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For decades the Pakistani establishment has termed the Baloch insurgency as a low-intensity conflict confined mostly to Balochistan, the country’s largest province by territory. But that seems to have changed, as a spate of attacks that have taken place this year clearly demonstrate that insurgency has entered into a crucial new phase. Despite Pakistani security forces claiming an intensive crackdown on rebels, the insurgency’s lethality has increased many folds in recent times.

There’s ample historical precedent for Donald Trump and the MAGA GOP embracing far-right, if not outright fascist, European politicians. Their latest hero is Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s likely new prime minister.

As academics and the media recall and reassess the Cuban missile crisis sixty years on, their focus will primarily be on the two superpowers — the United States and the USSR — that seemingly came close to nuclear war. However, it is also timely to reconsider those who found themselves in the middle of the would-be conflict: the Cuban leaders, whose willingness to accept Soviet missiles triggered the crisis in the first place, and the ordinary Cuban people, as the reality of the threat dawned on them.

Just three weeks are left for the holding of crucial midterm elections in United States of America on November 8. During this election, all the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 Senate seats will be contested.

Nahdlatul Ulama, arguably the world’s only Muslim mass movement propagating a genuinely moderate and pluralistic form of Islam, has forged an unlikely, albeit temporary, alliance with the Saudi-controlled Muslim World League.

If you’re going to undermine your own public rhetoric and supposed values by cozying up to a brutal autocrat, you might as well get something out of it. While maybe an obvious point to the rest of us, it’s apparently something US officials are just now belatedly realizing about the US-Saudi relationship.

Riding on the back of Boris Johnson’s support, Liz Truss entered into the cosy office of the prime minister of Britain, but this success has not provided her with the vision as to how to govern Britain.

The world is reeling from multiple shocks and the global economic outlook looks increasingly difficult. Therefore, the IMF is in quest for a more resilient world, as is reflected in the IMF’s policy paper, called the Managing Director’s Global Policy Agenda 2022. It has come with an assertion that the time to confront together our shared challenges is now. Act now and act together it has urged.

What is called OPEC+ that is the13 members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) together with 11 other petroleum exporting countries led by Russia, decided on October 5 to cut their oil production by 2 million barrels per day, starting from November. The US had been pressing OPEC not to take this decision. There had been hectic lobbying by the US to prevent this outcome, and several visits by top US officials to Saudi Arabia, including even by President Joe Biden, to press home the point. And yet OPEC decided otherwise; not surprisingly, this decision has been called in the western media “a slap on Biden’s face”.

The next eight years of the present decade would be decisive not only for Net Zero by 2050, but also to ensure energy security. The world is already not on track to achieve SDG target of providing universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy by 2030, which may fall short by a wide margin. Climate change has further threatened the energy security, that the world can overcome only by a complete transformation of the energy sector, which is responsible for around 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.