By Richard McGregor and James Fontanella-Khan in The Hague and Jonathan Soble in Tokyo
Japan, Italy and Belgium have agreed to hand over hundreds of kilogrammes of weapons-grade plutonium and highly-enriched uranium to the US in deals designed to give impetus to global efforts to secure nuclear material.
The agreements were announced ahead of the opening of the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, a meeting bringing together about 50 nations to set rules to prevent nuclear materials “from falling into the wrong hands”, in the words of Barack Obama.
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A video showing AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal asking a TV news anchor to emphasise certain sections of his interview went viral on Youtube tonight. The video, which is over a minute long, shows Kejriwal and the news anchor in a conversation after the interview.
During the conversation, Kejriwal is seen asking the TV anchor to give emphasis on certain segments of the interview. "Please play it up more," Kejriwal said in the video.
To this, the television anchor was seen saying: "Yes, we will play it up. The Bhagat Singh (comment) is good. We will get a lot of reaction to this."
The interview was apparently given by Kejriwal after he resigned as Delhi Chief Minister.
Incidentally, the video was made public on the day when Kejriwal criticised the media and accused a certain section of being biased against him.
Watch the video here:
Knowledge@Wharton: Apple Faces Life as a Mature Company. http://google.com/newsstand/s/CBIwlKGOjBI
sent from galaxy note, pardon brevity
Panda is a deadly criminal who operate on the sinister garb of being an ultra-left radical ostensibly to fight for the poor. But in reality he has been an evangelist stooge who had claimed responsibility for the murder of revered Hindu Monk, Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati in 2008.
Same year, Panda was the mastermind behind the Nayagarh police armoury loot and killing of several policemen.
Encina Hall West, Room 208
Performing Translation: Indian Jewish Devotional Song and Minority Identity on the Move
This research on Bene Israel (Marathi Jewish) devotional music explores dialogue between the Bene Israel and other social groups, and suggests new ways for thinking about cultural translation in musical contexts. The first half of the presentation is on Bene Israel kirtans (devotional songs with storytelling) performed in the decades following the founding of the first Jewish kirtan organization in 1880 and addresses how and why a Hindu temple genre was translated for Jewish purposes. The second half of the presentation addresses the re-gendering of kirtan and other Marathi Jewish song forms during their revival in late 20th-century Bombay and Israel. From the 1880s through the 1920s, Bene Israel men published dozens of Marathi Jewish kirtans, plays, songbooks, and ritual instruction books, but Marathi performing arts publishing waned as interest in Zionism increased in the 1920s. Women filled that lacuna by maintaining kirtan and other Bene Israel songs in the oral tradition. In the 1960s, as Indian Jewish people became increasingly dissatisfied with their marginal status in India and Israel, Bene Israeli women proudly sang Marathi Jewish songs to convince people that being Indian made them no less Jewish and that being Jewish made them no less Indian.
Anna Schultz is Assistant Professor of Music at Stanford University. Her book, Singing a Hindu Nation, was published by Oxford University press in 2013. Her other publications are on South Asian popular song, Marathi and Indo-Caribbean devotional music, American country music, nationalism, the aesthetics of suffering, new media, recording technology, patronage, liveness, and diaspora.
Free and open to the public. Lunch will be served.
If you scan the news these days the world seems to be a tinderbox, waiting for just a small spark to set off a conflagaration. The much-commented-on, eerie, similarities with 1914 that people have noticed concentrated on the rise of China as a revanchist power bent on changing the status quo, much as a rising Germany was a century ago. But there are other risks in a globalised world. I wonder what the catalytic action might be that actually sets off a cataclysm, just as the assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary set off World War I.
In addition to the quasi-revolution in the Ukraine, here are several other countries embroiled in, or at risk of civil war, or caught up in covert or overt violence:
Syria, where an actual civil war is going on with horrific human rights violations on either side.
Thailand, where the government and the opposition seem to have fought each other to a stalemate.
Venezuela, on the verge of a civil war over discredited Chavismo and corruption.
South Sudan, the newly created country already heading towards State failure.
Afghanistan, the perennial problem child, on the precipice of partition.
Egypt, with simmering dissent and a polarised populace.
And I am only covering a subset of the world's problems. Interestingly, with the singular exception of the Ukraine, none of these problem States is in the West's heartlands; they are at best peripheral to the concerns of the rich world. This is not to say that there has been no violence in the heart of the West: The brutality in Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc. took place not so long ago.
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