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US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday suspending a sanctions law aimed at Russia’s economy two days before it was due to take effect, lifting the threat of punitive tariffs on the largest buyers of Russian oil and gas, a group that includes India Image Source: AFPost on X Trump told Congress the suspension was in the national interest. The waivers remain in force until he or the secretary of state determines that further action is warranted. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 was signed into law in early October after passing both chambers of Congress by large bipartisan margins. It is named after the South Carolina senator who died in July at the age of 71 and who had pressed for tougher measures against Moscow over the war in Ukraine. The law targeted Russia’s energy and defence industries and the fleet of tankers used to move its oil outside Western price controls. It provided for tariffs of up to 500 per cent on Russian good...

Switzerland's president arrived in New Delhi on Monday with a large business delegation, a year after the trade agreement between India and the European Free Trade Association came into force, and left behind five signed documents covering migration, young workers, transport technology and scientific research Image Source: MEA India Guy Parmelin was given a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan, received by President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and held talks at Hyderabad House. His state visit runs until 7 October. The agreement underpinning the visit is worth understanding on its own terms. The European Free Trade Association is not the European Union. It consists of Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, four countries that stayed outside the EU while trading closely with it. Their agreement with India was concluded after sixteen years of negotiation and entered into force last October. It is India's first trade agreement with any economic...

Captain Smit Machchhar has given the first detailed account of what happened in the cockpit of flydubai flight FZ1073, describing a blow to the back of his head, a loss of vision, and a final effort from the cockpit floor to reach the door handle. He gave it in a video call on Saturday with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who invited him and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, to light a flame at Israel's next Independence Day ceremony — an honour, Netanyahu said, usually reserved for Israeli citizens. By the captain's account, the flight was ordinary until the first officer asked to pray, which Machchhar said was not unusual among local colleagues. Out of respect he kept facing forward rather than turning around. Four or five minutes later came what he called a big blow to the back of his head. His first thought was that the aircraft had suffered catastrophic damage. Then the blows kept coming, and he understood it was the other man in the cockpit. He ...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 15 Of 15 Image Source: @UN on X Every September, world leaders come to the green marble podium of the General Assembly, deliver their national statements and leave. Most of what they say is forgotten within days. Read together rather than one at a time, the statements of this year's General Debate, held from September 22 to 28, record something larger than any one of them conveyed, that a broad, cross-regional admission that the distribution of power has moved faster than the institutions meant to manage it. The Secretary-General set the terms on the opening morning. "We are clearly moving towards a multipolar world. And that movement is irreversible," António Guterres said in his final address to a General Debate before his term ends. He did not present this as good news or bad news. He said multipolarity could take two shapes: a world of "fragmentation and transactionalism", or a "networked" one in which severa...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 14 Of 15 File Photo: @DrSJaishankar on X Malaysia told the UN General Assembly it was "sick of" the Security Council veto and called for its abolition, arguing that the world's "global majority" could no longer simply live with decisions taken by a few. Delivering Malaysia's national statement on Saturday, September 26, Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said nowhere was the need for reform more critical. "No place requires reform more than the Security Council. No place more clearly exposes the weaknesses of the United Nations than the Security Council," he said. His frustration centred on Gaza. Malaysia and other states, he said, had pursued every avenue, including calls for an immediate ceasefire, unrestricted humanitarian aid, punitive action against Israel and full UN membership for Palestine. "Yet, again and again, the collective will of this assembly has encountered the silencing effect of the veto. ...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 13 Of 15 File Photo: @DrSJaishankar on X Belarus used the UN General Assembly to accuse the European Union of clinging to a "slipping dominance", a day after co-launching with Russia a Eurasian charter meant to anchor a multipolar order on the continent. Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov addressed the General Debate on Saturday, September 26. Turning the session's theme on the organisation itself, he said the UN "does not work for the benefit of all" and "does not manage change", blaming states he accused of deliberately undermining the system of international relations. He singled out the EU. Belarus, he said, was "concerned by the policies of the European Union's leadership", whose aim he described as preserving its "slipping dominance". He questioned whether Europeans wanted to become "cannon fodder" in a future war with Russia, and accused officials in Brussels of wanting to ...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 12 Of 15 Cuba told the UN General Assembly that the international system was dangerously close to falling into "the law of the jungle", as Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla accused the United States of imposing an "energy blockade" that has repeatedly brought down the island's power grid. Image Source: @BricsIndia2026 Addressing the General Debate on Saturday, September 26, Rodríguez said international law and the founding principles of the UN, among them the sovereign equality of States, were under "permanent attack" from expanding militarism and economic coercion. He called Washington's aim of imposing peace through force absurd and unachievable. He opened by recalling that 66 years earlier, almost to the hour, Fidel Castro had addressed the Assembly from the same podium. The centre of the speech was an account of US pressure since January. "Since January, 2026, this aggression has strengthene...

