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FirstUp: Trump envoy Steve Witkoff likely to visit Russia and other big headlines
The trip comes just before the US deadline for Russia to stop its war in Ukraine. Reuters/File Photo
It is a busy Wednesday.
Donald Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, is expected to visit Moscow today. The trip comes just before the US deadline for Russia to stop its war in Ukraine.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is likely to announce a 25 basis points cut in the repo rate today after its Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting ends.
Malaysia's King, Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar, is set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow today.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate Kartavya Bhavan today. It is part of the Central Vista Project, which began in 2019 to upgrade Lutyens' Delhi.
Today also marks 80 years since the first atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Here's a look at the events:
Trump envoy's Russia visit
Steve Witkoff, US President Donald Trump's envoy for peace missions, may travel to Russia today as the United States keeps urging the Kremlin to agree toas a peace deal in Ukraine.
Witkoff's visit comes at a time when frustration is growing in the White House. Six months of diplomacy under Trump have not led to a peace agreement or even a ceasefire to end Moscow's full invasion of Ukraine, which began in February 2022.
Last month, Trump gave Russian President Putin a 50-day deadline, warning of sanctions and tariffs. This included possible secondary sanctions on top buyers of Russian energy, such as China and India, if the Kremlin did not agree to a ceasefire.
Witkoff's visit comes at a time when frustration is growing in the White House. Reuters/File Photo
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday that Russia does 'not rule out the possibility' of Witkoff visiting Moscow later this week.
When asked what message Witkoff would bring to Moscow, and whether Russia could avoid more sanctions, Trump said on Sunday, 'Yeah, get a deal where people stop getting killed.
RBI likely to announce repo rate
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is expected to announce a 25 basis point cut in the repo rate today after its Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting ends.
A report from the State Bank of India (SBI) earlier said that an early rate cut could mean an 'early Diwali' by helping credit growth, especially since the festive season in FY26 will begin sooner than usual.
The report said, 'We expect RBI to continue frontloading with a 25 bps cut in August policy.'
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It also noted that Diwali, one of India's biggest festivals, usually brings a rise in consumer spending. Lower interest rates before Diwali help push up credit demand.
'Empirical evidence suggests a strong pick-up in credit growth whenever the festive season has been early and has been preceded by a rate cut,' the report added.
PM Modi to inaugurate Kartavya Bhavan
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the Kartavya Bhavan today.
The new building is designed to bring important ministries such as Home Affairs and External Affairs under one roof, to promote more efficient and sustainable governance.
Kartavya Bhavan is part of the Central Vista Project, which began in 2019 to upgrade the infrastructure of Lutyens' Delhi.
It is part of the Central Vista Project, which began in 2019 to upgrade Lutyens' Delhi. PTI
By placing key ministries in one location, the project hopes to improve coordination, support teamwork, and do away with the issues caused by old and scattered offices.
According to an official statement, the modern office complex will cover around 1.5 lakh square metres and will include two basement levels and seven floors in total.
Putin, Malaysia's King to hold talks
Malaysia's King, Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar, will become the first monarch from the country to make a state visit to Russia, as both nations try to build stronger ties in a changing global environment.
He is set to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow today.
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The Kremlin's press service said the meeting will focus on improving Russian-Malaysian relations and will cover ongoing international and regional matters.
After visiting Moscow, Sultan Ibrahim will head to Kazan in Tatarstan, one of Russia's autonomous regions with a Muslim-majority population.
80 years of Hiroshima atomic bombing
Today marks 80 years since the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Around 80,000 people were killed immediately by the blast, and about 35,000 more were injured. By the end of that year, at least another 60,000 had died due to radiation exposure.
A huge expanse of ruins left the explosion of the atomic bomb on August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima. File image/AP
On this day, the United States became the first and only country to use an atomic bomb in war.
