A recently analyzed 250 million-year-old fossil has shown that early mammals laid eggs, according to a paper published in the PLOS One journal on Thursday.

While some examples of egg-laying mammals exist today, such as the platypus and the echidnas, scientists have spent decades looking for proof of this in earlier ancestors.

According to South African Professor Jennifer Botha, one of the scientists behind the breakthrough research, the fossil was discovered in 2008, but could not be analyzed for years without cutting-edge and delicate scanning methods.

“It became clear that it was a perfectly curled-up Lystrosaurus hatchling. I suspected even then that it had died within the egg, but at the time, we simply didn’t have the technology to confirm it,” she said in a statement cited by phys.org.

With the use of advanced synchrotron X-ray CT scanning, which uses a particle accelerator to create extremely high-resolution non-destructive 3D images, the delicate fossil could be studied in depth.

Lystrosaurus was a herbivorous mammal ancestor which survived and then thrived in the tumultuous period after the End-Permian Mass Extinction around 252 million years ago, which is believed to have wiped out up to 96% of all marine species and 70% of land vertebrates on Earth. The catastrophe is theorized to have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions and resulting coal burning, which caused rapid global warming, and left a world of extreme heat and environmental instability.

Judging by the development and properties of the hatchling, the Lystrosaurus likely did not produce milk but laid large eggs, which are more resistant to drying out in a hot, arid environment, according to Botha’s Witwatersrand University.

Its young likely hatched at an advanced stage of development, ready to feed themselves and thrive in the hostile world following the worst extinction event in history.

The EU is sliding into a fuel crisis driven by a global supply shock caused by the US-Israeli attack on Iran. It has already triggered protests, early signs of shortages, and warnings of the wider economic impact.

This has resulted from the disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical route for global energy shipments. Oil prices surged above $120 per barrel during the escalation, and while crude fell below the $100 mark after a two-week US-Iran ceasefire was announced on April 7, it remains well above the $70 level before the war. Prices have remained volatile amid uncertainty over the truce and continued disruption to shipping through the strait.

Why has diesel become more expensive than gasoline?

The European market has shifted toward higher diesel consumption following decades of tax policies that lowered diesel taxes compared to gasoline.

The EU’s refining system produces a different mix of fuels than the market consumes. A barrel of crude oil typically yields about 40-50% gasoline, but only around 30–40% diesel and jet fuel combined, with the rest made up of heavier products.

This mismatch has left the bloc structurally short of diesel. The region is a major net exporter of gasoline but relies on imports for a significant share of its diesel and jet fuel.

Diesel has traded above gasoline prices at the pump in several EU countries.

Why are farmers and truckers protesting?

Rising diesel prices are hitting sectors most dependent on the fuel, particularly agriculture and road freight. The EU’s transport sector is facing a “fast-moving diesel shock,” according to logistics platform Logifie.

Ireland has become the most visible flashpoint of the crisis. Fuel protests have spread nationwide since this past Tuesday, led by farmers, truckers and transport workers, disrupting supply chains and transport networks, according to local media.

Blockades have strained fuel distribution, with queues forming at petrol stations with some running dry amid panic buying. On Thursday, the government called in the army to clear the blockades.

During a protest march in Dublin on Friday, demonstrators carried a coffin with “RIP Ireland” written on it.

Fuel protesters now leaving O’Connell Street for Kildare Street, carrying a coffin pic.twitter.com/5tbT6wkMNL

— Nicky Ryan (@NickyRyan_) April 10, 2026

What do jet fuel shortages mean for summer travel?

Airports across Europe could face “systemic” jet fuel shortages within three weeks if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, according to a letter sent by an airport industry group to the European Commission, as cited by the Independent.

According to Corriere della Sera, “some airports on the continent have been experiencing shortages in jet fuel quantities for days without officially reporting it.” The outlet cited its sources on Friday as saying that “it’s such a sensitive issue that official talk remains tight-lipped,” adding that Brussels is hoping the truce between the US and Iran will hold.

The war in the Middle East has delivered a major global energy supply “shock” that will push up prices further and leave the world economy facing weaker growth, the IMF has warned. 

The US-Israeli attack on Iran and subsequent Iranian retaliatory strikes across the region, including on energy infrastructure, have stressed global markets, driving oil prices higher and raising fuel costs. The conflict has effectively choked flows through the Strait of Hormuz, a key route that accounts for a significant part of global oil and gas supply. 

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said on Thursday that the turmoil amounts to a negative supply shock that is “large, global and asymmetric,” hitting countries differently depending on their reliance on imported fuel.  

Global daily oil flows have fallen by about 13% and LNG shipments by some 20%, she said, warning that even the IMF’s “most hopeful scenario” now involves a “downgrade” to world growth. 

“Had it not been for this shock, we would have been upgrading,” Georgieva said, adding that infrastructure damage, supply disruptions and loss of confidence will leave lasting “scars” on the global economy. 

A further 45 million people have been pushed into food insecurity as a result of the escalation, taking the total number facing hunger to more than 360 million worldwide, according to the IMF. 

The grim outlook comes as Washington and Tehran are expected to hold high-stake peace talks in Pakistan this weekend, after they agreed a two-week ceasefire late on Tuesday. Iran says any ceasefire must include Lebanon, which has been heavily bombarded by Israel this week. The scaled-up attacks, which killed hundreds and wounded more than 1,100, have raised concerns that the Iran ceasefire could be derailed.

Viktor Orban will most likely win the upcoming parliamentary elections in Hungary on April 12; however, for the ruling party, this will be an extremely difficult and hard-fought victory.

The issue is not the loss of charisma by the bright and skillful long-standing leader of Fidesz, nor even the 25% inflation the country experienced in 2023, but rather a shift in the focus of Hungarians’ historical memory. A new generation has grown up within a different historical paradigm and wants a change in political reality, even if this entails foreign-policy and reputational risks for the country.

Walking through the streets of Budapest these days, one gets the sense of two political realities coexisting. In one, there are blue billboards of the ruling Fidesz party with slogans like “Stop war!”, featuring the faces of opponents and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky labeled as a “danger.” In the other, there are rallies of the Tisza party, without party bureaucratic elites but featuring young people in Hungarian national dress carrying EU flags, with photos of the party’s young leader displayed on the hills of Buda. Budapest, like other Hungarian cities, is preparing for the parliamentary elections this Sunday, drawing the attention of political elites from around the world.

Peter Magyar: Not just a boy

The main intrigue and driving force of the current political campaign is the young energy of the Tisza party, particularly its leader with the resonant name Peter Magyar (literally “Peter Hungarian”). Notably, Magyar, who presents himself as a conservative liberal, comes from the very heart of the Fidesz system and Hungary’s highly closed elite. He is the former husband of Judit Varga, who served as the country’s minister of justice in 2019-2023, a great-nephew of Ferenc Madl, Hungary’s president from 2000 to 2005, and the grandson of a former Supreme Court member; his parents also held high-ranking positions in national legal institutions. He speaks the language of Fidesz about national interests, family, a “new homeland,” and a “modern European country” where one can live well and raise children. At the same time, his main criticism of the current ruling system focuses on corruption within the governing party and the need to overcome the entrenched division between right and left that has existed since the early 2000s.

Elections 2026

It can be stated that the real gap between the parties is around 2–3%. Orban draws support from villages and rural areas, while Magyar holds the more progressive Budapest (both halves: the elite Buda and the more relaxed Pest) and other large Hungarian cities where younger populations live and work. Polling data varies depending on the research institute. According to the Hungarian pollster Median, which predicted Orban’s victory in 2022, Tisza leads with 58% against Fidesz’s 35%. The opposition Research Center 21 shows 56% for Tisza and 37% for Fidesz, while the pro-government Nezopont Institute suggests 46% for Fidesz versus 40% for Tisza.

The intensity of the race is also influenced by Hungary’s complex electoral system, where districts are drawn to include both a liberal urban area and several conservative villages. The voting system is mixed, but under its rules, a candidate can win a mandate even with a one-vote advantage, and there is also a ‘winner compensation’ mechanism, where surplus votes for the winner are added to the party list. While this system has previously helped Orbán and Fidesz secure victories, in the current tight race it could work against them. Thus, the question of who will win remains open until the final vote count.

Economy

At first glance, Hungary’s main problems lie in the economic sphere. In 2023, the country experienced the highest inflation in the EU, peaking at 25%, with food prices rising by about 50% in what is de facto a wealthy agricultural country. The situation is worsened by Orban’s conflict with the European Commission, which has frozen more than €19 billion in EU funds owed to Hungary – which amounts to nearly 10% of the country’s GDP.

Magyar claims he could unlock the frozen funds within a month, which would help stabilize the economy and ease social tensions.

Trianon and ‘Deep Hungary’

It is important to understand that Hungarian society is entering a new phase of development. Throughout the 20th century, it was shaped by a sense of deep historical injustice stemming from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the humiliating Treaty of Trianon (1920), which stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its territory.

Even being in the Soviet orbit was not as painful for this formerly imperial society as the loss of territories inhabited by ethnic Hungarians to neighboring states. This does not mean Hungarians have forgotten the suppressed 1956 uprising, but the trauma of Trianon still evokes sentiment and, among some – primarily older rural populations – a desire to ‘take back’ regions like Transcarpathia or parts of Transylvania, which they believe belonged to Hungary for a thousand years.

The euphoria of “returning to Europe” and joining the EU in 2004 has been tempered by difficult and unfavorable economic and agricultural conditions within the EU, as well as challenges integrating into negotiation structures that often disadvantage newer member states. This has fueled feelings of injustice and disappointment, tied to the perception that major political decisions are now made not in Budapest, but in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels. Big politics is inaccessible to small states.

However, historical memory has its limits. A new generation of Hungarians, raised during the country’s integration into the EU and accustomed to free movement across Europe and the world, seeks a more pragmatic and comfortable approach to life and development. They are more cynical about life and family and do not relate to the ‘phantom pains’ of Trianon. Young Hungary increasingly operates with the mindset of a small country navigating within the orbit of major global powers.

This is the core drama of the current elections: two competing visions of how to live in the modern world and within an emerging global order. Which path conservative Hungary will choose will soon become clear. In conclusion, the current difficulties faced by Fidesz signal to Hungary’s ruling elites the impossibility of rewriting history or reversing the course of events already set in motion.

Hunter Biden, son of former US President Joe Biden, has challenged President Donald Trump’s two eldest sons to a “cage match,” in an Instagram video published by content creator Andrew Callahan.

Biden, 56, called out Donald Trump Jr., 48, and Eric Trump, 42, with the president’s sons yet to publicly respond.

“I just got a call from Andrew Callahan… He’s trying to organize a cage match, me versus Eric and Don Jr. I told him I’d do it, 100% in,” Biden said in the video.

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The popular YouTuber told USA Today that the ex-president’s son had likely made the suggestion “in jest.” However, he is willing to facilitate the fight if Trump’s two eldest sons are “willing to engage Hunter in mutual combat.”

Last year, Melania Trump threatened to sue Hunter over his claim that the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to her husband.

The cover-up of a major scandal involving Hunter Biden’s laptop, which he forgot in a Delaware repair shop in 2019, contributed to his father winning in the 2020 election, according to President Trump. The leaked contents of the laptop potentially implicated the Biden family in several foreign corruption schemes.

As one of his last and more controversial decisions as president, Joe Biden granted a sweeping pardon to Hunter, who was convicted in 2024 of breaching federal gun and tax laws.

The pardon covered any offenses Hunter “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.” It covers the time period of Hunter’s crimes and his tenure on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, when his father was in charge of US policy in Kiev during the Obama administration.

Germany has rejected 95% of all new asylum applications from Syrian migrants following a policy reassessment of the Middle Eastern country, according to media reports, citing an official document.

The change represents a stark reversal from the peak of the influx in 2014-2015, when recognition rates for Syrians frequently exceeded 90%. Germany emerged as a primary destination for Syrians fleeing war, driven by the open-door policy of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The country has since become home to one of the largest Syrian diasporas in Europe, with estimates putting the population at close to 1 million.

The figures come from a German government reply to a parliamentary inquiry by Left party lawmaker Clara Bunger, reported by multiple media outlets on Thursday.

According to the document, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) is now applying stricter case-by-case assessments. In October 2025, the BAMF ruled on 3,134 Syrian asylum applications, granting protection to just 26 applicants across all categories. Recognition rates reportedly remain higher for some minorities, including Yazidis, Christians, and Alawites.

After meeting al-Sharaa in Berlin in late March, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said up to 80% of Syrians living in Germany could return home over the next three years, describing it as part of a joint effort to support reconstruction.

Merz later backtracked, saying the figure was proposed by the Syrian side – a claim that al-Sharaa said was exaggerated and did not reflect his position.

The government’s shift in migration policy comes amid pressure from right-wing parties, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which portrays migrants, particularly from outside Europe, as a burden on public services and a driver of crime and social strife.

It also follows a series of violent crimes involving asylum seekers, including a 2024 knife attack in Solingen in which a Syrian national fatally stabbed three people and injured eight others.

Israel has carried out multiple strikes across Lebanon over the past 24 hours, fueling fears that the escalating violence could unravel a fragile two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran.

The expanded offensive in Lebanon since March 2 has killed 1,888 people and wounded 6,092 others, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. It says the April 8 bombardment alone involved “over 100 strikes within minutes,” leaving more than 300 dead and in excess of 1,100 injured.

RT’s Steve Sweeney, who, along with his cameraman Ali Rida, was caught up in this week’s Israeli strikes on central Beirut, reports from the Lebanese capital on the aftermath, where shattered residential buildings, children’s school bags and household belongings lie scattered in the rubble, and the seafront is filled with displaced families sheltering in makeshift tents. 

Residents live with an “overwhelming sense of anxiety,” fearing that “every sound” could signal another strike, he says.

The EU has sharply increased its purchases of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the first quarter of 2026 even as it insists it will phase out Russian energy by the end of next year, the Financial Times reported on Friday.

According to Kpler data cited by the outlet, the EU’s imports from Russia’s Yamal LNG project in Siberia rose 17% year-on-year to 5 million tons in Q1, with the bloc spending an estimated €2.9 billion ($3.1 billion). The EU took 69 of 71 shipments – or 97% – including 25 in March alone, compared to 59 of 68 shipments (87%) in the same period of 2025.