The Crown Prince of Dubai visited Captain Smit Machchhar on Saturday, days after the Indian pilot was stabbed in the cockpit of a flydubai aircraft carrying 174 people and managed, while bleeding and pinned to the floor, to release the cockpit door so that passengers and crew could overpower his attacker. Image Source: DubaiMediaOffice "He embodied the highest degrees of courage, responsibility, and care for human life," Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum said in a statement issued by the Dubai Media Office. "We are proud that he is part of our team, part of the story of our nation, and part of what the UAE stands for: a nation of compassion, a nation of peace, and a nation of life." Hamdan bin Mohammed: During a visit to Captain Smit Machchhar… the flydubai pilot who embodied the highest degrees of courage, responsibility, and care for human life. From us, and from the leadership of the nation, he has our full appreciation and praise. We are proud th...

Captain Smit Machchhar was in a hospital bed, on the phone with the Indian Prime Minister, and somewhere in the middle of it he broke down. "Sorry, main aapke saamne ro raha hoon sir." Narendra Modi told him that if he could not cry in front of him, then where.  The flydubai aircraft Machchhar was commanding from Dubai to Tel Aviv fell close to 14,000 feet in under thirty seconds. His first officer, an Omani national, had stabbed him in the cockpit, and an unlawful interference code went out that scrambled Israeli fighter jets. There were 174 people on board. The aircraft landed at Tabuk in north-western Saudi Arabia. The first officer was arrested. Benjamin Netanyahu said Machchhar had prevented a catastrophic midair disaster. Modi said his valour had saved hundreds of lives. In the conversation, Machchhar describes it without any of that vocabulary. He had fallen. He was wounded, he was pinned beneath something, he was still being struck. And he says he could feel, the way...

Hundreds of Social Media Posts asserting that a man wearing an explosive vest was stopped among worshippers near the Kaaba at Mecca's Grand Mosque circulated widely on X and other platforms on Oct 2 (IST) but Saudi authorities have not yet confirmed any such incident and no international news agency has reported one. Representational Image: IndianRepublic.in The claim was amplified by accounts with large followings, including the main handle of the Russian state broadcaster RT, which posted that a device had failed to detonate. Several posts carried video said to show the scene, with security personnel moving among worshippers. The posts named no official source. The only corroboration offered for the claim was other posts making it. Nothing to this effect has appeared on the Saudi Press Agency, the government's official channel, or from the Presidency of Religious Affairs of the Two Holy Mosques. Reuters, AFP, the Associated Press and Al Jazeera have carried no report. A sum...

