Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday insisted that the Islamic republic would 'not back down' in the face of mass protests that have spread across the country
Hundreds of demonstrators have gathered in Somalia’s capital to protest Israel’s recognition of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland
There have to be consequences for Rob Key and Brendon McCullum but English cricket’s problems lie much deeper and will be much harder to fix It seemed fitting, as the final moments ticked down at the Sydney Cricket Ground , as the day, the match, the tour seemed to ooze and melt a little at the edges under a hard white January sun, that Ben Stokes should finish this Ashes series still standing, but only just. It was at least a suitably slapstick final session in front of a scattered, holiday-ish crowd. Australia custard-pied their way to a victory total of 160, narrowly avoiding falling pianos, dangling off giant clocktowers along the way. Continue reading...
Vladimir Putin unleashed his sinister nuclear-capable 8,000 mph Oreshnik missile in a strike on the outskirts of Ukrainian city Lviv, Russian confirmed.
Case brought by Muslim leaders and MP follows failed 2024 bid and seen as part of global anti-women’s rights backlash A group of religious leaders and an MP in the Gambia have launched efforts to overturn a ban on female genital mutilation at the country’s supreme court. The court case, due to resume this month, comes after two babies bled to death after undergoing FGM in the Gambia last year. Almameh Gibba, an MP and one of the plaintiffs, tabled a bill to decriminalise FGM that was rejected by the country’s parliament in 2024. Continue reading...
You might think that the ongoing controversy over how West Midlands Police handled a football match last year between Aston Villa and the Israeli team Maccabi Tel Aviv was about the game itself.
The Israeli left has gotten used to fighting small, isolated battles. Mickey Gitzin, head of the New Israel Fund, thinks on a completely different scale – and says leftists can't leave now
A female prisoner behind bars are MCI-Framingham, Massachusetts's only female prison, said she was locked away after reporting a transgender inmate raped her.
Mothers have been left without maternity care and report breast milk drying up thanks to rising malnourishment, Maira Butt writes. Now, 100 leading figures of the arts are calling for action
In 1934 and 1978, Fifa’s big event was given over to authoritarian aims. There’s no more doubt that 2026 will be the same By 1934, it was entirely evident what Benito Mussolini was up to. Italy’s dictator had already consolidated power, colonized Libya and annexed the city of Rijeka. He nevertheless got to stage the second-ever World Cup, managing it with a heavy hand and even supplanting the Jules Rimet trophy with a far larger one. Hosting and winning that World Cup didn’t sate his expansionist appetites. By the end of decade, Mussolini would take Ethiopia, annex Albania and back Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. It was equally well established in 1978 that General Jorge Videla’s military junta in Argentina, which had taken over two years earlier, was maintaining its grip on power through systematic detention, torture and murder . Still, protestations from other nations were ignored and the World Cup kicked off. Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on May 12. You can preorder it here . He teaches at Marist University. Continue reading...
Rift deepens as Riyadh says Aidarous al-Zubaidi, leader of the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council, was helped to flee Yemen Saudi Arabia has accused the United Arab Emirates of smuggling a UAE-backed separatist Yemeni leader out of the country after he failed to turn up for crisis talks in Riyadh on Wednesday. The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen said Aidarous al-Zubaidi had fled the port city of Aden for Abu Dhabi under Emirati supervision, deepening a diplomatic row between Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Continue reading...
Pauline Hansonhas accused Anthony Albaneseof refusing to name radical Islam as 'the real problem' in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack.
Seattle drug abusers heaped praise on Mayor Katie Wilson when asked about her soft-touch policies by the Daily Mail.
A country 'cannot enforce its law on the territory of another state' without consent, UN rapporteur tells Al Jazeera.
US and Russian ideologies would be in alignment, leaving Europe as an island of liberalism, according to analysts.
Turkiye closely monitoring Israel’s regional manoeuvres in the Eastern Mediterranean as tensions widen.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says the Bulgarian diplomat chosen as 'designated' director-general.
Lloyd’s List analysis suggests 40 suspicious vessels joined Russian registry last year, with 17 reflagged last month Forty ships accused of belonging to a large “shadow fleet” moving sanctioned oil for Venezuela and others were reflagged to Russia last year in an apparent attempt to gain Kremlin protection from American seizure. Analysis by the shipping intelligence publication Lloyd’s List suggests that of those, at least 17 suspicious vessels joined the Russian registry over the past month, compared with 15 ships in the previous five months of 2025. Continue reading...
