Washington’s fragile ceasefire with Tehran moved close to collapse after President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s latest response to a US peace proposal and described the arrangement as being on “massive life support”. Trump’s remarks on Monday marked one of the sharpest public assessments of the 10-week conflict, which has already disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, lifted energy prices and strained diplomacy across the Gulf. Speaking […]
Washington has widened the corporate stakes around President Donald Trump’s China visit by inviting Elon Musk and Apple chief executive Tim Cook to join a business delegation accompanying him to Beijing for talks with President Xi Jinping. The trip, scheduled around high-level meetings on May 14 and 15, is being shaped as a test of whether the world’s two largest economies can stabilise a relationship strained by […]
By Nitya Chakraborty The U.S. President Donald Trump begins his three-day visit to China on May 13 for his summit with the Chinese President Xi Jinping, the outcome of which has special significance for Trump in shaping his political future in the context of the midterm elections in November this year. Among both leaders, the […]
The article Donald Trump-Xi Jinping Are Both Aiming For Win-Win Outcome At Beijing Summit appeared first on Latest India news, analysis and reports on Newspack by India Press Agency).
False ship positions have multiplied around the Strait of Hormuz, with vessels shown inland, clustered at impossible coordinates and moving at implausible speeds as electronic interference intensifies around one of the world’s most sensitive energy corridors. The disruption has emerged alongside renewed attacks and drone activity across the Gulf, sharpening concerns for crews, shipowners, insurers and energy buyers already dealing with curtailed traffic through the waterway. The […]
Gold prices fell on Monday as President Donald Trump’s rejection of Iran’s latest peace proposal deepened concern that a prolonged squeeze on the Strait of Hormuz will keep energy costs elevated and complicate the fight against inflation. Spot gold dropped 0.8 per cent to $4,678.39 an ounce, while US gold futures for June delivery declined 0.9 per cent to $4,686.20. The fall came despite renewed geopolitical strain, […]
Iran has handed Washington its formal response to a US peace proposal, but the exchange has deepened uncertainty over whether a 10-week war can be halted before the Strait of Hormuz crisis inflicts wider damage on energy markets and regional security. The response was delivered through Pakistan, which has emerged as a key mediator between Tehran and Washington. Iran’s position centres on an immediate cessation of hostilities […]
Arabian Post Staff -Dubai Wynn Resorts has signalled a limited delay to its $5.1 billion Wynn Al Marjan Island development in Ras Al Khaimah, adding geopolitical risk to one of the Gulf’s most closely watched tourism and gaming projects. Chief Executive Craig Billings told investors during the company’s first-quarter earnings call on May 7 that the opening timetable for the resort, earlier guided for early 2027, would […]
More than 70 days of near-total internet disruption have left millions of Iranians cut off from work, customers, banking tools and relatives abroad, turning a state security measure into a nationwide economic emergency. The shutdown, imposed after a fresh phase of unrest and intensified following military escalation in late February, has become one of the longest and most sweeping digital blackouts recorded in a major economy. Connectivity […]
Global oil markets are consuming their emergency cushion at a record pace as the Iran war keeps Persian Gulf flows constrained, turning inventories into the main defence against a supply shock that has already reshaped prices, refining and fuel security across major importing economies. Visible stockpiles fell by about 4.8 million barrels a day between 1 March and 25 April, far above earlier quarterly drawdown peaks, while […]
Matein Khalid The last four years were a succession of black swans that could have easily derailed the bull market on Wall Street but did not though the short term corrections on Nasdaq were both savage in their intensity. These black swans include the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Powell’s U-turn from “inflation is transitory” to the swiftest, most brutal Fed interest rate tightening policy since Paul Volcker, […]
UAE air defence systems were activated early on Friday after authorities detected incoming missile and drone threats from Iran, the third such episode this week as Gulf security tensions deepened around the Strait of Hormuz. The National Emergency Crisis and Disasters Management Authority issued an alert shortly after 6.30am UAE time on May 8, urging residents to remain in safe locations and follow official channels for warnings […]
Air India is preparing deeper cost controls and fresh flight reductions as the Iran war pushes up fuel costs, disrupts airspace and intensifies pressure on a carrier still trying to complete one of the world’s most ambitious airline turnarounds.
