Scientists are pushing for “radical” measures against climate change, proposing the construction of a dam across the Bering Strait that would link Alaska and Russia, said Science.

A study by University of Utrecht academics Jelle Soons and Henk Dijkstra suggests that this would be a decisive way to protect the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is instrumental in regulating the planet’s sea temperature and climate.

Three separate dams would be needed across the strait, which is 51 miles (82km) wide at its narrowest, due to the two islands that lie in the middle, with the longest section spanning roughly 24 miles (38 km), said LiveScience. Similar structures already exist in the Netherlands and South Korea, although “not in remote locations with strong currents and sea ice, or with rival geopolitical powers on opposite sides”.

‘Grave’ dangers

Building a dam in the Bering Strait is just as “out there” an idea as “refreezing the Arctic” or “floating a giant parasol in outer space”, said The New York Times. The concern for the continuation of the AMOC is very real, however.

Acting as a “vast oceanic conveyor belt”, it carries tropical, salty currents from the Atlantic towards Europe. There, it releases the warmth into the air, which regulates the temperature across the continent. Once cooled, it circles back south, influencing rainfall patterns in Africa, South America, and beyond.

There is a “growing body of evidence” that human-caused global warming could cause it to “shut down or slow significantly”, which would have “grave effects” on weather patterns on multiple continents.

“At first glance”, the role of the Bering Strait “isn’t all that obvious” in this global cycle. However, it acts as the “gateway for large quantities of fresh water” to flow from the Pacific into the Arctic Ocean, then into the Atlantic. A dam in this region would alter the balance of fresh and salt water in all three oceans.

The University of Utrecht study was based on simulations indicating that the AMOC was “much stronger” in the Pliocene era – roughly 5.3 to 2.6 million years ago. During this era, sea levels in the strait were lower, exposing an intercontinental land bridge, leading Soons, the study’s lead researcher, to wonder “could we do this again?”, said New Scientist.

No ‘escape hatch’

It is an “audacious proposal”, and a project that would be on an unseen and “truly epic scale”. Researchers have been “mulling it over” at the European Geosciences Union general assembly in Vienna this month. But “because we don’t fully understand the AMOC, we can’t be sure of the consequences of such an intervention”. “These drastic things really do have big uncertainties attached”, Jonathan Rosser, a climate researcher at the London School of Economics, told the magazine.

“This is one of those climate ideas that sounds almost ridiculous when you first hear it”, said Earth.com. In fact, the “real takeaway” from the study, and its discussion at a conference level, is “how worried scientists have become about the AMOC”. “When researchers start seriously modelling something this extreme, it tells you that the level of concern is high.”

Even if this project were given the green light – following much more advanced and rigorous modelling – it would “raise huge environmental, political, legal and logistical questions”. The scale of the intervention, let alone the complex political relations between the US and Russia, would mean this project would not be anywhere as simple as “building a bridge or a seawall”. “It would be one of the boldest and strangest geoengineering projects ever seriously contemplated.”

Even then, it does not promise an “escape hatch”, or get-out-of-jail-free card. “Once you are debating mega-dams to prop up ocean currents”, it’s a clear sign that progress towards reducing emissions “has not gone nearly well enough”.

What happened

European Union foreign ministers Monday agreed to impose sanctions on Israeli settlers over increasing violence against West Bank Palestinians. The sanctions will hit unidentified “Israeli extremist settlers and entities” and “leading Hamas figures,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said.

The proposal, which required unanimous support from the 27 EU nations, was finally adopted after Hungary’s new government lifted former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s veto.

Who said what

“It was high ​time we move from deadlock to delivery,” Kallas said on social media. “Extremisms and ​violence carry consequences.” Israel and Hamas both criticized the sanctions, which were drafted last year amid “rising violence and expanding settlements in the occupied West Bank,” The Washington Post said.

The financial penalties “could have massive implications” for the targeted Israeli organizations — reportedly Regavim, HaShomer Yosh, Amana and Nachala — and their work expanding “settlements and illegal outposts,” The Times of Israel said. But the penalties are “focused more against individuals and groups pushing for the de facto Israeli annexation of the West Bank” than “those involved in violent assaults on Palestinians.”

What next?

The sanctions will take effect “once legal and technical work is complete,” the Post said.

What happened

U.S. policy on Iran whipsawed last week, with President Trump telling Tehran to accept a peace deal or face a new wave of bombing, soon after he’d hailed “great progress” in talks and halted a military operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Trump had announced that, in a “humanitarian gesture,” the U.S. would guide merchant ships through the strait, a key oil export route that has been effectively shuttered by Iran since the start of the nine-week-old war. Any interference with “Project Freedom” would be met “forcefully,” Trump said. But as U.S. warships escorted two commercial vessels through the strait, Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones. None of the ships were damaged, and U.S. attack helicopters sank six Iranian military speedboats; Iranian strikes hit a major oil hub in the United Arab Emirates and at least two commercial ships in the Persian Gulf. Trump declined to say Iran had violated a four-week ceasefire, calling the clash a “mini war.” A day later he paused Project Freedom, citing movement toward a “complete and final” agreement with Tehran.

Trump’s U-turn came hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that “Operation Epic Fury is concluded” and that the war’s objectives had been achieved, despite Iran’s continuing choke hold on the strait and the lack of any deal over its nuclear program. Axios reported that U.S. officials believe they are nearing an agreement with Tehran on a one-page “memorandum of understanding” to end the war and set the stage for detailed negotiations. The war will end “assuming Iran agrees to give what has been agreed to,” Trump posted online, “which is, perhaps, a big assumption.” If they don’t, he said, bombing will resume, “at a much higher level and intensity.”

What the columnists said

Both sides are working with mediators to craft a 14-point “framework,” said Benoit Faucon in The Wall Street Journal. The working version calls for Iran to begin opening the strait and the U.S. to wind down its blockade of Iranian ports during 30 days of talks. Iran is said to be willing to discuss a possible halt to uranium enrichment and the removal of some of its stockpile of near-weapons grade uranium to a third country—but not the U.S. Divisions within Iran’s leadership could prove a roadblock, said Barak Ravid in Axios. Given the challenge of uniting disparate factions, some U.S. officials are “skeptical that even an initial deal will be reached.”

Project Freedom had two objectives, said Chas Danner in New York. One was to pressure Iran to fully open the strait and free 1,600 commercial ships stuck in the Persian Gulf, which failed miserably. The other was “a cynical attempt to rebrand the war,” which became illegal once it hit 60 days without congressional authorization. The administration wants the public to believe the offensive has ended and that the U.S. is now engaged in an entirely different “defensive” operation to open the strait.

The administration can say whatever it wants, but that “does not make it true,” said David E. Sanger in The New York Times. The war is not over. And its objectives have not been met. Trump cited five at the outset, including regime change and ensuring Iran can “never have a nuclear weapon.” Only one goal, disabling Iran’s navy, has been achieved. But the war has become a “political crisis,” and the White House is anxious to put it “in the rearview mirror.”

Americans can see the cost of this war everywhere, said Scott Waldman and Ben Lefebvre in Politico. Gas hit an average of $4.54 a gallon this week, up $1.56 since fighting began in February, and diesel hit $5.67, up $1.91. The spike in diesel, which powers trucks and trains, “in turn is expected to drive up prices for everything from groceries to postage.” Trump’s disapproval rating is climbing as well, hitting a record 62% in a new poll, said Scott Clement and Dan Balz in The Washington Post. Americans disapprove of his handling of the war by 66% to 33%, and his approval rating on the economy has dropped to 34%.

“There are now only two outcomes to the conflict,” said Scott Anderson in The New York Times. With Iran not about to cave, Trump can resume hostilities. But that seems unlikely, and “no amount of bombing” will change the fact that Iran has gained control of the strait and the ability to “paralyze the global economy.” The alternative is a settlement that will leave the “empowered” Iranian regime intact and “a blustering American president humiliated.” Operation Epic Fury is now looking more like “Operation Colossal Blunder.”

For nearly a quarter of a century, Vladimir Putin has led the Russian Federation as one of the most successful authoritarians on Earth. But more than four years after launching an all-out invasion of Ukraine, the Russian president synonymous with Moscow’s kleptocratic rule finds himself in unfamiliar territory. Russia is now roiled by rumors of organized unrest with months to go before parliamentary elections, while Putin himself faces allegations of extreme isolation and a weakening grip on power.

What did the commentators say?

There is a sense of “mounting unease within the Kremlin” as it grapples with domestic and economic problems plus “increasing signs of dissent and setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine,” said CNN, citing a report from a European intelligence agency. The Kremlin has “dramatically increased” Putin’s security, even installing surveillance systems “in the homes of close staffers” in measures “prompted by a wave of assassinations of top Russian military figures and fears of a coup.” Putin is “increasingly concerned” about an alleged “plot by members of the Russian political elite to topple him, or even assassinate him with drones,” said The Times. The president and his family have “stopped visiting their luxury residences” and Putin is spending “weeks at a time in bunkers.”

The report focuses on “growing internal tensions” between Putin and former Defense Minister and current Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, said the Kyiv Post. Considered a “potential coup risk” for his “continued influence within the military leadership,” Shoigu has not “personally” been linked with hard evidence to “any wrongdoing.” The arrest this past March of one of Shoigu’s deputies was “presented in the report” as a “sign of weakening informal protections among the elite” that has contributed to the tensions.

Putin’s slipping power is “not only about falling approval ratings,” said The Economist. Russia’s future is “no longer discussed” in terms of what Putin “will decide” but as “something that will unfold independently of him — and possibly already without him.” This waning authority comes from a “confluence” of factors, including rising wartime costs and a “growing demand for rules among elites who have been forced back into Russia, along with their capital.” Shifting geopolitical winds and the collapse of Russia’s previous “social contract,” in which the state “stayed out of people’s private lives while citizens stayed out of politics,” have created a “situation which in chess is known as a Zugzwang: when every move worsens the position.”

This isn’t to say that “revolution is imminent” or that the 73-year-old Putin “will be sidelined soon,” said The Wall Street Journal. Nevertheless, the “change in mood is remarkable” compared to “just last December,” when Russia was “buoyed by hopes” of a Moscow-friendly, Trump-negotiated ceasefire with Ukraine.

Changes in national mood notwithstanding, the “sudden spate” of coup-oriented reporting stemming from the “conveniently anonymous ‘European intelligence agency’” looks “suspiciously more like a psyop meant to generate paranoia in the Russian elite than a serious assessment,” said The Spectator. Europe has a “desperate appetite” for a “deus ex machina, for some miraculous end to the Ukraine war,” and a coup to oust Putin “certainly fits the bill.” Still, this would “hardly be the first time” intelligence services “succumbed to the temptation to provide their masters with what they want, not need, to hear.”

What next?

For the time being, Moscow “understands that there could be serious discontent ahead” and has accordingly “decided to allow low-level discontent to manifest itself,” said former Putin adviser Marat Gelman at the Journal. As things stand, Putin has “enough resources to crush any civil revolt.”

“In Russia, they say that things don’t happen fast, but when they happen, they happen fast,” former U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan said to the Journal. While he “wouldn’t have said it a year or two ago,” civic revolt is “possible now.”

What happened

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday presided over the “most ‌scaled-back Victory Day parade in years,” Reuters said. Afterward, he told reporters he thought the Ukraine war was “coming to an end.” President Donald Trump last week said Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had agreed to exchange 1,000 war prisoners and pause the fighting through Monday to mark the annual celebration of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

Who said what

Russia’s “markedly pared down” Victory Day parade “went forward amid veiled threats from Ukraine,” Radio Free Europe said. Zelenskyy “issued a mocking statement” beforehand “saying he was authorizing the Kremlin parade to be held” free from attacks. If Putin’s parade was “subdued” because he “feared a long-range Ukrainian drone strike” in Red Square. This is “one more sign that the tide may be turning against Russia after four long years of death,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial.

What next?

Russia’s Ukraine offensive “has slowed to a crawl” and its “challenges on the battlefield complicate the narrative of imminent victory” Putin is “selling” Trump to convince him Kyiv needs to cede land in U.S. peace talks, The New York Times said. At its current rate, Moscow would need “more than three decades to seize full control of the Donbas.”

What happened

The Dutch cruise ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak docked off Spain’s Canary Islands on Sunday so passengers could be evacuated to their home countries. They included all 17 American passengers from the MV Hondius, one of whom tested positive for the virus Sunday while another developed mild symptoms, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department said. One of five French passengers also tested positive after showing symptoms on the flight home, the French government said. Three passengers have died since April 11 and at least five others have fallen ill with hantavirus symptoms.

Who said what

Hantavirus is a rare and deadly virus usually spread by inhaling rodent droppings, but the Andes strain found in the infected passengers can spread through close human contact, the World Health Organization said. “This is not another Covid,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “And the risk to the public is low.”

What next?

The U.S. passengers are arriving in Omaha on Monday morning, where most will be monitored at the specialized National Quarantine Unit while the one who tested positive will be transferred to the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, HHS said.

A new report by Human Rights Watch argues that the compulsory use of Chinese as the primary language in schools in Tibet raises “serious concerns under international human rights law”.

Detailing the effects of the “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan” five years ago, as well as more recent updates to the “National Common Language Law”, the organisation argues that measures are marginalising Tibetan identity to the point of erasure.

“International concern about these developments has grown,” said Jianli Yang in The Diplomat. These language laws fit into a pattern in recent years of “intensified policies” aimed to “reshape” Tibetan identity through “cultural control”.

‘Eroding’ Tibetan culture

Both politically and legally, “China is steadily narrowing the space for minority autonomy in education, language, and religion”, said The Diplomat. In December last year, the National People’s Congress revised the “National Common Language Law”. It now requires Mandarin to be the “fundamental teaching language” and mandates standardised textbooks throughout the education system. The codification of assimilation policies “marks a new phase” in Beijing’s strategy: it seeks “not merely to manage ethnic diversity but to fundamentally reshape it”.

Videos from Tibet on social media have shown young children “not even able to say their names in Tibetan, pronouncing them as if they were Chinese”, said Kris Cheng in The Guardian. Children, who have been brought up speaking Tibetan stop speaking it within a year of beginning school.

Parents face a “dilemma”: education in Chinese improves employment and career prospects, but it often comes at the cost of associating Tibetan with “social disadvantage”. Some are sending their children to Tibetan language classes in the school holidays, but authorities have been “cracking down” by “banning unsanctioned schools and classes in many places”.

Perhaps the most “profound policy shift” from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Tibet was the 2021 “Children’s Speech Harmonization Plan”, said Human Rights Watch. For the first time, it mandated the use of Chinese language as a “medium of instruction” in all preschools. Though not explicitly banning Tibetan in educational settings, it effectively “downgrades” the freedom for minorities to develop and continue their language.

This law was not a “sudden rupture”, however, but the “near final step in a decades-long process” of “eroding the role of Tibetan as a medium of instruction”. It was a “key acceleration point” in the drive to reshape the “linguistic, cultural, and social foundations of Tibetan society”.

‘Narrowed’ tolerance

China’s stance “turned sharply against expressions of separate ethnic identity among minorities” when Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, said Josh Chin and Niharika Mandhana in the Wall Street Journal. Officials targeted Tibetan alternatives to state schools and expanded the boarding school system. Resistance since the uprising of 1959 has persisted under the current Dalai Lama, a “potent force despite decades of propaganda, political crackdowns and education drives aimed at undermining his authority”, living in exile in India.

During the earlier years of Communist Party rule China “espoused a certain notion of pluralism for non-Han people”, but the space for tolerance has “narrowed”, said Joe Leahy in the Financial Times. Look no further than Xinjiang, where more than a million Uighurs have been “subjected to mass internment”. China denies mass detentions of Uighurs and “blames unrest on terrorists”.

