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There is nothing to be surprised about Sri Lanka’s decision to dock Chinese ‘spy’ vessel Yuan Wamg-5 at its Chinese-built Hambantota port, last week, despite protests from India. Sri Lanka President’s belated statement that China won’t be allowed to use the port for military purposes could at best be intended to temporarily allay India’s concern. Such a promise has no legal or logical basis. Sri Lanka’s deep-sea Hambantota port, which China built at a cost of over one billion dollars as part of its global infrastructure programme (BRI), technically belongs to China. Under an agreement in 2017, Sri Lanka Ports Authority created Hambantota International Port Group (HIPG), which then became a joint venture after China Merchant Ports bought an 85 percent stake in HIPG to facilitate the Chinese company's US$1.12 billion investment in the port. Thus, the HIPG is majority Chinese owned. China can use the port the way it likes. Expect more such Chinese war ships to dock at Hambantota in future.

The hegemony of the US dollar was based on the fact that the world’s wealth-holders considered it to be “as good as gold”, even when it was no longer officially convertible to gold at a fixed rate, as it had been under the Bretton Woods system, after the collapse of that system. These wealth-holders were of two kinds: private individuals and institutions, and central banks that held the foreign exchange reserves of their respective countries.

On Wednesday, August 10, President Joe Biden signed the treaty to admit Sweden and Finland to membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This follows on the action last week of the Senate, which voted 95 to 1 (with one member voting “present” and three not voting) to ratify the treaty. Earlier this summer, the House of Representatives supported a non-binding resolution endorsing the move (since that chamber has no constitutional role on treaties). It passed 394-18.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, it took itself off the map of Eurasian transport corridors linking China and Europe. At the same time, it breathed new life into moribund routes that would allow goods to travel across the Eurasian landmass without traversing Russia. It also opened the door to greater Russian connectivity with the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia.

The invasion of Ukraine has been going on for more than five months now and hostilities may continue for quite some time. In military terms, the outcome is still uncertain, but what is already clear is who the big winners and losers of this conflict are.

When Donald. J. Trump, the former president of USA, left the White House after his defeat in 2020 election and shifted to his Florida residence at Mar - a- Lago, he took with him boxes of official documents which had to be handed to the National Archives Authority, under the Presidential Records Act of 1978. The Archives authority announced in February ,22 that it has recovered 15 boxes of documents, after prolonged persuasion, many of which are labelled classified or top secret and some of them are torn or damaged. They reported that there are more documents of importance still held by Trump. They were asking the FBI to determine if criminal charges are warranted under the Records Act, as by its provisions such records must be turned over to National Archives when a president leaves office. If that law is breached, the offender could be prosecuted criminally and if convicted could get a prison term of 5 years along with fines.

Two headlines stood out. One in an Israeli newspaper, ‘No one will any longer dare offend Islam: The 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie’. And the other in a New York daily, ‘NJ man, Hadi Matar, with sympathies toward Iranian government ID’d as suspect in Salman Rushdie stabbing’. The second emphasized on the first. Not only will no one dare offend Islam, those ‘no one’ will also not dare link the killer with Islam.

Mario Fiorentini, the last surviving partisan of the anti-fascist battalion in Italy died on August 8 at the ripe age of 104..He was born in 1918 in the last days of World War 1 and fought his most important battles after the Wehrmacht invaded his native Rome on September 8, 1943. He had early in life shown the spirit of rebellion; his father was a nonreligious Jew, and when, in 1938, Benito Mussolini’s regime proclaimed the antisemitic Racial Laws banning “mixed-race” marriages and the employment of Jews in public functions, the young Mario went to a rabbi saying he wanted to convert to Judaism; the cleric warned him against it.

During the one year under the Talibanrule in Afghanistan, girls are more isolated, hungry and sad- often go to bed without food, 46 percentof whomsay they’re not attending school compared with 20 percentof boys, according to a study, ‘Breaking Point: Life for Children One Year Since the Taliban Takeover’, by an NGO, Save the Children International. The Taliban had captured power in Kabul on 15 August 2021. The research study finds that 97 percent of families have been struggling to provide enough food for their children while girls are eating less than boys. Almost 80 per cent of children go to bed hungry in the past 30 days (study period). ‘Chill penury’ and economic distress are emblematic in the troubled Afghanistan.

On August 7, 2022, Progressive International Council member Gustavo Petro became the first left-wing president in the history of Colombia. In an address to the nation that was marked by his sense of history and vision for a new Latin America, Petro elaborated on his personal struggles and how it became a part of Columbia’s long battle for a fair society, doing away with the decades of domination by the US companies, drug mafia and oligarchs.