where some Twitter users have migrated after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, also appeared to have been suspended. In a series… Read More The ‘free speech’ advocate suspends accounts of several journalists who had reported on Elon Musk
Over the decades, after much reflection and repair, from both within and outside the judiciary, those dark days have been seemingly left behind. But what worried us then has now re-emerged to torment us again. The present move — of attempting to undermine and discredit the judiciary, as seen in the comments — is part… Read More The attack on the last bastion: Justice A. P. Shah
First posted November 22, 2015 On November 6, 2015, I visited Naxalbari along with my old comrades, Rabindra Ray (Lalloo), who retired from the Delhi School of Sociology in 2013; and Achintya Barua, (Monju), proprietor of Wild Grass, a tourist resort at the wild life sanctuary in Kaziranga, Assam. Rabindra’s book, The Naxalites and their… Read More In Naxalbari, forty-eight years later
Bharat Bhushan Why did the vice-president (VP) and chairman of the Rajya Sabha, Jagdeep Dhankhar, criticise the Supreme Court in his inaugural speech to the Upper House of Parliament? He claimed that the undoing of the National Judicial Appointment Commission (NJAC) by the judiciary was a “severe compromise of parliamentary sovereignty” and a “disregard of… Read More Where is the confrontation with the judiciary possibly headed?
After the truth-shower 