With four political factions working together to defeat Israel’s right-wing Likud Party in upcoming elections, there is a real possibility that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may lose power for the first time since the Gaza war began. But this doesn’t necessarily mean conditions in the region will improve for Palestinians.

What did the commentators say?

Israelis consider the Oct. 27 election to be important, but for “Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the stakes are just as high — even though they do not have a vote,” said The New York Times. Netanyahu has long vowed to “prevent the creation of a Palestinian state, and his government has built Israeli settlements in the West Bank at a breakneck pace.” Many Palestinians are “desperate to avoid another four years” of his government.

Still, even a victory that ousts Likud from power “may bring only marginal change for Palestinians suffering record levels of settler violence and mass displacement,” said Al Jazeera. While the opposition coalition of the Yashar party, the Democrats, the Yisrael Beiteinu party and the Together alliance have joined forces against Netanyahu, there is “little daylight between them when it comes to Israel’s foundational policies in Gaza and the West Bank.”

Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, who could potentially become Israel’s next prime minister, also opposes an independent Palestinian nation. The election is “unlikely to produce a sweeping shift in policies that have hampered a decades-old peace process,” said Reuters. Even if Netanyahu is ousted, the new coalition “effectively repudiates the ‘two-state solution’ that underpinned international peace negotiations for generations.”

What next?

Whether Netanyahu stays or goes, he has left an indelible mark on Israel. The “security doctrine he champions — opposition to a Palestinian state, stifling Iran’s nuclear ambitions, stationing troops in neighboring countries to neutralize perceived threats and the insistence that peace comes from strength, not the other way around — is now utterly mainstream,” said Bloomberg. With no end in sight to the destruction in Gaza, no “matter who wins, there will be no fundamental shift in our policy,” Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S., said to Bloomberg. “It may even be a more aggressive policy.”

In Brazil’s tightly contested presidential election, another contender is back in the spotlight: the outsized role social media plays in its politics.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva accused Meta of using “biased algorithms and AI restrictions“ to favour opposition candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, said The Associated Press. The son of the far-right former president, Jair, won 47% in the first round of the election compared with 45% for the incumbent.

Lula filed a complaint against the US tech company, claiming it had subjected his campaign to “unjustified reductions in reach”. It claimed Meta had artificially inflated accounts and adverts associated with Bolsonaro, a key ally of Donald Trump.

Meta denies wrongdoing, but ahead of the run-off on Sunday, “questions have festered over whether the digital arena has been a level playing field”, said Al Jazeera.

What is Brazil’s social media footprint?

Brazil is one of the world’s biggest markets for social media. The South American nation boasts about 180 million users, said Statista: more than three-quarters of the population. “Brazil is a power machine on the internet,” actress Fernanda Torres told Variety. “We’re heavy, heavy users.”

And with social media “eclipsing traditional advertising”, political ad spending on Meta’s sites has “grown at a breakneck pace”, said Al Jazeera. But critics warn this shift has “put political hopefuls at the mercy of Big Tech corporations and their biases”.

Left-wing actors in Brazil still “lag significantly behind the far right when it comes to digital communication”, said anthropologist Leticia Cesarino. The logic that underpins the attention economy is “structurally beneficial to the kind of alarmistic, simplistic, affect-laden far-right discourse”.

What are the allegations against Meta?

Google and TikTok are not allowing political advertising, which left Meta’s services as “the only large-scale channels for paid digital campaigning”, said The Guardian.

Meta temporarily disabled ads on Lula’s official campaign Facebook page. He was also briefly unable to boost his Instagram posts, while Bolsonaro could. Lula’s lawyers included this in “evidence” that Meta was “actively trying to interfere” in Bolsonaro’s favour.

Ekō, a digital advocacy non-profit coalition, published a report alleging that Meta had favoured Bolsonaro’s campaign. UN rights experts said reports of restrictions on Meta platforms were concerning. “Information, including from Meta employees, suggests that accounts linked to one side of the presidential race were disproportionately curtailed,” the experts said, without specifying which side.

What is Meta’s defence?

Meta called Lula’s allegations “false and unfounded”, said The Guardian, saying there had been “technical incidents” that affected campaigns from “different parts of the political spectrum”. But Meta’s own semi-independent oversight board said it was “concerned by recurring enforcement failures in Meta’s election integrity efforts”, citing Brazil’s election, where there had been an “over-enforcement of Meta’s fraud policies” against Lula.

Brazil’s top electoral court ruled that Meta could not “reduce the distribution of political contact, restrict searches or remove posts in a way that creates an imbalance”, said The Associated Press. Meta says it has complied with the court order to treat both election campaigns equally.

“We apply the same rules to all candidates, parties and political viewpoints in Brazil,” Meta told The Guardian. “We do not suppress content to harm one side or give preferential treatment to any side.”

When President Harry S. Truman, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met at Potsdam in 1945, the goal was for World War II’s victorious leaders to coordinate plans for postwar Europe. Eighty years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin has proposed another seismic trilateral meeting — this time between himself, President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Meanwhile, Russia continues its attempted invasion of Ukraine, a country conspicuously left off the invitation list.

What did the commentators say?

Putin is attempting to “capitalize on warming ties” between himself and Trump in the hopes of negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine that “would favor Moscow,” said The Wall Street Journal. But by omitting Ukraine, Putin’s “unprecedented” summit would “send alarm bells ringing in European capitals and beyond.” Coordinating a summit of global superpowers “appeals to Trump’s idealized view of the world” — a vision that would entail powerful leaders carving up territory with Trump “taking his seat, recognized by all, as one of those great powers,” said Slate.

Publicly, Trump has shown interest in Putin’s summit as an opportunity to address atomic weaponry. “I would do it, not so much for Ukraine,” he said to reporters this week, per Bloomberg. “We would have it to talk about denuclearization.” For years, Trump has had an “aspiration to reach a deal” with Russia and China regarding nonproliferation, said Axios. But “so far, Putin and Xi haven’t shown much openness to the idea.”

While the three countries have “overlapping interests,” they lack a “common strategic vision,” said Denis Simon, of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, to the South China Morning Post. Nuclear weapons offer the “most obvious potential starting point,” yet issues like Ukraine, Taiwan and the “broader international order” would “inevitably enter any conversation” among the trio.

What next?

Chinese officials have “privately welcomed” the potential talks but “have not pushed aggressively for them,” said the Morning Post. There is “no clear understanding yet regarding the meeting itself or its potential agenda,” said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov to the Journal. Still, all three parties “acknowledge the hypothetical possibility of such a meeting taking place.”

“As Europe struggles to fill its seminaries”, one Indonesian island in the majority-Muslim country has “become one of the world’s leading exporters of missionaries”, said The Economist.

Rugged island

Flores, located in the southeast of the Indonesian archipelago, is one of a handful of islands in the world’s most populous Muslim nation with a Christian majority, with 80% of its two million inhabitants identifying as Roman Catholic.

Catholicism came to Flores in the 16th century, when Portuguese spice traders brought missionaries to the “rugged, mountainous island”, said National Catholic Register. The faith is “deeply rooted” in its culture, and many young men choose to devote their lives to the Church.

Flores is home to multiple seminaries, training thousands of young men in Catholic liturgy, religious doctrine and pastoral care. Through “their early morning prayers, their long days of study, and their shared meals cooked over simple stoves, they carry forward a vocation” that lives on. Boys interested in a future in the priesthood can join the island’s minor seminary system, “which currently has 650 students enrolled at the junior and senior high school level”.

Flores “trains priests who go on to serve” in the United States, Africa, Europe and South America, said France 24. Indonesian priests have “earned a good reputation and are considered fair and tolerant, particularly on LGBT topics”. The Catholic Church considers Flores “indispensable to its future and survival in the region”.

Promised land

That devotion to the priesthood has become “surprisingly important to the future of the Catholic Church”, said The Economist. The numbers tell the tale: there are 1.4 billion Catholics around the world – more than twice as many as in 1970 – but “the number of Catholic priests has remained roughly the same”, at around 400,000.

Over the past half century, the number of trainee priests has “declined sharply” in Europe and North America, as “the prestige of the role has diminished in the face of child-abuse scandals and increasing secularism”. In 2024, there were an estimated 4,150 trainee priests enrolled in seminaries on Flores. “Ireland, by contrast, had just 104.”

The Catholic Church hopes Flores will play a major part in addressing the shortfall. Around 60% of seminarians now come from Africa and Asia, where “Catholicism is growing and the priesthood is still esteemed”. “Catholic enclaves” such as Flores now “produce enough priests not only to serve local dioceses, but also to send them abroad, tending congregations from Angola to Austria”.

The Diocese of Ruteng, described by Vatican News as Indonesia’s “promised land of vocations”, is central to this effort. “Faith is alive here,” Bishop Ciprianus Hormat of Ruteng told the Vatican’s Fides News Agency.

Canada’s largest prairie province will remain part of the country, as voters in Alberta overwhelmingly denied an independence referendum that would have started the province on a path to separation. The ripple effect of the defeated referendum now appears set to echo across Canada.

What did the commentators say?

Most Albertans apparently have no desire to break away. With 93% of the votes reported, nearly 76% of respondents chose to remain part of Canada, according to the preliminary referendum results. The vote “marks a major win for Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is facing a trade and political war with the United States amid President Donald Trump’s higher tariffs and repeated suggestions of annexing the country,” said Al Jazeera. While the vote is clear, it may “not spell the end for a movement that has spent decades pushing for greater autonomy from the federal government.”

Many Albertans are “expressing frustration that their views aren’t sufficiently represented by the Liberal government,” said Time. Still, many in the Canadian Parliament have been reluctant to support an independence push because Alberta is an “oil-rich province; mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction made up about a quarter of the province’s GDP in 2025.” Some in the province feel that “central Canada is taking advantage of Alberta; that the central government has, at times, through environmental regulations, for example, hindered the development of the oil resources,” Andrew McDougall, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto Scarborough, said to Time.

The vote will also precipitate further questions about whether Alberta Premier Danielle Smith “can maintain control of her party and the province,” said The Globe and Mail. Smith has consistently said she wants Alberta to be part of a “United Canada” but also has a “contentious relationship with the pro-Canada crowd, who have accused her of pandering to separatists.” The vote’s outcome is “unlikely to position Ms. Smith as an ally to the movement.”

What next?

Carney waxed poetic about the referendum’s defeat. Albertans “made a clear choice. They chose unity, to build together and to take care of each other,” the prime minister said on X. The results “mean that Albertans and all Canadians will move forward together with renewed purpose.”

An obscure island in the Indian Ocean has become an unlikely titan in the global online gambling industry. With its lack of corporate taxes and “minimal red tape”, Anjouan has become home to a “thriving industry” of gambling websites tied to the black market, and counts banks, brokers and cryptocurrency exchanges among its virtual residents, said Australia’s ABC News.

But there is “just one problem”: “none of the licences – financial or gambling – are worth the (virtual) paper they are written on”. Meanwhile, the industry continues to draw operators and gamblers from around the world – including Britain – into its ever-expanding orbit.

A widening ‘network’

Traditionally, Anjouan – one of the semi-autonomous islands that make up the Comoros archipelago – was best known for its exports of ylang-ylang oil and vanilla. But it has since “stumbled” into the “dangerous but highly lucrative” industry of underground online gambling, said The Guardian. There are now 1,500 registered gaming licence holders on the books in Anjouan.

This is far from a state-sponsored endeavour to create a low-regulation haven on the island. In fact, it appears to be led by a “small cadre of mostly British businessmen flogging unofficial ‘licences’” to online casinos, as well as banking and cryptocurrency platforms.

Anjouan-licensed gambling platforms have been linked to “serious breaches” including fraud, “theft of personal data” and a lack of payment of winnings, said Le Monde. And those seeking redress will find that “the legal value of licences from this island is highly questionable”.

‘Fighting back’

The whole operation is given a veneer of legitimacy thanks to a global “network” of organisations selling fraudulent gambling licences, which is estimated to be making “tens of millions of dollars a year in fees”, said ABC News. But the island’s authorities claim supposed gambling regulators are “fictitious entities” operating “illegally”, while Anjouan’s supposed financial regulator “lacks both credibility and accountability”.

Licences often “reassure” customers that there has been “some kind of due diligence process” in the operation, keeping their gaming and winnings “safe”, said sporting ethics NGO PlayTheGame. But under the surface, in the “overwhelming majority of cases”, customers find themselves “helpless” should they end up as the victim of fraud. And sadly, this happens “often”.

For its part, the island is “fighting back”: making efforts to rid itself of its increasingly notorious reputation, said The Guardian. The government of the Comoros Union has made a “direct request” to the British government for assistance to unravel the “unauthorised licensing regime” once and for all.

Ukrainians are “gearing up for the worst-case scenario”, said Finbarr Toesland in The i Paper. In the face of an “emboldened Russia”, this winter is expected to be the “most brutal since Vladimir Putin launched his invasion in February 2022”.

Stunned by Donald Trump’s surprise announcement of an “energy ceasefire” that would favour Russia, and apparent plans for “peace talks” without Ukraine present, Volodymyr Zelenskyy is struggling to win back US favour. But he needs ways to help Kyiv make it through winter months where temperatures can drop as low as -20C.

What did the commentators say?

“Trump’s efforts on the part of Russia” are “the act of an enemy”, said The Independent’s world affairs editor Sam Kiley. He has “strangled” Kyiv’s intelligence systems and “crippled weapons on the battlefield”. That’s an “act of sabotage”, and “Europe’s leaders must stand up and say so”.

This “sorry episode” shows “just how dependent Ukraine still is on the US”, said The Telegraph’s editorial board. For all the “strong words” of Europe’s leaders, “there remains a gulf” between their “rhetoric and the reality” of their support. Iris2, the EU’s version of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network won’t even be operational before 2030, and the Americans are still the only ones who can offer “ballistic-missile defence”. Europe must step up its provision of hardware, or “Kyiv’s security will remain hostage to Mr Trump, who has shown repeatedly that he cannot be relied upon”.

Britain and Europe have already reached their “limit” of what they can deliver, said Dimitar Bechev, a foreign-policy analyst at Carnegie Europe, in Al Jazeera. Its €90 billion loan of frozen Russian assets to Ukraine now looks like it “might be exhausted well before the end of 2027”, and any attempt to find additional funding could “open a can of worms” in both EU budget negotiations and upcoming elections in member states like France, Spain, Italy and Poland. But the EU and the UK have nevertheless “replaced the US” as the “de facto guarantors” of Ukraine’s survival. Joining the EU – or, at least becoming a closely integrated partner like Norway – is the “best-case scenario for Kyiv in the long run”.

Zelenskyy may have to “consider a temporary, if unwelcome, change of tactics” to relieve the “terminal stress” on his relationship with Trump, said The Times’ editorial board. And two US senators have suggested “a useful compromise”: if Ukraine pledges to stop attacks on Russian energy assets, SpaceX’s Starshield coverage could be “extended to roughly 200 miles inside Russia” to “help Kyiv take out some of the launchers firing at civilians all over Ukraine”.

What next?

To “reduce the impact of Russian missile and drone attacks” on Kyiv’s small number of combined heat-and-power plants, Ukraine “needs to decentralise” such “critical infrastructure”, Olena Pavlenko of Ukrainian energy think-tank DiXi Group told Toesland in The i Paper, but this is not a “short-term solution”.

