Mahir Ali

THE likely restoration of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister has stirred some angst among a few long-standing friends of Israel, not because of his abrasive personality, toxic ideology or the unresolved corruption charges against him, but because he can only return to power at the helm of the most extreme-right coalition his country has thus far experienced. That’s quite an ...

THE re-election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a decade after he completed his second presidential term has occasioned jubilations in Brazil and beyond. A palpable sense of relief is unavoidable, given the contemptibility of his adversary, but any exuberance beyond that might prove premature. What has frequently been referred to in the media as an ‘astonishing’ or ‘stunning’ comeback ...

  THE elevation of Rishi Sunak to 10 Downing Street may fall substantially short of the momentousness of Barack Obama’s 2008 triumph — after all, it isn’t based on any mandate — but it will nonetheless be recorded as a landmark in British politics. Serendipitously, it coincides with Diwali. The first person of colour in the post — who, not ...

OBSERVERS of the current tensions between Moscow and Washington, amid veiled threats of nuclear warfare and warnings of massive retaliation, are divided over whether the present predicament is less dire or a bigger danger than the ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ confrontation between the US and the USSR 60 years ago this month. It’s a tricky dilemma. The global situation is very different in ...

FRANCOPHONE West Africa has for several years been beset by an Islamist insurgency that nations such as Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso have failed to repel, despite international assistance. Much of that has come from France, the former colonial power. Mali, finding it ineffective, eventually switched to a different European power: Russia. That does not entail official military deployment on ...

MORE than four decades ago, the unusually eloquent Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski witnessed “a human river, broad and boiling, flowing endlessly, rolling through the main street [of Tehran] from dawn till dusk … a violent flood that in a moment will engulf and drown everything”. It did, albeit not quite in the way many of the components of that ...

ON the night of the Swedish election on Sept 11, a 26-year-old politician from the Sweden Democrats hailed its triumph in becoming the nation’s second-biggest parliamentary party by raising one arm and proclaiming “Helg … seger”. It means ‘weekend victory’, but to many local ears it sounded a lot like ‘Hell seger’, the Swedish version of ‘Sieg Heil’. The resonance ...

VLADIMIR Putin was already licking his wounds when he turned up in Samarkand last week for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit. Just days earlier, Russian occupying forces in the Kharkiv region had suffered a significant rout when a Ukrainian offensive took them by surprise. That, in turn, prompted some of the fiercest, ultra-nationalist supporters of the invasion to openly question ...

BEYOND the sometimes grating obituaries and pending obsequies, the demise last week of the British monarch has sparked a more interesting conversation in nations still constitutionally wedded to a deservedly obsolete empire. The shock and dismay over the demise of a nonagenarian can more or less be dismissed as hyperbole. Sure, Elizabeth II wasn’t on her deathbed when she gave ...

JUST a couple of days after Mikhail Gorbachev was laid to rest, a Moscow court took away the newspaper Novaya Gazeta’s licence to publish. It seemed as if the last vestiges of Gorbachev’s legacy were being buried alongside his mortal remains. Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief, Dmitry Muratov, who shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, was prominent ...