Editorials

The U.S. ratchets up the trade warwith China, but to what end? The rules-based world order for international trade appears to be in for a rougher ride yet after the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced this week that it would be slapping $200-billion worth of Chinese exports with …

As the job market is tight for those with PhDs in science,it is important that they develop other skill sets The number of PhD graduates has proliferated over the decades — while there were only a dozen doctorates till 1920 in India (the first was awarded in 1904), there were …

Kerala has a unique opportunity to put in place climate-resilient water management The recent floods in Kerala saw heroic rescues from raging rivers swollen by unprecedented rains — and the opening of shutters of major dams. There were allegations of ‘human blunders’ while the government said it could have done …

A recap of the Saibaba case shows just how urgently the UAPA needs to be read down In the 1950s, the U.S. was gripped by an anti-communist hysteria that is now known as “McCarthyism”, after Senator Joseph McCarthy, its chief propagandist. McCarthyism was characterised by blacklists and harassment, investigations and …

The debate on data localisation must not be reduced to a good-bad binary For long, Internet activists considered the Internet as being beyond law, politics and governments. J.P. Barlow made the famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. It was fine when this phenomenon was just shaping up and …

In a letter to the ‘Times’ Sir A.H. Fraser says: He and other members of theIndo-British Association  do not agree wholly with the unfavourable views on the reform scheme expressed by some speakers at a recent meeting of the Association. He welcomes the general principles and tendencies of the Report …

At a solemn conclave convened on Friday [September 13] of the Mahamandal Council and other prominent orthodox leaders of Benares including pundit authorities presided over by the Maharajah Darbhanga, the general President of the Mahamandal, it was decided, first, to inform the supreme Government that the proposed Bill of Mr. …

How an agitation against price rise cost the protesters Journalists have the best seats in the political theatre. This also means that we have to simply hear whatever is being said, whether spectacularly boring or even vitriolic. But there are good days when, for instance, an ironical drama unfolds in …

The Congress is ceding ideological ground to the BJP by increasingly adopting ‘passive Hindutva’ Discussing the current contest between opposing ideas of India, Malini Parthasarathy hit the nail on the head when she wrote, “Neither the Congress nor other opposition parties acknowledge emphatically that what is really unfolding in the …

We should accept Pluto as a dwarf planet, though an exceptional one After years of arguing over whether Pluto is a planet, in 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to remove Pluto’s planetary status. Now some researchers are challenging this decision, citing the manner in which scientific tradition has …