Israel treating cockpit stabbing on flydubai FZ1073 as a terror incident, with the co-pilot in Saudi custody Image Source: @netanyahu on X Israel's prime minister said a pilot's actions prevented a mid-air catastrophe on a flight to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, after one of the aircraft's two pilots stabbed the other in the cockpit. Benjamin Netanyahu said that as flydubai flight FZ1073 approached Israel, one pilot stabbed the other and apparently attempted to crash the aircraft with everyone on board. The flight, from Dubai to Ben Gurion airport, was carrying 174 people, among them Israeli citizens and nationals of other countries. The injured pilot was named by Netanyahu and by Israel's foreign ministry as Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national. Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, Netanyahu said, he fought back, resisted and opened the cockpit door, allowing passengers and crew to overpower the attacker. "He saved the lives of 174 people, including Isr...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 11 Of 15 Image Source: @EOIBeijing on X China used its address to the 81st UN General Assembly to present itself as a defender of the post-war order against unilateral force, bloc politics and protectionism, while avoiding the explicit language of multipolarity used by some of its partners. Vice President Han Zheng, who delivered China's national statement on Saturday, September 26, said the UN-centred international system and the order underpinned by international law that emerged after the Second World War "must be upheld". He called on states to "reject the Cold War mindset and bloc confrontation" and to "oppose unilateral military actions that violate the UN Charter and circumvent Security Council authorization". Major countries, he said, "shoulder special responsibilities" and "should take the lead in complying with rules, upholding rule of law and doing what's right". He did not nam...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 10 Of 15 File Photo Via: @mfa_russia on X Russia used its address to the 81st UN General Assembly to argue that the era of Western dominance is ending, and to give that argument an institutional shape across Eurasia. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the General Debate on Saturday, September 26, that delegates had heard repeatedly, from the rostrum and in the corridors, that tectonic shifts were under way and that "a more just, multipolar world order is emerging before our very eyes". Countries of the Global South and East, he said, were asserting themselves as sovereign centres of growth and taking responsibility for security in their own regions. Quoting President Vladimir Putin, he said "the dictatorship of a single hegemon has run amok and is simply dangerous for everyone around it." The rest of the speech amounted to a charge sheet against the West. The "Western minority", which he said had dominated for fiv...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 9 Of 15 Image Source: @DrSJaishankar on X India told the UN General Assembly that the international order built after 1945 is giving way, and that the world is moving towards multipolarity whether its institutions are ready or not. "We are now well on our way towards a multi-polar world. The post-1945 order is giving way to new realities," External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said in India's national statement on Saturday, September 26. "This process of adjustment, accommodation and acceptance will not be easy. Much of the turbulence that we witness today emanates from those very difficulties." The passage captured a long-held view in New Delhi that new centres of power are not in themselves the problem but institutions that have failed to adjust to them are. The inability of global institutions to keep the peace, Jaishankar said, was "not only weakening security, but is also threatening progress, slowing the pace...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 8 Of 15 Image Source: @miaamormottley on X Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley told the UN General Assembly that small states depend on the survival of fair international rules, warning that "without an equitable rules-based order, smaller States like mine will simply cease to exist in this world." Addressing the General Debate on Thursday, September 24, Mottley argued that the world's problem was not a lack of knowledge but a failure to act on it, and that UN reform could not stop at administrative changes. "We cannot move swiftly to reorganize offices and reporting lines while allowing the most consequential questions of power and representation to remain unresolved," she said. "Reform cannot be selective." "So yes, let us improve the machinery. But let us also reform the exercise of power," she said. She pointed to Africa's lack of a permanent Security Council seat and to the absence of assured...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 7 Of 15 File Photo Via: @JDMahama on X Ghana's President John Dramani Mahama told the UN General Assembly that Africa's lack of a permanent seat on the Security Council is "fundamentally unacceptable in the 21st century", and warned of "a dangerous drift toward unilateralism, lawlessness, and the erosion of multilateral norms". Addressing the General Debate on Thursday, September 24, Mahama argued that past injustices remain built into today's power structures. "Africa is home to 1.5 billion people, over 18 per cent of humanity, and constitutes the largest regional voting bloc in this General Assembly. Yet, Africa remains without a single permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council," he said. "We cannot credibly champion the sovereign equality of nations while preserving a global governance structure designed for the post-war geopolitical realities," he continued. "Security Counc...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 6 Of 15 File Photo Via: @RonaldLamola on X South Africa told the UN General Assembly that economic coercion and Africa's exclusion from global decision-making are eroding trust in the multilateral system, and demanded permanent African seats on the Security Council "with all the prerogatives of permanent membership". Ronald Lamola, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, delivered the national statement on Thursday, September 24, which is Heritage Day in South Africa. He opened by recalling that 60 years ago the Assembly condemned apartheid as a crime against humanity, calling apartheid's fall "a glorious story that attests to what multilateralism can deliver". That history framed what followed. South Africa, he said, had built "a democracy strong enough to withstand and resist attempts at external supervision and tutelage". He did not say from where such attempts came. On coercion he was direc...