The surge shows there is “no appetite from European buyers to stop buying Russian LNG,” Sebastian Roetters of environmental NGO Urgewald told FT.

The conflict has severely disrupted flows through the Strait of Hormuz – a key chokepoint handling about 20% of global seaborne oil and LNG – and hit Gulf energy infrastructure, driving a surge in LNG prices. Asian spot rates and European TTF nearly doubled before easing after the April 8 ceasefire, but both remain well above pre-conflict levels.

Moscow has echoed the warnings. According to Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev, “Europe and Britain will beg for Russian energy” as the crisis deepens, arguing that the bloc is unprepared for a “long-lasting energy shock” due to its failure to diversify supplies – a shortfall he blamed on “Russophobic, Green, and woke ideology.” Reacting to an FT report on X, he added: “As predicted, Europe needs Russia to survive.”

As predicted, Europe needs Russia to survive. https://t.co/v0z7HuPIh0

— Kirill Dmitriev (@kadmitriev) April 10, 2026

In late March and early April, Ukraine launched a series of drone strikes against the Baltic ports in Ust-Luga and Primorsk, as well as oil terminals on the south of the country in the city of Novorossiysk. This was clearly an attempt to disrupt Russia’s ability to export petroleum products. Additionally, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) have targeted other Russian regions to inflict further damage to the oil and gas industry and strain Russia’s air defense network tasked with protecting critical infrastructure. 

Given the current global situation, increasing exports of petroleum products would provide Russia with much-needed revenue. This income could help offset losses from Western sanctions and stabilize economic growth. Of course, these additional revenues would also benefit Russia’s military-industrial complex, a fact that Kiev is undoubtedly aware of.

Ukraine’s intensified strikes on Russian oil and gas infrastructure, particularly export terminals, aim to reduce Russia’s export capacity. A secondary goal may be to influence the media narrative by demonstrating the AFU’s enhanced strike capabilities. The third objective involves depleting the missile stockpiles of Russia’s missile defense systems through massive drone attacks.

Routes, tactics, and technological edge

In March 2026, the AFU set a record for long-range drone usage. According to Western sources, Ukraine deployed over 7,000 drones. This has been possible due to the mass production of relatively inexpensive drones of various types, with a range of up to 1,500km. Notably, the cost of these drones is quite low, and Ukraine faces no shortage of components, as sanctions and other restrictions do not hinder this supply chain. Drone manufacturing can be decentralized, with some production potentially taking place outside Ukraine. Final assembly likely occurs in several facilities in various locations, disguised as ordinary manufacturing or logistics centers. Clearly, the mass production of drones is a major state industrial effort that also involves commercial companies.

While the flight paths of drones from Ukraine to Novorossiysk raise no questions, the routes by which the drones reached locations as remote from Ukraine as Ust-Luga in Russia's northern Leningrad Region remain less clear.

Several hypotheses exist regarding the flight paths of Ukrainian drones. One hypothetical route extends from northern Ukraine, over Russian territory along the eastern border of Belarus to Leningrad Region, and then onward to the Baltic ports. This route is supported by data on air-raid alerts in western Russia and various accounts. The use of Belarusian airspace is theoretically possible, yet Belarus possesses a robust air defense and detection system. If drones were to infringe upon its airspace, it seems likely that such incidents would be reported.

There is also another interesting hypothesis: the drones may be taking a roundabout route through Poland and the Baltic states, then flying over the neutral waters of the Baltic Sea to approach the ports from the sea. The absence of surface-to-air missile defense systems over the sea lends some credence to this theory, especially considering the reports of drones crashing in the Baltic states and in Finland. It’s also quite possible that NATO countries may allow drones to be routed through their territory. However, this theory lacks ample supporting evidence, and the Russian Foreign Ministry’s response came only several days later and included no substantial details.

Considering the current advancements in autonomous navigation systems, it seems more likely that the drones were routed through Russian territory, using the natural characteristics of the terrain to approach targets from unexpected angles. Drones routed over the sea may be easier to detect – though that’s not always the case. For example, it wasn’t easy for air defense systems to detect drones traveling over the Black Sea.

As a conspiracy theory, one could speculate about the installation of radio beacons in Russia or neighboring countries to enhance the navigation of attacking drones under conditions of electronic countermeasures against existing navigation systems. This is technically possible and does not necessarily violate airspace, although it would require an intelligence network. I believe the military has already figured out how the drones reached their targets. 

So, what steps should be taken to defend against such attacks? What scenarios and methods need to be implemented for effective protection?

The main priority is timely detection. Lightweight drones with piston engines are notoriously difficult to track with traditional airspace radar. However, they can be spotted visually and detected by the sound of their engines. Given that these drones have been in widespread use for some time, appropriate detection measures should be deployed. I hope this issue is being addressed at a level beyond volunteer initiatives, as part of the country’s air defense. 

The second task involves informing all relevant parties about threats. All the structural elements of the army’s missile defense forces must have real-time access to information on detected drones, their flight paths, and potential targets. This will enable swift countermeasures – deploying mobile units, preparing weapons, providing targeting data, and organizing layered defense. This should be the responsibility of a unified governmental structure within the armed forces; departmental or regional units aren’t efficient enough for this mission. Ultimately, the devices used to communicate this information to end users should be simple and user-friendly tablets, not multi-ton trucks. I believe this work is already underway and in the testing phase.

Finally, the third task is the destruction of the drones. On the one hand, any means necessary can be employed; on the other hand, using traditional surface-to-air missile systems (SAMs) isn’t always justified. Firstly, conventional SAMs may not be effective against small, lightweight drones. Secondly, the cost of a missile is many times higher than that of the drone itself.

This is one of the most pressing modern challenges: cheap drone attacks can financially devastate advanced missile defense systems. This is a global issue that affects all technologically advanced nations.

There are several options, each with its pros and cons. The most cost-effective solution in terms of firing costs is laser weaponry. The expense per shot can be measured in mere dollars. However, the systems themselves can cost millions of dollars. Moreover, lasers have limitations regarding range; as the distance to the target increases, the beam’s power significantly diminishes. These large, energy-intensive systems are stationary and primarily serve as a last line of defense. Nonetheless, they can effectively neutralize drones, cruise missiles, guided bombs, and other types of munitions.

Specialized interceptor drones are another promising and already deployed solution. Almost every nation focusing on drone defense is currently developing and implementing such interceptors. They are relatively low-cost, but they do come with a significant drawback: due to their design, they carry very small payloads or rely on kinetic interception – i.e., engage the target through high-speed physical impact. When deployed en masse, however, interceptor drones can prove effective in certain areas and situations. 

Lightweight, short-range surface-to-air missiles are another option. These missiles can utilize both radar and laser guidance; target illumination can originate from the launch platform or a separate carrier. They can be fired from specialized systems like the Pantsir missile system, as well as from aircraft, similar to American APKWS missiles. Their costs are comparable to those of long-range drones.

Additionally, we must consider the tactical construction of air defense. Ideally, we wouldn’t know exactly how this is organized – when it comes to missile defense, all armies protect their tactical secrets. However, it’s reasonable to assume that an effective air defense strategy combines layered stationary defense with mobile air defense units that establish operational lines in directions that are deemed a threat. In this regard, having a comprehensive and accurate picture of the air situation in the region would be invaluable – without such information, mobile units might prove entirely ineffective.

***

The massive waves of Ukrainian drone attacks have become a real test for Russia’s air defense system. Steps have already been taken to enhance both detection and response capabilities against such attacks. Efforts are continuously underway to modernize existing systems and develop new weapons designed to target lightweight drones. Tactics for countering large-scale drone swarms are being refined, and the production of ammunition for these systems is ramping up. Intelligence operations aimed at locating and destroying the production, storage, and launch sites of drones are also likely a priority for the military. Such a comprehensive approach is essential for effectively addressing the threat posed by drone attacks.

Iran should not repeat the mistakes of Libya, which paid a heavy price for trusting the West, the North African country’s former information minister, Moussa Ibrahim, has warned ahead of the talks between delegations from Washington and Tehran.

The first direct meeting between the sides since the US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28 is expected to take place in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Saturday, according to the White House.

The American team will be headed by Vice President J.D. Vance, and will also include special envoy Steve Witkoff and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Tehran hasn’t announced the lineup of its delegation yet, but reports claim that it could be led by parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

In an interview with RT on Friday, Ibrahim – a former cabinet member under longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was deposed and murdered in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 – said that “both parties come to these negotiations with different ideas about peace and conflict.”

For Washington, it is “actually very beneficial to continue to wreak havoc in the region to make sure that any rising regional powers are under control... that the region is never united,” the ex-minister, who now serves as executive secretary of the African Legacy Foundation, insisted.

”The Americans come to these negotiations hoping to find a way to keep the conflict going, but not as escalated as it was in the last few weeks, so they would keep their face and find other ways – economic, political, diplomatic – to punish the Iranians and their friends in the region,” he added.

Ibrahim advised the authorities in Tehran “to be very careful, not to believe the American plans for peace and never to give up sovereignty and deterrence” during the talks.

The Kremlin has clarified that Russia’s Easter ceasefire is a humanitarian gesture, not a substitute for a lasting peace with Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has ordered a halt to hostilities from Saturday afternoon through Sunday.

“We want not a ceasefire, but a lasting, sustainable peace,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday. “And this peace could come today, if [Ukrainian leader Vladimir] Zelensky takes responsibility and makes the appropriate decision,” Peskov added, referring to Moscow’s repeated demands that Kiev withdraw its forces from Russia’s Donbass region.

Putin announced the unilateral Easter truce on Thursday, ordering Russian troops to pause offensive operations from 16:00 Moscow time on April 11 until the end of April 12. The Defense Ministry has been instructed to maintain readiness to repel any Ukrainian provocations.

“We expect the Ukrainian side to follow Russia’s lead,” the Kremlin said.

Moscow has previously declared unilateral ceasefires for Orthodox religious holidays. In 2023, Russia observed truces both during the Orthodox Christmas holiday in January and on Easter weekend in April at the initiative of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2025, an Easter truce was declared again, but was only partially successful as Kiev violated the pause more than 3,900 times, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Trilateral peace talks involving Russia, Ukraine, and the US have been on hold for weeks due to the Iran war, with no new date set. Moscow has consistently said it remains open to negotiations but insists that any lasting settlement must address the root causes of the conflict, including Ukrainian neutrality and recognition of the Donbass republics as part of Russia.

India has described the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon after the announcement of the ceasefire in the Middle East as “disturbing.” 

On Wednesday, Israel’s attacks on Beirut claimed more than 300 lives, as the Jewish state refused to halt its offensive in Lebanon despite a truce being called in the Middle East. 

“We are deeply concerned by reports of a large number of civilian casualties in Lebanon,” Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Randhir Jaiswal said on Friday. “As a troop contributing country to the UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) that is invested in Lebanon’s peace and security, the direction of events is very disturbing.” 

❗️India Voices Deep Concern Over Civilian Casualties in Lebanon

‘As a troop-contributing country to UNIFIL that is invested in Lebanon’s peace and security, the direction of events is very disturbing,’ MEA spox Randhir Jaiswal said pic.twitter.com/XBkvBrGa7v

— RT_India (@RT_India_news) April 10, 2026

New Delhi has always emphasized the protection of civilians as the foremost priority, he said.   

Observing international law and respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states is essential, Jaiswal added. 

Israel stepped up air strikes across Lebanon, pounding central Beirut, just hours after the US and Iran announced a two-week ceasefire.

The escalation comes in an apparent violation of the truce, which mediators said was meant to include Lebanon, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistance that it does not apply.

India has not condemned the US and Israel for their strikes on civilian targets or the assassination of top Iranian leaders. New Delhi has instead chosen to express concern and offer condolences.    
The South Asian nation, which has strong ties with the US, Israel, and Iran has also ruled out the possibility of mediating in the conflict, but has encouraged dialogue between the warring parties.

The European Commission could suspend up to €1.5 billion ($1.78 billion) in funding earmarked for EU candidate Serbia, Politico reported on Friday.

Serbia received €586 million ($685 million) in grants from 2021 to 2024 as part of financial assistance tied to its EU accession process, while a further €1.5 billion made available conditional on reforms could be pulled, Politico said, citing four Brussels-based sources.

The Eurobureaucrats have cited concerns over perceived democratic backsliding in Serbia as the main reason for the potential move. The EU has also long pressured Belgrade to align its foreign policy with the bloc, including adopting sanctions on Russia, a longstanding Serbian partner.

The EU’s enlargement policy has increasingly taken on geopolitical significance, with critics arguing that progress toward membership can depend as much on alignment with Brussels’ strategic priorities as on institutional reforms.

Expansion shaped by opposing Russia

Serbia is among several Western Balkan countries granted EU candidate status in the early 2010s, around the time Croatia joined the bloc.

In 2023, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia were also granted candidate status. The move was widely seen as a signal of the EU’s intent to counter Russian influence, rather than purely a reflection of the readiness of these countries to meet accession standards.

Ukraine has argued that fighting a war with Russia on the West’s behalf strengthens its bid for membership, a position broadly supported by EU leadership, although no clear accession timeline has been set.

Even Poland, a staunch supporter of Kiev, opposes swift accession for Ukraine, citing various concerns, such as the disruption of common EU agricultural markets if Ukrainian farmers gain full access.

‘Nice’ and ‘naughty’ candidates

The EU’s reactions to political developments in candidate countries appear to depend on their governments’ foreign policies. In Georgia and Moldova – which held parliamentary elections in October 2024 and September 2024 respectively – opposition groups alleged irregularities, including the silencing of critical media and misuse of state powers for electoral gain.

Brussels treated the claims in Georgia as credible and indicative of democratic decline. Before the election, Georgia was accused of becoming ‘more like Russia’ by passing laws promoting social conservatism and forcing transparency of foreign political funding. Like Belgrade, Tbilisi declared neutrality in the Ukraine conflict. Georgia’s EU accession process is now effectively frozen.

In contrast, similar accusations in Moldova were largely dismissed by EU officials, who suggested they were part of Russian efforts to undermine the country’s pro-EU leadership. Some Moldovan officials support absorption of their nation by EU member Romania as a path to joining the bloc.