More urgently, Ukraine must find a way to halt Russia’s “devastating air onslaught”, said The Times. It needs “proper air defences – and fast”, even if that means halting strikes on Russian refineries in return for Patriot missiles. Trump “may not be minded to provide these weapons” but he is under “growing pressure” from the US Congress, where even members of his own party have “expressed disquiet at the so-called energy deal” with Putin. A strategic pause in strikes may help to “prevent further Trump hostility to Kyiv”, which would be a “welcome” contribution to Ukraine’s cause.

Israeli police have arrested 10 suspects in the occupied West Bank following attacks by Jewish settlers over the weekend in which a US journalist and European diplomats were among those injured.

Masked settlers beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine as she covered an olive harvest in the Palestinian village of Abu Falah. The following day, settlers attacked diplomats from Belgium, France and Poland, as well as representatives of the Catholic Church, in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh.

Why is the harvest so significant for Palestinians?

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinian families depend on the olive sector for at least part of their income. Every autumn, thousands of families harvest olives that have sustained communities for generations. To many olive-growing communities, the harvest represents not just livelihoods, but cultural identity, family heritage and attachment to the land.

The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture estimates that olive oil production will reach approximately 21,000 tonnes this year, around a quarter of which would be surplus to domestic need and could be exported, said Palestinian News Network. But that yield is reliant on farmers being able to access and harvest their groves.

Settler attacks during this year’s olive harvest season have already surpassed the total for 2025. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has documented 199 olive-harvest-related settler attacks in the West Bank this season. These incidents resulted in one death, 124 injuries and damage to more than 2,500 trees and saplings.

Why is the season vulnerable to violence?

These attacks in the West Bank “are not new”, said Al Jazeera. Every year, “Israeli settlers and hardline groups use the olive harvest period to assert control over valuable agricultural lands”, including by “stealing crops, or building illegal settlement outposts and roads on private Palestinian property”.

This annual ritual of “assaulting farmers, burning or uprooting trees and stealing crops”, is “making it increasingly dangerous for Palestinians to reach and remain on their own land”, Ahmed Najar, a Palestinian political analyst and playwright, told the outlet.

The attacks are also designed to “deter international campaigners from accompanying Palestinian farmers, standing with them against settler violence and documenting the atrocities being committed”, he said. “The objective is not only to dispossess Palestinians, but to ensure that their dispossession happens without witnesses.”

What is being done?

The EU has condemned Israeli settler attacks, with a spokesperson for its diplomatic service saying it expects “full accountability as well as effective measures to prevent continued acts of violence and violent harassment against Palestinians, including during the ongoing olive harvest season”.

The Israeli military has condemned Saturday’s attack on the EU diplomats and said it has opened an investigation into the incident. However, “despite the international condemnation”, the office of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has “questioned the video evidence and testimony” from what it calls “alleged” attacks, said the BBC.

Ukrainian officials are scrambling to address the recent throttling of their crucial Starlink internet connectivity, a major engine of the country’s successful drone operations. While SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump have blamed each other for directly ordering the outage, a growing number of European leaders see the incident as a worrying sign that Musk's products have undue influence in Ukraine’s theater of war — and across the continent as a whole.

What did the commentators say?

Europe “must not leave it up” to Musk and Trump to “decide whether Ukraine will be able to defend itself or not,” said Renew Europe, the European Parliament’s liberal group, in a letter last week to European Union officials obtained by Euronews. Existing European satellites could instead “fill the gap” while the countries pivot away from Musk, said the outlet. The collective effort to respond to Musk comes as French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot this month accused the tech oligarch of using his X platform to “attempt to influence debate in European democracies,” said Le Monde.

“Big man, are you playing politics with your products again?” said Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski in a message to Musk on X after Starlink’s latest disruption. “As your European customers, we are watching you.” The minister’s “mocking address” recalled his 2025 clash with Musk, in which he explained that Poland provides millions of dollars for Ukraine’s Starlink access and would “seek another supplier if SpaceX proved unreliable,” said the Kyiv Post. “Be quiet, small man,” said Musk on X at the time, promising later that “Starlink will never turn off its terminals” in Ukraine or “use it ​as a bargaining chip.”

What next?

Even before this month’s throttling episode, European leaders were exploring ways to “strengthen collective satellite capacity” and wean themselves off Musk’s service, said Politico. The EU is now “aiming to give speedy antitrust approval” to a new satellite service “seen as the bloc’s answer to SpaceX,” said Bloomberg. The hope is to “help Europe cut its reliance on American satellite providers” while testing a “revamped EU approach” to creating “regional giants to compete with U.S. and Chinese rivals.”

What happened?

Ukraine said its access to U.S. intelligence and crucial battlefield technology was abruptly curtailed this month, days after President Trump called for the ouster of the Ukrainian president and American officials reportedly threatened to cut military assistance to the war-torn nation. Trump turned on Volodymyr Zelensky after announcing that he’d struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy Russian diesel, a stunning reversal of the nearly five-year-old U.S. and Western campaign to economically punish Russia for its war of aggression in Ukraine. Eager to bring down the soaring price of diesel before the midterms, Trump said Russia would immediately supply 300,000 tons of the fuel, followed by an additional 4.5 million tons beginning in November. The deal, which could inject some $4 billion into Russia’s ailing economy, shocked European nations and angered Zelensky, who called it “a weak decision” that would allow Putin “to kill more” Ukrainians. Trump demanded Zelensky end Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries, which have caused fuel shortages in the country. When Zelensky said Moscow must first end its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, Trump said Zelensky must “damn well stop” and that Ukraine needs “a new leader who can make a deal” to end the war.

Three days later, Ukraine’s armed forces said their access to the Starshield satellite internet service—the military version of Starlink, used for communications and to pilot drone fleets—was being throttled. The cutback came soon after the country was hit by dozens of ballistic missiles, which took out power for 600,000 people in Kyiv, without America’s customary advance warnings. Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, which supplies Starlink under contract with the Pentagon, said any “limits on usage” are decided by the Pentagon “and ultimately POTUS.” The administration offered no comment, but Ukrainian officials—who Zelensky said had been threatened with an end to U.S. intelligence sharing—drew their own conclusions. “This action cannot be a coincidence,” said military adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers assailed the diesel deal, which came a month after Trump signed a bill to impose tariffs on countries that import Russian oil. The U.S. “should not provide Putin with a financial life line,” wrote six senators, including Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and John Curtis of Utah. In striking a deal with “a murdering dictator,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Trump “makes us complicit.”

What the editorials said

Trump’s deal is “a moral and strategic mistake,” said The Wall Street Journal. With diesel above $6 a gallon, he wants to throw a bone to voters weeks before the midterms. But all this deal will do is “directly finance Putin’s bloody war in Ukraine.” Trump announced it after a week in which more than 100 Ukrainian civilians, including at least 20 children, were killed in Russian strikes. And he asked nothing of Putin in return. “The only pressure Trump ever applies is on Ukraine.”

“Trump has stooped to new lows,” said the Financial Times, and his hypocrisy here is “glaring.” Having assailed India and China for importing Russian oil and threatened tariffs and other sanctions on countries that buy from Moscow, he’s now ready to hand $4 billion to Putin’s murderous regime. It thoroughly “undermines the credibility of Western efforts to isolate Putin.”

What the columnists said

Trump’s deal is “a fraud on the American people,” said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. He’s “desperate” to show he’s doing something to bring diesel prices down, but short U.S. supply isn’t the problem—we’re the world’s top exporter. Even if it were, the amounts involved are “trifling.” The first shipment of 300,000 tons equates to about 2.2 million barrels. Our transportation sector alone uses “about 3 million barrels of diesel daily.”

Trump ridiculously blames Ukraine’s refinery attacks for Americans’ pain at the pump, said Jonathan V. Last in The Bulwark. But the real culprit is his failing Iran war, which has choked supply from the Middle East. And “Russia has been helping Iran the entire time.” It’s provided Tehran with satellite imagery, drone components, and explosives—all of which have been used “to kill American soldiers.” Now Trump is begging Putin to take our money for some fuel? It’s “the most stunning display of submission and weakness from an American president ever.

Trump has personal reasons for “going for Zelensky’s jugular,” said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. He vowed to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office. Since he won’t make demands of Putin, that required “Ukraine’s capitulation.” Zelensky understandably refused to surrender— turning himself into “a constant reminder of Trump’s dealmaking impotence.”

This grim debacle is the latest evidence that Trump’s relationship with Russia “remains intense, important, and very weird,” said Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. Since his first Moscow visit in 1987, “he has loudly repeated Russian propaganda and reflected Russian views,” a stance that’s “remained remarkably consistent.” Whether he’s just a “useful idiot” or a “deliberate agent of the Kremlin” is open to debate, said David Rothkopf in The Daily Beast. But with his grotesque betrayal of Ukraine, it’s never been clearer that he’s a Putin “puppet” ready to place “Russian interests ahead of America’s.” It’s “a profoundly dangerous development,” and we can only hope that more Americans begin to “recognize that there is no greater enemy to this country than its own president.”

The consensus is that Israel’s forthcoming election is one of the most consequential in the country’s 78-year history, and a defining moment for its political identity. It is the first since the 7 October attacks three years ago; and the first time voters have had a chance to pass judgement on the government’s failure to prevent that catastrophe, and on Israel’s prosecution of its subsequent wars on Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.

It could herald a reset in relations between Israel and its international allies, many of whom have been critical of Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government, particularly over Gaza. Above all, the election could herald the political demise of Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving PM, who has led the nation for all but 18 months since 2009.

What is the current make-up of Israel’s parliament?

The ruling party needs a majority of at least 61 seats out of 120 in the Knesset. Because of its proportional representation system – voters cast one vote for a national party-list – even the largest parties rarely win more than 35 seats, and Israel has always had coalition governments. At present, Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud has 32 seats. To govern, it relies on two ultra-orthodox Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (with 18 seats together), the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionist and Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) parties (with 13 seats between them), and the centre-right New Hope party (with four seats).

The government is widely regarded as the most extreme Israel has ever had. The main opposition bloc – ranging from the remnants of the once-mighty Labor Party to secular, liberal Yesh Atid to the centre-right Yisrael Beiteinu – has more than 40 seats, but has refused to govern with Netanyahu since 2019, partly because he was the defendant in three corruption cases. Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am, representing the 20% of Israel’s population that is Arab, have ten seats.

And how likely is Netanyahu to lose?

The emergence of Gadi Eisenkot, a former general, and his newly formed centre-right Yashar party, has consolidated the anti-Netanyahu opposition. He is seen as the PM’s principal rival, and could replace him. However, according to most opinion polls, the election is too close to call. The Economist’s poll tracker suggests that Likud and Yashar are neck-and-neck, on 22 seats each; that Netanyahu’s coalition will fall short of the 61 seats needed for a majority; but that Eisenkot’s coalition is likely to fall short too.

What are Eisenkot’s credentials?

A former IDF chief of staff, Eisenkot served in Netanyahu’s war cabinet until June 2024, when he resigned with a scathing criticism of the PM’s revanchist strategy in Gaza. He launched his party, Yashar (meaning “straight” or “honest”) just over a year later; since then, it has steadily risen in the polls. Although without Netanyahu’s charisma, Eisenkot, the son of Jewish immigrants from Morocco, is widely regarded by voters as a man of integrity. His son, Gal Meir, was killed in Gaza in December 2023, during an operation to recover the bodies of two Israeli hostages.

Netanyahu’s allies have sought, somewhat unconvincingly, to cast him as too left-wing and squeamish to protect Israel’s security. In fact, as a general, he pioneered Israel’s “Dahiya doctrine”, named after Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Beirut, which calls for the overwhelming use of force against civilian infrastructure in areas from which attacks are launched; he also categorically opposes the creation of a Palestinian state.

Are there other contenders?

Conceivably, there is Naftali Bennett, who served as PM in 2021-22 but could not keep his diverse coalition together. Another right-winger, and a former Netanyahu aide, he has merged his party with that of the centrist Yair Lapid, another former PM, under the banner “Yachad” (“Together”); but their party lags well behind leaders Yashar and Likud in the polls. Bennett also rejects a two-state solution. Lapid accepts it in theory, but thinks that it is not realistic for the foreseeable future.

How about the Arab parties?

They are on course to win at least ten seats in the Knesset. However, Eisenkot has ruled out a coalition with the Arab parties, only one of which (the conservative-Islamist Ra’am) has ever agreed to join an Israeli government (briefly in 2021). Their very participation has been the subject of controversy: on 2 October, Israel’s supreme court overturned a ban on them running in the contest at all. The ban had been imposed by the central elections committee, a political body dominated by Netanyahu allies, on the basis that the parties supported armed struggle against Israel.

So what would the opposition do differently?

In many respects, not much: the Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal has described Israeli politics as “50 shades of right-wing”. However, an Eisenkot coalition would establish a commission of inquiry into the 7 October attacks. It would seek to end the exemption of Haredi men from military service, an agreement dating back to 1948 that has become very controversial. It would roll back many of the judicial reforms introduced by Netanyahu, designed to give more control over the judiciary. It would also crack down on violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank – though it would retain settlements authorised in Israeli law. And it would try to reset troubled relations with Israel’s allies.

And if Netanyahu wins again?

It would mean more of the same. Many liberal Israelis fear that a new Netanyahu coalition, again likely backed by the far-right, would take the state in an increasingly autocratic direction: comparisons to Hungary and Turkey are often made. For the first time in Israeli history, emigration has begun to outpace immigration: in the period 2023–26, more than 200,000 Israelis left the country.

Do we need a new way of measuring time? Are we losing the battle against bed bugs? And is it time to close Everest?

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This week’s deadly attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels on Saudi Arabia’s airports and energy facilities have renewed focus on the Iran-backed militia’s growing strength, as well as its potential to disrupt global oil supplies.

Saudi Arabia has now launched “a major offensive” to support the Yemeni government forces who are trying to drive the militia out of the territory they’ve gained over the past 12 years, said CNN. But the rebels “have so far held their ground”.

How did they gain power?

Formally named Ansar Allah (“helpers of God”), the Houthis emerged in the 1990s as an armed political and religious group championing Yemen’s Zaidi Shia minority. Initially fighting for more autonomy in their northern homeland, they took a lead role in mass anti-government protests when civil war broke out in 2014. They captured the capital, Sanaa, and forced the internationally-recognised government to retreat to Aden in the south.

In 2015, Saudi Arabia intervened in the civil war, insisting that Iran was supporting the Houthis, and led a nine-country coalition in a years-long effort to restore the Yemeni government. The coalition’s bombing campaign led to “one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises” and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, said The New York Times. But the Houthis survived, “cementing their power” over northern and central Yemen.

A UN-brokered truce in 2022 led to peace talks but these broke down after Israel launched its campaign against Iran-backed Hamas in Gaza.

How have they grown so powerful?

A 2024 report to the UN Security Council concluded that support and training from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps had helped the Houthis transform from “a localised armed group” to “a powerful military organisation”. Their forces had grown to an estimated 350,000 fighters – up from just 30,000 in 2015. The Houthis had also been forcibly recruiting large numbers of children and Ethiopian migrants, using them as human shields, spies and for dangerous mine-planting.

While Iran is believed still to supply expertise, as well as “cutting-edge components like guidance systems”, the Houthis can now “manufacture much of their weaponry domestically”, said The Associated Press. They have “little aerial and naval power” but have been “increasingly turning to drones”, said Middle East Eye. These are very effective against pro-government forces, which lack “effective air defences”, global security consultant Wolf-Christian Paes told the news organisation.

How much of Yemen is under Houthi control?

