S Mubashir Noor

The Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn is presently Great Britain’s favourite political piñata, getting clubbed for all directions by friends and foes alike. Often described as the party’s “token lefty” Corbyn in September 2015 capped a meteoric rise from outlier to chief after the incumbent Ed Miliband resigned following Labour’s general election rout. Things have […]

 Through a historic nationwide referendum on June 23, the outright majority of Britons chose to ignore forecasts of financial doom and diminished global clout to opt out of the European Union (EU). In the process, they tuned out world leaders like US President Barack Obama, who had warned free-agent Britain would start at the “back […]

Cashing in on tragedy is Politics 101. Following the Orlando nightclub shooting on June 12 by a disturbed Muslim man of Afghan origin that felled 49 gay men and women and injured at least 50 others, conservative politicians in America generally loathe to acknowledging Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) rights have hijacked the community’s […]

Brown-on-black racism boggles my mind. The notion that people who are discriminated against for the colour of their skin in western countries should in turn push the same prejudice onto those of a darker pigmentation than themselves is absurd. Whither human compassion? Sadly, this is all too real and endemic in India, the self-described “world’s […]

Future US historians may well look back on the Barack Obama presidency as a foreign policy curio that pulled away from traditional alliances while seeking rapprochement with sworn foes. By pivoting towards the Asia-Pacific, his administration also reoriented America’s national interest towards containing China’s rise as a military power rather than managing the power dynamics […]

The Panama Papers continue to haunt British Prime Minister David Cameron even as he tirelessly campaigns to keep Great Britain in the European Union (EU) ahead of the national in-out referendum on June 23. Earlier, in April, a ComRes poll found nearly half of Britons critical of Cameron’s handling of his financial affairs, calling it […]

Ken Livingstone, mayor of London from 2000 to 2008, certainly thinks so and has the academic evidence to prove it, or so he claims. While the mayoral race this year transfixed Pakistanis worldwide by pitting son-of-the-soil, and eventual victor, Sadiq Khan against uber-rich Zac Goldsmith, also maternal uncle of children of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) chief […]

‘Active listening’, as any skilled negotiator will tell you, is key to diffusing powder kegs, diplomatic or otherwise. Unless both parties acquire a measure of sympathy for the opposing worldview, building and maintaining rapport is near impossible. Washington’s ears, then, are firmly clogged, as evidenced by the US Senate putting a procedural “hold” on the […]

This week I present to you Panama, a small Latin American country few Pakistanis could have accurately pinpointed on a map two months ago. Yet today, Panama dominates the local news cycle, thanks to a deluge of leaked financial documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca. These so-called Panama Papers allege fiscal malfeasance by many […]