The signing of the draft peace accord between the government of Colombia and the country's main rebel grouping, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Havana on June 23, had heralded the end of the longest running civil war in Latin America. In the last week of August, the two sides formalised the cease fire agreement in Bogota.

THE ‘failed’ coup of July 15-16 in Turkey is now over. Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has consolidated power – becoming even more powerful than before. He has ordered the arrest not only of over six thousand military and judicial figures, whom he has blamed for the coup but also thousands of teachers and professors as well as journalists who have been in the sights of the ruling party. Rumors abound: who is responsible for the coup? Erdoğan persists with the view that the culprit is the US-based Islamic scholar Fetullah Gülen. He wants him to be extradited to Turkey.

NOW that enough time has passed with Britain voting to leave the European Union (EU) without any major catastrophe occurring (frankly, should we even be surprised that a former imperial power still thinks that squabbles between its cabinet members and parliamentary backbenchers would lead to the end of the world, ‘as we know it’?), it may be a good time to think about what ‘Brexit’ means for political action, especially on the Left. The result of the British referendum should have hardly been surprising.

FRESH after their success in implementing regime change in Brazil through patently undemocratic means, the right wing in Latin America, aided and abetted by their allies in Washington, have now set their sights on Venezuela. The mainstream newspapers in the United States are busy writing the obituary of the Left in the American continent. An electoral setback for the Left in Argentina, where the Peronists lost the presidency by a narrow margin earlier in the year, was welcomed as great news in the West.

THE assassination of the Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour by an armed drone dispatched on the express orders of the American president, seems to have quashed all hopes of Afghan peace talks reviving in the near future. Mansour was killed along with the driver of the taxi car they were traveling on a highway in a remote part of Pakistan's Balochistan province. Though the car along with its occupants was charred beyond recognition, the passport which Mansour was carrying was found intact and displayed to international media.