Opinion

By Brahma Chellaney Twenty years ago this month, the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China held the first meeting of the BRICs. Since then, the grouping has been formalised—the first BRIC summit took place in June 2009—and expanded, with South Africa joining in...

During an interview with Margaret Hoover on her public affairs programme Firing Line With Margaret Hoover, broadcast on 4 September, author Salman Rushdie drew a comparison between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Such a shallow comparison is historically flawed...

One clear sign of de-dollarisation and the shift toward a multipolar monetary order is gold’s renewed prominence in global financial markets. Investors increasingly view the metal as a strategic asset; central banks are buying record amounts of it to bolster resilience against financial and geopolitical...

The 26th Summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in the Kyrgyz capital of Bishkek saw PM Modi in the company of the Chinese and Russian Presidents where in a strong statement on destroying the terrorist ecosystem evidently aimed at Pakistan, he joined the aggregated chorus...

Melvin Durai The service sector of the global economy keeps growing in unexpected ways. Every big city has thousands of businesses that offer a wide variety of services. In Shenzhen, China, for example, you can walk into one store to get your hair styled, another...

Tatyana Deryugina & Yuriy Gorodnichenko Twelve years ago, Ukraine was sleepwalking toward catastrophe. Now Europe is. Before 2014, Ukraine’s military had been hollowed out by decades of neglect and disarmament. That was a choice. Why spend scarce resources on defence when the 1994 Budapest Memorandum...

Yaqiu Wang & Nicholas Bequelin In Washington, nearly every serious proposal that could constrain American AI companies runs into the same objection: restrictions would endanger national security and future prosperity by giving China the advantage. As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it at a 2025...

Jagdish Rattanani Is the Indian economy hot, tepid or in cold waters? The raging debate on whether 2026 Q1 GDP growth was 7.8% as the government claims or a measly 2.6% that goes down to near zero if the downward revisions of the previous year...

Although the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been surging in the polls for two years, it has been kept from power by other parties' refusal to enter governing coalitions with it. But since this “firewall” relies on the AfD never winning outright majorities, it...

Unfathomable! In a matter of seconds, an immense mass of ice, rock and frozen earth broke loose high in the Himalayas, unleashing a violent cascade from the Tibetan heights into Nepal. What began at nearly 5,000 metres high became a wall of water, mud, rock...