Recent years have seen a gradual transformation from a “first-generation ethnic policy” to the “second-generation ethnic policy”, said The Diplomat. The earlier framework, under Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, “formally emphasised” ethnic and language autonomy. For instance, legislation in 1994 stipulated that all schools should “use Tibetan as the principal medium of instruction”, whilst “improving a bilingual Tibetan-Chinese education system”. Implementation was often “uneven”, but it at least “recognised the legitimacy of cultural pluralism within the Chinese state”.

Second-generation ethnic policy, however, marks a “significant departure” from this philosophy. It seeks to “minimise” the significance of ethnic distinctions, instead of preserving diversity. The Chinese state now sees minority languages as “potential threats” to Xi’s “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. Viewed more broadly, China’s current policies in Tibet represent “more than a shift in language education”, they reflect a “structural transformation” in how China perceives ethnic minorities.

What happened

Tehran is considering a U.S. proposal to formally end the Iran war and start a 30-day clock to negotiate a full agreement, Axios and other news organizations reported Wednesday. Iranian and Trump administration officials “offered contradictory and rapidly changing assessments of the state of the war and peace talks,” The New York Times said, all “while providing few details about those negotiations.”

Who said what

If Iran doesn’t agree to “give what has been agreed to,” President Donald Trump said on social media Wednesday morning, the “bombing starts,” and “at a much higher level and intensity.” Hours later, he told reporters the two sides “had very good talks over the last 24 hours” and a deal was “very possible.” An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Tehran would relay its response through Pakistan, while another Iranian official dismissed the proposal as an “American wish-list.”

The one-page U.S. memorandum of understanding involved “Iran committing to a moratorium on nuclear enrichment, the U.S. agreeing to lift its sanctions and release billions in frozen Iranian funds, and both sides lifting restrictions around transit through the Strait of Hormuz,” according to Axios. But the proposal would “not initially require concessions from either ​side,” sources told Reuters, and it leaves “unresolved key U.S. demands” on Iran’s nuclear program and reopening the strait.

What next?

The “biggest obstacle to an Iran deal may be Trump’s ego,” Politico said, citing U.S. and Arab officials. Trump’s “history of nursing grudges, ridiculing opponents and insisting he wins everything doesn’t bode well” for striking a deal with Iran’s respect-conscious leaders.

This week, the separatist group Stay Free Alberta submitted a petition for a referendum on the issue that had amassed 302,000 signatures – well ahead of the 178,000 (10% of eligible voters) required for the authorities to consider such a vote. It marks “a key step” towards a possible independence referendum said The Associated Press.

“This day is historic in Alberta history,” said Mitch Sylvestre, head of the organisation, delivering the signatures to the Elections Alberta office in Edmonton. “It’s the first step to the next step – we’ve gotten by Round 3, and now we’re in the Stanley Cup final.”

‘Western alienation’

The separatist movement is rooted in what is known as “western alienation”, said the BBC. Some believe Alberta is “often overlooked by decision-makers” in Ottawa. Anger with the federal capital has “long been brewing” in Alberta, particularly over its abundant natural resources.

Some Albertans believe the federal government, especially under the ruling Liberal Party, has “stood in the way of the province’s oil and gas industry in favour of pro-climate legislation”. Separatists maintain that independence would “unlock resources”. The overwhelmingly right-wing movement was once “on the political fringes”, but over the past year, a “unity crisis has become increasingly likely".

The “economic, fiscal, and political grievances about the seemingly unfair treatment of Alberta” increased during Justin Trudeau’s premiership, Daniel Beland, political science professor at Montreal’s McGill University, told Sky News, but “they have peaked and even declined since he left office”.

Last year, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith reduced the number of signatures required for citizens to trigger a constitutional referendum, down from more than half a million. And she has blamed previous federal governments for legislation that disabled Alberta’s ability to produce and export oil. The provincial government also changed how citizen-led referendums work, so that now, they can “pose questions that would run afoul of the Canadian constitution”, said The Guardian.

Forever Canadian, not American?

The petition “stumbled immediately” after a separatist-linked group posted the personal data of nearly three million voters online. One of the biggest data breaches in Canada’s history, it has “unleashed political chaos” in Alberta and sparked fears of “a possible political interference crisis”.

The verification of signatures has also been paused while a court considers a legal challenge by a group of indigenous First Nations. It argues that Albertan separation would infringe on its rights as agreed in treaties with Britain, long before the creation of the province. In December, a judge ruled that an independence referendum would be unlawful because it violates the group’s constitutional rights – the latest case is asking if that decision still holds.

The First Nations also warned that a vote to leave Canada would “enable foreign interference” by the US. Last year, separatists “held covert meetings with members of Donald Trump’s administration”, said the paper.

CBC reported that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a right-wing TV station in January: “We should let them come down into the US” because Alberta is a “natural partner”.

Stay Free Alberta said they doubted anyone in their movement wanted to join the US. “People want sovereignty, and that’s what people in the US have, but we want sovereignty independent of the US,” said Sylvestre.

So far, there has been no response from Prime Minister Mark Carney to the petition. But even if the signatures are verified and the court rules against the challenge by the First Nations, and the federal government allows a referendum to go ahead in October, a vote for “yes” still wouldn’t automatically trigger independence.

Polls suggest the majority of Albertans would vote no, with only 26% supporting independence from Canada, according to a recent survey by Abacus Data. A petition by anti-separatist group Forever Canadian received 450,000 signatures.

What happened

Pope Leo XIV’s public opposition to the Iran war is “endangering a lot of Catholics and a lot of people,” President Donald Trump said in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt broadcast Tuesday. Trump’s renewed criticism of Leo could complicate Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “fence-mending visit” to the Vatican on Thursday, The Associated Press said.

Who said what

“The pope would rather talk about the fact that it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said in the interview. Leo has spoken out against the Iran war and “taken aim at invocations of God” to justify the violence, The Washington Post said, but “he has never suggested that it is acceptable for Iran to have a nuclear bomb.” In fact, the pope has “repeatedly called for a world free of all nuclear weapons,” The Wall Street Journal said.

“The mission of the church is to preach the Gospel, to preach peace,” Leo told reporters Tuesday. “If someone wants to criticize me for announcing the Gospel, let him do it with the truth.”

What next?

After his audience with the pope, Rubio is expected to meet Friday with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a “long-time Trump ally” who has split with the president over his criticism of Leo, the AP said.

Russia’s Africa Corps is reeling after an alliance of separatist and jihadist groups in Mali launched a series of attacks on the country’s Putin-backed junta government in late April. Is this merely an instance of renewed violence in a country that has seen multiple coups this century? Or does the bruising rebuke to a feared Russian expeditionary force mark a potential crisis for one of West Africa’s most powerful and demanding benefactors?

‘Limits of Moscow’s reach and military might’

The “series of reversals” experienced by Mali’s “Moscow-backed military government” has “dented Russia’s image as a self-styled security guarantor in Africa,” said Reuters. The recent violence also “threatens” Moscow’s “strategic and economic interests ​on the continent.”

The attacks across Mali by “al Qaeda-linked rebels and mostly-Muslim Tuareg tribesmen” mark a “turning point in Moscow’s influence in West Africa,” said Fox News. Russia has been “grabbing Mali’s precious minerals, including gold,” while promising to “protect the country against the rebels.” The “wave of coordinated, surprise attacks” by Malian rebels has “exposed the limits of Moscow’s reach and military might in the impoverished West African state,” said The Guardian.

In recent years, Mali had “drastically pivoted toward Russia” as the junta pushed out Western governmental support, said The New York Times. Russia has dispatched “thousands” of fighters from its Africa Corps, the military intelligence-run force born from the infamous mercenary Wagner Group that “provides security support to several African governments” in exchange for payment or “lucrative contracts for access to resources.” Mali is part of a chain of African nations, including Burkina Faso and Niger, that Moscow has “worked hard to cultivate” for both “geopolitical clout and access to mineral wealth,” said Irina Filatova, an honorary research associate at the University of Cape Town, to Reuters.

Withdrawing from Malian sites during the recent attacks “punctures the claim that Moscow could deliver where France and other Western allies could not,” particularly in the town of Kidal, which had “come to symbolize Russia’s promise” of stability, said Bloomberg. By “negotiating themselves out of Kidal” and “leaving their Malian counterparts behind,” Russia “doesn’t give a good impression of them as security partners,” Nina Wilén, the director of the Africa Programme at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations, said to the outlet.

Insurgents participating in the past week’s attacks were not expecting to “seize and control cities,” said a “security source” to La Agence France-Presse, per France 24. The goal instead was to “carry out coordinated actions in order to at least capture Kidal, which is a rather powerful symbol.”

‘Reputational damage’

The Africa Corps has “really lost credibility” in the region, said Ulf Laessing, the West Africa program lead at the Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung think tank, to Al Jazeera. Putin’s forces will “struggle to attract new clients” because they “just didn’t do their job — it’s reputational damage, what has happened.”

Russia’s potential “collapse” in Mali “threatens the region” but it also presents Washington an “opportunity to reassert the control it had foolishly relinquished,” said Hudson Institute Fellow Zineb Riboua at The Washington Post. African nations once tight with Moscow “have seen what Russian reliability looks like.” As those bonds are increasingly called into question, the U.S. should “seek to make that reversal permanent.”

What happened

The four-week ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran faltered Monday as President Donald Trump’s attempts to reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz prompted Iranian attacks on U.S. warships and commercial ships. The United Arab Emirates and Oman also reported the first strikes on their territories since the ceasefire began, and the UAE blamed Iran. U.S. Central Command said that two U.S.-flagged merchant ships passed through the strait and that U.S. military helicopters sank six Iranian military speedboats; Iran said none of its boats were destroyed.

Who said what

Tehran “did not outright confirm or deny” its attacks, The Associated Press said. CENTCOM said it had shot down all Iranian missiles and drones fired at U.S. Navy ships and the commercial vessels they were guiding through a passage it had “successfully opened” through the strait. Trump appeared “willing to look past” Iran’s attacks, The Wall Street Journal said. But Monday’s violence put his “desire to end the Iran war” to the test.

What next?

Shipping companies said that Trump’s “offer to provide them safe passage” through the strait “fell short of the sort of arrangements that would persuade them to make the trip,” The New York Times said.

The Metropolitan Police are trying to bring the main suspect in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann to the UK to stand trial before the 20th anniversary of the incident next year. German national Christian Brückner was named prime suspect in her disappearance in 2022, while serving a prison sentence for the rape of an elderly woman.

“If the evidence is strong enough to extradite the prime suspect and try him here, that is what we would seek to do,” a Scotland Yard source told The Telegraph crime editor Martin Evans. “Clearly, there are numerous hurdles but our priority at the moment is to amass the strongest evidence we can against that prime suspect.”

‘Diplomatic and legal row’

The force “believes it can gather a strong enough case” for the Crown Prosecution Service to authorise charges against Brückner, said The Telegraph. A “small team of specialist detectives” are handling the missing person case, though they are building evidence for the CPS for suspected abduction and murder.

Telecoms data placed his phone in Praia da Luz around an hour before the abduction in 2007, and he had been “suspected of burgling hotel rooms and breaking into apartments and villas” in the area. In 2021, the lead prosecutor on the German investigation into Brückner, Hans Christian Wolters, said that he was “100% sure” that Brückner had murdered Madeleine McCann.

But despite Brückner remaining the only suspect in the McCann case, no charges were brought against him before he was released after his most recent sentence in September last year. Last year, he refused to be interviewed by the Met, just days before he was due to be released from prison.

Attempts to bring Brückner to British shores could provoke a “diplomatic and legal row”, said The Times. Despite the 2021 introduction of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement – a reciprocal extradition agreement – Article 16 of the German constitution retains the right to overrule extradition of its citizens to non-EU countries. If Germany refused to hand him over, it is understood that the Met would be “committed to ensuring that he still faces charges in Germany or in Portugal”.

‘Dropped off the radar’

Since his release from Sehnde prison last autumn, Brückner has “drifted around northern Germany”, “rarely staying in the same place for more than a few weeks”, said The Telegraph. Though his current whereabouts are unknown, he must wear an “ankle tag” as a condition of his release, living “under constant German police surveillance”.

He had initially relocated to Kiel on Germany’s north coast, into sheltered housing because he had reportedly “run out of money”. Following local “outcry” and the leak of his address online, he had to be escorted away from the area by German authorities. Since then, he is thought to have been living in a “makeshift campsite” in woodland near the city.

In November 2025, he was approached by ITV News reporters, “asking whether it was true that he had killed Madeleine”, said The Telegraph. Brückner responded by shouting at the news crew, and “knocked over a reporter’s microphone without answering”. After another failed attempt to relocate to a private flat, this time in Braunschweig in March 2026, he has “dropped off the radar”.

Hundreds of migrants, most of them from Haiti, left the southern Mexican city of Tapachula on foot last month, in search of better living conditions further north. These caravans “used to aim for the US border”, said The Associated Press. But many Haitians have “lost hope of making it to the US due to the restrictions that the Trump administration has placed on asylum seekers” and instead now seek to “settle down in large Mexican cities”.

Final destination

Mexico is “increasingly” becoming a destination for people “fleeing war, oppression, crushing poverty, gang violence or combinations of those problems”, said The Guardian.

As Haiti faces widespread violence, mass displacement and serious humanitarian issues, over one million people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands have fled the country to seek asylum, many of them in Mexico.

Many arrive after lengthy migration journeys that include stops in countries such as Brazil or Chile before crossing into Mexico via the Guatemalan border. Reaching the US has become harder under Trump, increasingly turning Mexico from another transit country into a destination.

According to Mexico’s national agency for refugees, 127,000 Haitians filed petitions for asylum in the country between 2020 and 2024, and Haitians account for around 25% of all asylum petitions filed in Mexico.

Because Mexico forbids asylum seekers from leaving the state where they first filed for protection, Chiapas – the country’s southernmost state, with the city of Tapachula only a few miles away from the border with Guatemala – receives 60% of Mexico’s asylum applications. However, substantial Haitian communities have also developed in Mexico City, and in the northern US-border city of Tijuana.

Legal limbo

Mexico’s asylum system is overwhelmed, and Haitians face particularly low approval rates. Around 62% of Haitian asylum claims are denied. Even for those who are approved, it can be a long wait. Although the asylum process is supposed to last just 45 business days, in reality “the wait can take more than one year”, said The Haitian Times.

This leaves many people in legal limbo, unable to fully settle or move forward with their lives. “Without documents, we can’t work, and we are people who strongly believe in working,” one Haitian refugee told the newspaper.

Those who are able to find work are usually restricted to low-paid, irregular jobs such as construction, food service, or street vending. The language barrier can often impose further limitations; many refugees only speak Haitian Creole or French, with limited Spanish.

But despite the challenges, many Haitian refugees have been able to build a better life in Mexico. “Haitians are very resilient,” Andrés Ramírez, coordinator of the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, told Yucatán Magazine. “They can integrate into Mexican society, despite coming from quite a different culture.”

Giovanni Rotschild was forced to flee Haiti in 2022 after receiving threats against his life as armed groups took control of several neighbourhoods in the capital, Port-au-Prince, where he lived. Within months he was recognised as a refugee and later received permanent residency in Mexico. “In that moment I felt free,” he told the UNHCR. “For the first time, I could live without fear, without stress. Now, I can do everything legally, and that makes me incredibly happy.”

Now, he wants to use his nursing skills to help others, and plans to start a health initiative in Mexico.

