Trinidad and Tobago has become the latest Caribbean nation to strike down laws criminalising same-sex intimacy after its highest court of appeal ruled they violated fundamental human rights.

The decision by the London-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ends one activist’s “historic 10-year legal battle”, said The Guardian, to scrap the “colonial era laws” that still apply in more than 30 Commonwealth countries.

Violated constitutional rights

“It is now official,” said the Trinidad Daily Express. “Consensual sex between adults of the same sex in private is no longer a criminal offence in Trinidad and Tobago.”

The Privy Council ruling also made clear that adults in same-sex or heterosexual relationships “can no longer be prosecuted under Section 13 of the Sexual Offences Act for consensual anal intercourse in private”.

Trinidad-born LGBTQ+ activist Jason Jones has been fighting the “buggery law”, introduced in 1925 under British colonial rule, since 2016, “arguing that it violated his constitutional rights”, said The Guardian.

Jones had won a landmark legal victory in 2018 when Trinidad’s High Court ruled that the “provisions criminalising consensual anal sex were unconstitutional”. But the islands’ government appealed and last year won a ruling that reversed that decision and “recriminalised consensual anal sex”.

The Privy Council, the highest court of appeal for many Commonwealth countries, has now overturned that judgment. In a unanimous verdict, the Privy Council ruled the colonial-era laws “infringed” Jones’ “fundamental rights”.

Issues unresolved

Jones, who lives in London, “welcomed the decision but said broader issues of human rights and equality for LGBTQ+ people remain unresolved across the Commonwealth and other jurisdictions where colonial-era laws continue to exist”, said Caribbean National Weekly.

Similar laws have been repealed in British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean such as Anguilla and Montserrat, and overturned in countries including St Lucia, Barbados and Dominica.

But some nations in the region retain legislation criminalising “consensual same-sex relations between men”, said Attitude, including Grenada, Jamaica, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.

After the ruling, Jones said: “We may not see the benefits of this for 50 years. What a judgment says in a courtroom and what happens in your home and workplace are two entirely different things.”

Faith can move mountains, they say. “And, as it turns out, it will also move the electorate,” said The Telegraph.

In the US midterms, avowedly religious Democrats clocked up win after win. Abdul El-Sayed became the first Muslim Senator in US history, while five current or prospective members of the Christian clergy were elected to Congress, including James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. Many other Democrat candidates ran successful campaigns that channelled religious principles at their core.

All of which marks something of a turning point: religion in the US has long been seen as the “preserve of the Right, with Republicans traditionally viewed as the party of Christian values”, said The Telegraph. But these “significant wins for religious Democrats” set up faith as a new “political battleground” in the lead-up to the 2028 presidential election.

‘Inclusive’ Christianity

Scripture was the “rallying cry” of the Left in these midterms, said The New York Times. References to Matthew 25 – where Jesus speaks of caring for the vulnerable – were a “favourite” among Democrats looking to “earn trust” from their state or district’s more moderate Christian voters. This religious messaging both stopped them being labelled as “godless”, and “successfully appealed to people frustrated with the cost of living”, the war in Iran, and divisions over immigration and healthcare. It was an “inclusive”, progressive push that reaped dividends.

Politicians on the Christian left have been trying to break through for a long while “but were mostly drowned out in primaries before they came close to reaching the national stage”, said Rolling Stone. But then, in just a few years of “profound corruption” and “incompetence”, Donald Trump, who had previously enjoyed support from many with a strong Christian faith, “accomplished what otherwise may have taken generations”: he “opened a door for the religious left to make incredible inroads”.

‘Progressive’ Islam

During his campaign for a Senate seat in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed spoke regularly about his Muslim faith. “He cited instruction by the prophet Muhammad, Islam’s founder, to be charitable to neighbours, which he interpreted as a responsibility to the people around you,” said The Washington Post. His election “brings new prominence to an expression of Islam that is both observant and progressive”.

He, and other prominent Muslim politicians in the US, such as Zohran Mamdani, are “raising public awareness of their faith”, precisely at a time of “increasing anti-Muslim rhetoric and vitriol from parts of the Republican Party”.

Earning trust of moderates

It may, though, be “too early to say whether this election marks the start of a realignment” among voters of faith, said The Wall Street Journal. For a Democratic Party that’s “long been wary” of mixing religion and politics, these victories by “unapologetically faith-based candidates” certainly mark a change of direction but the party’s broad support for abortion and transgender rights “still remain unpalatable” to many socially conservative voters.

To be successful in the 2028 presidential elections, the Democrats will need to keep winning over moderate Republicans for whom religion is important, said The New York Times. Candidates like Talarico have shown that their faith and “scriptural fluency” can achieve that. Running on a “duty to care for one another”, a core principle of many religions, could just be the party’s “new path to the White House”.

Uganda has started withdrawing troops from Somalia as part of a “phased drawdown that ​will end an almost two-decade deployment” in the country, said Reuters.

The first 109 soldiers left at the end of last month, and all 4,500 currently deployed will permanently return to Uganda by the end of 2027.

“Things are not dire now,” said Ali Omar, ​Somalia’s foreign affairs minister. But, in a country facing the threat of Al Shabab, an Al Qaeda-linked insurgency, a sudden withdrawal could “create problems”.

Aid ‘thrown into doubt’

Uganda was the first African country to deploy forces to Somalia under the African Union Mission in Somalia to protect the transitional government from “attacks by Islamist militants”, said the BBC. Since then, Ugandan forces have been key players in fighting alongside the Somali National Army to “recapture strategic territory and secure key government installations”.

More recently they have also been a part of the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (Aussom), which “focused on strengthening Somalia’s security institutions and preparing its forces to take full responsibility for the country’s security”.

But the future of Aussom has been “thrown into doubt” after US authorities decided to cancel funding for a UN logistics office, which is integral to the operation, said Deutsche Welle. Washington is the coalition’s largest donor. It has “voiced frustration with a lack of progress in the fight against Al-Shabab”, and accused the Somali government of “failing to unite the country and implement political reforms”.

This coincided with last month’s closure of the UN Transitional Assistance Mission in Somalia after more than “three decades of peace-building”. This aims to transfer responsibility to the central government and various UN agencies.

