3: India

आठ दलीय गठबन्धनमा यसरी हुँदैछ सत्ताको भागबण्डा
गठबन्धनसँग रेशमको माग : श्रीमतीलाई उपप्रधानमन्त्री, टिकापुरलाई जिल्ला घोषणा

Germany’s Scholz Visits Washington Amid Worries Over Ukraine ‘End Game’ Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrives Friday for a quiet working visit with President Biden, sparking speculation that they will discuss tough questions on how to end the war. .

War in Ukraine Has Changed Europe Forever No event has transformed the continent more profoundly since the end of the Cold War, and there is no going back now. ........ The 27-nation European Union was built over decades with the core idea of extending peace across the continent. The notion that economic exchanges, trade and interdependence were the best guarantees against war lay deep in the postwar European psyche, even in dealings with an increasingly hostile Moscow. .......... That Mr. Putin’s Russia had become aggressive, imperialist, revanchist and brutal — as well as impervious to European peace politics — was almost impossible to digest in Paris or Berlin, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. An increasingly militaristic Russia might swim, quack and look like a duck, but that did not mean it was one. ........ The war in Ukraine has transformed Europe more profoundly than any event since the Cold War’s end in 1989. A peace mentality, most acute in Germany, has given way to a dawning awareness that military power is needed in the pursuit of security and strategic objectives. A continent on autopilot, lulled into amnesia, has been galvanized into an immense effort to save liberty in Ukraine, a freedom widely seen as synonymous with its own. ........ The European Union has provided some $3.8 billion in military assistance to Ukraine. .......... Overall, European states, as part of the union or individually, have pledged more than $50 billion in various forms of aid to Kyiv, imposed 10 rounds of sanctions, absorbed more than eight million Ukrainian refugees (nearly the population of Austria), and largely weaned themselves off Russian oil and gas in a sweeping shift under acute inflationary pressure. .............. the Age of Reordering ......... “Even if the war ends soon, there will be no going back” ....... Finns saw their own Russia-plagued past in Ukraine’s suffering. They saw the impossibility of a workable relationship with the Putin regime. Old assumptions — that a strong defense ability, close cooperation with NATO and a mutually beneficial relationship with Russia could be combined — crumpled. ......... Support for NATO membership surged to over 70 percent. Finland was suddenly too small and too vulnerable to hold that long border. ......... “The Baltic Sea has become a NATO pond,” said Thomas Bagger, the German ambassador to Poland. “That is a big strategic shift.” ......... Ukraine was rapidly accorded formal candidate status to the European Union last year, but big problems, including endemic corruption and a weak judicial system, remain for a process that generally takes several years. ........... “A frozen conflict suits Putin,” said Mr. Delattre, the French ambassador to Germany. “A partially occupied, dysfunctional Ukraine cannot advance toward Europe. So of the three possible outcomes to the war — a Ukrainian victory, a Russian victory and a stalemate — two favor Putin.” .......... an increasingly repressive Russia under severe sanctions and a leader who is a pariah throughout the Western world, with no path to economic reconstruction, will also suffer from a prolonged conflict. But the limits to the Russian capacity to absorb pain are not easily discerned.......... Anti-German sentiment has swept Poland, which sees Berlin as too hesitant in its support of Ukraine, to the point that Germany’s supposed fickleness, at least in the eyes of the nationalist ruling party, is now a central theme of this year’s Polish parliamentary election. ............ Nowhere has the war in Ukraine been more challenging or transformative than in Germany. ........... a thoroughly post-heroic Germany, healing slowly from the Nazi horror, was unable to imagine the idea of a just war. ............ The most powerful country in Europe, Germany has had to reimagine itself overnight, abandoning a peace culture by arming itself and Ukraine in the name of a war for European freedom. It has had to eliminate its dependence on Russia for 55 percent of its gas. It has been forced to contemplate a partial decoupling from China, an enormous market for German cars, to reduce its strategic vulnerability. ............. “Europe took a holiday from defense for 30 years” .......... the Europe “whole and free” of which President George H.W. Bush spoke in 1989, with “borders open to people, commerce and ideas.” ........... “Life in Russia is boring, bad and difficult,” Mr. Rastegavi said. “You can start a war, but it’s not easy to finish.” .