“Strange as it sounds, it’s uplifting to visit Ukraine these days,” said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. That’s because “the good guys are winning—or at least holding their own.” Ukrainian troops pushed back a ferocious Russian offensive last fall, and their cities survived a frigid winter despite a Russian blitz on energy infrastructure. Now it’s spring, the power is still on, a $106 billion loan from the EU has been approved, and Ukraine is outpacing Russia despite being outgunned. The country’s military said it killed or wounded some 35,000 Russian troops in March, the highest monthly toll of a four-year war in which Russia has suffered more than 1.2 million casualties. That battlefield success has been powered by Ukraine’s homegrown drone industry. Its drones account for about 90% of all Russian casualties and are hitting targets deep behind enemy lines, including oil export facilities near St. Petersburg.

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin “is facing a spring of discontent,” said Nathan Hodge in CNN.com. Ordinary Russians are frustrated with the sanctions-battered economy, “rolling digital blackouts” intended to curb dissent, and the war’s rising death toll.

Kyiv has achieved all this without President Trump, said Phillips Payson O’Brien in The Atlantic. For more than a year, Ukrainian officials held out hopes they could win him over, even after Trump publicly berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House, repeatedly lavished praise on Putin, restricted military aid—first out of spite, then out of a need for weapons to strike Iran—and tilted peace negotiations in favor of the Russian invaders. “But now Kyiv appears to have given up on the U.S.” It is striking new diplomatic and military partnerships, sharing its hard-won expertise in drone warfare with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Gulf nations targeted by Iran, and with European nations threatened by Russia. “Writing the U.S. off as a friend might once have been a sign of doom for Ukraine. It isn’t anymore.”

Other American allies are following Kyiv’s example, said David French in The New York Times. In Europe and Canada, governments are racing to achieve greater military and financial independence from the U.S. They have woken up to the dangers of relying on a superpower protector whose leader has slammed them with sanctions, toyed with leaving NATO, and threatened to annex their territory. America may still be the world’s most powerful nation. But “the moral and strategic heart of the defense of liberal democracy” no longer beats in Washington. “It’s in Kyiv.”

The war with Iran has hit a “toxic stalemate,” said Janna Brancolini in the Daily Beast. American officials poured cold water on a proposal from Tehran to end the two-month conflict, under which the U.S. would end its naval blockade of Iranian ports and Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial oil-shipping route whose closure is choking the global economy. The regime’s nuclear program, meanwhile, would be discussed at a later date. A U.S. official said the nuclear punt was a nonstarter because it “would deny Trump a victory,” and in a 4 a.m. social media post—accompanied by an image of Trump as a gun-toting action hero and the caption “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY”—the president made his feelings clear on Tehran’s offer. “They better get smart soon!” he wrote, saying the regime’s only hope is to go “nonnuclear.” For now, Trump is set on “an extended blockade of Iran,” said Alexander Ward in The Wall Street Journal. He’s decided his other options, walking away or resuming bombing, carry more risk than targeting “the regime’s coffers in a high-risk bid to compel a nuclear capitulation Tehran has long refused.”

“Time is on America’s side,” said Mark Dubowitz and Miad Maleki in the New York Post. While U.S. motorists grumble about gas topping $4.20 a gallon, the remnants of Iran’s regime are battling triple-digit inflation, mass unemployment, a currency in “free fall,” and a U.S. blockade that has them “bleeding cash.” Worse, said Amit Segal in The Free Press, Iran is now “drowning in its own oil.” Within a few weeks, Iran will run out of storage for the crude it pumps out of the ground, leaving the regime no option but to halt production and see extraction systems clog up, a “death sentence” for its oil industry.

Don’t underestimate “Iran’s pain threshold,” said Ben Geman in Axios. The country has alternate storage facilities, including a fleet of floating crude carriers, and continues to sneak tankers past the U.S. Navy. And experts say the regime has other revenue sources, including oil exported overland, “to keep its troops paid and its position in Iran secure.” Iran believes it can hold out for at least another two or three months, said Ali Vaez in The New Yorker, and that “the American timeline” is more like two to three weeks. With Trump’s approval rating hitting a record low of 34% in a new Reuters poll, the regime thinks cost-of-living pressures will force him to back down and save Republicans from a wipeout in the midterms. Trump also doesn’t want the war to dominate his mid-May visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, let alone for jet-fuel shortages to ruin this summer’s World Cup, which the U.S. is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada.

Trump might still be able to reach a deal with Iran, said Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times, but it won’t be as good as the Obama-era pact he ripped up in 2018. That deal barred Iran from enriching uranium above 3.67% purity; its current stockpile is at 60% and with further processing could be used to build 100 nuclear bombs. And Tehran now has better cards to play than during the negotiations for the 2015 deal, including control of the Strait of Hormuz. For future talks to have any chance, Trump will “have to abandon his ‘I win, you lose’ approach to diplomacy,” said Trudy Rubin in The Philadelphia Inquirer. As gas prices climb higher, perhaps he’ll accept a compromise that lets both Iran and the U.S. save face. But based on everything we’ve learned about our president, “this hope requires a suspension of disbelief.”

As the EU faces the encroaching threat of outside countries, one nation is taking matters into its own hands. Germany is heavily investing in its military budget, spending more money on defense in 2025 than in the prior 36 years, according to recent reports. Officials have stated their intentions to make the country’s military the strongest in Europe over the next decade and a half, all while President Donald Trump is ratcheting up German-U.S. tensions.

What did the commentators say?

Germany put significant resources into its military last year, with its defense expenditure “growing by 24% year-on-year to $114 billion,” said a report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. The German government was the largest military spender among the 29 European members of NATO, and its military budget “exceeded the 2.0% threshold for the first time since 1990, reaching 2.3% of GDP in 2025.”

The country has “dramatically boosted its military spending as part of a long-term vision helmed by both former Chancellor Olaf Scholz and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius,” said Military.com. Pistorius is overseeing a defense development plan whose aim is to turn the German Army into the “strongest conventional army in Europe” by 2039.

As part of this plan, Germany aims to continue upping its military spending in the near future. The country is “planning to increase defense spending by a fifth in 2027 compared with this year,” said the Financial Times, putting it ahead of NATO’s military budget goal by at least six years. To accomplish this, Germany “unlocked its constitutional debt brake last year to allow virtually unlimited borrowing for defense.” The military plan “dwarfs that of fiscally constrained France and the U.K., Europe’s two big nuclear-armed powers.”

The rearmament of Germany is a “marked turnaround from just a few years ago when the country was widely regarded as a defense spending laggard and security free rider by its critics,” said Stars and Stripes. Germany has also been increasing its wartime industrial capabilities, with “manufacturers opening new factories and converting old ones to churn out ammunition.” The country has signed $130 billion worth of weapons contracts since 2022, according to the German newspaper Der Spiegel, per Military.com.

What next?

This remilitarization is happening alongside the looming question of how Trump’s foreign policy will affect Germany. After German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the U.S. has been “humiliated” by its war with Iran, Trump announced he was withdrawing approximately 5,000 American troops from Germany. The decision came “at a time of deep divisions between Washington and its European allies, with trans-Atlantic tensions already heightened by tariff threats,” said NBC News.

German defense analysts have “expressed little concern in the days following the announcement over losing a small chunk of the about 35,000 American troops currently stationed in the country,” said The New York Times. But some experts appeared concerned that the withdrawal may create an “economic hit that could be felt in communities that depend on American military institutions.” From “simple stripes to stars, I know all the ranks,” said Derya Uluc, who runs a dry cleaners near the U.S. Ramstein Air Base in southeast Germany, to the Times. “I have to be honest, business in Ramstein only works because of the Americans.”

What happened

President Donald Trump said the U.S. was launching a new effort Monday to “guide” blockaded commercial ships “safely” through the Strait of Hormuz, which has effectively been closed to maritime traffic since Trump and Israel launched the Iran war Feb. 28. Trump offered few details in his social media announcement, but described “Project Freedom” as a “humanitarian gesture” on behalf of the U.S., Middle Eastern countries and “in particular” Iran. Iranian state-run media said the announcement was part of “Trump’s delirium.”

Who said what

U.S. Central Command said guided-missile destroyers, drones and more than 100 aircraft would support Trump’s new initiative. But the plan “doesn’t currently involve U.S. Navy warships escorting vessels through the strait,” The Wall Street Journal said, citing senior U.S. officials. Traders and shipowners “expressed skepticism” that the “arm’s-length effort to unblock the vital supply route” would be effective.

Trump’s announcement was “essentially a challenge to Iran, and a bet that it would not want to take the risk of firing the first shots — or laying mines” — to challenge the U.S., The New York Times said. Ebrahim Azizi, the head of Iran’s parliamentary National Security Committee, said on X that “any U.S. interference” in the strait “will be considered a violation of the ceasefire.”

What next?

Two months into the war, Trump’s “predictions of a relatively short-term conflict with minimal economic consequences appear to be crumbling around him,” the Times said. “Voter backlash is building” as average U.S. gas prices hit a “wartime high of $4.39,” The Washington Post said, and “inside the White House, the options to lower prices at the pump are dwindling.”

What happened

The White House is arguing that the War Powers Act deadline to either wind down the Iran war or get congressional authorization is not Friday, as Congress assumed, because the 60-day clock stopped when President Donald Trump ordered a ceasefire on April 7. “For War Powers Resolution purposes,” an official told reporters, the hostilities “have terminated.”

Who said what

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses or stops,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Senate hearing Thursday. His assertion was “met with outrage from Democrats and skepticism from Republicans,” The Wall Street Journal said. The U.S. military “continues to enforce a military blockade,” which is “considered an act of war under international law.”

“Nothing in the text or design of the War Powers Resolution suggests that the 60-day clock can be paused or terminated,” Katherine Yon Ebright, a war powers expert at the Brennan Center, told The Associated Press, and Congress needs to push back against this “sizeable extension of previous legal gamesmanship” over the law.

What next?

In the hearing, ostensibly about the Pentagon’s $1.45 trillion budget request, Hegseth “did not say how long the war with Iran could continue,” The New York Times said.

It is “one of the strangest conundrums in modern zoological history”, said The Guardian: “what to do with the descendants of Pablo Escobar’s hippos?”

The animals, which the drug kingpin imported into Colombia, were left to “roam free” and multiply after Escobar was killed in 1993. Now the “feral” pack has become “such an environmental blight, they are facing a mass extermination”.

But they may have found “an unlikely stay of execution”: Anant Ambani, son of the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani, has once again offered them shelter.

Narco-pets

In the 1980s, the infamous Colombian drug lord illegally imported a plethora of exotic animals to fill his private zoo, including four hippopotamuses – dubbed the “cocaine hippos”, said The Independent. After Escobar’s death, most of the menagerie were relocated, but the enormous hippos were “left behind because they were difficult to move”.

They were abandoned to “go feral on the cocaine baron’s vast private Naples estate”, said The Times. But they multiplied, and spread “far beyond” the hacienda to “the lush river banks of Colombia’s Magdalena River”. An estimated 200 are now “roaming the muddy basin, attacking fishermen and steadily devastating the fragile ecosystem”.

Colombia made various attempts to control the population, including castration, but “to no avail”, said the BBC. The dearth of predators in the “fertile and swampy Antioquia region” provided “the perfect conditions” for them to thrive. Experts say the hippos, believed to be the biggest herd outside Africa, constitute “an invasive species”.

In 2023, the local authority proposed relocating 60 to Ambani’s private animal sanctuary, Vantara, in the Indian state of Gujarat. But “the logistical problems of capturing and moving the hippos” – who weigh up to two tonnes each – stymied the plan, said The Guardian. Taking them to their natural habitat in Africa isn’t feasible, given their limited gene pool and chance of carrying diseases.

After warnings that numbers could swell to more than 1,000 in the next few years, Colombia announced this month that the herd would “begin to be formally hunted and culled”.

‘Living, sentient beings’

Ambani, the son of a telecoms tycoon (and India’s richest man), said this week he’d appealed to the Colombian government to reconsider its decision, and allow the “safe, scientifically led translocation” of nearly half the herd to his private zoo.

“These 80 hippos did not choose where they were born, nor did they create the circumstances they now face,” Ambani wrote in a letter published on the zoo’s Instagram. “They are living, sentient beings, and if we have the ability to save them through a safe and humane solution, we have a responsibility to try.”

Colombia has not commented on the offer. But Vantara, which describes itself as “the world’s largest wildlife rescue centre”, has been the subject of repeated controversy.

The sprawling complex is home to 150,000 animals of 2,000 species, including elephants, tigers, lions and bears – but no hippos. Conservationists say the zoo is unsuitable for some species given the climate; temperatures in the Jamnagar region can soar above 40C. Vantara has also been accused of illegally acquiring and mistreating animals. Last year India’s Supreme Court ordered an investigation into the allegations, and claims that the sanctuary was “being used as a ‘private vanity project’,” said The Telegraph.

‘California should reconsider its rush to regulate e-bikes’

Stephen Zoepf at the San Francisco Chronicle

Because e-bikes “fall into a convoluted mix of transportation policies, they remain contentious and unable to fulfill their potential,” says Stephen Zoepf. Americans “have treated small, powered two-wheelers as recreational devices for far too long,” and making them “illegal altogether means that e-bike commuters, merely acting in self-preservation, can find themselves treated like hooligans.” While “cars and trucks continue to get bigger and more powerful, those outside them are being killed at nearly record-high rates.”

Read more

‘AI companies are just companies’

Robert Armstrong at the Financial Times

AI proponents “wave off the notion that the technology will lead to mass unemployment,” while “doomers respond that, in the case of AI, we’re not the drivers; we’re the horses,” says Robert Armstrong. This “back-and-forth highlights the idea that AI is unlike all the technologies that went before, with greater complexity, greater upsides and greater risks — for labor, cyber security, national defense, mental health and so on.” So “those controlling it have special responsibilities.”

Read more

‘Hedging is the new normal’

Suzanne Nossel at Foreign Policy

We are “living in a new world of hedgers,” says Suzanne Nossel. The “shocks of the last several years” have “upended how nations approach international affairs.” The “smooth flows of a globalized and rules-based world have clotted into uncertainty, forcing states to find new pathways for trade, diplomacy, resource extraction and defense cooperation.” Countries are “no longer hedging within a system that is episodically volatile but out of a recognition that there no longer is much of a system at all.”

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‘“Microlooting”: The left’s latest language deception’

Christian Schneider at the National Review

Progressives “keep trying to invent new words,“ says Christian Schneider. Hasan Piker “introduced the term ‘microlooting’ into the American vocabulary,” and the “innocuous prefix ‘micro’ was affixed to ‘looting,’ a crime, to make stealing from retail stores somewhat more palatable.” Picking a “new word or phrase to explain something people already experience is similar to stand-up comics doing observational humor.” But “what once was the purview of comedians has been crowdsourced to the feral mob on social media.”

Read more

Indonesia, Qatar, Ecuador and Angola have all departed the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in recent years. But the loss of the UAE, one of its longest-serving and most influential members, is seen as a major blow to the cartel.

The UAE said on Tuesday that quitting Opec and the broader Opec+ alliance next month reflects its “long-term economic vision” and desire to speed up investment in energy production. But Emirati officials had threatened for years to leave, blaming Opec’s production quotas for unfairly curtailing its oil exports. (The UAE has repeatedly been accused of exceeding those limits.)

Rising tensions with Saudi Arabia, Opec’s de facto leader, have also been greatly exacerbated by the Iran war; the UAE has criticised its Gulf neighbours for failing to defend it from Iranian retaliation. The question is whether the blow to Opec of losing its third-biggest oil producer will be a knockout one.

What did the commentators say?