The U.S. president’s decision to withdraw from dozens of international groups will make America’s enemies rejoice, The Independent’s World Affairs Editor Sam Kiley writes
In the early fray of foreign interventions, evidence is largely circumstantial. But here the circumstances tell a powerful story As late as Saturday afternoon, fires continued to smolder in parts of Caracas. Residents throughout the city, stunned and anxious, filled grocery stores and gas stations, stocking up before a future unknown. Everywhere the question hung in the air like the smoke still clouding Venezuela’s capital: what next? After months of military buildup, deadly strikes at sea and a looming ground war, the United States made good on its threats to attack Venezuela in a dramatic overnight raid that ended with Nicolás Maduro in a New York City jail cell. Yet 48 hours later, little else appeared different in Caracas: Maduro’s inner circle remained in place; state institutions remained in their control; streets were calm, if tense, while authorities called on people to return to their daily lives. In other words: move along, nothing to see here. Alejandro Velasco is an associate professor of history at New York University Continue reading...
Prosecutors in the United States say Chen Zhi boasted of pulling in $30 million a day
There is palpable tension: not because anyone trusts the president and the US, but because now there is opportunity for change Jesús Piñero is a historian at the Central University of Venezuela In 1936, Venezuelans learned for the first time what it meant to transition towards democracy. While this was not the only period of transition the country would experience (since the process that began in 1958 consolidated a more open and enduring political regime), the transition of 1936 was longer and more complex, resembling the one Venezuelans are now experiencing after the capture of Nicolás Maduro on 3 January 2026. Coromoto Escalona, a 35-year-old woman, was preparing her baby’s feeding bottle when she heard some strange noises in the house. It was two o’clock in the morning. She wondered whether the fridge had broken down, since it sometimes made strange noises when it was damaged. Her eldest daughter, who was scrolling on WhatsApp, shouted from her room: “Mum, they’re bombing us.” The two of them stopped what they were doing, grabbed the essentials – the feeding bottle, water and some food – and ran to an underground room in their house, an old colonial mansion in La Pastora, a working-class neighbourhood in central Caracas. Jesús Piñero is a journalist and a historian at the Central University of Venezuela Continue reading...
US envoy welcomes pause in hostilities in contested region although it is unclear whether deal will hold Syria’s government has announced a ceasefire after three days of clashes with Kurdish fighters in Aleppo, which has led to more than 140,000 people being displaced. The pause in the fighting, which was the most intense in the country for more than six months, came into effect at 3am local time (midnight GMT). Under the terms of the ceasefire, Kurdish militants were to leave the three contested neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud, Ashrafieh and Bani Zaid, where clashes were happening. They would be provided safe passage to the north-east of the country, which is controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and be allowed to take light arms with them. Continue reading...
The Mexican American artist was scheduled to give two concerts for young people on February 7
Six months pregnant, the student had returned home briefly after marrying a Dalit man despite facing threats from her family
The former Little Mix star confirmed her twins, eight month old daughters Ocean Jade and Story, had been diagnosed with the condition in an Instagram post on Sunday.
AI tool also used to undress image of woman killed by ICE agent in US, says research Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok has been used to create sexually violent and explicit video content featuring women, according to new research, as the British prime minister added to condemnation of images it has created. Grok has also been used to undress an image of Renee Nicole Good , the woman killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in the US on Wednesday, and to portray her with a bullet wound in her forehead. Continue reading...
Sample of roughly 500 posts shows how frequently people are creating sexualized images with Elon Musk’s AI chatbot New research that samples X users prompting Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok demonstrates how frequently people are creating sexualized images with it. Nearly three-quarters of posts collected and analyzed by a PhD researcher at Dublin’s Trinity College were requests for nonconsensual images of real women or minors with items of clothing removed or added. The posts offer a new level of detail on how the images are generated and shared on X, with users coaching one another on prompts; suggesting iterations on Grok’s presentations of women in lingerie or swimsuits, or with areas of their body covered in semen; and asking Grok to remove outer clothing in replies to posts containing self-portraits by female users. Continue reading...
The End Violence Against Women Coalition said it had been a year since the inital law was suggested
The warning from Moscowcomes after President Volodymyr Zelensky's allies said they had agreed to key security guarantees for Ukraine at a summit in Paris.
We’ve already geoengineered the planet through the careless release of greenhouse gases. Now we need a plan to manage the risks we’ve set in motion A few months ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a Georgia representative, held a hearing on her bill to ban research on “geoengineering”, which refers to technological climate interventions, such as using reflective particles to reflect away sunlight. The hearing represented something of a first – a Republican raising alarm bells about human activity altering the health of the planet. Of course, for centuries, people have burned fossil fuels to power and feed society, emitting greenhouse gases that now overheat the planet. Unfortunately, her hearing waved past an urgent debate that policymakers are confronting around the world: after centuries of accidental fossil-fuel geoengineering, should we deliberately explore interventions to cool the planet and give the energy transition breathing room? Craig Segall is the former deputy executive officer and assistant chief counsel of the California Air Resources Board. He is also former senior vice-president of Evergreen Action and a longtime climate advocate. He has academic seats at the University of Edinburgh, New York University, and the University of California at Berkeley The opinions in this piece are his own. Baroness Bryony Worthington was created a life peer in 2011, giving her a seat in the UK’s House of Lords where she served as Shadow Energy Minister She has over 25 years of experience working on climate, energy and environmental policy in the NGO and public sectors, and in the private sector. Continue reading...
