Kamboj named new representative to UN

Delhi will have to wait for a few more days for the monsoon to arrive because dry winds from the west from Wednesday will likely halt its progress for the next three to four days, the India Meteorological Department said on Tuesday. A change in wind direction from the east may resume on June 27 and cause heavy downpours in Karnataka, Konkan and Goa, it warned. The weather bureau is not providing any outlook on the monsoon’s advance for three to four days due to the westerly winds, said RK Jenamani, scientist at the Met office’s National Weather Forecasting Centre. The east-west trough of the monsoon, stretching from Haryana to northeast India, was south of Delhi, but was likely to shift north to the Himalayan foothills, according to Mahesh Palawat, vice president of climate change and meteorology at Skymet Weather Services, a private forecaster.

India on Tuesday named Ruchira Kamboj, a career diplomat with wide-ranging expertise in multilateral organisations, as its next permanent representative to the United Nations in New York. Kamboj is currently the ambassador to Bhutan and an officer of the 1987 batch of the Indian Foreign Service. She will succeed TS Tirumurti, who was given a three-month extension in service in view of his key role in dealing with the fallout of the Ukraine crisis at the UN Security Council. India is currently in the second year of a two-year term as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. Kamboj had a stint as counsellor at India’s permanent mission to the UN in New York during 2002-05, dealing with issues such as UN peacekeeping, Security Council reform and the Middle East.

As the Democrats head to the midterms later this year, Joe Biden’s biggest political challenge is the economy. Spurred by a pandemic stimulus package, supply chain disruptions, a shift in consumer spending patterns, and the Ukraine war, record inflation threatens to undo Biden’s achievements on job creation. But Biden is fighting this political economy battle even as “culture wars” have intensified. These refer to issues that go to the heart of the US identity — abortion, guns, education, voting rights, criminal justice reform, the so-called “Great Replacement Theory”, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex and Asexual (LGBTQIA+) rights, and immigration, writes Prashant Jha. These identity-related battles are a reminder, in some ways, of the predicament Indian liberals face when fighting the Right. What issues do you take up? What do you avoid to prevent an electoral backlash? As Biden’s experience shows, there is no easy answer.