Point One

It’s only a few hours away from curtains down on this outgoing year and we could at this point begin to mentally consign it to the bin of history, as we look forward with hope recharged to alluring prospects of a newly incoming year. You are well familiar with that annual ritual, aren’t you? We are at the recurrent juncture of time when an old year wobbles, bloodied and bowed, to a tardy close as humanity strains with impatience for the breaking forth of a fresh year. At a time like this, the prevalent mood is usually a cocktail of frustration over failed expectations from the outgoing year and a rebound of hope that the incoming year harbours better promises. Even among those for whom the outgoing year had been a cluster of accomplishments, there is eager anticipation that the incoming year will simply be distinctly better. But experience shows it is some vicious cycle of mood swings from a new year’s grand debut to its weary expiration: a swing from excited hope ...

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson led Tories to a stomping victory in the country’s general election on Thursday, last week – an electoral win that handed him a blank cheque he badly needed to push through with Brexit by January 31, next year. The Conservative Party netted 365 seats in the 650-member parliament, harvesting 47 more than it went into the poll with. The outcome is said to be the party’s biggest showing in Westminster since Margaret Thatcher’s electoral gale in 1987, and a pole vault from its fortunes in the 2017 snap election called by former Prime Minister Theresa May, in which the party lost the narrow parliamentary majority it had won under David Cameron in 2015 and was forced to court support by 10 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) members of the House of Commons to govern. Opposition Labour Party barely survived with 203 parliamentary seats in the latest poll – a rout that saw the party losing 59 of the seats it went into the election with and...