The Tata Group-owned airline is weighing measures that could include furloughs for non-technical employees, salary reductions for senior executives, lower bonus payouts and capacity cuts of more than 20 per cent over the next three months. The review comes as the airline faces longer routings, higher aviation turbine fuel prices and weaker economics on several long-haul and regional services.
Nearly 100 domestic and international flights are expected to be trimmed through July, with North America, Europe and West Asia routes among the most exposed. Longer flight paths caused by restricted airspace across parts of West Asia have increased flying time, crew costs and fuel burn. For an airline with a large share of wide-body operations, even a modest extension of flight time can turn a marginal route into a loss-making one.
Chief executive Campbell Wilson has told staff that the airline had already scaled back some services in April and May, but worsening operating conditions required further action in June and July. The cuts are being framed as a temporary response to abnormal costs rather than a reversal of Air India’s expansion strategy, though they underscore the fragility of the carrier’s recovery.
Air India’s financial strain predates the latest escalation in West Asia. The airline has been absorbing the cost of fleet renewal, cabin refits, technology upgrades, merger integration and service improvements since Tata Group acquired it from the government in 2022. Its merger with Vistara has expanded its premium network and given Singapore Airlines a stake of just over 25 per cent in the enlarged carrier, but the integration has also added complexity at a time of volatile fuel markets and aircraft supply delays.
The airline’s losses for the year ended March 2026 have been estimated at more than ₹220 billion, a sharp deterioration linked to high fuel costs, airspace restrictions, operational disruptions and the heavy cost of restructuring. The figure has raised expectations that shareholders may need to provide additional financial support while management attempts to protect liquidity.
War-linked airspace restrictions have hit Air India more severely than many rivals because of its geography. Flights between the subcontinent and North America or Europe often depend on corridors through Pakistan, Iran, Iraq and surrounding regions. With some of these routes restricted or avoided for safety reasons, aircraft must take longer paths, increasing fuel consumption and reducing aircraft productivity.
The carrier has also faced constraints from aircraft availability. Refits of Boeing 787 aircraft, delivery delays and maintenance requirements have limited flexibility in reallocating capacity. The airline’s earlier suspension of Delhi-Washington services highlighted how aircraft shortages and airspace restrictions can combine to make long-haul routes commercially difficult even where demand exists.
Air India’s planned cuts come against a wider global aviation squeeze. Jet fuel prices have surged as the Iran war disrupted energy markets and raised fears over supply through the Gulf. Airlines with weaker fuel hedging, older fleets or longer detour-heavy networks face the harshest impact. Some carriers are raising fares, while others are cutting capacity to protect cash and preserve operational reliability.
For passengers, the adjustments could mean fewer non-stop choices, higher fares on peak routes and greater reliance on partner airlines through hubs such as London, Frankfurt, New York, Newark, Chicago and San Francisco. Air India is expected to prioritise commercially stronger routes and maintain connectivity where demand, yields and aircraft availability justify operations.
