Daily Archives: April 7, 2016
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 Nawaz Sharif defamed Pak by having merely $11 million offshore: Twitter guffaws at #PanamaPapers
Image credit: Narendra Shreshta/Reuters A massive leak of 2.6 terabytes of data has suddenly thrown light on the murky world of offshore banking, where the world’s richest (and shadiest) tend to park their cash to avoid paying taxes or being detected. The 11.5 million documents from a Panama-based law firm were leaked by an anonymous source […]
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 Panama Papers: How a global media operation held the rich and powerful to account
Image credit: Reuters/Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA Novosti With the Panama Papers exposé perhaps we can now say the fortress walls of offshore secrecy are finally cracking. Such havens allow corruption and tax avoidance to take place on a massive international scale by some of the richest and most powerful people on Earth. Meanwhile, the poor get poorer. Western […]
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 In Tamil Nadu, the Forest Department is being forced to kill tigers
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons Rana was on a single-minded mission. His task: to find a tiger, an alleged “man-eater” before it killed again. Sniffing out wild cats is his speciality. The 27-month-old German Shepherd belongs to the Special Tiger Protection Force at Bandipur in Karnataka and is specially trained to detect wild animals in dense forests […]
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 The Sri Sri syndrome: What we should not forget about so-called gurus and godmen
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons Even as the high-decibel criticism of students from Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad University continues unabated, the riverside celebration of “Hindu-India” curated by the self-anointed Sri Sri has been forgotten. It has dissolved into the polluted air that hangs over the Yamuna. This so-called guru initially proclaimed that he would pay no […]
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 Explainer: Why #PanamaPapers is just the tip of the iceberg
Image credit: Carllos Jasso/Reuters The leak of information from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the giant law firm headquartered in Panama, is a reality check. Not because the information, which went public in India late Sunday night, exposes over 214,000 offshore companies typically used as structures to evade taxation connected to people in over 200 countries. […]
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 How JNU and HCU were ranked as the best universities in the country (and why it may not matter much)
Image credit: PTI They might have been called dens of anti-nationalists and good for nothing. But on Monday, the government added another label to Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad Central University: The best educational institutions in the country. In its first-ever nationwide ranking of educational institutions and other universities, JNU and HCU came in at the […]
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 Bhogbhumi quip: Perhaps RSS’s Bhaiyyaji Joshi needs to read some (more) Hindu scriptures
Senior Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader leader Bhaiyyaji Joshi recently made a rather controversial quip. He said that those who view India merely as a land of bhog, or consumerism, are the ones who refuse to say Bharat Mata ki jai! Really now? Hindu scriptures describe achieving dharm (religion or duty), arth (money power), kaam (physical […]
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 Women’s rights undercut by water crisis in Bangladesh
Image credit: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP / Women are on the frontlines of climate change, both as those affected by it, and as the first responders to the crisis. This holds across the region, as women in Pakistan, India, Nepal and Bangladesh struggle to deal with the crisis of water. Bangladesh is the country most vulnerable to the […]
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NEWS 
April 7, 2016 Stunning Jain manuscripts from the 13th century go online
Image credit: via www.jainpedia.org/ The Jain manuscripts currently in the British Library collections have a long history and were formerly held by two distinct institutions, the British Museum and the India Office Library. Built over a period of more than two-and-a-half centuries, from the earliest acquisitions of 1753 (in the British Museum’s Sloane and Harley collections), […]
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CLOTHING 
April 7, 2016 The emperor’s clothes: BJP files police complaint against journalist whose tweet mocked Modi
“Every joke is a tiny revolution,” observed British novelist George Orwell in 1945 with characteristic perspicacity. People have always mocked the powerful, either through prose, poetry, theatre or – most brutally – jokes about their body functions. To these analogue forms of humour, we’ve now added more digital equivalents – for example, thiscompilation of 24 […]