With inputs from agencies
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Scroll.in
2 minutes ago
- Scroll.in
The twisted tale of two men tied together by Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an allegory for today's world
Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Donald Albury died within months of each other. The former lived to the ripe old age of 93, and passed away in January this year [2010]; the latter died in May 2009, at the age of 88. Neither of them were household names in their respective countries, yet they were noticed in obituaries scattered across newspapers. However much newspapers have changed over the last few decades, surrendering their place to television, cable, the Internet, and the mobile phone as sources of news, information, and commentary, the obituary pages have survived the relentless drive that has turned newspapers into merely another vehicle for advancing commercial interests. I was again reminded of Yamaguchi, whose obituary I first encountered in The New York Times, in August when the bells tolled, as they do every August 6 and 9, in remembrance of the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the mid-1960s, as a young boy living in Tokyo, I had no comprehension of what had transpired at Hiroshima. I wasn't even aware that my father had visited Hiroshima, until, a few years later, when I was in my early teens, I chanced upon a book of photographs documenting the effects of the atomic bombing, evidently purchased by him at the museum of the atomic dome in Hiroshima. Though the captions were in Japanese, the pictures furnished a terrifying record of the loss of human lives and the devastation of an entire city. Over the years, being drawn to the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, and, then, in the 1990s, witnessing India's own tragic quest to become a nuclear power, the question of what Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent has never been far from my mind. Ruminating over these matters a couple of months ago, the obituary of Charles Albury came to my notice. I knew at once that their stories, the stories of Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Donald Albury, had to be told together. There is no other way to tell their stories, even if no one else should think of linking their lives. Yamaguchi and Albury never knew each other; neither was known very much, as I have hinted, to the outside world, even if their names are, or will be, indelibly sketched in history books in unlikely ways. They ought to have known each other, all the more so since Charles Albury was dispatched to kill not Tsutomu Yamaguchi, but the likes of him. We cannot characterize Yamaguchi's killing as a targeted assassination; some will even balk at calling it a killing, considering that Yamaguchi survived the attempt to eliminate him by close to 65 years and, more poignantly, outlived Albury. Indeed, Albury would never have known of Yamaguchi's existence when he was sent on his mission, and I doubt very much that he knew of him at all before he died. If Albury did know of Yamaguchi, he seems never to have betrayed that knowledge or acted upon it in any way. No bookie could have placed bets on Yamaguchi's chances of survival and walked away with a bounty. After hearing Yamaguchi's story, one might be a thorough non-believer and still believe in miracles. And, then, as if Yamaguchi's life doesn't already stand forth as eloquent testimony to the clichéd observation that 'fact is stranger than fiction', one is even more surprised to find the lives of Yamaguchi and Albury linked in the strangest ways. Even the gifts of a supreme artist are likely to be inadequate to describe their association. Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old engineer at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, when, in the summer of 1945, his boss sent him to Hiroshima on a business trip. His work wound up in early August and he was preparing to leave the city on the morning of August 7. But before he could do so, the bomber Enola Gray dropped 'Little Boy' on Hiroshima and flattened the city, killing 80,000 people. Yamaguchi survived the bombing: he was a little less than two miles away from 'ground zero' when the bomb exploded, and he escaped with ruptured eardrums, burns on his upper torso, and in utter incomprehension at what had transpired. High up in the sky, Charles Albury, a First Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, was in the support plane behind Enola Gay: as Colonel Paul Tibbets released the bomb, Albury dropped the instruments designed to measure the magnitude of the blast and the levels of radioactivity. From an altitude of over 30,000 feet, Albury would not have noticed the Japanese engineer. Yamaguchi could not have appeared as anything more than an ant from that immense height; at any rate, it is reasonable to suppose that the training of those charged with an extraordinary, indeed unprecedented, mission – one calculated to kill hundreds of thousands with the release of one bomb, exact an unconditional surrender from the Japanese, and showcase to potential future enemies the establishment of a new world order with the United States at its helm – would have stressed the necessity of shelving aside the slightest sentiment about feeling something for the hated enemy. Albury did, however, have the presence of mind to notice that he was a witness to a spectacular sight: as he told Time magazine a few years ago, he dropped his instruments and 'then this bright light hit us and the top of that mushroom cloud was the most terrifying but also the most beautiful thing you've ever seen in your life. Every color in the rainbow seemed to be coming out of it'. Robert Oppenheimer made a similar observation when the bomb was first tested in New Mexico. A more scholarly man than Albury, with some inclination for such esoterica as the Sanskrit classics, he noted that he was reminded of verses from the Bhagavad Gita when he saw the stupendous explosion – the splendor of which, akin to the 'radiance of a thousand suns' bursting into the sky 'at once,' turned his mind towards Vishnu: 'Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,' says Krishna (the incarnation of Vishnu) to Arjuna. There is, however, no reason to suppose that Yamaguchi, or any of the other victims of the atomic bombings, experienced anything resembling the beauty of a thousand suns or the most dazzling rainbows. Unlike other survivors of the first atomic bombing, Yamaguchi had no reason to stay on in Hiroshima; he didn't have to hunt for survivors among family or friends. So Yamaguchi headed home – to Nagasaki. On the morning of August 9, still nursing his wounds, Yamaguchi nevertheless reported to work. When his boss sought an explanation for his dressings and unseemly appearance, Yamaguchi began to describe the explosion and insisted that a single bomb had wiped out Hiroshima and much of its population. You must be mad and gravely disoriented, said his boss: a single bomb cannot cause such havoc and destruction. At that precise moment, Charles Albury, co-pilot of the mission over Nagasaki, dropped the second atomic bomb, nicknamed 'Fat Man', over the city that had in the nineteenth century been Japan's gateway to the West. Yamaguchi knew at once what was happening. He also thought, as he told an interviewer much later in life, that 'the mushroom cloud had followed' him to Nagasaki. Eighty thousand people would perish from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, half of them instantly. Yamaguchi would become, one might say, thrice born, as he survived the blast. 