Weigh prudence over bravado: Why US–Pakistan campaign of retaking Bagram could trigger wider war

Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury | October 9, 2025 8:15 PM

Dhaka: The United States looks poised to return to the very theatre it once abandoned: Bagram. What Washington calls a tactical correction could quickly become a strategic rupture for South Asia. A renewed US push - now reportedly coordinated with Pakistan's security establishment - to retake Bagram Air Base and re-establish a foothold in Afghanistan risks detonating a broader regional conflagration, reigniting refugee flows, empowering jihadist networks and drawing Pakistan deeper into an unwinnable security quagmire. The question is not whether the dust will settle - it is how many countries, communities and lives will be buried beneath it.

China welcomes resumption of direct flights with India

IANS | October 9, 2025 7:55 PM

Beijing, Oct 9 (IANS) China on Thursday welcomed the resumption of direct flights with India, calling it an "active move" that facilitates friendly exchanges between the two nations. Responding to a question during a regular media briefing in Beijing, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry stressed that the decision demonstrates how the two nations "faithfully act" on the important common understandings reached between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping during their recent meeting in Tianjin.

Journey towards becoming an Islamist state: Dhaka regime starts sending Bangladesh Armed Forces to slaughterhouse

IANS | October 9, 2025 6:23 PM

Dhaka, Oct 9 (IANS) Bangladesh today stands on the brink of an unprecedented national catastrophe. Under the guise of reform and accountability, the pro-Islamist regime of Muhammad Yunus has begun dismantling the nation's most vital institutions - the Armed Forces and the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI). What appears to be a judicial process is, in reality, a political purge aimed at replacing the patriotic guardians of Bangladesh's sovereignty with a militant, ideologically driven "Islamic Revolutionary Army". In doing so, the Yunus regime risks transforming Bangladesh from a moderate Muslim democracy into a jihadist state - a South Asian version of Iran or Afghanistan.

Hungary's Krasznahorkai, whose pensive oeuvre straddles East and West, conferred Literature Nobel

Vikas Datta | October 9, 2025 6:14 PM

New Delhi, Oct 9 (IANS) In line with the objective of bringing seminal authors to greater global renown, the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature was conferred on Hungarian litterateur Laszlo Krasznahorkai, whose demanding, yet pensive, post-modern, near-surrealist works draw on the traditions of Nikolai Gogol, Frank Kafka, and Samuel Beckett, but go ahead to span both his Central European milieu and that of the mystic East.