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NEW YORK: Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first and only left-leaning president, leaves office soon. First round voting on his replacement takes place on May 31, and Iván Cepeda, standard bearer of Petro’s Historic Pact party, leads in opinion polls. Cepeda and his vice-presidential running mate are waging a vigorous campaign. She is Aída Quilcuée, of Nasa heritage and a leader of CRIC, Latin America’s oldest indigenous organization.

NEW Y0RK: “Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.” As thousands of believers filled St Peter’s Square in the Vatican for the rites of Palm Sunday this year, Pope Leo XIV chose to include in his homily these words that God speaks at the beginning of the Book of Isaiah. In the context of his brief homily, it was the last of several Bible verses Leo chose to illustrate the idea of “Jesus, King of Peace.” But in the context of the Trump administration’s ongoing war on Iran, it was immediately understood as a direct rebuke to a prayer service led by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon a few days earlier, in which he had besought the Almighty for “overwhelming violence.”

Oil’s refusal to break decisively towards $100 a barrel, despite a tense geopolitical backdrop and repeated threats tied to the Strait of Hormuz, says something important about how markets are reading the balance between rhetoric and reality. At one level, the price action looks counterintuitive. A blockade or even a serious disruption in Hormuz would ordinarily be expected to trigger a violent risk premium, given the waterway’s central role in global crude flows. Yet crude lingering in the mid-80s suggests traders are not fully pricing in a near-term catastrophe. That does not mean markets are relaxed. It means they are making a more granular judgment: the political temperature is high, the messaging from Washington has been erratic, but the probability of an immediate and prolonged supply shock still appears limited.

Pakistan’s emergence as a diplomatic intermediary between the United States and Iran has introduced an unexpected variable into South Asia’s strategic equation. For a country more often associated in global discourse with internal instability and regional tensions, Islamabad’s role — whether seen as substantive mediation or facilitated diplomacy — has generated symbolic capital.

Over the past several weeks, Bangladesh has been facing a growing wave of economic pressure marked by rising fuel prices, increasing LPG costs, mounting public debt obligations, and concerns over weakening investment and employment conditions. Taken together, these developments are creating a complex and interconnected set of challenges that affect households, farmers, businesses, and policymakers alike. From an analytical standpoint, the situation reflects not a single crisis but a convergence of multiple stress factors that are reinforcing each other.

NEW YORK: A crucial resource is being choked off from the world amid the ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran — and it’s not oil. It’s helium.

South Asia’s economic narrative has long relied on a familiar comfort: growth will take care of jobs. That assumption is now collapsing in plain sight. What was once described as a lag between output and employment is hardening into something more structural, more persistent—and far more troubling.

Pakistan may be right that peace in Lebanon is essential for talks between the US and Iran. But, the key question is: will Iran’s theological regime ever ask its terror sponsor, Hezbollah, to go soft on Israel which lately launched massive waves of airstrikes across southern Lebanon, hitting over 200 Hezbollah targets, killing hundreds of people and driving thousands out of home. Iran provides active, deliberate support—such as funding, weaponising, training, intelligence, or safe-haven—to Hezbollah. The latter is a violent non-state actor, hated by both Israel and the elected Lebanese government. The relations among Iran, Pakistan, Israel and Lebanon are extremely complex. Neither Pakistan, nor Iran recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Thus, Pakistan’s bid to act as a back-channel mediator between Iran and the US-Israel combine is bound to fail.

The conflict between President Trump and Pope Leo XIV is unprecedented. While popes have commented on politics before, Trump's personal insults toward the Pope are unusual. Although reports suggest his tone has softened, his discomfort is still clear.

Pope Leo’s sharp criticism of war, sectarian manipulation and the political misuse of religion has cast fresh attention on the narratives shaping the US-Israel confrontation with Iran. Speaking in Cameroon, Africa, the pontiff warned against turning geopolitical rivalry into a civilisational struggle between Christianity and Islam, while also highlighting the dangers of deepening Shia-Sunni divisions. His remarks challenge strategic rhetoric that risks transforming a political conflict into a broader religious and identity-based confrontation with destabilising global consequences.