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One Saturday morning in November 2020, Dimitris Choulis, a human rights lawyer native to the Greek island of Samos, woke to a message informing him that twenty-four asylum seekers had landed on the beach.

US President Joe Biden’s so-called Summit of the Americas has been branded “a neoliberal failure” after some regional leaders refused to attend over his exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The leaders of Bolivia, Honduras and Guatemala are boycotting the week-long event, which opened in Los Angeles on Monday. Some are sending junior government officials in their place.

Allow me, for a moment, to indulge my inner Tom Friedman. A few weeks back, I was exchanging the usual banter with a taxi driver, Amandeep, an Indian immigrant who had lived in New York nearly two decades, when the conversation turned to politics. After telling me about the racist and sexist treatment she sometimes gets from passengers, Amandeep bluntly told me how little she thought of President Joe Biden — and how much she missed Donald Trump.

United States of America and European acquiescence in Turkey's long-standing refusal to honour Kurdish ethnic, cultural, and political rights has come home to roost with Turkish opposition to Finnish and Swedish NATO membership. The opposition has sparked debates about Turkey's controversial place in the North Atlantic defence alliance.

The monolithic dictatorship of the Taliban shows cracks as the compulsion for compromises on certain issues looms large. There is bitter opposition within the top leadership. It was apparent months ago when the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, publicly pulled up the Taliban high command for banning girls from attending secondary school. Formerly head of Taliban’s political office in Qatar, he said “We must aim for winning the hearts of our people rather than ruling over them with batons”. Michael Semple, professor at Queen’s University Belfast and former European Union and United Nations adviser in Afghanistan finds the rift in the Taliban leadership something ‘unprecedented’.

Finally, much to the delight of millions, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not the Invincible! Little Qatar in the Gulf brought the Modi Government to its knees even as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Iran weighed in. Modi’s ‘Arabian Nights’ stands curtailed because Modi is no Xi Jinping.

With France’s parliamentary elections scheduled on June 12, Jean-Luc Mélenchon looks in a stronger position than ever. Where other left-populist challengers around the West have struggled to build lasting organization, or even to repeat their initial electoral scores, his France Insoumise movement has established itself as a key force in national politics. In April’s presidential contest, he scored 22 percent support, and ahead of National Assembly elections on June 12 and 19, he heads a broad-left coalition — the Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES) — polling up to 30 percent support.

On May 23, a domestic court in Ukraine sentenced a 21-year-old Russian soldier to life in prison for committing war crimes. The soldier had shot dead an unarmed civilian in Ukraine. This was the first conviction related to the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia. On May 31, two other soldiers were sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment each for shelling a civilian area. The lenient sentence was due to the fact that there were no casualties.

It’s a sign of the times that one of the world’s most prominent intellectuals has just published a book of essays titled Time for Socialism. As Thomas Piketty explains in the volume’s long introduction, “If someone had told me in 1990 that I would publish a collection of articles in 2020 entitled Vivement le socialisme! in French, I would have thought it was a bad joke.”

Central banks all over the capitalist world are raising, or are about to raise, interest rates as a means of countering the currently rampant inflation, which is certain to push a world economy that is barely recovering from the effect of the pandemic, back towards stagnation and greater unemployment.