Photo Source: Washington Source By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe UpFront In February 2020, the United States signed a peace deal with Taliban in Qatar, and agreed to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, in following fourteen months, provided Taliban upheld the conditions of the agreement, including distancing itself from Al-Qaeda. The U.S. said that it was also committed to close its five military bases, within one hundred thirty five days, and also expressed to end economic sanctions on the Taliban, by August 2020. The Afghan government, which was not party to the deal, rejected the US and Taliban call for a prisoner’s swap, in March 2020, because President Ashraf Ghani believed such a swap would require a further negotiated agreement, and that it should not be implemented as a precondition for future peace negotiations. However, Ghani contradicted his statement on March 10, 2020, and eventually signed a deal to swap fifteen hundred Taliban soldiers, provided they did not retu...

Photo Source : Global Research By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront I n mid April 2020, a report issued by the United States State Department called " Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments " raised concerns that China might be conducting nuclear tests with low yields at its Lop Nur site, in violation of its Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) undertakings. The U.S. report also claims that Russia has conducted nuclear weapons experiments that produced a nuclear yield, underlying the CTBT. Russia and China have rejected the U.S.’s claims. With growing rivalry among major powers, the report harbingers a new global nuclear arms race, which would mark the end of the CTBT that came into being in 1996. In search of a political diplomacy, it was in March 2020, when Donald Trump  agreed to a proposal that China should join for a new round of arms control talks, along with four other pe...

Photo Source: Gard.no By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront  G ulf of Guinea continues to be world’s most dangerous route for international shipping trade. Called as ‘world's piracy hotspot’, it has now eclipsed the troubled waters off Somalia, in the Horn of Africa, by becoming a new epicenter for looting and kidnappings. According to International Maritime Bureau, almost eighty two percent of maritime kidnappings, in the world, occurred in the Gulf of Guinea in 2019. Attacks against merchant ships were recorded off Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea.  There were seventy-two attacks on vessels at sea, in 2018, between Ivory Coast and Cameroon, up from twenty-eight in 2014, and thirty in 2019, as per a report in The Economist.   Pirates in the Gulf of Guinea target all kinds of vessels: crews from fishing, refrigerated cargo vessels, or even oil tankers. They have been mostly attacking ships with international crews, according to ...

Photo source: Constantine Alexander's Journal By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront T he Black Sea is dying, and its impacting the world around it. Under the current  environmental conditions, more than one hundred sixty million people in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Russian Federation, Romania and Turkey are exposed to its alarming dangers. At its healthiest, the sea supported a thriving fishing industry, and scenery so tranquil that top communist leaders, from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, often shifted their work from Moscow to their seaside dachas for the duration of the summer. Even now, millions of holiday makers flock to its stony beaches when the stifling August heat strikes. However, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, water quality had hit such a low ebb from the inflow of industrial strength agricultural fertilisers that some scientists wondered aloud whether the Black Sea might become the first major waterway devoid of life.  The amount of marine litter i...

Photo Source: Nikkei Asian Review By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe UpFront I n August 2019, as world watched the China-US trade war play out, another tit for tat brawling occurred between South Korea and Japan, as it threatened the world’s tech supply chain, and made the global economy more uncertain. It came at an unfavourable time when Brexit was also looming, and putting businesses under an onslaught.  The dispute involves historical grievances that date back hundred years. Despite both countries claimed to have imposed trade sanctions, in the interest of national security, the victimisation of trade became a worrying trend. Recently, the tensions between the two countries escalated when South Korea refused to re-sign the military intelligence sharing pact it has with Japan. This announcement from President Moon Jae-in’s Blue House came after months of wrangling over a 2018 Supreme Court decision, in Seoul, that upheld claims that Japanese corporations must pay re...

Photo source: Business Insider By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe UpFront 2019 Amazon wildfires, that lit up in August, led to an international concern about the fate of the rainforests, responsible for world’s twenty percent oxygen, often called as the ‘lungs of the world’. Some 1,202 square kilometers (464 square miles) of forest — an area more than twenty times the size of Manhattan — was destroyed from January 2020 to April 2020, according to Brasil's National Space Research Institute. It’s the highest figure for the first four months of the year since 2015. The same agency reported that there were more than eighty thousand fires in 2019, the most that it had ever recorded. It was nearly an eighty percent jump with what the country had experienced in 2018: the sky over Sao Paulo, Brasil’s largest city, went dark with smoke clouds that blocked out the sun. After bowing to pressure, president Jair Bolsonaro announced a 60-day ban on setting fires to clear land. The environmen...

Photo Source: Guardian By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe UpFront S ince 2015,  six hundred million Indians are facing extreme drought stress. The Indian government has accepted this fact in its own report ‘Composite Water Management Index: A Tool For Water Management’, published in June 2018. Droughts have not only given crop failures but also poor soil health. The livelihood of farmers is so much affected that cases of suicides have gone up. It will also be soon when forty percent of country’s population may have no access to drinking water. It is because ground water is being depleted at an alarming rate: some eight five percent of the country's drinking water comes from aquifers, according to Water Aid. What is alarming is that this also has serious implications for India’s population. Currently, nearly two hundred thousand people die every year, due to scarce access to safe water. With seventy of India’s water contaminated, the country ranks 120th among 122 c...