South Asia Citizens Web

The Hindu, March 9, 2013
[rouge]DEBATE @ THE HINDU The Gujarat Chief Minister’s proposed address to a university forum in the U.S. was part of a campaign by his Indian-American supporters to sanitise his imagerouge]
It has been a strange experience to witness the unfolding of events and rhetoric after I, along with some colleagues, drafted a letter to the student organisers of the Wharton India Economic Forum, protesting their decision to invite Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi to be (…)

In the next generation, beyond drones lie the so-called “fully autonomous” weapons. Perhaps, 20 years away or less, they are already the subject of debate. The Pentagon has said it will certainly proceed to develop and acquire them, while the Human Rights Watch is saying that they should be banned. Sometimes called killer robots, these are weapon systems that will function without human intervention.

The URG’s Bulletin 9 culls out information from hundreds of collective bargaining agreements and provides an indepth overview of leave and working hours as reflected in the agreements in the 1980’s in Bombay.

Moscow 1937 By Karl Schögel reviewed by BENJAMIN SCHWARZ In this dazzling 650-page feat of historical reconstruction, Karl Schlögel, a professor at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), has summoned up a great city—what was once the New Jerusalem for much of the world’s intelligentsia and downtrodden—as it consumed itself in an orgy of fear, paranoia, denunciations, mass arrests, suicides, and executions. Schlögel’s book is a fragmentary yet meticulous social history of Moscow (…)

This report documents incidents of attacks on places of worship in Sri Lanka since the end of the war in May 2009 and discusses the broader context of such attacks. The report lists 65 cases of attacks on religious places of worship between May 2009 and January 2013. Direct attacks have been reported from all provinces of Sri Lanka, making clear that the threat is not restricted to particular areas. Most of the reported incidents were from the Western province (16), followed by the Eastern province (12), the Southern province (11) and the North-Western province (9).

Although the list cannot claim to be comprehensive, it offers a starting point to document attacks against places of worship of the four main religions practiced in the country.