World news

World news

People on the island have grown so accustomed to Chinese displays of power that life continues as usual. As China carried out live-fire drills and rehearsed a military blockade in the waters surrounding Taiwan this week, 70-year-old Liao said she wasn't worried about war. She was enjoying life as a retiree, playing mahjong with her friends and keeping an eye on the stock market.

Israeli forces have begun demolishing dozens of buildings housing Palestinian families in the northern occupied West Bank, forcing mass displacement as winter sets in, and leaving communities scrambling for shelter. Israeli military bulldozers and cranes tore through residential blocks in the Nur Shams refugee camp on Wednesday, flattening homes that housed about 100 families. Thick clouds of dust rose over the camp as residents watched from a distance, according to an AFP news agency journalist at the scene.

Latest attacks bring the total number of known boat strikes to 33 and the number of people killed to at least 110 since early September. The United States military has killed at least three people in yet another attack on alleged drug smuggling boats, and ordered the country's coastguard to launch a search for survivors. The statement by US Southern Command on Wednesday did not reveal where the attacks occurred. Previous attacks have been in the Caribbean Sea and in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

As we enter 2026, one truth is impossible to ignore: children around the world are facing their greatest levels of need in modern history just as the humanitarian system meant to protect them and their futures is battling some of its biggest challenges in decades. The events of 2025 marked a dramatic rupture in global humanitarian and development efforts. When the United States abruptly halted foreign aid in January, billions of dollars vanished overnight.

The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, has praised his troops fighting abroad as forging an invincible alliance with Russia in a new year's message, state media said on Thursday. Pyongyang has sent thousands of troops to support Russia's nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine, according to South Korean and western intelligence agencies. At least 600 have died and thousands more have sustained injuries, according to South Korean estimates.

On the shores of the Dead Sea, about 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian women had gathered, holding hands and calling for an end to what they called a vicious cycle of bloodshed. It was an October evening in 2023 and they had travelled from villages, settlements and refugee camps around the region for a mass peace rally jointly organised by the Israeli movement Women Wage Peace and the Palestinian group Women of the Sun.

Australian beef producers said they were extremely disappointed after China announced a 55% tariff on imports that exceed quota levels in a move to protect a domestic cattle industry slowly emerging from oversupply. China's commerce ministry said on Wednesday the total import quota for 2026 for Australia and other countries such as Brazil and the US covered under its new safeguard measures is 2.7m metric tons, roughly in line with the record 2.87m tons it imported overall in 2024.

The world's richest individuals accumulated a record $2.2 trillion (£1.7 trillion) in additional wealth during 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with just eight billionaires accounting for around a quarter of the gains. The surge pushed the combined net worth of the world's 500 wealthiest people to $11.9 trillion, fuelled by booming equity markets, a rally in cryptocurrencies and metals, and renewed investor optimism following Donald Trump's election victory in 2024.

Can Syria's new banknotes help rebuild the economy?

The United Arab Emirates has announced the withdrawal of its forces from Yemen, declaring an end to what it called counterterrorism operations there, after Saudi Arabia accused Abu Dhabi of supporting separatists in the Gulf nation. The announcement on Tuesday came after Yemen's internationally recognised government demanded the UAE pull its forces from the country within 24 hours, a call that was backed by Saudi Arabia.

A suicide bomber targeted a group of Syrian police officers in the city of Aleppo killing one member of the security forces and wounding several others, the official news agency SANA reports. The incident, hours before the new year on Wednesday, follows the bombing of an Alawite mosque in Homs that killed at least eight people on Friday. The Aleppo governorate administration said the assailant blew himself up after officers approached to detain him in the city's Bab al-Faraj neighbourhood.

Russian forces shelled the town of Kostiantynivka in Ukraine's Donetsk region, killing one person, an official said. The deadly attack came a day after an attack in Druzhkivka killed another person and wounded four, according to the Ukrinform news agency. Russian forces also launched waves of attacks on the Black Sea ports of Pivdennyi and Chornomorsk in Ukraine's Odesa region, hitting two Panama-flagged civilian vessels Emmakris III and Captain Karam as they approached to load wheat, the Ukrainian navy said. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksii Kuleba said that oil storage tanks were also hit in the port attacks.

Crowds flock to Dhaka's streets to mourn the loss of the former prime minister, who led Bangladesh thrice. Bangladesh bade farewell to former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia in a state funeral that drew vast crowds mourning a towering political figure whose leadership shaped the nation for decades. Zia, the first woman to serve as prime minister in the South Asian nation of 170 million people, died on Tuesday aged 80.

Ukraine says it struck oil facilities in Russia's north and south 12/31/2025December 31, 2025 Ukraine's domestic security service, the SBU, reported that Ukrainian long-range drones struck the Temp oil depot in the Russian city of Rybinsk, located approximately 270 kilometers north of Moscow. The SBU described the facility as a key logistics hub for fuel and said that the attack sparked a large fire.

"China has become one of the world's fastest-rising economies in terms of innovative capacity," he declared in a televised address on Wednesday beamed to the nation's 1.4 billion people, in which he touted China's achievements in large AI models and breakthroughs in chip research and development. The Chinese leader underscored the role of innovation in his government's aim for high-quality economic development and the integration of technology and industry, citing the advancements in humanoid robots and drones.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah came to global attention because he was a leading figure in the 2011 pro-democracy revolution that turned Cairo's Tahrir Square into a surging sea of young people. The demonstrators chanted Down with corruption, Down with autocracy and Down with dictators. When the uprising succeeded in toppling Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak, the world rejoiced, including Europe and North America. Abd el-Fattah was all over the media, a voice for the part of the movement that was committed to building an accountable, participatory democracy

A peace deal is "90 percent ready...but the remaining 10 percent contains, in fact, everything...that will determine the fate of peace, the fate of Ukraine and Europe, and how people will live," he said in the televised address. "What does Ukraine want? Peace? Yes." "But at any cost? No. We want the end of the war. Not the end of Ukraine," he added.

We know that Trump bombed a factory in Maracaibo. We fear that they mix coca paste there to make cocaine and take advantage of its location on the Maracaibo Sea, Petro said via X. He added that those responsible for producing cocaine in the area are the ELN guerrilla group, with whom his government tried to negotiate a peace agreement, but those talks are now frozen.

So far, there has been no official reaction from the Chavista regime to the announcement made by Donald Trump regarding the attack that U.S. forces allegedly carried out on Venezuelan soil against previously identified drug trafficking targets presumably linked to the Tren de Aragua criminal organization. The operation, carried out with drones earlier this month, is the first military aggression by a United States government against Venezuela in its entire history.