Firstpost Editor's Picks: Lockdown in Kashmir, Amazon forest fires, PV Sindhu at BWF World Championships; today's must-read stories

If Indian media fails to speak out against the silencing of Kashmir, it risks losing its own voice in the future

For weeks now, India has looked on the most ambitious exercise in censorship since the Emergency — one that has shut down not only swathes of the formal media and political dissent in Kashmir, but even everyday communication between one citizen and another. There has, significantly, been little pushback from media institutions.

Amazon fires: Solutions lie beyond nationalist politics, a new green vision must be global in scope

Even before the fires started, the Amazon forest was already in the process of being murdered. An area of the forest the size of three football fields fell every minute last month due to deforestation, according to data from Brazilian satellites cited in an article in Business Insider. That was just ordinary “development”.

Triumphalism over Modi-Trump meeting at G7 Summit is misplaced: Bigger diplomatic tests over Kashmir lie ahead for India

The Indian media has shown a bit of triumphalism in the aftermath of the Narendra Modi-Donald Trump meeting in Biarritz, France. The headlines have portrayed it as some sort of a diplomatic victory for India as the US president seemingly backed off from his oft-repeated desire to mediate in the Kashmir issue. However, to base a “diplomatic victory” on Trump’s latest comments is a risky proposition.

An analysis of the annual reports of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) shows that at 5.5 percent, the central bank’s contingency fund (CF) reserves are presently at the lowest level in at least 19 years. The RBI chose the lower band of the 5.5-6.5 percent range proposed by the Bimal Jalan-led expert panel for the purpose of computing the amount of surplus that needs to be transferred to the government as per the revised Economic Capital Framework (ECF).

Bigger the challenge, the better PV Sindhu gets: Deconstructing world champion’s form trajectory on badminton’s greatest stages

In the run-up to the BWF World Championships, the country’s top women’s shuttler and two-time silver medallist PV Sindhu had succumbed twice in a row to World No. 1 Akane Yamaguchi at two different World Tour events. Defeats against lower-ranked players like Cai Yan Yan and Nitchaon Jindapol kept her out of the ‘favourites’ picture. But it didn’t matter what we had to predict about Sindhu’s run-up before a major event.