ON October 10, during his weeklong trip to the USA to attend the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley accused the opposition parties in India, mainly the Left, of being ill-informed and opportunist and adopting double standard on the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

THE BJP rulers of Uttar Pradesh have a medieval communal mindset. Nothing exemplifies this attitude more than their attempt to denigrate the Taj Mahal which is considered as one of the most beautiful buildings in the world.The vilification of the Taj Mahal was begun by the Chief Minister Adityanath himself. In June this year, he called the Taj Mahal and similar Mughal monuments as not reflecting Indian culture. This was followed by the Uttar Pradesh Tourism department omitting the Taj Mahal from the places of tourist interest of the state in a booklet that it brought out.

FOR long one could divide the world’s currencies into three distinct categories: (i) the leading currency, typically belonging to the leading imperialist power,in the present case the United States, which was considered “as good as gold” by the world’s wealth-holders; (ii) other metropolitan currencies in terms of which the world’s wealth-holders also held their wealth, but which, precisely by virtue of not being considered “as good as gold”, had to maintain a certain stable value vis-à-vis the leading currency through the pursuit of appropriate macroeconomic policies, including contraction

LENIN, who was in exile, kept pace with the developments in Russia which were moving with ‘hurricane like velocity’. Along with directing Bolshevik activities from exile, he was immersed in another important task of finishing his monumental work, ‘State and Revolution’, which he started writing in August. He used his experiences from the Russian revolution to explain the theoretical propositions of Karl Marx and Engels.The Kornilov revolt and its defeat had accelerated the Russian revolution tremendously.

THE appointment of Dr Soumya Swaminathan, director general of the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR), as a deputy director general (DDG) of the World Health Organisation is a welcome development. She joins Jane Ellison of the UK as one of the two newly appointed DDGs and will be in overall charge of programmes, while Jane Ellison will be in charge of ‘corporate affairs’. The WHO elected Tedros Adhanom of Ethiopia as the new director general (DG) at the World Health Assembly in May 2017, to replace the outgoing incumbent, Dr Margaret Chan.