World politics

World politics

Let me begin with the uncomfortable truth: A rift, a deep divide has opened between Europe and the United States, Merz said. Vice President JD Vance said this a year ago here in Munich. He was right in his description, Merz said, as he called for a new transatlantic partnership. Referencing Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, Merz also warned that Europe did not need to move in the same political direction as the US, saying the culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party secured a clear majority of parliamentary seats in the country's landmark election, with party chairman, Tarique Rahman, set to become the next prime minister. Follow here. BNP chief Tarique Rahman is set to lead Bangladesh after the electionsImage: Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo/dpa/picture alliance Skip next section What you need to know Bangladesh Nationalist Party has secured a clear majority of parliamentary seats BNP chairman Tarique Rahman expected to take over from interim government led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus

It's inherent to their business model: When you make a website where anyone can bet on anything, there is going to be someone with some nonpublic information ready to place a wager and make a killing. Sometimes, those insider-trading scandals are relatively harmless, like the one-day-old Polymarket account that correctly predicted 17 out of 20 Super Bowl halftime show events, including appearances from Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin.

The following day, as I was reading through my cables, I looked up from my computer to find a very unkempt individual, about 20 years my senior with bushy eyebrows and a dirty, wispy looking mustache hovering over me, in essence, violating my personal space. He introduced himself as Aldrich Ames, the individual planning the conference which I had refused to sign off on the day before.

The meeting was originally scheduled for next week, but Netanyahu insisted on moving it up after Trump's envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, met in Oman with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in the first round of talks that both sides have agreed to continue (amid a threatening military buildup in the Middle East), although without specifying a date or location for the next round.

A White House official has reiterated Donald Trump's opposition towards Israel annexing the West Bank, after Israeli plans were announced that would pave the way for more settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory. The measures, announced on Sunday, included allowing Jewish Israelis to buy West Bank land directly, and extending greater Israeli control over areas where the Palestinian Authority exercises power. It was unclear when the new rules, approved by Israel's security cabinet, would take effect but they do not require further approval.

Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov dismissed Kamchybek Tashiev as chairman of the State Committee for National Security (SCNS) on February 10 and appointed Jumgalbek Shabdanbekov as acting chairman amid rising political tensions in the Central Asian nation. Tashiev, a longtime political ally of Japarov, is currently undergoing medical treatment in Munich, Germany, according to the Kyrgyz Embassy there. Sources close to Tashiev told RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service that the dismissal "was completely unexpected," adding that he "heard this news while receiving medical treatment."

Iranian security forces have arrested several figures from the country's reformist movement, local media reported on Monday, as Tehran's crackdown on dissent continues to widen. Those arrested include Azar Mansouri, the head of the Reformist Front, which represents several factions, former diplomat Mohsen Aminzadeh and Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, who was part of the group that stormed the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Japan's stock market has hit a record high after Sanae Takaichi's Liberal Democratic party (LDP) secured a comprehensive victory in Sunday's election. The LDP won 316 of the 465 seats in the country's lower house the first time a single party has secured two-thirds of the lower house since the establishment of Japan's parliament in 1947. The Japan Innovation party, the LDP's coalition partner, won 36 further seats, giving a supermajority of 352 seats.

Hamas's political leader abroad, Khaled Meshaal, has rejected calls to disarm Palestinian factions in Gaza, arguing that stripping weapons from an occupied people would turn them into an easy victim to be eliminated. Speaking on the second day of the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha on Sunday, Meshaal described the discussion around Hamas handing over its weapons as a continuation of a century-long effort to neutralise Palestinian armed resistance.

They can't, he said. Pressed to explain, he continued: We are the pot of gold. We're the one that everybody wants. And they can retaliate, but it cannot be a successful retaliation. As Trump saw it, Europe was weak and feckless a minnow compared with the American economic juggernaut. When confronted with a US president prepared to throw his country's weight around, Europe would certainly cave.

I'm always amazed by the myopic drone that colonisation and everything that's happened in our country was all bad, said Seymour, who is leader of the right-wing ACT Party and a member of the Maori community. The truth is that very few things are completely bad, Seymour had said, according to local online news site Stuff.

