The relationship between governments and criminal organisations is also more complicated than a simple exchange of money for violence. Financial incentives are an important motivation, particularly because contract killings and covert operations
Tucked into a Sept. 10, 1998, intelligence report sent to President Bill Clinton’s White House was a warning that, more than a quarter-century later, reads with striking prescience. A CIA analyst wrote
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1. Manic “Change Round” In Sigmund Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” the melancholic is in want of an object, never knowing exactly what they may have lost. Melancholy transforms the object-loss of mourning into
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Sky News published a video this month that opens on a rigged explosive device and a pickax under a stark title card, “Inside the Taliban’s Museum of Death.” Three seconds pass before
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Diplomacy is usually conducted across polished tables. Increasingly, it is also conducted in the back seat of an armoured limousine. On Friday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin closed
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Nearly a year after being sidelined from one of the World Health Organisation’s most senior regional positions, former WHO South-East Asia Regional Director Saima Wazed has broken her silence over the investigations
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It may be coincidence that, on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, bad news from the Arab world is once again dominating the headlines. But the latest
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In a fragrant garden near San Francisco, Hamid Hayat, 43, tells his story over a coldening frittata. He is a thin man in jeans, a T-shirt and a Dallas Cowboys cap. Almost
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Saudi Arabia’s crude oil production plunged by nearly 2 million barrels per day in August to its lowest level in more than 35 years, as conflicts across the Middle East disrupted the
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Editorial Sri Lanka’s exclusion from meaningful participation in BRICS should be treated as a diplomatic failure, not disguised as another routine event in international affairs. A country that has moved closer to
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At 10:50 a.m., a large convoy of vehicles sped through the main gate of the Government Palace’s courtyard under heavy security. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stepped out of one of
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The return of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India marks a potentially important moment in the painstaking effort by the two countries to repair relations after years of military tension along the
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More than a century ago, Franz Kafka imagined an America where politics resembled a travelling circus. In his unfinished novel America, written between 1912 and 1914, the young emigrant Karl Roßmann encounters
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The story begins with a murder. On 10 September 2025, Charlie Kirk was shot from 180 metres away in front of 3,000 students on a university campus in Utah. A single high-velocity
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When Jim O’Neill, then head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs, published his influential paper in 2001, he was describing an economic phenomenon rather than designing a political alliance. Brazil, Russia,
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On September 12–13, 2026, India will take centre stage as host of the 18th BRICS Summit, bringing together an increasingly consequential gathering of the Global South. The small five-member group that India
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