This is “the beginning of the end of Opec”, energy analyst Saul Kavonic told the BBC. The group “loses about 15% of its capacity and one of its most compliant members”. Saudi Arabia “will struggle to keep the rest of Opec together”. This means “a fundamental geopolitical reshaping of the Middle East and oil markets”.

Opec’s ability to influence oil prices will be “clearly weakened”, said former International Energy Agency official Neil Atkinson. The UAE “will attempt to sell as much oil as they can to as many people as possible”. That “will run up against any attempts” Opec makes to “keep prices high”.

But when the UAE announced its decision, “oil markets merely shrugged”, said the Financial Times. The “muted” reaction is “a symptom of Opec’s declining relevance”. It was a “major power” in 1973 when its Arab members carried out a “devastating” embargo on countries supporting Israel. But despite its expansion to include 10 nations in Opec+, its influence has “waned” as non-members, particularly the US, boosted oil production.

Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz is “a further blow to Opec’s ability to control the market”. Tehran showed it could halt most of the flow of oil from the Gulf – more than half the cartel’s oil production. “It completely dilutes Opec’s market power and puts Iran in control of the vast majority of Opec’s exports,” said Joel Hancock, senior commodities analyst. Opec “effectively becomes an instrument of Iran’s foreign policy”.

The UAE’s departure would probably not be “fatal” for Opec, said Raad Alkadiri of the Center for Strategic and International Studies – unless Venezuela, Iraq or Iran also quit.

And that’s “only a matter of time”, said Damien Phillips in The Spectator. “Opec has always been a tenuous and fractious alliance that just about holds together when convenient and nearly falls apart when it isn’t.” It has always been “beset by chronic quota cheating” and “wildly inconsistent” compliance. There are “endless disputes over baseline production levels”, which often lead to “full-blown price wars”. Membership has also become “increasingly toxic”; the West sees Opec’s attempts to tighten oil supply as “helping to fund Russia’s war effort and immiserating ordinary consumers”.

The UAE understands “energy security and abundance” is now a global priority. In a world of “drill, baby, drill”, “price-fixing relics like Opec are being left behind”. Opec members “can see that the end is nigh”.

What next?

Opec’s remaining 11 members, and 10 more in Opec+, will still account for about 40% of global oil output. But Kazakhstan and Iraq are seen as most likely to “soon start creeping toward the door”, said MarketWatch. Both have excess crude-production capacity that could “incentivise them to leave”. Kazakhstan, like the UAE, has been “chafing” under Opec’s production quotas.

The UAE, meanwhile, is “splashing cash on production infrastructure”, aiming to increase production from the current 3.6 million barrels a day to 5 million by 2027, said The Economist. But any increase in exports depends on when the Strait of Hormuz reopens. The UAE’s departure from Opec, long a “bugbear” of Donald Trump, may “endear” it to the US, but it will “further sour its relations with Saudi Arabia”.

Saudi Arabia “might respond with an oil price war” that poorer Opec members might not be able to withstand, said the BBC’s economics editor Faisal Islam. “Much depends” on their response. Emirati officials also talk of building new pipelines from the Abu Dhabi oil fields towards “the underused port of Fujairah”, bypassing the strait entirely. If they do so, “Emirati oil will flow like never before”. “It will have little effect on the current blockades. It could change everything afterwards.”

The U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has had a tangible effect on the economy in the Middle East, and the conflict is also making things more expensive for Americans at home. Increasing oil prices resulting from the war have cascading consequences, and while things like gasoline are most obviously affected, other products are also getting pricier.

Clothes

Supply chain issues with crude oil are raising the cost of the oil’s building blocks, called petrochemicals. Six of these petrochemicals are the “major foundations of plastics and synthetic materials like nylon and polyesters,” said The Associated Press. When petrochemicals become more expensive, it is often accompanied by a spike in clothing prices.

To make a button-down shirt, for example, the “materials account for 27%-30% of the cost a manufacturer incurs,” Andrew Walberer, a partner at the global strategy and management consultancy Kearney, told the AP. Experts are “warning consumers to budget for price increases of 10 to 15%” in clothing if the petrochemicals’ costs continue to rise, said the South China Morning Post.

Condoms

People may not assume safe sex would be impacted by the war, but the world’s largest condom manufacturer, Karex, is planning to “raise prices by 20% to 30% and possibly further if supply chain disruptions drag on due to the Iran war,” said The Guardian. Karex, a Malaysian company, supplies more than 5 billion condoms annually to global manufacturers, including major brands sold in the U.S. like Trojan and Durex.

Karex is being forced to raise its prices because the company “has seen a cost increase for synthetic rubber, nitrile, ‌aluminum foil and silicone oil,” said Inc. magazine. While still seeing high demand, the company is “currently faced with rising freight costs and shipping delays, leading to its customers carrying lower stockpiles” of Karex’s products.

Cosmetics

The war in Iran is even “seeping into the cosmetics supply chain, pushing up the cost of everything from plastic jars and ​lipstick tubes to transport, and reminding the beauty industry that even a tub of face cream depends on fragile ‌global trade routes,” said Reuters. The most notable sector being affected is the Korean beauty industry, which has a large following in the United States.

Due to the unstable cost and raw material prices of petrochemicals, the “unit prices of most products will inevitably be increased,” cosmetics company Luxepack Korea said in a press release, per The Washington Post. Many similar cosmetic brands “aren’t sure how much longer they can absorb rising production costs.”

Gasoline

This one is probably the most obvious: spiking oil prices are causing costs at the pump to skyrocket. On April 29, gas prices “hit a fresh record since the start of the war with Iran, rising to an average nationwide of $4.23 per gallon,” said NBC News, citing data from AAA. The price of Brent crude, the benchmark for international petroleum, also “stands at $114.60, up nearly 25% from the recent low seen April 17.”

It may be unlikely that gas prices will come down anytime soon. President Donald Trump has “told aides to prepare for a long blockade to throttle Iran’s economy by blocking Iranian oil shipments,” said The Guardian. The number of ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz is “now at its lowest level since the start of the war.”

Toys

Like clothes, many stuffed plush toys are “made with polyester and acrylic, synthetic fibers derived from petroleum,” said the AP, so rising prices could similarly impact the toy industry. Suppliers in China have notified Aleni Brands, the company behind popular plush lines like Bizzikins, that “getting the materials already was costing them 10% to 15% more.”

Notable production hurdles are also being experienced by a “cluster of manufacturers in Shantou, a city located 190 miles northeast of Hong Kong, which produces a third of the world’s toys,” said The New York Times. Other child-adjacent products, including crayons, are additionally facing shortages due to petrochemical supply chain issues.

What happened

The United Arab Emirates on Tuesday announced it was withdrawing from OPEC and Russian-led OPEC+ on Friday, weakening the oil cartel’s leverage to set and stabilize oil prices. The UAE, which joined OPEC in 1967, is the cartel’s third-biggest oil producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Who said what

The UAE’s exit “had been rumored as a possibility for some time, as it pushed back in recent years” against production limits enforced by OPEC to influence oil prices, The Associated Press said. In the short term, the decision “doesn’t really matter,” Semafor said, because with the “Strait of Hormuz closed, Gulf oil producers can’t hit their production targets anyway.” But “in the long term,” The New York Times said, the UAE’s move “could contribute to greater volatility” in the oil markets.

What next?

Free from the cartel’s “rigid quotas,” the UAE “gains the flexibility to aggressively increase its oil production on its own terms,” The Wall Street Journal said. Its departure could “spur more defections” from other members who have similarly “chafed at Saudi Arabia’s dominance.” This is the “beginning of the end of OPEC,” MST Financial energy analyst Saul Kavonic told the BBC.

What happened

Iran has proposed a deal to open the State of Hormuz provided the U.S. and Israel cease their attacks and the U.S. ends its naval blockade of Iranian ships and ports. Tehran’s nuclear program and enriched uranium would be discussed at a later date. The proposal, passed to the U.S. through Pakistan on Sunday, followed an Iranian offer to suspend its uranium enrichment that President Donald Trump rejected.

Who said what

Trump is “unhappy with Iran's proposal as he wants nuclear issues dealt with from the outset,” Reuters said, citing a U.S. official. The proposal was “subject to a vigorous debate inside the administration” over which side “has more leverage,” The New York Times said, “and which country is better positioned to endure the economic hardship” from the strait’s closure.

Iranian officials are “serious about getting themselves out of the mess that they’re in,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Fox News. The Americans “have achieved none of their goals, and this is why they are asking for negotiations,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told reporters in Russia. “We are now considering it.” Leaders of European nations also weighed in: the U.S. “quite obviously went into this war without any strategy” and has “no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations either,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Monday. “A whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”

What next?

The “tense stalemate” has “entered a Cold War-like phase of financial sanctions, gunboat interdictions and talks about having talks,” with “no immediate end in sight,” Axios said. With the midterms six months away, a “frozen conflict is the worst thing for Trump politically and economically,” said a source close to the president.

The Trump administration’s threat to review its position on Britain’s claim to the Falkland Islands could have a significant impact on the future of the South Atlantic British Overseas Territory, analysts have said.

A leaked internal Pentagon memo published last week by Reuters revealed that, as punishment for not supporting Donald Trump’s war against Iran, the US could reassess diplomatic support for longstanding European “imperial possessions”, such as the ⁠Falkland Islands, which have been administered by Britain since 1833 but are still claimed by Argentina.

Argentina’s President Javier Milei is “upbeat about the prospects”, said Reuters, after the Trump ally told a radio show that “we are doing everything humanly possible to bring the Falkland Islands back into Argentine hands”.

On Monday, his vice president, Victoria Villarruel, ramped up rhetoric further by calling for Falkland Islanders to go back to England.

What did the commentators say?

Donald Trump “has repeatedly demonstrated his desire to use transactional diplomacy to pressure both allies and adversaries”, said the BBC. The Falklands are a “pressure point for the UK but irrelevant to the US”, making them a perfect target for this kind of “leverage”.

Given the current state of Britain’s armed forces, the UK would “struggle to defend the Falkland Islands if Donald Trump followed through on threats to withdraw American support for British sovereignty”, said The i Paper.

But while the loss of American backing for UK control of the islands would “make it easier for Argentina to press its claim more assertively”, said Dr Johanna Amaya-Panche, senior lecturer in international relations and politics at Liverpool John Moores University, an invasion remains unlikely.

“Argentina is not capable of retaking the islands militarily, and there is no credible indication that it intends to try,” but the Milei government “may adopt a more assertive diplomatic or legal strategy, seeking to internationalise the dispute and mobilise external support”.

Downing Street has insisted that the Falkland Islands’ status will remain unchanged, with the prime minister’s spokesperson saying “sovereignty rests with the UK and the islanders’ right to self-determination is paramount”.

“Such robustness is a welcome surprise,” said The Telegraph in an editorial. The government will be hoping the state visit by King Charles will help defuse tensions with the White House. The reality is that “casting doubt over the ownership of the Falklands would hardly be in Washington’s interests”. Even in 1982, the Royal Navy “had to leave other missions unresourced in order to retake the islands” and today its numbers are “so shrunken that it could never act meaningfully in the South Atlantic and in support of the US simultaneously”.

What next?

If the US did change its position to one in which it supported Argentinian claims over the islands, that would be “pretty significant”, Ed Arnold from the Royal United Services Institute security think tank, told the BBC, as “it might cause other countries to move that way as well”.

“You could potentially see a situation where Argentina pushes for some intervention at the UN and the US may support or just not actively block.”

“A change of US policy towards the sovereignty of the Falklands will not mean we will face a repeat” of the 1982 war with Argentina, said former defence secretary Penny Mordaunt in The Express. “But it should be a reminder that the world can change fast” and that “we owe it to all Brits, whether they reside in the UK or in her territories, that we are capable of defending them and their interests.”

The case of an “off-grid” Anglo-Australian couple whose children were removed by authorities has divided Italy. Nathan Trevallion, a British former chef, and Australian ex-horse trainer Catherine Birmingham were raising three children in a stone farmhouse in the woods of the mountainous Abruzzo region. But the children were taken into care last year, when the family ended up in hospital after eating poisonous foraged mushrooms.

The couple have been battling to get their children back, filing an appeal with the court in regional capital L’Aquila. In the meantime, the family has become a cause célèbre for the far-right, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni expressing her “alarm” and declaring that “children are not of the state”.

Remote ‘paradise’

The couple moved to a two-room cottage in Abruzzo’s “remote woodland” in 2021, said The Times. They hoped to “build an off-grid paradise”, growing their own food and homeschooling their daughter, Utopia Rose, now eight, and twins Bluebell and Galorian, seven.

The family would “draw water from a well” and “produce electricity from solar panels”, said The Telegraph. Their house is surrounded by wildlife, including wolves. They slept in one room and used a lavatory in a wooden outhouse, but had a car for shopping in the nearby village of Palmoli, as well as a computer and mobile phones.

But in 2025, when the entire family was hospitalised after eating poisonous mushrooms, their “woodland existence” became known to authorities. Police officers who inspected their home reported the family to social services, who described the farmhouse as “a dilapidated ruin” that was unacceptable for young children. The family “fled to Spain”, then to Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, before returning to their “little patch of wilderness”.

Five months ago, a juvenile court in L’Aquila ordered that the children be put into care. Prosecutors said the children were being raised in “challenging and harmful” environment, without sanitation, formal education or medical supervision. Their mother was initially allowed to live in a room in the same building as her children. But she was “ejected in March”, said The Times, “accused of turning them against staff”.

Cause célèbre

The decision to remove the children “sparked a fierce debate in the country over alternative lifestyles”, said The Guardian. Both parents have given interviews “generating support from thousands” who want the family kept together, and backlash against the magistrate who ordered the children’s removal.

“We live outside of the system, this is what they’re accusing us of,” Trevallion told La Repubblica. “They are ruining the life of a happy family.” Birmingham told a press conference: “This has been by far the cruellest thing I have experienced and personally seen done to children in my life.”

The Italian far-right has “seized upon the case in the name of educational freedom”, said Le Monde, with deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini likening the case to a kidnapping. Trevallion and Birmingham, “foreigners without clear professional activity, not integrated into Italian society and living in informal housing”, have become improbable “victims to be defended” by a faction that is usually “less sympathetic to such profiles”. But, for Salvini's party, which is linked to Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson, the “forest family” has become “a top priority”, used to “fuel its anti-judge rhetoric, portraying magistrates as enemies of family liberties”.

The couple are currently renovating the farmhouse, adding running water and electricity to comply with social services’ requirements. They are also considering moving into an apartment on the edge of the woods that was offered free by the mayor, as a temporary solution. A decision on whether they can have their children back is possible as soon as next month.

What happened

With peace talks between the U.S. and Iran at an impasse, the clash for control of the crucial Strait of Hormuz intensified last week as Iran seized at least two cargo ships in the trade corridor in retaliation for a U.S. naval blockade of its ports. The Navy has turned back some 30 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since the blockade was imposed earlier this month, and in a bid to ramp up the economic pressure on Tehran, the U.S. last week boarded a tanker carrying Iranian oil in the Indian Ocean and seized an Iranian-flagged container ship that tried to run the blockade. The Iranian regime accused the U.S. of “piracy” and soon after seized two cargo ships—one flying a Panamanian flag, the other a Liberian flag—claiming the vessels had tried to navigate the contested strait without its approval. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said Iran’s attacks on “international vessels” didn’t constitute a violation of the U.S.-Iran ceasefire.

A U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance was set to travel to Pakistan for a second round of peace talks, but the trip was delayed after Iran refused to take part. A foreign ministry spokesman cited “contradictory messages” and “inconsistent behavior” from the Americans; other Iranian officials cited the blockade, which the regime called “an act of war.” Trump, who had warned that the “military is raring to go” for strikes on Iran if a deal wasn’t reached before the temporary ceasefire ended last week, extended the truce indefinitely, saying Iran’s leadership was “fractured” and needed time to “come up with a unified proposal.” Iranian officials accused Trump of trying to “buy time for a surprise strike.”