EU ‘worse threat’ than NATO

Russia has traditionally viewed the EU as a mostly economic project posing no military threat, unlike NATO. Russian officials have stated that Moscow does not oppose Ukraine’s EU candidacy, as long as the country remains militarily neutral.

“The EU is no longer just an economic union. It can transform, and rather quickly, into a full-blown military alliance, one overtly hostile to Russia, and in some ways worse than NATO,” Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council, warned last week.

Uncertain outlook for enlargement

EU leaders are also considering changes to the enlargement rules, potentially simplifying accession in various ways. There were even discussions of a “reverse” expansion, allowing Ukraine and others to become partial members with limited rights before meeting all requirements.

In February, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama advocated in an op-ed a two-tier integration model, which would give Balkan non-members access to the EU’s market and free trade arrangement. Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos rebuffed the idea.

Given the EU’s challenging economic situation, near-certainty of long-term tensions with Russia, and increasingly heavy-handed suppression of internal descent, the benefits of accession may not be as attractive as Brussels imagines.

At least 30 civilians, including women and children, were killed when a drone strike hit a wedding ceremony in a town in Sudan’s North Darfur state, the UN has said.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric condemned the attack on Kutum as “unacceptable” at a briefing on Thursday, saying civilians continue to “bear the brunt” of the escalating violence in the African nation.

“Civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected in line with international humanitarian law. In South Kordofan, clashes around the town of Dilling since last Monday have reportedly killed 47 civilians and injured dozens more,” Dujarric said.

Emergency Lawyers, a local rights group monitoring the war, said the drone bombed the gathering on Wednesday and denounced the attack as a “heinous crime.”

No party immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Drone attacks have become increasingly common in war, with both the army and the paramilitary accused of targeting civilian areas.

Last month, the World Health Organization said a drone strike on Al Deain Teaching Hospital in East Darfur killed 70 people, including women, children, and medical staff, rendering a facility serving more than 2 million people out of operation.

The Middle East ceasefire and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz are based on extremely shaky ground, Professor Seyed Mohammad Marandi has said, adding that Israel will do everything it can to reignite war in the region.

Speaking to RT India on Thursday, Marandi, a political analyst and professor at the University of Tehran, said US President Donald Trump has been forced to accept Iran’s framework for negotiations. 

“But right now there is a spoiler, and that is [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” he added. Pointing to the pounding of Lebanon by Israeli forces, Marandi said that “this means the commitments given by the United States are not being fulfilled. And that means that we could have a continuation of the crisis.”

Marandi accused Netanyahu and his allies of wanting the global economic crisis to continue.

On the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, he said Iran would like energy flows to be back to normal.

“That is what we want. We did not start this. We were doing business as usual until this imposed war by the Trump and Netanyahu regimes took place,” Marandi added. “But we’ll have to see, because Netanyahu is violating the ceasefire agreement.”

Marandi said Iran will also watch the American stance at the negotiating table, and see if “Netanyahu and the Zionist regime are able to wreck” the ceasefire. “I have no doubt that the Zionist lobby and the Israeli regime will do whatever they can to make sure this war reignites,” he said.

Marandi said the only thing Trump and Netanyahu have achieved from their war on Iran is to create global hardship.

“We are sanctioned by the United States,” he said. “They don’t want us to use their dollar. So we would prefer ourselves to use other currencies.”

The use of the Indian, Russian, or Chinese currencies is “open for discussion,” Marandi added.

The countries in the Persian Gulf that hosted US bases and facilitated attacks on Iran “have Iranian blood on their hands… They are complicit in this war. And they betrayed their own people,” Marandi stated.

The UK’s proposed digital ID scheme has drawn criticism for not recording whether a person is male or female – traditionally a core identifier alongside name and age – after the government deemed it “not necessary” for identification.

The scheme, unveiled by Prime Minister Keir Starmer last year, has been pitched as a secure, free digital credential stored on smartphones to replace physical documents for identity checks. Initially planned as mandatory, it was made optional amid backlash and a petition with nearly 3 million signatures. A full rollout is planned by 2029, with draft documents stating the IDs will include name, date of birth, nationality or residency status, and a biometric photo – but not sex or gender.

“Information about sex and gender is not necessary for the intended purpose of the digital ID,” the documents state, arguing such data does not improve verification, which will rely on “programmatic” checks and “biometric authentication.”

“Having struggled for so long to define what a woman is, Labour have now decided it’s easier just to abolish the concept entirely,” Shadow Equalities Minister Claire Coutinho told GB News on Thursday. “There can be no excuse for failing to accurately record a person’s biological sex.”

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry… This is ludicrous,” former Labour MP Rosie Duffield added. “The idea that one of the most fundamental identifiers… would not even be recorded… makes a farce of the whole idea.”

Social media users echoed the criticism, accusing the government of acting out of “fear of the woke mob” and branding the initiative “a joke.”

🚨🇬🇧 Meanwhile in bat shit crazy UK - New Government Digital ID won’t state gender.

“When you told me about this, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry”

The British government tyrannical digital ID scheme, which is the steppingstone to total Government control - won’t even… pic.twitter.com/AyJJkTGCvC

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) April 9, 2026

LOL the useless government is so woke its digital ID card won’t say if you are male or female.

Because they can’t ask the question without pissing off their supporters, they’ve decided not to bother 🤣

It’s actually funny. In fact the whole thing is a joke. pic.twitter.com/brHMro3lKH

— Bernie (@Artemisfornow) April 9, 2026

The proposed scheme had already proven controversial. While supporters say it could streamline services and boost security, critics warn it risks turning the UK into a “police state.” Concerns include mass surveillance, centralized data vulnerabilities, and a potential “honeypot” for hackers. A February Ipsos poll found 40% of Britons oppose the scheme, with just 32% in favor – a sharp reversal from July 2025, when 57% supported it and 19% opposed.

The White House has issued a warning to staff against using insider information on the Iran war to trade on financial markets, several media outlets reported on Thursday, citing unnamed administration officials. 

Federal employees are barred from gambling while on government property, while federal ethics regulations prohibiting the use of non-public information for personal gain. Some major policy decisions made by US President Donald Trump have, however, been preceded by well-timed bets, prompting some experts and politicians to question whether information may have leaked in advance.

The White House Management Office reportedly sent a warning email on March 24, a day after Trump ordered a five‑day pause in planned strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure.

Multiple news outlets, citing market data, later reported that about 15 minutes before the abrupt announcement of a policy shift, futures markets saw a surge in trading activity. More than $760 million worth of oil futures contracts reportedly changed hands in under two minutes. Several reports also said three Polymarket accounts collectively earned over $600,000 after correctly anticipating the timing of this week’s ceasefire with the Islamic Republic.

There was no evidence of leaks or misuse of insider information within the administration, with one official describing the email, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, as a timely “reminder” amid discussion of large market trades.

In recent months, media reports have pointed to heightened trading around conflict-related events. Reuters reported in January that an unknown trader made about $410,000 after betting on the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. 

There were also reports of users in Israel placing bets on Iranian missile strikes on Israeli territory, with some cases involving attempts to influence related reporting in order to affect betting outcomes.

Earlier this month, Polymarket apologized after public backlash over allowing bets on whether American airmen from a downed US fighter jet would be rescued from Iran.

The Hungarian government has accused Facebook of interfering in the upcoming parliamentary election scheduled for Sunday by restricting the reach of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s posts while boosting the visibility of his main rival, opposition leader Peter Magyar.

Speaking to Politico, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs claimed that Facebook’s algorithm is “basically working against the government parties.” 

He argued that Orban’s official government page is subject to stricter advertising limits and reduced organic reach, while Magyar is allowed to operate a personal ‘public figure’ profile that enjoys greater algorithmic freedom. 

A report by the think tank MCC Brussels found that despite similar video views, Magyar’s posts have generated nearly three times the engagement of Orban’s. It also noted a trend of “disappearing comments” on content in support of the prime minister’s Fidesz party, while no similar behavior has been observed on opposition pages.

A Magyar aide has attributed the success to the opposition leader’s ability to “speak the language of the algorithm” and keep up with the speed of the news cycle.

Budapest’s latest allegations follow an incident in late February in which Facebook temporarily blocked three pro-government news outlets. The Hungarian National Media Association condemned the move as an attack on freedom of press, suggesting that the tech giant could be “punishing right-wing news portals.”

Last month, after several Fidesz members claimed that Meta started restricting the reach of their Facebook posts, commentators Joey Mannarino and Philip Pilkington identified Oskar Braszczynski as the employee likely responsible. Braszczynski, who works as Meta’s ‘Government and Social Impact Partner for Central and Eastern Europe’, has shared pro-Ukraine, anti-Orban, and pro-LGBT content on his personal social media accounts.

Orban has also accused Ukraine of cutting off oil supplies through the Druzhba pipeline for political reasons, and blocked a €90 billion EU loan for Kiev in retaliation.

On Tuesday, US Vice President J.D. Vance visited Budapest in a show of support for Orban, accusing EU bureaucrats of “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference” he has ever seen. Vance claimed that Brussels has “tried to destroy the economy of Hungary” because they dislike Orban.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is facing the most serious threat to his power in decades, in an election that’s drawn in the EU, US, and Ukraine. RT explores the players, the stakes, and the dirty tricks shaping the Hungarian election.

We’ve delved into the election in our ‘Battle for Hungary’ series, but if you’ve just joined us, here’s what you need to know:

Hungarians go to the polls on Sunday, April 12, to elect all 199 members of the National Assembly. Elections are held every four years in Hungary, and take place over a single round on a single day. Results are typically known within hours of polls closing.

How many people will vote?

There are roughly 8.2 million registered voters in Hungary, and between 2006 and 2022, voter turnout typically ranged between 61% and 69.59%, according to data from the country’s National Election Office. The last election, in 2022, saw a record turnout of 69.59%.

Around 91,000 Hungarian citizens have registered to vote from abroad, with a significant number living in Ukraine’s Transcarpathia region.

Who’s running for election in Hungary?

More than a dozen parties have put candidates forward, but the election is essentially a showdown between two: Orban’s Fidesz, and Peter Magyar’s Tisza.

Orban has been in power since 2010, and is seeking a fifth consecutive term in office. His Fidesz party and its Christian Democrat partners currently hold 135 out of 199 seats in the National Assembly.

Orban is known for his conservatism, drawing the ire of the EU for refusing to accept non-European asylum seekers and banning LGBTQ propaganda. He’s also known for his program of economic nationalism – known as ‘Orbanomics’ – and for his criticism of the EU’s financial and military support for Ukraine. Orban has blocked multiple rounds of sanctions on Russia, relenting only after securing exemptions that have allowed Hungary to continue purchasing Russian energy, and is currently vetoing a €90 billion ($105 billion) debt-financed EU loan package for Kiev.

A former member of Fidesz, Magyar resigned from the party in 2024 and joined the ranks of Tisza, a party that had languished in obscurity since its founding four years beforehand. While embroiled in two legal cases – one in which he testified about alleged corruption in Orban’s government, and another in which he was accused of domestic abuse by his ex-wife, former Justice Minister Judit Varga – Magyar was elected to the European Parliament that year, along with six other Tisza MEPs.

Magyar describes himself as center-right, and hopes to mend Budapest’s ties with Brussels should he win. Repairing relations with the EU is critical to Magyar’s economic platform – an ambitious program of public spending that entirely depends on Brussels unlocking nearly €20 billion in frozen funds. Magyar has not publicly supported or opposed the EU’s Ukraine loan, and his positions on immigration and social issues remain ambiguous.

What do the polls say?

Magyar’s Tisza is currently leading Fidesz by 49 points to 39, according to an aggregate compiled by Politico. However, individual opinion polls vary wildly, depending on the political alignment and funding of the pollsters.

For example, a poll by the 21 Research Center, which is financed by the European Commission, shows Tisza leading Fidesz by 19 points. Another by the opposition-linked Median shows Magyar’s party 23 points ahead of Orban’s. Conversely, a poll by the Center for Fundamental Rights – a conservative think tank – places Fidesz eight points ahead of Tisza.

Politico has reported that “many” EU leaders secretly believe an Orban victory is “likely.” Hungarian EU Affairs Minister Janos Boka thinks that the disparity between public surveys and private sentiment is no accident, and that by skewing polls, Magyar and his supporters in Brussels are “building the narrative that if they lose the election, then this is an illegitimate result.”

Who is interfering in the Hungarian election?

Panyi became embroiled in an election meddling scandal of his own when it emerged that he had collaborated with EU intelligence agents – possibly the same sources who fed him the ‘Russian interference’ story – to wiretap Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto. The wiretap revealed conversations between Szijjarto and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Szijjarto insisted that having these conversations is part of his job as the EU’s longest-serving foreign minister, and that the positions expressed in these calls – opposition to sanctions on Russia and disdain for Brussels bureaucrats – are already well known.

Ukraine has stuck its thumb on the scales too. Kiev has refused to restart the flow of Russian oil through the Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia via Ukraine, claiming that the pipeline was damaged in a Russian air raid in January. Orban maintains that Druzhba is operational, and that Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky is keeping it closed in order to drive up energy costs in Hungary and hamper his reelection campaign. Kiev has also trained spies working within Magyar’s party, according to Hungarian security authorities.

Why is the Hungarian election so important to the EU and Ukraine?

Why was J.D. Vance in Budapest?

US President Donald Trump is an ideological ally of Orban, and dispatched Vice President J.D. Vance to Hungary on April 7 in a show of support for the Hungarian prime minister. Over multiple public appearances with Orban, Vance railed against EU and Ukrainian interference in the election, calling their combined efforts “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I have ever seen.”

Vance also saved his most scathing criticism for Zelensky, hammering the Ukrainian leader’s “preposterous” threat to send soldiers to Orban’s house over Hungary’s vetoing of the EU loan package.

However, Vance was accused of election interference by Tisza and EU officials. After the US VP described Orban as “the single profound leader in Europe on the question of energy security and independence” and said that he would “help as much as I can possibly help” to get him reelected, the European Commission announced that it would “convey our concerns” about the visit to Washington.

