Student Commentary

On 9th January 2015, in front of the Jeddah Mosque, a Saudi activist and blogger named Raif Badawi was publicly given the first fifty out of the thousand lashes he was sentenced with, for ‘insulting Islam through electronic channels.’ The disturbing incident instantaneously became viral on social media and the #JeSuisRaif movement gained momentum. Saudi [...]

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“In the pandemic economy, face masks are like bars of gold. Hoarders are hoarding them. Governors are bartering for them. Hospital workers desperately need them.” – Michael Schulman The N95 mask is very important armor in battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Instances of hoarding and black marketing of masks are rising in India. Healthcare personnel risk [...]

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The conundrum that India’s media has found itself in during the pandemic has been nothing unusual. India’s mainstream media has been mired in distrust for a large part of this decade. The fledgling state of the media has been a limited focus since the World Press Freedom Index has rated India lower in 2020 than [...]

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Everything will be tokenized and connected by a blockchain one day.   -Fred Ehrsam With the rapid digitization, we saw a new technology called Blockchain quickly emerge. This peer-to-peer distributed ledger has provided a platform to create transactions that are safe, secure, and immutable. Blockchain gave rise to a concept called “smart contracts”, a major contributor [...]

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(c) Flickr (The Jonestown Institute)

Trump’s presidency has always been one straight out of a cult leaders’ playbook. When late SF journalist Phil Tracy exposed the notoriously narcissistic Jonestown cult-leader, Jim Jones, Jones urged his followers to flee from California to Guyana, South America. When last month, Twitter exposed Donald Trump’s false claims about mail-in ballots, Trump threatened to revoke [...]

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Technology has always been a necessary evil but the advent of Deepfake has tilted the balance more towards the evil side. Deepfakes are an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technology used to morph a person’s face onto another and manipulate voice recordings. Deepfakes have been increasingly used to create doctored videos and sound recordings which on [...]

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When COVID-19 is crippling  countries and the world is in an arduous condition, China is paving its way to be the next superpower. The country has revived from the coronavirus pandemic and has restarted to build itself economically and politically. To this effect, the country can be seen consolidating its control over the most controversial [...]

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Amidst the pandemonium arisen due to the notoriety of the COVID–19 virus, we cannot afford to be lost on the significance of how there continue to be deep-rooted pernicious influences that plague the lesser privileged strata of Indian and Nepalese societies. “Witch hunting” is one of such numerous influences and has persisted through the centuries, [...]

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On 29th April, Côte d’Ivoire announced its withdrawal from the special declaration of jurisdiction provided under Article 34(6) of the ‘Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights on the Establishment of an African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights’. Article 34(6) of the Protocol reads that “the State shall make a declaration [...]

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