With traffic at a standstill in the strait, which carried some 20% of the world’s oil before the start of the war, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged that gas prices—now averaging about $4 a gallon—might not drop below $3 until next year. Trump said that’s “totally wrong” and that prices will plummet “as soon as this ends,” a claim experts called unrealistic. “Oil and gasoline rise very quickly, and they come down very slowly,” said economist Peter Earle. A new Quinnipiac poll found 65% of Americans blame Trump for the spike in gas prices, and more than half blame him “a lot.”

What the columnists said

As Trump’s approval numbers plunge to the mid-30s, associates say he “wants out of the increasingly unpopular war,” said Barak Ravid in Axios. His negotiators suspect a peace deal is within reach, but that “they may not have anyone in Tehran empowered to say yes.” Hard-line generals from the elite Revolutionary Guard now run the country, and they’re “openly at odds over strategy” with Iran’s civilian negotiators. The new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, could break the impasse. But he is rumored to have been badly wounded in the air strike that killed his father, former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and is “barely communicating.”

There’s another major obstacle, said Alayna Treene and Kevin Liptak in CNN.com: The Iranians don’t trust Trump. The two sides seemed two weeks ago to be nearing an agreement. Then Trump went on a tear on social media and in interviews, falsely claiming Iran had agreed to “a host of provisions that hadn’t been finalized” and had accepted the most contentious U.S. demands, such as handing over its stockpile of enriched uranium. That tanked “the rising optimism for a deal,” and “it’s unclear where peace talks go from here.”

“Even Trump’s most basic claims about the Iran war can’t be trusted,” said Daniel Dale, also in CNN.com. He said last week that Vance was en route to Islamabad; in fact, the veep had never left the U.S. And he falsely claimed two weeks ago that Iran had agreed to never again close the Strait of Hormuz. Virtually nothing the president says can be taken at face value, a situation the world “has never had to contend with.” He’s confounded not just negotiators but ordinary Americans, said Peter Hamby in Puck. A new poll shows they “have no idea why this war is happening,” with answers ranging from keeping Iran from getting nukes (22%) to “taking oil” (20%) to “a show of power” (13%).

Control of the strait has become “the strategic fulcrum of the war,” said National Review in an editorial. Iran seems to think if it keeps the strait closed it will “exact so much economic pain” that Trump will end his blockade, or accept a deal that relents on his “red lines.” He needs to convince Tehran he’s “perfectly willing to start shooting again” and “take the strait back by force.”

Iran thinks it has the upper hand, said Erika Solomon in The New York Times. After a “high-stakes game of chicken,” it believes “Trump blinked first” when he extended the ceasefire with no concessions. That validates its view that Iran’s readiness to absorb the economic pain wrought by the war exceeds Trump’s. The regime sees this as an “existential battle,” and no matter how much suffering the blockade inflicts, experts say “it’s not going to blink.”

Both sides have powerful incentives to end this, so “in a world of logic” a settlement would be “a safe bet,” said Marc Champion in Bloomberg. But we’re in a realm where logic doesn’t seem to apply, stuck with leaders who lack “the personal and political courage needed for compromise.” In Tehran, fanatical hard-liners call the shots. In Washington, we have a president who “seems to live in his own movie, reinventing reality to follow a script in which he plays the triumphant hero.” It’s “an inherently unstable situation” with no obvious way out, and “a return to war looks all too possible.”

What happened

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Russia on Monday morning after a weekend of diplomatic trips to Pakistan and Oman, but no direct talks with the United States. President Donald Trump on Saturday called off an announced trip to Islamabad by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, saying it would be a waste of time given Iran’s lack of commitment to meet with them.

Who said what

“If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us,” Trump told Fox News on Sunday. With U.S.-Iran talks “derailed, at least for now,” The New York Times said, “Tehran and Washington are sinking into an awkward limbo of neither peace, nor war,” with each projecting confidence they can “outlast the other in a standoff with drastic stakes for the global economy.” Pakistani officials said “indirect talks” were ongoing even as they “scrambled to reignite” direct negotiations, The Associated Press said.

What next?

Trump was “expected to hold a Situation Room meeting” on Monday after receiving an Iranian proposal to “reopen the Strait of Hormuz and end the war,” Axios said, “with nuclear negotiations postponed for a later stage.”

Japan could soon be selling more arms overseas after it lifted a ban on exporting lethal weapons, including fighter jets. It’s the country’s biggest overhaul of defence export rules for decades and a “major shift” to Japan’s “post-World War II constitution”, said Al Jazeera.

Pacifist nation no more

“Pacifist restraints” have “shaped” Japan’s post-war security policy, said Reuters. The previous rules, introduced in 1967 and enacted in 1976, restricted military exports to non-lethal arms, such as those used for surveillance and mine sweeping.

There was a partial easing in 2014, when then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe lifted the self-imposed ban on arms exports and defence industry cooperation. Then, last year, Australia sourced advanced frigates from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a deal that meant Japan began to emerge as a “major arms exporter”, said Newsweek.

Now, the five export categories that had limited military exports to rescue, transport, warning, surveillance and mine-sweeping equipment, are being removed. Instead of banning exports of lethal arms outright, ministers and officials will assess the merits of each proposed sale.

Some export principles will remain: strict screening, controls on transfers to third countries, and a ban on sales to countries involved in conflict. But the government said exceptions could be made when deemed necessary for national security.

It’s thought that nations interested in buying Japanese-made weapons include Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Indonesia. Sources told Reuters that warships for the Philippines may be among the first exports.

“With this amendment, transfers of all defence equipment will in principle become possible,” the PM, Sanae Takaichi, posted on X, adding that “recipients will be limited to countries that commit to use in accordance with the UN Charter”.

New rules for a new world

Explaining the shift in policy, Takaichi said that “in an increasingly severe security environment, no single country can now protect its own peace and security alone”.

Takaichi, who is regarded as a China “hawk” and often referred to as Japan’s “Iron Lady”, is among a number of recent Japanese leaders to have “pushed back against the country’s pacifist stance”, said Al Jazeera.

There is an “increasingly severe security environment”, said the Japan News. So her government feels that the regional environment has become significantly more dangerous, because of China’s growing military power and tensions over Taiwan, North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs, Moscow’s activity in the region, and the knock-on effect of tensions in the Middle East.

So it wants to deepen military cooperation with friendly countries and share the burden of regional security, instead of relying almost entirely on Washington. There’s also an economic dimension: Japan hopes to scale up production, attract revenue, innovation and investment.

We “shouldn’t underplay how important this will be”, William Yang, a senior analyst on north-east Asia at the International Crisis Group think tank, told The Telegraph, because “over the last few decades, Japan has been secluded from the global defence and arms supplies markets”.

The S&P 500, the benchmark US stock index, hit a record high on Wednesday. This is being mirrored in other major stock markets across Asia and Europe, despite growing concerns over global fuel and energy prices as a result of the war in Iran and the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz.

“There’s a lot of risk out there and yet asset prices are at all-time highs,” Sarah Breeden, deputy governor of the Bank of England, told the BBC’s business editor Simon Jack. “We expect there will be an adjustment at some point”, she said. What “really keeps me awake at night is the likelihood of a number of risks crystallising at the same time”.

As Jack said: “It is unusual for a senior figure at the Bank to be so forthright on market movements.” With confidence fluctuating around peace talks, and reverberations in energy markets continuing, what has gone up could just as easily come down.

What did the commentators say?

“Nothing, it seems, can dent the almost inexplicable optimism coursing through financial markets,” said the ABC’s chief business correspondent Ian Verrender. In the past, stock markets would “shudder” and “tumble”, then spend a decade recovering from economic “calamity”; nowadays the recovery time is cut down to weeks, “if they bother to react at all”.

Investors are not “oblivious” to what is happening in the world, said Joe Rennison, financial markets reporter for The New York Times. They are just attuned to “what exactly the markets are measuring”, looking beyond the “immediate upheaval from the war” to concentrate on its “long-term effects on corporate profits”. Americans may be struggling to afford fuel for their cars, but companies have been “very profitable indeed” for “quite a while now”. Big tech is “riding a wave of enthusiasm”, and it is these bigger companies, like Microsoft and Meta, who have been shielded from the war and tend to influence the market more profoundly.

Although the market “rapidly rebounded – and then some” after Trump’s ceasefire announcement, having been on a steady slide for most of March, investors are “not simply taking Trump at his word” that the war is “almost over”. Instead, they are responding to the White House’s “apparent eagerness” to find an end to the combat. “Investors might not believe Trump, exactly, but they do seem to believe that the worst of the war has already passed.”

After “years of headline-driven volatility” and a “dip-buying mindset”, investors have learned not to “stay bearish for too long”, said Bloomberg. The current pattern echoes the “Ukraine-war playbook from early 2022, when an initial equities sell-off and commodity price surge” soon reversed to normal.

“It is never easy to price uncertainty,” said Tej Parikh in the Financial Times. Investors have long relied on “ebitda”, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation, to ascertain the “core value of a business”. But it now appears they have changed their tune, relying on “earnings before Iran, tariffs and dubious announcements”.

What next?

Since the war in Iran began, analysts have “actually raised their expectations for upcoming profits” for S&P 500 companies, said The Associated Press. Major companies such as PepsiCo and GE Vernova have either “stuck by” or “raised” their revenue forecasts for the year, which were initially published before the start of the war. S&P 500 profits could “accelerate to 20% in the second quarter, and companies aren’t giving them many reasons to reconsider”.

Of course, the US stock market “can easily return to falling”. If US-Iran peace talks break down, or if oil supplies cause greater concern, Wall Street’s mood could “swing quickly back to fear”. If oil prices, in particular, stay elevated for long enough, that could “erode” profits and raise costs, not to mention “weaken the spending power” of consumers around the world.

Hungary’s ousting of longtime Prime Minister Viktor Orbán this month sent shockwaves across Europe and beyond. In Moscow, Hungary under Orbán had been a rare ally amid an adversarial EU. In Kyiv, Orbán’s intransigence had scuttled various European initiatives to aid Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government in the country’s with Russia. But with Orbán out, Hungary will seemingly focus on repairing and normalizing EU ties. Ukraine stands to benefit from this emerging era in Eastern Europe, even as it faces a host of risks.

What did the commentators say?

Over the past four years of war with Russia, Hungary has been a “persistent source of irritation” for Ukraine, The New York Times said. Orbán’s government “maintained friendly relations” with Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin while “blocking critical European Union funding” for Kyiv’s war effort and “stalling Ukraine’s path toward integration into the bloc.” Orbán’s ousting means “this sort of Trojan horse for Russia within the EU may disappear,” said Andreas Umland, a policy fellow with the European Policy Institute in Kyiv, to the Times.

Orbán’s “vociferous recalcitrance” toward Ukraine allowed him to cast himself as “virtually the only opponent of aid to Ukraine in the entire EU,” said the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “In reality,” Orbán was “simply willing to wield his veto and absorb all the backlash,” allowing other antagonists to “remain in the shadows.”

The victory of Hungary’s incoming Prime Minister Péter Magyar “clears the way for greater European support for Ukraine,” said the Council on Foreign Relations. Already, that shift has seen Hungary lift a hold it placed on a 90 billion euro loan to Kyiv, which Orbán coupled with what he claimed was Ukraine’s destruction of the Druzhba oil pipeline (Ukraine contends the pipeline was damaged in a Russian strike). The “spat” over the Druzhba pipeline also blocked a round of Russian sanctions the EU had hoped to “adopt to mark the fourth anniversary” of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in late February of this year, the CBC said.

With Orbán’s hold lifted, Ukraine is expected to make short work of the initial EU loan payments, the first of which are supposed to arrive in Kyiv “as soon as next month,” said The Telegraph. To date, Ukraine has been “reliant on donations from allies to plug the gap left by the Hungarian veto” and will use the newly released funds toward “U.S.-made Patriot air-defense interceptors to protect against incoming Russian ballistic missiles, new-fangled drone technologies produced in Ukraine and other legacy weapons, such as British Storm Shadow missiles.”

Ukraine is also taking Orbán’s ousting as an “opening to expand its energy footprint in Europe and displace Russian crude oil in Eastern Europe,” said Politico’s E&E News. Ukraine’s state-owned Naftogaz oil company is “eying plans to ship about 100 million barrels of oil a year” from a Black Sea port to neighboring countries, including Hungary, which could “supplant the Russian deliveries.”

What next?

Although the “dramatic change in tone” from Hungary is “certainly encouraging,” Ukrainians are “well aware that Hungary is not likely to become a major supporter,” said the Atlantic Council. Incoming Hungarian leadership has already “ruled out” arming Ukraine and “underlined” opposition to “fast-tracking the country’s EU accession process.”

While Magyar is “expected to take conciliatory steps toward Ukraine,” said the Russia Eurasia Center, “expectations may be overstated.” Ukraine’s inclusion in the EU is “increasingly unpopular in the bloc’s eastern part,” where countries like Poland and Bulgaria see Kyiv as a “direct competitor for European subsidies, jobs and agricultural markets.” Ukraine is also seen by some of its neighbors as an “obstacle to accessing Russian energy supplies.”

Removing Hungary’s vetoes on Ukrainian aid improves the EU’s “decision-making capacity,” said Zsuzsanna Végh, an analyst at the German Marshall Fund think tank, to The Telegraph. But Hungary won’t contribute to the EU funds directly, as Magyar’s Tisza party is “unlikely to embrace expansive military support.”

Ukrainians saw Orbán as the “hostile actor,” said Kyiv Independent reporter Tim Zadorozhnyy to the Lowy Institute, “not Hungary itself.” With Magyar’s promises of eased tensions and EU backing, he “now has all the cards in his hands.”

The EU has finally signed off a €90 billion (£78 billion) loan to Ukraine after Hungary dropped its veto. The loan – agreed in December but blocked for months by Hungary in a row over an oil pipeline – is “a question of our life, of surviving”, said Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Without the money, his country was struggling to manufacture the number of weapons it was capable of producing, he told CNN.

“Ukraine really needs this,” said EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas. “It’s also a sign that Russia cannot outlast Ukraine.”

What did the commentators say?

“European officials had found ways” to get some funds to Ukraine during the delay but this no-interest loan provides “far more substantial financial support”, as Moscow’s full-scale invasion extends into a fifth year, said The New York Times. Ukraine will only need to repay the loan if a future peace deal includes Russia paying reparations.

Having finally secured the loan, Zelenskyy has renewed calls to restart peace talks with Vladimir Putin, said The Independent – although US mediators are currently “preoccupied with the conflict in Iran”.

A resumption of talks seems unlikely any time soon. Only a few weeks ago, the Russian president gathered key oligarchs behind closed doors and asked them to contribute financially to the war, said independent Russian news outlet The Bell. “We will keep fighting,” its sources reported Putin as saying. “We will push to the borders of Donbas.”

And it’s the question of Donbas that led to the most recent peace talks being “placed on hold”, said political scientist Samuel Charap and military analyst Jennifer Kavanagh in Foreign Affairs. Donald Trump’s administration had “centred the talks on a core bargain”: that Ukraine cede the roughly 20% of the Donbas region it still holds to Russia “in exchange for security commitments from the US and Europe”. This approach exaggerated “the significance of territory for Russia and the importance of Western assurances for Ukraine”. It also neglected to “address the key challenge in ending any war”: convincing each side that “its enemy will really commit to peace”.

What next?

