Seated in the domed, red sandstone government building unveiled by the British Raj less than two decades before India threw off imperial rule, S. Jaishankar, the Indian foreign minister, needs no reminder of how the tides of history sweep away antiquated systems to usher in the new.

Such, he believes, is today’s transformative moment. A “world order which is still very, very deeply Western,” as he put it in an interview, is being hurried out of existence by the impact of the war in Ukraine, to be replaced by a world of “multi-alignment” where countries will choose their own “particular policies and preferences and interests.”

Certainly, that is what India has done since the war in Ukraine began on Feb. 24. It has rejected American and European pressure at the United Nations to condemn the Russian invasion, turned Moscow into its largest oil supplier and dismissed the perceived hypocrisy of the West. Far from apologetic, its tone has been unabashed and its self-interest broadly naked.

“I would still like to see a more rules-based world,” Mr. Jaishankar said. “But when people start pressing you in the name of a rules-based order to give up, to compromise on what are very deep interests, at that stage I’m afraid it’s important to contest that and, if necessary, to call it out.”

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posted by f.sheikh

NEW DELHI — On a freezing December day on a remote Himalayan mountain ridge, Indian and Chinese soldiers fought with sticks, stones, clubs and bare fists. Scores were bloodied and injured. The incident, according to the Indian authorities, occurred on Dec. 9, when about 300 soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army of China attempted to occupy Yangtse, a mountainous border post on the disputed India-China border in the Tawang area in northeastern India.

Soldiers from China and India, nuclear-armed Asian neighbors, have been clashing on their disputed border with an alarming frequency owing to the rise of aggressive nationalisms in President Xi Jinping’s China and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India. Insecurity is also growing in New Delhi and Beijing over intensified construction of border infrastructure by both countries. And mutual suspicion is deepening as China contemplates the increasing strategic cooperation between the United States and India as competition and conflict between Washington and Beijing intensifies.

China and India share a disputed 2,100-mile border, which has neither been settled on a map nor marked on its difficult mountainous and glacial terrain. Broadly, it runs between China’s Tibet Autonomous Region and the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh in the northeast, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and the federally administered territory of Ladakh in the north. Neither the colonial British authorities nor the leaders of independent India were able to agree on the detailed alignment of a border with China.

A few years after China invaded Tibet in 1950, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India ordered official maps of India’s borders to be updated, and India laid claim to the alkaline desert of Aksai Chin, which lies between its northern Ladakh region and China’s Xinjiang autonomous region. China contested India’s claim by displaying its control and possession of Aksai Chin, where it had completed a strategic highway linking Tibet with Xinjiang by 1957.

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posted by f.sheikh

Here’s some history. In the mid-1990s and early 2000s, the United States and many European nations agreed to lower the valuation of loans they had provided to the poorest nations — something that is known in finance as “taking a haircut.” Since then, many G-7 nations have been reluctant to provide large loans again, so African and southeast Asian countries have increasingly turned to China and private lenders for funding. China is now the world’s largest government creditor to developing nations, accounting for nearly 50 percent of these loans, up from 18 percent in 2010, according to the World Bank. These Chinese loans were often at high interest rates. It would have been a stretch for poor nations to repay them even in good times, and now it’s impossible after a global pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine have decimated low-income economies where people are struggling to afford food.

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Interesting article by Todd Lencz on embryo selection before birth that raises ethical as well as religious questions. Is there a line dictated by God which humans cannot cross? (f.sheikh).

‘As long as it’s healthy!’ Up until now, this cliché was merely a generic – if somewhat ominous – way for expecting parents and their loved ones to talk about their future children. But what if that outcome was not merely an expression of wishful thinking, but something that parents could control? Imagine a fertility doctor examining the embryos that could develop into your children, providing you with a menu. One has a heightened risk for schizophrenia but a very low risk for cancer; another has relatively low risks for these diseases but a three-fold increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease; and a third has roughly average risks for all of these diseases. Oh, and the first two are boys, while the third is a girl.

While this may sound like a science-fiction movie, several private companies have begun selling services that resemble this scenario. Such companies cater to couples undergoing in vitro fertilisation (IVF), offering to generate a genetic risk profile for each of their frozen, days-old embryos. It’s estimated that more than 100 families have already taken these tests, and some resulting babies have been announced. But is it really possible to offer such a ‘menu’ in a way that provides meaningful, scientifically valid information? This question has been the focus of our work as geneticists in the past few years. To the extent that the answer is yes, it raises an even more challenging question: should this be allowed?

To better consider these questions, we’ll review some key arguments for and against this kind of risk profiling – called ‘polygenic embryo screening’, or PES. (Terminology in this new field is not fixed, and the procedure is also sometimes called ‘preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic diseases’, or PGT-P.) We will attempt to clarify which arguments are relevant and convincing, and which require further study. We will also consider this technology in the context of the historical evils of eugenics. Since the word eugenics is too often used in a manner that sheds more heat than light in discussions of genetic technologies, we will first lay out what is known (and not yet known), before engaging with the most inflammatory aspects of the debate.

Despite ample initial scepticism, recent science has demonstrated the potential utility of profiling human embryos for disease risk. Importantly, if these profiles are used to select the ‘healthiest’ embryo from a given IVF cycle, the child to be born is expected to have better health than a randomly selected sibling embryo. However, unbridled enthusiasm would be misguided: these bright predictions might only be fulfilled under certain conditions, and there is a risk that consumers using these services will be misled about their benefits. Further, widespread implementation of embryo screening will not only complicate IVF clinical procedures, it could also have social and psychological effects that reverberate far beyond the clinic.

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