ON July 15, the five BRICS countries, Brazil , Russia, India, China, and South Africa formally created a New Development Bank at Forteleza, Brazil, which would be headquartered in Shanghai and would have an Indian as its first president. It would have a capital base of $50 billion to start with, contributed by the five governments, and would provide development funding to all governments for infrastructure projects.

THE parliamentary debate on the Israeli attacks on hapless civilians in Palestine’s Gaza strip has proved the point that what was initially presumed as the ruling BJP’s obduracy in preventing a Parliamentary discussion was actually a cover to conceal its real political and ideological affinity with the Zionist project.

THE Left Front in Tripura has registered a magnificent victory in the just concluded three tier panchayat elections. It has swept the eight zilla parishads. Of the total 116 ZP seats, the CPI(M) won 115 conceding just one seat to the Indian National Congress.

In the panchayat samitis also, the opposition was decimated. The Left Front secured a majority in all the 35 samitis. Of the 418 panchayat samiti seats for which results were declared (out of the total 419 seats), the Left Front won 409 and the Congress 9.

DELHI THE world is witness to the brutal attack that Israeli forces have launched on Gaza in which more than two hundred people have died, thousands wounded and more than one lakh people had to flee from the Gaza city, very large number of whom are women and children.  To protest against these brutal attacks, Palestinian Solidarity Committee, All India Peace Solidarity Organisation (AIPSO) and Indian People in Solidarity with Gaza called for a demonstration on July 17, 2014 in front of the Israeli Embassy in which a large number of people from CPI(M), CPI, RSP, Forward Bloc

ZOHRA Segal was born in a family of Rohela Pathans in Saharanpur in 1912. It has become fashionable to add the prefix ‘conservative’ before Rohela Pathan, and this is done to highlight the fact that she chose dancing and acting as a career. Obviously the prefix helps reinforce the image of the Muslim as intolerant and posits Zohra as the rebel and therefore abnormal as far as the Muslims were concerned.