“I would like to point out, since Vance is complaining about the EU’s alleged interference in the election, that the US vice president was in Hungary just a few days before the election. This fact alone speaks for itself as to who is interfering,” German government spokesman Sebastian Hille told reporters on April 8.

Speaking to RT, former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl described the election as a “proxy war” between Washington and Brussels, with the EU willing to “paralyze” Hungary (by refusing to pressure Zelensky to reopen the Druzhba pipeline) in order to oust Orban, and the US “cultivating resistance” against the bloc by supporting him.

Gabon has imposed a sweeping ban on social media use for people under 16, introducing one of the strictest digital laws on the continent, Gabon Review reported on Thursday, citing the newly enacted law.

The authorities declared it illegal for children to create accounts on social media networks or online platforms, except in narrowly defined education contexts. The measure was adopted on February 26 and officially published earlier this week.

Officials say the move is aimed at shielding children from online risks such as cyberbullying, harmful content, and disinformation. Oversight will be handled by Gabon’s High Communication Authority (HAC), which is tasked with monitoring compliance and auditing digital operators. 

The law introduces shared responsibility between families and tech companies. Parents or legal guardians are now held accountable for the online behavior of children under 16.

The law also requires platforms to respond swiftly to reports involving minors. They must acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and take action within 72 hours.

In February, the HAC announced a temporary social media block for an indefinite period. The decision was cited as a response to the spread of undesirable, defamatory, and offensive content, which they say is a threat to national security. No specific platforms were named.

The decision reflects a broader global push to tighten control over access to digital platforms for minors. Most of them, however, are still waiting for full implementation.

US President Donald Trump unleashed a “tirade of insults” at NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte during their meeting at the White House on Wednesday, Politico has reported, citing European officials.

Rutte’s trip to Washington followed weeks of Trump’s criticism of NATO over its reluctance to join the US-Israeli war against Iran and warnings about possible American withdrawal from the bloc.

The US president used the talks, which happened behind closed doors, to vent his frustration with European NATO members, Politico said in an article on Thursday.

“It went sh*t,” one European official told the outlet, adding that Trump had badmouthed Rutte and “apparently threatened to do just about anything.”

The official and another informed person claimed that the US president signaled that he was considering options for reprisals against the European nations, but didn’t provide any details.

Bloomberg earlier reported that the US president had issued an ultimatum to the Europeans during his meeting with Rutte, demanding a commitment to help secure the waterway, which accounts for around a quarter of global seaborne oil trade, “within days.”

A White House official approached by Politico for comment denied those claims, saying that Trump “has zero expectations for NATO at this point and did not ask them for anything, even though it’s a fact they benefit from the Strait of Hormuz far more than the US.”

In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Rutte described his talks with Trump as a “very frank, very open” discussion between “two good friends,” but acknowledged that the US president was “clearly disappointed” with Europe. The NATO chief avoided a direct answer when asked if Trump had spoken about Washington leaving the bloc.

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday that “none of these people, including our own, very disappointing, NATO, understood anything unless they have pressure placed upon them.”

US President Donald Trump has thrown his weight behind Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, urging voters to “get out and vote” for his reelection ahead of Sunday’s parliamentary election.

In a post on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump described Orban – his “true friend, fighter, and winner” – as a “strong and powerful leader” with a “proven track record of delivering phenomenal results.”

“[Orban] fights tirelessly for, and loves, his great country and people, just like I do for the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Viktor works hard to protect Hungary, grow the economy, create jobs, promote trade, stop illegal immigration, and ensure law and order!”

Trump also credited Orban with driving “new heights of cooperation” between the US and Hungary and said he looks “forward to continuing working” with him.

Trump on Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán:

I was proud to ENDORSE Viktor for Re-Election in 2022, and am honored to do so again. Viktor Orbán is a true friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as Prime Minister of Hungary — HE WILL NEVER… pic.twitter.com/uOWFCP7nRt

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) February 5, 2026

“Hungary: GET OUT AND VOTE FOR VIKTOR ORBAN,” he urged, stressing Orban has his “complete and total endorsement” for re-election.

Trump has repeatedly backed his longtime ally ahead of the vote. Earlier this week, he even called into a rally in Budapest via Vice President J.D. Vance’s phone, telling supporters, “I am with [Orban] until the very end.”

President Trump calls in during @VP's speech in Hungary to show support for Viktor Orban:

"I love Hungary, and I love Viktor. He's a fantastic man ... Remember this: He didn't allow people to storm your country and invade your country like other people have." pic.twitter.com/zPUhBAJDwp

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) April 7, 2026

Vance, who visited Budapest to boost Orban’s campaign, described Hungary as a “laboratory” for sovereign, conservative politics and accused the EU of “interfering” in the vote.

Hungary has opposed Ukraine’s EU ambitions, refused to supply arms to Kiev, and is currently blocking a €90 billion EU loan package – after accusing Vladimir Zelensky of cutting Russian oil flows via the Druzhba pipeline. Orban has also claimed Kiev is waging a “quiet war” against his government, alleging Ukrainian intelligence is operating inside Hungary to sway the vote toward the Tisza Party.

Orban has repeatedly accused the EU of trying to engineer a change in government and install a “puppet regime” in Budapest, alleging Brussels has already “picked” Magyar as a compliant successor. He has also argued that freezing billions in funding is a deliberate attempt to sway voters against him.

On March 25, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution proposed by Ghana declaring the transatlantic slave trade the “gravest crime against humanity,” despite opposition from Western states. The measure secured support from 123 countries, including Russia and China, while the US, Israel, and Argentina voted against it, and 52 nations – among them the UK and EU members – abstained.

Why do the US, Israel, and Argentina stand against the recognition of the absolute horror of the enslavement of Africans? In fact, acknowledging this crime would expose them to the collapse of their own historical narratives. The US, in voting against, is rejecting its own indictment, built on the paradox of a proclaimed freedom resting atop an enslaving system it never truly reconciled with. To recognize this injustice is to open the door to reparations, and a reconfiguration of the social contract – something that today’s America, still shaped by persistent inequalities, refuses to confront.

As for Argentina, today it protects a national narrative built on a racial fiction of a white nation oriented toward Europe and severed from its indigenous roots. Acknowledging the full extent of the crime of slavery would mean reopening the wounds of a long-concealed historical erasure and genocide. Thus, this tripartite vote reveals a refusal to decolonize history and to face consequences, such as reparations, educational revisions, and transformation in global power relations.

Abstention in this issue, however, cannot be seen as a neutrality. When France, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, and some forty other states choose to abstain, they are fleeing history itself.

What does it mean to abstain from a resolution that recognizes the transatlantic slave trade and racialized slavery as an injustice against humanity? It means: “We know, but we will not speak. We acknowledge, but we refuse to assume responsibility. We see, but we look away.”

Belgium carries the shadow of the Congo Free State, an industrial-scale reign of terror where millions of lives were crushed for rubber and profit. Abstention allows it to continue sanitizing the past.

Germany, often praised for its work of remembrance regarding the Holocaust, exposes here the limits of its moral universalism. When it comes to the genocide of the Herero and Nama in Namibia, or its role in European colonial ventures, its discourse becomes calculated.

For Ukraine and other abstaining states, the link to historical responsibility in the transatlantic trade may seem less direct. Yet their abstention reflects geopolitical alignment, the desire not to offend certain allies. Historical justice is sacrificed on the altar of strategic interest.

This collective abstention reveals a troubling truth: the international system is incapable of delivering full recognition of the crimes that shaped it. The states that comprise it are simultaneously judges and parties, accusers and accused. Under these conditions, how can genuine justice be expected?

Abstention becomes a mechanism of preservation. It maintains the illusion of international consensus while avoiding necessary ruptures. In short, it is a form of denial.

But denial comes at a cost. It fuels distrust among African peoples and their diasporas toward international institutions perceived as partial or complicit. It undermines the credibility of Western human rights rhetoric and perpetuates legitimate resentment, born of centuries of unrepaired injustice.

Abstaining in this context is choosing inertia over justice. The abstained refuse to break with colonial logics, trying to perpetuate their consequences instead. But this strategy is doomed. France, Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the other cannot hide indefinitely in this gray zone. There are moments when not choosing is betrayal, and this betrayal, though dressed in the respectable garments of diplomatic prudence, deceives no one.

And it is precisely this loss of control that frightens them.

To fully recognize the horror of racialized African slavery means to accept that the very foundations of Western modernity must be questioned. It is to acknowledge that the Enlightenment, often heralded as the dawn of universal reason, coexisted and sometimes co-constructed with the most radical darkness: systematic dehumanization.

The reality today is an Africa that thinks and demands. A diaspora that articulates claims, rejects half-truths. In the face of this, what is abstention worth? Nothing except the testimony of a refusal to take responsibility.

Yet there is still time. Time to understand that recognition is strength, not weakness. That truth, even painful, is the only foundation for a shared future. But this requires courage. And clearly, that courage remains in short supply. History will move on without them, or despite them. The abstainers and the calculating will only endure it.

An army general and several soldiers have been killed in an overnight assault by Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) militants on military targets in Nigeria’s restive Borno State, the authorities said on Thursday.

The militants attacked the headquarters of the 29 Task Force Brigade in Benisheikh at about 12:30 AM local time, army spokesman Michael Onoja said in a statement. He said troops responded to the coordinated “terrorist” assault with “exceptional courage, professionalism, and superior firepower,” forcing the insurgents to retreat.

“Regrettably, the encounter resulted in the loss of a few brave and gallant soldiers who paid the supreme price in the line of duty,” the military stated, without specifying how many troops were killed or disclosing their names.

Local media, however, reported that Brigadier General Oseni Omoh Braimah, commander of the 29 Task Force Brigade, was among 18 soldiers killed.

A separate statement from Nigerian President Bola Tinubu appeared to confirm that the general died in the raid. Tinubu described the “insurgents’ counterattack [as] a sign of desperation” and said the government “will never forget” the sacrifices of the fallen soldiers.

“I extend my condolences to the families of our gallant soldiers, led by Brigadier-General Oseni Omoh Braimah, who made the ultimate sacrifice in the defence of our country in Borno State,” he wrote on X on Friday.

Police in Borno said earlier this week that officers had repelled attacks in Nganzai and Damasak, days after four officers were killed in an assault on a divisional headquarters in the state.

Nigeria declared a national security emergency in November amid the deteriorating situation. The US, which has stepped in to support Abuja’s campaign against Islamic State-linked militants, has warned its citizens against traveling to the West African country, citing terrorism and armed violence.

The Gulf states have emerged much weaker than Iran from the Middle East conflict, leading US academic Jeffrey Sachs has said.

Countries in the region made a huge mistake by seeking protection from the US and Israel, Sachs told RT India in an exclusive interview on Thursday.

“This has been a disaster for them,” he said, adding that the “clever idea” of the United Arab Emirates as a financial haven and tourism hub “all… fell under bombing right now.”

“[The US] did nothing to help it. I think the Emirates made a terrible mistake in signing on with Israel and the United States saying, ‘This is our side. This is our protection,’” he said.

Sachs said he was baffled when Gulf countries pledged billions of dollars to the US when Donald Trump began his second term as president.

The US is not where the high-return investments in the world are right now, Sachs noted.

“But these countries believed that the US is their protector and that the US is their source of NVIDIA chips and data centers and cutting-edge technology. They’re not looking clearly at how the multipolar world is taking shape,” he said.

“They’ve come out way, way behind in all of this. It’s been clear that Iran can devastate them,” he added. “The desalination plants, the bombing of the oil and gas infrastructure, the vulnerability of these countries more generally. It’s been awful.”

Sachs said the Gulf countries “don’t have their own geopolitics… They have been under the US line. But basically, this is a debacle for them.” These nations need to rethink their politics, he added.

“The truth is Iran and the Gulf should be partners. They should be co-investors. They should be at peace.”

India knows from its time under British rule that divide-and-conquer is the essence of imperial strategy, Sachs said.

“The US has loved to pit Iran against the Gulf, and the Gulf fell for it. Big mistake that needs to be reconsidered,” he said.

The US is perceived as a threat by a significant portion of people in six leading European nations, a new opinion poll suggests. In Spain, a majority holds this view, it says.

Politico, which commissioned the survey, said on Wednesday that these perceptions are linked to the policies of US President Donald Trump.

Since taking office just over a year ago, Trump has imposed tariffs on European allies, pushed for the annexation of Greenland from Denmark, and started a war with Iran, jeopardizing global energy stability.

The European Pulse poll was conducted from March 13 to 21 in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain, with at least 1,000 adults surveyed in each country. In Spain, 51% of respondents described the US as a threat, while only 17% considered it a close ally.

Six major EU countries now view the U.S. under Trump as a bigger threat than China, per a new POLITICO Pulse survey—a significant shift in European threat perception.pic.twitter.com/Bz7YtheU1b

— The Dive Feed (@TheDeepDiveFeed) April 9, 2026

Poland presented a contrasting picture, where the US is largely seen as a partner or ally. Only 13% of Polish respondents viewed America as a threat, with an equal share labeling it a competitor. However, a significant 16% said they are unsure how to assess the US.

The survey took place amid escalating hostilities in the Middle East, as the US and Israel attempt to topple Iran’s government through a bombing campaign. No European NATO members directly joined the campaign, but Spain was notably vocal in opposing it, calling the operation illegal under international law and refusing the US access to its airspace for strikes.

Earlier this week, Trump signaled openness to negotiations based on a ten-point proposal from Iran, which led to the announcement of a two-week ceasefire. However, the fragile truce has been strained by increased Israeli attacks against Lebanon. Washington claims these actions fall outside the scope of the ceasefire, but skeptics argue that Israel is deliberately acting against US goals to derail peace efforts.

The Trump administration has been accused of using bad faith negotiations as a diversion before surprise military actions against Iran.

North Korea has conducted a series of high-tech weapons tests as it seeks to expand its arsenal with electromagnetic weapons, carbon fiber bombs, and new mobile air defense systems, KCNA state news agency reports.

The tests were conducted over the course of three days. Kim Jong-sik, a general who oversaw the tests, described the electromagnetic system and carbon fiber bombs as “special assets” in the country’s arsenal, but provided few details about the nature of the new weapons.

