The Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka rank among the deadliest terrorist attacks in modern history, and underscore the metastasising scourge of Islamist violence in Asia.

On 4 April, a group of international buyers’ associations from the garment, footwear, sporting, and travel goods industries sent a letter to Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to express concerns over abusive labour practices and human-rights violations. Already, Cambodia’s tax-free access to the vast European Union (EU) market, granted under the EU’s Everything But Arms scheme, is in danger of being suspended over such violations.

Dante’s Divine Comedy describes one level of hell (the City of Dis) as “Satan’s wretched city…full of distress and torment terrible.” He could well have been describing many modern-day metropolises.The world, especially Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, is experiencing a massive wave of urbanisation.

The drumbeat of warnings about a looming worldwide recession is growing ever louder. According to the latest Brookings-Financial Times TIGER indexes, which track the global economic recovery, growth momentum is declining in virtually all of the world’s major economies.

For more than two years, China has waged a campaign of unparalleled repression against its Islamic minorities, incarcerating an estimated one-sixth of the adult Muslim population of the Xinjiang region at one point or another.

For the West, the year 2008 marked the beginning of a difficult period of crisis, recession, and uneven recovery. For China, 2008 was also an important turning point, but one followed by a decade of rapid progress that few could have foreseen.Of course, when the United States (US) investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a global financial crisis, China’s leaders were deeply worried.

Do you want to know what is happening in British politics today in the great debate about the United Kingdom’s (UK) departure from the European Union (EU)?Join the club. With Brexit possibly just weeks away, most British voters are in the dark. So are members of Parliament. So are the million people, including three of my daughters and three of my older grandchildren, who recently marched in London to protest against Brexit.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was presented by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The initiative features a connectivity of systems and mechanisms, which aim to construct a unified large market and make full use of both, international and domestic markets through exchange and integration.

Nancy Pelosi is the highest-ranking elected female politician in the history of the United States (US). Theresa May is only the second female British prime minister. Amal Clooney is a world-renowned human-rights lawyer. Serena Williams is arguably the greatest female athlete of all time.All four are succeeding in environments where high-achieving women are the exception rather than the rule.

Once again, an attack on India by a Pakistan-based terrorist group has raised the spectre of a major confrontation on the Indian subcontinent and fuelled international pressure for Pakistan to take concrete action against the 22 United Nations (UN)-designated terrorist entities it hosts. But this time, the pressure is compounded by fury over attacks by Pakistan-based terrorists on the country’s other key neighbours, Iran and Afghanistan.