New wars, old wars, famine, panic everywhere. So much for a quiet August | Simon Tisdall

From Bangladesh to Venzuela, one calamity rapidly overtakes another, but common denominators include poverty, corruption and lack of hope

August is the quietest month - to mangle TS Eliot's verse - or so news editors used to think. Politicians go on holiday, governments shut down, people head for the hills or the beach. Not much happens. Not so this August. The world this month is experiencing an extraordinary peaking of volatility, instability and insecurity, unprecedented in recent times. It's scary, it's shocking, it's a wild ride.

Sudden revolutions, wars current and imminent, terrible crimes, high-stakes feuding, famines, cost of living crunches, violent riots and unfathomable market panics come not as single spies but in battalions. In a world where mutual destruction, steeped in cruelty and despair, is a favoured human pastime, grim vistas of Eliot's The Waste Land beckon anew.