Preventing a ‘security vacuum’

African Union peacekeepers are planning to move from Barawe, 135 miles southwest of the capital Mogadishu, to replace the outgoing Ugandan troops. They will move to four bases – Sabid-Anole, Bariire, Awdheegle and Bulonagad – which are deemed “critical” to protecting Mogadishu, said The Associated Press. Failure to do so would allow Al Shabab to exploit the “security vacuum” left behind.

This turning point marks a “significant development in Somalia’s ongoing security transition”, said the Somali Guardian. Barawe is a “strategically important coastal town and port” and Shalanbood, another facility vacated by Ugandan forces, is a “key settlement along a major transport corridor” in Lower Shabelle, a region where Al Shabab has maintained a "significant presence”.

It also comes at a “politically sensitive juncture”. Political divisions and differing priorities among groups within government “risk diverting attention and resources from military operations and the broader campaign against insurgency”. This is not a “routine change of command”, it is a “test” of the Somali National Army’s “preparedness to assume a greater share of the country’s security responsibilities”.

There is a deep “contradiction” at the heart of the Chinese state, said Han Yong Hong in Lianhe Zaobao (Singapore). “Despite the extraordinary concentration of power at the top,” Xi Jinping, all-powerful general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of China for the past 13 years, “has still struggled to secure genuine loyalty” from leading figures in the bureaucracy beneath him.

Earlier this year, he railed against the “performative obedience” of party officials, describing in a caustic speech their many forms of “two-faced” behaviour. Some, he said, loudly proclaim their political loyalty while quietly defying orders; others are opportunists who resort to flattery and deception, but “stand ready to jump ship at any moment”. And it was revealing to find that the focus of last week’s party plenum in Beijing was not economic planning, as is customary – but discipline and loyalty. Behind closed doors, officials were told they will now face even tighter oversight and constraints over the way they carry out their duties, not least through more detailed performance reviews.

Warning to others

The internal machinations of a far-off bureaucracy may not seem significant, said The Indian Express (Noida). But “in a system where the Party effectively subsumes the state”, the way the CCP governs itself can have far-reaching consequences. It will shape how China projects its power abroad, impacting global markets and the strategic calculations of other powers.

The subtext for this latest crackdown, said The Straits Times (Singapore), is that Xi’s long-running purges are not paying off. Millions of CCP members have been dragged into the autocrat’s “anti-corruption” drive in the past few years, and hundreds of senior officials and top generals have disappeared from view. Yet Xi seems anxious to shore up his authority even further.

Xi took out one of his biggest targets just two weeks before the gathering, continued Han Yong Hong. Former Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan, who earned the nickname “roly-poly toy” for his ability to be knocked about by political upheavals without being toppled, was taken from his home by the authorities on 10 October for “suspected serious violations of discipline and law”. Huang had stepped down as Chongqing mayor a decade ago, but his intricate network of political connections was clearly considered a threat by Xi. His removal will have served as a “stern warning to others within the political establishment” ahead of the Fifth Plenum.

Lonely princeling

A record 33 members of the CCP’s central committee were purged ahead of last week’s meeting, said Allegra Mendelson in The Telegraph – including Zhang Youxia, Beijing’s highest-ranking general, who was dismissed after a months-long corruption investigation; and a former party secretary from Xinjiang who was removed for “nepotism, bribery and paying for sex”. It left the “largest number of empty chairs” in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People since these plenums began.

These regular party meetings matter a huge amount to a leader like Xi, said James Palmer in Foreign Policy (Washington DC), because his power is almost entirely rooted in the CCP’s formal structures. That marks a sharp contrast with Mao Zedong, who was able to use the strength of his personality cult to bypass the formal structures and attack his enemies – as he did during the Cultural Revolution “when he mobilised the student-led Red Guards against the CCP’s established leaders”.

Xi’s personality cult is only surface level: “unlike Mao, nobody has ever cried singing Xi’s poems”. Nor does he have the personal networks to sustain his influence. Although he is the son of one of the founding fathers of the People’s Republic of China, he has not built close ties to other princelings, “choosing instead to curtail them”. Xi’s power stems almost entirely from his formal position and his ability “to control the CCP’s internal security services”. Without that, his authority would disappear.

“The only thing I worry about is that people will forget Hong Kong,” Joshua Wong wrote from prison, in letters seen by The Guardian, after being given a further 10-year sentence for foreign collusion.

The pro-democracy activist, now 30, has been imprisoned since 2020 and was due to be released in January. But his second conviction under Beijing’s national security law – which “has been used to quash dissidence and lock up journalists”, said The Telegraph – has put paid to that prospect.

Wong wrote of his fears that, “amid competition and struggles between great powers”, people will “forget the countless ordinary, unknown people in different places who have paid a price for their beliefs”.

What happened to Wong?

Wong is the only activist to have been prosecuted twice under the controversial law, which Beijing imposed on the territory in 2019 following “huge and often violent pro-democracy protests” that “convulsed the international financial hub”, said CNN.

In his ruling, High Court judge William Tam said Wong had used an underground network and sought to “draw the attention of foreign countries” to bolster the cause.

The conviction represents more than another prison sentence for a prominent activist. It illustrates the increasingly difficult environment facing organised political opposition in Hong Kong.

What challenges lie ahead?

Since the national security law came into effect in 2020, “civil groups have disbanded, and some independent media outlets have been shut down”, said CNN, while “most pro-democracy figures are either in jail or in exile overseas”. The legal environment now creates significant risks for those seeking to organise within Hong Kong.

It remains to be seen whether the pro-democracy movement can preserve its networks, identity and international connections without the visible street mobilisation that once defined it.

What will happen next?

The Wong verdict is another setback for the pro-democracy movement and highlights just how dramatically Hong Kong’s political environment has changed since the mass demonstrations of 2014 and 2019.

Large-scale protests on that scale are unlikely to return in the foreseeable future. Activism may increasingly shift overseas, but this brings its own challenges. Divisions within the diaspora, declining international attention and concerns about transnational pressure on activists and their families could all hamper efforts to sustain the movement.

There could also be a generational shift, as younger Hongkongers develop a different understanding of political participation in light of the perceived personal and professional risks.

But activism is not necessarily limited to elections and demonstrations. It can also involve preserving collective memory, cultural identity, historical narratives and freedom of expression.

So while the future of activism in Hong Kong looks increasingly difficult, it is not necessarily hopeless. The city’s democratic aspirations will not disappear simply because its political organisations have been dismantled.

