THE US, European Union (EU) and its allies are part of a 76-country “WTO initiative” on “trade related aspects of e-commerce”. Strangely enough, this initiative was launched in the World Economic Forum at Davos, and not in any WTO fora. This “initiative” was discussed a number of times in WTO including the last ministerial in Buenos Aires in 2017, where also it was rejected. The developing countries including India had argued that without any agreement on Doha development agenda, WTO could not take up other issues.

PM MODI is clearly rattled by reading the writing on the wall concerning the outcome of the 2019 general elections. As a result, he is doling out various excuses and reasons in order to portray the efforts for unity, that is emerging among the secular opposition for the ouster of the BJP from government, as an act of either opportunism, an act of money bags getting together or an act of sheer desperation; that it is Modi versus the rest in the forthcoming elections. Let us examine these claims of the prime minister.

Just months after a statue of V I Lenin was pulled down in Tripura by right-wing goons, the largest statue of the Communist icon in the country was installed in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu at the initiative of the CPI(M) Tirunelveli district committee.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury unveiled the statue. He congratulated the Tirunelveli district committee of the Party for the initiative and recalled how the legendary Tamil poet, Subramania Bharathi, who was a native of Tirunelveli, had penned a song praising the October Revolution.

THE 17th Maharashtra state conference of the SFI that was held in the Adarsh Vidyalaya, Mumbai, from December 24 to 26, 2018, was attended by 166 delegates and observers from 16 districts. They included 39 girl students. The stage was named after SFI martyr Abhimanyu from Kerala, the hall after a former SFI leader from Pune, Dr Shekhar Bendre, a young medical doctor who died in an accident last year, and the venue was named after martyr Gauri Lankesh, who was mercilessly gunned down by Sanatan Sanstha criminals.

PUBLIC MEETING

ON Saturday January 19, ordinary French people in their tens of thousands were again out on the streets of France, sporting the yellow safety vests that have become a global symbol of revolt. Since materialising as if from nowhere on November 17, 2018, and despite full-on brutal State efforts to contain it, the movement of the Yellow Jackets (Gilets jaunes) continues to confront French President Emmanuel Macron with his gravest crisis yet.