Once Mazar-i-Sharif falls, some isolate pockets of resistance may remain, which the Taliban would tackle through political work or coercion, asserts Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar.
'I do not agree that the intent was to send a political message to China that the US treats friends and foes alike.' 'In any case, such acts do not ruffle a feather in China,' observes Commodore Venugopal Menon (retd).
England scored through Will Calnan's (25th minute) field strike and penalty corner conversion by Luke Taylor (44th) to register the comfortable win.
London Olympic champion and world record holder Elena Lashmanova of Russia continued her dominance, clinching gold in the 20km walk race at the 14th IAAF World Athletics Championships in Moscow on Tuesday.
Pusarla Sindhu romped into the final of the World Badminton Championships, trouncing China's Chen Yu Fei 21-7, 21-14 in semi-finals, in Basel, on Saturday.
Major General Sujan Singh Uban, a legendary veteran of the Second World War, was a natural choice to raise, train and command the Special Frontier Force and mould them into a well oiled fighting machine, recalls his son Inspector General Gurdip Singh Uban (retd), who led SFF troops during the Kargil War.
Under the ambit of probe is how former exec Eric Alexander obtained medical records of woman who was raped by an Uber driver in Delhi in 2014
India needs to shed its policy of lethargy and inhibitions to engage the Taliban with an intent to maintain its influence in Afghanistan. This would not just put a spanner in Pakistani designs, but also incentivise the Taliban not to be the puppets of GHQ, Rawalpindi, asserts Colonel Nikhil Apte (retd), who served on the Af-Pak desk at the Military Operations Directorate.
The purchase or construction of houses by large numbers of people can add meaningfully to India's economic growth, points out Neelkanth Mishra.
Defending champion P V Sindhu marched into the final of the women's singles at the US $120,000 Macau Open Grand Prix Gold on Saturday.
India's P V Sindhu squandered an 11-6 lead in the second game before going down 18-21, 21-18, 21-8 in 68 minutes to former world number one Akane Yamaguchi.
The 16-year-old, son of a farmer based in Meerut, first combined with compatriots Arjun Singh Cheema and Anmol Jain to log a total of 1731 to win the team gold and fetched the individual gold with 239.8 in the eight-man individual final to finish with two gold medals.
With this subdued forecast, India is likely to record its worst growth performance since the 1991 liberalisation. However, it is among the only two major economies, which will register a positive growth rate in 2020. The other being China, for which the IMF has projected a growth rate of 1.2 per cent.
Mbappe and Benzema inspire France to 2-0 win against Finland
World number one Novak Djokovic blasted past qualifier Alexei Popyrin 6-4, 6-2 to reach the second round of the Japan Open Tennis Championships in Tokyo.
'The growth drivers are mostly invisible, but the growth is undeniable at least for now,' notes Debashis Basu.
'It is nobody's contention that uncomfortable questions regarding national security should not be raised. But that is a topic for another day and another time when the immediate threat has faded,' argues Vivek Gumaste.
'Modi has presided over an ultra-nationalism that has stunted India's growth, been unable to change the country's external situation, brought foreign intervention into Indian affairs,' explains Aakar Patel.
Eight seeded Saina defetaed Okuhara 21-15, 21-14 late last night to improve her head-to-head record to 6-1 against her Japanese opponent.
India, which appears to have been pushed back to being the world's sixth biggest economy in 2020, will again overtake the UK to become the fifth largest in 2025 and race to the third spot by 2030, a think tank said on Saturday. India had overtaken the UK in 2019 to become the fifth largest economy in the world but has been relegated to 6th spot in 2020. "India has been knocked off course somewhat through the impact of the pandemic. "As a result, after overtaking the UK in 2019, the UK overtakes India again in this year's forecasts and stays ahead till 2024 before India takes over again," the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said in an annual report published on Saturday. The UK appears to have overtaken India again during 2020 as a result of the weakness of the rupee, it said.
Fitch Ratings on Thursday said the resurgence of COVID-19 infections may delay India's economic recovery, but won't derail it, as it kept the sovereign rating unchanged at 'BBB-' with a negative outlook. It projected a 12.8 per cent recovery in GDP in the fiscal year ending March 2022 (FY22), moderating to 5.8 per cent in FY23, from an estimated contraction of 7.5 per cent in 2020-21. Fitch had in June last year revised outlook for India to 'negative' from 'stable' on grounds that the coronavirus pandemic had significantly weakened the country's growth outlook and exposed the challenges associated with a high public debt burden.
A summary of sports events and persons who made news on Sunday.
Far from mourning the end of her brief reign as the world number one, shuttler Saina Nehwal is happy that she at least made it to where no other non-Chinese could reach in the last four years.
The remaining qualification rounds will be followed by the six-man final on Sunday. 81 shooters are in the fray.
Indian elections are won and lost on 'negative' imageries and campaigns - but not certainly on 'negativity' as a political trait and electoral creed, asserts N Sathiya Moorthy.
Hitting the target with monotonous regularity, Indian shooters' dominance in a phenomenal 2019, at times, made world events look like domestic tourneys. Indian shooting's best show at the Olympics remains the two medals won at London in 2012, but if the shooters' exploits in recent months are anything to go by, the country can easily emulate or better that in Tokyo.
Did Vinod Sehgal die in Tsangdgar or was he taken PoW to Tibet or China? Why has the IAF kept so quiet for all these years, asks Claude Arpi.
Most rating agencies had projected contraction in India's GDP for the first quarter of 2020-21.
'Some have speculated that it has to do with Doklam and the 2019 elections.' 'That Modi asked Xi not to embarrass him by sending the Chinese army into Bhutan again, this time rolling over our resistance,' says Aakar Patel.
The World No 25 pair of Satwiksairaj and Chirag put a gallant fight in the second game but couldn't stop the two-time All England Champions from Indonesia, going down 12-21, 24-26 in a 42-minute match.
It was a triumphant return to the tour for Djokovic
'We have unleashed a nastiness and viciousness in ourselves that had been bottled up before.' 'This government has helped uncork it, possible forever, and to my mind that is its most significant achievement.'
Indian women shuttlers advanced to the Badminton Asia Team Championship quarter-finals despite a 1-4 loss to Japan in which P V Sindhu notched the country's only win Alor Setar, Malaysia, on Thursday.
Images and a round-up of all the World Cup qualifiers played across continents on Tuesday.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is very much aligned with the foreign policy priorities of the Modi 2.0 government, says Sana Hashmi.
With the world's worst outbreak of COVID pandemic stalling a nascent economic recovery, the government has begun assessing the impact of the second wave of infections on different sectors and may look at providing support at an appropriate time to segments requiring fiscal help. Some of the economic indicators, including the Goods and Services Tax (GST) collections, still provide confidence and incoming data will throw some more light on the state of the economy, sources said. Services sectors like hospitality, tourism and aviation which had just started recovering were hit hard by the second wave of COVID, the sources said, adding these segments might need some support on an urgent basis from the government.
While most economies contracted in the second quarter of 2020, the Chinese economy grew by 3.2 per cent.
Stating that India's economic stimulus was not adequate, Banerjee said, the measures did not increase consumption spending of lower income people as the government was not willing to put money in the hands of the low income population.
Far from mourning the end of her brief reign as the World No 1, shuttler Saina Nehwal is happy.
Aruna Tanwar enters Taekwondo quarters.