The Houthis control between a quarter and a third of Yemen, but that portion is home to around three-quarters of the population. The militia “rules over its impoverished territory with an iron fist”, said The New York Times. The Houthis are the de-factor regime in northern and western Yemen, while the Yemeni government “controls much of the rest of the country”, said Al Jazeera. The Houthis have recently grown more powerful, “consolidating control over major cities and pushing to seize others”, said CNN. In September, they seized control of key locations along the Red Sea coast, giving them leverage over the Bab al-Mandab Strait, which is vital to global shipping.

“Half of the story is Iranian support,” international affairs professor and Yemen specialist Thomas Juneau told AP. The other half is “the weakness of their adversaries”. The anti-Houthi forces are “deeply divided” in the loyalty either to Saudi-backed government troops or to UAE-supported southern separatists, while Yemen’s recognised government remains “fragmented”, disunited and corrupt. The Houthis “have systematically been able to exploit that”.

A team of researchers has arrived at a remote, crab-infested island to inspect possible plane wreckage of the famed aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished in 1937.

The “mystery of what happened” to the pioneering Earhart has “captivated historians and conspiracy theorists for nearly 90 years”, said The Telegraph. Now, nearly 90 years later, one of aviation’s greatest mysteries might be solved.

Crash landing

Born in 1897, Earhart became passionate about flying and determined to prove that women could achieve great things in aviation. In 1928, she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air as a passenger. She also championed greater opportunities for women in aviation, and helped establish the organisation known as the Ninety-Nines, which supported female pilots.

In 1937, she attempted to fly around the world with navigator Fred Noonan, but on 2 July, they disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while travelling towards Howland Island. Despite extensive searches, neither they, nor their aircraft, were ever found.

The official explanation is that the plane suffered communication problems and ran out of fuel before crashing into the ocean, but some think that Earhart and Noonan “crash-landed on or near” a coral-ringed atoll and “perished as castaways there, hundreds of miles from their intended refuelling stop”, said Reuters. It is there that the new searches will focus on.

Crabs and El Niño

Supported by Purdue University, Indiana, an institution “long affiliated with Earhart ​and her legacy”, the researchers will work to locate an item that’s been named the Taraia Object, first spotted on the edge of a lagoon off Nikumaroro island in satellite imagery in 2020.

They will aim to discover whether it’s the wreckage of Earhart’s twin-engine Lockheed Electra 10-E aeroplane. Sceptics doubt that it is an aircraft at all. Some believe it’s simply a collapsed tree.

The search crew from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University arrived at Nikumaroro Island in the Pacific Ocean on Monday and their work is expected to take five days.

The project faces two main challenges: giant land-dwelling crabs, and the El Niño climate phenomenon. The coconut crabs, also known as robber crabs, “emerge at night” on the “hunt for small mammals and seabirds”, and their presence will “force the search crew to spend nights on their ship for their own safety”, said the BBC.

Two previous attempts to locate the plane’s wreckage ‌in the surrounding ⁠ocean “proved fruitless”, reported Reuters. Whether this one is a success remains to be seen, but Earhart’s place in aviation history is secure.

Formula 1 will race in Africa for the first time since 1993, with Rwanda landing a 10-year deal to stage the African Grand Prix from the early 2030s.

Both Morocco and South Africa also harboured ambitions to host a Grand Prix on the continent but it was Rwanda that was first to produce a coherent and viable plan. Yet the country is a “political hot potato”, with “question marks” over its human rights record, said The Telegraph. Some critics of the “landmark deal” are already calling F1 organisers “morally tone-deaf”.

‘Expanding markets’

Over the past decade, F1 has “dramatically changed its approach” to its racing calendar and started “to focus on expanding markets” amid a “boom in popularity”, said The Athletic. Three races are now run in the US, and this year’s Bahrain Grand Prix was hosted in Malaysia. With over 100 million fans across Africa – and 60% of fans in key sub-Saharan African markets under the age of 35 – a return to the continent has been on the organisation’s radar “for a number of years”.

The “Rwanda Motodrome” will be a purpose-built “natural road course” 25 miles south of Kigali, near the “under-construction Bugesera international airport”, said Autosport. The track will be a fast-flowing, “17-corner anti-clockwise challenge” with, befitting the country’s reputation as the “Land of a Thousand Hills”, a 645ft change in elevation per lap – almost twice that of the current track with the biggest elevation difference, Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium. Plans also include a long back straight followed by a hairpin, to promote overtaking and increase excitement for both drivers and fans.

“There is little doubt that courting international sport is central to promoting Rwanda’s regional and global aspirations,” said The Telegraph. The country has already spent more than £190 million on international standard facilities that include a national sports stadium, a basketball arena, a golf course and a cricket stadium. And the investment has already paid “dividends”. Rwanda has hosted the NBA’s Basketball Africa League since 2021 and, in 2023, it was the stage for the annual Fifa Congress. Last year, it became the first African nation to host cycling’s Road World Championships.

‘Accusations of sportswashing’

“Of more relevance”, though, is “Rwanda’s human rights record and long-held accusations of sportswashing”, said The Independent. Amnesty International has said the vague wording of Rwanda’s laws is “deliberately exploited to violate human rights” and is misused to “criminalise criticism of the government”. Human Rights Watch said political rivals have “no real chance of gaining power”, after de facto leader Paul Kagame was declared to have won a 99% majority in the 2024 general election. Kagame has held power since 1994, when he led the Rwandan Patriotic Front to “end the genocide in which approximately 700,000 people were killed over 100 days”.

In the “lavish” ceremony announcing Rwanda’s contract, F1 was “keen to stress” that only money from Rwanda’s development board’s investment plan will be used, with no diversion of state funds. Last month, Rwanda announced a five-year, £3.5 billion strategic plan, aimed at attracting private investment. The project is “certainly one of deep fascination”, but there will be “plenty of boxes to tick and plenty of questions to answer. Doubters will need to be appeased.”

It’s fair to say that Rwanda will be “far from the only country on the F1 calendar” with questions over its human rights record, said The Telegraph. The sport has also “come under fire” for racing in China, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

And other major sports, including football, have done deals with Rwanda. Arsenal only recently ended a partnership deal with Visit Rwanda “following intense pressure”, not least from fans, over the country’s support of the M23 militia in conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But Aston Villa, Paris St-Germain, Atlético Madrid and Bayern Munich all have ongoing deals, as do US basketball team, LA Clippers, and American football team, LA Rams.

Donald Trump’s proposed “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine has been dismissed as unfair and partisan with the US leaving Kyiv significantly weakened.

As the challenges of winter draw near, Trump’s move has thrown the future of Ukraine into doubt.

“It had already been a terrible week in Ukraine” before Trump’s “one-sided ceasefire plan” put Kyiv “in a tough spot as winter approaches”, said The New York Times.

What did the commentators say?

The deal “comes at a particularly bad time”, said The New York Times, as Russia is “stepping up efforts to target Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, including, crucially, its energy infrastructure” as “part of an ongoing effort to both cripple Ukraine’s economy and break its will to fight”. The coming winter “might be the hardest yet” because Ukraine is “facing a critical shortage of air defences”.

But the “bigger problem” is that Trump is “pressuring Ukraine to give up the best tool it has for fighting back” – its attacks on Russian oil refineries. Ukraine “effectively has no operational oil refineries”, so “this ceasefire, such as it is, would really only tie the hands of one party”.

After Russian drones and missiles “pummelled nearby power stations, triggering power cuts” and Kyiv was “plunged into darkness”, there was a “sense of outrage and betrayal”, said The Economist.

A Ukraine government source said American officials warned that unless Kyiv stopped its drone assaults on Russian oil refineries, the US would block weapons shipments under the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List, under which Ukraine has received “about $10 billion [£7.5 billion]-worth of American weapons” paid for by Nato allies and partners.

This move would “further weaken some of the country’s defences” and although Trump’s “new turn against Ukraine may be as transitory as the earlier ones”, this is still “a dangerous moment for Ukraine”.

But Trump’s threat of a suspension is “far from hypothetical”, said Sasha Vakulina on EuroNews. In 2025, the White House “temporarily halted intelligence-sharing and military assistance to Ukraine amid a diplomatic confrontation with Kyiv”.

Although “both were subsequently restored” following talks, the episode “demonstrated how quickly Washington could use security cooperation as a source of political leverage” and “how dependent Ukraine remained on American capabilities”.

US intelligence “remains crucial to Ukraine’s ability to anticipate Russian attacks”, and it is still “unclear how far European allies could compensate should another American suspension come into force”.

Although Trump’s announcement “seemed to make Ukraine’s situation even more perilous”, said Eric Ciaramella on Foreign Affairs, it’s not “necessarily a major setback for Ukraine”, because it “comes amid a broader shift” by Trump to “move away from pursuing an elusive comprehensive peace agreement in favour of a mutual ceasefire on strikes against energy infrastructure”. This shift “could ultimately be beneficial to Kyiv”.

Also, “in his angry retort” to Zelenskyy’s criticism of the diesel deal, Trump “revealed a potential way forward: as long as Ukraine stopped hitting Russian refineries, the president said, ‘you can do whatever you want to Russia’”.

Ukraine has “more leverage than a year ago”, said Nicholas Vinocur on Politico, and European leaders are “warning” Trump “not to squander it by pressuring Kyiv to ease up on Russia”. Although Trump “wants the attacks to stop, Ukraine’s European allies are keen to cripple Russia’s war effort”.

What next?

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said “repeatedly” that Ukraine is ready to halt its strikes on Russian oil refineries and other energy facilities if Moscow “did the same”, said the BBC.

But Moscow said Ukraine does not deserve the “respite” a ceasefire would bring, because it would mean Europe would be able to “pump” Ukraine with new weaponry.

“Netanyahu knew” – that was the verdict of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as it reported allegations that Benjamin Netanyahu was warned about the 7 October attacks.

A string of claims that Arab officials warned the longtime Israeli PM that a violent attack was coming have put him on the defensive less than 30 days before the nation’s crucial elections. Netanyahu has said the reports are an “absolute lie” and threatened to sue the paper.

What are the claims?

The claims “began to trickle out” last month in a book by two Israeli journalists called “Hostages: 843 Days of Abandonment”, said The Washington Post. It details an encrypted call reportedly made by the Emirati president, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, also known as MBZ, less than two weeks before 7 October 2023, to warn Netanyahu about a planned attack. Netanyahu did not pass on the warnings to his security aides, according to the authors, Shlomi Eldar and Ruth Yuval.

The PM was also warned of an impending attack by Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, according to The Wall Street Journal. Kamel allegedly phoned Netanyahu just days before 7 October, adding to warnings from the previous month, when he is said to have flown to Israel to inform security officials in person that Hamas was planning a major assault, claimed the paper.

“We know that Egypt’s chief of intelligence flew to Israel on 26 September and warned Israel of a… Hamas attack,” Ahron Bregman, an Israeli security analyst and senior teaching fellow at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera. “We also know that similar messages came from MBZ.”

How might they affect the election?

According to polling, events surrounding the attacks and “questions over responsibility for security failures that preceded them” are “important issues” for voters in the parliamentary elections to be held later this month, said the outlet.

But the polls have “held relatively steady in recent weeks”, said The Washington Post. Jonathan Rynhold, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv, said Netanyahu’s loyal base and Israel’s mainly right-leaning electorate may not move their votes to the “centrist bloc led by Eisenkot without a ‘clear smoking gun’”.

Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Beyachad (Together) alliance, said that if the allegations were proven true, Netanyahu “cannot continue to serve in his position for another minute”, while the former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, who leads Netanyahu’s Likud party in the polls by the “slenderest of margins”, said, “Netanyahu received dozens of warnings for 7 October and ignored them all. He is unfit.”

Many of Netanyahu’s electoral rivals, including Eisenkot, have promised to immediately establish an independent commission of inquiry if elected.

What does Netanyahu say?

Netanyahu has strongly denied ever receiving any warning of an attack. The Israeli PM said the report that he was warned by bin Zayed was an “absolute lie” and denied he even spoke to the Emirati leader at that time.

The Israeli PM has tried to “shift the blame” for not being warned of the attack to the former head of Israel’s internal security service, Ronen Bar, said Al Jazeera. Bar announced last month that he would sue the prime minister, a “longtime political nemesis”, for defamation over the claims.

A militia led by a former honey and herbs trader is “changing the Saudi-Houthi war”, said The Telegraph.

The Southern Giants, the “most feared militia” in Yemen, now represent the “most dangerous fault-line” in the alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Formidable force

The Southern Giants, known in Arabic as Alwiya al-Amaliqa, emerged in southern Yemen in 2015 during the country’s civil war. The group’s ideology is “rooted in Salafism, an austere, ultra-conservative strand of Sunni Islam” that regards Shia groups such as the Iran-backed Houthis as “heretics”, said The Telegraph.

The group is led by Abdulrahman al-Mahrami, a former honey and herbs trader known to his fighters as Abu Zara’a. Until recently, they were thought to number between 20,000 and 30,000 but some now believe there could be as many as 70,000.

The Giants have become “one of Yemen’s most formidable military forces”, said Al Jazeera. Last week, the militia took a leading role in an operation to retake the strategically vital Red Sea port of Mocha, captured by the Houthis last month. The Yemeni government says Mocha and the coastal road along the crucial Bab el-Mandeb strait is now under their control again, “one of their first major military gains in years”.

So far, the militia “has largely stayed out of infighting between anti-Houthi forces” within the Yemeni government coalition, said Al Jazeera. However, some analysts believe that it “remains fundamentally a separatist force”, motivated by the liberation of southern Yemen from Houthi control rather than by national unity.

Levers of power

“Nominally” fighting under the internationally recognised Yemeni government, “in practice” the Southern Giants are the “creation and instrument of a different wealthy patron: the United Arab Emirates”, said The Telegraph. Trained in camps in Abu Dhabi, the Giants brigades are “lavishly supplied with tanks, artillery, modern armour, guided missiles” by their Emirati patrons, who also pay soldiers’ salaries.

The Red Sea ports of southern Yemen have long been a “focus of Emirati maritime ambition”, said the newspaper, and in the Giants the UAE has created a “loyal, capable force” who can act as a “lever over the future of southern Yemen”.

For now, the Giants represent the Saudi-led coalition’s “cutting edge” in the fight to roll back Houthi conquests that have given the rebel faction “leverage over global shipping”. But while Saudi and UAE interests may align for now, “their partnership is tactical” and time-limited. How Abu Dhabi’s Yemen proxy proceeds from here “will shape not only the battle for the Bab el-Mandeb Strait but the longer struggle for control of Yemen’s south”.

We may be about to call time on the leap second, which for decades has kept Coordinated Universal Time (the global standard underpinning timekeeping systems) in sync with the Earth's daily rotation.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures is convening its governing body for its General Conference in Versailles this week, as it does every four to six years. The timekeepers had already voted in 2022 to phase out the leap second by 2035. “But now there is a spanner – or spinner – in the works,” said the Financial Times. Earth has been rotating unusually rapidly for a decade, meaning that before 2035, there’s a chance we’d need the first-ever negative leap second – in other words, deleting a second. Scientists say this unprecedented step could “create mayhem in the digital time-stamped continuum”. The guardians of time are therefore considering an urgent draft resolution to fast-track the phase-out of the leap second.

How do we measure time?

“For millennia, a day has been defined as one full rotation of the Earth,” said physics and astronomy professor Vahe Peroomian on The Conversation. Ancient Egyptians were the first known civilisation to divide day and night into twelve parts each, establishing the 24-hour day.

Dividing hours into 60 minutes, and minutes into 60 seconds, harks back to ancient Mesopotamian numerical systems, which were based on the concept of 60. Greek astronomers like Claudius Ptolemy adopted the system while measuring the motions of planets, dividing degrees into 60 units. These subdivisions were adopted worldwide for timekeeping, dividing each hour into 60 minutes, and a minute into 60 seconds.

