The Supreme Court’s reply to the Presidential reference is a big letdown. The Constitution Bench’s task was to ascertain if the Court can prescribe timelines for Governors and the President to decide on a Bill that comes up before them, and whether the conduct of Governors and the President is justiciable.
Hyperbole aside, Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City is a significant development that will reverberate in US national politics, and find resonance abroad.
Socialists and leftists in Europe have declared validation of their ideology by American voters, and hope to do better in their own countries, states and cities as a result.
Has the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, eroded the chances of a trade deal between India and the US, with his apology to the US President over a television spot that a Canadian state government recently ran on US networks? The probability is strong that he has, even if purely inadvertently.
The four labour codes long in the making have finally been notified. The good thing is that a legal framework now exists for a company inclined to provide social security for the gig workers it employs to actually provide it. Uber, for example, says it has been waiting for such a legal framework. Any labour law is only as good as its enforcement. Where workers and their unions are strong enough to compel enforcement, laws are complied with.
If winter comes, can spring be far behind? Given the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth’s axis, which produces the seasons during the course of the planet’s steady rotation around the sun, such poetic expectation of inevitable good tidings is pretty realistic. But the hope that if you build giant data centres, a boom in artificial intelligence capability and its applications would follow rests on shakier ground.
A ruling by the Swiss Federal Administrative Court on October 14, holding as illegal the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority’s decision to write down Credit Suisse’s Additional Tier 1 bonds, as part of the state-directed merger of troubled Credit Suisse into rival banking giant UBS, has revived hopes in India for those pursuing a case in the Supreme Court against the similar writing down of AT1 bonds issued by Yes Bank, as part of its salvage operation. Their optimism is misplaced.