The South Korean military said it detected several missile launches from North Korean territory. The projectiles flew 240 to 700 km, according to Reuters.

The tests came amid rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula. First Deputy Foreign Minister Jang Kum-chol described South Korea as the “most hostile enemy state” in a statement on Tuesday.

Earlier this week, Seoul apologized to Pyongyang over drone incursions, denying any official involvement and claiming that the launches were a private initiative. Three people – including an employee of the National Intelligence Service, a South Korean military officer, and a graduate student – are facing charges.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un stated last month that a nuclear arsenal capable of posing a credible threat to the US is the only leverage against American “terrorism and aggression.” He also said North Korea would not give up its nuclear weapons and would oppose any efforts to challenge its status.

US First Lady Melania Trump has made a surprise public statement about Jeffrey Epstein, denying that she had any meaningful relationship with the late financier and convicted sex offender, and insisting that he did not introduce her to Donald Trump.

In remarks released by the White House on April 9, Melania said she had “never been friends with Epstein,” described her contact with his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, as nothing more than “casual correspondence,” and urged Congress to hold public hearings centered on Epstein’s victims.

“The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” the first lady said, accusing unnamed critics of trying to “defame” her reputation. She stated that she and Donald Trump had only occasionally attended the same social events as Epstein due to overlapping social circles in New York City and Palm Beach, and said she first crossed paths with him in 2000 at an event she attended with Trump.

First Lady Melania Trump’s Statement pic.twitter.com/fSEz24NEyg

— First Lady Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) April 9, 2026

Melania also denied ever being on Epstein’s plane or visiting his private island, and specifically pushed back against claims that Epstein played a role in her relationship with the future president. She further insisted that her name has never appeared in court documents, depositions, victim statements, or FBI interviews tied to the Epstein case.

The Trump administration has faced growing backlash over its handling of the Epstein files. One day earlier, several media outlets reported that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates agreed to testify before the House Oversight Committee, which has already heard testimony from former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The controversy has simmered for over a year. In February 2025, Bondi said Epstein’s supposed client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” fueling expectations of major disclosures. But by July, the DOJ said no such list exists, and that it did not plan to release additional records – a reversal that triggered ridicule from both Democrats and Republicans and intensified accusations of a cover-up.

US President Donald Trump has posted a horrific video of a woman being beaten to death at a Florida gas station earlier this month, using the killing to launch a blistering attack on former President Joe Biden and his immigration record.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, the suspect is Rolbert Joachin, a Haitian national accused of fatally attacking a woman in Fort Myers on April 3. DHS said Joachin first entered the US illegally in August 2022 and was released into the country under Temporary Protected Status.

The suspect was tracked down and arrested with ICE assistance, and appeared in court on Wednesday, where he revealed that he went to the gas station specifically to kill the victim.

In a furious Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump said he felt “obligated” to publish uncensored footage of the murder, previously shown in court, so Americans could “see what Democrats are protecting,” while warning viewers that the tape is “not for children.”

Trump branded the suspect an “animal” and blamed Biden and congressional Democrats for allowing him to remain in the country, arguing that the case was a brutal example of what he sees as the human cost of lax immigration enforcement.

Trump ended his post by offering prayers for the victim’s family and vowing that “quick and severe JUSTICE” would be served. DHS said ICE had lodged a detainer against Joachin and that he would face deportation regardless of how the criminal case unfolds.

The cooperation of private capital and state funding in space exploration and infrastructure became a key topic at the inaugural Russian Space Forum taking place in Moscow ahead of the upcoming Cosmonautics Day. The event will also delve into the use of AI, robotics and prospective medical technologies needed for flights beyond Earth orbit, such as to the Moon or Mars.

Kicking off ahead of the 65th anniversary of Yury Gagarin’s April 12, 1961 flight as the first human in space, the event brought together government officials, scientists, and investors from over 40 countries, including Russia, China and India.

“The advancement of the rocket and space sector, alongside the strengthening of its scientific, human resources, and technological potential, remains among our unconditional priorities. It is of utmost importance to expand satellite constellations and to widely integrate new materials, digital and nuclear technologies,” President Vladimir Putin said in a greeting message to the participants.

Just last month, Russia launched 16 communication satellites for the Russian Rassvet (Sunrise) high-speed internet project, which is being helmed by domestic company Bureau 1440, Bakanov said. The program will give Russia its own alternative to SpaceX’s Starlink.

“We work closely together, sometimes formalized through the regulatory framework, sometimes manually, to help companies thrive, to ensure fertile soil, and to create an investment climate conducive to people investing in the sector,” Bakanov said.

Real-time coordination between Roscosmos and private space firms was also discussed, to prevent potential collisions in orbit, which many fear could lead to the so-called Kessler Syndrome, a runaway chain reaction of crashes that could render entire orbital regions around Earth unusable.

China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) deputy director Bian Zhigang, speaking at a panel on future challenges and national strategies, spoke out against the weaponization of space.

“We need to support technologies in different countries in order to aid urban planning, resource exploration and disaster prevention. This requires all countries to cooperate,” he said, calling space “an important bridge” that facilitates this international collaboration.

The forum will also serve as the launchpad for a number of cooperation agreements between Roscosmos and Russian nuclear energy corporation Rosatom, as well as with private players in the space sector.

Russia’s Space Week, established by Putin to promote national achievements and popularize the industry, will conclude on Cosmonautics Day on Sunday with a number of other themed events all across the country.

Donald Trump has declared the start of a new “golden age” in the Middle East after announcing a ceasefire with Iran. The war, at least for now, has been paused. And while predictions are always risky with this White House, there is at least a chance that the fighting will not immediately resume.

That alone matters. A prolonged war would raise risks for everyone, but above all for Washington. For all the bombast coming from the US administration, America has always been deeply uncomfortable with prolonged uncertainty and strategic risk. It is one thing to threaten. It is another to endure the consequences when threats fail.

The precise terms of the ceasefire remain unclear and may not yet be fully agreed. But the central political fact is already visible: Faced with determined resistance, the US stepped back.

None of the sweeping demands set out at the start of the operation were met. Trump’s all-caps demand for Iran’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” now looks more like political theater than strategic doctrine. Yet behind the social media drama, something more rational prevailed in Washington: When pressure fails, it is better to retreat than to escalate into a situation you may no longer control.

The feverish rhetoric before the truce served a purpose. It allowed Washington to claim that Tehran had blinked, while creating such a sense of looming catastrophe that any pause in fighting could be sold as relief. The White House will now try to present restraint as victory.

This conflict is undoubtedly a milestone in the wider transformation of the international system. But it is not the end of that process. Nor is it the final chapter in the struggle for the Middle East.

Tehran’s response was not spectacular in the conventional military sense, but it was effective. Iran widened the theater of tension and signaled that the costs of escalation would not be confined to military targets. It forced its opponents to reckon not only with Iranian retaliation, but with the fragility of the wider regional system.

This matters because the endurance of the US and its regional partners is limited. Iran’s, by contrast, has historically been much greater.

The so-called Axis of Resistance also proved more durable than many had assumed. Despite the serious damage inflicted by Israel over the past two years, pro-Iranian forces in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq remain a strategic factor. Even where they did not intervene directly, they raised the temperature and forced the attackers to remain on edge.

The broader effort to neutralize Iranian influence has therefore backfired. Iran has emerged bloodied but still standing. Even if Tehran’s claims that any settlement must happen on its terms are partly negotiating tactics, one thing is already clear: Iran’s regional weight has not diminished in the way Washington and West Jerusalem intended.

Negotiations with Tehran are now unavoidable. The real question is what Iran itself wants.

For the wider region, the implications are profound.

The Gulf monarchies have had a sobering experience. There will be no return to the comfortable old formula in which security could simply be outsourced to Washington in exchange for money and loyalty. That arrangement, which underpinned the region since the Cold War, has been badly shaken.

Publicly, the Gulf states are unlikely to make dramatic gestures. But privately, their search for new hedges and new partners will intensify. China, South Asia, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe will all become more important in their calculations.

That doesn’t mean the Gulf will accept Iranian dominance. The monarchies will not tolerate Tehran having unchecked influence over the Persian Gulf or the ability to dictate terms in the Strait of Hormuz. Their policy is likely to become more complex: containing Iran where possible while engaging with it where necessary.

The domestic consequences for the US are harder to judge. Trump’s self-congratulation already rings hollow, but much will depend on economics. If oil markets stabilize, the White House will try to move on quickly and insist disaster was averted thanks to Trump’s leadership. Whether that helps Republicans in the November midterms is unclear.

Still, Trump has always had one instinct his critics often underestimate: He knows how to survive setbacks and reframe them.

The larger conclusion, however, goes beyond Trump. The US remains immensely powerful. Its military reach, financial leverage and ability to shape events are still formidable. But they are not limitless. America can still influence outcomes but can no longer simply impose its will at any cost.

That lesson has now been absorbed far beyond Tehran. Allies and adversaries alike will draw their own conclusions. Iran may be a special case, but a precedent has been set.

This is another step toward a different world, one in which coercion is less decisive and the old assumptions about American omnipotence increasingly obsolete. Trump may wish to replace a liberal American-led order with an illiberal one under US dominance. But the events of recent weeks suggest something else: a world moving beyond any order Washington can fully control.

This article was first published by Rossiyskaya Gazeta, and was translated and edited by the RT team 

The homeless man accused of fatally stabbing 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska could see charges against him dropped after he was deemed unfit to stand trial, several US media outlets report, citing a motion filed by his attorney. He was previously indicted by a federal grand jury in the case, which could lead to the death penalty.

Zarutska was killed on a train last August in Charlotte, North Carolina. Surveillance footage shows Decarlos Brown Jr., 34, stabbing her three times in the neck in what appeared to be an unprovoked assault. The man was arrested shortly afterward and charged with first-degree murder.

According to a motion filed on Tuesday, Brown was evaluated at the Central Regional Hospital in late December and found to be not competent to stand trial. Under North Carolina law, a defendant must be deemed capable of understanding the nature of the proceedings, comprehend their situation, and assist in their defense in a rational manner.

If a judge agrees with the psychiatric evaluation, charges against Brown will be dismissed. A court ruling could still allow for the charges to be refiled if he ever regains the capacity to be tried.

Brown was also ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation as part of a separate federal court case, but it was not completed as of early March according to the court filings.

The man’s mother claims he is schizophrenic. Brown has a lengthy criminal record that includes robbery with a dangerous weapon.

Zarutska’s killing caused a public outcry and led to calls for capital punishment for the suspect. US President Donald Trump described Brown as an “animal” and urged that the death penalty be applied.

Mexico is looking to tap unconventional natural gas deposits to boost energy sovereignty, President Claudia Sheinbaum has said, as global energy markets reel from the shock triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran.

The US’ southern neighbor is its biggest importer of natural gas, with the supplies covering roughly three-quarters of Mexican demand, while domestic output from conventional fields has declined and no longer meets the country’s needs.

“If we continue like this, we’re going to import more and more natural gas,” Sheinbaum said on Wednesday. “The other options are what’s called shale gas, unconventional gas.”

Unconventional deposits refers to gas trapped in dense rock formations such as shale, which do not allow the fuel to flow freely and require more complex extraction techniques, including hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Development has so far been limited due to environmental concerns, high water usage, regulatory uncertainty, and political opposition.

“What’s the problem with importing?” Sheinbaum asked rhetorically. “Just look at how lots of countries in the world are suffering because of what happened in Iran.”

Sheinbaum’s remarks come amid broader tensions between Mexico City and Washington.

In January, US President Donald Trump said he could order strikes against drug cartels on Mexican territory following the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by US commandos over alleged narcotics trafficking.

Trump has also claimed that cartels effectively control Mexico and accused the country of “flooding” the US with drugs and illegal migrants.

Mexico has cooperated on anti-drug efforts but rejects any foreign military presence, with Sheinbaum warning any such action would violate national sovereignty.

There are moments in history when reality breaks through ideology with brutal clarity. Western Europe is living through one of those moments now.

The Iran war has sent shockwaves through global energy markets – but in Europe, the tremors feel like an earthquake. What was once dismissed as pessimism or “populist scaremongering” is now openly acknowledged at the highest levels of power.

With the Strait of Hormuz blocked, the EU faced a supply shock that promised to cripple manufacturing, ground airlines, hike up the price of food, spike borrowing costs, and send inflation spiraling back to crisis levels.

The crisis nobody can deny anymore

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has compared the looming burden to the darkest days of recent memory, warning it could be “as heavy as we recently experienced during the Covid pandemic or at the start of the Ukraine war.” Head of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde has admitted that the long-term effects are “probably beyond what we can imagine at the moment.”

Beyond imagination. That is where Western Europe now stands. And yet for millions of ordinary Europeans, the consequences are already painfully real: higher bills, shrinking savings, and a growing sense that something has gone profoundly wrong.

This is not just another cyclical downturn. It is something deeper – more systemic, more dangerous.

The greatest energy shock in modern history

Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, did not mince words: “At this moment, we are losing 11 million barrels per day, which is more than the two major oil crises combined… the greatest threat to global energy security in history.” Unlike past crises, this one spared nothing. Oil, gas, diesel, jet fuel – everything was under pressure at once.

The illusion that Europe could insulate itself has collapsed.

For years, Brussels reassured Europeans that the continent’s limited reliance on Persian Gulf crude would protect it. But reality has a way of exposing half-truths. Europe depends on the Gulf for more than 40% of its refined products – diesel that fuels trucks, and jet fuel that keeps planes in the air.

Now those lifelines are tightening. Asian economies, far more dependent on the region, are bidding assertively, pulling supplies away from Europe. Tankers are changing course. Contracts are being rewritten. Prices are surging. And the EU – self-constrained, self-limited – has found itself last in line.

The consequences are immediate, tangible, and deeply personal. In some countries, diesel prices have nearly doubled since the start of the Iran war. Airlines are bracing for impact; Lufthansa is already discussing grounding up to 40 aircraft because of jet fuel shortages. The EU’s fossil fuel import bill jumped by €14 billion in mere weeks.

Behind these numbers are real lives. Farmers paying more to harvest their crops. Truck drivers watching margins evaporate. Families forced to choose between heating and other essentials. Businesses – already weakened – now pushed to the brink.

