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116 Posts
From Darwin’s world

From Darwin’s world

Written By : Riaz Quadir Paris, France Book Review Rediscovering Darwin – By David Elliot Loye If you are going to read only one book this year, or in the next two years or the next five, let David Elliot Loye’s “Rediscovering Darwin” be the one. As has happened many times before in human history, original ideas get hijacked, transformed, mangled, suppressed or misrepresented by those who came after. The greater the ideas the greater the chances of any of this or a combination of these happening to them. The irony is that such distortions happen more often by the…
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Heroes and A Tale of Migration – Part 1

Heroes and A Tale of Migration – Part 1

A heroic act, like those superheroes frequently do on-screen, performed in real life, the Spiderman, captured on mobile phones, posted on social media, shared thousands and millions of times, praise and glory showered on, a meeting with the President the next day, promise of immediate nationality, work offer from fire brigade company, media houses fighting for exclusive interviews, people in the street asking for selfies,... thus the life of Mamoudou Gassama, 22 years old young man from Mali, has changed drastically, from illegal immigrant to naturalized citizen. France, the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, opened its arm to this…
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Aadhaar Card and Identity

Aadhaar Card and Identity

Debkumar Mitra (Debkumar is a Kolkata-based writer) In the mid-1990s the government of Iceland had granted deCODE Genetics exclusive access to the medical records, some of them hundreds of years old, of the tiny European nation. The move caused a furore inside and outside Iceland with many calling it to be the sellout of the genetic identity of every Icelander. A woman moved the supreme court of Iceland against deCODE and the court ruled in favour of her. The controversy did not die down with it, since then whenever the researchers of the Human Genome Project wanted to study the…
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The Effect of China’s Ban on Foreign-Trash Import

The Effect of China’s Ban on Foreign-Trash Import

Dr. Trina Biswas Department of Agricultural Economics & Agribusiness, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA. Contact: [email protected] Over the last several decades the ‘Global South’ countries have been the dumping ground of toxic or hazardous wastes coming from the ‘Global North’ countries. For years China topped the list of Global South countries as the world's top destination for recyclable trash followed by countries like Ghana, India, Philippines, etc. As it is cheaper to export garbage to China and as the country has no equivalent when it comes to waste-management capacity, China has always been thetop destination for foreign garbage or…
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The Wedding

The Wedding

Written by : Riaz Quadir photo credit : Shutterstock In the course of history, Empires rise and fall with periodic regularity. But rarely has one falling, passed on the baton to its wayward cousin across the ocean to carry on and complete its original blueprint for the Empire. The Anglo-American experience is that exception. Lately, it had been faltering, but today the project got a special shot in the arm. It was a wedding that (like in the old days) was going to cement the two countries, at least at a people’s level. The groom was a British Prince, the…
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Hawking was a neuroscientist

Hawking was a neuroscientist

Written by : Arghya Manna Are we conscious of our being? Though neuroscientists, philosophers and neuro-philosophers have debated over the topics for decades, the answer has not come. Who thenunderstood consciousness? Virginia Woolf was someone who did. She was one of the most important English writers of the twentieth century, who had exploited consciousness in her narratives. According to Woolf, consciousness— simultaneously establishes and questions our being—is the accumulation of our scattered thoughts. She noted in her diary that when she looked inside herself, what she found was consciousness never stood still, rather it was a turbulent current. Woolf explained…
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