Kill switch, insurance as tools to fight digital arrest

A high-level committee constituted by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to look into the menace of 'digital arrest' is considering the idea of a 'kill switch' that will allow users at the receiving end of a potential digital scam to immediately stop all financial transactions from their accounts. 

A question at Davos: Are we back to the era of kings?

The return of kings and lords is reshaping the international landscape. Neo-royalism concentrates power at the top in sovereign leaders ruling through courts and loyalists. 

In Noida death, faltering of the city's promise

What makes a city a home? At its most basic, this would include, not necessarily in that order, economic opportunities, assurance of security, community. For 27-year-old technology professional Yuvraj Mehta, Noida was that place until Friday, when driving home to Sector 150, his SUV veered off course in the dense fog and into a deep construction pit full of water. Even though rescue teams responded within minutes of his call to his father, lack of requisite infrastructure became the impediment: Mehta died over two hours later, still calling for help. The postmortem points to the brutal aftermath of a civic failure built up over years of warnings ignored, prior accidents forgotten and responsibility deferred.

Slashed NEET-PG cut-offs point to a larger absence

While Neet-PG cut-offs have been slashed in previous years to fill vacant postgraduate seats, the move this year has whipped up a social media storm. A recent PIL in the Supreme Court by a group of doctors posits that this move risks compromising the integrity of the profession and threatens public health.

Critics argue that a disproportionate number of these vacancies exist in private medical colleges, and that lowering cutoffs risks allowing students with inadequate foundational understanding to enter postgraduate training. 

The gutkha nation and the welfare state

In rural India, the bottom 40 per cent households spend just 2.5 per cent of monthly per capita consumption expenditure on education, while spending 4 per cent on pan, tobacco and intoxicants. 

Before AI Summit, an ethics checklist

AI Ethics is one of those blue-sky ideas that appears in almost every Al governance conversation but is rarely defined with any precision. As India prepares to chair the AI Summit next month, the term must move beyond abstract principles into practical, enforceable, people-centred standards.

Any ethical framework must guarantee consent, community control over data, fair value sharing and protection against extractive practices.

Faster warming, faster breeding: Climate change upends Antarctic penguins

Warming Temperatures are forcing Antarctic penguins to breed earlier and that's a big problem for two of the cute tuxedoed species that face extinction by the end of the century, a study said. 

Trump's great trade reset made China great again

Upon taking office, Trump signalled an intent to build on a bipartisan project in DC - isolating China. His actions have had the opposite effect.