But it took many centuries before devices, such as 17th-century pendulum clocks and 20th-century quartz watches, “became accurate enough” to measure seconds, said BBC Future.

What’s the problem with astronomical timekeeping?

The speed of the Earth’s rotation can fluctuate, so defining a second as a fraction of a solar day is imprecise. In 1967, the General Conference on Weights and Measures adopted a new definition of a second based on the cesium-133 atom, which oscillates at “a remarkably steady rate”, said Peroomian. One second was defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations. Atomic clocks use cesium-133 to give us Coordinated Universal Time (UTC): the super-precise global standard used by telecoms, computer networks, international businesses and power grids.

So what are leap seconds?

Atomic clocks run at a fixed rate but – apart from right now – Earth’s rotation has been gradually slowing, primarily due to the Moon’s gravitational pull. To keep UTC in sync with Earth’s rotations, timekeepers invented “the leap second” in 1972. This “interloper” allows the two systems of time – astronomical and UTC – to “run in parallel”, said the Financial Times. Once the lag reaches a certain point, a leap second is inserted to “yank them back in alignment”. At irregular intervals, 27 leap seconds have been added to global clocks since 1972 – the last in 2016.

Why are they being phased out?

Leap seconds have become “increasingly difficult to deal with in the computer age”, said ABC News. They can disrupt computer operating systems, which assume a day is always 86,400 seconds long, resulting in glitches and outages. But the prospect of the first negative leap second poses an even greater risk. “Many computer programmes assume all leap seconds are positive”, Setnam Shemar, the UK’s principal timekeeping scientist, told the FT. Removing a second could “result in a major technology failure in telecommunications or electricity grid networks or satellite navigation systems”.

This week, the world’s timekeepers will vote on introducing a “leap hour” instead. This could take “a millennium or more” to accumulate and, by then, life may be so different, there may be no need to adjust the lag at all. All this change “would be a practical win for tech overlords, digital gatekeepers and official clock-watchers” but it could be “something of a cultural loss for our stargazing species, detaching human timekeeping from its ancient, astronomical roots”.

Leaders of India’s Cockroach Janta Party have been detained after breaching a security cordon to demand the resignation of the country’s election chief, who deleted 130 million names from voters’ lists.

The activists, who claim the mass deletion was designed to benefit Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, evaded security to enter Jantar Mantar, a “historic Delhi observatory popular for protests”, said the BBC.

The election commission insists the purging of electoral rolls was to remove voters who have died, moved, or cannot otherwise be verified, and that those impacted can apply to be re-enrolled. But over the weekend, tens of thousands of people, including prominent lawyers and journalists, were detained and released in protests that show no signs of slowing.

What did the commentators say?

It will be “difficult” for Modi, who denies the deletions were carried out to benefit his party, to “quell the turmoil”, wrote Andres Schipani and Jyotsna Singh in the Financial Times.

The Cockroach Janta Party emerged as a student-led movement focussing on alleged examination irregularities, but it is now targeting the institution that “oversees elections in the world’s largest democracy”, making it harder for Modi to “find the right response”.

If the PM concedes to the demand for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation, he could open the door to questioning the wider legitimacy of his government, Ruchi Gupta, executive director of the Future of India Foundation, told the broadsheet. Fundamentally, “the government has a trust deficit that it needs to address.”

“If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, nobody notices,” said Vidya Krishnan on Al Jazeera. Indian democracy currently resembles a “plucked chicken, stripped of its plumage”. The revision of the country’s electoral rolls was the last straw – an “exercise in bureaucratic fascism”, for “there is simply no other way to frame an event that strips 130 million Indians of their right to vote.”

Modi now finds himself “retreating behind barricades, facing the wrath of students for whom the slow erosion of democracy has left little to lose and even less to fear”. The mass protest on Saturday was “just an opening salvo”.

But even so, Modi “remains popular” among large swathes of the population, said Faisal Mahmud on Asia Times. His “popularity, cult-like charisma, organisational strength and electoral record cannot simply be wished away”, and “nor can allegations of electoral manipulation substitute for evidence”. But now, “the government’s handling of dissent has become an issue in its own right”.

What next?

The protesters and opposition party are showing no sign of letting up. Modi “does not understand that the game is over”, said the leader of India’s opposition alliance, Rahul Gandhi. “We will ensure that Modi pays for the crimes he has committed against the country.”

“The youth will keep coming out,” Uday Bhanu Chib, national president of the Indian Youth Congress, a unit of Gandhi’s party, told the FT. They’re “no longer afraid of this government”.

The Cockroach Janta Party protests “have laid bare the hollowed-out democracy that India holds up to the world as exemplary”, said Krishnan on Al Jazeera. There is little doubt that “history books will cast Modi in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Indians to lose all respect for the government”.

Saudi Arabia has vowed a firm response to the deadly attacks on the kingdom’s airports and oil and gas facilities by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

The Iran-backed Houthis said their latest drone and missile strikes – some of which struck King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, killing 13 people and injuring more than 300 – were launched in retaliation for “brutal Saudi aggression” against areas they control in western Yemen.

“The events of recent weeks are serious. Our response must be equally serious,” said Saudi energy minister Prince Abdul Aziz bin Salman today. There is “no room for fear in the vocabulary of Saudis”.

What did the commentators say?

“No political slogan, ideological grievance or claim of resistance can justify turning airports into targets,” said Hani Hazaimeh on Arab News. The Houthis are reckless, and Saudi Arabia “has every right to defend its citizens” and its “critical infrastructure”. It’s easy “to urge calm from a distance, far from the airports” and homes under missile attack; “it is far harder to explain to grieving families why the international response remains trapped in a cycle of condemnation followed by inaction”. All thought of “diplomatic theatre is over. The time for effective action is now.”

The Houthis are “drawing from Iran’s playbook” and “vowing a painful escalation” by “targeting critical infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and imposing a global economic cost”, said Mostafa Salem on CNN. So far, Saudi Arabia has largely confined itself to providing air cover for the anti-Houthi Yemeni coalition but “whether that restraint will hold” is now “an open question”. Putting Saudi troops on the ground in Yemen would plunge the nation “into an expensive and grinding ground war” and undercut Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s carefully cultivated image “of a stable, investment-friendly kingdom and global tourism hub”.

But the airport death toll is “bewilderingly high” for the Saudis, who are “unaccustomed to such fatalities”, and that’s “likely to prompt a bloody response”, said Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. If so, the kingdom faces a “long, intractable war with a resourceful and impassioned antagonist, one willing to sustain a high degree of pain in ways that Riyadh can’t match without orienting itself entirely towards war”.

The Iran war has “stirred political loyalties, triggering a surge of Houthi advancement”, destabilising the “region’s tense equilibriums” as Donald Trump “decided that the safety and security” of America’s Gulf allies were “secondary” to his beef with Tehran. Saudi Arabia is “bewildered and losing lives and capital, stuck between old alliances that no longer work and new hostilities that are too calamitous to confront”.

What next?

The Houthi attacks on the Saudis could “drive global oil prices even higher”, said Sky News’ Middle East correspondent, Adam Parsons. “Were the Houthis to put a stranglehold” on the Bab al Mandab strait, “it would have a major influence on trade that would hit the price of oil”.

This would “anger Donald Trump, who sees the price of oil as such a barometer of his own success”. The US president has said he is reviewing the situation, and is “going to look at” joining any Saudi response.

As surrogacy remains illegal in China, demand is growing for overseas-born babies.

An “industry of agencies, consultancies and fertility clinics” has sprung up to help Chinese people connect with potential surrogate mothers overseas, said the Financial Times. Many are attracted by the US’s “advanced medical facilities, strong legal protections for the parents and the prospect of an American passport for their child”.

The motherhood penalty

Between 2014 and 2020, nearly a third of surrogate babies in the US were intended for international parents, a survey published in 2024 suggests. More than 40% of those were from China.

There’s a “growing interest” from women who aren’t struggling with infertility, but who fear the impact of pregnancy on their bodies and careers, said the Financial Times. That fear is “well founded”, said Lu Pin, a Chinese women’s rights activist. The so-called “motherhood penalty” is “a product of how the environment works against women” in China.

“If I remain unmarried, I will have to bear all the costs of pregnancy and post-partum recovery myself,” a 25-year-old entrepreneur told the paper. That “really isn’t very different from the cost of having a child through surrogacy”.

Last year, China registered its lowest number of births since records began: the fourth consecutive year of population decline. There has been a “very clear increase among patients who are fearful of getting pregnant and giving birth”, said a Chinese medicine doctor and fertility specialist. “Chinese women worry about how it will impact their appearance and whether they can return to their normal weight and womb health.”

Extreme surrogacy?

But there is a darker side: “a little-known trend in the largely unregulated US surrogacy industry”, said The Wall Street Journal. Chinese elites and billionaires are paying to “quietly have large numbers of US-born babies”.Some, “inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children”, shell out millions to hire women in America to “help them build families of jaw-dropping size”.

In the US, there is a “thriving mini-industry” of surrogacy agencies, law firms and clinics, even services to collect newborns from hospitals. Chinese people can “ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back”, for up to $200,000. The market is now “so sophisticated” that some Chinese elites have had US-born children – who automatically become US citizens under the 14th Amendment – “without stepping foot in the country”.

One billionaire, Xu Bo, an “online megaposter” and “vocal critic of feminism”, calls himself “China’s first father”. The maker of fantasy video games claims to have 100 children. He told a US court in 2023 that he hoped to have 20 US-born children through surrogacy, preferably boys, to one day take over his business. Another wealthy Chinese executive, Wang Huiwu, hired US models as egg donors to have 10 girls, allegedly “with the aim of one day marrying them off to powerful men”.

He ultimately plans to father 100 “high net-worth babies”, according to The Times. And although the practice is “arousing concern” in both the US and China, there is no US law stopping multiple surrogacy births for the same family. This “extreme surrogacy” is “a perfect mix of liberal Californian attitudes and Chinese productivity”.

“Acts of true heroism are rare,” said The Daily Telegraph. But the actions of those on board flydubai flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv last Wednesday “surely qualify”.

‘Constant threat’

As the plane neared Israel, the co-pilot, an Omani national named Hamam al-Hammami, attacked his Indian colleague, Smit Machchhar, with an axe, kept in the cockpit for emergencies. Badly injured, Captain Machchhar somehow opened the cockpit door, allowing passengers to overpower al-Hammami, and two off-duty pilots to take control of the plane and land it in Saudi Arabia. It is a “fresh reminder” that, three years on from 7 October, “Israeli civilians continue to live under the constant threat of terrorism”.

“Israel almost experienced its own 9/11,” said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator. We now know that al-Hammami had been preparing for the attack long before he joined flydubai. He intended to fly towards Israel as though making a normal landing, then to divert at the last possible moment and crash into Ben Gurion Airport or nearby tower blocks, before Israeli fighter jets could intervene.

‘Shirking responsibility’

The attack points to a “massive security failure on several fronts”, said The Wall Street Journal. Omani officials knew of al-Hammami’s interest in radical Islamism but failed to flag their concerns; flydubai never checked his record with the Omani authorities. The attack raises the question of whether pilots should be able to lock cockpits from the inside, said Jason Burke in The Guardian – a measure introduced after 9/11 to prevent passenger hijackings. If Machchhar’s “desperate efforts” to open the door had been unsuccessful, “there is little doubt all on board would have died”.

The Israeli authorities have questions to answer, said The Jerusalem Post. They knew of the risks posed by this flight route. Pilots from states without diplomatic relations with Israel, such as Oman, are in theory prohibited from landing in Israel. Yet no official body seems to have been in charge of vetting them. With various authorities “shirking responsibility”, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has “vowed to fix the cracks”. But as the “euphoria” over the mid-air heroism dissipates, there must be “accountability”.

The execution by firing squad of former US Army major Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed for the public to watch, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said.

This will make it the first public execution in the US since 1936, and the prospect has already been described as “medieval”.

Who is he and what did he do?

Hasan, a former US Army psychiatrist from Virginia, fatally shot 13 unarmed US soldiers at Fort Hood in November 2009, injuring another 32. The attack took place in a crowded medical building where soldiers were waiting for check-ups and vaccines. It was the deadliest ever non-combat attack on an American military base.

He admitted in court that he was the gunman, and said that he believed he was protecting Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He apologised for “any mistakes” but was convicted of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.

Why is it being livestreamed?

Hegseth signalled that the execution would be livestreamed as a deterrent for the sort of crime Hasan committed. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” he said.

The US government is sending “a very clear message”, said Sky News US correspondent David Blevins. Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert and law professor at Fordham University, New York, told The Associated Press that livestreaming an execution could make the process “much more transparent”, and inform the public about all that capital punishment entails. Those are benefits that she said would be useful at a time when Christa Pike’s botched execution has raised fresh questions about the manner by which criminals are put to death.

What’s the reaction been?

The Republican senator Thom Tillis said the plan is “beyond disgusting”. Chris Murphy, a Democrat senator, told CNN that public executions are “medieval” and mimic Islamic State killings. “That’s what America has become? That’s pretty extraordinary.”

Livestreaming “will not educate”, it will “terrorise”, and is “beneath the dignity that we owe to anyone”, even those who commit a “horrific” crime such as Hasan’s, Austin Sarat, a legal expert in the death penalty at Amherst College, Massachusetts, told The iPaper.

The decision to livestream the execution is “unprecedented in the modern era” and “on uncertain legal terrain”, John Mills, a lawyer who works with inmates sentenced to death, told the BBC.

The livestream may face a legal challenge because federal regulations forbid the “visual or audio recording” of an execution without a specific judicial order.

The Prime Minister of Lithuania has called for a firm Nato plan to respond to Russia’s hybrid attacks, “warning that Moscow is willing to test the alliance”, said Politico.

Mindaugas Sinkevičius spoke after the largest airport in Lithuania was forced to close due to a suspected drone, which was thought to have flown into the country from Belarus.

Forced shelter

Fears of drone attacks have risen this year. In September, a drone that violated Lithuanian airspace was shot down over the nation’s territory for the first time, following similar incidents in Latvia and Estonia. Residents in Vilnius were “forced to take shelter” across the capital in May after a drone alert was “triggered”, briefly grounding flights and rail travel, said the BBC.

Lithuania, a “staunch supporter” of Ukraine, shares a large part of its southern and eastern border with Belarus, a “key Russian ally”. Military drone incursions have become increasingly common across Europe since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the incident served as a reminder of the Baltic state’s vulnerability.

Achilles heel

A “tranquil corner” of Lithuania has become a “tinderbox that could help trigger World War III”, said The Sun. It has been called “the most dangerous place on Earth”, said Der Stern. Spanning 40 miles as the crow flies, the Suwalki Gap is a corridor of land, running along the Polish/Lithuanian border, that connects the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to Belarus.

The area has long been viewed as the Achilles heel of Nato’s eastern defences, because of the relative ease with which Russia could seize it by launching a pincer assault between Kaliningrad in the northwest and its client state, Belarus, in the southeast. The creation of such a land bridge would effectively isolate the Baltic states (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia), which are all members of Nato, from the EU.

US General Ben Hodges has described the gap as “one of the most volatile points on the world map”, said The Sun. Lithuania has been “holding military drills and rehearsing wartime evacuation plans” and it has allocated almost €5 billion (£4.2 billion) to defence this year – 5.38% of its GDP, “dwarfing the UK spend of just 2.6%”.

