IN a deeply important and emotionally charged ceremony held in Ho Chi Minh City on April 30, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) To Lam delivered a powerful address marking the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the South and the reunification of Vietnam. The programme, attended by top national leaders, revolutionary veterans, and international guests, celebrated one of the most significant milestones in the country’s modern history.In his speech, To Lam recalled the heroic victory of 1975 that ended decades of colonial domination and foreign intervention.

EUROPEAN states have been gradually building up an aggressive posture in the context of the war in Ukraine. As the United States, under President Donald Trump, has called for a ceasefire and peace talks, European leaders have been urging more military supplies for Ukraine. On April 11, 2025, the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, once led by the US and now led by Germany and the United Kingdom, pledged an additional €21 billion in military aid to Ukraine.

AFTER an absence of nearly three decades, the red flags of the working-class movement returned to the stage of the Southall auditorium in London – a venue historically graced by revolutionary leaders like Jyoti Basu and Harkishan Singh Surjeet. It was here that Shaheed-e-Azam Bhagat Singh’s comrades, Pandit Kishori Lal and Shiv Varma, once inspired audiences with tales of India’s glorious freedom struggle. It was also where the late Prime Minister VP Singh vehemently criticised the corruption of an electoral democracy subservient to capital.

ON Friday, February 28, when US President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office of the White House with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump mused: ‘I hope I will be remembered as a peacemaker’.As Trump talked about the necessity to make a deal between Russia and Ukraine, Zelenskyy fidgeted. The two men, representing two different sets of interests, did not see eye-to-eye either on the nature of this war or on the possibility of concluding it. Zelenskyy sees Russia as the out-and-out aggressor, and he feels that Russian President Vladimir Putin will never agree to a stable peace.

IT did not take long. Within weeks, US President Donald J Trump authorised the firing of missiles at some caves in Somalia, where – he claimed – a military leader of ISIS (or the Islamic State) was hiding. No US president in the past quarter century has started his term without an attack on ‘terrorists’. Three days after he became president, on January 23, 2009, Barack Obama sent an aircraft to fire a missile at Ziraki village in North Waziristan (Pakistan).