South Asia Citizens Web

Secular neutrality is a pillar of higher education. We can’t cave in to faith groups in our institutions – even if it causes offence

We live in a deeply segregated society. Segregation by gender may be one aspect of this, but segregation by class or by social standing may have a still more detrimental effect on how we function and think. While better access to education, and greater parental endeavours to get their children the best they can should have created the flows of mobility in a social structure that has been static for generations, it remains blocked in many different ways.

Quite often, Pakistan has wanted the United States to give it more aid than the latter had promised and has been told to exert more for the realisation of agreed objectives by improving its economy, governance and capacity to benefit from external aid. There have also been occasions when Pakistan has urged the US to not forget its responsibility to reciprocate Pakistan’s performance in securing the goal of friendship. The reason, on most occasions, has been a difference in the partners’ perceptions of their obligations under mutual assistance agreements and the substance of partnership deeds. The seeds of this divergence were sown quite early in Pakistan’s history.

On Fukushima Beach is an hour long brilliantly constructed documentary that uses a montage of mainstream and Internet media clips to unpack the Fukushima disaster. In addition to providing a painless scientific overview of radiation health issues, it outlines the ongoing radiation risks faced by all residents of the northern hemisphere.

Commercial satellite imagery shows that the construction is finishing of what appears to be a second gas centrifuge facility at the Rare Materials Plant (RMP), near Mysore. This new facility could significantly increase India´s ability to produce highly enriched uranium for military purposes, including more powerful nuclear weapons. India is also in the early stages of building a larger unsafeguarded centrifuge complex, the Special Material Enrichment Facility (SMEF), in Karnataka. However, as a result of domestic opposition alleging this facility is on environmentally sensitive lands, the National Green Tribunal, the government environmental oversight body, ordered major construction to halt temporarily in August 2013.