- Arvind's Newsletter
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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.How a cross-border love story illustrates the extent of WhatsApp surveillance in India: How private is your chat?
What started as a remarkable tale of cross-border love ended up as a warning against the extent of mass surveillance in India.
India deported a 19-year old Pakistani woman, Iqra Jeewani. Jeewani had eloped with an Indian man, and had been living in Bengaluru for four months. However, she was given away by the WhatsApp calls she was making back home to her family in Pakistan. Using this, Indian authorities were able to hone in on her.
The fact that Indian authorities were able to pinpoint and pick out a WhatsApp number from a city has led cybersecurity experts to infer that it is plausible that the metadata from the popular messaging platform is being used for mass surveillance. While WhatsApp encrypts user communication, several instances have now shown that it still collects enough data about its users to allow governments to mount highly effective surveillance and thus put user privacy at risk.
2.Which is the world’s best-performing stock market? It’s…Turkey’s, which has soared about 70% in the last year, Asia Times reports. The country has been through a lot: a currency crisis two years ago, rampant inflation, and, most recently, earthquakes that killed tens of thousands. But its economy has benefited from close trade relationships with China, Russia, and the Middle East following US sanctions on the Kremlin.
3 Nalanda: The university that changed the world. More than 500 years before Oxford University was founded, India's Nalanda University was home to nine million books and attracted 10,000 students from around the world.
Founded in 427 CE, Nalanda is considered the world's first residential university, a sort of medieval Ivy League institution home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era's most revered scholars. As the Dalai Lama once stated: "The source of all the [Buddhist] knowledge we have, has come from Nalanda." Read on
4.Americans (but not Indians ) are ignoring the one true “superfood”: Pulses.
"Superfoods" are nonsense. No specific food can single-handedly propel you to super health, but there is one food group that comes pretty darn close: pulses.
Popular pulses include chickpeas, beans, lentils, and peas. Their regular consumption is associated with reduced rates of obesity, heart disease, and overall mortality.
Legumes, the plants that produce pulses, also fix their own nitrogen from the air. This means that they require vastly less fertilizer than other crops.
5.One year of war in Ukraine: We provide a brief update on the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which escalated an armed conflict which simmered in Ukraine's east since 2014. The move triggered what has become Europe's largest land war since World War II.
The past 12 months have included a rebuffed initial Russian surge, a Ukrainian counteroffensive, and intense fighting in Ukraine's south and east. See a map of how the battle has evolved over time here.
Western intelligence suggests military casualties—those either dead or wounded—are nearing 200,000 for Russia and have reached 100,000 for Ukraine. International groups have confirmed the deaths of more than 8,000 Ukrainian civilians but believe the true toll to be higher. The U.S. tried to isolate Russia by imposing sweeping sanctions along with its Western partners. But the rest of the world has taken a more neutral approach to the war, including India and China, as this graphic shows.
Estimates suggest at least 8 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced, while 8 million others have fled the country. Ukraine's population was above 41 million before the invasion.
Total Western aid—including military, economic, and humanitarian support—has topped $135B. Of that total, more than $75B has been provided by the US.
Putin, in recent days, has cast the war in a historical context, referring to countries adjacent to the country as originally Russian land. Analysts have warned Russia is ramping up for a renewed offensive while also questioning its remaining military capacity.
Despite the significant risks posed by protesting the war in Russia, thousands have spent the last year resisting their government's invasion of Ukraine. (Watch)
Finally See photos from a year of war here