“We will kill Trump,” says a huge new billboard in central Tehran. There is a “good degree of triumphalism” inside Iran at the results of the US midterms, said Patrick Wintour, diplomatic editor of The Guardian. But supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei has warned those expecting an immediate shift in American policy towards Iran that they are “seriously mistaken”.

Donald Trump will soon face pressure on military spending from a Democrat-controlled Congress. But, in the two months before the new Congress convenes, “he has greater latitude and little accountability”. The president has paid a high “political price” for his war with Iran, and, “having come so far”, he may look to “cement his legacy and finish the job”.

What did the commentators say?

Trump will not “go gentle into the political twilight of his career”, said the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen. Despite his drubbing at the ballot box, “he retains broad powers to use America’s military might”, and his “determination never to be seen” as a loser might tempt him to “blot out the electoral rout” by taking action abroad.

The new Congress will curb Trump’s “sledgehammer” approach to diplomacy, said Foreign Policy. The Democrats may not “get their way” completely but “the power of the purse will grant them considerable influence and negotiating power”. They could also “use their new oversight authorities” to hold hearings on the Iran war. If these are navigated shrewdly, any mistakes Trump makes in Iran could be weaponised as a “line of political attack” stretching to the 2028 presidential election.

“The president had been planning with Israel a new offensive after the midterm elections,” said Samer Al-Atrush, The Times’ Middle East correspondent. But such is the “historic drop in support for Israel” among US voters, that, even before the elections, Trump suggested he might soon “scale back American aid to Israel”. Key US ally Saudi Arabia will be “alarmed” by the Democrat triumphs and other Gulf nations that “initially opposed the war” will “welcome the moderating influence of an opposition-led Congress”.

But Trump “is peevish”, said Sam Kiley, The Independent’s world affairs editor. “His will has been thwarted, and his administration has been humiliated by Iran’s defiant resilience.” He will blame Iran’s survival, not his own actions, for “the spike in fossil fuel prices”. And if the world sees Iran as some “plucky underdog”, he “will want to shoot that animal”.

What next?

“All of Trump’s options are problematic,” said Axios. He could launch further strikes but going back to war would keep fuel prices high and be “highly unpopular”. Negotiation could be dogged by Iran, “sensing weakness”, refusing to make concessions, meaning Trump will have a “hard time reaching a deal”. He could continue to “strangle” Iran with naval blockades and sanctions but that “could take months to show progress”. The bottom line is: “there’s no tidy way for Trump to ‘finish the job’”.

The US midterm elections were “a total referendum” on Donald Trump, said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the US president’s former-ally-turned-major-critic. “He told people to vote like he was on the ballot and they did” – with a mighty rebuke.

Trump has long relied on the support of a vocal, tight-knit fanbase but even the Maga faithful have wobbled as petrol prices soar, the Iran war staggers on and the president seems more interested in remodelling the White House than addressing their concerns. The crushing scale of last night’s defeats at ballot boxes across the country could loosen Trump’s grip on the Republican Party and weaken its contender in the 2028 presidential race.

What did the commentators say?

“The political weather in Washington and beyond changed overnight,” said Katy Balls, The Times’ Washington editor. This was not a Democratic “blue trickle” but a “blue tsunami”. Candidates from all wings of the party won so widely and broadly that any potential Democrat presidential candidate will be able to “find a statistic” to “back up” a claim that their bloc “is destined for the White House”. Trump’s failure to question the results could be “a rare show of magnanimity” but “the results were so bad, it would be hard to claim this was down to a few thousand lost votes”.

“Donald J. Trump is now officially, thoroughly, a lame duck,” said Jonathan Lemire in The Atlantic. For the first time, he may start to see the “fealty of the Republican party erode”. Such an “electoral wipeout” shows his “instincts and influence seem to be waning”, which could make his party “more willing to defy him”. As the US gears up for the next presidential race, Republicans will be trying to map out “what their post-Maga future will look like – and what role, if any, Trump plays in it”.

The Democrats have taken control of both chambers of the US Congress and that will have “two immediate consequences”, said Edward Luce, US editor of the Financial Times. First, the campaigns to replace Trump as the 2028 Republican nominee “will begin straightaway”; second, “Trump’s unpredictability” is likely to figure ever larger in the rest of his term. After all, “Trump is rarely outbid in the drama stakes”.

View Trump as a “spent force” at your peril, said Peter Baker, The New York Times’ chief White House correspondent. His power “may be receding” but he will still be president for two more years, and he will do “everything he can to remain a dominant voice for as long as he can”. There is a “natural tendency” to read too much into a “big midterm wave” but there are “plenty of examples” of when such an apparently “fundamental shift” in the electorate “did not last long”.

What next?

“The next two years will look nothing like the previous two,” said Moira Donegan, The Guardian’s US columnist. Trump will be facing “a hostile Congress”, a “cratering approval rating, and a term limit”. He’ll also have to lead a “fractured coalition”, having “split his inner circle and destroyed his credibility with the Republican rank and file” over the Iran war. Ambitious politicians in the party will “smell blood in the water” and “turn on him to shore up their own prospects”. He will “rage at their betrayal”, like a “stupid King Lear”, but, from now on, “his efforts” to “exact revenge may be severely diminished”.

“No one seems to want to apologise for the transatlantic slave trade, do they?” said Tom Peck in The Times. The prime minister and King Charles were both in the Caribbean for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua yesterday, a summit dominated every year by growing calls for slavery reparations.

King Charles, the head of the Commonwealth, spoke of the “monstrous injustice” of the trade that forced an estimated 12-15 million enslaved people from Africa, about 4.7 million to the Caribbean, and caused unquantifiable human suffering. It “fills my heart with horror and my soul with the most profound personal sorrow”.

But he “artfully declined” to apologise for Britain’s role. Even Andy Burnham, “one of the great apologisers of his generation”, stopped short. Of course, the problem with apologising is that sorry will “inevitably open the door to what it has always really been about” – reparations.

‘Shouldn’t be liable for historical wrongs’

It’s right and patriotic to have the “difficult conversations” that Commonwealth members have been asking for, said Burnham in The Guardian. That’s why Britain is offering a “structured dialogue” with nations affected by the slave trade.

But I do not believe financial reparations are the “right answer”. British people today shouldn’t be “liable for historical wrongs, however heinous, that happened in a different age under different laws and in which they played no personal part”.