A local father of 11, Valtemir Masharipov, told the tabloid that he fears a Russian invasion. “I would perhaps hide in the cellar, but that would be like burying yourself in a coffin if a bombardment came.” Meanwhile, Sinkevičius warned that a Russian victory in Ukraine would probably push Moscow to look for “other directions”.

The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement has been invoked for the first time since it was signed in August, following Houthi-led attacks on Saudi infrastructure Mecca, Medina and the capital’s airport.

While not identifying the Yemeni group by name, the alliance, composed of Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, will undertake a “rapid deployment” of troops to Saudi Arabia as part of their “collective defence commitments”.

Saudi Arabia is also supporting an offensive by the Yemeni government to take back the capital, Sanaa, held by the Houthis since 2014. Three people have been killed in attacks on Saudi Arabian airports over two days, as fighting spilled across the Yemen border into the Kingdom. It is unclear how Pakistan and Turkey will contribute to this action.

As the US continues to focus on Iran, and has ruled out direct intervention in Yemen, the alliance’s success could redraw the lines of power and control in the region.

What did the commentators say?

“Even the threat of joint involvement could dramatically shift the Saudi-Houthi conflict,” said Foreign Policy. Although in its infancy, members of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement boast nearly 1.4 million active troops combined, as well as “3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks, and more than 340 naval assets”. Pakistan has nuclear capabilities – “the only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority nation in the world” – and Turkey stands second only to the US for the largest armed forces in Nato.

Defence relations between the countries had already been close, even before the Mecca Accord was signed in August, said Abid Hussain on Al Jazeera. Pakistan has trained Saudi military personnel since 1967, and a declassified CIA assessment from 1985 estimated that 13,000 to 14,000 Pakistanis were serving in the Saudi army.

However, the Turkish “footprint is less clear”. And there is a potential sticking point, as Article 92 of Turkey’s constitution stipulates that the “authority to send troops abroad rests with the parliament, which has yet to ratify the Mecca pact”.

The timing of the announcement also “carries deep symbolic weight”, said Sean Mathews in Middle East Eye. Pakistan has been positioning itself as an “honest broker” for peace in the region, mediating between the US and Iran in previous negotiations, and Turkey has overtly established its stance as a “rival to Israel”. And by invoking the pact, Saudi Arabia has demonstrated that it has the “support of the wider region in its counter-offensive against the Houthis” and, by extension, Iran.

In the grand scheme of things, the Mecca Accord should be perceived more as an “additional layer of regional security rather than a wholesale strategic realignment”, said international relations expert John Calabrese on The Conversation. Traditionally, states in the region have relied on external support to gain “greater strategic autonomy”. Yet, as the threats in the region become harder to “separate into discrete categories”, and suspicion of the conventional allies grows, Saudi Arabia is moving to “hedge” its bets to avoid becoming vulnerable.

What next?

Despite the invocation, a resolution in Yemen against the Houthis is “unlikely without a wider deal between the US and Iran”, said Samer Al-Atrush, The Times’ Middle East correspondent. Currently, however, Washington is intent on demanding “concessions” from Tehran by enforcing its own naval blockade.

The killing of a woman in Okinawa has sparked an outcry across Japan and inflamed long-simmering tensions over the US military presence on the island.

US Marine Devin Ballard was arrested on Sunday on suspicion of strangling Anna Yagi, 39, whose body was found at a hotel in Naha, the largest city on Okinawa. The 20-year-old lance corporal has denied the allegations.

‘Brutal’ crime

Security footage shows a man resembling Ballard entering the hotel with Yagi, and later leaving alone with her belongings, according to public broadcaster NHK. Yagi’s body was found in her hotel room.

Ballard, who was arrested in a civilian district while off duty, will remain in the custody of the Japanese authorities. If convicted, he could face life in prison or the death penalty.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi urged US authorities to “enforce stricter discipline” of their troops in light of the “brutal and heinous” killing, while Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi posted on social media about his “strong indignation”. Incidents involving US military personnel “cause significant anxiety to the local community and must never occur”, he said.

On Okinawa, the incident has met with protests and also a grim familiarity. “Honestly my first reaction was, ‘Not again’,” one local told the BBC.

‘Anti-US sentiment’

Crimes involving US troops stationed on Okinawa have been “a constant source of tension between Tokyo and Washington”, said The Guardian. Most of the 54,000 US troops in Japan, and 70% of their military facilities, are based on the island.

In 1995, when three American servicemen raped a 12-year-old girl, tens of thousands of people protested for months, intensifying the “anti-US sentiment” in Okinawa. A teenage girl was raped by a US serviceman in 2024, one of four sexual crimes linked to US military personnel that year, and “anger erupted again”. It’s a problem that seems to be increasing: last year, there were 101 recorded crimes involving US troops, according to prefectural police – up from 40 in 2020.

The killing of Yagi is emblematic of a decades-long issue for the people of Okinawa, gender and peace professor Kozue Akibayashi told Al Jazeera. “They have expressed countless times their opposition to, and anger at, the US military presence,” she said. But Tokyo has “chosen the US-Japan alliance over the safety and lives and voices” of its people.

“Authorities seek to drive us out of our places of study through budget cuts, the closure of places, dilapidated buildings, selection, or repression, let’s not let them: let’s block and retake the universities and high schools!”, wrote the Student Union and the High School Trade Union in a statement last week.

What started as a “spontaneous blockade” of a high school in a Paris suburb in mid-September, has now led to the closure of up to 500 schools across the country, said Le Monde. Since protests began, more than 5,000 people have been arrested, “85% of them minors”, said the same paper, with the education minister confirming that 24 schools had either been “burned or ransacked”, and millions of euros of damage caused.

Ever since the student demonstrations of May 1968 and, more recently, the gilets jaunes protests in 2018, “every government has run scared of angry French youth”, said Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield on the BBC. With no sign of slowing down, and presidential elections coming up, the protests will “send shivers” down the French government’s spine.

Why has this happened?

A major cause of the protest has been a lack of central government funding for the education system. On Thursday, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu outlined a modest 1.7% rise in education spending to €65.53 billion (£55.7 billion) in a draft of the 2027 budget, said The Telegraph. However, this is below the rate of inflation, and excludes teacher pensions. Traditionally, education has been the “largest item in the French budget”, but this year, debt-servicing costs are expected to reach €74.5 billion (£63.1 billion), according to the draft.

Another “main complaint” is a shortage of teachers and support staff in schools, said Time Magazine. In the year 2024/25, nearly 10% of teaching hours in public secondary education went untaught, according to data from the education ministry. The majority of that (7.5%) was due to a failure to find substitute teachers, and 2.3% because of complete school closures.

Students have had to navigate “overcrowded classes of up to 40 children in crumbling buildings”, said The Guardian. “Ceilings partially collapsing during class, leaks, cockroaches and buildings in disrepair” are fairly common experiences.

Many have also found the online system designed for university applications – “Parcoursup”, the equivalent of UCAS – “opaque and difficult”, and in urgent need of reform. Discontent this year has also been exacerbated by “unbearable temperatures in classrooms during heatwaves in May and June”.

How has the government responded?

The government has “strongly condemned the violence and responded forcefully”, said The New York Times. On Friday, France’s justice minister Gérald Darmanin said on X that he would pursue a “firm” criminal response, and hold parents of minors civilly liable “wherever possible”.

But the government has also tried to “placate” the rapidly spreading protests, and has “acknowledged some of the students’ grievances”, said the NYT. Education minister Édouard Geffray announced on Thursday that the government would scrap plans to increase some higher education registration fees, an idea floated just hours before in the proposed 2027 budget. Ahead of meeting unions for talks on Friday, Geffray said he would introduce a new platform, where students could voice their thoughts for education reform, which would then be included in a “national report”, said Time.

Geffray also told broadcaster France 2 on Thursday evening that the protests, which were “legitimate at the outset”, had been “taken hostage by ultra-left groups”, said Le Monde. Lecornu’s team had directly blamed La France Insoumise (France Unbowed, or LFI) and “its ultra-left proxies” for the violence. LFI, led by presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has strongly denied the claim, though supported the students’ right to protest. However, party member and mayor of Paris suburb Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, had said that “violence can sometimes be legitimate”.

What could be the effect of the protests?

Talks between student representatives and Geffray “failed to produce the concrete measures they were seeking”, said The Wall Street Journal. Student unions have called for a third day of nationwide protest on Tuesday, joined by several teachers’ unions. The General Confederation of Labour, one of France’s largest unions, also “threw its support behind the demonstrations, raising the prospect of the unrest broadening beyond schools and universities”.

We cannot forget that French presidential elections are “only months away”, said the BBC. These protests, like many youth movements, are “unpredictable and shapeless”, and have “no clear structure” that would allow for negotiation. Because of this, they will have Emmanuel Macron in “cold sweats”.

One person who stands to gain is Mélenchon, who “stands a good chance of making it to the second round of the presidential elections”. Polls show he has “massive” support – around 40% – among 18- to 24-year-olds. He still lies behind Marine Le Pen in popularity, but given the current unrest, France is in “unstable territory”, and the “young people’s protests of recent days will indeed have been a harbinger” for the election’s results.

Authorities in South Africa’s capital city have set out plans to round up and remove around 60 chacma baboons, which are increasingly coming “into conflict” with the city’s human residents, said Reuters. The animals can be “intimidating” – males grow up to one metre tall and weigh around 50kg – and this urban primate population has adapted to city life, raiding bins, cars and houses for food.

But plans to move the baboons to a newly built sanctuary have “triggered a bitter dispute” over ‌whether they should be “confined, culled or allowed to coexist with residents”. Protests are ongoing, and the issue could play a major role in Cape Town’s upcoming municipal elections.

‘Divisive’ and ‘expensive’

Problems with baboons in the city stretch back decades but they have “reached boiling point” over the past two years, said The Guardian. In the early 2000s, the city authorities stopped the culling of baboon troops in response to public pressure, but that has since swollen the population by a third – to around 500. Geography is “partially to blame”, too, as the baboons are “boxed in” between the steep landscape of the Table Mountain National Park and “the sprawling urban development that stretches to the Atlantic Ocean”.

Current baboon-management measures in the city have not only been “divisive” but “expensive”. Full-time rangers monitor the groups as part of a programme that costs around R20 million (£900,000) every 18 months. Those who support the baboons being removed say the only serious alternative is culling. Officials believe the primates will be “better off if they are confined” and supported by a high standard of care in alternative locations, said CNN.

There is also a wider plan that includes “strategic fencing, better waste management and stronger by-law enforcement”, said SA People News. Authorities have already started distributing 6,000 lockable “baboon-proof bins” to some of the most affected communities. It remains to be seen how well this solves the competition between people’s need for “safe neighbourhoods” and wildlife’s needs for habitat.

Failure of leadership

“For years, baboons have been chased, paintballed, harassed and subjected to increasingly intensive forms of disruptive management,” said the Daily Maverick. What is fundamentally a failure of environmental leadership has “repeatedly been attributed to the animals themselves”. There have been few attempts to teach householders why food waste should not be mixed with other rubbish in outside bins, for example, “even though this would reduce wildlife attractants”. The baboon-proof bins are a good step, but Simon’s Town, an area where 60 baboons have been identified for removal, has been excluded from the rollout.

Cape Town is a city that “derives so much of its identity, beauty and prosperity” from the nature around it, and many believe that the decision to remove the baboons will be a stain on its environmental record. The city has municipal elections in November, and voters will be all too aware that any solutions to the baboon problem are a “measure of the kind of city Cape Town is choosing to become”.

“The best solution to resolving conflicts is to prevent them,” said US anthropology professor Shirley C. Strum on The Conversation. Preventing undesirable baboon behaviour, like raiding food, is easier than trying to tackle it once it’s become engrained. Translocation methods – like the one the city authorities plan – have been successful in the past but, nowadays, there are “very few places left where baboons can’t get into trouble”. Culling them is highly difficult due to their “wily” nature and, “even if you succeed (which I doubt)”, then “another troop will soon take its place”. It’s difficult but we must face up to the fact that “conflict between baboons and humans won’t change unless human behaviour and attitudes change”.

What was the key factor that propelled Donald Trump back into the White House for a second term? If you’d asked him that a couple of years ago, said Virginia Heffernan in The New Republic, his answer would almost certainly have been the cost of living.

“The beautiful but simple word ‘groceries’,” he once rhapsodised. “I won on that word.” Well, we now know the word on which he’ll likely lose: diesel.

Supply disruptions caused by the Iran and Ukraine wars have had a particularly severe impact on diesel prices: they hit a record high of $6.52 a gallon in the US last week, up from an average of $3.63 at the start of 2025. The price hikes “aim a missile squarely at the voters Trump can least afford to alienate”, such as pickup truck owners, lorry drivers, and farmers in states such as Iowa. By upsetting the “diesel class, Trump may have bitten the final hand that feeds him”.

‘Cheap appeal’

To fix this problem, Trump is toying with the idea of banning US diesel exports, said National Review. The policy has “cheap appeal” ahead of the midterm elections on 3 November, but it would only bring down prices for a short while, and only in some areas. While America makes more diesel than it consumes, pipeline constraints mean that most of it remains relatively close to refining hubs on the Gulf Coast.

Other areas of the US, such the Northeast and the West Coast, largely rely on diesel imports, so would end up paying even higher prices if the US further reduced global supplies of the fuel. What’s more, if Gulf Coast refineries were unable to export diesel, they’d soon run out of storage space for it and have to slash their output. Result? Not just less diesel, but also a reduced volume of other refined products such as petrol and jet fuel.

‘Fake fix’

A diesel export ban wouldn’t help America, agreed Catherine Rampell on The Bulwark. And it would cause major problems for countries that rely on these exports, such as Mexico, the UK and the Netherlands, which trade with the US in other oil-based products, and could well decide to retaliate in some form.

Still, this is the Trump White House we’re talking about – a team of people with “zero policy expertise” and “zero patience”, who care “only about what talking points will get them through the next news cycle, tomorrow’s consequences be damned”. The worse the opinion polls get ahead of the midterms, the more tempted Trump will be to reach for this “fake fix”.

“A disaster.” That was German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s own verdict on his party’s showing in the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania last week, said Klára Odstrcilová on EU Perspectives (Brussels).

The state is one of the five that made up the former East Germany (there are 16 German states in total). And though Merz’s Christian Democrats (CDU) won 38% in the first state election held after reunification in 1990, it has been shedding support there ever since. In the previous state election (2021) it won just 13%.

Even so, no one expected that this time the CDU wouldn’t even make 5% – the threshold a party has to cross to gain parliamentary representation. By contrast, the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party – which had vowed to bring down energy prices by restoring the supply of Russian gas (the state is home to the terminal of the suspended Nord Stream pipelines) – more than doubled its vote share to 38.2%. So yes, Merz is right: a disaster, indeed.

‘Existential crisis’

Nor was the CDU’s failure confined to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, said The Economist. On the very same day as that debacle, the party got thumped in Berlin’s local elections, in this case being humbled by the far-left Die Linke party. And these twin losses themselves came just two weeks after the CDU had suffered a crushing defeat in another east German state, Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD triumphed with 43.8%.

Indeed, Merz has acquired the dubious distinction of being the most unpopular German leader in polling history: his approval rating is just 13%. Yet despite all this, he has vowed to stay on for the sake of Germany’s “democratic future”, and to pursue his economic and welfare reforms with “backbone, steadfastness, and patience”. Brave words, but some of Merz’s own colleagues believe their “zombie chancellor” can’t go on.

