The O-1 nonimmigrant visa is for the individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.
On October 1, the new fiscal year for the federal government begins. Some deep thinking and debate are underway in Congress, to approve the proposed budget by that deadline. Under former President Trump and now under President Biden, Congress authorized $6 trillion for COVID-19 relief, recovery, and expenses associated with vaccine and vaccination.
The Indian portal thewire.in has published several articles recently relating to the Pegasus affair.
bit.ly/3j9ZOg2
bit.ly/3xeDBm8
There are two aspects to the issue, the legal, and the realistic.
Though the Indian Government has not admitted that it purchased the Israeli cyberware, circumstantial evidence points to the direction that it has. Pegasus sells the cyberware only to governments or their agencies, not private persons or private organizations.
NSO Group, the Israeli company which created and licenses the mobile phone spyware Pegasus, is not only doubling down on rejecting the core assertions in media reports about egregious surveillance by at least eleven governments around the world – among them reportedly India though the government has strongly denied this – but even saying it will no longer entertain media inquiries about the controversy.
Academic life in social sciences is supposed to be a lonely pursuit of interpretations. Not often does an academic theory emerge that energizes, also repulses, so many of the people outside of the Ivory Towers. And rarely, if ever, one emerged that managed to do exactly that in such a short span as Critical Race Theory has done. School districts, universities and Fortune 500 corporations are rolling out orientation programs that are “informed by” the theory while many schools retooled their curricula to incorporate the theory in classrooms as young as kindergarteners. On the flip side, some states are passing laws that prohibit the teaching of the same.
I am not a supporter of democracy, and I want to give my reasons. In his book ‘The Republic’, Plato, the disciple of the great Greek philosopher Socrates, mentions a dialogue between Socrates and a man called Adeimantus about democracy. Socrates compares the country with a ship sailing in a perilous sea, with gales and tides threatening to capsize it.
According to Greek mythology, Bellerophon was the hero who captured the winged horse Pegasus. But is there any Bellerophon today which can check the modern Pegasus, which is snooping by the government on people as a result of the explosive growth of surveillance techniques by today’s modern technology? Edward Snowden’s disclosures show that evidently there is none.
It is evident from recent breaches such as SolarWinds, MS Exchange, and Colonial Pipeline, the number, type, and complexity of cyberattacks keep growing every day. The truth is that no organization is immune to a cyberattack.
Two folks, I follow on Twitter got into an exchange about media coverage of startup funding. The conversation caught my attention to the (somewhat rare) extent that I felt compelled to weigh in — mainly to offer some historical perspective from what I learned during my days as a professional blogger and journalist.
Tharoor writes that Universities are meant to be hotbeds of argument, debate, and dissent. But argument, debate and dissent can be meaningful and useful, and also meaningless and empty prattle. I am afraid it has been mostly been the latter in our Universities.
