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Mary -Louise Parker in movie Young Washington 2026 as Washington's mother Mary Ball. Here she talks to Marc Myers of the WSJ about her childhood growing up as an Army officer's daughter in different bases before settling down in Arizona. Her fight with shyness till she over compensated. Her father's confidence in her and pointing to her the prospect of going to the North Carolina Institute of Arts, where she learnt the craft of acting. She moved to New York for different roles including one in "Weeds."  She is 61 years, and lives with 2 sons 19 years and 22 years, in a large apartment in Brooklyn that overlooks the water with views of sunsets which she enjoys. It was Mary Ball who told her son not to join the British Navy, wanting to keep him in America. Washington joined the British forces in North America after a career as a surveyor. Land and landholdings were important at the time and as a surveyor with important connections to prominent British families Washington built his career, and further enhanced it by joining the British forces against Indian raids and the French in the coveted Ohio territory. Where did Washington get his keen knowledge of history and the Enlightenment thinkers that enabled him to grasp the ideas of Jefferson? Washington was like the first Chief Justice Marshall in the same communities at the time in the Virginia colony. Both were mentored by a major British landowner who built a large library in the colony that both were able to go to and learn what they later used to start the struggle for a new Nation. It shows the importance of books and libraries, of knowledge during the Enlightenment period in shaping the minds of the Nation's founding fathers- Jefferson, Marshall, Washington, Madison, Samuel Adams and others. ...

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These 2 steel plants date back to Scunthorpe 1861, and Port Talbot 1905, when they were first built, when Britain led the world's industrial revolution. The two plants were modernized in the 1950's. British Steel and Tata Steel Port Talbot only two remaining steel plants in UK- retaking the UK steel supply chain move taken Labour in July 2026 as Andy Burnham takes the premiership. British Steel was privatized in 1988. In Asia British Steel and US Steel were revered during the colonial period to the 1950's and 1960's. In the US and UK strangely economic theories took hold that did not see the importance of steel and other basic industries in the life of a nation and its people. About 40 years later the lessons of outsourcing your main supply chains has been learned at great cost to the US and the UK. Note that in today's WSJ an Exclusive report shows the success US steel has become with government help and American tariff protection agiainst dumped steel from China and India. US Steel has grown till it is now the third largest steelmaker in the world. The UK government is nationalizing Scunthorpe plant now given name British Steel under the Steel Industry Nationalization Act. UK has set aside 2.5 million pounds for subsidies to the Scunthorpe and Port Talbot plants for modernization of old pre-1960's plants. This is the right move, if US Steel is a success story with DJT tariffs and government support, British Steel will be a success story with the same kind of support. And contrary to bad economic theory purveyed by some economists the US and UK can now have their own modern steel industries and supply chains at home. ...

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Depleting ground water reserves are leading to water shortages in India's cities. About 40% of India's people lack drinking water by 2030, according to government think tank NITI Aayog 2018 report. Water shortages are hitting cities such as Chennai. This report looks at the water shortage in remote Himalayan region Ladakh. WOrld Resources Institute points out that India is the 13th most water stressed country in the world, with a population three times the combined population of 16 countries that are water stressed. By 2030 water demand will double in India. The government is giving drinking water top priority in its plan for the next 5 years as key to development.  One of the problems is that farmers in the northern plains pay little for gorundwater use resulting in the planting of water intensive crops. The government plans to promote conservation of water as a national priority with education on this subject of water critical to achieving its objective of providing 100%  access to drinking water for Indians. Drip irrigation with minimal water use is also being encouraged to conserve water. ...

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India says it will divert water from the eastern tributaries of the Indus River away from Pakistan to the Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, in response to a terrorist attack. Under a World Bank brokered treaty the waters of the Indus river are shared by both countries. India's Modi government faces elections in 2019.

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Sharing the waters of the Indus river system means— the ‘Eastern Rivers’, namely Sutlej, Beas and Ravi, for India, and the ‘Western Rivers’ of Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab for Pakistan. Indus Waters Treaty changes proposed by India include bilateral not international arbitration for Indian dam building plans, and using water storage optimally on its side for the western rivers.

The western rivers have four times the water as eastern rivers and dam building technology has evolved over 75 years. The Indus Water Treaty was written by civil engineers but its international arbitration and three levels need to be replaced with bilateral settlement so that India can go ahead with dam building for development without Pakistan simply stalling everything, which serves no purpose for modernization.