That the CDU, which has produced more chancellors than any other party, should now be “plunged into an existential crisis” is all down to Merz, said Hugo Müller-Vogg in Cicero (Berlin). He’s only been in power for 16 months, but over that time the national vote share of the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), has fallen from 28.5% to around 20%. Merz’s fractious coalition with the centre-left Social Democrats has completely failed on its promises to contain the far-right and reverse economic stagnation.

Twilight phase

Immigration is usually the issue people cite when accounting for the rise of the AfD, said Dalia Marin on Project Syndicate (Prague). But more attention should be paid to a factor every bit as crucial: China. Economic competition from China has upended Germany’s export model of selling cars and high-end machinery, and devastated the advanced manufacturing industry Germans have long relied on for “good jobs and broad-based prosperity”. Average annual growth since 2020 has slumped to just 0.12%.

Nor does this only affect the poorer, former communist eastern states that are the AfD’s heartlands: “western” states such as Baden-Württemberg, home to Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, also feel the pain. In March, the AfD almost doubled its vote share there to 18.8%: it should no longer be seen as just a creature of the east.

Merz himself now seems to have entered “Kanzlerdämmerung” – the twilight of the chancellor, said Zafer Mese in Daily Sabah (Istanbul): his coalition looks marooned. However, no CDU or CSU politician has stepped forward to replace him, so he may cling on for a while yet.

And he has one thing in his favour, said Roland Nelles in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). Next year’s five state elections are all in western states, ones where the AfD, despite its recent gains, will struggle to land a knockout blow. The “stabilising effect” this will have could lend the coalition a small window of opportunity in which to kick-start growth through its welfare and pension reforms. They’d better hope it does: if not, more election nights like the ones last week will follow.

As the Israel-Hamas war nears its three-year mark, an outbreak of algae throughout Israel’s desalination plants is threatening the country’s water supplies, which could affect the sewage systems in Gaza. Experts say the ongoing war is likely to exacerbate the problem.

What did the commentators say?

The issue began after a microalgae bloom in the Mediterranean Sea forced five out of six desalination plants on the Israeli coast to shut down, according to Israel’s national water company Mekorot, per CNN. These plants remove salt from seawater, and their closures caused a ripple effect due to the “country’s heavy dependence on desalination for drinking water,” said the outlet. Israel is “arid and has neither big rivers nor abundant rainfall, but its mastery of this technology has made it a water superpower.”

While Israel itself is unlikely to see a shortage of water, it could lead to a compounding crisis in Gaza, which has already seen “many of its pipelines and water infrastructure destroyed during the devastating war with Israel,” said NBC News. The algae currently attacking Israel’s water supplies may actually be caused by the situation in Gaza.

The “discharge of untreated sewage from the Gaza Strip into the sea is contributing to the worsening crisis affecting the Israeli desalination facilities,” the Zalul Environmental Association, an Israeli environmental NGO, told The Guardian. The wastewater “contains nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, which feed microalgae.”

Scientists are “trying to assess possible environmental fallout from Gaza’s destroyed wastewater infrastructure” and determine how much of a role it may have played in the algae bloom, said Middle East Eye. Regardless of the cause, it is a “reminder of the dire humanitarian conditions facing 2 million Gazans,” said The Washington Post. Gazans have “faced severe water shortages and have often resorted to using makeshift latrines.”

What next?

This kind of event will probably keep happening thanks to the steadily warming planet. It’s a “fair estimation that this will not be a once-in-a-lifetime” thing, Edo Bar-Zeev, an associate professor in water research at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, said to CNN. People “can assume that this will occur more and more through climate change.”

Argentina is subjecting the Falklands to “economic warfare”, the leader of the British overseas territory’s government has said.

As the country ramps up political pressure on its claim of sovereignty over the territory, restrictions are making life more difficult for the residents of the remote Atlantic islands, Andrea Clausen told the Financial Times. And at the centre of the power struggle with Britain is the Falklands’ first oil project: Sea Lion, a joint UK-Israeli venture.

What is life like on the islands?

The Falklands are home to about 3,500 people, most of whom live in the capital, Stanley, with the remainder spread across the sprawling archipelago roughly half the size of Wales. “People are always amazed by the scale when they visit,” one resident told the Metro.

Leaving the islands “isn’t simple – or cheap”. There are two 18-hour direct flights a week to the UK, on a military plane, or one commercial flight a week to Chile. A monthly flight from a small city in southern Argentina is considered a domestic flight by Buenos Aires, although not by the Falklands’ authorities.

Because of the limited connections, imported goods can cost more than double their price in the UK. There’s currently only one shipping link, to Uruguay, which sometimes leads to shortages of cheese and other food staples, said the FT. Most international suppliers “refuse to serve Falklands’ businesses” out of fear of angering Argentina. Officials are preparing a second shipping link to Chile, scheduled to open between November and December. But some islanders worry that Buenos Aires “could try to disrupt those efforts”.

What resources do the Falklands have?

There is a “huge capital programme” underway to boost the islands’ infrastructure, said resident Traighana Smith in The Independent, including a new power station and port, and “a hydrocarbon industry is also on the horizon”.

There are “vast energy reserves” just 136 miles north of the islands, said The Telegraph. Surveys suggest the Sea Lion oilfield contains up to 1.7 billion barrels of oil: “larger than anything remaining in British North Sea waters”.

Two oil companies, Britain’s Rockhopper Exploration and Israel’s Navitas Petroleum, are due to begin a joint project extracting from the oilfield within two years. The $2.2 billion venture, the Falklands’ first commercial oil project, aims to produce 50,000 barrels per day. It could be “economically transformative for the islands”, said the FT. It could “triple GDP” and reduce dependence on the inconsistent fishing industry.

“We never want to rely on handouts from the UK,” said Stirling Harcus, a director at the islands’ Chamber of Commerce. “We’re already a growing self-sufficient economy, but oil would supercharge that process.”

What is Argentina doing?

At the start of September, President Javier Milei announced restrictions on companies involved in oil extraction, along with additional military funding. His new sanctions regime “appears to target both oil and fishing”, said the FT, which is responsible for more than half of the islands’ GDP.

And on Monday, Milei warned that his government would request an emergency order to stop development of the Sea Lion oilfield if drilling is not halted within two weeks. If the “illegitimate exploitation” does not stop, his statement said, Argentina will ask the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, a Hamburg-based maritime court, to order a temporary halt to the project. Argentinian officials argue the project is “an inflection point”, said the FT, because it violates a UN resolution banning “unilateral” changes to the status quo on the islands.

“Time will tell” if Milei follows through on his threats, said Smith in The Independent. But in the meantime, the Falklands will “continue to grow its industries and care for its people”.

The sight of a disabled octogenarian being removed from her home on a stretcher has reignited public anger about Spain’s housing crisis. Tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets last weekend, protesting at the eviction of Madrid pensioner María del Carmen Abascal, known as Maricarmen, and demanding “stronger protection for tenants in the face of a housing shortage and soaring rents”, said the BBC.

‘You are not alone‘

Abascal has lived in her flat in Madrid’s El Retiro neighbourhood for more than 70 years, and was paying rent of around €500 per month when the building was bought by investment company Urbagestión in 2018. The company increased the rent to €2,650 a month, “later reduced to €1,650”, but still well above Abascal’s monthly pension of €1,350, said Euronews.

The company moved to evict her. They had three attempts blocked by the courts, so Abascal‘s successful eviction last week “shocked many”, said CNN. Police used tear gas to clear a path between protesters who had “waited outside her home since the previous night trying to prevent” her removal. Abascal was brought out on a stretcher while the crowd chanted: “You are not alone.” She was taken to hospital, suffering from anxiety and extreme exhaustion.

A few days after her very public eviction came the “welcome news” that Abascal would be able to return to her home. Her lawyers said her landlord has agreed to let her pay a rent “similar to the one she had previously”, under a new eight-year contract. But we need things to improve for everyone, protestor Jacob Patiño told the BBC: “There are lots and lots of other people who are being evicted.”

‘Global symbol‘

Nearly 10,000 people gathered in Madrid in the afternoon after Abascal’s eviction, both to protest at what had happened to her and to express a wider “frustration over the growing difficulties in finding housing”, said CNN. There was also “a huge wave of spontaneous solidarity” protests in Barcelona, Seville, and Valencia.

As Spain’s population continues to grow, “housing construction remains far below the levels recorded before the financial crisis”, said Euronews. The imbalance of supply and demand is “particularly concentrated in Madrid, Barcelona, the islands, much of the Mediterranean coast and other major urban and tourist centres”, where rents have spiralled in recent years.

Under pressure from the widespread protests, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has brought forward a long-delayed housing reform bill. “Crafting legislation” that his minority government could hope to get through the Spanish parliament was “tricky”, said Politico. The draft bill had to be “moderate enough” for the Catalan separatist Junts party, “which is conservative on landowners’ rights”, but not so “lenient” that it would alienate Sánchez’s left-wing allies. As it currently stands, the bill bans evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, limits rent hikes for two years and prohibits investment funds purchasing houses for two years. It now has a month to be approved by parliament.

Abascal’s case has resonated far beyond Spain; she has become a “global symbol for housing activists”, said El Pais. “What is happening here is a signal for all of Europe,” political analyst Federico Tomasone told the paper. “This transcends borders. There are many Maricarmens everywhere.”

An “extraordinary diplomatic row” has erupted between South Korea and Ukraine over the fate of two North Korean prisoners of war, said the Financial Times.

At the UN General Assembly last week, Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed that Ukraine had transferred the men, who were captured while fighting for Russia, to South Korea. Seoul has since demanded an official apology, accusing the Ukrainian president of violating a secrecy agreement about the transfer, which was arranged to ensure the prisoners’ safety from reprisals.

But Kyiv has denied that such a confidentiality agreement existed, creating both an international and domestic drama for President Lee Jae-myung.

The prisoners of war

The two men, who were reportedly wounded and captured in Russia’s Kursk region in early 2025, are among tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers sent to fight for Russia against Ukraine. So far, they are the only known surviving prisoners. One of the men, when he realised he was going to be taken prisoner, “tried to kill himself and he was shocked that fate didn’t let him die”, Zelenskyy added in his speech. “This is how they raise people in the North.”

The two prisoners told local media that they “wanted to be sent to South Korea”, said BBC News. South Korea “legally regards the North as part of its territory”, said The Associated Press. Its policy is to accept and support defectors from North Korea; more than 34,000 have arrived since the end of the Korean War. The majority are female civilians from the “poorer northern regions”; defections by soldiers are “uncommon”.

After negotiations between Seoul and Kyiv, the soldiers reportedly arrived in South Korea via a third country this month. Seoul claims Ukraine requested secrecy to avoid domestic criticism for passing up the opportunity to exchange the North Koreans for Ukrainian prisoners held in Russia. South Korea agreed, President Lee claims, partly to protect the soldiers and their families from reprisals by the North Korean regime.

In North Korea, the families of defectors can face “collective punishment such as internment or forced labour”, said the Financial Times. Ukraine has “done a lot of damage to the welfare of these soldiers and their families”, said Peter Ward at the Sejong Institute. “The South Korean media should probably never have been granted access to them. Ideally, their capture should have been kept permanently secret.”

Diplomatic headache

After Zelenskyy revealed the transfer at the UN, Lee said on X that Ukraine had broken a “non-disclosure agreement”. But Dmytro Lytvyn, Zelenskyy’s communications adviser, denied the accusation, writing on Facebook that “there was no such agreement”.

The row has “prompted questions over why Seoul placed such importance on keeping the transfer quiet”, said The Korean Herald. South Korea might have “wanted to minimise potential friction” with the North, as Seoul hopes to “reopen dialogue” between Washington and Pyongyang.

The row also highlights South Korea’s ambiguous position on Ukraine: South Korea was once one of Russia’s foremost trading partners, and has worked to “deepen trade and diplomatic relations with Russia, which borders North Korea”, said the BBC.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Seoul condemned Moscow and joined Western sanctions against Russia. In July, it announced a $100 million support package for Kyiv. But it has “kept the war at arm’s length”, said The Guardian. It has refused to send much-needed weapons, citing its policy of only providing humanitarian aid, rather than lethal weapons, to active war zones.

The situation has created a headache for Lee, whose government is “keen to improve relations” with North Korea. The row has turned “cautious support for Kyiv into open criticism” of aid.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion attempt against neighboring Ukraine nears its fifth year of region-disrupting violence, a new wave of intelligence reports has raised a frightening prospect: a widening theater of violence, in which Russian hybrid warfare strikes deep European Union territory. With alarm bells ringing over potential Russian offensives — both digital and kinetic — in the coming months, vulnerable European nations must figure out if, and how, to respond.

‘Undermining’ NATO

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has framed the “rising number” of hybrid incidents in NATO countries as a sign that Russia is “losing the war in Ukraine,” said The Associated Press. But recent incidents, including an “explosive-laden drone at a German airport” and a “strike on a passenger train near the Polish border,” have presaged a “rush of warnings about more chaos to come” across Europe, said The New York Times. “The question is how Europe responds.”

Unlike the “classic thing you think of with NATO” warfare, in which one country’s army “attacks, tries to invade” and “tries to take things,” Russia’s hybrid model is “aimed at undermining our NATO allies without a full-scale invasion,” said Kurt Volker, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” The goal is to “sow doubt” and “cause NATO countries to back off of support for Ukraine” for fear “there might be a bigger escalation with Russia that we don’t want.”

‘Hardened’ Western rhetoric

Russia’s “shadow war” with Europe “grows bolder by the day,” said the The Kyiv Independent. “No one can say how far the Kremlin is ready to go.” Although “rhetoric in Western capitals has hardened,” material responses so far have “ranged from symbolic ones” targeting Russian “cultural and diplomatic centers” to “fresh sanctions and arms packages for Ukraine,” which Moscow has already “weathered for years.”

Europeans should guard against “overreacting to any sort of hybrid activity,” said current U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker at a recent event in Iowa, per the AP. Russian hybrid attacks aren’t “at a volume that would mean that it’s the beginning” of broader violence. “We haven’t reached that threshold.”

The hard-right Sweden Democrats (SD) had high hopes of achieving complete “detoxification” in last week’s general elections, said Nicola Quondamatteo in Jacobin (New York).

With its roots in the neo-Nazi movement, the anti-immigrant populist party had started its journey to the mainstream in the 1990s, when it expelled overt hardliners from its ranks and moderated some of its policies. By 2018, it was the third-largest party in the Swedish parliament. But other parties continued to treat the SD as pariahs until 2022, when the party became the second largest, with 73 seats – and a conservative bloc struck the Tidö deal, giving the SD influence over some policy areas in return for it propping up the centre-right minority administration.

Ahead of last week’s election, PM Ulf Kristersson had promised that if the bloc retained power, he’d offer the SD an even bigger prize: places in the cabinet. But Swedish voters had other ideas: they turned away from the SD in droves. With its support down three points, to 17.5%, it lost 11 seats, leaving the right-of- centre bloc with 173 seats in total, three fewer than a centre-left bloc led by Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson.

Incendiary rhetoric

In a sense, the SD has been a victim of its own success, said Håkan Boström in Göteborgs-Posten (Gothenburg). When it started railing against immigration, the main parties still took pride in Sweden’s reputation as a haven for refugees. But ten years ago, as Sweden and other EU states reeled from the 2015 refugee crisis, parties across the spectrum agreed that the rules had to be tightened. Then, in 2022, the new SD-supported government embarked on reforms to reduce immigration as much as possible without breaching EU law.

