UGANDA'S long ruling president, Yoweri Museveni, was declared elected for another five year term in the third week of February. The opposition in the country along with most of the international observers have criticised the conduct of the elections. Museveni's main challenger, Kizza Besigye, who was credited with getting more than 35 percent of the vote, has described the election as a sham. Uganda's Election Commission, which is considered to be a government rubber stamp, had announced that Museveni got 60.8 percent of the votes.

MALAYSIA'S attorney general, Mohamed Apandi, a handpicked appointee of the prime minister, Najib Razak, surprised few Malaysians when he announced in the last week of January that he is closing the corruption inquiry into the transfer of hundreds of million dollars into the personal bank accounts of his boss. Apandi solemnly announced in the last week of January that “no laws were broken” by the prime minister and that he had ordered the country's anti-corruption bureau to close the investigations into the sources of the funds that the Malaysian prime minister received.

THE liberation war of Bangladesh was absolutely a struggle of Bangladeshi people to get rid of the tyranny and get freedom from Pakistan. None had created Bangladesh from outside. The people of Bangladesh had wanted liberation because of deprivation, which was spontaneous, said Biman Basu, member of the Polit Bureau of CPI(M) while speaking as the chief guest in a seminar held at Dhaka on March 5 last.

JUST weeks after the terror strike in Pathankot, Pakistan was hit by an even more deadly attack. Before that, in the same fortnight, there were major terror attacks in Istanbul, Jakarta and Ouagadougou. Terrorists, belonging to a faction of the Pakistani Taliban, attacked the Bacha Khan University campus in Charsadda near the city of Peshawar in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. The university is named after Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi.

THE failed terror attack on the strategically located Indian Air Force base in Pathankot on January 2 was an obvious attempt to derail the dialogue process between India and Pakistan. Around the same time, there was an attempt to storm the Indian consulate in the Afghan city of Mazhar-i-Sharif. Prompt action by Afghan security forces foiled that attempt. Afghan security officials have said that the militants who tried to storm the consulate were well trained and highly motivated.