As the conflict in Sudan passes the grim milestone of 1,000 days, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper writes that the same diplomatic energy that helped end the war in Gaza is needed to end the crisis
Fresh evidence has emerged that could explain the decades-long hostilities between Fulani herdsmen and the people of Agatu Local Government Area (LGA) in Benue State. Documents obtained exclusively by DAILY POST show that part of Agatu land was secretly ceded to Fulani herders in 2017, an act that some said has fueled persistent violence and […] Benue herders crisis: How Agatu land was secretly ceded to ‘Indigenous’ Fulani herdsmen [Documents]
Zelenskyy calls for ‘clear reaction’ from world after strikes including missile attack about 50 miles from Ukraine’s border with Nato member Poland Meanwhile, the country’s prime minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, offered a bit more detail on the power and water supply outages in the aftermath of the Russian attacks overnight. In a short update on Telegram, she said that work was under way to restore power to “more than 500,000 consumers” in Kyiv, after damage to substations, lines and generation facilities. Continue reading...
Russia fires suspected hypersonic missile at critical infrastructure in Lviv after Zelensky accuses Putin of weaponising winter
A wave of humiliating sexualised imagery must prompt regulators and politicians to step up An online trend involving asking Grok, the Elon Musk-owned chatbot, to undress photographs of women and girls and show them wearing bikinis has rightly sparked outrage in the UK and internationally. Earlier this week Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, described the proliferation of the digitally altered pictures, some of which are overtly sexualised or violent, as “unacceptable in decent society”. What happens next will depend on whether she and her colleagues are prepared to follow through on such remarks. The government’s generally enthusiastic approach to AI, and the growing role they see for it in public services , do not inspire confidence in their ability to confront such threats. In addition to the deluge of bikini images, the Internet Watch Foundation, a charity, has evidence that Grok Imagine (an AI tool that generates images and videos from prompts) has been used to create illegal child sexual abuse images. Yet while X says that it removes such material , there is no sign of safeguards being tightened in response to bikini images that are cruel and violating even where they do not break the law. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . Continue reading...
Russian mortality rates reportedly soar, troops test new tactics and Zelenskyy reshuffles Defence Ministry.
Ceno Bar and Restaurant announced this week it was shutting down for good, with its owners blaming Highfield House Hotel that adjoins it for a decline in customers.
Labour party chair says government having conversations about use of platform in light of sexualised Grok images UK politics live – latest updates UK ministers are considering leaving X as a result of the controversy over the platform’s AI tool, which has been allowing users to generate digitally altered pictures of people – including children – with their clothes removed. Anna Turley, the chair of the Labour party and a minister without portfolio in the Cabinet Office, said on Friday that conversations were happening within the government and Labour about their continued use of the social media platform, which is controlled by Elon Musk. Continue reading...
Barely a mile from Floyd’s murder, an officer killed Renee Nicole Good. We must peacefully say no to this violence On 25 May 2020, America witnessed a stunning act of police brutality when a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, murdered George Floyd . The killer, Derek Chauvin, apparently confident that he would be immune to accountability, did his deed in the open, with other officers standing by and in front of a crowd of onlookers. The video of Floyd’s murder shocked the nation. Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty Continue reading...
The Oreshnik, whose name means Hazel Tree, is an intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile
Gustavo Petro tells the BBC's Ione Wells that the United States is treating other nations as part of a US "empire", after Trump threatened Colombia with military action.
The sociopolitical ideology founded by former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is rooted in anti-imperialism.
Russia has said that a plan to send European soldiers to Ukraine is “dangerous,” which has lowered hopes for a quick end to the war that has been going on for almost four years. European leaders and US representatives said this week that after the war, Ukraine will get promises of security. These promises will […] ‘You’re inviting war’ – Russia warns US, European leaders over plan to send soldiers to Ukraine
The opposition-controlled Congress voted in December to pass a bill that would reduce Bolsonaro's 27-year sentence.
Christian singer Stacie Orrico has named Universal Music Group and her ex manager Britt Ham in a lawsuit, alleging he sexually abused her when she was 14.
In an explosive lawsuit, the parents of Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin claim the murders could have been prevented by WSU.
A horror crash involving several teenagers in the early hours of December 13 last year will have caused unimaginable sadness for the families of the victims.
The presence of the rusting, 100,000-tonne vessel set the scene for another dramatic Special Forces raid on the high seas, if the US President chooses to intervene.
US oil company executives are expected to meet with Trump to discuss investments in Venezuela's oil sector.