'I could have died on either of those days,' he told a Japanese newspaper only months before he died in January 2010. 'Everything that follows is a bonus.' A new word, hibakusha, the explosion-affected people, was coined in Japanese to describe the survivors of either atomic bombing; and yet another phrase describes the 'twice-bombed' survivors, known in Japanese as nijyuu hibakusha. Yamaguchi was the only officially acknowledged nijyuu hibakusha, otherwise believed to number around 165. I don't believe that there is a vocabulary in any language that can describe what Yamaguchi might have gone through. Yamaguchi's wife died from kidney and liver cancer in 2008. His daughter describes her mother as having been 'soaked in black rain' from the bomb. Her brother, born in February 1945, was exposed to radiation, and would fall a victim to cancer at the age of 59. Yamaguchi himself struggled with various illnesses but held on to life with tenacity and philosophical composure, displaying an equanimity that might explain the energy he displayed, at the age of over ninety, in finishing 88 drawings of the images of the Buddha, representing the same number of temples – or stations – encountered on a famous religious pilgrimage around Shikoku. Later in life, after his son passed away, Yamaguchi became an ardent critic of the nuclear race, and he denounced the obscenity of the possession of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, his mission accomplished, Charles Albury returned to the U.S. and became a pilot with Eastern Airlines, settling down in Florida. He would say, when questioned, that he felt no remorse: the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had, he argued, saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Japanese and American lives that would have been needlessly sacrificed had the U.S. commenced a land invasion. This argument is keenly contested, and many would argue that it has been discredited; one can even accept that Albury may have had good reasons to believe that his missions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were calculated to save lives, though why he should have persisted with this view to the end of his life is another matter. When lives become part of a calculus of cost and effect, nearly every argument becomes permissible. Nor have we asked why a second bomb had to be dropped, when the Japanese high command had been thrown into utter confusion after the destruction of Hiroshima. In 1982, while being interviewed for the Miami Herald, Albury stated that he opposed war, but would drop the bomb again if the U.S. were under attack. We know what such 'opposition' to war means. 'My husband was a hero,' Albury's wife of 65 years told the Miami Herald after his death, adding: 'He saved one million people. . . . He sure did do a lot of praying.' Since Charles Albury felt no reason to be contrite, one wonders why he prayed and, if he prayed, whether he prayed that he might become a better Christian or that the souls of the Japanese might be saved. One of the most troubling signs of our times is the manner in which the loftiest words have become debased: where prayer is a private matter between the worshipper and his or her God, it has now been harnessed as a form of ' spiritual warfare '. Members of the United States Strategic Prayer Network are committed to building a wall of prayer against enemies external and internal. Still, since prayer often retains its earlier characteristics, we should recognize it as a reclusive matter, a form of communication between the worshipper and the Divine, and thus allow Charles Albury the privacy of his religious beliefs and practices. The Americans vanquished the Japanese. So goes the story, and it has many takers. The Chinese gained the respect of the Americans, Henry Kissinger once observed, when they became a declared nuclear power. Whatever cultural capital India may have thought it derives from being the land of the Buddha and Gandhi was evidently not enough when, in its quest for muscularity and military prowess, it exploded a nuclear bomb. We have shown them, a prominent Hindu nationalist leader was heard saying, that ' we are not eunuchs '. The target of this missive was Pakistan, but India's gigantic neighbor to the north also seems to have had its ears to the ground. 'Sad to say,' the author of a recent book on the Chinese communist party has admitted, 'but India's nuclear bomb gained New Delhi respect in Beijing. Certainly, Chinese strategists complained bitterly to me that Beijing did not respect New Delhi until India had the bomb.' It appears difficult to deny Iran its choice, if that is what it is, to embark on a program of nuclear armament when its two most vociferous critics, the United States and Israel, are armed to the teeth. It is all the more difficult, even reprehensible, to do so when it faces the threat of military destruction, and social and cultural annihilation, from the only country that has so far deployed nuclear weapons. However, pondering over the twisted tale of Tsutomu Yamaguchi and Charles Albury, it is all but certain that political choices should not be confused with the will for ethical action and thought. The future of humankind will rest upon our capacity to rise above the base politics of the nation-state system and the idea that life is a zero-sum game. Not only is there no merit in being a superpower, but there is much greater merit in resisting the obscenity of a power unrestrained by wisdom, compassion, and intelligence. I believe one can never be certain who is the vanquisher and who the vanquished. All too often the vanquished have given birth to the vanquisher. There are many possible readings, but when one places the stories of Yamaguchi and Albury in juxtaposition, it is quite transparent who represents the nobler conception of human dignity. The ontology of the vanquished, as the life of Yamaguchi shows, always has room for the vanquisher; the same cannot be said for the vanquisher. In this respect, at least, we might say that the vanquisher is always a lesser person than the vanquished. I would like to believe that Yamaguchi crossed over to the other side with an ample awareness of this fundamental truth. Vinay Lal teaches history and Asian American studies at UCLA.
