World politics

World politics

After the fortnight the prime minister has had, a spot of rarefied pageantry is just the ticket. The government weathered a three-hour monsoon of questions in the Commons on Tuesday, which amounted to MP after MP asking why on earth Lord Mandelson was appointed as our man in Washington in the first place, and then why it took so long for Sir Keir Starmer to realise his position was untenable.

China's annual international security gathering in Beijing is the first since the start of US President Donald Trump's second term. The event is part of Beijing's bid to bolster its recent power projection efforts in "upholding international order." The Xiangshan Forum, which runs from Wednesday to Friday, is widely regarded as China's answer to the Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia's premier annual security gathering in Singapore, typically attended by minister-level officials from Western countries, including the United States and its allies.

There have been many times in American history when celebrations of the country's multi-ethnic, ever-changing demography served as powerful counterweights to narrow, exclusionary, nationalisms. In 1855, for example, the publication of Brooklyn native Walt Whitman's offered a "passionate embrace of equality," writes Song of Myself Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, "the soul of democracy."

In response to the June 2025 war between Israel and Iran, mainstream media outlets - both Persian-language and international - largely fell into predictable camps, either backing their preferred state actor or maintaining strategic silence about favored governments' actions. Yet this binary framing has systematically erased the perspectives of Iranian leftist feminists who, even while facing brutal repression from their own government, refuse to be co-opted into supporting external military intervention.

Genocide is occurring in Gaza,

Doha, Qatar Foreign dignitaries from across the Arab and Muslim world have gathered in Doha, and observers are expecting them to deliver a decisive response to Israel after its attack on Qatar. The emergency summit of the Arab League and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) opens on Monday, a day after foreign ministers from the participating states met behind closed doors in Doha to hammer out a draft resolution proposing concrete measures against Israel.

The United States and China have reached a framework agreement to transfer TikTok's ownership to US control. Officials from both countries made the announcement on Monday. list of 4 itemsend of list The short-form video app was set to be banned in the US by Wednesday if its owner ByteDance did not agree to sell the company to a US-based operation or if the US did not extend a pause of the ban, which the White House has already done three times, most recently in June.

My country's capital was subjected to a treacherous attack targeting a residence housing the families of Hamas leaders and their negotiating delegation, the Qatari emir said in his opening speech at the emergency summit of the Arab League and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). list of 4 itemsend of list Our citizens were surprised, and the entire world was shocked by the aggression and cowardly terrorist act, he said, referring to the global condemnation of the September 9 attack that killed six people.

The proposed increase seeks to guarantee a fair and proportional contribution, based on the intensive use of infrastructure and specialized human resources,

We were not allowed to paint in red, green, black and white: The Palestinian flag was forbidden. And the colors of the Palestinian flag were forbidden,

US political analyst John Mearsheimer argues that Israel attacked Qatar to preclude any closure to the war on Gaza. In the aftermath of an Israeli attack on Qatar targeting the leadership of Hamas, American political scientist John Mearsheimer argues, The Israelis are interested in making sure there are no negotiations that settle the conflict in Gaza. Mearsheimer tells host Steve Clemons that the United States and Israel basically act as a tag team, and despite a mild rebuke by President Donald Trump, the US supports Israel unconditionally.

I am ready to do major Sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing, and when all NATO Nations STOP BUYING OIL FROM RUSSIA, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Saturday, which he described as a letter to all NATO nations and the world. Trump proposed that NATO, as a group, place 50-100 percent tariffs on China to weaken its economic grip over Russia.

The veteran negotiators Hussein Agha, representing Palestine, and Robert Malley, an American diplomat, played instrumental roles in that long effort, including the critical Camp David summit of 2000. But, in their new book, "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," they conclude that they were part of a charade. "A waste of time is almost a charitable way to look at it," Malley notes bitterly. "At the end of that thirty-year-or-so period, the Israelis and Palestinians are in a worse situation than before the U.S. got so heavily invested."

Dalio described a future where humanoid robots, smarter than humans, and advanced AI systems, powered by trillions of dollars in investment, could render many current professions obsolete. He questioned the need for lawyers, accountants, and medical professionals if highly intelligent robots with PhD-level knowledge become commonplace, stating, "we will not need a lot of those jobs." This technological leap, while promising "great advances," also carries the potential for "great conflicts."

In 2015, a scrappy group of Hong Kong film-makers imagined what their semi-autonomous city could look like under the increasing influence of the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental, reads the first scene in the opening credits. But decade on, many of the predictions made in Ten Years have, in some form, come to pass.

No matter where you are, Israel's long arm' may be coming for you next. And so Israel has struck again. On Tuesday, the Middle East's favourite perennial aggressor launched missiles against the Qatari capital of Doha, targeting Hamas leaders involved in negotiations surrounding a proposal from the United States for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli genocide of Palestinians has officially killed more than 64,000 people in less than two years.

Israeli-Russian academic and Princeton University student Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was held captive in Iraq for more than two years, was released earlier this week in an exchange deal with Israel, according to a report by Iran's Tasnim News Agency. Two prisoners, including a Lebanese national seized in 2024, were released by Israel in exchange for the freedom of Tsurkov, whom Tasnim described in its report on Thursday as an Israeli spy.

And yet this powerful and complex documentary, directed by Brandon Kramer (a distant relative of some of the people involved) and co-produced by Darren Aronofsky, is a reminder that the situation now can't be understood without remembering the Hamas massacre how it was calculated to provoke a rage-filled reaction that would discredit Israel internationally, what it meant and continues to mean within Israel and how the political and ideological connotations of the hostages have themselves evolved.

One US official reportedly said that the Trump administration was ready to go, ready to go right now, but we are only going to do this if our European partners step up with us. Trump's proposal comes amid his frustration at brokering a peace deal, including at a high-profile summit with Putin in Alaska, and amid Russia's increasing drone attacks, including its largest ever air attack on Ukraine last week.

As the U.S.-Japan alliance confronts an era where digital threats increasingly target economic stability and national security, integrating cyber strategy into the relationship is essential. The longstanding pillars of military, trade, and diplomacy have supported peace and prosperity. Still, the rise of cyberspace as a borderless, high-stakes domain demands that both nations make cybersecurity a foundational element of their partnership in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

The small, resource-rich Gulf state has helped negotiate deals to release United States citizens held in Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela, and return Ukrainian children to their families after they were taken to Russia. Qatar has also presided over diplomatic breakthroughs between Sudan and Chad, and Eritrea and Djibouti, as well as the 2011 Darfur peace deal. In 2020, Qatar helped negotiate the US's withdrawal from Afghanistan with the extremist Taliban group.