A Kremlin spokesperson has been reported as saying Putin would only meet Zelenskyy “for the purpose of finalising agreements”, said The Guardian. Instead, Russia wants the US to send Trump’s delegates Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – who “have repeatedly listened to Putin’s maximalist demands” – to Moscow.

While the EU loan is “sorted”, there is now “another issue altogether”: Ukraine gaining membership of the EU, said Henry Foy in the Financial Times. Zelenskyy has long seen this as key to securing Ukraine’s long-term security and prosperity. “Belligerent public opposition” to the idea from outgoing Hungarian president Viktor Orbán had long “provided a useful shield for many other EU leaders to huddle behind” but, with his departure, “they will be forced to clarify their positions”.

Before 2000, single fathers by choice were “virtually unheard of”, said The Atlantic. But in the past few years, this population has been growing “notably”.

English law changed in 2019 to give single parents the same rights as couples over surrogate children. Since then, the number of men applying to become sole parents of surrogate babies has tripled, according to data cited in The Times. The number is still “a tiny percentage” of the total applications, but it reflects “a growing trend”.

‘Go it alone’

There aren’t many reliable figures documenting the number of men “deciding to go it alone”, said The Guardian. Most surveys don’t differentiate single fathers by choice from widowers, or separated/divorced men. But according to the Office for National Statistics, about 15% of the UK’s single-parent households are headed by dads.

“We are seeing more men wanting to adopt than in recent years,” said Natalie Gamble, a lawyer specialising in surrogacy law. Since 2019, “the options are opening up. More British surrogates are willing to be matched with fathers.”

Many applying to become single fathers by surrogacy are gay – but not all. Some have either “struggled to find a relationship” or left partners because of “incompatible approaches to having children”, said The Telegraph. This is a “family type that does seem to be on the rise”, said Catherine Jones, a family psychology expert at King’s College London.

The “main hurdle” for surrogacy is “money rather than stigma”, she said. In the UK, it is illegal to advertise for a surrogate, or that you’re willing to become one. Single men often look to Cyprus or Belarus to find surrogate mothers. Many complain that the law in the UK is “yet to catch up with the fact that single men can now much more easily pursue fatherhood in this way”.

The increasing number of single men becoming surrogate parents has caused concern among some campaigners. “The checks on single men undertaking surrogacy are not remotely comparable to those we see in cases of adoption,” said Helen Gibson, from campaign group Surrogacy Concern.

But some single men turn to surrogacy because they were turned down by adoption agencies, said ABC News. “I called five different agencies and every one of them told me that either I would not be considered or that I would be at the bottom of the list because I was a single father,” said Peter Gordon.

“Who is going to give their kid to a 50-year-old bachelor living in SoHo, you know?” said Steven Harris, who was also rejected by adoption agencies. “I wouldn’t.”

The promise of meaning

The trend shouldn’t be surprising given that singlehood has been increasing for years, “more steeply among men than women”, said The Atlantic. The gay community has also recovered from the Aids pandemic; a new generation has “made it through” to adulthood with more financial security and societal acceptance than before.

But the fact that some men are “paying extravagantly for egg donation and surrogacy” might suggest “just how important fatherhood is” for many today. Multiple professionals described the pandemic as a “turning point for a lot of single fathers by choice”. Men came out of the pandemic wanting to “spend those moments with their loved ones before it was too late”.

And in a moment when “many of the traditional trappings of manhood” are no longer guaranteed, fatherhood can be “an answer” to questions of identity. For many single men, fatherhood “dangled a promise of deeper meaning in life”.

But in a society that is “set up to regard women as primary caregivers”, single fatherhood can be alienating, said The Guardian. “Men get questions asking whether it’s Mum’s day off,” said Sophie Zadeh of University College London, who has been researching single fathers by choice. “People assume they can’t parent properly because they are male.”

Her research also suggests men are scrutinised more than women by healthcare visitors, and can be viewed with suspicion. “They’re seen as that bit more unusual.”

Prosecutors in El Salvador have opened a mass trial of 486 alleged members of the infamous MS-13 gang on charges ranging from homicide and femicide to extortion and arms trafficking.

They have been accused of more than 47,000 crimes between 2012 and 2022, including an estimated 29,000 homicides. These trials encapsulate President Nayib Bukele’s “iron-fist approach” to fighting organised crime, said The Associated Press, in a country that has been in a state of emergency for four years.

But mass trials have been criticised by human rights organisations, including a group of UN experts who claim they “undermine the exercise of the right to defence and the presumption of innocence of detainees”. Many are held in custody for years before their trial, facing blanket rulings from unknown judges.

What is MS-13?

The MS stands for Mara Salvatrucha, thought to be a combination of “Mara” (“gang”), “Salva” (a shortening of Salvador) and “trucha” (“which translates roughly into street smarts”), said the BBC. “The 13 represents the position of M in the alphabet.”

The gang was formed “on the street corners of Los Angeles” in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants who had fled civil war, said Sky News. It only spread to Central America when the members were deported from the US.

Donald Trump designated the group a terrorist organisation last year and made “deportation agreements” with El Salvador to “exchange prisoners affiliated with the gang and others”.

The main aim of the mass trial is to target the “ranfla” – the “highest echelon” – of the gang, said The Times. Alongside its rival gang, Barrio 18, MS-13 at one stage controlled up to 80% of El Salvadoran territory through “extortion, drug dealing, contract killings and arms trafficking”. Prosecutors allege that the gang’s attempts to gain complete control amounted to a “parallel state, undermining national sovereignty”.

“Over three decades” Bukele’s government estimates the gangs have killed around 200,000 people, including many listed as disappeared.

Has a trial like this happened before?

The first “collective” trial of this magnitude took place in March 2025, said AP. At its conclusion, 52 members of Barrio 18 were convicted, with one individual sentenced to 245 years in prison.

In November, a similar trial found 45 members of a rival faction, Barrio 18 Sureños, guilty of several crimes and “handed down a 397-year prison sentence to one leader”.

What is the criticism?

Bukele’s “crackdown has drawn sharp criticism from human rights organisations”, said The Times. There is significant risk that, given the limited evidence specific to individuals, mass trials risk convicting innocent people.

Human Rights Watch estimated that El Salvador’s prison population has reached 118,000, “more than double the country’s capacity”. Set against “significantly worsening already poor prison conditions”, nearly 2% of the country’s entire population was incarcerated, “among the highest rates in the world”.

More than 500 people have already died in state custody under Bukele, and there have been reports of torture, said Agence France-Presse. Bukele has also acknowledged that “at least 8,000 innocent people” have been arrested under the crackdown, and have since been released, said AP.

Who is behind this?

President Bukele’s stance on criminal gangs has “made him the most popular elected head of state in the world”, said The Times. According to official figures released by his government, the rate of homicides fell from 7.8 per 100,000 people in 2022 to 1.3 last year, said Reuters.

Trump is a close ally. He said he had “the best relationship” with Bukele after the El Salvador president’s visit to the White House in 2025, said The Telegraph, despite previously accusing Bukele of sending MS-13 gang members to the US. Trump also signed a deal with Bukele last year, paying El Salvador between $6 million (£4.5 million) and $15 million (£11.3 million) to hold deportees in its prisons – “seemingly with little due process”.

What will happen next?

At the beginning of the trial, the judge stated that armed groups had disturbed “the peace of the Salvadoran population and the security of the state” for decades, and would be tried “with the full force of the law”.

Of the defendants, 413 of them are being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center (“Cecot”) in Tecoluca, and will watch proceedings on a screen. Cecot, a maximum-security prison built by Bukele in 2023, has “become a symbol of his controversial security policies”, said AP. The other 73 remain at large and will be tried in absentia.

Prosecutors say they have “overwhelming evidence” and will seek the maximum permitted sentence, said The Times. The trial could last up to six months.

With the Russo-Ukrainian War in its fourth year, both sides are dealing with critical troop shortages, and Ukrainian officials think they’ve found a solution. The country has started using remotely controlled robots in combat to account for these shortages and also reduce casualties. But some experts are also downplaying the effect these robots could have on the war.

‘Seize Russian positions solely with automated weapons’

The robots, which often feature mounted machine guns, can “help Ukrainian troops carry gear, lay mines, evacuate the wounded and attack Russian positions,” said Business Insider. At least 280 companies are working to develop these robots, many of which are used to transport ordnance because they can “carry more than roughly 10 servicemen can,” Oleksandr Yabchanka, the head of robotic systems for Ukraine’s Da Vinci Wolves army regiment, told Business Insider.

The robots are a key part of Ukraine’s fight because of their offensive capabilities. One video during combat, filmed last summer, showed several Ukrainian robots that “each carried 66 pounds of explosives,” said The New York Times. One of these robots drove into a Russian stronghold and “blew itself up, while the others held back, monitoring the position.” Several Russian soldiers surrendered, and these kinds of attacks show “that the Ukrainian military can now seize Russian positions solely with automated weapons.”

Of course, human soldiers remain the key demographic on the battlefield, but Ukraine is “eager to highlight its advances to show Western partners that its outnumbered army can stay in the fight,” said the Times, while also promoting the country’s “homegrown defense industry.” During the first three months of 2026, Ukraine’s ground robots “carried out more than 22,000 missions on the front lines,” said Business Insider, citing data from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

‘The reality is more nuanced and far less futuristic’

There are drawbacks to using robots, as they “can still fall prey to enemy drones and also face challenges in traversing battle-scarred landscapes,” said Ars Technica. Though they may be good for frontline combat, at least one Ukrainian battalion reported that robots “attempting to evacuate wounded soldiers failed to reach the positions in four out of five cases due to complicating factors.” Ukraine’s efforts are also in “competition with the Russian military, which has similarly increased its use of robots on the frontlines.”

The narrative has largely been that Ukrainian robots will eventually supersede most of the country’s soldiers, but the “reality is more nuanced and far less futuristic,” said the Kyiv Post. The expansion of these battlefield robots is mostly part of an effort to “support troops not replace them.” And even though the stories of killer robots dominate the headlines, much of the “work performed by these robots remains logistical,” encompassing the delivery of “supplies, including food, ammunition, water and equipment, to frontline positions.”

But even non-offensive missions using robots “can save lives, as they replace tasks that would otherwise require soldiers to move on foot under fire,” a senior operator of ground robotic systems from Ukraine’s 13th Brigade told the Kyiv Post. It remains “far better to send a robot on a mission. If it is destroyed, you lose equipment. But if you send two or three soldiers and they are killed, it is a much greater loss, both emotionally and for the unit’s combat capability.”

President Lee Jae Myung warned earlier this month that the conflict in Iran represented a “war-like situation” for South Koreans. As oil reserves continue to dwindle, even if normal service in the Strait of Hormuz were to resume, it would take a long time for supplies to catch up.

The war is “serving as a significant turning point” for South Korea to shift to renewable energy, South Korea’s Minister of Climate, Energy and Environment Kim Sung-hwan told CNBC. We must undergo a “fundamental energy transition” and “turn this challenge into a blessing in disguise”.

Rising oil prices, and the weakening of the won against the dollar, are “dealing a double blow” to the Korean economy, said The New York Times. But reliance on oil has also highlighted the domestic tussle for green energy action in a divided South Korean system.

‘Draconian’ measures

The “brightly illuminated” satellite images of South Korea at night, compared to the “sea of blackness” in the North, have long been seen as a “wider triumph of capitalism and democracy”, said Christopher Jasper, transport industry editor, in The Telegraph. However, due to the Iran war, these lights could be extinguished “in a matter of weeks”.

Compared to fellow developed countries, South Korea is “almost uniquely lacking in natural resources”, relying on imports to meet “90% of its energy needs”. Around 70% of its crude oil shipments, in addition to 20% natural gas, come from the Gulf. The country has seen fuel prices increase by a fifth, a ban on driving one weekday in five for individuals, and calls to reduce shower times and to charge electric cars and phones only in the daytime. Much more “draconian” measures could be just weeks away.

South Korea must face a “difficult home truth”, said David Fickling in Bloomberg. Behind the “sleek modern society” is an “insatiable appetite for fossil fuels that’s undermining its economy”. But this appetite presents a climate and “strategic” threat. State utility Korea Electric Power Corporation’s (Kepco) “huge” generation plants provide “tempting targets for rocket attacks”, and its proximity to North Korea and China leaves the South exposed to mine threats, should the conflict expand.

A ‘catalyst’ for energy reform?

The fossil-fuel vulnerability highlighted by the war in Iran could be the “catalyst for a faster clean energy system”, said The Guardian. South Korea’s energy targets long predate the current war, aiming to generate 20% of electricity from renewables by 2030 and phase out coal by 2040.

As with most renewable energy, there must be the infrastructure to support it. The power generated by new energy is “colliding” with the grid’s capacity, meaning it is “in effect going to waste”. There is hope in the form of Kepco building high-voltage transmission lines to Seoul, but a decade-long wait and “resistance” from locals are taking the shine off the progress.

On top of the energy opportunities, this is a “fresh opportunity” to “strengthen Seoul’s hand” against North Korea, said Jenni Marsh in Bloomberg. According to Finance Minister Koo Yun Cheol, Middle Eastern countries are “lining up” to buy Korea’s missiles, with their 90% success rate and “affordable price tag” an attractive proposition for buyers. The crisis has also fuelled government investment into nuclear-reactor restarts to “maintain grid stability”. As North Korea’s Kim Jong Un “plays hard to get” with the US, and “refuses talks” with Lee, improving defence capabilities “looks like an increasingly smart option”.

President Lee’s “catnip” calls to transition to renewables due to the war in Iran have “no chance of being met”, said Fickling in the same outlet. For instance, Kepco has “effectively banned” all new generators in the “renewables-rich” east until 2032, all because its “crumbling grid is supposedly incapable of accepting new connections”. Decisions such as these will do “nothing to advance South Korea’s energy transition”. Society as a whole needs to fight against those who have kept them “hooked on polluting power”.

Former Bulgarian President Rumen Radev will soon have a new title, and with it a whole lot of new power. Radev won Bulgaria’s parliamentary elections on Sunday and will become the country’s next prime minister. But while the election victory by Radev’s newly created Progressive Bulgaria party could represent a fresh beginning for a nation fraught with political strife, some people are concerned about Radev’s ties to Russia.

Radev’s beginnings

Radev, 62, was born in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria, and his early career was dedicated to military service. He is an ex-fighter pilot and former commander in the Bulgarian Air Force, and received several military merits before turning his attention to politics. Radev has often used his “daredevil flying skills to build his political brand,” said Politico. When he first ran for president in 2016, the Bulgarian Air Force “heavily promoted his loop-the-loops in a high-profile air show.”

Upon winning the ceremonial role of the presidency in 2017, Radev “quickly made up for his lack of political experience, capitalizing on his military background to cultivate the persona of a fearless patriot uncorrupted by party politics,” said Politico. In January 2026, after anti-corruption protests toppled the government, he became the first Bulgarian head of state to step down from the presidency and announced his candidacy for prime minister. During his campaign, Radev “cast himself as an opponent of the country’s entrenched mafia and its ties to high-ranking politicians,” said The Associated Press.

‘A more pro-Russian stance’

Radev has largely “positioned himself as the populist standard-bearer for anti-corruption protests that brought down the government in December,” said The Washington Post. But many in Europe are concerned about his potential friendliness with the Kremlin. During his campaign, Radev made it clear his government will take a “more pro-Russian stance, consistently opposing aid to Ukraine and saying he wanted to restore relations with Moscow.”

The new prime minister has also criticized the European Union and “called for a new security architecture in Europe, echoing a key Kremlin drive,” said the Post. If tensions were to continue rising between Bulgaria’s new government and the EU, it could cause financial strain in the country, as “Bulgaria’s economy is heavily dependent on EU funding.” Radev’s easy victory in the election could also “strengthen his hand in opposing a proposed EU ban on imported Russian energy supplies.”

