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| THIS
OUR NORTH AMERICA |
| George W. Bush –
The legacy left behind |
Khushwant
Toor writes from Toronto
GEORGE W. BUSH, acting president of the United
States of America is due to step down as the 43rd
president of the United States of America on January
20, 2008. What kind of legacy he wanted to leave
and what has he left America with are the questions
being fired at him at each and every press conference
being held during the last few days of his tenure.More
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| Bush's tortured legacy |
 ALL
last week on President-elect Obama's transition
website, Change.gov, the top-rated publicly-submitted
question asked the incoming president whether
he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate
"the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration,
including torture and warrantless wiretapping."
When ABC News's George Stephanopoulos pressed
Obama about it on "This Week," Obama
said he was "still evaluating" the situation
but added, "My orientation is going to be
moving forward."More
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| Terrorism and recession:
America and Russia need to cooperate |
Harjap
Singh Aujla writes from New Jersey
GONE are the
days when the Russian economy collapsed to pave
the way for the collapse of the mighty Soviet
Union. Now the smaller former Soviet Republics
are independent and Russia does not have to lift
their economic burden on its broad shoulders.
Stung by a recession soon after the break up of
the Soviet Union, the Russians have become hardened
and wiser. Instead of experimenting with hard
capitalism, they now have a mixed economy, which
is doing surprisingly great.More
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| ANALYSIS |
| Though
the peephole: development and planning-5
|
Vinod
Anand
AFTER having looked at the trend of the economic
indicators in the earlier Parts of this Paper, let
us now review the trend of some of the social indicators,
which are equally important to assess the effects
of planning on the economy. We have considered the
following social indicators for which the time-series
data are available: Population in terms of birth
rate, death rate and life expectancy; Education
in terms of literacy rate; Health and Family Welfare
in terms of number of registered medical practitioners.More |
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| Contemporary
global capitalism: Multi-pronged crises-2
|
Pritam
Singh
The grand failure of many a financial institution
in the US is one of three such crises that have
affected the world today; the others related to
oil prices and food shortages. These in sum have
broken the back of neoliberal triumphalism, and
have resulted in a spatial shift in global capitalism.More
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| Cuba:
From isolation to reinsertion
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| Patricia
Grogg
CUBA’S reintegration into Latin America
means that the government of Raúl Castro
will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the
Revolution in a wholly different regional context
than the one that prevailed in the 1960s, when
this Caribbean island nation was marginalised
by practically all of Latin America.More
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| LAW & JUSTICE |
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| UN: destined to doom
but obliged to live |
Joginder
Singh Toor writes from Toronto
 AFTER
days of Israeli shelling, the city and life no longer
exit. Gaza City, with some 400,000 people, stopped
supplying water when fuel ran out for the power
station driving the pumps. People listen to battery-run
radios for news; apartment buildings are shaken
by bombs aimed at a nearby Hamas run government
compound.More |
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| ART & LITERATURE |
| Any hope for lessons
learned? |
| Laurinda
Keys Long
PARTITION Literature in the Indian sub continent
is not a story to pass on.It’s all too real.
it is a narrative about erosion and erasure. Journalists,
researchers, historians have all pored over the
events, the numbers, the horrors, the reasons
and the results of the partition of the subcontinent
in 1947 and its re-cutting in 1971.More
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Spice Group ready to invest
$408 mn in Satyam | Mumbai attacks not planned
in Pak territory: Diplomat | Punjab seeks verification
of land allotment claims | GDP grew by 9% in 2007-08,
says CSO | Yuki Bhambri storms
into Oz Open final
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| Spice Group ready to invest
$408 mn in Satyam |
| Spice
Group is ready to invest about 20 billion rupees (USD
408 million) in Satyam Computer Services and wants to
buy a 51 percent stake in the fraud-scarred outsourcer,
Spice chairman B K Modi said. "That is our desire,"
Modi said on Friday. "We want the money to go inside
the company. For that they will have to make a preferential
issue.More
Updated on January
30, 2009 at 01:00 p.m.
