Amid rising coronavirus cases in India, the government has asked people not to panic, saying no community transmission of the virus has been observed and there has only been a few cases of local transmission so far and that it is "not a health emergency" in India at present.
As the pandemic unfolded, the India-China relationship has come under severe stress. To restore normalcy, agreements between the two countries must be respected scrupulously in their entirety. Where the Line of Actual Control is concerned, any attempt to unilaterally change the status quo is unacceptable, declares External Affairs Minister Dr Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
Chennai on Wednesday turned a virtual island after unprecedented rains in 100 years pounded the city, shutting the airport and rendering thousands homeless.
'What happened last Sunday is a great tragedy, an insult to humanity'
'If you destroy the assets in Pathankot, you degrade the combat potential of India; you degrade the war potential of India.'
'It is time India thought big not only about its global clout politically and diplomatically, but also act its size against pin-pricking by anti national elements,' says Group Captain Murli Menon (retd).
'Collateral damage during operations needs to be avoided.' 'Such an objective can be achieved more easily should stone throwers not gear up to en masse oppose security forces.' 'With the conditions being quite sensitive at this stage, the death of one of these boys could easily serve the terrorists in instigating violence,' notes Brigadier S K Chatterji (retd).
'We should expect a cold-blooded, transactional relation that requires a lot of engagement and mutual trust to sustain,' says Constantino Xavier, Fellow, foreign policy, Brookings India.
'Amazingly, along with the yellow army, there was still a huge number of desis, who had flown in from various parts of the world. No, we didn't sell our tickets -- we just changed our colours, for the day,' says Swapna Mitter, who was at the World Cup Final.
Playing 'fearless' cricket has been Bangladesh's war-cry at the ICC World Cup but courage alone will not be enough to upset India and their army of blue-clad fans at the Melbourne Cricket Ground where the teams play their quarter-final on Thursday.
Skeletal remains of 80 bodies have been dug out of a mass grave in a former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam stronghold in Sri Lanka, fuelling speculation that the bodies are of Tamil civilians who disappeared during the war with the rebels.
New Delhi has reached out to neighbours like seldom before while singling Islamabad for criticism at international forums.
30 years ago, after India sent in troops to resolve a crisis in the Maldives, Ambassador B S Prakash was part of an Indian government team assigned to the islands to help the then president. This is what he discovered. A Must Read!
A Ganesh Nadar meets a community of Rohingya refugees on the outskirts of Chennai who are happy to have found a place where their lives are not in danger.
Tibetan refugees in India face a bleak future, says Greg C Bruno.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi returned to the national capital on Thursday after a successful three-day visit to Nepal capital Kathmandu, where he attended the 18th South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Summit.
The Bangladesh government on Sunday claimed the attackers who slaughtered 20 hostages inside a cafe in Dhaka in the country's worst terror attack were members of "homegrown" Islamist terrorist outfits and not Islamic State of Syria and Iraq militants.
As the island heads for elections, two major factors worry Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. One is the division in the Sinhala vote and the other is the prospect of the Tamils and Muslims voting heavily against him.
All the hostages killed during the 12-hour siege by Islamic State terrorists were foreigners, with most being Italian or Japanese.
Former Sri Lanka captain attributes the Indian team's debacle in the first two Tests against England to lack of preparation.
Driven from its self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria, Islamic State is down but not out. Where once they confronted armies, the extremist Islamist group's adherents have now staged hit-and-run raids and suicide attacks. In some cases, the group has claimed responsibility for atrocities, including the bombings of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka that killed at least 253 people. Its involvement is not always proven, but even if the link is ideological rather than operational, Islamic State still poses a security threat in many countries.
In a minor relief for residents of flood-hit Chennai, the rains have stayed away for the last few hours.
'Vietnam has become an adjective as well as a verb -- the Americans, for instance, were driven by the passion to do a 'Vietnam' on the Soviet Union when that country invaded Afghanistan in 1979.'
At a crowded beachfront mass, Pope Francis canonised Sri Lanka's first saint on Wednesday.
'The incidents have remained confined to the paramilitary forces on both sides with both the armies scrupulously avoiding getting involved. While this incident has been going on, the LOC has been reasonably quiet. Cross border firing achieves no tactical or strategic aims and is more a symptom of hostility. Unfortunately, India has to learn to live with this. Like Israel, we must construct shelters for the border populations and be ready to retaliate in kind,' says Colonel Anil A Athale (retd).
South Korea's Asian Games cricket experiment ended in defeat to Sri Lanka on Tuesday, but after their collection of baseball players and weekend enthusiasts took eight wickets off the Twenty20 world champions, coach Julian Fountain believes the sport could truly flourish here.
Looking at the most touching Hindi movies inspired by true-life events.
'If the nub of India's sensitivity over the Chinese presence in Doklam is the enhanced threat to the Siliguri Corridor, a vital link to the northeast, does it serve the national purpose to have the districts along it, and then much of the tribal northeast, in turmoil?' asks Shekhar Gupta.
The decision to not attend the forum attended by 28 heads of state and 130 national delegations is a clear break from its usual policy of going along with the crowd.
In insight into PNS Ghazi, the Pakistan Navy's prized submarine that now lies embedded in the Vizag seabed about 1.5 nautical miles from the breakwaters.
Voters in Sri Lanka's Tamil majority Northern Province on Saturday began voting in the first local elections in 25 years to elect a council to govern the former war zone, four years after the military defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam after decades of bloody civil war.
The ongoing daily spat between Narendra Modi and the Congress party serves to cover up the real problems being faced by the people, says A Ganesh Nadar
'Will anything change for you after the election?' And the man said 'Kuch nahin badlega.' And he had a smile on his face. He knew nothing was going to change.
'The question now is how long the exercise in perfection he created will last once his influence isn't there any longer,' says Sunanda K Datta-Ray.
A double-quick analysis of the Lankan election results would show that the relatively narrow victory margin of challenger Maithripala Sirisena was made up by the three minority communities of Tamils, Muslims and Christians, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
Protester Sasi Perumal's death has given a new fillip to the pro-prohibition movement, which was beginning to draw attention across Tamil Nadu after different political parties began to make it a part of their poll manifesto for next year, says N Sathiya Moorthy.
B S Prakash takes a tongue-in-cheek look at what India's neighbours think about the proposal of a SAARC satellite.
'These ISIS terrorists want to smash Western civilisation, smash India. For the time being though, their main target would be the US and Europe.'
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