Other analysts believe that Radev’s Russian coziness is more of a political tactic. Radev will probably be “unlikely to seek to be disruptive in relations within the European Union,” Vessela Tcherneva, the deputy director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said to The New York Times. In the “coming economic crisis, he would not risk the freezing of EU funds.” Radev’s EU criticism, particularly “regarding financial and military support for Ukraine or sanctions against Russia,” will be “aimed primarily at the domestic audience” and may not translate into action, Maria Simeonova of the European Council on Foreign Relations told the Times.

Some pro-democracy activists feel that Radev’s win could give Bulgaria its “best chance in recent history to do away with the stranglehold of corruption and the weak, unstable governments that have plagued it for decades,” said the Times. Radev’s 44% margin of victory may allow him to create a strong coalition, which could “enact structural and constitutional reforms to tackle the corruption that has stymied Bulgaria’s institutions.”

What’s the situation in Cuba? 

The country is running out of fuel—and fast. Oil shipments from Venezuela, Cuba’s main fuel supplier for the past three decades, ended in January after the U.S. attacked the South American country and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro. President Trump then declared a full oil blockade, threatening severe tariffs on any country that sent Cuba fuel. The blockade has exacerbated a long-simmering economic and humanitarian crisis for Cuba’s 11 million people. Blackouts of up to 20 hours are routine, and their consequences are severe: Running water has been cut off in many urban areas because the systems rely on electric pumps; trash has piled up for lack of gas to run garbage trucks; and doctors say preventable deaths are rising as equipment fails. In late March, the U.S. Coast Guard allowed a single Russian oil tanker carrying about 730,000 barrels of oil to pass through the blockade, providing Cuba with at best a few weeks of fuel. “It’s not going to have an impact—Cuba is finished,” Trump said. “And whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.”

How did Cuba get here?

The island has been under U.S. sanctions for nearly seven decades. What began with an arms embargo during the Cuban Revolution in 1958 was broadened into a full trade and travel embargo after Fidel Castro established his communist government. While Castro’s rule saw an expansion of access to education and health care, alongside those gains came political repression and the confiscation and nationalization of private land, businesses, and homes, prompting millions of Cubans to flee. The U.S. trade embargo— the longest in modern history—intensified Cuba’s chronic economic woes, which deepened after the collapse in 1991 of its main foreign backer, the Soviet Union. The Cold War–era embargo continued until the second term of President Barack Obama, who sought to ease what he called “a rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”

What did Obama do?

Believing a rapprochement could reduce repression on the island and provide economic opportunities for ordinary Cubans, he opened discussions in 2014 with Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and successor. The Obama administration restored diplomatic relations and struck Cuba from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. In March 2016, Obama became the first U.S. president to set foot in Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928. Americans were allowed to travel to Cuba for “educational” purposes for the first time in decades, and direct commercial flights resumed and embassies opened. Cuba’s tourism revenue jumped 15% in the first half of 2016, and a record 4 million foreigners visited that year. But few Cubans reaped benefits, as increased demand for food and poor planning caused shortages and price hikes. “It’s a disaster,” said Lisset Felipe, a government-employed air conditioner seller, in 2016. “We never lived luxuriously, but the comfort we once had doesn’t exist anymore.”

Why didn’t the thaw last? 

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump pledged to undo Obama’s policies—promises that helped him win the votes of a majority of Cuban Americans in Florida. In office, he imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba and put the country back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Though President Joe Biden reversed that move in his last week in office in January 2025, Trump quickly reimposed it after returning to the White House last year with a newfound interest in Latin America, heavily influenced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a foreign policy hawk and the son of Cuban immigrants. Trump’s first target was Venezuelan autocrat Maduro, a close ally of Cuba, and many Cuban Americans saw that intervention as a step toward realizing Rubio’s desire to topple the island’s communist government. “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned—at least a little bit,” Rubio warned hours after the January raid that captured Maduro.

What does the White House want?

The end of Cuba’s communist government. The Trump administration has been negotiating with President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s regime and seems inclined to avoid using military force, hoping the blockade will inspire Cubans to rise up against their government. Protests are spreading, with furious residents banging pots and chanting, “We’ve had enough,” “Freedom,” and “Put the lights back on.” In the central city of Morón last month, protesters set the Communist Party’s local headquarters on fire—the biggest show of dissent in years. But the blockade is also inflicting pain on ordinary Cubans. “The U.S. is trying to punish the Cuban government,” said one Havana resident. “But it’s the people who are suffering.

How do Cubans feel about the blockade?

They’re desperate. In a country where the official average monthly wage is about $15, gas is now nearly $40 a gallon—if you can find it. There were three major blackouts in March, and the United Nations has warned the blockade will result in a “severe humanitarian crisis,” with fuel shortages hitting every aspect of the island’s food system, from irrigation and harvesting to refrigeration and distribution. Health experts predict diseases such as dengue and chikungunya will return. Cuba’s once-vaunted health system is collapsing. There’s little fuel for ambulances, doctors and nurses are unable to commute to work, and pharmacy shelves are bare. Many refrigerated medicines spoil when the power goes out. Doctors say premature births are increasing as an antibiotic shortage leads to rising infections. It’s also getting harder to administer chemotherapy amid blackouts, and patients on ventilators now rely on backup batteries or hand pumps. “I don’t know how long we can keep going,” said Xenia Álvarez, whose 21-year-old son’s lungs can’t pump air on their own. “His life depends on electricity.”

What happened

Hungarian voters booted out their longtime prime minister, Viktor Orban, in a general election last week, dealing a blow to the European far right and robbing the Trump administration of its biggest cheerleader in the EU. Though the Kremlin-friendly Orban had held power for the past 16 years, partly by tilting the electoral system in his favor, his far-right Fidesz party lost to the center-right Tisza party of anti-corruption campaigner Peter Magyar. With turnout at a record 80%, Magyar took a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which will allow him to undo the changes Orban made to Hungary’s courts, elections, and press that had restricted the country’s democratic freedoms. While Orban had been expected to cry fraud if he lost, the trouncing was too complete. Instead, he conceded quickly as pro-Magyar crowds celebrated across the country. Magyar pledged to work more closely with the EU and NATO and restore checks and balances. “Together we liberated Hungary and took back our country,” he told cheering supporters. “Those who commit the sin of dividing the nation must leave power.”

Ahead of the vote, the Trump administration had made a show of supporting Orban, with Vice President JD Vance visiting Budapest last week to campaign with him. President Trump even called in to a rally to praise Orban’s anti-immigrant policies. “I love Viktor,” he said. “He didn’t allow people to storm your country.” Russia, too, had an interest in keeping Orban in power, as he had consistently advanced Kremlin aims by blocking EU aid to Ukraine and vetoing EU sanctions on Moscow. “This is not just a repudiation of Russian influence,” said Ian Bremmer, head of the risk advisory firm Eurasia Group. “It’s also a repudiation of Trump.”

What the columnists said

Why was the White House “so invested in seeing Orban prevail”? asked Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Because MAGA elites looked to his “illiberal Christian democracy” as a model, even holding an annual conservative confab in Budapest. Orban was the “ur-Trump,” who proved back in 2010 that voters would flock to an anti-immigrant and culturally reactionary “strongman.” And crucially, he showed that such a person could entrench power by packing courts with loyalists, handing the press over to friendly oligarchs, and rigging the election system for his own party.

Yet eventually Orban forgot “a basic rule of politics” said Andrew Higgins in The New York Times. A populist must actually “be popular to win elections.” But as Hungary’s economy became “deformed by corruption,” voters grew angry. Hungary today has “the slowest growth in the region,” and “unemployment is at a 10-year high.” In the end, even Orban’s near-total control of the media, which effectively barred Magyar from TV during the entire campaign, was no match for reality.

That’s why Fidesz’s shellacking could be an “omen for Trump’s MAGA movement,” said Max Boot in The Washington Post. Like Orban, Trump “presides over flagrant corruption while inflation is rising and economic growth slowing.” He could face a similar smackdown in the November midterm elections. That would be more likely if Democrats were to follow Magyar’s script, said William A. Galston in The Wall Street Journal. The Hungarian challenger’s “disciplined and energetic campaign” focused on bread-and-butter issues: “cronyism and corruption, economic stagnation and inflation, and decaying public services.” Wisely, he avoided discussing “divisive social issues” or “attacking his opponent as an enemy of democracy.”

“Don’t read too much into Orban’s defeat,” said Jamie Dettmer in Politico. Sure, it’s tempting to see Hungary’s result as a “symbolic setback” for populists everywhere, especially given the effort that Trump and Vance have put into juicing far-right European parties. Yet elections reflect “local political and economic circumstances” much more often than “broad and lasting transnational” trends. This vote in a nation of only 10 million “isn’t a devastating blow to the far right”—not in Europe and not in the U.S.

Perhaps not, said Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, but it does show that “illiberalism is not inevitable.” There’s been a belief within the MAGA movement—one that’s “also present in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric”—that it and its international brethren are “somehow destined not just to win but to hold power forever, because they have the support of the ‘real’ people.” But that’s no longer the case. Hungary showed that “‘real’ people grow tired of their rulers. Old ideas become stale. Younger people question orthodoxy.” If Orban can lose, so too can his “Russian and American admirers.”

For weeks, the Trump administration has waged a brutal war on Iran. But now that Iran has successfully shifted the conflict’s nexus to the oil-shipping bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz, the White House has a new plan to inflict maximum pressure: economic warfare, the “financial equivalent” of a bombing campaign, said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a White House briefing last week.

What did the commentators say?

Blocking Iranian ports and shipping lanes and pivoting from “kinetic to economic warfare” is an attempt to “end the conflict without a new U.S.-Israeli onslaught,” said CNN. Per the White House’s “rationale,” the “ruinous financial and humanitarian consequences” of being unable to ship and sell oil leave Tehran with “no choice but to accept U.S. terms” to end the conflict.

Although focused on Iran specifically, the administration’s threats stretch beyond the Islamic Republic to those who would do business with it. Countries that are “buying Iranian oil” or hold Iranian funds in their banks now risk “secondary sanctions, which is a very stern measure,” Bessent said on PBS News. Iranians themselves will feel the “financial equivalent of what we saw in the kinetic activities.”

Bessent’s threat came one day after his Treasury Department notified “financial institutions in China, Hong Kong, the UAE and Oman” that they are at risk of secondary sanctions for “allowing Iranian illicit activities to flow through their financial institutions,” said The Associated Press. The “argument being made to Trump” is that no matter if the Iranians think they can “weather the storm,” any inability to pay their “loyalists” could “pressure Iran to the table.”

Approximately one-third of the oil Iran exports through the Strait of Hormuz “directly funds the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,” said The Foundation for Defense of Democracies Senior Fellow Miad Maleki on Fox News. Bessent’s threats will “shut down a lifeline that the regime desperately needs right now to keep its economy on some life support.”

Trump himself has been a “heavy user of financial sanctions” targeting “countries, individuals and companies,” The Washington Post said. At the same time, his administration seems to have been “caught unawares” when rivals like China and Iran “weaponized their economic advantages.”

While sanctions have long been the “instrument of choice for applying pressure on Iran,” the White House’s pivot toward “more kinetic forms of economic coercion” blurs the line between “financial restriction and military intervention,” said Harsh Pant, an international relations professor with King’s India Institute at King’s College London, at The Economic Times. “By physically interdicting maritime traffic” with its naval blockade, Trump is showing a willingness to enforce America’s “economic objectives through direct control of global commons.”

What next?

In many ways, the “damage” caused by economic weapons is already “sparking a response,” with nations that depend on the Strait of Hormuz “making plans to reduce their vulnerability to a future closure,” the Post said. But critics warn that attempts to impose other financial consequences on Iran could ultimately backfire on the United States and its allies. Much of the previous phase of war has “helped Iran’s economy,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), per the AP. Imposing further economic conditions is simply an attempt by Bessent to “mop up the mess that Donald Trump has created by initiating this war.”

The administration could still be making a “sound bet,” said CNN. Iran’s economy has been “shattered by sanctions” and could “quickly suffer critical food shortages, hyperinflation and a banking crisis” that would push Tehran to settle with the Trump administration. But this hope shared by “U.S. officials, conservative editorial pages and analysts” may ultimately “rest on an assumption” that has “led the U.S. astray in the Middle East” many times in the past.

What happened

U.S. Marines boarded and took control of an Iranian cargo ship on Sunday after it breached President Donald Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Central Command said. An Iranian military spokesperson warned that Iran “will soon respond and retaliate against this armed piracy.”

The seizure followed a weekend of mixed signals on the status of the strait and mutual accusations of violating the fragile ceasefire set to expire Wednesday. Trump said that his envoys would meet with Iranian negotiators in Pakistan on Tuesday, but Iran’s Foreign Ministry later said that Tehran had “no plans for the next round of negotiations” and has made “no decision” on further talks.

Who said what

Trump on Sunday said the U.S. was “offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL” to Iran, but if it did not accept, he would “knock out every single Power Plant, and every single Bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!” Iran’s state media said Tehran saw “no clear prospect for productive talks” given the Trump administration’s “excessive demands” and shifting, “unrealistic requests.”

Both sides have “triggered a swirl of confusion over the status of peace talks,” The Wall Street Journal said, though Iran “made similar threats ahead of participating in the previous round of negotiations.” Pakistan “appeared to be preparing for the talks,” Reuters said, and U.S. “security equipment and vehicles” landed at an airbase in Islamabad over the weekend.

What next?

All the uncertainty “sent oil prices rising again,” The Associated Press said, and Iran this morning “warned it could keep up the global economic pain” and keep “inflicting political pain on Trump.”

India has an “entrenched culture of outsourcing household work”, said Reuters, with domestic help traditionally organised through word of mouth and paid in cash. But new apps are changing the practice and turning the system digital.

Although the start-ups offer attractive fees for clients alongside competitive earnings for workers, concerns around safety will be harder to pay off.

Attractive numbers

Start-ups like Urban Company, Pronto and Snabbit are offering on-demand bookings in cities for short tasks, entering a “vast, largely unregulated market” that boasts an estimated 30 million domestic workers. It includes many women with “few formal job options”, said the BBC.

The model of the agencies works a bit like Uber: the helpers get bookings, pointing them to jobs in homes in designated neighbourhoods on their apps. They press a countdown timer in the app before they start work.

The numbers are currently attractive for both clients and workers: companies are “betting big” and “burning millions of dollars” to “lure busy professionals” with charges of less than 99 rupees (79p) an hour that “have no global parallel”, said Reuters. For instance, similar services can cost around £22 an hour in the US, and around £5 in China.

In a country with a per capita income of around £2,200, workers on these apps can see annual earnings reach £3,700 by working eight hours a day. “My income has roughly doubled,” a 32-year-old from West Bengal, who worked through Snabbit, told the Indian Express.

Greater risks

So far, so good. But the “craze” is “tempered by concerns” about women’s safety in a ⁠country with “high rates of sexual harassment”. Unlike delivery drivers who spend “just brief moments at doorsteps”, the workers may spend hours inside private homes, “exposing them to greater risks”, said Reuters.

Pronto and Snabbit have an SOS button within the app that alerts area supervisors in case of emergency. Pronto also offers self-defence training for workers. Urban Company says it offers a women-only safety helpline and an SOS app feature.

But a women’s rights activist noted that while the companies run extensive background checks on workers before hiring them, they don’t vet the credentials of customers, who can simply log in on apps to book home help.