In recent years, asylum claims have fallen sharply and, since 2016, net immigration has fallen by two-thirds to about 47,000 a year. As a result, immigration was not the biggest issue for voters this year. Yet the SD chose “Make Sweden Sweden Again” as its campaign slogan, and stepped up its incendiary rhetoric. “Do you miss Mogadishu? Remigration will help you go home” read an ad it splashed on buses around Gothenburg, which has a large Somali diaspora. This repelled moderate swing voters, and mobilised turnout for the centre-left.

Shifting the dial

In an “ominous political landscape”, European progressives will have derived welcome optimism from the result in Sweden, said The Guardian. But the ray of hope it offers is not a bright one. In Sweden, as elsewhere, the far-right’s nativist agenda has been so normalised that the Social Democrats – should they form an administration – are not proposing a very different approach. And the Sweden Democrats will keep stoking divisions from the sidelines. They and their supporters are already blaming their defeat on “imported” Muslim votes. Europe’s social democrats must be courageous in seeking to “shift the dial of political debate” – or the far-right “will continue to set its terms”.

This week, the world heard from an often quiet figure at the center of the Iran-U.S. war: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian. While subservient to Iran’s supreme leader, Pezeshkian wields immense power as the head of government, and a fiery speech at the United Nations showed that he has no intention of rolling over for the United States.

Heart surgeon-turned-president

Pezeshkian, 71, was born in the city of Mahabad and completed his military conscription service at the age of 19. During his conscription, he served in “Zabul — one of the most deprived cities in Sistan and Balochestan province, an experience that was said to be his political awakening,” said The Guardian. After returning home, Pezeshkian decided to have a career in medicine and “returned to his hometown to start his medical training.”

He eventually pivoted to cardiac health and “became a heart surgeon and served as the head of the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences,” said The Associated Press. His middle life was also marked by tragedy, after a 1994 car accident “killed his wife, Fatemeh Majidi, and a daughter.” Pezeshkian eventually became a politician, serving as Iran’s “deputy health minister and later as the health minister under the administration of reformist President Mohammad Khatami.”

In 2024, Pezeshkian ran for president as a moderate with a pledge to “open Iran to the world,” said Deutsche Welle. His campaign focused on “rebuilding trust between the government and the Iranian people, fighting disillusionment after persistent economic woes and political repression.” He won the election in a runoff, and his victory came as a stunning upset against his hardline opponent. While Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei remains the country’s ultimate authority, Pezeshkian has become a historically significant leader.

‘Never bow our head or bend at the knee’

Since the war in Iran began, Pezeshkian has largely pushed back against what he views to be U.S. aggression. He asserted himself during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly against President Donald Trump, who had personally threatened Iran when he spoke to the body the day before. The country will “never bow our head or bend at the knee,” Pezeshkian said of Iran during his speech. The Iranian president was “defiant in the face of what he called ‘bullying’ by Trump, while saying Tehran is open to negotiations,” said USA Today.

Pezeshkian’s visit to the United Nations in New York City is an “extraordinary appearance,” given that the U.S. and Iran are in a state of war, said USA Today. Just “months after he and other Iranian leaders were targeted by U.S. airstrikes, Pezeshkian — like other world leaders — is traveling through Manhattan with a Secret Service escort.” Pezeshkian has repeatedly accused the U.S. of war crimes and during his speech he “held up a photo of children killed in a U.S. strike on an Iranian primary school at the start of the war.”

While much of the ongoing tension surrounds Iran’s alleged attempts to enrich uranium, Pezeshkian has denied that his country “wanted a nuclear weapon” but “refused limitations on the country’s civilian nuclear program,” said NPR. His conditions for negotiating in the future include the “halting” of “U.S. hostilities, an end to the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports and the release of Iranian funds.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Thursday night hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping for a state dinner at the White House, after the two leaders spoke privately and toured Trump’s remodeling projects. Trump said he and Xi have “never gotten along better” and presented him with a bald eagle statue. Xi, whose gift for Trump was two pandas for Atlanta’s zoo, said the U.S.-China relationship should be based on “healthy” competition, not a “wrestle in which one either wins or loses.”

Who said what

The “lavish summit” was “heavy on symbolism but light on substance,” Reuters said, “with no sign of breakthroughs on thorny ​issues such as AI, trade, Taiwan and the war with Iran.” Trump is “drawn to the theater of summitry and his personal rapport with Xi,” The Wall Street Journal said. But “for all the pomp and circumstance,” he “appeared to walk away with few tangible gains while handing Xi the images of coequal standing he had come to Washington for.”

China “made clear it views Taiwan as the most sensitive issue in the U.S.-China relationship,” The Associated Press said. A Chinese readout of the private meeting said Xi had urged Trump to “adhere to the correct position of opposing Taiwan independence.” The U.S. did not release a readout as of Friday morning.

What next?

Xi’s visit “came six weeks ahead of the midterm elections in which Trump has branded Democrats as communists,” the Journal said. “Trump’s fawning drew complaints among several Republican senators, who said they weren’t sure what the GOP would gain from hosting the Communist leader and U.S. business rival.”

What happened

China’s government has taken possession of “potentially sensitive” F-35 stealth fighter jet parts “inexplicably diverted” to Hong Kong while being sent to the U.S. from Australia via UPS, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the incident. The Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Program Office told Politico last week it was “aware of a shipment issue” involving F-35 parts and was “actively working” to retrieve them.

Who said what

The diverted cockpit canopy and weapons-bay door contain “stealth technology that only the U.S. and its allies have access to,” Politico said, citing sources, and the late May reroute “triggered an ongoing series of briefings” for congressional national security staff. The F-35 is “widely recognized as America’s best and most advanced fighter jet,” Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said to The Associated Press. China has been “aggressively trying to get F-35 data through electronic espionage,” former congressional military analyst J.J. Gertler told Politico. But studying a part’s schematics is different than “possessing a real one.”

Lockheed Martin manages the F-35 supply chain and “uses commercial shipping providers to transport parts,” Politico said. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2023 that more than 1 million F-35 parts had gone missing over the previous five years.

What next?

The F-35 Joint Progress Office said it was working with “industry partners” to investigate the Hong Kong diversion and “place safeguards to avoid a future occurrence.”

What happened

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on Wednesday told the United Nations General Assembly that the U.S. “hit us, but we did not bend the knee” and will defend “our beloved” homeland “until our last breath.” His “defiant speech” at the U.N.’s New York headquarters “marked a striking instance of a foreign leader addressing the world body while their country is at war with the host nation,” The Associated Press said. Pezeshkian held up “pictures of people killed by American and Israeli airstrikes” while “standing at the same lectern where a day earlier” President Donald Trump had “threatened to ’annihilate’ his country,’” The New York Times said.

Who said what

Pezeshkian accused the U.S. of violating international law with “cowardly attacks” on civilian infrastructure and said Iran would not give up its civilian nuclear program. Trump “described us as terrorists,” but Iranians are “the victims of terrorism,” Pezeshkian said. “Iran must be powerful to avoid being threatened,” and Trump and others “who seek to bully us” must understand that Iran is “ready for dialogue, diplomacy and negotiations without accepting the language of force.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran had little standing to “lecture anyone on human rights or the international system when they habitually violate it.” As Pezeshkian was speaking, the “lone American diplomat sitting in the hall left,” the Times said.

What next?

U.S. and Iranian officials downplayed indirect talks on the sidelines of the General Assembly. They’re “not anything new,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei. Rubio said holding talks was “positive” but “I don’t want to mischaracterize this as a major breakthrough.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Tuesday told the United Nations General Assembly in New York City he was deciding whether to make a deal with Iran or “annihilate the Islamic Republic” and “drive them into hell with no chance of survival.” After his speech, his envoys met indirectly with Iranian officials for what Trump described as a “very good meeting.”

Who said what

In his 35-minute address, Trump also celebrated his military operation in Venezuela, hailed a new agreement on Greenland and criticized efforts to regulate artificial intelligence. But the “heart of the address was a fulsome defense” of his Iran war, The Associated Press said. Trump “didn’t offer an answer” on whether he would annihilate the country, The Wall Street Journal said, leaving the “question to hang over the final weeks of the campaign season as GOP candidates are facing sharp questions” about the war and its fallout, including “sharp increases” in gas and diesel prices.

Trump was “again the center of attention” at the U.N., Politico said, but even as “world leaders scrambled to stay in his good graces,” there was an “undercurrent of discontent — and even defiance — from some leaders who are seemingly preparing for a life after the U.S.-led order.” After Trump threatened to destroy Iran from a “podium where world leaders typically champion peace and global harmony,” The New York Times said, other leaders “warned of the dangers posed by division and unilateral action.”

What next?

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is scheduled to address the General Assembly on Wednesday, where “his remarks will be closely watched,” the Times said.

“If a left-wing candidate can win in New York, then there’s no reason it can’t happen in Berlin.” A year on from her comments after Zohran Mamdani’s victory, Elif Eralp looks likely to be elected as the mayor of Berlin. She would be the first Turkish-origin person in the role, and the first candidate from left-wing party Die Linke to become mayor since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Victory for Die Linke does not guarantee Eralp will become mayor, said The Berliner. The new parliament has to elect the governing mayor and, with 47 seats out of 158 in the state parliament, Die Linke will need to form a coalition. The centre-right CDU refuses to engage with them, but a joint government with the Greens and the Social Democratic Party would be a “realistic” outcome.

‘Generational shift’

Eralp has become the “new face of radical left-wing parties asserting themselves in major cities around the world”, said Le Monde. Her “historic win” is all the more impressive considering she inherited a party “marred by internal divisions”. Now, it is “one of the most dynamic forces in German politics.

Die Linke, which emerged from the communist Socialist Unity Party that ruled East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, has undergone a “striking generational shift” in the last three years, said the Financial Times. A recent overhaul has seen the party “draw a tidal wave of new supporters, doubling its membership in the space of a year, reaching 123,000 at the end of 2025”.

A younger, predominantly female cohort has emerged at the top of the party leadership, who have not been afraid to take on AfD and have become “social media stars on the German left”. Eralp and others have “cultivated a recognisable style: sharp fringes, tattoos, hoop earrings and red lipstick”, which she is often seen sporting alongside “jeans and trainers with a bomber jacket”. She also regularly wears a gold necklace which displays the word “Mietendeckel” (“rent cap”).

On ‘borrowed time’

Berlin’s housing crisis was “at the heart of Eralp's campaign” said Euro News. She called for rent caps, an increase in social housing, and has floated the idea of expropriating properties from large housing portfolios to come under government control. And this fits the issues facing Berliners, said Novara Media. In Berlin, 84% of the population rent, and “more than half from private landlords”, while “10% of Berliners live in housing poverty”. A 2021 referendum saw Berliners support the city government’s seizing of privately-owned flats from large corporate landlords.

Pressure had already been “mounting” on Chancellor Friedrich Merz following the success of the AfD in regional elections, and his “struggles to push through promised economic and social welfare reforms”, said Al Jazeera. Less than 18 months into power, his approval ratings have tanked to around 14%, “raising doubts among fellow party members about whether he can continue to lead”.

The “cumulative effect” of the losses to both the right and the left “can hardly be exaggerated”, said The Guardian. Merz cancelled a planned trip to speak to the UN in New York, “already anticipating he would need to be in Berlin to grapple” with the aftermath of the state election. For now, he has vowed to remain in post, but for many, the German leader is “on borrowed time”.

Andy Burnham, stateside for the United Nations General Assembly, is meeting Donald Trump for their first in-person talks today in a stronger position than Keir Starmer was as a new PM. Trump is increasingly unpopular at home, and preoccupied with the Iran war and looming midterm elections, while the UK has been strengthening its ties with Europe and Canada. “It’s completely different this time,” one official told Politico. “There’s no drama about having to stay in his good books.”

But Trump has previously called Burnham “extremely liberal” and dismissed him as the “mayor of a town”. And if his past meetings with world leaders are anything to go by, there’s still plenty of potential for drama.

What did the commentators say?

In 2024, sucking up to Trump was the “medicine required”, one UK diplomat told Politico. Burnham, however, has inherited “an established relationship” with no need to lavish praise. His job is therefore to “fix the mess of unresolved threads left behind” – and “avoid a barrage of abuse on Truth Social”.

He is “not expected to take a big list of deliverables or policy goals”. His aim, according to senior UK officials and MPs, is: “Get in, smile, press the case for Ukraine, and try to leave without a major upset.” Officials are hopeful that he will encounter a “more pro-Ukraine atmosphere” in Washington, after the House of Representatives approved a “sweeping Russia sanctions bill”. Burnham hopes to persuade the US to increase the deliveries of air defence interceptors – but it’s unlikely that Ukraine is even in the top five of Trump’s priorities, said Daniel DePetris in The Spectator.

Burnham’s more assertive approach seems to be working so far, said Reuters. His team pointed out that Trump “did not push back” against Burnham’s ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. But Trump is a “notoriously fickle and unpredictable” man who “spreads trade tariffs like confetti”, said The i Paper. Burnham will have to avoid the “minefield” of some of Trump’s “fixations”, such as North Sea oil and defence spending.

There is “no suggestion” Burnham will go further and emulate “the more combative approach” of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, said The Guardian’s Pippa Crerar. Nor would it be wise to; Trump is still angry the UK didn’t join him in strikes on Iran, and recent comments on the Falklands and Irish unification “suggest his displeasure has not abated”. The meeting will be “fraught with tension” with “potential for further clashes”. The US president might be weaker domestically, but he’s still in office for two more years. For now, “the power still rests with Trump”.

What next?

Even if Trump and Burnham hit it off, the meeting itself “isn’t the most important event”, said DePetris. “What truly matters is the follow-through.”

The Iran war remains “a dark storm cloud hovering over US-UK relations”, and with Houthi rebels continuing to advance, effectively controlling Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, Trump could grant Saudi Arabia’s request for military intervention. In that case, “you can be almost certain the Trump administration will expect the UK to get involved”, and Trump could slam Burnham’s government for insufficient defence spending in next month’s Budget. Remember, things were fine between Trump and Starmer – “until they weren’t”.

As the United States struggles to extricate itself from the Iran war, longtime regional ally Saudi Arabia is facing a growing Iranian threat of its own. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, long considered proxies of the Iranian regime, have successfully launched a series of military offensives, including the recent capture of the port city of Mokha and the destruction of an overland pipeline. These are key fuel nodes for the Red Sea, made all the more vital as Iran throttles traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The result is a “nightmare scenario for Saudi Arabia” that has “sent jitters through global markets,” said The Associated Press. With fighting between the Saudi-backed government and Iranian-backed rebel forces spreading, Yemen has become a stand-in for larger forces scrambling to capitalize on a new paradigm in the Middle East.

Why are Saudi officials worried?

Saudi Arabia is “becoming a focal point for the Middle East crisis,” as it “contends with a multifront campaign being waged by Iran and its Axis of Resistance allies,” said Newsweek. Houthi forces have “stepped up cross-border attacks” against Iran while “simultaneously gaining ground” against Saudi-backed government forces “in some of the most intensive clashes since an April 2022 ceasefire halted Yemen’s civil war.”

At the same time, the Saudi’s “most essential ally, the United States,” has been “unpredictable and sometimes unreliable” under this administration, said the AP. The White House “seems reluctant to widen an already unpopular and stalemated Mideast war ahead of congressional elections.”

