Latest news with #Varadarajan
Wall Street Journal
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
Misjudging Peruvian Vargas Llosa
Tunku Varadarajan's op-ed 'Vargas Llosa Stood for Freedom Against the Nationalist Tide' (April 16) is troubling despite its intent to praise Mario Vargas Llosa. The claim that the most striking thing one can say about Vargas Llosa is that he was 'a great and exemplary Spaniard' is baffling. Though he held Spanish citizenship, Vargas Llosa remained Peruvian in his civic commitments, literary imagination and identity. He fled authoritarianism, not his country. To claim otherwise is to erase the roots that defined him and to diminish the tension that made his literature so universal. Mr. Varadarajan's portrayal of Vargas Llosa's 1990 electoral loss as a matter of racial aesthetics is dismissive of Peruvian voters' political agency. Alberto Fujimori's appeal rested on anti-elitism and frustration with entrenched political classes. Though Vargas Llosa lost that presidential contest, his classical-liberal ideals prevailed and helped shape Peru's institutional trajectory. The country's sound currency, stable central bank and ongoing constitutional accountability bear his influence.
The Hindu
10-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
The Wire says website unblocked after portal removed article
The Wire news portal said that unblocking orders were issued for its website shortly after it reached out to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting about the censorship of its website, it said in a statement on Saturday (May 10, 2025). As a precondition for removing the site, the site said that the government urged it to take down an article it had put out based on reporting by the U.S. publication CNN. While the site has taken the article down, it noted that the original CNN story remained available, and said it would challenge the decision. The website's blocking had drawn condemnation from multiple journalistic bodies, including the Press Club of India, DIGIPUB Foundation, and the Editors' Guild of India. Follow the Operation Sindoor LIVE updates here 'I am constrained to note that under the IT Act, the procedure your ministry should have followed was to first issue notice about the news story in question, then give The Wire a chance to present its views before the inter departmental committee and only then, in the event that the IDC insists on the story's deletion, could you have taken the extreme step of blocking our website if we remained non-compliant,' the site's founding editor Siddharth Varadarajan wrote to the government. The committee Mr. Varadarajan was referring to is set up by the government, led by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, to adjudicate on blocking orders. Also Read | SC to hear plea challenging blocking of YouTube channel '4PM' on May 13 'The impugned story was published at 0347 on May 8 and the information it reported about was widely available at least 12 hours earlier, from CNN, whose story has remained widely available in India since then. I fail to see why the government wants our story deleted and treated it as such a matter of emergency more than 24 hours after publication that no notice was even served to us and our entire website blocked,' Mr. Varadarajan said in his letter. 'Shortly after we sent this reply, MIB officials informed us that orders had been issued to Internet Service Providers to unblock the site,' Mr. Varadarajan said. 'However, despite the fact that more than 12 hours have passed since then, readers on various networks in different parts of the country are still unable to access The Wire's website.' Most modern websites use a Secure Socket Layer, indicated with https in their web addresses, to prevent interception of their traffic. This technique makes the specific content under a website any individual user is viewing inaccessible, and by extension, unblockable. However, full websites can be blocked instead of individual pages.
Wall Street Journal
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
How to Repair New York's Broken Bail Reform
In Tunku Varadarajan's excellent Weekend Interview with Jessica Tisch ('Can Democrats Govern Big Cities?,' March 29), the New York police commissioner says that the state's recent criminal-justice reforms created 'a high-speed revolving door for recidivists.' Yet Mr. Varadarajan obscures how crazy our pretrial release rules are by writing that the state's bail reform 'introduced a presumption of release unless the judge deemed the accused a threat to public safety.' If only our representatives in Albany were so reasonable. The Democrats who drove the reform made sure to exclude a provision that would have given judges this authority. To this day, New York is the only state that categorically prohibits judges from considering the threat to public safety posed by the defendants before them. Mr. Varadarajan is right that the mayoral race 'offers little hope.' That's a pity, especially for a city that can produce leaders like Ms. Tisch. Rafael A. Mangual Manhattan Institute New York Mr. Varadarajan concludes that Ms. Tisch 'could have a future as a politician.' I think he needs to add the word 'Republican' to this phrase. Ms. Tisch's tough, common-sense positions on crime seem counter to everything for which the Democrats stand. Dana R. Hermanson Marietta, Ga. Congratulations to Ms. Tisch for disavowing a run for mayor of New York City. My husband and I have often bemoaned the sad truth that excellence in one job doesn't automatically transfer to another. It's very sad to see the best teacher in elementary school 'promoted' to principal and become ineffective and fail. The same is often true of public administration. Ms. Tisch is doing a great job at the NYPD. Let her flourish there. Laura Lengel Macon, Ga.