In between bookings, the workers “have only the cold, dusty sidewalk to sit on” and for some, the uniforms they wear are “visible identifiers that they’d rather not have”, said The Indian Express. One worker said there “should be a place for us to change back into regular clothes” because “many of us don’t want everyone to know what we do”.

It would be to the advantage of the platforms if they could “successfully crack the safety protocols” because they will “earn the deepest consumer loyalty” and “the most sustainable market returns”, Soumya Chauhan, a principal at Dutch e-commerce investor Prosus, which has a stake in Urban Company, told Reuters.

‘Our longing for inconvenience’

Hanif Abdurraqib at The New Yorker

Longing for “Walkmans and VCRs is, of course, an offshoot of a larger obsession with the not-so-distant past,” says Hanif Abdurraqib. There is a “longing for some previous era, if not actually a desire to return to it.” The “yearning for the past often lands us on the somewhat hollow nostalgia of ephemera: if we can’t have the nineties back, we can build a life of things that might feel transportative,” and “convenience and inaction are often bedfellows.”

Read more

‘History is running backwards’

David Brooks at The Atlantic

Many “thought that the world would get more democratic as it modernized, but for the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen,” says David Brooks. People “used to have a clear idea of where modernity was heading — toward greater autonomy and equality, secularism, stronger individual rights, cultural openness and liberal democracy.” Science and reason “would prosper while superstition and conspiracy-mongering would wither away.” But it “turns out that was yesterday’s vision of the future.”

Read more

‘Yes, of course war settles things’

Rich Lowry at the National Review

There are “many things that can be said about the tragedy of warfare without crediting the blatantly ahistorical cliché that it is never the answer, or doesn’t solve disputed questions, often with a terrible finality,” says Rich Lowry. War can “determine international boundaries and the nature of governments.” It “might be pointless, or fought for prestige, revenge or territorial aggrandizement. That’s all true, but it doesn’t change the fact that military conflict is, at times, necessary.”

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‘Polio has no cure. The vaccine is the only way to save lives.’

Simone Blaser at USA Today

Making polio vaccines “optional is a bad idea. It’s also a dangerous one,” says Simone Blaser. There is “no cure for polio, but there is a way to prevent this terrible illness.” If the “polio vaccine becomes optional,” it “becomes a mathematical certainty that we will see a resurgence.” You “may believe your choice doesn’t affect others, but there is no way to know who in a community is unvaccinated, whose immune system is shoddy, or who is particularly vulnerable.”

Read more

What happened

A 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon took effect at midnight local time on Friday, though Hezbollah has not committed to the truce. President Donald Trump announced the ceasefire on Thursday after a flurry of diplomatic wrangling. The pause in fighting, if it holds, would remove one of the sticking points in U.S. peace talks with Iran, Hezbollah’s main backer.

Who said what

The State Department said Israel, as a “gesture of goodwill,” had agreed to pause “offensive operations” against Lebanese targets while reserving the “right to take all necessary measures in self-defense.” Lebanon was expected to take “meaningful steps” to prevent Hezbollah from attacking Israel.

Trump’s ceasefire pressure put Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “in an awkward position,” The New York Times said. His “goal to gut Hezbollah is far from fulfilled, and he was swiftly assailed by his allies and critics” for agreeing to the truce. Israel’s security cabinet “heard about Trump’s announcement several minutes into” an “urgent conference call” Netanyahu had convened “to discuss the ceasefire and vote on it,” Axios said.

Netanyahu said in a subsequent statement that Israeli forces would remain in a 6-mile-deep “security zone” spanning southern Lebanon, “and we are not leaving.” Hezbollah said “Israeli occupation of our land” gave them “the right to resist it,” and it will act “based on how developments unfold.”

What next?

The temporary truce “will bring immediate relief” to war-ravaged Lebanon, The Wall Street Journal said. But “without Hezbollah at the negotiating table,” peace is “on shaky ground.”

Confusion reigns over whether there will be further direct talks between Lebanon and Israel.

Galia Gamliel, a member of Israel’s security cabinet, announced that Benjamin Netanyahu would be speaking to Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun today, following historic talks earlier this week.

However, a spokesperson for Aoun said they were “not aware of any call” taking place between Aoun and the Israeli prime minister. Aoun did confirm that a ceasefire is the “natural starting point for direct negotiations”, and called the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the country an “essential step towards consolidating” such a ceasefire.

As Israeli air strikes destroyed the last remaining bridge connecting southern Lebanon to the rest of the country, and civilians continue to flee their homes, diplomatic talks appear somewhat hopeless as Israel’s aims remain unclear.

What did the commentators say?

It is “hard to imagine much change resulting from the meeting” between Israeli and Lebanese officials in Washington on Tuesday, said The Economist. As things stand, Israel has an “overwhelming military advantage”, and Netanyahu has demanded Lebanon presents a “comprehensive plan for disarming Hezbollah” and “establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries”.

But the Lebanese government is “too weak” to disarm the militant group and has faced “thinly veiled threats of a violent coup” should it try. Even if Beirut were able to strive for “political consensus” in its “deeply fractured society”, it is “unlikely” Netanyahu would “give them the necessary time” to capitalise on it.

For most countries affected by war, ceasefires are a “welcome development”, but for Israel’s “maximalist” leaders, they are often “seen as getting in the way of efforts to finish the job”, said Mairav Zonszein in The New York Times. Just as the ceasefire was announced, the Israel Defense Forces hit 100 Lebanese targets in 10 minutes, killing 350 and wounding “well over 1,000, many of them civilians”. War, as seen in Gaza and now Lebanon, is “increasingly the state’s go-to response to geopolitical challenges – not just the strategy but the norm”.

Israelis’ problem is that their “definition of victory” is “framed by a distorted reality” that threats “can and must be eliminated through invasion and occupation”. The media rarely provides an insight into civilian casualties, and practically no one in the domestic political landscape is challenging the country’s tendency to “treat war as a tool of first resort in statecraft”. This could end badly for all sides involved: “when war becomes the norm, everyone loses”.

“Israel’s primary goal is simple: weaken Hezbollah,” said Daniel Byman from the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Its ongoing campaign against the group displays a “familiar but intensified strategic objective”: that of “mowing the grass”; so “not the elimination of Hezbollah, but its sustained degradation”.

Yet there are “enduring risks” with this strategy. Even a wounded Hezbollah can disrupt life in northern Israel and “escalate unpredictably”. “Ultimately, Israel appears to accept that the conflict with Hezbollah will persist as a recurring feature of the region’s security landscape.”

For Netanyahu himself, the “rhetoric about the war on Lebanon is simple”, said Ori Goldberg on Al Jazeera. He wants to be the leader who “emerged as clearly and absolutely triumphant” from the “longest war in Israeli history”.

After alienating much of the Western world – except for his closest ally Donald Trump – it seems removing Hezbollah is his “only remaining opportunity to claim victory” on the world stage and secure a legacy. In the region, and on the domestic front, tackling the “fictitious invasion” by Hezbollah is the “only political promise Netanyahu hopes he can fulfil for future voters” in the elections expected this autumn.

What next?

Though these talks should be welcomed, “significant hurdles remain”, said Bilal Y. Saab from Chatham House. Given the “deeply rooted” Hezbollah problem, both sides need to take “more concrete action”.

In order to preserve ties with the Lebanese government, Israel must “avoid further attacks on state infrastructure”, particularly in Beirut, to destroy Hezbollah’s “narrative of resistance”. The Lebanese government’s focus, however, is internal. It should consider “expelling Hezbollah ministers from the cabinet”, confiscate arms, “outlaw all of Hezbollah’s financial activities” and “arrest anyone endangering civil peace”.

There are hopes this would lead to a formal peace deal. “It’s a long and winding road, but there’s no better alternative.”

What happened

The U.S. on Tuesday hosted the first direct meeting between Israel and Lebanon since 1993. Israel, which is occupying southern Lebanon as it attacks Hezbollah, continued trading strikes with the Iran-backed militia during the meeting. Israeli attacks have killed at least 2,124 people in Lebanon in six weeks of war, including 168 children and 88 health workers, Lebanon’s health ministry said. Israel said 13 soldiers and at least two Israeli citizens have been killed.

Who said what

Tuesday’s two-hour Washington, D.C., meeting “concluded with encouraging words and talk of further meetings,” The New York Times said, but “no firm commitments and no change in Israel’s refusal to halt its punishing military campaign” in Lebanon. Israel’s U.S. ambassador, Yechiel Leiter, said he and his Lebanese counterpart, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, had agreed “that the evil of Hezbollah must be eradicated.” Moawad said she had “underscored the need to preserve our territorial integrity and state sovereignty” and “called for a ceasefire.”

The Lebanese government’s “capacity to confront Hezbollah” is “limited,” the BBC said. Hezbollah said it won’t abide by any agreements from the bilateral talks. “What does Lebanon have to offer on a negotiating table?” a Lebanese government official said to The Washington Post. “Nothing.”

The Israel-Lebanon talks are “a process, not an event,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters. “Hezbollah and Israel have always helped each other to destabilize the government of Lebanon,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said. “It’s time for Israel and Lebanon to be working together.”

What next?

The U.S. State Department said Israel and Lebanon “agreed to launch direct negotiations” at an unspecified “time and venue.”

India’s programme to reintroduce cheetahs to the country is “flourishing”, but mounting opposition to “Project Cheetah” from local farmers has “teeth”, said The Times.

The big cats were declared extinct in India 70 years ago because of habitat loss, prey reduction and “rampant Raj-era poaching for luxury fashion”, but now they are back, and causing plenty of division.

Ambitious vision

India’s links with the “world’s fastest land animal date back centuries”, and the word cheetah itself comes from Sanskrit citra, meaning spotted. Royals “kept them as pets”, and in the 12th century they became a “popular hunting animal” and the Mughal emperor Akbar was believed to have collected some 9,000 of them.

Legend has it that the last three cheetahs in India were shot dead by the Maharajah of the historical state of Koriya, on a nighttime drive in 1947. Sightings were reported “intermittently” after that but the big cats were declared extinct in the country in 1952.

Then, in 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, launched an ambitious scheme, with the aim of re-establishing the cheetah within its historical territory in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. The government claimed the project would aid global conservation and “improve livelihood options for local communities through ecotourism”, said The Hindu.

Re-establishing a cheetah population initially relied on importing cheetahs from countries like South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Last month, “nine wild African cheetahs were tranquillised in Botswana’s savannah, quarantined for a few weeks in the country, and then taken on a 10-hour flight over the Indian Ocean by the Indian Air Force” before being delivered by helicopter to a national park in Madhya Pradesh.

The latest arrivals from Africa bring the total number of cheetahs in India to 53, 33 of which are native-born cubs. In December, the government said India was on course to have a self-sustaining population of cheetahs by 2032.

Land grab

But the project has had its “hiccups”, said The Times. Several cheetahs went into septic shock and died during a monsoon. Others perished from climate stress and parasitic infections as a result of their transition from Africa’s savannahs to India’s “scrub forest ecosystems”.

The new population of predatory carnivores is also proving a headache for local livestock farmers. One villager in Chak Kishanpur said she had lost her goats, worth 10,000 to 15,000 rupees (£90-£120) each, and is now forced to harvest wheat in a nearby field instead.

Some scientists are also opposed: conservationists have called for a ban on importing cheetahs, demanding that the most recent batch should be the last, citing an “abysmal lack of habitat and prey”, said The Hindu. The project is currently entirely based in the Kuno National Park, which will become more and more crowded if the free-ranging cheetah population continues to multiply.

This is a land grab in the name of conservation, Nitin Rai, a fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, told the outlet. Pointing to past conflict between state-led conservation efforts for tigers and the land rights of Indigenous communities, Rai said that “the cheetah, like the tiger, is being used as a proxy for territorial control of land and to move out forest dwellers.” The officials behind the cheetah scheme have “run roughshod over local opinions, understanding and histories of landscape change”.

People across the United States are making their opinions known as the war in Iran enters its seventh week, and perhaps none more so than military members. Active-duty soldiers and veterans are experiencing an array of emotions connected to the conflict, with some in support and others vehemently against it. The differing feelings come as tensions in the Defense Department grow.

‘Powerful motivator’

Some soldiers are angry that the Iran conflict has been run with “strategic incoherence” because the “president hasn’t really been able to say with clarity to the American people what exactly this war is about,” Marine veteran Elliot Ackerman said to WBUR News. The war “leaves this question, okay, ‘So is this tool we have, the U.S. military, is that a tool that we can use to create that better future for our country and for Iran?’” It is important to “articulate a very clear plan if we’re going to put American service members’ lives in jeopardy.”

The number of people looking to leave the military had already been increasing, and the “war against Iran has been a powerful motivator,” Kat Lonsdorf and Tom Bowman said at NPR. Many soldiers are “airing their concerns and frustrations,” Bill Galvin, who helps run the GI Rights Hotline for military discharge, said to NPR. Most of the callers are “asking how to apply to become a conscientious objector,” and nearly all of them “mention the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran on the first day of the war.”

Many veterans also remember the effects of years-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When it comes to the war in Iran, the “U.S. is creating a new generation of anti-American sentiment in Iran and across the region,” Chris Sarson, who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, said to WBUR News. Soldiers who served during these conflicts became “acutely aware of the heavy costs that civilians pay for war.”

‘Many acknowledge the role Iran played’

Though many in the Armed Forces feel the conflict might become another “forever war,” others have more complex feelings. Some soldiers are largely against war but “also acknowledge the role Iran played behind the scenes” assisting other regional nations in Middle East wars, Jeff Schogol and Patty Nieberg said at Task & Purpose. Wars in the Middle East have “caused a lot of moral injury and PTSD amongst the veterans’ community,” but “at the same time, Iran again has been a party to this conflict over the last 25 years,” Alex Plitsas, a former Army staff sergeant and Iraq veteran, said to Task & Purpose.

Some veterans feel that the war means Iran is “finally being held accountable,” said Schogol and Nieberg at Task & Purpose. “I’ve flown combat missions against the very terrorists funded and directed by the Iranian regime, and I’ve seen firsthand the threat Iran poses,” Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas), an Air Force veteran, said in a press release when the war began. The conflict has been “coming for the ayatollahs, who have no regard for human life or peace.”

Many younger soldiers are also “excited to deploy” to Iran because the war is “what needs to be done,” Army veteran Juan Munoz said to The Associated Press. Other soldiers support the war thanks to their positive feelings about President Donald Trump. There “had to have been some reason” for Trump “to bomb them,” Army veteran Edward Bauman told the AP. “I don’t think he would have just went out of his way to just, ‘I’m going to bomb these people.’”

What happened

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party secured a majority in Parliament on Monday after winning three special elections to fill vacant seats. The party last year fell short of the 172 seats needed for a majority in the House of Commons. But following five defections from opposition parties in the past five months and last night’s victories, the Liberals now hold 174 seats, allowing them to legislate without other parties and keeping Carney in office through at least 2029.

Who said what

Carney’s election win last year was “fueled by public anger over President Donald Trump’s annexation threats” and trade war, The Associated Press said. With his new majority, Carney will have “broader latitude with his legislative agenda, which is focused on reducing Canada’s dependency on the United States,” The New York Times said. “No modern majority government in Ottawa has ever been built” through defections before, Politico said, and while opposition parties keep “hammering Carney over high grocery prices” and a “nationwide housing shortage, ‘Carneymania’ continues to sweep the nation.”

What next?

Now that he has a majority, it’s “important for Carney to actually deliver,” McGill University politics professor Daniel Béland told The Wall Street Journal. The “first move of Carney’s majority government,” Politico said, will “be to announce relief for Canadian consumers facing skyrocketing gas and diesel prices” from Trump’s Iran war.