Opinions and Editorials

Obama's China trip has been sharply criticised by most US newspapers as being unnecessarily deferential and obtaining no real concessions.

The sale of shares of up to 60 public sector enterprises by the Central government will have many advantages.

Inevitably, expectations from Copenhagen have been tamped down by now. Climate action will not come from one dramatic global compact next month. And India has decided to be big about the matter, offering to submit a national communication on climate action every two years, which could become the basis for negotiating with the world and bargaining for technological or financial payback.

North Block hopes it has found a lever to increase bank lending — money will come in (capital infusion in state-owned banks) if money goes out (loans to business).

So umpires in India have started calling bowlers for chucking and it is nice to see a forgotten law being implemented! Some bowlers, especially those who have played first class cricket for eight or ten years might choose to disagree with the current practice, they are entitled to be a bit confused, but really in our part of the world we had no alternative.

During the last days of the 14th Lok Sabha, its speaker, Somnath Chatterjee, drew a dispiriting profile of the House.

Former wrestler and Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav distancing himself from Kalyan Singh has not impressed the Urdu world.

The 11th International meeting of the Communist and Workers Parties is being held in New Delhi this week, at a time when the Left in India is facing its worst-ever crisis and is fast losing support even in traditional strongholds like West Bengal and Kerala.

At a Thai restaurant in Islamabad, after the first day's play in the final Test in 2004, Rahul Dravid politely declined to stay for dessert, saying he needed to sleep because he had to bat the "whole day tomorrow".

More than most other people, Nandan Nilekani knows how to turn information into hard currency. The induction of this former head of an iconic IT company as chairperson of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was meant to send out a larger message: UPA-II was willing to learn lessons from India Inc.

The disgraceful conduct of a UK-based Muslim charity with the victim-survivors of the 2002 communal carnage in Gujarat could have been ignored as an isolated, if highly deplorable act.

Surprisingly, there was in the Indira Gandhi eulogies very little discussion on her food and agriculture policies apart from some acerbic non-factual diatribes.

Burden of their song The editorial in the latest issue of RSS mouthpiece Organiser, titled "Vande Mataram.

No matter how much we try to make up for our historic underinvestment in roads by frantically constructing flyovers and highways, India will never be truly on the move unless it addresses the dark question of injury and mortality.

It is a comment on the over-centralised nature of our political parties that the Congress has sustained such a buzz with its election programme for its youth wing.

Impartial administration of justice is the hallmark of a democratic society based on the rule of law.

In the light of the rebellion in the Karnataka BJP waged by the mining barons of Bellary, CPM General Secretary Prakash Karat talks about the larger issue of the invasion of business into the sphere of politics and the need for checking the trend, in the latest issue of party mouthpiece People's Democracy.

China's shadow "China has promoted security and stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan".

Sometime ago we asked if Barack Obama was black or white. Now we are wondering how green he is, going by the way the US establishment has already given up on a legally binding global agreement on climate change at Copenhagen.