Opinion

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...

By Bhaskar Nath Biswal India has long celebrated its youth demographic as an engine of economic potential, yet reality threatens this national promise. A NITI Aayog report, ‘Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat@2047’, highlights a paradox. An estimated 8.7 crore youth aged 15 to 29 are...

By Bruhaspati Samal India is once again celebrating an impressive economic headline. The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) has reported real GDP growth of 7.8% in the first quarter of 2026–27, covering April–June 2026. Nominal GDP grew by 10.3%, while real Gross Value...

By Dhurjati Mukherjee The nature and scale of disasters are becoming increasingly hazardous, affecting millions of people across the world. This is starkly evident in the very recent glacial flood disaster in Nepal. The disaster was reportedly triggered by the bursting of a glacial lake...

By Gordon Brown As the pillars of the post-1945 global order—support for human rights, multilateral cooperation, the rule of law, humanitarian aid, and environmental stewardship—crumble, and as country after country reduces or even terminates funding for international organizations, the next United Nations secretary-general faces a staggering...