What about those who profited from the trade? Ghana, “one of the biggest slave-trading countries”, is leading the campaign directed at Britain, which was “not the most guilty” of those countries involved, said historian Robert Tombs in The Telegraph. It’s demanding to be “compensated for its own crimes against humanity”.

Muslim countries were “arguably the cruellest” in exploiting enslaved people; Brazil, France and the US were among the biggest buyers. “If reparations are due, all these should pay them.”

‘Meaningless attempt at appeasing’

But meaningful reparations “cannot be reduced” to the improved debt repayment conditions Burnham proposes, said Verene A. Shepherd, vice-chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, on Al Jazeera. What we, “the descendants now living with the legacies of chattel enslavement and colonial terror”, want is debt cancellation and monetary compensation. We “reject the notion” that a country that profited from slavery should not now be held responsible. “It is time for Britain to apologise and pay its debt.”

Ultimately, sorrow without accountability is a “meaningless attempt at appeasing the ‘natives’”, said Caribbean analyst Kenneth Mohammed in The Guardian.

The Commonwealth “presents itself as an association of equal, independent nations”. If members can’t “secure meaningful engagement from Britain on one of their most consequential historical grievances”, how equal is it? The Caribbean “need not accept neocolonialism and historical amnesia” as the price of partnership.

He’s done it again, said Vera Magalhães in O Globo (Rio de Janeiro). If anyone was capable “of pulling off an unprecedented turnaround against all odds”, it was President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who this week won a historic fourth term in office.

Brazil’s working-class hero suffered a shock defeat in the first round of the presidential election in early October, coming second to Flávio Bolsonaro, 45, the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro (aka “the Trump of the Tropics”), who is currently under house arrest for plotting a coup.

Short-lived celebrations

No other candidate has gone on to win the second round after losing the first. But the Workers’ Party (PT) leader, who was accused of arrogance and of failing to understand the needs of young gig-economy workers, shook up his strategy, said Igor Gielow in Folha de São Paulo. He announced a number of populist measures and mobilised ten million followers via a new WhatsApp channel “Exército do Lula” (“Lula’s Army”). In the end, “the fear of a Bolsonaro returning to power” was enough to mobilise the centre-left voters who had sat out the first round: Lula won Sunday’s vote with almost 52% to 48%; his vote surged from 54 million in the first round to 64 million.

Lula’s celebrations will be short-lived, said Míriam Leitão in O Globo. He governs a country “more divided than at any time during his previous three terms”. Bolsonaro, who is under investigation as part of a money-laundering probe, initially rejected Sunday’s result amid a row over voting hours being extended at the last minute by a supreme court judge who was previously Lula’s lawyer. He later fled to the US.

The chaos was a fitting end to one of the ugliest elections in recent years, said Paulo César de Oliveira in Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro). Not since the 1964-1985 military dictatorship “has there been such a heavy, radicalised political environment”. The deep animosity between the two candidates was on full display during the televised debate held two days before the vote, said Stephen Gibbs in The Times. It “descended into a shouting match”, with Lula calling his hard-right rival “a habitual liar, a thug”. Bolsonaro, for his part, had the word “corrupt” written on his palm to serve as a reminder, as he put it, for what Lula’s Workers’ Party stood for. He would be keeping his distance from his opponent during the debate, he declared, “because my wallet could be stolen”.

Spending spree

The grimiest part of the whole race, said Roseann Kennedy in Estadão (São Paulo), was the vast spending spree Lula went on after losing the first round. In the final three weeks of the contest, the PT accelerated spending on measures announced in the last year, totalling R$354 billion (£50 billion) – “institutionalised vote-buying” on a huge scale. That includes forgiving the debt of micro-entrepreneurs, and pushing through a 15% increase to the Bolsa Família programme, which provides cash to low-income households – even changing the payment schedule so people would receive the benefit days before the final vote. It makes a mockery of Brazil’s electoral law, which prohibits incumbents from granting these benefits mid-campaign.

Worse, Lula’s last-minute splurge will only aggravate Brazil’s deteriorating public finances, said O Globo. They are just one of a series of crises the president immediately faces in his fourth term. There are also the accusations of corruption against Lula’s inner circle, including his eldest son. And the fact that he’ll be governing with a hostile parliament which, following the first round of elections, now has a distinctly conservative (and Bolsonaro-friendly) profile.

Brazil’s president already has an “extraordinary biography”. He led historic workers’ strikes during the military dictatorship, and helped draft the 1988 constitution. Imprisoned after governing for two terms, he stormed back to power in 2022, becoming a “symbol of democracy” when he defeated Jair Bolsonaro. Now, having just turned 81 years old, Lula faces his biggest challenge of all.

Viktor Orbán is being touted by the Trump administration as the next secretary general of the United Nations.

“You read that correctly,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, reflecting that the appointment of Hungary’s former authoritarian populist prime minister to succeed António Guterres would be hugely controversial.

What did the commentators say?

Russia and China are “believed to be supportive” and “when the US, Russia and China all want the same thing at the UN Security Council, they usually get it”.

There are “plenty of reasons” not to back Orbán, “such as that he would act as an apologist for Vladimir Putin and other dictators”. But he would be the “dream Maga-conservative candidate”, one State Department official told the WSJ, thanks to what the paper called “his moves against mass migration, liberal NGOs and Hungary’s left-leaning courts and press”.

It has been more common for “failed liberal politicians” to end up in roles at “intergovernmental networks and transnational bureaucracies”, said Philip Cunliffe on UnHerd. These appointments “allow politicians to retain the trappings of high office long after they have been rejected by their own country”.

Orbán won “five national elections, four with supermajorities” so “has a more impressive electoral track record than most liberals” who might be candidates for the top UN job.

But “it would be strange to think of a person less inclined toward the UN”, said Balkan Insight. He was “apparently encouraged by the Trump administration to enter the race”, said Josie Ensor in The Times, but some “UN watchers” think Orban’s name may be being used a “‘stalking horse’ to make the case for another, more pragmatic, contender: the British-educated Emirati diplomat Lana Nusseibeh”.

“Momentum has quickly shifted” towards Nusseibeh, prompting “speculation that she may have been America’s first choice all along”. But her denial of accusations that the UAE is fuelling the civil war in Sudan by supporting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has caused criticism.

“With all five Security Council permanent members so tied to and dependent on the UAE, it will be no surprise if they eventually wave Nusseibeh through,” said Dino Mahtani on Middle East Eye. “But don’t expect her to act in the interest of the victims of wars, mass atrocities and genocides.”

