There are moments in the long march of international affairs when a summit, otherwise destined for the archives of routine diplomacy, acquires the resonance of a turning point. The BRICS Summit convened
I’ll say it again and again: The 2024 presidential election will be a very close race. Head-to-head national polling averages currently have President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump – the two major parties’ presumptive nominees –
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Katchatheevu, a 285-acre uninhabited island in the Palk Strait, between India and Sri Lanka, and about 33 km from the Indian coast, has suddenly become a matter of acrimonious debate in India
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Faced with a continued cash flow crisis, the United Nations in Geneva (UNOG) will partially close down – for the second time since December last year— as it scales back its operations,
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In Sri Lanka, we are an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, which is vital for fishing (food), trade (shipping), tourism (recreation and pleasure), and our overall well-being (health). Clean water is
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What will come first, the presidential or the parliamentary election? That is the multi-million dollar question. But Basil Rajapaksa, American citizen recently back from his second home in the U.S. where his
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Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey of the Opposition Labour Party has today pointed out: “Since the last election we’ve had five Chancellors, four Foreign Secretaries, three Prime Ministers, two Defence Secretaries, but
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Only a few days ago, it looked like former president and current Republican nominee Donald J. Trump would be on the hook for more than half a billion dollars, after he lost
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Political ethics requires leaders to meet higher standards than would be necessary for private life. They may have less of a right to privacy than ordinary citizens do, or no right to
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On 15 February 2024, Jared Kushner (Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor during his presidency) sat down for a long conversation with Professor Tarek Masoud at Harvard University. During this discussion, Kushner talked
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Though peace continued to prevail in Sri Lanka through 2023, the politico-economic crises that engulfed the country in 2022, persisted. There was, however, relative improvement in the overall situation. No terrorism-linked fatality
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On March 19, 2024, the head of France’s ground forces, General Pierre Schill, published an article in the newspaper, Le Monde, with a blunt title: “The Army Stands Ready.” Schill cut his teeth in
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Twenty-one years have elapsed since the U.S. army invaded Iraq under the pretext of rooting out weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and “spreading democracy.” However, the absence of such weapons, the fiasco
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Miami – Haiti, today the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, was once the richest back in 1800. How did this happen? In those long distant days, the West indies was the equivalent
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By the time President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had arrived in Singapore in the second week of July 2022, a few days after fleeing Sri Lanka, he firmly believed that then Prime Minister Ranil
More The culture of the Israeli military was shaped in October 1973, when Egypt and Syria attacked without warning. Importantly, the assault represented a direct threat to American interests. Egypt and Syria were
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