In a country where financial, health and welfare systems have collapsed, half the population are starving, there are four million drug addicts, and 20 percent suffer mental health problems, the Taliban are obsessed with one policy agenda — robbing women of any kind of purposeful existence.

In the context of the Ukraine war, the manner in which the world functions, and rivalries between superpowers, have been profoundly transformed in ways that are scarcely yet understood.

Mushrooming funding for the Tehran-backed Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi paramilitary movement in Iraq has almost doubled their size to 238,000 personnel and nearly $3 billion of the budget, according to the Iraqi parliament’s finance committee.

Another day, another “martyrs” event at which Hassan Nasrallah laboriously and provocatively holds forth on every imaginable issue — while being inexplicably bashful about discussing Lebanon’s dire domestic predicaments.