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BBC looks at the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 that allocates waters of 6 rivers. Waters of three rivers in the east going to India, and 80% of waters of three western rivers including the Indus river going to Pakistan. Both countries are required to share waters data to manage agriculture. India is upstream for these rivers.  In the same way China is upstream of the river Brahmaputra in India and is building dams in Tibet to control flow of water downstream to India. There is no treaty for the Brahmaputra between India and China as China has occupied Tibet since 1950's and acquired Aksai Chin in the Kashmir region from Pakistan. Before 1950 for ten centuries Tibet region was a distant land mostly unreachable from China and China was never in control of Tibet. Kashmir region for 15 out of 18 centuries since 100 BC was a land of Vedic, Buddhist Shiva cultures. For China the occupation of Tibet on the borders of India creates a situation that is not sustainable for long and stretches resources at a time when India is rapidly building the same level of infrastructure on its side of the border. Chinese people in the provinces bordering Tibet have shown little interest in moving to the vastly different high country of Tibet. At some point in history not too distant by 2050, China (and Japan) will revert to its Buddhist religion and culture and with respect for Buddhist culture see Sarnath, Kushinagar, and Bodh Gaya more as sacred pilgrimage places in India, a common heritage with India to be treasured and revered. Something the Europeans and Americans cannot comprehend, the depth and breath of Vedic Buddhist and Shiv culture in Asia. ...

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The Chief Minister of Kerala writes about the Kochi Water Metro project to be inaugurated by pm Modi. The project was built at a cost of about $150 million with state funding and a loan from KfW, a German development bank that funds climate green infrastructure. 78 electric boats powered by batteries will transport people in Kochi between 38 terminals spanning 10 islands on the Arabian Sea.

The boats are built at Cochin shipyard with cutting edge design, light weight boats of aluminium hull and FRP superstructure. High court to Vypin on the first phase takes 20 minutes with tickets costing Rs. 20. Kochi One cards can enable seamless travel on Kochi Water Metro to Kochi Metro with weekly and monthly passes,

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The story of hand woven cloth or khadi is also the story of Mohandas Gandhi and India. Here in Scroll.in Pramod Kapoor tells the story of Mohandas Gandhi's search for the tools that would drive the independence struggle and how in 1921 in Madurai he found the idea of khadi. It was like the idea of the salt march. Always about the dignity of man. Kapoor tells the story of Pamela Hicks, daughter of Mountbatten, the first governor general of India, who says her father told Gandhi, that sending a piece of his hand woven cloth would be like sending the crown jewels. Later, years later, Elizabeth was to tell about this treasured possession to Modi during her two meetings with the Indian leader who started his own version of khadi with Har Ghar Jal, water, life's basic necessity, to all Indian homes by 2024.

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20 million barrels a day  of oil flow through Straits of Hormuz. 2.6 million barrels a day by pipelines to Oman. 70% of it going to Asia- China, India, Japan, South Korea. Iranian exports go through these Straits also making it difficult for Iran to generate oil revenue if the Straits are closed to shipping. Would Iran risk closing the Straits and what would it take to open the Straits? The answers are given in the adjoining article by Wald in The Atlantic Council publication. It says even if Iranian waters are closed in the Straits of Hormuz oil can still flow through the longer route in UAE waters. Wald says the bigger risk is for Suez and Red Sea shipping which is restricted by the Houthi rebels supported by Iran, with the US Navy operating in that area to keep shipping lanes open.

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Kuwait oil production cut as storage fills up March 2026. Fewer tankers are making it through the Straits of Hormuz. Huge inventory on tankers in ocean waters and the added supplies from Venezuela help relieve the pressure on oil supplies as Iranian oil production stops. The US allows India to get Russian oil for 100 days in this special situation of war in the Middle East region. 

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A revolution is taking place in the lives of rural families in India. Under the Jal Jeevan Mission put forward by the prime minister clean drinking water from tap water will reach every family in India. It was launched on Aug 15, 2019 and plans to do this by 2024. The impact is huge. Out of 180 million rural families only 33 million families have clean drinking water from tap water in the country. Clean water brings life to the countryside and access through individual tap water connection brings a revolution to people's lives in a country of 1.2 billion people. This report in the Economic Times tells us what most of us do not know that with the growth in population from about 300 million after independence in 1947 to 1.2 billion today and the drought conditions in parts of the country, the per capita water availability has fallen sharply today. Dropping from 5000 cubic metres of water per capita in India in 1951 to 1545 cubic metres of water in 2011.  The infrastructure capital to be invested is 3.5 trillion rupees or $ 50 billion. $50 billion in cement, pipes, construction, pumps, equipment, wages, conservation, skill building, knowledge in water management to revive the rural economy. Hit hard by coronavirus it boosts the rural economy. The infrastructure project could be a model for other Asian, African and Latin American countries.  Cholera and other water borne diseases can never be eliminated without clean drinking water from tap water for all families in India. It means so much during this pandemic.  ...