The Excellence of Kamala Harris Is Hiding in Plain Sight Ms. Harris has met (mostly in person) with more than 100 world leaders to repair damage to our international relationships caused by Donald Trump. ........ Through public-private partnerships, she helped raise over $4.2 billion to address the root cause of migration from Central America. ......... Ms. Harris has pushed for federal legislation to secure voting rights, worked to expand access to the child tax and earned-income tax credits, is co-leader of the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, was an integral part of the White House’s push to get Americans vaccinated against Covid, and is the chair of the National Space Council. ....... Presidents Trump, Dwight Eisenhower, Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover and Zachary Taylor never held elected office before becoming president. ....... for most of American history, white men were the only people considered for high-level jobs in what amounted to affirmative action for them. .

The Promise and Peril of Biden’s Climate Policy . After several years during which “It’s infrastructure week!” became a punchline, he passed a major infrastructure bill. .......... most important, Congress enacted the Inflation Reduction Act, which despite its name is mainly a climate bill; we’re finally taking serious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. .......... huge progress in renewable energy and related technologies, notably batteries, means that it now looks almost easy to achieve a low-emission economy. We can now easily envision a society in which people drive electric vehicles and cook on induction ranges, using power generated by solar panels and wind turbines, and experience no sense of sacrifice. ........... we may need a third, bureaucratic miracle to fix the electricity grid and make this whole thing work. .

“Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is imaginable, what is feelable, and how can I loosen the grip of what I already know to find some new, changed relationship,” the poet Jane Hirshfield tells me. Through poetry, she says, “I know something new and I have been changed.” ........ Her book “Ledger” is one I gift to people most often. Hirshfield’s true talent as a poet is her singular ability to imbue the ordinary, the invisible, the forgotten with a sense of majesty and wonder. Her work is littered with lines that force you to stop, to slow down, to notice what you might have missed or overlooked. .

America Is In Over Its Head The war suddenly appeared as a face-off between a mass of disenchanted Russian incompetents and supercharged, savvy Ukrainian patriots........... As battles rage across Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s leaders and some of their Western backers are already dreaming of Nuremberg-style trials of Mr. Putin and his inner circle in Moscow. .......... Only the full, Desert Storm style of deployment of NATO and U.S. troops and weaponry could bring about a comprehensive Ukrainian victory in a short period of time. ......... Absent NATO involvement, the Ukrainian Army can hold the line and regain ground, as it has done in Kharkiv and Kherson, but complete victory is very nearly impossible. ......... What has been a meat grinder in one direction is likely to be a meat grinder in the other. ......... Russia has nearly switched its state onto a war economy setting, while the United States has yet to meet the war production needs of its foreign partners. The war has already used up 13 years’ worth of Stinger antiaircraft missile production and five years’ worth of Javelin missiles, while the United States has a $19 billion backlog of arms delivery to Taiwan. .......... The United States may even have an interest in keeping the fighting going as the war reduces Russia’s ability to operate elsewhere in the world, increases the value of American energy exports and serves as a convenient dress rehearsal for the rallying of allies and coordination of economic warfare against Beijing.......... Moscow now seems mostly focused on maintaining its positions in Luhansk and Donetsk and securing a land bridge to Crimea. These are territories that even in the best of circumstances would be difficult for Ukraine to reincorporate. ......... As it stands today, Ukraine’s economic future appears viable even without the territories currently occupied by Russia. Ukraine has not been turned into a landlocked country and it remains in control of seven of the eight oblasts with the highest G.D.P. per capita. ........... Ukrainians may be better off defining victory as accession to the European Union rather than a complete recapture of all Ukrainian territory. ........... membership in NATO, which since the 1990s has acted as a ratings agency in Europe, guaranteeing countries as safe for investment. ......... convincing Ukrainians that access to the common market and a European Marshall Fund is a reasonable exchange for “complete victory.” .

The Spectacular Fall of Lori Lightfoot . Lightfoot belongs to a group of recently elected Black mayors of major American cities, including Eric Adams in New York, Sylvester Turner in Houston and Karen Bass in Los Angeles. ........ Vallas had run a tough-on-crime, law-and-order campaign in which he told one crowd that his “whole campaign is about taking back our city, pure and simple.” Lightfoot called the remark “the ultimate dog whistle.” ....... “I’m always going to be viewed through a different lens, that the things I do and say, that the toughness that I exhibit, is viewed as divisive, that I’m the mean mayor, that I can’t collaborate with anyone.” .

Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S. Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom. ....... 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met. ......... Her stomach often hurt, and she was unsure if that was because of the lack of sleep, the stress from the incessant roar of the machines, or the worries she had for herself and her family in Guatemala. ......... Largely from Central America, the children are driven by economic desperation that was worsened by the pandemic. This labor force has been slowly growing for almost a decade, but it has exploded since 2021, while the systems meant to protect children have broken down. ......... jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined .......... In town after town, children scrub dishes late at night. They run milking machines in Vermont and deliver meals in New York City. They harvest coffee and build lava rock walls around vacation homes in Hawaii. Girls as young as 13 wash hotel sheets in Virginia. .......... For the past three years, she said, almost every eighth grader in her English learner program of about 100 students was also carrying an adult workload. .......... In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors. ....... Far from home, many of these children are under intense pressure to earn money. They send cash back to their families while often being in debt to their sponsors for smuggling fees, rent and living expenses. .......... H.H.S. regularly ignored obvious signs of labor exploitation ............ about two-thirds of all unaccompanied migrant children ended up working full time. .......... “It’s the new child labor. You’re taking children from another country and putting them in almost indentured servitude.” .......... just a sense that she could not stay in her village any longer. There was not much electricity or water, and after the pandemic began, not much food. ......... The only people who seemed to be getting by were the families living off remittances from relatives in the United States. ........... Child labor is the norm in rural Guatemala, and she herself had started working around the second grade. ......... The growth of migrant child labor in the United States over the past several years is a result of a chain of willful ignorance. Companies ignore the young faces in their back rooms and on their factory floors. Schools often decline to report apparent labor violations, believing it will hurt children more than help. And H.H.S. behaves as if the migrant children who melt unseen into the country are doing just fine. ........... Parents know that they would be turned away at the border or quickly deported, so they send their children in hopes that remittances will come back........ “Even when he shares $50, it’s a huge help,” Mr. Cutzal said. “Otherwise, there are times we don’t eat.” ......... Many sponsors see themselves as benevolent, doing a friend or neighbor a favor by agreeing to help a child get out of a government shelter, even if they do not intend to offer any support. Children often understand that they will have to work, but do not grasp the unrelenting grind that awaits them. ....... Except on farms, children younger than 16 are not supposed to work for more than three hours or after 7 p.m. on school days.......... ecently arrived preteens and teenagers are running industrial dough mixers, driving massive earthmovers and burning their hands on hot tar as they lay down roofing shingles ........... an adult will apply for a job in the morning, and then a child using the same name will show up for orientation that afternoon. ........... if migrant children needed to work full time, it was preferable for them to have jobs at a well-monitored workplace. .......... The Labor Department is supposed to find and punish child labor violations, but inspectors in a dozen states said their understaffed offices could barely respond to complaints, much less open original investigations. When the department has responded to tips on migrant children, it has focused on the outside contractors and staffing agencies that usually employ them, not the corporations where they perform the work. .......... Mostly, though, she keeps to herself. Her teachers do not know many details about her journey to the border. When the topic came up at school recently, Carolina began sobbing and would not say why......... After a week of 17-hour days, she sat at home one night with her aunt and considered her life in the United States. The long nights. The stress about money. “I didn’t have expectations about what life would be like here,” she said, “but it’s not what I imagined.” ......... Now night had fallen and they were eating Froot Loops for dinner. The heat was off, so they wore winter jackets. .

In an Epic Battle of Tanks, Russia Was Routed, Repeating Earlier Mistakes A three-week fight in the town of Vuhledar in southern Ukraine produced what Ukrainian officials say was the biggest tank battle of the war so far, and a stinging setback for the Russians. .

5 Exercises to Keep an Aging Body Strong and Fit Declines in muscle and bone strength start earlier than you might think. Build a smart workout habit now..