Higher costs in agriculture, transport, and manufacturing cascade through the economy. Prices rise everywhere. Growth stalls. Inflation returns with a vengeance.

Europe is staring into the abyss of stagflation – stagnant economies paired with relentless price increases, quietly eroding the savings and dignity of millions.

This is not just an economic crisis. It is a social wound. A psychological burden. Another chapter in a long decade of instability that has left many Europeans exhausted, anxious, and increasingly distrustful of those in power.

Leadership without answers

In times like these, people look to their leaders for clarity, for courage, for solutions equal to the scale of the problem. What they receive instead feels painfully inadequate.

Energy Commissioner Dan Jorgensen has advised people to work from home, drive slower, and share cars. These are not solutions; they are coping mechanisms. They shift responsibility onto individuals while the structural failures remain untouched.

Even as shortages loom, Brussels insists on staying the course: a complete ban on Russian energy imports, no change to the plan to end Russian LNG imports by 2026, and pipeline gas by 2027. At the very moment when flexibility is needed, rigidity prevails.

Warnings are coming from all sides. Shell CEO Wael Sawan has said shortages could hit as early as April. Germany’s Economy Minister Katherina Reiche has cautioned that supply scarcity may emerge within weeks. Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto confessed, “I’m forced to know things that don’t let me sleep.”

And still, the policy does not change. Even from across the Atlantic comes a blunt message. Donald Trump remarked: “You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”

Harsh, perhaps – but not entirely wrong. The EU has boxed itself in.

Yet across the continent, a different kind of leadership is beginning to emerge – one that dares to say what many already know.

In Germany, Alice Weidel of the AfD has articulated a position rooted in economic reality rather than political fashion: “Germany must return to an affordable and reliable energy supply to be internationally competitive… we must purchase energy resources… where it is cheapest, which is Russia.”

More and more Germans understand this. It is no coincidence that the AfD has risen to become the second most popular party. People are not embracing extremism – they are searching for common sense.

Central Europe’s warning – and its resolve

Further east, the message is even clearer, shaped by geography and experience.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has called for immediate action, urging Europe to lift sanctions on Russian energy to avoid “one of the most severe economic crises in its history.” Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has echoed this urgency, calling for restored pipeline flows and renewed dialogue with Moscow.

His words cut through the diplomatic fog. The EU must “ensure the supply of these strategic raw materials from all possible sources and directions, including Russia.” Otherwise, he warned, the current path resembles a “suicide ship.”

These leaders are often dismissed in Brussels. Yet they are the ones confronting reality head-on. They understand that geography cannot be negotiated away. That energy cannot be replaced overnight. That ideology does not heat homes or power factories.

The return of reality – and of Russia

The Iran war has accelerated a reckoning that was already underway. It has shown, with unforgiving clarity, that the EU cannot secure its energy future by excluding its most logical supplier. Russia is not a distant option; it is a structural pillar of the European energy system – one that has been deliberately removed without a viable replacement.

The result is what we see today: scarcity, volatility, vulnerability. Restoring relations with Moscow is no longer a theoretical debate. It is becoming an economic necessity.

And the momentum is shifting. Across Germany and Central Europe – Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Czechia – voices are growing louder, more confident, more aligned in their insistence on pragmatism over ideology.

A turning point for Europe

Europe now stands at a decisive turning point. One path leads further into crisis: continued shortages, declining industry, rising social tensions, and a widening gap between elites and ordinary people. The other path is more difficult politically – but far more sustainable economically. It requires acknowledging mistakes. Reopening dialogue. Rebuilding ties where they make sense.

Above all, it requires listening – to the citizens who are paying the price, and to the leaders who have the courage to speak uncomfortable truths. Change is coming. The Iran war may well accelerate it. Because in the end, reality is undefeated. And Europe, whether it admits it or not, is already on the road back to it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the nation’s military to halt all operations against Ukrainian forces over Orthodox Easter weekend, the Kremlin has announced. The unilateral pause is scheduled to last from 16:00 (Moscow time) on Saturday until the end of Sunday.

According to the Kremlin, Russian troops should still be ready to respond to any Ukrainian offensive operations or provocations, with relevant orders given to Defense Minister Andrey Belousov and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov.

“We expect the Ukrainian side to follow Russia’s lead,” the statement read.

Moscow has previously declared unilateral pauses during Orthodox religious holidays throughout the Ukraine conflict. In 2023, Russia observed truces both during the Orthodox Christmas holiday in January and on Easter weekend in April at the initiative of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In 2024, a pause was not announced, with Putin arguing that Kiev could use it to rearm and regroup its forces. In 2025, an Easter truce was declared again, but was only partially successful. Although a certain lull in the hostilities was observed, Kiev violated the truce more than 3,900 times, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky rejected Hungary’s calls for a Christmas truce last year.

Moscow and Kiev held several rounds of direct talks in Istanbul last year, as well as trilateral talks that also involved the US. The negotiations led to several major POW exchanges but ended without a decisive breakthrough. The trilateral discussions have been paused over the past months because of the US and Israeli war on Iran.

Russia has repeatedly stated that it is ready to resolve the Ukraine conflict through diplomatic means, as long as its root causes are addressed and the situation on the ground is taken into account.

A Republican-aligned political group has been accused of sending leaflets featuring Ku Klux Klan imagery to voters in Virginia ahead of a high-stakes referendum. The Washington Post has suggested that the campaign primarily targets black voters.

The mailers, reportedly distributed in recent weeks by the Democracy and Justice political action committee, use imagery associated with the KKK – a group historically linked to racist violence against Black Americans – alongside warnings urging voters to reject the ballot measure redrawing the state’s political map to favor Democrats.

The leaflet design combines emotionally charged historical visuals with simple, urgent messaging. One leaflet, shared by the Virginia Independent, features grainy black-and-white images from the era of racial segregation, including Klansmen in white hoods and scenes of Black Americans facing violence, alongside claims that “they want to silence your voice.” Another pairs civil rights-era imagery, such as marches and protests, with slogans like “politicians are trying to take our districts away.”

Idk man I’m just surprised they used images of the KKK on the vote no on redistricting mailer pic.twitter.com/WuKGgPZ6D4

— Kate Martin (@katekeepsit100) March 7, 2026

The April 21 referendum will ask voters whether to change how Virginia’s electoral districts are drawn, a decision that could affect which party wins more seats in Congress.

What is this crap (an inflammatory, false, absurd etc. anti-referendum mailer being sent out) and what's the deal with the group ("Democracy and Justice PAC") behind it? https://t.co/HdBJrU2Wr2 pic.twitter.com/8rJJiBefNQ

— Blue Virginia (@bluevirginia) March 7, 2026

Black voters make up roughly one-fifth of Virginia’s population and are a key voting bloc in statewide elections. Virginia, though Democrat-leaning overall, remains a closely contested battleground state where even small shifts in support can sway outcomes.

A group, Justice for Democracy, has been sending out mailers and texts with some clear dog whistles, using varying disclaimers in Virginia ("Democracy and Justice PAC" and "Justice for Democracy PAC").

Its treasurer is listed as Christopher Woodfin and its address is the same… pic.twitter.com/JvetyKGnbw

— Matt Royer (@royermattw) March 7, 2026

Virginia’s vote comes amid a broader national push by Republicans and Democrats to redraw congressional maps ahead of the 2026 elections, with several states already adopting new boundaries to gain political advantage. District maps are typically redrawn once every ten years after a census, with the next scheduled for 2030.

Unlike most states, which make such changes through legislatures or courts, Virginia is putting the measure directly to voters through a public referendum. Former US President Barack Obama has urged Virginians to back the measure.

US energy giants ExxonMobil and Chevron have reported lower production and a financial fallout linked to the Iran war, citing operational disruptions and market volatility as a result of the conflict and restrictions on the Strait of Hormuz regarding shipping linked to the West.

In a filing to US regulators on Wednesday, ExxonMobil flagged a potential hit of up to $6.5 billion to earnings, noting that its global oil and gas production in the first quarter of 2026 will be about 6% lower than in the final quarter of 2025, partly due to attacks on facilities in Qatar and the UAE in which it holds stakes. Chevron on Thursday reported first‑quarter production of 3.8–3.9 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, down from 4.05 million in the previous quarter.

Exxon, which has significant exposure to the Middle East, said the region accounts for around 20% of its global output. It added that damage to assets, including gas liquefaction facilities in Qatar, “will take a prolonged period to repair,” and that it is unable to estimate when full operations will resume.

The company also said the largest hit to its first-quarter earnings, estimated at $3.5 billion to $4.9 billion, is linked to price swings caused by the conflict.

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te on Friday proposed a nearly $40 billion military buildup amid tensions with Beijing. This came just days after the head of the self-governing island’s main opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), traveled to the mainland seeking rapprochement in the first such visit in a decade.

Taiwan became a de facto autonomous territory in 1949, after Chiang Kai-shek’s forces fled there following their loss in the Chinese civil war. Beijing considers the island part of its sovereign territory under the One China policy, which most UN nations, including the US and Russia, recognize.

Lai presented the massive military spending bill at a meeting of his party’s top decision-making body on Friday, calling it a way to counter the “threat of authoritarianism.” The proposal came just days after lawmakers from the US, Taiwan’s primary arms supplier, visited the island.

Earlier this week, Lai gave a speech positioning military strength, economic resilience, cooperation with Western and regional allies and “equality and dignity” as the main requirements for peace in the Taiwan Strait.

KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun, who arrived on the mainland on Tuesday, has stressed that opposing Taiwanese independence is a way to guarantee regional peace.

“The two sides of the Taiwan Strait are not destined, as some in the international community worry, for war,” she said in a speech in Nanjing.

RT has been covering the arrival with our correspondent Konstantin Rozhkov in China.

WATCH FULL VIDEO:

The Irish government has announced that it will use the military to clear trucks and tractors blocking “critical infrastructure.” Protests launched over soaring fuel prices have brought Dublin to a standstill in recent days.

In a statement on Thursday, Irish Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan said that “the blocking of critical national infrastructure will not be permitted to continue and the assistance of the Defense Forces has been requested.” Protesters who fail to disperse will have their vehicles moved by force, and “should not complain later about any damage caused to those vehicles,” O’Callaghan added.

Protesters in trucks, tractors, and other large vehicles have blockaded Dublin city center since Tuesday and formed slow-moving convoys on key motorways throughout the country. The demonstrators have also blocked ports in Galway and Limerick, and the country’s only refinery at Whitegate, near Cork, which processes imported oil to meet 40% of Ireland’s fuel demand.

The blockades have already triggered fuel shortages across Ireland, with 100 petrol stations predicted to run dry by Thursday night, an industry spokesperson told the Irish Independent.

Fuel prices have spiked in Ireland as a result of the US-Israeli war on Iran, with petrol rising by 15% and diesel currently costing nearly 30% more than in mid-February. Home heating oil, meanwhile, has surged in price by almost 70%. Taxes make up almost 60% of fuel costs in Ireland, and the protesters argue that the government should slash these levies to ease pressure on farmers, haulers, and commuters. 

In case you are unaware, tens of thousands of farmers, truck drivers, bus drivers and delivery drivers are fuel protesting across Ireland this week.

The Irish have had enough and are fighting back 🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻
Follow us for video updates and share pic.twitter.com/KltGl3OO9x

— TheLiberal.ie (@TheLiberal_ie) April 8, 2026

A minor cut in fuel taxes last month – 15 cents per liter on gasoline and 20 cents on diesel – was criticized by Ireland’s opposition Sinn Fein party as “a pathetic token gesture that doesn’t even come close to what is needed.”

The Irish government has refused to negotiate with the protesters. “It is an act of national sabotage to blockade this refinery and it will directly impact the people of Ireland,” Prime Minister Micheal Martin said on Wednesday, referring to the Whitegate demonstration. “A gun can’t be put to the head of government.”

Martin was filmed on Thursday walking away from angry demonstrators in Cork, who accused him of “walking away from the Irish people.”

Micheal Martin look at the ground walks directly past a Irishman asking question.

He doesn’t even have the ability to look the man on the eye let alone answer questions.

He is a weak man pic.twitter.com/zoD0foTw8w

— Real News Éire (@real_eire) April 9, 2026

In keeping with EU policy, the government has also ruled out a return to Russian fuel imports. Despite a spiraling energy crisis, Deputy Prime Minister Simon Harris said last month that “any move by the European Union to start buying Russian oil again… would be utterly despicable.”

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry is reportedly weighing a plan to rebrand the agencies behind Kiev’s conscription campaign, according to a local lawmaker. Social media has detailed press gangs hunting for recruits in the streets while a desperate population is increasingly fighting back.

Kiev introduced Territorial Centers of Recruitment and Social Support (TCKs) in 2022 to replace Soviet-era military commissariats. Amid the conflict with Russia, the TCKs have become widely associated with forced recruitment raids and allegations of corruption that allow influential individuals to avoid mobilization.

According to MP Roman Kostenko, a military veteran and secretary of the parliamentary committee on national security, defense, and intelligence, who leaked the plan, the proposal is window-dressing and an attempt to deflect public discontent.

Kiev has claimed that the widely shared videos are a form of attack on the country, taken out of context, or fabricated by Russia. Last week, Ukraine’s military ombudsman, Olga Reshetilova, complained that teenagers are “harassing” TCK staff after exposure to what she described as “Russian TikTok.” 

At the same time, human rights ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets published photos from a TCK facility in Uzhhorod, reporting that as many as 60 men held in custody there had only three cups and eight plates among them and no means to properly clean shared utensils.

Lubinets also noted that one detainee had syndactyly, a condition involving fused fingers, while another required urgent medical attention due to high blood pressure, which he received only after intervention by the ombudsman’s office.

Under the proposal, “conscription offices” or “recruitment offices” will handle conscription, Kostenko told Liga.net on Thursday, saying that the ministry expects the word “office” to have a positive connotation.

During parliamentary confirmation hearings in January, Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov identified fixing the conscription system as a priority. Kostenko said the ministry wants to force the national police to take a more direct role in mobilization in order to shift blame.

Not so long ago, US President Donald Trump openly endorsed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of the Hungarian parliamentary elections scheduled for April 12.

