For the past several years, there has been a debate stoked by AIDS campaigners and gay rights groups about revoking this section of the penal code (it was introduced by the British in British ruled India in 1861, and is no longer prevalent in the Britain of today). However, attempts by the Government to do a debate on removing this section of the penal code runs aground due to opposition by religious groups (and there are enough people in each religious group to be outraged by the thought of homosexuality), so it would have seemed difficult by the Government to move fast on such a law. And then came this stunning judgment by the Delhi High Court (and interestingly, it uses the same argument as used by several US state courts, using the theory that such laws are violative of many of the equality and fundamental rights of citizens) (link to target):

In a breakthrough judgment, the Delhi High Court on Thursday legalised gay sex among consenting adults holding that the law making it a criminal offence violates fundamental rights. “We declare section 377 of IPC in so far as it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private is violative of Articles 14, 21 and 15 of the Constitution,” a Bench comprising Chief Justice A P Shah and Justice S Murlidhar said.
It further said that this judgement will hold till Parliament chooses to amend the law. “In our view Indian Constitutional Law does not permit the statutory criminal law to be held captive by the popular misconception of who the LGBTs (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) are. “It cannot be forgotten that discrimination is antithesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster dignity of every individual,” the Bench said in its 105-page judgement.

It is pretty much sure that there will be appeals to the Supreme Court by many sections of society, one only hopes that the Government will not try to get this judgment over-turned. At the same time, this is a judgment by the Delhi High Court, and is applicable in the capital city (even though it is a precedent that can be used by organizations all over the country); ultimately it is either the judgment of the Supreme Court or a law passed by Parliament that can ensure coverage across the entire country.

US troops are withdrawing from towns and cities in Iraq, six years after the invasion, having formally handed over security duties to new Iraqi forces. A public holiday - National Sovereignty Day - has been declared, and the capital, Baghdad, threw a giant party to mark the eve of the changeover. US-led combat operations are due to end by September 2010, with all troops gone from Iraq by the end of 2011.
Some 131,000 US troops remain in Iraq, including 12 combat brigades, and the total is not expected to drop below 128,000 until after the Iraqi national election next January. The US Ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, said there would be no major reduction in forces until next year but the pullback was a “milestone”.

The current Iraqi Government is treating the event as a major watershed in its regaining of the total control of Iraq, since the presence of US troops in the cities ensured that the Iraqi Government could not take many steps that they would have liked (such as when the Government wanted to apply pressure on Sunni sections in the cities, they had to face some resistance from the US army). With the general elections also due in the next few months, the Iraqi Government is sure to use the opportunity to claim this withdrawal as a victory.
However, the withdrawal does not really reduce the number of troops in the country, and many of the problems that Iraq faces are still there:
1. Security remains a problem
2. Simmering tension between the Sunni and Shia factions remains in place, increased by the impending elections and signs of fraud
3. The army and police are still not upto the required level of training, and not free from factional bias

A federal jury Thursday found a 32-year-old Minnesota woman guilty of illegally downloading music from the Internet and fined her $80,000 each — a total of $1.9 million — for 24 songs. Jammie Thomas-Rasset’s case was the first such copyright infringement case to go to trial in the United States, her attorney said. Attorney Joe Sibley said that his client was shocked at fine, noting that the price tag on the songs she downloaded was 99 cents.
This was the second trial for Thomas-Rasset. The judge ordered a retrial in 2007 after there was an error in the wording of jury instructions. The fines jumped considerably from the first trial, which granted just $220,000 to the recording companies.

Not sure about whether this will be a success, given that the accused is a single mother who works for an Indian tribe. Also, the RIAA has mostly given up fighting these cases, so this would be one of the few such cases that are still existing.

The scale of humanity’s impact has shocked them. “I was surprised by the magnitude of the depletion of species and its universality around the globe,” Dr. Andrew Rosenberg, an HMAP project leader told CNN. “The extent of it was really quite dramatic. We’ve fundamentally changed ecosystems without realizing that was possible.” HMAP research has revealed a picture of a remarkable wealth of life in the seas as recently as 200 years ago, which has now largely been lost.
Before whaling began in the waters to the south of New Zealand around 1800, the population of whales was roughly 30 times higher than today. In the 17th century the waters around southwest England were home to blue whales, as well as large numbers of porpoise, dolphins, and blue and thresher sharks. Around the world the inshore regions of our seas are estimated to have on average held 10 times the amount of life two or three hundred years ago than they do today.

The oceans are a fundamental factor in the continuance of the human species, whether that be due to the effect they have on global climate, or due to the fact that many geographical concentrations of humanity are dependent on sea life as a major source of nutrition. For the fisheries around the world to have lost so much correlates with earlier research from a couple of years back that stipulated the dangerous position that many of the world’s fishing stocks are in. We already see this in the restrictions on the amount of fishing allowed in many regions around the Atlantic in order to conserve the fish population.
At the same time, the research also found that there is hope. If scientifically imposed restrictions on fishing are imposed, fish stocks have bounced back, with the example of the regeneration of the North Sea (Atlantic) herring stocks. If Governments have the courage to thwart the short term interests of the commercial fishing industry, then fish stocks (and the larger species such as whales and other larger fish) can come back.

