THE General Strike on July 9 gave a glimpse of the anger of the workers and the toiling people against their worsening conditions imposed by the neoliberal policies aggressively pursued by the NDA government led by Modi. The call for the General Strike given by the joint platform of central trade unions and independent sectoral federations received magnificent response from the working class and support from the mass of the common people.

A RECENT paper in Science addresses an intriguing question: Did North America have settled agriculture before the arrival of Europeans? Or were the people in North America still in the hunter-gatherer stage, unlike Mesoamericans, who had advanced civilisations, such as the Mayans, Aztecs, and the Incas? The answer is that it did have significant agriculture, which "disappeared" only after their encounters with the invading Europeans settling in their lands.

THE No.2 man in RSS, Dattatreya Hosabale, who many think will one day become the No.1 if the current sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat so desires, raised the issue of the insertion of ‘socialism’ and ‘secularism’ in the Preamble of the country’s Constitution during the Emergency. He argued that these words should be deleted. This seemed to be a signal because suddenly, there was a chorus of usual suspects shrilly supporting the demand.

THE World Bank has recently published a list of Gini coefficients for 61 countries relating in some cases to income distribution and in others to consumption expenditure distribution. In that list India had the fourth lowest Gini coefficient in 2022, on the basis of which the Modi government has gone to town declaring India to be the fourth most egalitarian economy in the world. The ludicrousness of this claim has already been exposed by several researchers; and spending more time over it would appear like flogging a dead horse.

THE people of Tamil Nadu have never lagged behind in expressing their steadfast support and solidarity with socialist countries across the globe – especially with Cuba. Over the years, our deep commitment to this cause has been as resolute as our condemnation of US imperialist hegemony and its inhumane, cowardly economic blockade against this small Caribbean island nation of just over ten million people.