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100 ships pass through Straits of Hormuz daily 5-6 daily in March 2026. BBC Verify looks at the kinds of ships from India, Pakistan, Iran, and Greek shipping that have made it through the Hormuz shipping lane.  Some of these ships go close to the Iranian coast and not in the middle of the channel. The mountainous terrain along the coast, the peculiar geography of the channel have made it difficult to secure the Straits of Hormuz for international shipping . The channel is itself narrow at one point about 24 miles of water separating Oman from Iran. The shipping lanes are 2 miles wide, a separation zone of 2 miles between inbound and outbound ships. This makes it hard to secure from fast speedboats, missiles, and drones without securing both sides of the channel on mountainous terrain. 

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Parmeswaran Iyer headed two of prime minister Modi's favorite projects, one for ODI free India through the Swachh Bharat Clean India Mission, and second the Jal Jeeven Drinking Water for All mission. In both he has performed admirably. He is an IAS officer from 1981 from Uttar Pradesh batch and worked with the World Bank water initiatives from 2009 when Modi brought him back to India for Swacch Bharat Mission. Har Ghar Jal to bring water by tap to every family in India is an exceptional achievement of Modi and Iyer.  This report in Hindustan Times shows how hands on Iyer is, as it says Iyer cleaned a toilet pit during one visit to Telengana state in 2017. The behavioural transformation India experienced under people like Modi and Iyer takes India back to the days of the Gandhi Ashram on the Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad. Gandhi's activity there including a form of Swachh Bharat Mission in its pioneering days in the 1920's setting the form of activity that was not forgotten and brought back by Modi and Iyer one hundred years later. This has touched the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians today in the way Gandhi's ideas touched the lives of hundreds of millions in the 1920's, bringing dignity and grace to the faces of 1.4 billion people and providing an example for the extended neighborhood to Indonesia for close to 2 billion people. ...

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As shown in this Guardian report about clean tap drinking water in China in 2017 pollution of rivers and lakes was so severe that anywhere between half to 80 of water in rivers was not drinkable. This was just before the pandemic. Efforts since 2015 to tackle the problem are still in progress. This is happening as India works on getting 100% of 190 million homes covered for drinking tap water in India by 2024. Out of this 116 million homes or 60% have clean drinking tap water in 2023 under prime minister Modi's  Jal Jeevan Mission (Water for Life) led by IAS's Mr Parmeswaran. India and China started out in 1990 with about the same GDP. China attracted foreign investment to accelerate its economic growth to where its GDP is much higher today than India. Yet in 2023 India starting from behind has some advantages. In the case of clean drinking water, limiting contamination of the rivers with effective regulation of industries which was missing in China, and providing clean drinking water with newer technological means is one of these advantages. Indian investment comes with the technology of the 2020's compared to China's investment using technology from the 2000 period. This will create additional gains in GDP and quality of GDP in its challenge of matching and exceeding growth in China. ...

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Parmeswaran Iyer takes over India's development planning body Niti Aayog from Amitabh Kant on June 30. Iyer joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1981. He led the Swachh Bharat or Clean India Mission in 2016, and headed the national drinking water and sanitation department. In 2009 he left IAS to join the World Bank as Global Lead for Water Global Practice initiatives. He has also served as Professor of Management Practice at the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad. 

The Modi administration has selected a person in the right field of water resources with IAS background from Uttar Pradesh, and proven management ability to deliver results, for the critical task of leading India's development to 2030. 

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The Jal Jeevan Mission of Indian prime minister Modi had the goal of bringing clean water by taps in every home. Of 190 million homes in 2023, 116 million homes now have clean tap water. This is 60% of homes in 2023 compared to 17% or 32 million homes when the program was started by prime minister Modi in 2019 just before the pandemic. Jal Jeevan's safe supply of drinking water to 1.2 billion people is closely connected to health of people and diseases, epidemics,  in villages and towns in India. In this way it ensures the health of the rural population in India, a must do of basics for development in India, that had never been tackled from 1947 to 2019. With much of it accomplished during the pandemic itself, and the target date set for 100% completion by 2024- the biggest achievement since independence. To day it is not just supply but how to maintain the supply of good fresh water using education of people in rural areas as part of the effort, and programs for preserving and storing fresh water. Programs are thought out in a broad context to include next generation technologies, water conservation and storage. ...