When the LDP's conservative wing forced a leadership election to replace the embattled Ishiba in October last year, many expected his ally Shinjiro Koizumi the young, telegenic son of a previous prime minister to win. Instead, Japan's party of government for most of the past seven decades took a gamble on his ultra-conservative rival, Sanae Takaichi, installing her as the country's first female prime minister.

Three days after the student-led protests forced Hasina to resign, Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh's only Nobel laureate, took over as the country's interim leader, tasked with stabilising a fractured country after one of its bloodiest upheavals that killed more than 1,400 people. Yunus, now 85, framed his mandate narrowly but ambitiously: restore a credible electoral process, and build consensus around reforms aimed at preventing a return to authoritarian rule by balancing power among different state institutions.

Israel is tolerating violence against its Palestinian citizens to push them out, while weaponising anti-Semitism to pull Jews in. While the international media has rightly focused on the genocide and enormous displacement in Gaza alongside the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, the 300 murders inside Israel in 2025, 252 of whom were Palestinian victims, garnered little to no media coverage outside Israel.

How it works: Gallup polled a nationally representative sample of about 1,000 people age 15 and older in each of 107 countries from March - October 2025. It asked: "According to you, what is the most important problem your country is facing currently?" Respondents wrote in answers, and Gallup grouped them into buckets. By the numbers: The answer was nearly the same everywhere: The economy was identified by a median of 23% of adults across these countries.

This is an environmental and health crime against Lebanese citizens and their land, Aoun was quoted as saying by Lebanon's National News Agency. He added that the incident is a continuation of repeated Israeli attacks on Lebanon and its people. Since Hezbollah and Israel reached a ceasefire agreement in November 2024, Israel has been attacking Lebanon almost daily in breach of the deal.

In October, Hamas and Israel signed a peace deal supposedly intended to stop two years of slaughter in Gaza. Since then, more than 420 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire-an average of about four people a day-in what international mediators continue to describe as a successful de-escalation. The distance between that official narrative and the facts on the ground reveals how the language of ceasefire has been repurposed: It no longer describes a pause in violence but rather a mechanism for managing it, sanitizing ongoing military force under the guise of restraint.

"Don't go!" more than one voice could be heard shouting in the packed Teatro Colón on January 24. The plea was in response to Colombian senator María José Pizarro Rodríguez's declaration that Colombia's President Gustavo Petro would be traveling to the White House on February 3 "in an act of courage." While the popular Pacto Histórico senator was mostly met with cheers and chants of the Chilean protest song, " El pueblo unido jamás será vencido,"

What's happening here is very significant, Al Jazeera's Teresa Bo reported just outside of Hasakah, adding that a convoy of 150 personnel from the Syrian military had entered the city. Where I'm standing right now, there used to be a checkpoint run by the Kurdish-led SDF, and it is now being manned by soldiers from the Syrian army. This shows just how significant this territory is: an area that has been under the control of the SDF throughout the Syrian civil war, she said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has unveiled its annual budget, aiming for steady growth in an uncertain global economy rocked by recent tariff wars. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the budget for the 2026-2027 financial year in Parliament on Sunday, prioritising infrastructure and domestic manufacturing, with a total expenditure estimated at $583bn. India's economy has so far weathered punitive tariffs of 50 percent imposed by United States President Donald Trump over New Delhi's imports of Russian oil.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Theresa Lazaro said on Thursday that ASEAN has not endorsed the three phases of the elections that were held in Myanmar, which concluded last weekend. Lazaro was speaking after hosting ASEAN's first major ministerial meetings this year in the central Philippines city of Cebu, where the Myanmar crisis was high on the agenda. Asked in a news conference if the bloc did not recognise the elections, Lazaro said yes, as of now.

Asked by the Guardian in November in Tehran what cost benefit analysis could possibly conclude that the nuclear programme was a worthwhile project, the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, referred to Iran's sovereign right under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the medical benefits, and the blood of past assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists. He suggested a compromise whereby a consortium including possibly the US could enrich uranium in Iran, but insisted the principle that uranium would be enriched inside Iran remained sacrosanct.

What we're really talking about is whether it will continue as the same entity as it is now. For instance, the way apartheid South Africa was no longer the same entity after 1994, or that East Germany was the same entity after unification [in 1990]. The argument is that Israel, as it stands now, is unsustainable. And it is not so much about the way Israel treats Palestinians, but about division within Israel.