OPINION

Doha, 9 March – The Fifth United Nations Conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDC5) in Doha, Qatar ended today with member states committing to measures to deliver on the Doha Programme of Action, a ten-year plan to put the world’s 46 most vulnerable countries back on track to achieving …

MUNICH – In the year since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war has evolved in ways few predicted. The conventional wisdom was that Russian forces would quickly overwhelm the overmatched Ukrainians and take possession of much more of the country than they gained in 2014. Others went …

MADISON, WISCONSIN – China’s population decline, which the Chinese government officially confirmed in January, has led many observers to wonder if the country’s current demographic trends threaten its stability. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s population shrank last year for the first time in 60 years, nine years earlier than government projections …

CAMBRIDGE – Microsoft is reportedly delighted with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a natural-language artificial-intelligence program capable of generating text that reads as if a human wrote it. Taking advantage of easy access to finance over the past decade, companies and venture-capital funds invested billions in an AI arms race, resulting in a technology that …

LONDON – After leaders of government, business, and civil society met at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, the observation that we are living in the age of a “polycrisis” has spread. The simultaneous occurrence of multiple catastrophic events is a cornerstone of today’s socioeconomic and geopolitical climate. …

WASHINGTON, DC – When President Joe Biden took office in 2021, his first message to the rest of the world was: “America is back.” Having assumed his third term as general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in October, President Xi Jinping appears to be issuing a similar …

NEW DELHI – The recent decision by President Joe Biden’s administration to renominate former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti to be US ambassador to India has highlighted the peculiar state of the bilateral relationship. Since Biden took office two years ago, the United States has not had an ambassador in New Delhi …

By RCSC With the enactment of the Civil Service Reform Act of Bhutan 2022, Ministries have been reconstituted as follows: 1. Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock; 2. Ministry of Education and Skills Development; 3. Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources; 4. Ministry of Finance; 5. Ministry of Foreign Affairs and …

I’m not a banker, but I’m surprised by the patent lack of understanding displayed by FM Lyonpo regarding the lifting of moratorium on CSI and BDBL.     I read recently a notice by the RMA clarifying the underlying reason and rationale for the imposition of the moratorium in the first place.  Not …

CHICAGO – Last month’s midterm elections in the United States were surprising in more ways than one. The Democrats’ unexpectedly strong performance not only has shifted the political terrain for the next two years, but has revealed that a substantial number of voters across party lines, many of them young, …