World news

World news

During the meeting, Russia offered personal protection to the Malagasy leader, who has repeatedly stated that he feels threatened. In this way, Russian President Vladimir Putin intends to add Madagascar to the growing list of African countries under his direct influence, following the same pattern of protection and military cooperation in exchange for access to resources. This list already includes the Central African Republic (CAR), Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Libya, and Equatorial Guinea, among others.

In the displacement camps of Ad-Damazin in southeastern Sudan's Blue Nile State, the war is reshaping social norms and introducing new realities that are forcing Sudanese women into manual labour to survive. Rasha is a displaced mother. She has ignored old boundaries and perceptions of what a man's work is and started working as a woodcutter to feed her children. Carpentry is hard, but the axe has become an extension of my hand, Rasha told Al Jazeera Arabic.

Ukraine, Russia, and the United States, after two days of "constructive" peace talks in Abu Dhabi, are set to resume peace negotiations in the United Arab Emirates capital next week, even as the war itself showed no signs of letup. On January 23-24, "the United States coordinated a trilateral meeting alongside Ukraine and Russia, graciously hosted by the United Arab Emirates," White House envoy Steve Witkoff wrote on X.

Ukraine and Russia have agreed to hold a second round of US-brokered direct peace talks next weekend after a two-day meeting in Abu Dhabi, despite Ukrainian complaints that negotiations were undermined by a barrage of deadly strikes. The trilateral talks in the UAE would resume on 1 February, a US official said on Saturday, adding: I think getting everyone together was a big step.

The head of the department of defence, Greg Moriarty, will succeed Kevin Rudd as Australia's ambassador to the United States. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, announced Moriarty's appointment to the role on Sunday. A former chief of staff to Malcolm Turnbull and former Australian envoy to Iran and Indonesia, he has led the defence department since 2017. He will take up the posting in Washington from April. Moriarty was Australia's inaugural counter-terrorism coordinator and previously worked in US Central Command in the Gulf during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He represented Australia in Papua New Guinea, and as a negotiator of the peace monitoring group for Bougainville.

Israeli forces have fatally shot a Palestinian man north of Ramallah, the Palestinian Ministry of Health says, as Israel escalates its violence in the occupied West Bank in tandem with its genocidal war in Gaza. The ministry identified the victim on Sunday as Ammar Hijazi, 34, from Nablus. list of 3 itemsend of list Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency, said Hijazi was shot while driving a vehicle.

But urgency should never become an excuse for illusion, spectacle, or political shortcuts. The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be sharper. While United States President Donald Trump and a group of world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to sign the charter of the so-called Board of Peace and unveil glossy reconstruction plans, the killing in Gaza continued. Since the ceasefire came into effect on October 10, no fewer than 480 Palestinians have been killed.

Sophie Quinn was sitting in a car with her partner, John Harris, outside a house in Lake Cargelligo on Thursday afternoon when a ute approached from the opposite direction. From the driver's side window, at least three shots were fired, killing her and Harris. Quinn was seven months pregnant with a boy her family say she planned to name Troy.

There is a dashboard for pizza places around the Pentagon. The Pentagon Pizza Index (PizzINT) is a real-time dashboard that monitors pizza shop popularity around the Pentagon area in Arlington, Virginia. Based on the famous "Pentagon Pizza Theory," this project tracks potential correlations between late-night pizza orders and military activity. Originally a Cold War-era observation that pizza deliveries to government buildings might indicate crisis activity, the theory gained internet fame during recent geopolitical events. Our dashboard brings this concept into the digital age using publicly available data.

Not me, thanks: children need the human connection the love that gives life meaning. As he works towards launching SpaceX on to the stock market, in perhaps the biggest ever such share sale, the world's richest man has every incentive to talk big. Yet as Musk waxed eccentrically about this robotic utopia, it was a reminder that major decisions about the direction of technological progress are being taken by a small number of very powerful men (and they are mainly men).

The Australian took control of the race on stage 2, launching a powerful acceleration alongside defending champion Jhonatan Narvaez that no one else could follow, with the pair finishing first and second on the stage. After losing two teammates, including Narvaez, to crashes on the shortened stage 4, Vine also hit the deck on the final day when kangaroos jumped into the peloton.

The Syrian army and the SDF agreed to a four-day ceasefire on Tuesday, after Kurdish fighters relinquished swaths of territory to government forces, which also sent reinforcements to a Kurdish stronghold in the northeast. Government troops have seized expanses of northern and eastern territory in the last two weeks from the SDF in a rapid turn of events that has consolidated President Ahmed al-Sharaa's rule.

"We must ensure full implementation of everything agreed with President Trump in Davos regarding air defense," he stressed.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has accused his United States counterpart Donald Trump of wanting to create a new UN, days after the US president launched his new Board of Peace initiative in Switzerland. Instead of fixing the United Nations, what's happening? President Trump is proposing to create a new UN where only he is the owner, Lula said in a speech on Friday.

The recent demonstrations erupted in late December when protests over a currency collapse morphed into a nationwide upheaval calling for the overthrow of the Islamic republic Iran's system of governance. The authorities' response led to one of the most violent confrontations since the country's 1979 revolution. Iranian state media said the protests had left 3,117 people dead, including 2,427 civilians and members of the security forces.

Donald Trump lauded the UK's military after Prime Minister Keir Starmer urged the US president to apologize for downplaying the role of NATO troops in the war in Afghanistan. The president in a Saturday social media post stopped short of making a full apology, but said that British forces are "second to none" and that their "GREAT and very BRAVE soldiers" will "always be with the United States of America."

A suicide bombing attack at a wedding in northwestern Pakistan has killed at least seven people, according to the police. The bombing tore through a building housing members of a peace committee during a wedding ceremony on Friday in Dera Ismail Khan district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, police official Muhammad Adnan said on Saturday. The committees are made up of residents and elders and supported by Islamabad as part of its efforts to counter fighters in the regions along the Afghan border.

Some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people traveled to Switzerland this week, to attend the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos. That meant some of the world's fanciest aircraft descended on nearby airports, too. Business Insider has been tracking the private jets and government aircraft that arrived there this week. On Monday alone, there were around 160 private jet arrivals from over 40 countries spread across five continents.

But the echoes of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin's imperial land grab of the waiter's own country are clear to him. They're crazy. The pair of them. For those paying more attention in Ukraine, amid Russian airstrikes, the freezing cold and power cuts, the correspondences are not only clear, but often alarming even if for now Trump has switched from sabre rattling to trying to rationalise a vague and incoherent deal he thinks he struck for the territory with Nato.

South Korea hosts about 28,500 US troops in combined defence against North Korea's military threat and Seoul has raised its defence budget by 7.5% for this year. South Korea is capable of taking primary responsibility for deterring North Korea with critical but more limited US support, said the National Defense Strategy, a document that guides the Pentagon's policies. This shift in the balance of responsibility is consistent with America's interest in updating US force posture on the Korean Peninsula, the document added.