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The New York Times has just reported what national and international peace forces have known for a long time – the war in Ukraine is much more than a battle between the two countries directly involved. It is also part of a major effort by the U.S. to permanently weaken Russia, thereby extending its economic and political control over Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.

WASHINGTON: After narrowly losing elections in 2013 and 2017, Xiomara Castro and her social democratic Freedom and Refoundation Party (Libre) won the next set of elections such that, as of January 2022, she was Honduras’s new president. The defeated National Party had presided over worsening corruption, electoral fraud, poverty, and violent repression for 12 years – President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), for eight of them.

A recent gathering of Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaaf (PTI) in Islamabad has led to the accentuation of political turmoil in the country. Recent arrests in Punjab and Balochistan are further pointers that the government is struggling against its own challenges as well as those from the Opposition.

WASHINGTON: Watching the Harris-Trump debate, an old idiom came to my mind: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Karl Marx had another way of saying much the same thing: “All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.”

Who won Tuesday's Trump-Harris debate and the answer was in the media's pocket. Democrat Kamala Harris had to just show up while Republican Donald Trump had to field pointed questions. Harris owned the media and Kamala wasn't late at the ABC show. Kamala's highlight of the debate was her quip that Trump's "bored fans were leaving all his rallies."

In its report, published for 2024, September, the International Labour Organisation has come out with its new findings on the share of labour going down in the production process.

President Emanuel Macron has landed France in a serious political crisis by appointing the conservative leader of a small right party Michel Barnier as the new Prime Minister after rejecting the candidature of the largest group of the national assembly Lucie Castets. President Macron took the final decision after getting approval for Barnier from the Far Right National Rally (RN) leader Marine Le Pen.

Pope Francis arrived in Muslim-majority Indonesia on Tuesday last week , kicking off a four-nation tour of the Asia-Pacific, the longest and farthest of the 87-year-old’s papacy.

China, which is by far the world’s largest importer of iron ore required to run the BF-BOF segment of its giant steelmaking industry presents analysts with the riddle surrounding continuing arrivals of the raw material at Chinese ports in high volumes in the face of steel production fall. The country’s imports of iron ore in the first seven months up to July were 6.7% up year-on-year to 713.77m tonnes. But in the first half of this year, production of crude steel was down 1.1% to 530.6m tonnes. No wonder then inventories of the steelmaking ingredient at Chinese ports are sitting at elevated levels vis a vis established seasonal norms. The riddle becomes even more tricker by high summer ore imports when mills routinely apply brake in capacity use in response to steel demand fall from construction and housebuilding sector.

Following its landslide victory in Mexico’s presidential elections, the MORENA coalition is wasting no time in getting to work. Even before president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum takes office on October 1, the new Congress is taking up a package of constitutional amendments proposed by outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), flexing the muscle of a two-thirds qualified majority that allows the president’s party to pass such measures virtually on its own. And the first one up is already drawing the ire of corporate media and foreign powers alike: a judicial reform requiring direct, democratic elections for the entire federal judiciary.