Russia, backed by China, hoping to exploit mounting doubts in the Gulf about the reliability of the United States as the region’s sole security guarantor, is proposing a radical overhaul of the security architecture in an area that is home to massive oil and gas reserves and some of the world’s most strategic waterways.

In the summer of 1945, a jittery premonition marked the lives of the citizens of Hiroshima, as B-29 super fortresses—planes that the Japanese locals called B-San or Mr.B—had been stationed in the northeast corner of the fan-shaped city.

A recent ban on a militant, Iranian-backed Shiite group raised the spectre of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry spilling onto Nigerian streets as security forces launched a manhunt to find the alleged Boko Haram operatives who killed 65 people attending a funeral.

Roberto Goizueta, the legendary CEO of the Coca Cola Company, once said that to thrive every business must “get an enemy.”

A few days may have passed, and the news media may have moved on, but US President Donald Trump’s racist rant on Twitter on July 14 has ripped open a raw wound for US immigrants of colour (this writer included), that will take a long, long time to heal.

Four years ago, when I stepped onto American soil for college, I quickly learned, somewhere in small talk, the rhetorical question “Where are you originally from?” and the phrase “Go back to your country” were vintage stocks of an evil market called racism.

The July 17 judgement of the Hague-based International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a case relating to former Indian Navy officer Kulbhushan Jadhav has seen India coming out a winner on most counts against Pakistan. While any India-Pakistan standoff is almost invariably accompanied by chest-thumping and jingoism, it is time to sift the hype from the reality.

Will the July 31 deadline for publication of the final list of Assam’s National Register for Citizens (NRC)—a list of bona fide Indian nationals—be adhered to or extended further?

It came as a disappointment after the mega build-up to the launch of India’s second mission to the moon on July 15. The launch of Chandrayaan-2 was scrapped by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) about an hour before the lift-off of the country’s

History was made on this day in 2015, when Iran agreed to the landmark nuclear deal, better known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

An official Turkish visit to the troubled northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang to assess reports of a brutal crackdown on the region’s Turkic Muslims could shape Turkey’s challenge to conservative Gulf

Any government in an elected parliamentary democracy invariably seeks to strike a balance in its annual budget between the imperatives of politics and the pressing needs of the economy.

The old order is broken. No less than Russian President Putin has declared the Neoliberal order “obsolete”.

Jared Kushner, the US president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, recently unveiled in Manama an economic proposal to settle the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict. He billed it as the “opportunity of the century”.

When the exercise to update the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam began two years ago, it was expected to have a contagion effect in the rest of northeast India where identity politics has always been pronounced. The first sign of that has come in the public domain with the government in Assam’s next-door neighbour, Nagaland, having announced a move to draw up a digital database of all indigenous inhabitants of the state.

Sri Lanka and Maldives, by their mere locations, are of geostrategic significance in relation to east-west sea trade to and from South Asia. While Sri Lanka lies close to India’s south-east, Maldives is located 400km south-west of India. The latter has 26 atolls and over 1,000 islands covering a huge maritime area stretching 750km from north to south. They are significant for China, India and US, who are all jostling for strategic positions in the Indian Ocean.

The 14th summit of the Group of 20 (G20) major economies was held at the International Exhibition Center,

On June 17, 2019, Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president, died inside a glass cage, in an Egyptian courtroom, during the course of an espionage trial. The 67-year-old former president apparently suffered for a full 20 minutes before

It has finally happened. The trade conflict between India and the United States has broken out as New Delhi ended its almost year-long wait for a negotiated settlement and came up with a retaliatory step imposing higher tariffs on import of 28 high-value agricultural items from the US with effect from June 16. It was in June last year that the US set off the conflict by hiking the duties on import of goods from India including steel and aluminium.

On the morning of June 3, the world woke up to the news of a harrowing, bloody crackdown on peaceful civilian protesters on the streets of Khartoum by the RSF (Rapid Support Forces, a newfangled name of the notorious Janjaweed militia)—under the command of the infamous Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemeti, the mastermind behind the genocide in Darfur. The fault of the protesters? Demand for a civilian transitional governing body, following the fall of Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president of 30 years.