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Cordoba and Perez in WSJ on the desperation of the people of Cuba looking for a better life. It covers not just Havana, but also the interior Santiago de Cuba and Camarguey different regions of Cuba all desolate and in complete disarray with lack of running water, electricity and inadequate food supplies. Cuba is clearly a failed experiment and a warning to all Latin American nations that capitalist system as the US itself knows quite well has serious drawbacks that need the likes of Jefferson, Lincoln, TR and FDR, JFK and LBJ to correct but the rhetoric of Castro is not the answer, itself quite dangerous. And the answer has to come by developing new alternatives, studying what works and what doesnt, the need for inputs of capital, labor and technologies, the need for hard work, the need for scientific and technological cooperation and goodwill of the successul nations, as China has proven and India is proving today for upwards of 3 billion people in Asia.

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This video from the World Climate Initiative provides a glimpse of water use conservation that has cut water use by 70% in some villages in the states of Gujarat and Rajasthan in India. Under the MARVI project young water experts are trained by the University of Maharana in Udaipur and the University of Sydney. These water experts pass on water conservation methods to the village farmers. One method is to plant a mix of mustard, chickpeas and wheat, with another grain instead of only wheat. Other effort is to educate farmers about use of well water in ways that conserve underground water and to use drip irrigation, sprinklers. Other projects link up with projects and manufacturing set up under Israeli Indian collaboration near Tel Aviv using Israeli water technology.

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Two years after it was launched the Jal Jeevan Mission to bring tap water to every household in India has made significant progress. Only 17% of all rural households had tap water in 2019, today even with covid disruptions 41% of rural households have tap water. 48 million more households have tap water connections added. The goal of Har Ghar Jal (Every home tap water) is now seen as achievable by 2024. Financing in 2021-2022 is increased from 115 billion rupees to 500 billion rupees, quadrupling the financial resources dedicated to providing water to all of India's people. The Swach Bharat Mission Director General, Akshay Rout, shows how this mission for water is moving as as quickly as the open defecation free ODF mission  under SBM. A household in ODF saved Rupees 50,000 a year from cleanliness and medical costs according to UNICEF. A WHO study shows 200,000 diaorrhea deaths prevented. JJM is decentralized, demand driven and community managed. Rout says that setting a deadline and aiming for saturation that leaves on one behind is a good way of tackling critical problems such as hygiene, sanitation and water. He says shoddy implementation or product can be prevented by robust monitoring and supervision systems. By 2019 India had made big achievement in hygiene and clean India campaign with ODF open defecation free achieved under this approach. ...

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The UNESCO report on Water scarcity and contaminated water. It creates awareness on World Water Day but comes across as a largely academic exercise, ask any rural woman in India and she knows the significance, question is what should have been done and the resources are there. For action it has to come from nations,, large nations such as India from it's Jal Jeevan Mission, China and Japan transferring the knowhow and technologies to Africa and Latin America and other parts of Asia. The period after a pandemic is also a time to focus efforts on  doing this. How it undermines girls and women and their participation in society is part of the understanding in India, and uppermost in the minds of Indian leaders and technologists, and in the mind of PM Modi. Unfortunately the UNESCO reports fails to even cover right up front in its summary how Jal Jeevan is being done for 1.4 billion people in India to have clean tap water so that people in Africa and Latin America can see that this is possible, if in the Himalayan regions possible in their region it is possible. Just see for yourself in India. ...

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PM Modi's Jal Jeevan mission In India for clean tap water for 1.4 billion people even in the Himalayan regions can be seen in the context of water scarcity across the developing world in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, with 1 in 2 persons facing water scarcity. And there is further the problem of contaminated water. It shows that it is possible if there is the will to do it and the resources dedicated to do it. Not only is it harmful and reduces health with diseases it considerably undermines women and girls in society. This is shown in ads for Jal Jeevan mission with a mother and her daughter on Indian television with the daughter telling her mother that PM Modi and the government have brought tap water to the village and it need not be carried long distances from wells, the mom incredulous till she realizes it is true and hugs her daughter. It may be the most memorable of television public service ads on Indian  television in a long long time and shows the immense changes in the world's most populous region even overcoming the challenges of the pandemic. ...