“For a decade,” the Saudi attitude toward Yemen has “rested on the assumption” that “patiently and strategically” applying time, money and force would “eventually produce enough leverage to subdue the Houthis,” said Responsible Statecraft. “Or at least force them into a settlement on Riyadh’s terms.” For the past several weeks, that “assumption has been tested more severely than at any point since 2015,” as Houthi forces press toward the city of Marib, which is the “last major stronghold of forces loyal to the internationally recognized government of Yemen.” And as “Iran-aligned groups” such as the Houthis “increase pressure” on Saudi Arabia, “diplomacy” between the Gulf States and Iran has “hit its own wall.”

What’s at risk for the kingdom?

Attacks by Houthi forces have “already caused a plunge in Saudi oil exports to Asia” from “around 3.4 million barrels a day in June to 128,000 in August,” said the AP. As the group tightens its grip on the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab Strait, Houthi figures have “assured U.S. officials” that the group has “no intention of attacking U.S. shipping in the Red Sea,” said Al Jazeera. Instead, any restrictions would “apply only to vessels linked to Saudi Arabia.”

Israel has “reportedly offered to intervene in Yemen on Saudi Arabia’s behalf,” said Al Jazeera. But kingdom officials may be “wary of being seen to rely on Israeli military support” for fear it could “damage Riyadh’s standing and legitimacy throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.”

Where is Iran in all this?

The Houthis are “agents and proxies of the Iranians,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio to reporters earlier this month, per Off the Press. Iran “arms, trains and coordinates with the Houthis” in a relationship that “indeed deserves scrutiny,” said The National Interest. But the group has “independent origins, an autonomous decision-making structure, its own revenue base and a track record of acting against Tehran’s preferences when its own interests demand it.”

Ansar Allah is an “independent Yemeni actor” that “makes its own decisions,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei on X, using the Houthis’ official group name. It “takes orders from no one and acts as nobody’s proxy.”

The group is “first and foremost” a Yemeni movement “whose fight has always been about power inside Yemen,” said The Conversation. But “Yemeni security sources” have claimed senior Iranian commander Abdul Reza Shahla’i was “on the ground overseeing part of the latest operation in September.” Moreover, there is also a risk that seizing another fuel “choke point” to target Saudi shipping “makes the Houthis look, to much of the world and no small part of Yemen, like Tehran’s instrument,” no matter what their “own objectives actually are.”

Where is China in all this?

Neither the United States nor Saudi Arabia seems “eager to send their forces to die en masse,” said Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft's Middle East program, to Newsweek. Both countries “prefer to rely on superior air power,” which has “proven repeatedly inadequate as a means of holding territory in Yemen and elsewhere.”

Riyadh has instead “turned to China for help” following recent Houthi victories, said Reuters. Accordingly, Beijing has “privately asked Tehran to help rein in Yemen’s Houthis,” going “further” in its private call for restraint and diplomacy than in China’s “public statements.”

Saudi Arabia could also “seek a diplomatic solution with either the Houthis or their patrons in Tehran,” said the AP. But the Houthis have “demanded the lifting of a Saudi-led blockade,” which would allow them to “grow much stronger over the long term.” Iran similarly has “little interest in stabilizing the region without securing major U.S. concessions.”

What happened

Ukraine hit a major oil refinery in Moscow on Sunday, along with a warehouse and residential buildings, in what Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin called Kyiv’s “largest ever” drone attack on the Russian capital. Sobyanin said “a few drones” got through, out of 1,600 targeting the Moscow region, including 450 aimed at the city, and the attack was “clearly planned with the aim of disrupting” Sunday’s final day of voting in Russia’s first parliamentary elections since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv said it was targeting Moscow’s Gazpromneft-Moscow Oil Refinery to deprive Russia of war funding.

Who said what

Ukraine has been using its drones to “make the Russian public feel the war’s consequences and pressure Russian President Vladimir Putin into negotiating a peace settlement,” The Associated Press said. Kyiv’s refinery attacks have caused months of “widespread fuel shortages” in Russia, The New York Times said. Even before Sunday’s strikes, not “many fuel stations had any gas to sell.”

What next?

With almost all electoral competition quashed, Putin’s “ruling United Russia party is expected to retain its dominance in the parliament and present the win as proof of public support for the war,” Politico said. With 95% of votes counted, Putin’s party had nearly 58%, Russia’s Central Election Commission said Monday, though results will not be official until Sept. 25.

“The Iran war is metastasising,” said Adrian Blomfield in The Telegraph. Having evolved into a struggle for control of the Strait of Hormuz, the conflict is now threatening another key oil-shipping route.

One of the reasons that global oil prices haven’t risen higher in recent months is that Saudi Arabia has still been able to export large amounts of Gulf oil via the Red Sea instead. But this lifeline is now in peril.

Last week, Houthi rebels in Yemen launched a lightning offensive against Yemeni government forces, seizing control of the country’s entire Red Sea coast, including the towns and islands around the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

On Friday, another militia group aligned with Iran – this one based in Iraq – launched drone attacks on Saudi Arabia’s vital East-West oil pipeline to the coast, forcing its closure. The combined assault pushed oil prices above $110 a barrel.

Saudi Arabia’s ‘nightmare’

Until the middle of last week, the Houthi forces had appeared to be on the back foot, said Mark Urban in The Sunday Times. But they achieved a sudden breakthrough against divided government factions, reportedly with the help of an AI-generated spoof message that purported to be from a Yemeni government commander and ordered a general troop withdrawal.

It has produced a “nightmare scenario” for Saudi Arabia, which faces a threat to its vital national interests but also knows from “bitter experience” how hard it is to defeat the Houthis in Yemen, having tried and failed to do so for over a decade. Turkey and Pakistan, with whom Riyadh signed a much-vaunted defence pact last month, aren’t rushing to help the Saudis out.

‘Global solution’

Nor is the White House, which already has enough on its plate with Iran and “is increasingly aware of the limits of what it can achieve through military force”, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Yet the US administration is also in a bind. Until the Houthis’ intervention, the oil situation had appeared just about manageable, thanks to Red Sea exports and the US shepherding vessels through Hormuz; oil shipments there are now at roughly a third of pre-war levels. Enough oil was reaching the global market to keep prices safely below the $100 a barrel level.

But supplies of Gulf energy to the West are now looking much more precarious. This is a global crisis requiring a “global solution”, said The Times. President Trump needs to work with China and other consumers of Middle Eastern oil to help stabilise the situation in Yemen and remove the Houthis’ threat to these crucial sea lanes. “Otherwise, the Bab al-Mandeb will continue to live up to its name: the Gate of Tears.”

The Democrats made a very wise decision this spring, said Lauren Egan on The Bulwark. They were considering whether to host their own midterm convention to steal attention from the one staged by the Republicans in Dallas.

In the end, they opted not to, because they were short on cash and thought it might be “strategically smart to cede the stage to Donald Trump in hopes that he would dig his own political grave”. Boy, did that pay off.

Trump, who has already alienated voters this summer by talking about how great data centres are and how he loves inflation, was on unhinged form in the two-day conference. He boasted that America “controls the Trump Strait”; he demanded that the audience join him in a pledge (“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States...”); he even promised every American a $5,000 bounty if his party wins the midterm elections.

Democrat insiders have long joked that Trump is trying to lose November’s midterms, but some are now seriously wondering whether he has lost his grip on reality.

An ‘incredibly risky’ bet

Republican candidates contesting swing seats in November certainly regard him as a liability, said Ayman Mohyeldin on MS Now. Many of them stayed well away from Dallas, wary of association with a president whose approval rating is down to below 35%. The Republican Party has nevertheless decided that, despite everything, it’s worth making Trump the face of the midterms, because of his unrivalled ability to drive Republican voters to the polls.

It’s an “incredibly risky” bet, said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. The Maga base is already “fired up”. It’s among the larger category of traditional Republicans that the GOP has a turnout problem. They need to inspire these people to vote by offering a coherent agenda.

There’s little evidence of that, said The Washington Post. Trump’s wild proposal to pay $5,000 to every adult citizen if the GOP retains control of Congress in November beggared belief. It’s a “desperate gimmick” that betrays a total lack of seriousness about America’s fiscal situation. It would cost more than $1.2 trillion, in a country already saddled with $40 trillion in debt.

The Democrats are in no position to accuse Trump of trying to “trade votes for cash”, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review. It’s what they do in every election, albeit in more disguised ways. But this bribe is still a terrible idea, not least because it would stoke inflation. Trump says he’s defending America from the socialists, but if his populism means throwing money at voters, “what need is there of socialism at all”?

Another Trump ‘con’

Trump’s cheques will never arrive, said Steve Benen on MS Now. Congress wouldn’t approve the move, the courts would object, and the money’s not there in any case. It’s just another Trump “con”. He pulled the same trick before the 2018 midterms, when he claimed that he and Congress were preparing a new, “very major” tax cut that would exclusively benefit the middle class. Even White House officials were “mystified” by this declaration, which had no basis in reality.

It’s bad enough that Trump spouts nonsense, said Eric Boehm in Reason Magazine. Worse was the sight of his VP, J.D. Vance, defending the bribe plan and insisting it could be funded through tariffs. Vance is supposed to be the heir apparent to Trump – “the guy with the political and policy chops” to redefine this populist movement for the next generation. Yet he has no problem with the concept of bribing Americans with their own money? “Trumpism is out of ideas, and soon it is likely to be out of power – no matter what ridiculous promises the president makes along the way.”

Russian voters joke that, if there’s a “special military operation” in Ukraine, there’s now a “special electoral operation” for their parliament, said The Economist. Polls open for the Duma ballot on 18 September – the first parliamentary election since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine – and, despite ever greater public opposition to the war, Vladimir Putin’s grasp on power is unlikely to be shaken.

But battlefield “bodies are piling up” and “smoke is billowing” from oil refineries across Russia hit by Ukrainian drone strikes. The failing Russian economy and continuing fuel shortages are weighing more heavily on the population and, although this election’s outcome is all but certain, the people’s “tacit consent is crumbling”. The educated and politically conscious, who always voted in the past “no longer see much point in the charade”.

What did the commentators say?

“The system of power in Russia is often referred to as ‘managed democracy’”, where “the Kremlin does the managing”, said the BBC’s Russia editor, Steve Rosenberg. Critics dismiss the elections as “neither free nor fair” but, frankly, the Kremlin “doesn’t care what the critics say”. Does this mean there will be “no surprises”? “Far from it.” We’ve already seen a TV debate with “six empty lecterns”.

The election of 450 deputies to Russia’s lower legislative house “gives the impression of some diversity”, with communists, nationalists and “even some self-described liberals” on the ballot, said Brawley Benson on Foreign Policy. “In reality, scope for disagreement is vanishingly small.” United Russia – Putin’s party – holds 70% of the seats and there’s “little tolerance for genuine opposition”. The other Duma deputies are seen as “systemic opposition”, or parties that partially differ in their priorities, but “broadly support” Putin.

“United Russia’s popularity has been hovering around 32% in public opinion polls,” said political science professor Regina Smyth on The Conversation. That’s the lowest percentage since the invasion of Ukraine, and “even then, the number is likely inflated by respondents’ fear of revealing their opposition”. But the Kremlin has long deployed an “arsenal of tools” to retain its grip on power. Gerrymandering, “significant” levels of electoral fraud and, this time round, the banning of eight out of 19 political parties have, in effect, “eliminated non-partisan organised opposition”. The election is not about who wins but what could be telling is seeing how heavily the Kremlin needs to place “its thumb on the scale to maintain its party’s two-thirds majority”.

“Engineering” the outcome too tightly is “not without a risk for the ruling regime”, said The Guardian’s editorial board. “Too blatant” an election steal can be “a sign of weakness”. Already last month, Russia’s supreme court blocked the “old and marginal liberal party”, Yabloko, from participating in the vote. It does not “pose a serious challenge to the regime” but it is opposed to the war in Ukraine. The case for banning it was “spurious to the point of absurdity”. Putin wants to look as if he is well supported but “the harder the Kremlin is seen to work at constructing electoral proof of that support, the less confident it looks”.

What next?

While there may be “little reason to care” about this “snoozefest” election and its “foregone conclusion”, many Russians “are worried” about what might follow, said The New York Times’ Moscow-based correspondent, Valerie Hopkins.

“Rumours of a large, forced mobilisation are rampant”, as the military “burns through” troops in Ukraine. And, for a country that is a major oil producer, it “has found itself in the unusual position of running short of fuel”. Nearly 60% of Russians think the “people around them are experiencing anxiety”, according to a July poll from the state-affiliated Public Opinion Foundation. That’s “a four-year high”. And the state-owned Sberbank reported Russians withdrawing more money from banks this summer “than in the previous six years”.

Most significantly, the Kremlin public relations machine has been forced to switch tack. Picking up on the fact that many people are “struggling and scared”, it has abandoned its old “business as usual” message for a call “to rally around President Vladimir V. Putin and his war”.

Whether President Donald Trump truly believes he can turn Canada into the 51st state remains as much a question of personal psychology as one of national policy. But it’s clear the president’s increased aggression toward America’s northern neighbor has convinced many in Canada that their national interests lie elsewhere. Despite sharing geographic, cultural and historic ties with the United States, Canadian officials are now turning to other international outlets, like the European Union, in an effort to wean themselves off the U.S.’ turbulent sphere of influence.

Pursuing a ‘unique alliance’ with Europe

With the United States and Canada “embroiled in the worst bilateral trade war in their modern history,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has pushed to “take Canada’s relationship with the EU to the next level,” said The Wall Street Journal. The effort is a “bold gambit” by Canada to “rewire the economic cabling of the Western alliance.” By “accelerating Canada’s pivot to Europe,” Carney is “matchmaking a shotgun marriage to offset the pain of its divorce with America.”

Talks between Canada and the EU have focused on “easing the movement of goods, services and specialized workers in critical sectors, including energy, artificial intelligence, defense and critical minerals,” said The Independent. The two bodies are also exploring “cooperation on subsea cables, cloud storage, data centers, satellite networks and infrastructure to export Canadian energy to Europe.”

“We’re not looking to become a member of the European Union,” said Carney to reporters this past weekend, per The Globe and Mail. “What we are looking for” is a “unique alliance between Canada and the European Union.” EU officials want to work on “opening the door for Canada to be the first associate member of the European Union,” said EU President Ursula von der Leyen this week in her State of the European Union address. Although “details remain scant and the linkup is not a done deal,” von der Leyen's announcement was “met with a standing ovation from lawmakers,” said The New York Times.

‘Cozying up is a no-brainer’

Talks of Canada actually joining the EU as a full member-state are “more meme than reality,” said Bloomberg. But the apparent “openness to talks on ‘anything other than membership’” has driven “justified enthusiasm among the Ottawa and Brussels crowds.” The “logic of cozying up is a no-brainer” as Canada works to “diversify trade away from its southern border,” and the EU hopes Canada’s “vast reserves of energy and minerals” will help it “carve a middle path between the U.S. and China.”

Carney hopes to “build an alliance of liberal powers” that are “committed to the multilateral order thrown into chaos by Donald Trump,” said the Financial Times. To that end, he intends to “show commitment to European allies” by potentially contributing to the EU-led 90 billion euro Ukraine Support Loan, of which the U.K. is the “only other non-EU country to have participated.”

While it’s unlikely that Canada and the EU will reach a “deeper overarching agreement any time soon,” they are slowly creating a framework for what it “actually means to be a ‘trusted partner’ in the context of economic security,” said Canada EU Trade and Investment Association President Mark Camilleri to the Financial Times. “If Canada and the EU can get this right, it is a model that can be adapted to other like-minded countries such as the U.K., Norway, Japan and Australia.”

In the meantime, said Politico, Canada is set to “make its Eurovision debut in 2027.” The country will “host an EU summit in Montreal” in late October.