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LONDON: Labour’s left warns against any bid by Keir Starmer or the wider Cabinet to stitch up a transfer of power without a proper contest. MPs with any sense should recognise the folly of any such move. Forget the received wisdom at Westminster about leadership contests being navel-gazing exercises.

LONDON: The threat of the far right looms over British politics. That is the most serious takeaway from the 2026 elections. It is not that Reform are winning everywhere. The Scottish National Party look secure in power at Holyrood, despite their vote share falling. Labour’s historic defeat in Wales is down to the advance of Plaid Cymru, which topped the polls, as well as Reform.

While debates rage in Britain’s left circles over the rights and wrongs of dual membership of political parties, a long standing arrangement of this kind has been placed under severe threat.

Food security for countries across the globe at all times will largely depend on how well the farm sector of the world’s two most populous countries, namely, India and China are doing. Of the world population of 8.3bn, India is home to 1.48bn followed by China with 1.41bn. The past bears testimony to the fact whenever crop production would suffer a major setback because of monsoon failure or a natural disaster in either of the two Asian giants, the victim country would enter the world market in a big way to procure farm products and in the process, prices would shoot up to the disadvantage of other importing countries also.

NEW YORK: A leak of supposedly private audio recordings from Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram—speculated to come from a source close to former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández—has unmasked an alleged plot to force regime change in Honduras and other Latin American countries.

LONDON: Last summer, Giorgia Meloni’s Italian government approved a so-called “anti-Gandhi law,” which criminalizes even nonviolent protests and passive resistance. The highly controversial “Security Decree” was recently followed by a further one, introducing measures such as preventive detention during public gatherings and signalling a shift toward police-state measures. Civil society organizations warn that these “security packages” constitute “one of the most serious attacks on the right to protest in recent republican history.”

The urge to call it a “political miracle” is understandable. After all, the fall of Trinamool Congress (TMC) after fifteen years in power and the sweeping ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in West Bengal looks, at first glance, like a sudden rupture. But politics rarely works in ruptures. It accumulates. It ferments. And then, almost quietly, it breaks.

NEW YORK: Trump is a billionaire president, with billionaire friends, who represents the billionaire class in the United States. Evidence of this abounds, and when it comes to Cuba, there is no clearer example than his relationship with the Fanjul family.

The ongoing confrontation between Iran and the United States has brought renewed global attention to the Strait of Hormuz—a narrow maritime chokepoint vital to global energy flows. Despite superior Western military power, Iran’s ability to disrupt, control, and condition access to this corridor underscores a complex strategic reality that resists quick resolution.

NEW YORK: Venezuela’s sweeping new mining law, passed on April 9, is the latest in a series of domestic “reforms” purportedly directed at rebuilding the country’s energy and mining sectors. This follows years of debilitating US sanctions and disinvestment, which have seen the mining centres of the Amazonas, Bolívar, and Delta Amacuro states abandoned to governance by “criminal syndicates.” But buried deep within the text of this law is a historic concession that will redefine Venezuela’s relationship with transnational energy and mining capital for the foreseeable future, a mandate that Caracas must submit to investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS)–style arbitration.