The exit polls that started getting published once the stay on them was removed after the 13th (the last phase of election) were again off the mark, since they all projected that the Congress will have a narrow lead over the BJP and would need support from many parties. The BJP of course refused to believe such polls and stood fast in projecting that they will be the victors.
And then came the election results - and they were shocking to everyone. The Congress led poll, the UPA, is almost at the point of having half the seats, while the BJP led alliance, the NDA, is way behind. The Congress gained seats all over the country, with the party looking to reach 200 seats on its own (its best result since it started declining in the 1989 polls); it trounced the BJP in many states that the BJP should count as core constituencies such as Haryana, Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttranchal, and made gains even in states such as Madhya Pradesh and Gujrat. The Congress made real good in states such as Andhra Pradesh, with the partners, the DMK, in Tamil Nadu.
However, the major surprises in this election happened in multiple states; in Uttar Pradesh, the Congress needs to get back its core constituency and it seems that the gamble it took seems to have paid off (it has got 20 seats on its own), in Maharashtra, the MNS seems to have bitten into the seats of the Shiv Sena and the BJP and led the Congress to victory. The biggest surprise has been the Left strongholds of Kerala and West Bengal. Kerala frequently changes between the Congress and the Communist, and in this election, the fight between the different factions of the Communist party propelled the Congress to victory. The biggest surprise seems to have been in West Bengal where the Congress combination with Mamta Banerjee blew away the Communist party in the state where the Communists have held sway since 1977.
What are some of the conclusions from this election:
- Manmohan Singh re-emerges as the Congress Prime Minister with a much stronger support and with less interference from supporting parties
- The BJP leader LK Advani will slowly fade away - he is already 81 years old and unlikely to be the leader in the next election
- Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi are the unquestioned leaders of the country now - even people such as me who do not believe in dynastic based leadership have to acknowledge that they have led their party to a genuine victory
- Nitish Kumar and Naveen Patnaik are new emblems of victory, with strong shows of performance and low individual corruption levels
- The Left, having been used to a much stronger influence in the last Parliament will be a pale self with questions about the leadership becoming much stronger
- Mayawati has faced a severe setback in her quest for national leadership; the same goes for former influential leaders such as Mulayam Singh Yadav (who suffered after inducting Kalyan Singh), Lalu Prasad Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan
- Economic policies and world related policies should remain the same and in fact become more clear and without the holding back due to the Left

Experts have warned that the richly diverse coral reefs of the Coral Triangle around southeast Asia will disappear by the end of the century if action is not taken against climate change. As well as the loss of one of the world’s most diverse underwater ecosystems, the knock on effect would be the collapse of coastal economies that supports around 100 million people, according to the WWF- commissioned study outlined at the World Ocean Conference this week.
The Coral Triangle includes 30 percent of the world’s reefs, 76 percent of global reef building coral species and more than 35 percent of coral reef fish. “In this world, people see the biological treasures of the Coral Triangle destroyed over the course of the century by rapid increases in ocean temperature, acidity and sea level, while the resilience of coastal environments also deteriorates under faltering coastal management. Poverty increases, food security plummets, economies suffer, and coastal people migrate increasingly to urban areas.”

The report concludes that unless we take action to rollback some of the effects of global warming, the direct impact on fishing will cause huge problems to the global fishing economy and impact people who are dependent on fishing as both livelihood and for their food needs, and yet, if one evaluates where we are with trying to roll back emission levels, it is still talk and no action. The Obama administration, for all its talk about making changes in the Bush administration policy of action on global warming, has not taken any concrete action.

At the same time, this inaction was something that the western backers of Pakistan were not able to understand; it seemed like a vindication of the fact that the Taliban was not something that the government or the military seemed to want to tackle; and the pressure exerted was incredible. There was a huge flurry of articles and interviews about how Pakistan is on the verge of collapse, that the institutions have lost credibility and were not able to ensure social justice in the country (which encouraged the growth of a force such as the Taleban), that the nuclear arms hosted by Pakistan were in danger of being taken over by the Taleban, and so on.
There is also another view that is seeming to emerge, that action taken by the Government on the urging of western Governments would turn the population further against the west and against the actions of their own Government; already there is a feeling that this is not Pakistan’s war and that forcing the Pakistani army to fight their own Muslim brothers is just not done. The view was that it needed for people to hear more about the kind of society that the Taleban is bringing on, and that as the Taleban occupied more areas of the country and that people realized that now they were in mortal danger, that this was not something that was happening far away, they would finally turn against the Taleban. This would be a time for the Government to take action.
Currently, the Pakistani Government has declared that the pact in Swat is dead, and fierce military action is underway against the Taleban. There is no common thoughts on whether the Government did indeed plan it this way, or whether the action was taken because the pressure on the Pakistani Government and the army was proving impossible to face; indeed, the fact that the Pakistani military has always been a proponent of the strategic depth option in Afghanistan makes it hard to say either way. It needs to be seen whether the action will go all the way, or will end when Zardari comes back to Pakistan.