What next?

Guterres’ second five-year term as UN secretary general ends on 31 December. There are seven candidates officially running to replace him, including Nusseibeh but not, yet, Orbán.

To save the UN “from the irrelevance in which it now wallows”, said former EU and US officials Alex Rondos and Mark Medish in The Guardian, its next leader “will require the concerted backing of the few powers that govern the security council”. War has become preferable to dialogue and diplomacy, but the UN can be a “problem-solver rather than a bystander, a credible forum rather than a costly talking shop, and the prime instrument for collective action”.

This won’t happen “unless the great powers want it to”. Appointing a new secretary general “is one of the few moments when they must agree on a qualified person and a timely agenda”.

With many American tech companies looking to expand their footholds across the world, a large number have planted their flags in Aragon, a diverse region of northeast Spain. While Aragon is one of Spain’s least-populated areas, its tech boom is quickly becoming consequential.

Why Aragon?

Many U.S. conglomerates are moving there because of Aragon’s sparsity. The area is a “Big Tech company’s dream,” as “vast, uninterrupted stretches of the region are empty,” said Bloomberg.

Aragon’s capital, Zaragoza, is Spain’s fourth most populous city, but beyond that the “landscape opens out into broad countryside where most municipalities have fewer than 26 residents per square mile,” said Bloomberg. This large territory has made Aragon one of the “fastest-growing data center hubs, with investments announced by Amazon, Microsoft and others surpassing $94.4 billion.”

Amazon is one of the biggest investors and “promises to spend almost $40 billion to build multiple vast complexes — one alone as large as 600 American football fields,” said NPR. Amazon and others like it believe Aragon “could serve as a model for a European Union seeking to triple its data center capacity within seven years and narrow the AI infrastructure gap with the U.S. and China,” said Reuters. Unlike other areas in Spain, Aragon’s government is also largely friendly to data centers.

What does this mean for the region?

Many officials “speak boldly of the jobs and long-term prosperity that await once Aragon becomes ‘the Virginia of Europe,’” said Bloomberg, referring to Loudoun County, Virginia, which has the world’s highest concentration of data centers. The Aragon government “expects data centers to create tens of thousands of jobs and says local companies are already feeling the positive impact.”

Still, questions about long-term viability remain. Due to fears about the AI bubble bursting, some investors have “cast doubt on the billions of dollars that tech companies are pouring into infrastructure upgrades and partnerships with AI startups,” said The Wall Street Journal. The rapid buildup of tech has also “left many in Aragon feeling excluded from decisions that will profoundly impact their region and lives,” said NPR.

“We are going to open the window and see nothing,” said Silvia Baselga, who lives near a data center construction site, to NPR. It’s “going to be like living beside a prison.”

“Why is everybody so mad?” said The Wall Street Journal, about the Bayeux Tapestry’s return to Britain and the “class war” that has broken out around it.

Britons who want to see the historic embroidered cloth dating from the 11th century “say they’re being treated like Taylor Swift fans on Ticketmaster”, while “American tech billionaires, luxury hotel guests and museum sponsors get to skip the line”.

‘Akin to a birthright’

The Bayeux Tapestry “holds a particular position in British public consciousness” because “it tells, over 230 feet of finely embroidered cloth, the story of the last time England was conquered” – the victory of William of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

“For many Brits, seeing it is akin to a birthright.” But when tickets went on sale people found them hard to get, and then “word started to trickle out about who was having no trouble getting in”. For example, the luxury hotel One Aldwych offered tickets to the tapestry as “part of a package stay, with guests in rooms that cost around $1,100 (£825) a night promised a viewing any date and time of their choosing”.

Meanwhile, some visitors are being given a different experience, said Lara Brown in The Spectator. “Most art critics and journalists” have been “permitted by museum marshals to stop and appreciate the thing”, but “the rest of us commoners will have no such luck”.

After queueing outside, we were “informed by our guide that we would be going inside in precisely 32 seconds”. There we were “introduced to a cartoon bird who would guide us through our ‘experience’”. After a further hour’s wait, we reached the display and realised that the focus of the staff is to get us “through the exhibition hall as fast as humanly possible”.

Bayeux biscuits and a Norman soldier teddy

“The reason the queue is going slowly is because people are dawdling inside”, said Giles Coren in The Times. And “they are hustling people along inside because they don’t want the queue to be too long”. So “how, exactly, Einstein, do you think they can solve both” of those problems?

I am “sympathetic” towards the British Museum, said Brown in The Spectator, because “hundreds of thousands of people want to visit” and “they need to find a way to get us all through”. Although I’m “grateful to have seen such an important piece of English history”, I would have been “even more grateful if I had been allowed to properly look at it”.

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, acknowledged that “the experience has not been as smooth as we would have liked”, and announced new measures including longer opening hours, an audio guide and extra seating for those stuck in the queue.

But his statement “stopped conspicuously short of an apology”, said The Telegraph. So “the question now is whether the museum’s attempts to right the ship will prove enough, or be seen as too little, too late”.

Meanwhile, visitors can enjoy the gift shop, which manages to “upstage” the exhibit itself, said CNN. “A box of Bayeux biscuits, Bayeux Tapestry horseman keyrings, a maritime tea light holder and a Norman soldier teddy bear”, are among the delights on offer to commoner and tech billionaire alike.

The first shipment of Venezuelan oil has arrived in the US, under the terms of Donald Trump’s opaque and highly controversial deal with the South American nation.

The president claimed that, “the biggest oil deal in the history of the world” with Venezuela’s Washington-backed interim government would bring the US “BILLIONS of Barrels”. But many Venezuelans see it as an illegal surrender of natural resources to enrich a select few, at the behest of a colonial US. Trump further fanned these fears by suggesting that “someday soon” Venezuela might “become a prosperous 51st state”.

What do we know about the deal?

In August, the US announced a partnership agreement with North American Blue Energy Partners (Nabep), a private firm registered in the Bahamas and run by the Venezuelan billionaire Alejandro Betancourt López. The full text of the deal has since become “one of the most sought-after secrets in Washington”, said ProPublica.

Caracas has given Nabep control of 17 oil fields, and the Trump administration has taken a 35% stake in the firm. The deal allows the US government to purchase its first million barrels of Nabep’s crude oil, with no mark-up, for $30 (£23) a barrel, or less than a third of current market prices, sources told The Washington Post. The US then sells the oil to refineries run by Exxon Mobil and Venezuelan-owned Citgo Petroleum.