Global asset managers are pressing ahead with Abu Dhabi expansion plans, signalling confidence in the emirate’s financial architecture despite a regional war that has tested the UAE’s security environment and disrupted air and maritime activity. Abu Dhabi Global Market, the capital’s international financial centre, has drawn fresh commitments from major investment houses including Capital Group, Man Group, Bain Capital and Barings, underlining a strategy built around long-term […]
Arabian Post Staff -Dubai Washington’s plan to escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz has run into an early diplomatic test, after Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were reported to have withheld full operational access before later easing restrictions on U. S. use of bases and airspace. The pause in “Project Freedom,” a U. S.-led effort to restore commercial navigation through one of the world’s most […]
By Saifur Rahman The Emirates Group, which operates the world’s largest airline Emirates and its ground handling and ticketing arm Dnata, reported a 7 percent growth to record $6.6 billion (Dh24.4 billion) profit before tax in its 2025-26 financial year ending March 31, 2026, despite a disruption of flight operations during the US-led attach on Iran and its fall-out on the regional aviation industry from February 28, […]
Greenlogue/AP Climate campaigners have accused Shell of turning wartime turmoil into a fossil-fuel windfall after the group reported first-quarter adjusted earnings of $6.9bn, lifted by higher oil and gas prices, stronger trading and improved refining margins. The London-listed energy major’s profit was more than double the $3.26bn recorded in the final quarter of last year and above market expectations of about $6.36bn. The figures have sharpened scrutiny […]
Cybersecurity investigators have linked a Microsoft Teams-based credential theft operation to MuddyWater, the state-sponsored threat group associated with Iran’s intelligence apparatus, after an intrusion first presented itself as an ordinary Chaos ransomware attack. The operation, detected in early 2026 and detailed this week, shows how trusted workplace collaboration tools are being turned into entry points for espionage. Attackers used Teams chats and screen-sharing sessions to trick employees […]
The BGI, presented Wednesday by an international group of governance scholars, analyses measurable benchmarks of democratic accountability across 145 countries.
On a 100-point scale, the global score for democratic accountability slipped slightly from 65 in 2000 to 64 in 2023, the most recent data used in the project. The wave of democratisation observed in the closing decades of the last century has stalled in the last 15 years. Democratic accountability fell in 54 countries while it improved in 48 countries.
Yet the BGI — a collaborative project of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Berlin’s Hertie School and the Berggruen Institute, a think tank headquartered in Los Angeles — captures remarkably widespread growth in provision of public goods.
Encompassing healthcare, education, infrastructure, environmental sustainability and conditions to foster employment and rising prosperity, public goods improved in 135 of the countries studied, while declining slightly in just four. The global average jumped from 58 to 69 points from 2000 to 2023.
The third component of what the BGI authors refer to as the “governance triangle” is state capacity, defined as the ability to tax, borrow and spend, control territory, operate scrupulous, competent bureaucracies and administer predictable rule of law. The index finds the global average ticking up from 48 to 49 points; 56 countries had increased state capacity while 57 declined.
“What does it tell us about the world ahead?” Prof. Helmut K. Anheier, a Luskin School sociologist and BGI principal investigator, asked during the public release of the 2026 BGI on the UCLA campus.
“Countries are not really improving in their governance performance in significant ways. … We’re not really having forward-looking investment in governance capacity. There is considerable inertia.”
The largest improvements across all three BGI components occurred in Gambia, which the report groups with “low-capacity developing states.” These states score low across the board, particularly in the provision of public goods. This cluster constitutes the poorest countries with the least developed economies, which face the most serious challenges.
“They have the greatest exposure to likely future crises, whether it’s global warming, whether it’s a new pandemic, whether it’s another financial crisis, whether it’s the impact of AI,” Anheier said. “And they have the least capacity to respond to it.”
Bhutan, Georgia, Iraq and Tunisia — which make up the remaining top five countries with the largest improvements in the BGI — are classified as “capacity-constrained states.” They tend to be middle-income with struggling democracies. These countries score higher across the board than the low-capacity developing states, but their state capacity tends to lag compared to public goods and democratic accountability.
The capacity-constrained states risk falling into “a cycle that erodes the institutions they have built,” Anheier said.
“Consolidated democratic states”, a cluster of most of the world’s richest countries, which score highly in all three BGI components, have to confront domestic complacency. Further, in the United States and some others, “political dysfunction” is leaving mounting problems unaddressed and risking erosion of state capacity, Anheier said.
At the other end of the spectrum, the country with the farthest fall on the BGI since 2000 is Nicaragua. Second from last is Venezuela, followed by Hong Kong, Hungary and Turkey. The rest of the bottom 10 are Russia, Iran, Poland, El Salvador and Belarus.
Since 2023, which is the last year of data available for the study, Poland and Hungary have both seen government changes via election, despite serious democratic backsliding. Both had fallen out of the group of “consolidated democratic states” by 2023 and moved into the capacity constrained cluster.