From a diplomatic standpoint, urging citizens of another country to vote for a specific candidate is contentious, to say the least. First and foremost, it is considered direct interference in the electoral process. But even more importantly, it highlights the widening ideological divide within what was once a largely unified Western world.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, however. Like Trump is in the US, Orban has long been a symbol of the European conservative movement, challenging the so-called ‘rules-based order’. Washington may view Hungary as a bastion of conservative politics within the EU, one that could serve as a model for other member states.

Evidently, the system Orban has built in Hungary over recent years exemplifies the “healthy nation” according to Trump. Moreover, in a show of support for Orban, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Hungary in February, and US Vice President J.D. Vance visited Budapest in the week of the vote.

The EU’s stance, however, is particularly noteworthy; while it refrains from endorsing any candidate, it hopes that the opposition Tisza party, led by Peter Magyar, will win. 

“I think everybody hopes Orban will lose,” a European diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Indeed, this year’s election campaign is quite intense for Orban. The Tisza party (officially the Respect and Freedom Party), established in December 2020, is the main rival of Orban’s Fidesz party. Interestingly, different polls show varying results, and each party claims that it is ahead of the other.

According to the polls published by Tisza, it leads Fidesz by over 20%. This creates a challenging environment for Orban and could be used to contest election results if his party wins. 

Moreover, the EU – whose leaders refused to recognize election results in Belarus (in 2020) and Georgia (in 2024), and have publicly criticized Orban – may openly back the opposition should it lose in this weekend’s elections. 

However, Tisza could also accuse Fidesz of having similar plans. Regardless of the results, the upcoming elections will be challenging for Hungary. 

European officials accuse Budapest of straying from the so-called ‘party line’, accusing the current government of the erosion of democratic norms and restrictions on press freedom and NGO activities; Orban is also accused of running a campaign that discredits the EU. 

Orban dismisses these allegations as unfounded and presents himself as a defender of traditional European Christian values against an out-of-touch liberal elite. Orban primarily operates from conservative principles, distinguishing the interests of Hungary from those of the EU as a larger supranational entity that often overlooks the needs of its member states (consider the EU’s decision to open markets for Ukrainian grain, which forced Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to go against Brussels’ directives and protect their own borders).

The EU’s list of complaints against Orban is quite banal. The EU criticizes Budapest for perceived threats to judicial independence, increased media control, strict immigration policies, and a more independent foreign policy regarding Russia and China. 

As the EU evolves into a sort of supranational ‘superstate’, it demands complete alignment from its member states, while the European Commission functions as a facilitator of globalization, pushing for uniformity in values and approaches expected to be shared by all members.

In contrast, Orban prioritizes sovereignty as the supreme value and believes that no supranational organization should interfere in a nation’s internal politics. He effectively denies Brussels the right to control political processes within Hungary, which naturally irritates the European Commission.

Hungary’s stance is clear: the EU was originally intended as a union of states, but has transformed into a rigid structure where recruitment for leadership positions is opaque, and mechanisms are far from democratic. 

At the same time, Orban has been reelected four times since 2010, casting doubt on any claims regarding the undemocratic nature of elections in Hungary. This shows that the policies of his party reflect the general sentiments of the Hungarian public, and the external pressure exerted on Budapest is a sign of disregard for the views of the Hungarian people.

The conflict over whether common regulations and the unification of EU nations should take precedence over national sovereignty and the interests of local populations has smoldered for years. This standoff has already cost Hungary billions of dollars in frozen EU funds. Such actions by the European Commission have exerted pressure on the Hungarian currency and fueled inflation. The opposition has particularly highlighted this destabilizing economic factor when pointing out the repercussions of the EU’s ‘punishments’.

The disputes between Brussels and Budapest have persisted for years, although they usually resulted in compromises. But all that changed in 2022 when Russia’s military operation in Ukraine revealed significant differences between the interests of Hungary as a sovereign state and those of the EU as a supranational political entity.

How Ukraine exacerbated the divide between Hungary and Europe

The divergence in Hungary’s and Brussels’ approaches to the Ukraine crisis became evident as early as February 2022. Budapest consistently advocated for a peaceful resolution through dialogue, while the EU, following the lead of the Biden administration in the US, focused on “strategically defeating” Russia on the battlefield.

Moreover, Orban prohibited the transit of lethal weapons to Ukraine from third countries through Hungarian territory. And of course, Hungary itself does not supply weapons to the Ukrainian military.

As a bordering state with Ukraine, Hungary prioritizes its own national security and has expressed concerns about being drawn into the conflict instigated by the Ukrainian government. 

Budapest also had grievances against Kiev, particularly regarding its failure to protect the ethnic Hungarian minority living in Transcarpathia. Furthermore, the ban on Hungarian-language education and the forced conscription of ethnic Hungarians exacerbated tensions between Hungary and Ukraine.

Still, compromises were generally reached – either through negotiations, mutual concessions, or direct threats to cut off Hungary’s access to EU funds. 

The dynamics shifted after Trump returned to the White House, effectively removing the US from the coalition supporting Ukraine. This compelled the EU to expedite decision-making processes regarding sanctions and aid to Ukraine. And now, amid the backdrop of the US and Israel’s war against Iran, the EU also faces serious energy issues. 

The EU is grappling with an incredibly complex challenge: it needs to arm Ukraine, find additional funds for skyrocketing fuel costs, and continue exerting pressure on Russia. Meanwhile, Hungary is blocking the implementation of the 20th package of sanctions on Russia and, even more significantly for the EU, a €90 billion ($105 billion) loan for Kiev. According to the Ukrainian press, this could mean that Kiev will run out of money for the war by the summer.

Budapest’s actions are driven by Ukraine’s blockade of the Druzhba oil pipeline, which transports crude oil from Russia to Hungary. Ukraine claims that the pipeline has been damaged by a Russian attack, but denies inspection teams from Hungary and the EU access to the site, which certainly undermines the credibility of Kiev’s statements in Budapest’s eyes.

Things escalated to the point where Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky directly threatened Orban, saying he would send guys from the Ukrainian armed forces to talk to the Hungarian prime minister “in their language.” Even the European Commission felt compelled to criticize Zelensky, albeit very delicately (which is hardly surprising). 

With the end of direct US financial support for Ukraine, the urgency of Western funding has intensified. Any delays instigated by Orban could prove disastrous for Europe’s plans to weaken Russia.

Meanwhile, Brussels is still trying to probe Russia’s ‘red lines’, attempting to push them further away.

This is no longer just an internal political debate about shaping Hungary’s political landscape; it has evolved into a broader discussion about differing views on European security. Should Moscow’s interests be considered in constructing the continent’s security architecture (as Budapest believes), or should they be disregarded entirely (as Brussels believes)?

So in order to strengthen sanctions and unlock funding for Ukraine, the European Commission hopes that the Hungarian people will vote against Orban on April 12.

Will anything change if Orban loses?

Predicting the outcome of this year’s parliamentary elections in Hungary is quite challenging. Political analysts agree that the chances for Fidesz and Tisza are roughly equal. However, even if Magyar wins, most likely he would not be a convenient choice for Brussels either. His agenda appears equally nationalistic, and he’s not likely to budge on issues such as immigration or Ukraine’s accession to the EU – in these aspects, at least, there seems to be a consensus among Hungarian politicians.

However, one thing is certain: Magyar will back Brussels’ anti-Russian foreign policy course, especially since he has expressed a desire to restore the significance of the Visegrad Group by strengthening ties with Poland. Essentially, Tisza aims to align the approach to Ukraine with the broader centrist European establishment. In practice, this means expediting the resolution of issues, thus helping Brussels fuel the Ukraine conflict.

It’s no coincidence that Orban’s party has integrated Zelensky’s image into its campaign; if Tisza comes to power, EU funds could flow more swiftly to Kiev. This would only prolong the conflict and worsen Hungary’s situation as it moves further away from Russian energy sources in favor of the supranational interests of the EU.

Moscow believes the US-Iran ceasefire has a regional dimension and extends to Lebanon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told his Iranian counterpart Abbas Aragchi in a phone call on Thursday, according to a readout. 

Lavrov stated that Russia fully supports the cessation of hostilities between the US and Iran and Israel’s accession to those agreements. He expressed hope for the success of the upcoming negotiations and reaffirmed Moscow’s readiness to help “overcome the consequences of the unprovoked US‑Israeli aggression against Iran and ensure long-term peace and sustainable security in the region.” 

The Russian minister also emphasized that Moscow “firmly believes that these agreements, as announced by the Pakistani mediators, have a regional dimension and, in particular, extend to Lebanon.”  

Israel has insisted that Lebanon is not part of the ceasefire deal and said it intends to continue operations in the country, where it has conducted extensive airstrikes and launched a ground invasion.  

Shortly after the US-Iranian ceasefire was announced, the Israeli military said it carried out its largest wave of strikes on Lebanon since the war began, hitting approximately 100 targets across the country in just ten minutes.  

Iran has made clear that Lebanon must be included in any cessation of hostilities. It has also warned that the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed to shipping until Israel commits to a ceasefire on all fronts. 

Araghchi thanked Lavrov for Russia’s “principled position” during UN Security Council meetings on the situation in the Persian Gulf, according to the ministry. The two diplomats also discussed broader regional security issues. 

Moscow has consistently condemned the US‑Israeli campaign against Iran, which began on February 28. Russia has called for de‑escalation and a diplomatic solution, while accusing Washington of violating international law.  

The Kremlin has also criticized Israel’s strikes on Lebanon, including a March attack on a Russian cultural center in the southern city of Nabatieh.

Former US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who was fired by President Donald Trump last week, will not be required to testify about her handling of the investigation into late financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the Justice Department (DOJ) has announced.

In a letter explaining the decision, the DOJ argued that Bondi was summoned to appear before Congress in her official capacity – a role she no longer holds – rendering the demand invalid. However, lawmakers from both parties have insisted that she remains legally obligated to appear.

“The removal of Pam Bondi as attorney general does not diminish the Committee’s legitimate oversight interests in seeking her sworn testimony,” Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace and her fellow legislator, Democrat Ro Khanna, have said.

Mace further stressed that Bondi “cannot escape accountability simply because she no longer holds the office,” and that her testimony is “even more important” now.

Democratic Representative Robert Garcia has threatened to initiate Congressional contempt proceedings if Bondi fails to appear, insisting she must “come in to testify immediately” about the Epstein files and the “White House cover-up.”

Bondi’s refusal comes as the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files has faced a mounting backlash ever since Congress passed a law last year requiring the DOJ to release all unclassified records related to the financier, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

In February 2025, Bondi told Fox News that Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” fueling expectations of explosive revelations. By July, however, the DOJ announced that no such list ever existed and that it had no plans to release additional documents. 

Bondi’s refusal to publish the full Epstein files has been widely ridiculed, including by both Democrats and Republicans. The former official reportedly even had to move into military housing over mounting threats.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is scheduled to testify in a closed‑door transcribed interview in June. Gates has not been accused of any misconduct, and his representatives say he “welcomes the opportunity to appear before the committee.” 

Other prominent figures who have already testified include former president Bill Clinton and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and billionaire Les Wexner.

Norway is assisting Ukraine with preparing “terrorist attacks” on Russian commercial vessels in the Barents and Norwegian seas, TASS has reported, citing a defense source.

Around 50 Ukrainian drone operators have already arrived in the NATO country and begun their training, the agency said in an article on Thursday.

According to the source, they are “practicing the use of submerged and surface unmanned systems in the Norwegian Sea in cold conditions together with experts of the Norwegian Navy’s special operations command.”

The plan by Kiev and Oslo is to target ships heading in and out of Murmansk, which is Russia’s largest Arctic port, located in the north-west of the country, a source told TASS.

“The Norwegian leadership’s assistance to the Kiev regime’s terrorist activities and the provision of its territory for preparation and execution of sabotage at sea directly draws Norway and the entire NATO bloc into a military conflict with Russia,” the source stressed.

In February, Norwegian intelligence agencies issued a report which described Russia as the “greatest threat” to the security of the Nordic nation and the whole of Europe. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the paper as a collection of “fantasies” and “baseless accusations,” stressing that “the deliberate escalation of tensions” by Norway contradicts the interests of both Moscow and Oslo.

The authorities in Moscow have repeatedly said they harbor no aggressive plans against NATO and will only fight the bloc if it attacks Russia first.

Ukrainian drones have previously targeted vessels transporting Russian oil and other goods in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Kiev also attacked the port of Novorossiysk, which accounts for some 20% of Russia’s crude oil exports, and energy facilities in various parts of the country.

Washington has called on Americans to avoid traveling to Nigeria and has approved the departure of non‑emergency embassy staff and their relatives from the capital Abuja, pointing to a deteriorating security environment. 

In an updated advisory released Wednesday, the US Department of State specifically advised against travel to northern and central states – including Plateau, Jigawa, Kwara, Niger and Taraba – due to terrorism and armed violence, as well as regions in the northwest and southeast plagued by unrest and criminal gangs. 

According to the advisory, violent crime is “common throughout Nigeria,” ranging from armed robbery and carjacking to hostage-taking and roadside banditry.

“Americans are perceived as wealthy and are often targets of crime and kidnapping,” the statement read. 

The West African state has long struggled with criminal gangs and extremist groups, which frequently hold people for ransom. This gained global attention in 2014 when Boko Haram militants kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls from Chibok in Borno State. ISWAP is a Boko Haram splinter group, which has conducted attacks on military and civilian targets. 

At least 20 people were killed after armed militants attacked in Bagna and Erena in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State earlier this week. 

US Ambassador Leo Brent Bozell III formally presented his credentials to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday, saying he has “fallen in love” with the country amid strained relations between Washington and Pretoria.

He made the statement in a message he delivered as he formally presented his diplomatic credentials to President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Bozell handed over his Letters of Credence and Recall during an official ceremony at the Sefako M. Makgatho Presidential Guesthouse on Wednesday, marking the formal start of his tenure as Washington’s envoy.

“Mr President, before I arrived here, I cannot tell you how many people told me that, in short, I’ll fall in love with the country. It’s only taken two months, and I can confirm that has happened.”

Bozell said the US and South Africa are two nations with “shared values and interests”.

