New Delhi: In what is being seen as a modicum of good news in the wake of strained India-US ties, Donald Trump has appointed close aide Sergio Gor as US ambassador to India, the “world’s most populous region”, according to the US President.
“After a long spell, there is some semblance of good news for India,” Harsh V. Pant, vice president of studies and foreign policy at the New Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation is quoted as saying in a report in The New York Times. “Ambassadorial roles are important in relationships going through a rough patch, and all the better that he has Mr Trump’s ears.”
“Mr Gor was valued by the president for his perceived loyalty, and his willingness to freeze out of government people he considered insufficiently pure in that regard. But he was also criticized by others as capricious in his decisions,” reads the report.
“And he fought bitterly with Elon Musk, Mr Trump’s billionaire adviser who ran an effort that ripped through existing government systems in the name of cutting costs and who himself often fought with others in the government,” it adds.
In The Washington Post, Pranshu Verma notes that Gor has his task cut out—given the current state of India-US relations.
“The United States and India seemed primed to strengthen ties when Trump returned to the White House, but in recent weeks, the relationship has soured after Trump levied 50 percent tariffs on India for what he cited as punishment for New Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil. The Modi government has responded by signalling it will strengthen relations with the BRICS bloc, which includes Russia, China and Brazil,” he writes, proceeding to lay out the other complications in the relationship between the two nations.
The Economist weighs in on regulation of the online gaming industry in India.
India’s “booming money-based gaming industry”—which includes 2,000 startups—was gutted overnight after passage of a bill which bans all online money games. “Why the heavy-handed response,” asks the article, adding that the “biggest loser might be the state itself”.
“The Indian gaming-industry body claims that gaming firms contribute more than 200bn rupees annually in taxes (roughly 1% of all tax receipts). It is unclear whether the public-health and societal benefits from an outright ban will compensate for the loss of revenue,” it says.
“There are concerns that gamers could instead just get their kicks from shady, unregulated offshore outlets—many of which are already easily accessible from India. That would do little to quell worries about public health and could exacerbate problems such as money laundering.”
Researchers in Tamil Nadu are working feverishly to scrape the enamel off a 2,500-year-old tooth. The reason? It could hold the key to understanding the early inhabitants of Keeladi—an archaeological site in the state that has “emerged as a political flashpoint”, reports Cherylann Mollan in the BBC.
“Researchers at Madurai Kamaraj University say the tooth belongs to one of two human skulls that they have used as models to digitally reconstruct faces,” says the report, adding that archaeologists have excavated about 50 urns from the site so far.
Researchers at the university are “now extracting DNA from human bones and other goods found in these urns to better understand who the inhabitants of Keeladi were and what their lifestyle was like,” reads the report. “But a more profound quest seems to be under way.”
“We want to understand our ancestry and the migration routes of our ancestors,” professor G. Kumaresan, who heads the genetics department at the university, told the BBC. “It’s a journey towards answering the larger question of ‘who are we and how did we come to exist here’.”
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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