According to reports, US President Joe Biden last week hastily rewrote parts of his State of the Union address to take account of events in Ukraine following the Russian invasion.

A health expert with a smattering of classical education recently quipped: “It’s a long way from omicron to omega.” She was talking about the likelihood that the omicron variant of the coronavirus would be its last serious manifestation.

The specter of inflation is once more looming over the global economy. The prospect of sharply rising prices of goods and services threatens to throw out the careful calculations of economic policymakers and make recovery from the pandemic recession more unpredictable and hazardous.

Many people, myself included, do not like tax. In fact, for many foreign workers in the Gulf region, that dislike is one of the big reasons we are here in the first place.

The world has had an uncomfortable relationship with nuclear power from the very beginning, when early work on nuclear fission became part of the US-led effort to build the first atomic weapons, subsequently used against Japan in 1945.

Many analysts, and indeed many ordinary people in Britain, view Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a dead man walking, in political terms.

On the first anniversary of the riots in Washington that sought to overturn the election of US President Joe Biden, there are plenty of political experts hypothesizing that 2022 will be a decisive year for American democracy.

It is a supreme irony that, despite the vocal calls of environmental activists for the complete abandonment of coal as a source of power generation, 2021 will go down as the year King Coal resumed his throne in the global energy markets.