By Steve Sweeney Vietnam celebrated the 130th anniversary of the birth of Ho Chi Minh on May 19 by announcing the imminent end of its COVID-19 outbreak, with no locally transmitted cases reported for 33 consecutive days. Despite bordering China, where the outbreak began, Vietnam has recorded no deaths...
By Sankar Ray Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan Niazi announced reimbursement Rs 12,000 to each laid-off worker due to Covid 19-led lockdown under the Ehsaas Kafaalat social protection and welfare program (Ehsaas Cash Emergency Programme), launched on 1 April last. It became operational right away. He tweeted ‘Yesterday...
By Nitya Chakraborty Desperate situations demand innovative solutions. The Indian economy, ravaged by the lockdown for the last 57 days, is in a dark tunnel with no possibility of coming out in the near future. The Rs. 20 lakh crore stimulus accounting for 10 per cent of the GDP...
By K Raveendran Is Modi’s Covid lockdown going the way of the ill-fated demonetisation? Looks like it is. There have already been many similarities between the two events that have influenced the economy and people’s lives like none else. Both were announced in a jiffy, arbitrarily and without due...
By Chidambaram N It was more than a century and a half ago that Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”...
By Belinda Henwood Indian NGO, SEEDS in partnership with researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) is part of a research initiative termed the Corruption and Disasters Research Initiative (CADRI) to pioneer a new area of cross-disciplinary...
By Pallab Sengupta “When you can uproot all the grass of Vietnam, only then will there be no anti-French fighters left in Vietnam”. It was told by Nguyen Trung Truc before he was killed by French colonialist when they invaded Saigon region in the year 1859. That was the...
By David Trujillo and Ismael Parra Rev. Dr. William Barber of the New Poor People’s Campaign has been preaching: “This virus is teaching us that from now on, living wages, guaranteed health care for all, unemployment and labour rights are not far-left issues but issues of right vs. wrong...
By Kalyani Shankar How will life change for us in the post lockdown exit period and what have we learnt from the coronavirus outbreak? As every doctor and administrator in the world claims that it will be a ‘new normal’ and you have to live with it but what...
By Anjan Roy Of all the changes and reforms the finance minister announced over the course of last week, the one reform which is likely to have a lasting impact would be her announcements regarding marketing of farm products. This is visually scrapping the APMCs and marketing of agro...
By Arun Srivastava It was more than a coincidence that on the day around 24 poor daily wage workers, on way to their native places, were killed in a road accident near Auraiya in Uttar Pradesh, the senior BJP leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi were celebrating the sixth...
By P Sreekumaran THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Left Democratic Front (LDF) Government has offered a cautious welcome to the Rs 20 lakh crore package announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and unwrapped in fie tranches by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The Government has welcomed the decision to raise the limit for...
By Sushil Kutty Are we past the worst of the coronavirus crisis? From the looks of it and the behaviour of lots and lots of people across the world, yes! Countries worldwide are lifting lockdowns and markets are tentatively started selling with people buying into the belief that things...
By Saniya Siddiqui There can be no two opinions, that the novel coronavirus caught the entire world by surprise, and what set countries apart is how they responded to the crisis. India chose the world’s strictest stay-at-home restrictions to ensure life is preserved while allowing only essential services. Although...
By John Wojcik Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders have established a task force to unite the Democratic Party on a progressive agenda. The action reflects the urgency that not only most in the Democratic Party but labour and all its allies place on the task...
By Nantoo Banerjee At least 200 million people may have lost job since the nation-wide lockdown was clamped on March 25 to curb the spread of Covid-19. Although the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) in its last report said that 122 million Indians lost their jobs in...
By Amulya Ganguli The Narendra Modi government is facing several problems. After the praise it received from the WHO about its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and also from Bill Gates, the signs are that India is on the verge of a second wave of the disease while the...
By Dr. Arun Mitra The world is seized with tackling COVID-19 which is being perceived as biggest health threat to the humanity today. True, this virus is more lethal than other Corona viruses. There is an all out effort by the scientists around the world to develop vaccines to...