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About a week back, Pakistan’s Finance minister was urging its citizens to consume less tea as the country was scraping the bottom of the barrel to organise even essential imports. Foreign exchange reserves had sunk to cover just a few days imports. Every leaf of tea consumed in the country has to be imported.

Enthused by the sudden crash in crude prices, oil bears are daring to imagine oil at $50 a barrel. Their optimism is boosted by tanking stock markets, soaring inflation and mounting recession fears.

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion and making abortion illegal in at least eighteen states, with more potentially to follow. Despite ample warning, based both on the justices’ histories and the leak of the decision almost two months before it became official, national Democrats were caught flat-footed. President Joe Biden, to his credit, strongly denounced the ruling, saying, “Today, the Supreme Court of the United States expressly took away a constitutional right from the American people that it had already recognized.”

“A very hard blow.” Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez couldn’t mask his disappointment at the resounding defeat for his Socialist Party (PSOE) in its traditional stronghold of Andalusia last Sunday. In a seismic shift in the country’s electoral politics, the conservative Partido Popular (PP) swept to victory in Spain’s most populous region, winning an absolute majority of seats in the Andalusian parliament for the first time. The overall right-wing bloc (which includes the PP and the far-right Vox) won nearly twice as many seats as the broad left, while the PSOE also suffered a symbolically important defeat in the regional capital, Seville, losing the hometown of its historic leader Felipe González for the first time during the post–Francisco Franco era.

India is surrounded by economies that are moving towards bankruptcy and severe balance of payments crisis. Only Bangladesh like India is on a revival mode. But Indian economy is perhaps the fastest growing in the World. It is therefore pertinent to analyse what went wrong with these so called Himalayan economies. In this context it is also worthwhile to draw lessons from India and to some extent Bangladesh which have managed to weather the storm after Covid pandemic.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-wing alliance elected 142 MPs to France’s National Assembly on Sunday. In some ways this was a success: the broad left more than doubled its number of MPs and helped strip President Emmanuel Macron of his majority, though it also fell way short of the 289 seats needed to make Mélenchon prime minister. In the last such election five years ago, Mélenchon’s France Insoumise had taken seventeen seats, barely more than the number needed to form an independent group; this time, there were seventy-two, making up half of the overall left-wing bloc.

Is the world is staring at a recession? The question is coming up fast as there is serious concern that is going around. The global central banks’ policy moves to tame inflation could initiate a recession and larger unemployment.

Inauguration of nine km long ‘Padma Setu’ on the mighty River Padma on June 25 by the Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sk Hasina will be perhaps the brightest feather on the cap of her government. Built at an estimated cost of lithe over Taka 30,000 crore is a sound slap on the face of World Bank which arbitrarily cancelled the $1.2 billion IDA credit in support of the Padma Multipurpose Bridge project in 2012 when the implementation of the project was at the initial stage. It also exposes the US imperialism to whose tune the WB and International Monetary Fund dance.

When Egyptian football legend Mohammed Aboutreika came out swinging against homosexuality in late 2021, he touched a raw nerve across the Muslim world. The tit-for-tat between Aboutreika and supporters of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights laid bare a yawning gap.

“France has had enough of its monarch president. If the French people decide to give us a majority then we will govern . . . Destiny is in your hands,” crisply said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the coalition of various hues of left and green at a gathering of working people a few days before the runoff elections on June 19 for the 577-member L'Assemblée nationale (French parliament)..The maverick ultra left icon failed to defeat President Emmanuel Macron-led Ensemble’s coalition, but the ruling party fell well short of a majority. No single party is dominant in the new chamber. It won 245 seats, 101 less than the last election in 2017. It’s vote share is 38.6 percent. France has now has a hung Parliament.