Friedrich Merz did not mince words. Speaking to his party faithful in Munich at the Christian Democratic Union party conference last week, Germany's chancellor declared that Pax Americana, as Europe had known it, was over.

POLITICS has an uncomfortable relationship with honesty. Everyone claims to value it, yet few are willing to practice it when the truth is inconvenient.

WE are living through a period that keeps forcing us to confront an uncomfortable question: why have good leaders become so rare? This is not a wistful look back at a romanticised past or golden age. It is a recognition that leadership, as a societal function, seems to have drifted from its moral centre.

WHEN Donald Trump returned to the White House for his second term, the world braced for a more aggressive and unpredictable chapter of US foreign policy.

PUBLIC sentiment is hardening into a view that the government is under-delivering at a time when Malaysians are wrestling with rising prices, sluggish delivery of election promises, and the lingering effects of subsidy rationalisation.

The United States' ongoing trade wars under Donald Trump's second administration have fundamentally changed the global trading environment.

OVER the past weekend, Kuala Lumpur witnessed the return of something once synonymous with Malaysian resistance politics – a street protest.

TWO weeks ago, Malaysia's legal community reached a tipping point when lawyers, led by the Malaysian Bar Council, embarked on a 2.6km "Walk to Safeguard Judicial Independence." Clad in black and armed with a 65-page memorandum, they pressed the Prime Minister's Office to curb executive overreach in judicial appointments.

More than six decades after government surveyors first nailed acquisition notices to rubber trees at Ladang Batu, the Court of Appeal has tried to bring the Semantan Estate saga to a close.

The road to a broad-based consumption tax in Malaysia has been long and tortuous, stretching back more than a decade before its brief life under Barisan Nasional (BN). In December 2009, the then-government first introduced the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill in Parliament, pledging that a uniform, 6% levy would replace the patchwork of Sales and Service Taxes (SST) then ranging from 5 to 15%.

THE rule of law is one of the most fundamental principles that underpins a democratic society.

ON 2 August 2024, my father, Harpal Singh Grewal, passed away. In one of the most poignant traditions of the Malaysian Bar, a special proceeding known as a "Reference" is held before the High Court to honour members of the Bar who have departed.