Death and perfidy cast their dark shadow over the week in review. Terrorists gunned down 26 tourists in Jammu and Kashmir’s idyllic Pahalgam, and injured several more. In a move designed to inflame communal passions in India’s already febrile polity, the terrorists first checked if their victims were Muslims or not, before shooting them dead.
TK ARUN What matters in a country’s international commercial transactions is the current account balance, not trade surpluses or deficits with individual countries. Tempers are running high in sections of the media over the rise in India’s trade deficit with…
The week in review was dominated by US president Donald Trump, as every week has been since his inauguration on January 20.
The Google Tax was slated to die, but Donald Trump has removed the rationale for its dignified death. Now, removal of the digital tax is achieved by US bullying, by means of the tariff threat.
It is welcome that a Supreme Court bench comprising Justice BR Gavai and Justice AG Masih have stayed the order of Justice Ram Manohar Narayan Mishra of the Allahabad High Court that had downgraded the criminal offence of attempt to rape determined by a lower court to a lesser charge of assault or use of criminal force with intent to disrobe, and aggravated sexual assault. This matters not just for gender justice, and social justice (the accused and the victim are from different castes separated by a power differential), but also for India’s economic prospects.
When a butterfly flaps its wings, it could cause a tornado someplace else, suggested MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz 50 years ago, after noting that rounding off a number to three decimal places, in the computer model of 12 parameters he was running to forecast weather patterns over the next two months, produced a result vastly different from the one he had got when he used the full number running to six decimal places. What Lorenz failed to foresee was that if the insect flapping its wings was situated in the White House, the chaotic effect would be magnified many times over. Initial conditions really do matter.