World

Javier Milei, who is very likely to be elected president of Argentina in the October election, is fairly frank in his view of Pope Francis, a fellow Argentine.

"The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine," wrote Sextus Empiricus, a Sceptic philosopher who lived mainly in Athens and Alexandria almost 2,000 years ago. Justice may be slow to come, but in the end the wicked will be punished.

Three of the world's biggest democracies, all with past, present and/or prospective leaders facing prison at the same time. In the end, it's the courts that decide.

When Nato held its annual summit in Brussels two years ago, all 31  presidents and prime ministers of the alliance's member states dutifully showed up, but their hearts weren't really in it.

"I believe the (Iranian) regime will fall within a couple of years," said Mohsen Sazegara. "It's very different from three years ago, when they suppressed demonstrations in just five days. And the movement is spread all around the country."

Let us suppose that the current Russian regime collapses, with or without a Ukrainian military victory to give it a final shove. Who would be the least objectionable candidate to take over in Moscow?

There is no justice. Bashar al-Assad, the murderous Syrian dictator whose membership even the Arab League suspended twelve years ago, is off to Riyadh this week to celebrate his re-admission to the organisation.

Turkey's elections are fairly free, and there is going to be one this Sunday (14 May). President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been in power for two decades, and he should really lose by a landslide.

Last year US President Joe Biden called Pakistan "one of the most dangerous countries in the world," presumably because of its potentially lethal cocktail of nuclear weapons and unstable politics.

It's a pity that both sides can't lose in the war that broke out between rival generals in Sudan on Saturday, but the best that the 48 million Sudanese can hope for now is that one side loses quickly.

"The cold is coming soon," gloated former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last June. He predicted that the citizens of the European Union, deprived of the Russian gas that normally supplied about 40% of their energy, would be freezing in their homes ...

"We are but one very small company (among) many hundreds of companies using AI software for drug discovery and de novo design...

As we pursue our daily lives, seeking solace within our own environment, we are constantly bombarded by events beyond our control that disturb our peace of mind

On Tuesday they reset the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight. How did they know that Germany would agree to give Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine on Wednesday?

Alliances are as old as civilisation. Older, actually: almost every hunter-gatherer band that anthropologists have studied, from the New Guinea highlanders to the Yanomamo in the Amazon

Alliances are as old as civilisation. Older, actually: almost every hunter-gatherer band that anthropologists have studied, from the New Guinea highlanders to the Yanomamo in the Amazon

When the two most senior military and intelligence officials in Washington make the same obvious error in public three times in three weeks, you have to wonder what they are really up to

The recovery of the city of Kherson is the third big victory for the Ukrainian armed forces in three months: first, the reconquest of all of Kharkiv Oblast (province) in September

Elon Musk is that rarest of things, a benign sociopath, and therefore a person of considerable value to the world. He has just made a mistake that could ruin his long-term plan, for his purchase of Twitter is almost bound to end in tears.

Italy is getting nervous. The United Kingdom's Conservative Party (aka the Tories) has now been led by four different prime ministers in only six years. Italy still holds the long-term record -- a new government every thirteen months since 1945.

I never thought I'd be writing a column in defence of Donald Trump, but a journalist has to go where the evidence leads. Over the years I have written columns in defence of Daniel Ellsberg, Mordechai Vanunu, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

There's an election in Italy next Sunday, almost exactly 100 years after Benito Mussolini's 'blackshirts' marched on Rome and brought the first fascist dictator to power.

The situation in Ukraine is really an example of a clash of civilisations; it can be seen as a clash between globalist and Eurasian civilisation."

On the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to turn India into a developed country within the next 25 years. If all goes well, that could actually come to pass