The other eight countries at the bottom of the list are all places that once had some semblance of competitive elections, but by now have little or no remaining pretense of democracy. They are grouped by the authors among the “authoritarian and hybrid states”, which have by far the lowest democratic accountability but outperform even some struggling democracies in delivering public goods.
These regimes have tended toward faster economic growth in the period observed. But that seeming prosperity, typically fueled by extractive industries or overreliance on exports, masks “serious institutional weaknesses in these countries, including divided elites,” Anheier said.
Relatively few countries — 21 of the 145 — changed enough for better or worse to be classified in a new group by the end of the 23-year study period.
“Movement between them is rare, but this is largely what we should expect,” said Stella Ghervas, a UCLA historian on a panel of experts who discussed the BGI findings Wednesday. “Government systems are not created in a moment. They evolve over long periods of time.”
Local conditions shaping governance in each country can rarely be quickly reset through political will or even external shocks, Joseph C. Saraceno, a Luskin School data scientist and BGI co-author, said Wednesday.
“Despite all the talk of major transformations happening in global affairs, the underlying configuration of governance simply doesn’t appear to change very much,” Saraceno said. “We use the term inertia to describe this reoccurring pattern. In other words, the structures of global governance are resistant to movement as the conditions beneath them are quite sticky: political economies, demographics, resource endowments. These are deeply layered, and they push each country toward the world that it already inhabits.”
But the challenges lurking around the world may not wait for the slow and difficult processes of political change and development to catch up.
“With the few exceptions of those countries in the consolidated democratic world,” Anheier said, “the great majority of the countries in the world is ill-prepared for the future.”
The full report, ‘ 2026 Berggruen Governance Index – The Four Worlds of Governance‘, can be viewed and downloaded from the website of the UCLA’s Luskin School.
Frank Fuhrig, DNA
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Matein Khalid With SanDisk (SNDK) up 4000%, Western Digital Corp (WDC) up 900% and Micron Technology (MU) up 680% in the past year, I guess every investor who prostrated before the Chip Gods has every reason now to cash out now that memory Xanadu has been attained. The Philly Chip Index 50 day moving average is now 35% below its current level, so this is where strategic […]
A second ADNOC-linked liquefied natural gas tanker has cleared the Strait of Hormuz, signalling that Abu Dhabi is cautiously restoring limited export movement through one of the world’s most sensitive energy chokepoints despite the war involving Iran. Ship-tracking data on Wednesday showed the LNG carrier Mraweh, managed by ADNOC Logistics & Services and chartered by ADNOC Gas, had reappeared loaded off Indonesia after losing its automatic identification […]
Cybersecurity investigators have linked a deceptive ransomware-style intrusion to MuddyWater, a state-sponsored hacking group associated with Tehran’s intelligence apparatus, after forensic evidence showed the operation was built around espionage rather than financial extortion. The campaign, observed in early 2026, was presented to victims as an attack by an affiliate of the Chaos ransomware-as-a-service ecosystem. Yet the intrusion lacked a defining feature of ransomware: there was no file […]
Omani government networks have been hit by a wide-ranging espionage campaign attributed to Iran-linked operators, with evidence pointing to the theft of judicial records, identity data, staff credentials and internal system files from multiple state entities. The operation centred on the Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs, where attackers used a custom ASP. NET webshell to maintain access, issue commands and extract data. Exposed attacker infrastructure showed […]
UAE air defence systems intercepted ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones on Tuesday evening, after loud sounds were reported across parts of the country during a fresh wave of aerial threats linked to the wider Gulf confrontation. The Ministry of Defence said the explosions heard by residents were caused by air defence units engaging hostile projectiles and unmanned aircraft. The statement sought to reassure the public […]
Arabian Post Staff -Dubai US President Donald Trump has temporarily halted Washington’s ship-escort operation through the Strait of Hormuz, saying talks with Tehran have made “great progress” toward a wider settlement after weeks of disruption to one of the world’s most critical energy corridors. The pause, announced on Tuesday, came only hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio detailed a US effort that began on Monday […]
