John Metzler

It’s been a strange and uncertain summer, bookmarked by high temperatures, torrid inflation, and a very hot war on Europe’s eastern doorstep.

Despite their huffing, puffing, and threatening, regarding the short but symbolic visit of U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to what China deems a “renegade province,” Taiwan, the Beijing Dragon blinked.

In what he optimistically called a “beacon of hope” in a world that desperately needs it, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres helped broker a complicated diplomatic deal between warring parties Russia and Ukraine.

This was a crisis waiting to happen. Europe’s unfolding energy emergency was long in coming but at the same time widely encouraged by Western European states all too eager to embrace Russia’s cheap and available natural gas delivered to the European Union’s doorstep by a spiderweb of pipelines some dating from the Soviet era.

The jolting but not unexpected wake-up call came from London.

Just a year ago, the political odds of comfortably neutral Sweden and Finland joining NATO were a long shot; Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine changed the military threat and jolted the political calculus.

How time flies. It’s been 25 years since Hong Kong returned to Chinese control, a quarter century since the prosperous British Crown Colony became a semi-autonomous part of the People’s Republic of China, the world’s largest dictatorship.

Is China drawing yet another provocative red line, this time in the narrow but strategic Taiwan Strait?

Foreign investment flows worldwide have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels reaching nearly $1.6 trillion. That’s the good news. Yet as a new report warns, the war in Ukraine and widening global uncertainty make the prospects for expansion appear grim.

It was time to celebrate! The 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1952 makes her the longest serving Monarch in British history. Thus, the grandly named Platinum Jubilee has not only dazzled the country with its Royal Pomp and circumstance, but as importantly invigorated it with its joyous celebrations of unity across the land.

Our world is beset by unthinkable tragedy; brash military aggression, widening instability and grinding humanitarian suffering.

Has Putin’s war against Ukraine, started during the Winter, proved a stroke of genius by the denizen of the Kremlin?

Thousands of miles beyond the widening tragedy in Ukraine, a new threat has reemerged on the Korean peninsula with a provocative long-range missile test by communist North Korea.

The second salvo of diplomatic condemnation slammed into Russia as the UN General Assembly once again soundly and overwhelmingly condemned Moscow’s actions in Ukraine.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a rising tsunami of refugees fleeing their beleaguered homeland and heading for neighboring Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.