This is introspection time for the Republicans; they are down and out right now - and yet, instead of trying to become more inclusive and including people in the center, a section of the Republicans seems to feel that they need to become more conservative; that they need to go back to their core statements of small Government, fiscal and moral conservatism. A lot of these were dramatically over-turned during the Bush years and the heritage of that era still causes a lot of schisms inside the party. However, unless they try to become more inclusive, it is quite likely that the Republican party will cede control of the moderate sections of the American citizenry.
However, it is not that President Obama has a free run now. As the Democratic party has reached out to people in the center, there are now Senators who have opinions on subjects such as gun control, abortion, fiscal responsibility, etc which are closer to what the traditional views of the Republican Party had, and different from what the Democrats used to believe. As a result, if President Obama wanted to get a bill passed on abortion rights, or on gun control, or on climate change, a lot more opposition will now come from within the Democratic Party rather than outside, as was the case in the past.

In radio broadcasts and sermons, Taliban militants have been promoting themselves as Islamic Robin Hoods, defending Pakistan’s rural poor from a ruling elite that they describe as corrupt and oppressive. That message has been resonating throughout the Pakistani countryside, where the culture is deeply conservative and the people are desperately poor. “Justice [in Pakistan] is only for people who have money,” Daoud said, while slicing through handfuls of grass with a small scythe. “We are illiterate,” he added, “but we are hoping that with Islamic sharia law, our lives will get better.”
Enforcement of sharia law is the platform the Taliban have been using to justify recent land-grabs, such as last week’s armed occupation of the district of Buner, some 60 miles from the Pakistani capital. Militants have slowly taken over territory in northwestern Pakistan by first targeting unpopular landlords and bureaucrats, according to Amnesty International, the human rights watchdog. “Its systematic. The Taliban move into an area, they use local existing resentments. They often go in with the guise of being Robin Hoods,” said Amnesty International representative Sam Zarifi. “They scare away some local thieves, they impose very, very quick justice, very harsh justice, and initially in some places they are even welcomed.”

And how are the Taliban fought ? Attempts to reform society to make it more even and less corrupt do not go anywhere (or are not even made); the military has fought the Taliban in parts, but the battle is a battle in which innocents are affected and make them resentment of the efforts of the military; the presence of the US drones that make frequent bombing runs of villages in order to eliminate terrorists are seen as invasions of Pakistani sovereignty, and killing of innocents only serves to inflame the population even more.
What can be done ? The effort has to be bring down the Robin Hood image of the Taliban by reducing corruption levels, by making more development in these regions, and at the same time, confronting them militarily. One wonders whether Pakistan can do all this ?

Health officials around the world worked to contain what appears to be a spreading swine flu outbreak early Monday, while one out of every five residents of Mexico’s most populous city wore masks to protect themselves against the virus. Mexico seems to be the epicenter of the outbreak, where as many as 103 deaths are thought to have been caused by swine flu, the country’s health minister said. An additional 1,614 reported cases have been reported in the country.
The WHO has called the outbreak a “public health emergency of international concern.” Researchers are trying to determine how easily it can jump from person to person. And Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s assistant director-general, said it was too early to predict whether there will be a mild or serious pandemic. The H1N1 strain of swine flu is usually associated with pigs. When the flu spreads person-to-person, instead of from animals to humans, it can continue to mutate, making it harder to treat or fight off. Symptoms of swine flu include fever, lethargy, lack of appetite, coughing, runny nose, sore throat, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, the CDC said.

The problems with such a disease are manifold:
- Many of them start in areas where health services are not available at the desired levels, and growth in the disease can happen quickly before detection happens
- Countries tend to repress such diseases for fear of inflaming citizens or investors or tourists (such as China with-holding information about SARS and bird flu earlier)
- Drugs are not available, since the disease mutates fast and there has not been much research by drug companies in this area
- People are hesitant to take the measures that are required to bring such diseases under control (such as culling stock, and taking the extensive health measures and ceasing contact with other people)

The swine flu is not yet an epidemic (or a pandemic), but is bothering health authorities and Governments enough that they are taking the necessary precautions such as ordering closure of cinema halls in Mexico, quarantining people in other countries who have recently visited Mexico and who show signs of flu-like conditions, and so on. If the disease does turn out to be serious enough, Governments all over the world will have to get more active, and take the necessary steps to enhance their health facilities.