Daily Hindu Editorials

The security protocol at military installations must be speedily upgraded The number of casualties in the terror attack on the Sunjuwan Army base in Jammu has risen to seven after clearing operations. The garrison of the 36 Brigade of Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry was attacked last Saturday by a small group of heavily armed terrorists that managed to enter the residential quarters of soldiers. While three terrorists were killed, six soldiers and a civilian lost their lives. Many more sustained injuries. This is the latest in a series of attacks on military installations over the last few years. The worrisome aspect is the repeated success of terrorists in infiltrating high-security military complexes. As in every case, the Army will conduct a court of inquiry into the incident to identify lapses. However, the Sunjuwan attack exposes the vulnerabilities in perimeter security and the scant progress made in improving the security protocol since the attack on the Pathankot Air Force st...

The idea of rating an individual, an entity and even a nation has been there for aeons. The historian Herodotus, along with the scholar Callimachus of Cyrene, made lists of the original Seven Wonders, describing them and their worth in soaring rhetoric. Modern day credit rating agencies, however, have a far more recent origin — ironically, they were first established after the financial crisis of 1837 in the U.S. Such agencies (with the first established by L. Tappan in 1841 in New York) were then needed to rate the ability of a merchant to pay his debts, consolidating such data in ledgers. Soon enough, such ratings were being applied to equity stocks. Demand also rose for independent market information, offering trustworthy analysis of credit-worthiness, with Moody’s ratings’ publication increasingly focusing on industrial firms and utilities, offering letter based ratings. By the 1920s, the big three of the ratings world (including Fitch, Standard & Poor’s...

Studying the impact of sanitation on stunting is tricky, and the much-awaited results of two ambitious new trials published this year show why. The trials, which implemented water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions in Bangladeshi and Kenyan villages for two years, were an effort to prevent stunting (low height for age) seen in children under two years in developing countries. Specifically, the WASH interventions included replacing poor-quality toilets with improved ones, chlorinating drinking water, and promoting handwashing — all in an attempt to protect toddlers from the faecal pathogens that are believed to interfere with their growth. But when the trials ended, disappointingly, the researchers found these children were not taller than those who did not receive these interventions. The findings are a setback to the hypothesis that improving sanitation can thwart childhood stunting. But how big a setback they are is disputed. The problem of open defecation One point...

Poland’s ‘Holocaust’ legislation highlights its continued shift to the far right A new law in Poland that makes it a crime to blame the country for Nazi atrocities has reopened the Holocaust denial issue. Expressions such as Polish death camps to describe concentration camps including Auschwitz have touched a raw nerve over the years. Now the ruling ultra-nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS) appears intent on drawing political mileage from this dark chapter in Polish and European history. The government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has enacted legislation to impose a fine and three-year imprisonment for all references that imply the complicity of the Polish nation and the state in Nazi war crimes. Its contention that artists and scholars would be exempt from the restrictions has not assuaged critics, who are challenging assaults on freedom of expression. Clearly, responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated against Jews during the Holocaust rests with the ...

The political crisis in Sri Lanka will likely end in a reconfiguration of coalition forces Sri Lanka’s local government election held on February 10 has become more than a mid-term poll that usually helps the opposition. Rather, it has led to an immediate political crisis of sorts, threatening the stability of the present government. While the disunited ruling coalition, jointly headed by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, has lost the election badly, the newly formed Sri Lanka People’s Front, unofficially backed by former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, has secured a sweeping victory in provinces except in the north and east. 🔹Pressure points There are two dimensions to the crisis. The first is the pressure from the Rajapaksa camp for the Wickremesinghe government to resign, interpreting the local government election as a referendum on the government as well as a loss of its popular mandate of 2015. The government can easily dis...

“Let me mention three main trends in publishing. First, a significant sales shift toward online/e-commerce. Second, the growth of digital audio books. And third, the strength of print”. Markus Dohle is the global Chief Executive Officer of Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade book publisher. Additionally, he is Chairman of the Association of American Publishers and serves on the PEN Board of Trustees and the Board of Directors of the National Book Foundation. Excerpts from an email interview: 🔹The playwright David Hare said that the two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction”. What is your sense of the future of literary fiction? People are reading more than ever, but is there still a place for longer, textured novels? I believe in the future of literary fiction. I think fiction is more important than ever in today’s world because it helps people escape from the never-ending news cycle by immersing th...

Since over a million years ago, the Indian region has not been deserted at any time In 1863, British geologist and archaeologist Robert Bruce Foote discovered the first Palaeolithic stone tools from India at the Attirampakkam site, close to Madras. Since then, this site has been visited by many investigators, and considerably more knowledge about the civilisation has been obtained. It was believed until recently that modern human ancestors moved out of Africa and settled in various places where they left their mark by introducing small tools, around 140,000-120,000 years ago. However, a recent paper published in Nature, ‘Early Middle Palaeolithic culture in India around 385-172 ka reframes Out of Africa models’, by Akhilesh Kumar, Shanti Pappu and others, has revealed stunning new evidence that small tools — as opposed to larger ones that characterised early human species — were being made at this site way before — nearly 385,000 years ago. Does this the...