Hans India
2 minutes ago
- Hans India
RBI waiting for post-US tariff cues
Mumbai: Reserve Bank Governor Sanjay Malhotra will announce the third bi-monthly monetary policy of this fiscal on Wednesday amid expectations of pause on interest rate after three consecutive reduction totalling 100 basis points. Malhotra will announce the resolution of the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) at 10 am. The six-member panel, headed by Malhotra, started the three-day deliberation on the monetary policy on Monday. Experts are of the opinion that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) may go in for a status quo this time and wait for more macro data after the announcement by the US to impose 25 per cent tariff on Indian imports beginning August 7. However, a section of industry players do hope for a 25 basis points rate cut on Wednesday. Vivek Iyer, partner and financial services risk leader, Grant Thornton Bharat, opined that the RBI's MPC meeting will see no rate cut and cited reasons for it. He said the external environment continues to be too volatile and uncertain and there needs to be some more time for the monetary transmission to take effect. 'The tariff uncertainty we believe was taken into account in the earlier rate cut. Hence, we don't believe that the tariff situation should substantially weigh in on the RBI decision,' Iyer said. Praveen Sharma, CEO, REA India ( said that with the RBI having already frontloaded a 100 basis point rate cut this year, the MPC is expected to maintain the status quo in the upcoming policy announcement. 'While a lower interest rate environment is always a positive, today's homebuyers are increasingly driven by long-term confidence rather than short-term rate fluctuations. On their part, developers are sustaining momentum by offering flexible payment plans and smart incentives that ease the financial burden and enhance buyer affordability,' Sharma said. The central bank has been tasked by the government to ensure that consumer price index (CPI) based retail inflation remains at 4 per cent with a margin of 2 per cent on the either side. Based on the recommendation of the MPC, the RBI reduced the repo rate by 25 bps each in February and April, and 50 basis points in June amidst easing retail inflation.
Indian Express
2 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Planning to hold Maharashtra civic elections after Diwali, VVPAT machines to stay off: state poll chief Dinesh Waghmare
Amidst speculations about the local self-government body elections in Maharashtra, State Election Commissioner Dinesh Waghmare Tuesday indicated that the polls will be held in November-December. At the same time, the State Election Commission has also ruled out the possibility of the use of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines, drawing flak from the Opposition. In Maharashtra, currently, as many as 29 municipal corporations have been run by administrators for the last three years. 'We are exploring the possibility of holding the elections from October end. You can say that the elections will be held in November-January,' Waghmare told The Indian Express. Waghmare said they were planning to hold the Maharashtra local body elections after Diwali. 'We have not declared the elections, but it would be held from the end of October to December,' he said. Waghmare said VVPAT machines will not be used in the civic and local self-government body polls. 'In the past, VVPAT machines were not used in the local self government body polls. This time too, they will not be used,' he said. Meanwhile, Waghmare said the voters' list of July 2025 will serve as the basis for the Maharashtra local self-government body polls. He said the four-member ward structure will be implemented as in the last elections. SEC sources said there will be no change in the reservations, including those of SC-ST and OBCs. Shiv Sena (UBT) spokesperson Sushma Andhare said, 'If VVPAT machines are not used in local self-government body polls, then it raises serious issues of transparency of the elections. We will be forced to approach the courts if the machines are not used'. Congress MLA Vijay Wadettiwar, too, questioned the logic behind not using the VVPAT machines in local self-government body polls. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Sarang Kamtekar said both Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) and Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) elections have not been held since 2022. 'There is a pressing need to have elected bodies in place. SEC's move to hold elections after Diwali could be because people would be busy in celebrations, and then it could throw up the possibility of less voter turnout. It looks like the elections will be held in a phased manner in November-December, and could also be held in January,' said Kamtekar. Among the civic bodies waiting for polls are the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), Pune, Nagpur, Nashik, Navi Mumbai, Kolhapur, Dombivli, Kalyan, Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, and Vasai-Virar. In March, SEC had asked the state government to begin the delimitation exercise of wards. The state poll body took action after the Supreme Court directed it to notify the local self-government body polls within four weeks. The top court also asked the Maharashtra State Election Commission to maintain the status quo related to the OBC reservation of 27 per cent. Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades. Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives. Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees. During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa. Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died. Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More
