THE World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Assessment, 2018, has identified climate change as one of the main challenges impacting on the economic well being of the current capitalist economy. In its report, it states about the failure of “governments and businesses to enforce or enact effective measures to mitigate climate change”. The report identifies heightened environmental risks as one of the main factors that will adversely impact the interests of global business.

THE dust has settled on the Gujarat elections. The BJP has claimed that it has fought twenty two years anti-incumbency and won the elections because of its ‘politics of vikas’ versus the opposition’s ‘casteist politics’. In a post-election interview, the BJP president Amit Shah claimed that his 150+ mission had failed because of the “dirty and low level casteist politics of the Congress and its allies”. In doing so, Shah dismissed all the agitations that Gujarat has been facing for the last few years as “dirty low level politics”.

THE National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) has come out with its ritual annual report. And the statistics are grim. Like the prices of vegetables, crimes in our country too have a tendency only to rise up, up and above. If only these statistics become weapons, can we see a change.Let’s recount our achievements as detailed by the NCRB. Data shows that cases under Crime against Women have reported an increase of 2.9 per cent in 2016 over 2015. Delhi once again, being the national capital city, does not disappoint. It ranks first in terms of the crime rate against women.

Her case reveals how deeply the current climate created by sectarian ideologies based on a narrow reading of religious identity has pushed back women’s rights to autonomy as equal citizens. From the government to the courts, to the strengthening of conservative and regressive thinking and practice, it’s all out there in Hadiya’s case.THE Supreme Court did not allow itself to be converted into a khap panchayat, although it came close to it on Tuesday, November 28, as it heard the Hadiya case.

IN his much publicised annual Vijay Dashmi address to the RSS cadres, Mohan Bhagwat announced that the “Gau Rakshaks have nothing to worry” and they were only doing their patriotic duty. This announcement became necessary because the observations of the Supreme Court took a stern view of cow vigilantism and the union government was subsequently forced to warn vigilante groups to curb their activities. However, Bhagwat said that “patriotic gau rakshaks” should not worry about government pronouncements.