“The agreement has raised eyebrows to say the least,” said the BBC. Nabep is “little known” outside Venezuela and Betancourt has been under investigation in five different countries, mainly for corruption and money laundering. The 46-year-old oil baron has never been charged with a criminal offence, and denies any wrongdoing.

What’s in it for Trump?

Oil prices have skyrocketed across the US since the outbreak of war with Iran, while Trump’s approval ratings have fallen to record lows ahead of the midterm elections next week. This first shipment “gives Trump a chance to tout access to cheaper crude as ​evidence his policies are delivering economic benefits”, said Reuters. US petrol and diesel prices “will soon come plummeting down”, he wrote on social media – “JUST WATCH!”

Trump’s words show “the extent to which the White House is seeking to leverage its influence” over Venezuela for its own “political benefit”, said The Washington Post. But oil experts say the deal is “not expected to have a significant impact” on prices at US pumps. US refiners are already operating at maximum capacity, leaving them little room to scale up, and thick, heavy Venezuelan crude is particularly difficult to refine.

What’s in it for Venezuela?

Venezuela’s Trump-backed interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, has insisted that Caracas retains sovereignty over its massive oil reserves. “The benefits” of this oil deal are “endless”, she said, bringing in revenues of more than $209 billion (£154 billion) and turning Venezuela into “an energy powerhouse”.

But the deal has “provoked outrage” across Venezuela’s political spectrum, said The Guardian. One prominent opposition figure called it “a massive land grab” by a “rapacious, mafioso” US.

Some survivors of extreme weather events are channelling their experience and “starting to organise into a political force”, said The Guardian.

With apocalyptic floods, wildfires and other events becoming more common, that force is growing and transforming devastation and heartache into action.

‘Political toxicity’ around climate change

These survivors are calling for “improved disaster response and even action on the politically contentious issue of global heating”. The “shock” of extreme weather is bonding them in “an unusually bipartisan way”, with “politically diverse delegations” travelling to Washington to lobby politicians.

Some of them are surprised to find themselves in the role of activist. “I just didn’t care about politics,” said Kylie Nidever, whose childhood home in Hunt, Texas, was one of the few in her neighbourhood to survive floods last year. “I never thought I’d be doing this.”

Their “common woes” have helped develop a “greater appreciation of the role of the climate crisis in disasters” among those “previously sceptical” of the connection. But the “political toxicity” around climate change, which Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “bullshit”, means the campaign groups have names that don’t include the term, such as Extreme Weather Survivors and Rebuild: the National Disaster Survivors Association.

Extreme Weather Survivors concentrates on issues such as federal aid, debris clean-up and insurance reform. The latter has particular resonance because survivors of Hurricane Helene in 2024 “struggled to navigate a patchwork of insurance policies” after the storm, said WFAE 90.7.

‘Power in humanity’

A meeting of survivors in Texas in October suggested that politicians “don’t yet feel overwhelming political pressure to engage with those affected by extreme weather”, said The Guardian. In a community hall in Kerrville, near where flash floods killed 136 people last year, all of the candidates for the Texas governor election and selected state legislators were invited to speak to survivors but “only one”, the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, “showed up”.

But even if survivors don’t make a “major impact” at this election, “many feel this will change as warping weather” raises home insurance rates and other costs and “large chunks of the year” see “toxic wildfire smoke, flooding and heat”.

Meanwhile, “one of the most powerful discoveries is how quickly trauma can become power if the right support is there”, Amanda Rosa, from Extreme Weather Survivors, told the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

She’s “watched survivors go from breaking down in a support call to testifying before the Senate judiciary, and briefing FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] leadership in a matter of months”. Rosa explains that “when people are given the space to feel, heal, and then speak, their stories can move people”. Their advocacy “isn’t separate from the emotion, it comes from it” because “their power is their humanity”.

Trailblazer Tomoka Nishiyama has become the first female kishi – a professional player of shogi, a Japanese board game often compared to chess.

Shogi has two professional classifications: kishi, which is, in theory, open to women as well as men, and joryū kishi, which is for women only. But, since the Japanese Shogi Association was established in 1924, every single kishi player has been a man. Nishiyama has the honour of “breaking a century-old ceiling” in an overwhelmingly “male-dominated game”, said The Japan Times.

‘Stifling’ maleness

On an 81-square shogi board, there are wooden counters that can be played in a similar way to the rooks, kings, bishops, knights and pawns of chess, but there are additional complexities. Players also control “jewels”, “lancers” and “silver generals”, and nearly all captured pieces “can be redeployed to attack their former king”, said The Times.

Professional shogi matches bring together “some of the country’s most brilliant minds in subtle contests of technique, strategy and intuition” but there is “an atmosphere of stifling maleness”. For years, it’s simply been assumed that women are “intellectually incapable” of competing at the highest levels. Nishiyama’s achievement finally puts paid to that.

Not that her rise to the top was easy: she had encountered “repeated setbacks” in her journey to kishi, said The Japan Times. Her first effort, in 2021, fell short and, in 2025, she narrowly lost another bid, defeated 2-3 in an examination in which candidates must win three matches against five professionals. She finally made it under a new ruling that allows five-time winners of the “prestigious” women’s Hakurei title to qualify for professional status – which she formally accepted this week.

Shoulders of giants

All this follows a breakthrough for joryū kishi players last December, when the Japanese Shogi Association overturned a rule it had introduced eight months earlier that barred new mothers and women in the last six weeks of pregnancy from title matches.

It was a measure reportedly intended to protect women’s health but, when Kana Fukuma, who once held six of the eight major women’s championship titles, forfeited a title under this rule, she protested loudly. “I was forced to choose between titles and giving birth,” she told Japanese media. The rule was eventually rescinded but shogi officials bear “a heavy responsibility for the confusion it caused”, said The Mainichi.

After confirming her kishi status, Nishiyama thanked the senior female players who “have always been kind to me” and “taught me about the difficulties of being a woman in shogi”. I’m aware that their history “is what has allowed me to be where I am today”.

Israelis go to the polls today. It’s their first general election since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023 led to war in Gaza. With opinion polls suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition is “neck and neck” with the main opposition bloc, this is a nation “deeply divided and ready for a fight”, said the BBC. Most Israelis see this election as “the most consequential in their country’s history”, said The Guardian.

What did the commentators say?

