Two specialists from the Tata Memorial Cancer Institute, Bombay, Dr. Paymaster and Dr. Jussawalla, arrived in the City [Madras] this morning [Jan. 21] and examined the Chief Minister, Mr. C.N. Annadurai, who has been admitted in the Cancer Institute, Adyar. The specialists studied the X-ray pictures of Mr. Annadurai and …
Read More »Monthly Archives: January 2019
‘Please read my story’
Contrary to many of the stories that appeared about him after his brutal death in 2011, Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad had always played it safe. A journalist at the Asia Times , Shahzad wrote about jihadi groups, and was among the few who had met Osama bin Laden, Mullah …
Read More »Death by design
In situations involving humans and animals, Murphy’s law takes a strong hold: if things can go wrong, they most likely will. Jallikattu may have drawn the attention of animal rights activists for the innumerable accounts of cruelty to bulls, but the deaths fall mostly on the human side of the …
Read More »Summit 2.0
Even though there was little progress in achieving the goals set in the historic meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un of North Korea in June 2018, the announcement of a second summit next month is a step in the right direction. The fact that Pyongyang has …
Read More »Justice delayed is markets stymied
Since the 1991 economic reforms, India has improved tremendously in almost all economic indicators, and is now one of the fastest growing nations in the world. Various economic policies of the current government have enabled the economy to move faster than ever before. These include tax reforms leading to the …
Read More »The fault lines of diplomatic recrimination
One of the world’s largest telecom companies, Huawei, is at war with a few powerful western nations led by the United States. This is not a new spat. The conflict, which has been simmering for quite a few years, reached its crescendo on December 1, 2018 with the detention and …
Read More »Why EVMs must go
The recent Assembly elections — the last major polling exercise before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls — were not devoid of Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) malfunctions. Though the discourse at present makes no distinction between a ‘malfunction’ (which suggests a technical defect) and ‘tampering’ (manipulation aimed at fraud), there were …
Read More »The ambiguity of reservations for the poor
The 103rd Constitution Amendment Act introducing special measures and reservations for ‘economically weaker sections’ (EWS) has been perceived as being obviously unconstitutional. This article is sceptical of such a reading and takes the view that a constitutional challenge to the amendment will take us into unclear constitutional territories. The strongest …
Read More »Novel hope for stem cell approach to treat diabetes
By tweaking the recipe for coaxing human stem cells into insulin-secreting beta cells, researchers have found that the resulting cells are more responsive to fluctuating glucose levels in the blood. The study, published in the journal Stem Cell Reports , showed that transplanted cells produced insulin at levels that effectively …
Read More »Climate ‘time bomb’ for groundwater is ticking
Future generations face an environmental “time bomb” as the world’s groundwater systems take decades to respond to the present day impact of climate change, scientists warned on Monday. Groundwater is the largest useable source of freshwater on the planet and more than two billion people rely on it to drink …
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