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The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought to the fore necessity to bring about changes in the international agreements on drugs/vaccines keeping the public health priorities uppermost. Latest data points out that 66.2% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine while this number in low income countries is only 17.7%.

Pakistan’s new foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s speech at the foundation ceremony of Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad marks a complete hyphenation from his maternal grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who took over as the foreign minister in the early 1960s following the death of Mohammad Ali Bogra under the Chief Martial Law Administrator Field Marshal Ayyub Khan.. In the mid-1960s ,Bhutto gave a call for a thousand year war with India while Bilawal made a strong pitch for re-engaging with neighbours, stressing the imperative for communicating with not only the Indian government but addressing the people on ‘behalf of my country and our people’ as the foreign minister of Pakistan. Cutting ties with any country, (without naming, but meaning India) would not be beneficial for Islamabad which ‘ is already ‘internationally isolated and disengaged.”

In the largest global review by WHO so far, nearly one in eight people have been found suffering with mental disorders while this ratio is one in seven for teenagers. The common conditions, such as depression and anxiety have even gone up by over 25 per cent during the first year of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. The most vulnerable age group is 15-19, which suffers all sorts of mental disorders, which is a matter of great concern. The frightening data has triggered even WHO warning that has urged countries to get to grips with worsening condition in a backdrop in which a majority of the patients do not have access to any help or treatment.

China could be entering choppy Middle Eastern waters. Multiple crises and conflicts will likely shape its relations with the region’s major powers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey.

The question for Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is not whether either country will recognise Israel but when and who will go first.

Like it or lump it: the Chinese have more influence on you and me than what we are ready to admit. Apparently, the world is increasingly revolving around China, a proposition that the West used to boast. Whether it is the outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan that brought the world down, or the post-covid zero tolerance by the Chinese authorities towards the virus, manifesting in localised lockdowns, keeping an estimated 130 million people strictly indoors, leading to unprecedented supply chain disruptions, worse than what was experienced during the pandemic.

French voters in their first round elections to the National Assembly of Parliamentarians on Sunday gave a clear signal to the incumbent President Emanuel Macron that the people are ready for change. The opening round saw Macron’s Ensemble coalition take a slight lead with 25.75 per cent of the popular vote as against 25.66 per cent for the NUPES Left block led by Jean Luc Melenchon.

Qatar Airways CEO Akbar Al-Baqr, a man known for his pithy retorts, pretended to quiver in his pants. Hindu nationalists had called for a boycott of the Gulf airline after Qatar took India to task for derogatory remarks about the Prophet Mohammed and Muslim worship by two spokespeople of the country’s ruling party.

Surging food costs in South Asia, a region populated by more than one-third of the global poor and where one-fifth of calories come from wheat products, pose significant challenges to poverty alleviation and food security. The World Bank’s projection of downside risks to the economic outlook of the region presents even more alarming situation which includes adverse geopolitical developments, the possibility of even-higher inflation, tighter financing conditions, the re-emergence of stress in the financial sector, and the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic, all in an environment of high debt levels and worsening current account positions of the countries.

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.