Author: Saliya Weerakoon

The US Justice Department said on Friday it had charged a captain in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards with murder and terrorism offenses in the 2022 death of American Stephen Troell in Iraq. Mohammad Reza Nouri, 36, helped plan an attack on Troell, 45, who was working at an English language institute in central Baghdad, according to a complaint unsealed in US Federal Court in Manhattan. The attack was carried out in retaliation for the US killing of the Revolutionary Guards’ top commander Qassem Soleimani in a 2020 drone strike, according to the complaint. “The Department of Justice will not tolerate…

How does one man consistently get it right in Earth’s most unpredictable political stage play?  Meet Allan J. Lichtman, a historian with a seemingly magical Midas touch who has been calling US Presidential Elections with eerie accuracy since 1984. While most political pundits and pollsters scramble to keep up with the tides of public opinion, Lichtman calmly unveils the future, his predictions as steady as a seasoned fortune teller’s gaze into a crystal ball. But how does he do it? Is he a modern-day Nostradamus, gifted with supernatural foresight, or is something deeper at play here? Lichtman’s method Lichtman’s method,…

The image of Sheikh Hasina, the once revered ‘queen’ of Bangladesh, fleeing to neighbouring India is one that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago. Yet here we are, watching in disbelief as the tides of power shift in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Just months ago, I wrote about the precarious situation in Bangladesh, warning that the anti-Hasina movement was gaining traction despite her apparent electoral victory. The world, however, dismissed these concerns, blinded by the spectacle of economic success that Bangladesh had become. Between 2009 and 2023, the country’s meteoric rise to prosperity was hailed as a…