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Labour market has been undergoing unprecedented distortion for the last two and a half year, first hit by wrong policy stance of the majority of the governments across the world driven by profit oriented mindset at the cost of workforce, and then by multiple crises. COVID-19 made it worse, and then the price rise and inflation is all set to break its spine. Loss of jobs and income for the workforce has become a global trend while crony capitalists have been making huge profits. Economic recovery is obviously not human centred, but profit oriented, in spite of the clarion call of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) for “Action for a Human-Centred Recovery” adopted one year before in June 2021 and UN’s initiative for “Global Accelerator for jobs and Social Protection for just transition”.

In 2020, Japan adopted two policies to strengthen supply chain resilience. Big subsidy was provided to stimulate Japanese investors to diversify offshore investment and invest in domestic market for supply chain resilience. The main aim was to reduce over dependence on China. Focuses were made on Southeast Asian countries for offshore diversification.

When US intelligence asserted that Iran was selling hundreds of combat drones to Russia, it was signalling more than Iranian support for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Co-founder of Ethereum, the world’s second-largest blockchain network by market cap, Vitalik Buterin last week kicked up a storm by claiming that corporate efforts to create metaverse will not be successful. He specifically mentioned Meta Inc. (formerly Facebook), which suffered $10 billion of losses in 2021 and close to $6 billion in the first two quarters of 2022 on its metaverse project, saying its attempts in metaverse will “misfire”. Buterin said while metaverse “is going to happen”, corporate attempts to create it will not lead anywhere.

Largely unnoticed by the Indian mainstream media, Bangladesh hosted the Ministerial Conference of Developing 8 grouping, D-8 for short, a few days ago. This relatively new alliance brings together eight Muslim countries spread from South East Asia to Africa.

Despite a clear edge in the recent popularity curve in Pakistan former Prime Minister Imran Khan and chief of Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf is in political dock again. The Election Commission of Pakistan has caught him on the wrong foot by indicting King Khan and his party of having received overseas fund illegally. The PTI was a "willing recipient" of $2,121,500, the order, concurred by all the three members, stated.

As the tension between the United States and China mounts as a fallout of Nancy Pelosi’s provocative Taiwan visit, the technology war between them is also taking a new turn. Both houses of Congress have approved the CHIPS and Science Act—a $280 billion plan to boost chip manufacturing in the United States. Currently, 75% of chip manufacturing is in East Asia, centred around Taiwan, South Korea and China. The United States aims to re-shore the semiconductor industry back to itself. It hopes to revive the fortunes of its chip manufacturers, like the once-upon-a-time king of chip-making Intel, currently fighting not to become another has-been like IBM.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world, common people have been bearing the brunt of the once-in-a-generation cost-of-living crisis since the beginning of 2020. Hundreds of millions lost even access to food, energy, and finance, millions of them just perished, and millions somehow survived on assistance in cash or kinds from various government and private sources. Just when the global economy was recovering from the abyss of misfortune, Russian aggression on Ukraine in February 2022 started reversing the recovery, making the crisis increasingly worse. Out of this human crisis, profiteers across the world unrestrictedly multiplying their profits, that the United Nations has finally called “immoral”, a term euphemistically used perhaps for “a devil of an act”.

President Joe Biden was not wrong when he declared that “justice has been served” with the killing of Al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri in a US drone strike.

United States House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi is under immense scrutiny for her family’s incredibly profitable stock trades as the U.S. Congress considers a ban on its members, their staff, and families from swapping securities. She is presiding over what could be her last term as Speaker, if Republicans get their way, with historic unpopularity ratings. And to top it all off, she has seemingly decided on a whim to pay a visit to the island of Taiwan.