|
- Mumbai attacks not planned
in Pak territory: DiplomatMore
- Punjab seeks verification
of land allotment claimsMore
- GDP grew by 9% in 2007-08,
says CSOMore
- Yuki Bhambri
storms into Oz Open finalMore
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| E D I T O R I
A L |
| Shocking suicides by farmers
haunt India |
| MORE than
six decades after India shook away slavery, the
plight of the farming community is so worse that
they are forced to commit suicides. Farmers are
committing suicides and it has been increasing
over the years, reads one report. Since 1997 as
many as 1, 82,936 farmers have forced to extinguish
the lives. And, despite tall promises made by
the rulers over the years, the government policies
have been just cosmetics.More |
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| FOCUS |
| A dictate for the farmers
|
Gobind
Thukral
 PUNJAB
Farmers Commission has done what was expected from
a state sponsored commission. It has kept to the
status quo telling farmers to keep sowing wheat
and paddy, using biochemical fertilisers and pesticides
and other chemicals as the country’s food
security demands it . The Commission chairman, Dr
G.S. Kalkat maintains with zeal of neo converts
that if farmers shift to organic farm practices
there would be shortfall of 20 per cent in food
production and the country’s food security
would suffer.More |
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PSFC: Farmers’
Commission or ‘Food Security Mission’?
|
| Sukhpal
Singh
 THE
recent report of the Punjab State Farmers’ Commission
on the relevance and feasibility of organic farming
in Punjab has created a fresh and heated debate on the
subject. The report lacks research rigour and logic
on many fronts. One, the report defines food security,
which is used to assess role of organic farming, as
just enough food production. It does not realize that
food security is not just about production and availability
of food but also about access to relevant food in hygienic
food preparation and consumption environment for a healthy
life.More
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| Israel
unlikely to achieve its objectives |
Dr. Sawraj
Singh writes from Washington
 ISRAEL
launched the attack on Gaza with several objectives.
However, it is unlikely to achieve its objectives and
the war may further radicalize the region with Israel
and the moderate Arabs becoming the biggest losers in
the long run. Israel’s major objective was to
avenge the defeat of 2006 against the Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Many people in the world, including many in Israel itself,
felt that Israel lost to the Hezbollah. This time, Israel
wants to secure a clear victory against the Hamas.More |
| FEATURES |
| Inflation and recession:
a dilemma-2
|
| Vinod
Anand
IT is necessary
to define inflation and recession as concepts
before we analyse these. Inflation is understood
as a process of steadily rising prices, resulting
in diminishing purchasing power of a given nominal
sum of money. Recession is a state of the economy
when there is unemployment but it is of short
duration unlike depression which is of long period
duration. Inflation is either demand-pull or it
is cost-push inflation.More
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| Economy:
2009 |
| THERE are
plenty of doomsayers and no economist or politician
is stretching his or her neck out to claim that this
would see and an end to economic recession that is fast
turning into depression. What is, however, clear is
that the present neo liberal model that allowed unfettered
run to fundamentalism of the market is lifeless. What
replaces it is yet not clear.More |
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| Pakistan:
Tragedy continues |
|  IN
Pakistan violence during the year 2008 peaked with a
deadly attack on December 28 in the Buner district of
the Northwestern Frontier Province (NWFP), where a suicide
bomber rammed an explosives-laden car in to a polling
station killing 32 innocents. A report by the mass circulation
daily, The News recounted 66 suicide attacks and 965
deaths all over the country, taking the average monthly
casualties to at least 80 suicide.More
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| COMMENT |
| Sri Lankan media under
attack
|
| Investigate
killing of prominent journalist
 The
killing of a prominent newspaper editor today and the
bombing of a private television station on January 6,
2009, highlight the Sri Lankan government's failure
to stop violence against the media, Human Rights Watch
and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) said.
The groups said that past investigations into attacks
on journalists have led nowhere, and that the government
should act quickly to bring the perpetrators of the
attacks to justice.More
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| Billionaire
blowups’ list |
|  INDUSTRIALIST
Anil Ambani continues to be on the focus of US magazine
Forbes but this time around for topping the list of
'Billionaire Blowups of 2008' by virtue of turning the
biggest loser of wealth in less than a year of being
touted as the biggest gainer in the world. According
to Press Trust of India, “Besides ranking Anil
as the sixth richest person in the world with a net
worth of $42 billion, Forbes had credited him for having
added maximum wealth in its last annual rankings in
March 2008.More
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