How to Make, and Keep, Friends in Adulthood A friendship expert shares strategies for finding connection in a lonely, disconnected world......... people in transition — like those who’ve recently moved, gone through a breakup or who are traveling — tend to be more open to making new friends. ....... In 1990, only 3 percent of Americans said they had no close friends; in 2021, nearly 12 percent said the same. The United States is in the grips of a loneliness crisis that predates the Covid pandemic. .......... people who think friendship happens organically — based on luck — are lonelier. You really have to try and put yourself out there. ........ if you try to connect with someone, you are much less likely to be rejected than you think. .......... when strangers interact, they’re more liked by the other person than they assume. ....... the “acceptance prophecy.” When people assume that others like them, they become warmer, friendlier and more open. ......... joining something that meets regularly over time ........ just texting a friend can be more meaningful than people tend to think. ......... Our communities used to be built-in, not sought after. ......... Social media is a good example. It can be a tool for connection, but mostly we use it to just lurk, which is related to increased loneliness and disconnection. ......... swipe through your contacts, or look at who you were texting this time last year, and reach out. You can say something simple, like: “Hey, we haven’t chatted in a while. I was just thinking about you. How are you?” .

Expert Tips for Curbing Bad Breath Food choices, oral hygiene habits and certain health conditions can play a role — but there are ways to keep dragon breath in check....... A popular and useful litmus test is to cup your hands over your nose and mouth, exhale and then inhale ........ lick (yes, lick) the back of your hand a few times, wait a minute for the water to evaporate so that the odor molecules concentrate, then give the back of your hand a good sniff. If what you smell makes you want to keel over, you may want to do something about your breath ....... Onions and garlic are common bad breath culprits because of their strong aromas ....... alcohol, coffee, tomatoes, citrus fruits and onions ........ Bacteria in the mouth are another common cause of bad breath. These bacteria release what are called volatile sulfur compounds, which “smell like rotten eggs, smelly toes” ........ Brushing your teeth twice a day and flossing once a day can help eliminate these germs as well as the food particles that might be stuck in and around your teeth. .......... Staying hydrated can therefore prevent bad breath, as can rinsing with a mouthwash that treats dry mouth .......... recommended against rinses that contain alcohol, because they “dry the patient’s mouth out, and it’s a vicious cycle — once the alcohol dries it out, the bad breath comes back even worse” ........... Gum disease can be another bad breath culprit. If your gums frequently bleed, you see pockets around your gums or your teeth feel loose, you should see a dentist to determine if you have diseased gums ......... Gum disease can cause bad breath because bacteria get stuck in little pockets around the gums, “making a real stink-a-thon” ............ gargling with salt water .

China Increasingly Seen as Antagonist in Diplomatic Talks Around the World Tensions over China arise in many gatherings of global leaders and diplomats, as Beijing increasingly plays a spoiler role, often siding with Russia. ......... Although Russia’s war in Ukraine has dominated diplomatic dialogue around the globe this past year, the dilemma of dealing with an increasingly assertive China is ever-present — and for many nations, a thornier problem than relations with Moscow. They subscribe to the framing that President Biden and his aides have presented: China is the greatest long-term challenge, and the one nation with the power and resources to reshape the American-led order to its advantage. .......... Last October, Mr. Biden announced sweeping restrictions on selling advanced semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, in what aides called an effort to end China’s access to “foundational technologies.” .

Where Digital Payments, Even for a 10-Cent Chai, Are Colossal in Scale India’s homegrown instant payment system has remade commerce and pulled millions into the formal economy. ........

The little QR code is ubiquitous across India’s vastness.

........ You find it pasted on a tree next to a roadside barber, propped on the pile of embroidery sold by female weavers, sticking out of a mound of freshly roasted peanuts on a snack cart. A beachside performer in Mumbai places it on his donations can before beginning his robot act; a Delhi beggar flashes it through your car’s window when you plead that you have no cash. ......... The codes connect hundreds of millions of people in an instant payment system that has revolutionized Indian commerce. Billions of mobile app transactions — a volume dwarfing anything in the West — course each month through a homegrown digital network that has made business easier and brought large numbers of Indians into the formal economy. ......... The government says about 99 percent of adults now have a biometric identification number, with more than 1.3 billion IDs issued in all. ........... services from hundreds of banks and dozens of mobile payment apps, with no transaction fees. ........ In January, about eight billion transactions worth nearly $200 billion were carried out on the U.P.I. ........ The value of instant digital transactions in India last year was far more than in the United States, Britain, Germany and France. ........... now used by close to 300 million individuals and 50 million merchants ......... nearly 50 percent classified as small or micro payments: 10 cents for a cup of milk chai or $2 for a bag of fresh vegetables. .......... A Siri-like voice declares how much money was instantly received with each payment by QR code. .