Stronger weather extremes prove particularly damaging for women and worsen existing inequalities, scientists have shown A cyclone that ripped through low-lying fishing communities. A wildfire that turned the sky red with embers and black with smoke. A drought that ravaged crops and pushed grain prices higher.  What weather extremes like these have in common is not just that burning fossil fuels makes them stronger — it's that they hit men and women in wildly different ways. In Bangladesh, nine times more women than men were killed when Cyclone Gorki battered coasts in 1991.

THE 15th state conference of Tripura committee of CITU was held at Agartala on May 28-29, 2022 with great enthusiasm and took a vow to fight hard against the anti-worker and anti-people policies of the government. On the opening day, a huge procession was organised on the city roads of Agartala in which people from different walks of life participated. Girls from tea estate worker families, performing jhumur dance in front of the procession from the start till the end marked the fighting spirit of the people.

AFTER the relentless hype about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, LUNA, etc., for the last couple of years, we are now witnessing their complete meltdown. The hype was primarily driven by eye-popping increases in valuations of all the major cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin had gone from around USD 4,000 to USD 64,000, a sixteen fold increase, in 20 months. Other cryptocurrencies had even more ridiculous price increases in the same time period – Ethereum had a 50 fold increase, Solana 500 times, and LUNA had a 1,000 times increase.

THE month of May ended with a flurry of diplomatic activity from the US side in the Asia-Pacific region. Starting from US President Joe Biden, US administration officials made a beeline to our part of the world. Apart from his bilateral visits to Japan and Republic of Korea (RoK, South Korea), Biden’s time was occupied in meeting the leaders of Quad in Tokyo, launching a new initiative – the Indo-Pacific Economic Forum for Prosperity (IPEF). Given the war in Ukraine and NATO’s involvement, it is natural to be surprised with this high-level flurry of US activities in the region.

K T JALEEL, former Kerala higher education minister, highlighted the importance of fighting communal ghettoisation and polarisation. “We should not allow India to be turned into a country like Pakistan. Secularism is India’s oxygen. Without secularism India ceases to exist,” he asserted.  “Our nation is a secular country. India is inclusive of everyone. This tradition of secularism is what safeguards the Indian republic. India cannot progress if it segregates a community,” he added.