PROFESSIONAL athletes have an enormous amount of power that they put to good use this past week in a series of unprecedented strikes. But workers of all types have similar kinds of power – and could, just like athletes, use it to shut society down to fight injustice.On August 26, professional athletes in five sports leagues (men’s and women’s basketball, soccer, baseball, and hockey) did something unprecedented: they shut down their workplaces over political issues, namely racial justice and police brutality.

ANKHI Das, a name, which all of a sudden became popular in the country continues to make headlines in the media. Public policy chief of Facebook for South and Central Asia, Das is known for her proximity to the BJP and also to the point how she shaped Facebook’s policy, more aligned to the BJP. Her remarks do not just limit to this alignment brought about to win the general elections in 2014 but go deeper to the ideological hostility to which she is wedded/ linked to.

IN the space of a few days, there have been two developments concerning the pandemic and the economy which are alarming.  India became the country with the second largest number of Covid-19 cases in the world, overtaking Brazil.  Preceding this came the news that in the first quarter (April-June) GDP had contracted by 24 per cent.  This is the worst fall among 25 major economies of the world.The pandemic is surging and it has spread to small towns and villages.  India has outstripped all countries in the daily increase in number of infections.

CPI(M) Polit Bureau member, Brinda Karat, wrote to Piyush Goyal, minister for railways, on September 4, bringing to his notice the potential public health disaster in evicting lakhs of jhuggi dwellers in Delhi during the Covid-19 pandemic.She reminded the minister that the Delhi High Court in its judgement last year had directed that arrangements for rehabilitation must be made in the event of relocation being required.

IN a press release dated September 5, AIKS has stated that in the entire cotton-growing area of Haryana the standing crop that reached the stage of ball formation suffered massive losses due to Whitefly infestation. A total of 7.37 lakh hectares were sown with a cotton crop which is almost nine per cent more than last year. This is spread over half of the districts of the state out of which it is one of the major crops in at least five districts along with Paddy, Bajra, pulses etc., in the Kharif season.