For Israelis in Netanyahu’s electoral strongholds, the prime minister is their “champion and protector against enemies across the region” and against a loathed “domestic ‘elite’ they perceive as undermining the will of the people” by succumbing to “international pressure to allow a Palestinian state”, said Neri Zilber in the Financial Times.

Elsewhere, the atmosphere is very different. On Saturday, thousands rallied in Tel Aviv to protest against Netanyahu’s government and call for an independent inquiry into the security failures that led to the 7 October Hamas attacks. “Taking part were leading figures from opposition parties, including Gadi Eisenkot,” said Al Jazeera. The Yashar party leader, and Netanyahu’s main centre-right rival, “was greeted by chants of ‘Who’s coming? The next prime minister’”.

Division has also arrived by air. As most Israelis living abroad are not allowed to vote by post, “expatriates need to cross oceans to cast their ballots”, said The Telegraph. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics estimates the number of citizens living abroad at 600,000, so the expat vote has the “potential to tip the scale”. There’s much talk “about the thousands coming home, determined to remove Netanyahu”, said Jonathan Sacerdoti in The Spectator, “but thousands also are coming to keep him in office”.

The young will be a crucial voting demographic. More than 500,000 Israelis have reached voting age since the last election in 2022. This generation “came of age after the Oslo process collapsed” and were teenagers when the October 7 attacks occurred, said The Guardian. “Bucking global trends,” they “are more right-wing than older generations”.

What next?

The first exit polls will be published at 10pm local time (8pm in the UK) but neither Netanyahu’s bloc nor Eisenkot’s are projected to win the 61 seats needed to form a majority government. There’s likely to be weeks or months of political wrangling before any workable coalition government can be formed.

The “critical balance of power” will almost certainly be held by the two Arab-majority groupings, said the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Yolande Knell. Most of the other parties, including Eisenkot’s Yashar, have so far said they would not work with Arab parties, because of “a lack of shared values”. The Arab groupings are open to alliances but they have their own policy aims, not least a solution to “rampant gang crime”. In this high-stakes election, it’s “Arab citizens could yet decide who wields power in Israel, and they see this vote as key to their own future in the country”.

Across Malawi, filling up your petrol tank has become an endurance test. In the past four weeks, fuel shortages have become a “national emergency” across the southeast African country, said The Guardian.

Drivers wait for hours at empty forecourts for deliveries, while one has morphed into a “makeshift village” where some camp out for days. At Mount Meru petrol station in Zomba, the former capital and Malawi’s fourth largest city, drivers sleep “under the bellies of trucks” and “aggressively block any queue-jumpers” as the situation turns “patience into hostility” at the nation’s petrol pumps.

‘Terrifying’ atmosphere

Fuel shortages have been a “recurring problem” for years in Malawi and were a “major issue” in last year’s general election, said Reuters. There had been a temporary improvement but the onset of the Iran war has plunged the country back into crisis.

Despite being one of the poorest countries in the world, Malawi has one of the “highest fuel pump prices in Africa” at more than $3 (£2.25) a litre, said Semafor. The recent crisis has sparked a “nationwide crackdown” on stockpiling and “black market sellers”; petrol stations “caught hoarding” could risk losing their licence and unauthorised sellers face arrest.

The result is a “terrifying” atmosphere at petrol stations, where attendants face a “barrage of verbal abuse” and threats from “angry motorists”, said The Guardian. For those who rely on vehicles for their jobs, there is a particular “psychological toll”, while low-income commuters reliant on shared transport also face soaring fares.

Easing pressure

Malawi relies on imported fuel but supplies have been hit by a shortage of foreign currency, primarily US dollars.

The country has been “urgently” encouraged to “diversify its struggling economy”, said Deutsche Welle. Currently, Malawi depends on tobacco exports, but increasingly unpredictable harvests related to climate change and dwindling smoking rates across key European markets have significantly impacted revenue. Diversification into more reliable sectors, including tourism, has been floated as a means to bring in the hard currency needed to allow the nation more access to global markets.

The International Monetary Fund is making “considerable progress” on a support package that would help stabilise Malawi’s economy, said Semafor.

Pressure is also being applied on the government to “change its importation policies” to open the fuel market to more suppliers, said Malawi24. The Consumers Association of Malawi says that licensing more operators to import fuel and sell it “at prices that reflect the cost of securing supplies under the current market conditions” will ease pressure on supply, “even if consumers have to pay higher prices”.

What happened

As the most destructive riots in modern French history engulfed the country last week, France ordered troops into the streets and imposed curfews in multiple cities. Shattered glass littered sidewalks after rioters smashed and looted thousands of shops, torched cars and buildings, and attacked police, who fired tear gas and water cannons. The protests began in September as student demonstrations over underfunded, understaffed schools, but they soon mushroomed into a larger, less coherent outpouring of rage involving at least half a million protesters. In Limoges, the clock tower of the 19th-century city hall collapsed in flames; masked vandals broke into Marseille’s city hall and toppled the statue of Marianne, the national symbol; and Paris’ iconic Monument to the Republic was damaged. Over the weeks of demonstrations, at least 1,250 people have been injured — the majority police — and more than 7,000 have been arrested. President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged some “legitimate demands” but vowed that “those who destroyed must pay.”

The unrest soon spread across Europe, where nearly every capital saw protests, some of them violent. In Belgium, buildings, monuments, and public facilities were damaged. Italy sent 500 soldiers to combat looting and arson in Milan, where most of the hundreds arrested were teens. Ongoing demonstrations over the housing shortage swelled in Spain and Portugal, where students set up tent camps in city squares. In Albania, where anger over development in a nature preserve has spawned an antigovernment movement, protesters hurled Molotov cocktails. President Trump and Vice President JD Vance sought to tie the riots to the upcoming midterms. “If you want to see what is at stake in this election,” Trump said, “just look at what’s happening in France.” Vance shared a post of the burning Limoges tower with the comment “This is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country.”

What the columnists said

France is no stranger to protests, said Nora Bussigny in The Free Press, but these “civil-war-like scenes” are new and horrifying. Law-abiding citizens are “traumatized.” One young Parisian mother told me that when she warned the rioters ransacking a café outside her window not to sully their cause by looting, they shouted, “You bourgeois bitch, we’re going to rape you!” Then they tried to break into her apartment.

