World View

Even before the final results were in from all of the 27 European Union countries that voted in the EU elections last weekend, President Emmanuel Macron had called national elections in France for the end of this month.

"Pride goeth before a fall", says the Old Testament, so India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was just begging for humiliation. It duly arrived.

It has not been a good week for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyhu, chief decision-maker in the war in the Gaza Strip that has already cost at least 35,000 civilian deaths.

Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, once called Slovakia "the black hole at the heart of Europe," which seems a harsh judgement on five million Slovaks.

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born," wrote Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in 1929.

Last week a despairing reader asked me if the solution to the "Middle East Problem" might be to throw money at it: just buy the Palestinians out.

"Just like this year, last year the heat wave extended from parts of India to Bangladesh and Myanmar, and all the way to Thailand. This year it went further east, into the Philippines. So, it’s the same pattern," Prof Krishna AchutaRao of the Indian Institute of Technology said.

Hamas did not need a ceasefire.

Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is embarrassed and humiliated by the complete failure of his drone and missile attack on Israel, but does US President Joe Biden have the empathy to feel sorry for his old adversary in his time of trouble?

What should you do when your government assures you that everything is under control and says there is no need to buy generators, stock up on food and withdraw money from the bank?