These are not “mere schoolchildren,” said Noah Rothman in National Review. “Within their ranks, the protesters have incubated” the “civilizational cancer” of antisemitism, and it’s a radical and violent strain. Rioters in Paris burst into Ohaley Yaakov synagogue, “scattering holy books across the floor, overturning tables, and opening the Torah ark — defiling its contents.” It’s not that this was an explicitly anti-Jewish protest. But the protesters in France, as in the U.S., have adopted the Palestinian flag as a catchall symbol of oppression, and violence as their strategy. When will we “wake up to the West’s peril?”

These riots had many causes, said Sylvie Kauffmann in the Financial Times. The country “is adrift, politically, fiscally, and socially,” and its political class is only making things worse. Farleft party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon of France Unbowed has “tried to capitalize on the chaos,” openly sympathizing with the protesters and even joining protests last weekend. The “main beneficiary,” though, is likely Marine Le Pen, whose far-right National Rally party wants to expel migrants; she is now favored to win the presidency next April.

The postwar French social compact was “never really tenable,” said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. American progressives have often gazed longingly at France’s “sacrosanct social benefits,” which include universal health care, cheap tuition, and retirement at age 62. But funding all that is insanely expensive. Government spending now makes up “a whopping 57%” of France’s GDP. Nearly a third of its education budget is eaten up by pensions, so its poorer schools are crumbling. Debt outpaces GDP altogether. It’s not surprising that these “policies of national self-impoverishment have broader effects on social cohesion and national security.” Young talent is fleeing, and those who remain are rioting in the streets and fighting one another for dwindling resources.

“It’s not only France that’s feeling the heat,” said Lionel Laurent in Bloomberg. Most Western countries are aging and feeling the sting of inflation, especially in ballooning housing costs. That’s why affordability is the main question in the French election next year as well as in the U.S. midterms. What’s missing from the politicians “is honesty on the reforms that are needed — both from politicians and the aging electorates that are blocking inescapable change.”

What happened

Trump administration envoy Steve Witkoff praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “humanitarian” on a visit to St. Petersburg last week, after President Trump stunned U.S. allies and lawmakers from both parties with a string of decisions that will aid Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. In Russia to discuss possible peace talks between Trump, Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Witkoff hailed Putin for releasing Stephen Hubbard, a retired American teacher who was snatched from his home in eastern Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion. Hubbard, 74, was imprisoned on what the State Department called false charges of fighting for Ukraine; fellow prisoners said he was tortured for being American. “You are a humanitarian, sir,” Witkoff told Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine has killed at least 15,000 civilians. “I salute that and I commend you.”

Trump issued an executive order last week suspending sanctions included in legislation that he signed last month, which would have hit top buyers of Russian energy and Russian officials and companies. Trump said the sanctions pause was needed because he didn’t want to “drive Russia away from the bargaining table.” The waiver came a week after Trump announced he was suspending other energy sanctions to buy hundreds of thousands of tons of Russian diesel fuel. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials said the U.S. cut off advanced warnings on incoming missile strikes for several days and had limited Ukraine’s access to the satellite internet service Starshield, used to guide Ukrainian attack and defense drones. The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk, whose Starlink supplies Starshield under a Pentagon contract, ordered the slowdown after consulting with Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon had not manipulated the service, but noted that Starlink has “terms of service” that need to be complied with.

Zelensky said it would be a “historic mistake” for the U.S. to switch sides and support Russia. But Trump claimed “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine” and hasn’t “been doing much,” despite its increasing attacks on Ukraine’s power grid and on civilians. He spoke just hours after a drone strike on a park in Kharkiv killed six people, including a 1-year-old who died in her stroller. “We’ve given tremendous amounts to Ukraine,” Trump said. “We’ve got nothing back.”

What the columnists said

“Trump’s assistance to Putin keeps growing by the day,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. In waiving the sanctions contained in the law — which was championed by the late GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham — Trump claimed he was serving the national interest. “But the opposite is true.” Trump’s best pal Putin responded to this “gift” with one of the war’s fiercest strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, hitting more than 15 power facilities. Meanwhile, the administration “still hasn’t come clean” on who throttled Starshield, or why the delivery of crucial Patriot interceptor missiles to Ukraine is being held up. After the midterms, there must be a “bipartisan reckoning.”

The dealmaker in chief may be eyeing business opportunities, said Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster in The Atlantic. Instead of “a battle for the modern, rules-based world order,” many Trump allies see the Ukraine war “as an impediment to future business deals with Russia.” If Kyiv just surrendered, it would “open up avenues to Russia’s diesel, rare earth minerals, and other resources.” The New York Times has reported that the administration has discussed a possible multibillion-dollar deal for assets owned by Russia’s Lukoil. That deal would directly benefit a Trump donor as well as Middle Eastern executives with ties to Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Trump has finally achieved his heart’s desire, said David Corn in Mother Jones: “a deal with Putin.” For decades he’s hungered to do business in Russia; as president, he’s laid bare his yearning “to be a Putin BFF,” providing cover for “a foreign adversary that has attacked American democracy repeatedly.” Trump, who couldn’t give a fig about international laws or Ukraine’s democracy, has seen Russia’s invasion “mainly as a nuisance” blocking him from the alliance he craves. “Putin’s criminality and barbarity were obstacles.” But Trump “has decided to move past that. Vlad is his man.”

For Republicans and Democrats alike, Trump’s “shocking” actions should be “the last straw,” said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. Russia is “an enemy committed to our destruction,” led by a “murderous dictator.” Trump is “giving him aid and comfort” as he wages war against a democratic ally, bent on its “conquest.” And he’s doing it all as Russia is “actively abetting Iran’s military operations” against the U.S. with intelligence and drone weaponry.

“America is now an ally of Russia,” said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic. In thrall to Putin, Trump has not only betrayed Ukraine; he’s “abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful— security arrangement in human history.” And he seems to have done so to serve not national interests but his own. Until now, “Manchurian candidates and red presidents” allied with Russia were “the stuff of paranoid fiction. But this alliance now exists.”

“The question at issue is not just about Ukraine and Russia,” said Mark Hertling in The Bulwark. “It is about what the United States stands for.” For 250 years, Americans have believed in “sovereignty, self-determination, and opposition to territorial conquest.” Now Trump is executing a “disturbing and shameful abandonment” not only of Ukraine but of those bedrock principles. In America’s long history we haven’t always lived up to our values. “But rarely have we so obviously and notoriously abandoned them.”

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.