ICYMI: Ambassador L. Brent Bozell III had a few words to share with President Ramaphosa at his credentialing ceremony 🇺🇸🇿🇦 pic.twitter.com/V6h1B3I4Ua

— US Embassy SA (@USEmbassySA) April 8, 2026

“Perhaps not enough people understand this, but you, your excellency, were the primary author of your constitution. You do understand that.

”It’s my goal and my time here to build on the shared interests, to build on self-respect, to build on our shared values, to take our two nations to places they’ve never been before. I believe in the art of the possible, and I believe it will happen.”

Despite tensions, Wednesday’s ceremony emphasised continued diplomatic engagement.

Bozell was among representatives from 20 countries, including Zimbabwe, Cuba and Denmark, whose credentials were accepted by Ramaphosa.

First published by IOL

A federal judge has barred the administration of US President Donald Trump from ending the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that has allowed more than 5,000 Ethiopian nationals to live and work in the US since 2022.

The US Department of Homeland Security announced in December that it was terminating TPS for Ethiopians, saying conditions in the country no longer justified the designation. The protections were due to expire on February 13, but District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston temporarily halted the move on January 30 ahead of that deadline.

In the latest ruling on Wednesday, Murphy concluded that Washington acted “without regard for the process delineated by Congress” and that the decision was “preordained” and based on “pretextual” reasons.

The lawsuit was filed by three Ethiopian nationals and the advocacy group African Communities Together. In March, the court extended its temporary pause after hearing arguments, leaving the protections in place unless a later order says otherwise. Plaintiffs challenging the move argued that the administration acted unlawfully in ending the program despite continued violence and instability in parts of Ethiopia.

The ruling marks the latest setback for the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy. TPS shields foreign nationals from deportation and allows them to work in the US when conditions in their home countries are deemed unsafe. Since Trump returned to office last year, his administration has moved to phase out the program for 13 countries, including Somalia and South Sudan.

Republican US Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri has criticized the court decision as “absurd” and an “assault on the rule of law,” adding that Judge Murphy “lacks the subject matter jurisdiction to issue this order.”

US President Donald Trump has lashed out at NATO over the inaction of European allies during the war with Iran.

Trump, according to sources close to bloc chief Mark Rutte who spoke to Bloomberg, has issued an ultimatum to its members demanding a commitment to help secure the Strait of Hormuz “within days. ”

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN,” Trump posted on Thursday on his social media platform Truth Social.

Trump’s anger follows weeks of criticism of European NATO members for what he sees as their refusal to support the US-Israeli war on Iran. Spain has refused outright to allow US planes use its bases, while Germany and the UK have refused to condemn Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming only “this is not our war.”

Rutte described the exchange as a “very frank, very open” discussion between “two good friends.” He said in a Thursday interview with CNN, however, that Trump was “clearly disappointed” that US allies had refused to take part in the Iran war. Asked multiple times if Trump had said if he would leave the alliance, Rutte did not answer directly.

"Is the world safer today than it was before the war was started?"
Secretary-General of NATO, Mark Rutte: "Absolutely, and this is thanks to President Trump's leadership" pic.twitter.com/jjOWexNsOg

— Glenn Diesen (@Glenn_Diesen) April 9, 2026

Rutte has faced a barrage of criticism in Europe for his perceived deference toward Trump. During a joint press appearance last year, he jokingly called the US president “Daddy,” drawing media attention and ridicule.

Ahead of the latest meeting, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told journalists that a possible US withdrawal from the bloc is “something the president has discussed.” She also said that Trump could raise the issue with Rutte.

A US Army veteran who worked with the elite Delta Force commando unit has been charged with providing top secret data to a reporter, the US Department of Justice has said.

Courtney Williams of Wagram, North Carolina was indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday over “her alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist,” the DOJ said in a statement. The preliminary charge against the 40-year-old carries a penalty of up to ten years in prison.

The court filings did not name the reporter in question, but Politico and other outlets identified him as Seth Harp, author of the 2025 non-fiction book ‘The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces’.

Williams, who held a position providing paperwork allowing special operations troops to covertly deploy abroad between 2010 and 2016, is mentioned as a source in the book on multiple occasions. It also contains several of her photos.

The DOJ said that the veteran held a ‘Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance’ and signed non-disclosure agreements when she joined and departed her unit.

Williams will remain in custody at least until Monday, when the judge is scheduled to decide on the request by the prosecutors to keep her detained pending trial.

FBI director Kash Patel said in a post on X on Thursday that Williams’ arrest was the result of “outstanding work” by his agency’s operatives.

“Let this serve as a message to any would-be leakers: we’re working these cases, and we’re making arrests. This FBI will not tolerate those who seek to betray our country and put Americans in harm’s way,” Patel wrote.

Harp called the veteran’s indictment “an outrage,” arguing that “[President Donald] Trump’s unhinged DOJ will not even say what ‘classified information’ she allegedly leaked.”

During nearly six weeks of the war on Iran, the US has suffered heavy military aircraft losses, now exceeding those recorded during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iran’s recent downing of an American F-35 jet marks the first time in 23 years that a US fighter jet has been shot down in combat; the previous instance was in Iraq in 2003, when an A‑10 was lost. 

Over the seven years of the Iraq campaign from 2003 to 2009, total US aviation losses amounted to 129 helicopters and 24 fixed‑wing aircraft, with only 46 attributed to hostile fire. The remaining cases were due to malfunctions, fuel exhaustion, and pilot error.

Since the start of the Iran war, the US has lost at least 44 aircraft, including the first incident of the US fifth-generation stealth F-35 Lightning II being hit. The list includes four F-15E Strike Eagle (the Wall Street Journal cited a fact sheet stating that the original model costs at least $31 million, while the cost of newer models is close to $100 million), two A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, two Lockheed C-130 Hercules, two Boeing E-3 Sentries, eight Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers, one Boeing CH-47 Chinook, one Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk (damaged), two Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks (damaged), four MH-6 Little Bird helicopters, and 17 General Atomics MQ-9 Reapers (at about $30 million each, totalling close to $500 million).

High-value AWACS and multiple KC-135 tankers were damaged by Iranian strikes on regional airbases.  In the first four days of the war, Iran hit almost all US military bases (or locations hosting US aircraft) in the Gulf. It struck key US ground radars linked to the THAAD air‑defense system, other early‑warning radars, and multiple radar and communication nodes.

In the UAE, an area of Al Dhafra base with several satellite antennas was hit, while it is still unclear whether the AN/TPY‑2 radar of the THAAD system at Al Ruwais was damaged. In Kuwait, structures at Ali Al Salem base connected to SATCOM systems were damaged, and at least three radar domes at Camp Arifjan were destroyed.

At Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan base, at least one strike hit a satellite‑communications area where an AN/TPY‑2 radar had previously been deployed. The large AN/FPS‑132 fixed‑face AESA early‑warning and long‑range anti‑ballistic radar at Al Udeid in Qatar also appears to have been struck. Iranian sources further claim damage to another AN/TPY‑2 at Muwaffaq Salti base in Jordan, though this remains unconfirmed. In Kuwait, in addition to damage to some structures at the Ali al Salem base that appear to be connected to SATCOM systems, at least three radar domes at Camp Arifjan were destroyed.

Most of these high‑value radars – along with aerial refuellers and AEW&C assets – were targeted using ballistic missiles or relatively inexpensive Shahed drones (costing between $20,000 and $50,000 each).

While US lost many high-value ground assets in the region and nearly 44 aircraft, Israel had minimal losses on the ground and only slow-moving UAVs in the air. Israel is a regional player, and has had years of experience in targeting ground assets in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, among others. Israel has been perpetually at war. Being a small country, it has been conscious of securing its assets under hardened shelters. It has nearly ten Iron Dome-class AD systems, among others, such as David’s Sling and Arrow. The Israeli Air Force has fine-tuned tactics to keep its own assets secure.

The reasons behind US losses

The Iranian Air Force was grounded or destroyed in the early air action by the US and Israel, which have flown more than 10,000 combat flights since the conflict began. The Iranian Air Force was no match for the US Air Force in terms of numbers and technology. While a significant number of Iranian air defenses were also neutralized, enough survived to engage adversary assets.

The fact that F-35 stealth fighter jet could be tracked and engaged indicates the possibility of Iran having used Chinese YLC-8B and YLC-8E advanced, mobile Chinese UHF-band 3D surveillance radars specifically designed to detect low-observable, stealth aircraft. Iran might have also used up-to-date intelligence from Russian satellites, often including the position of airborne aircraft.

The US lost more aircraft in the air due to a lack of coordination with the Gulf countries, where most of its assets are located. Also, more action has shifted south near the Strait of Hormuz, and when Iran started hitting assets in the countries that allowed housing US assets. Many of their radars and large air platforms were lying in the open. These assets were thus a relatively easy target. Iranians used drones and drone swarms to hit US military assets.

While the US Air Force and Navy have been exercising regularly with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, including “large force engagements,” the GCC nations have had almost no combat experience. Early coordination challenges with Gulf host nations, contributed to incidents like the initial friendly-fire loss of three F-15Es over Kuwait.

While the US campaign initially succeeded in degrading Iranian air defenses and leadership, it encountered serious operational and strategic failures as the conflict continued. The US underestimated Iranian defenses and tactics. Reports indicate that Tehran could have 50% of its missile launchers and drones intact.

Iran successfully targeted US military installations across the region, including in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq, causing significant casualties. This demonstrated that US air dominance did not equate to security on the ground. Tehran relies heavily on inexpensive, locally produced drones like the Shahed, costing $20,000–$50,000, to overwhelm sophisticated, expensive air defenses as part of asymmetric warfare. Iran is fostering closer military ties with Russia, supplying drones in exchange for advanced technologies such as the S-400 system.

The US repeated mistakes from previous conflicts (Afghanistan, Iraq) by relying solely on aerial destruction without a viable, clear “day-after” political strategy to replace the targeted regime. Despite neutralizing senior leadership, the “rally-around-the-flag” effect became visible.

The conflict has already exhausted US military resources significantly, including high-value assets like Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors, creating shortages in other critical theaters such as Europe and Asia. Most NATO members refused to join or help in replenishments. The global economic downturn caused by the war has been of great concern and is likely to have played a role in the ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump.

Bangladesh is battling a major measles outbreak, with the government reporting more than 1,000 suspected cases across the country in 24 hours.

The Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said that 1,248 suspected and 189 confirmed measles cases were reported from 8 AM on Tuesday to 8 AM Wednesday, the Dhaka Tribune reported.

Ten suspected deaths were also recorded during the period, including six in the capital, Dhaka, which registered the highest number of suspected cases at 505.

The DGHS has reported 11,133 suspected and 1,599 confirmed measles cases nationwide between March 15 and April 8.

Health officials said the data reflects only cases recorded in government hospitals, adding that the actual number of infections could be significantly higher.

A surge in infections, deaths, and hospital admissions has been reported from across the South Asian nation.

Dhaka is conducting emergency measles-rubella vaccinations while trying to contain the outbreak, which has killed more than 100 children in less than a month, the Associated Press reported.

The government said vaccination for children aged from six months to five years old in 18 high-risk districts began on Sunday in association with the World Health Organization (WHO).

Measles is a highly contagious airborne disease causing fever and respiratory issues, and can have severe or fatal complications, especially in young children, according to the WHO.

The WHO says 95% of the population has to be vaccinated in order to stop the disease from spreading.

France’s top military commander has told the country’s parliament that the prospect of a direct conflict with Russia is his “primary concern,” insisting on ramping up military spending as Paris reportedly prepares to shift to a “war economy.”

General Fabien Mandon, the chief of staff of the French Armed Forces, made the statement during a hearing before the National Assembly’s Defense Committee about a proposed update to the 2024-2030 military programming and budget.

“An open war with Russia remains my primary concern in terms of preparing the armed forces,” he told lawmakers, pointing to what he called “the continued presence of a Russian threat on our continent.”

Mandon, who had previously warned of a potential “clash in three or four years” with Moscow, insisted that France is in a “dangerous period” and desperately needs more investment in the military.

The general’s remarks come as the French government has announced a revised long-term military budget that would see it spend an additional €36 billion ($42 billion) on weapons, pushing annual spending to €76.3 billion by 2030, or 2.5% of GDP. 

The shift is being carried out “with a view to preparing for a ‘war economy’,” the document read. 

France’s rearmament push comes amid a wider European militarization trend as Germany is also undergoing a massive buildup, with Berlin planning to spend more than €500 billion on defense by 2029 and aiming to increase its active troops from 180,000 to over 260,000 by 2035. 

Moscow has consistently dismissed Western allegations of an imminent Russian attack as “nonsense,” arguing that such claims are used to justify record military spending, distract from domestic problems, and whip up anti-Russian hysteria. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in February that Moscow “has no intention of attacking any part of Europe” and has “absolutely no reason to do so.” He warned, however, that if European nations launch an attack on Russia, “there will be a full-scale military response with all available military means.”

Russia and Ukraine have conducted a repatriation of the bodies of fallen troops, continuing a string of roughly-monthly humanitarian actions launched last year.

In the latest round on Thursday, 1,000 sets of Ukrainian remains were handed over to Kiev, while Russia received 41 bodies, as witnessed by Ruptly video agency.

The previous such event, facilitated by the International Committee of the Red Cross, was reported in late February, while in early March Kiev and Moscow returned 300 POWs each.

The ratio of soldiers sent back for burial has remained mostly consistent over the months, suggesting a significant difference in attrition taken by the two sides of the Ukraine conflict. However, there is no strict correlation, considering that Russian forces have long been making territorial gains and consequently collect more bodies of Ukrainian troops killed in action.

Kiev relies on mandatory conscription to replenish its battlefield losses, enforced with harsh tactics increasingly rejected by the Ukrainian public. In recent months there was an uptick in serious injuries and even death reported during confrontations between draft officers and civilians. The manpower shortage is further exacerbated by mass desertion of conscripts.

The death toll from heavy rains and flooding in Angola has risen to 42, with casualties reported across several provinces following last weekend’s downpours, Televisao Publica de Angola (TPA) reported on Tuesday, citing official data.  

Most victims were recorded in Benguela, the authorities said, while fatalities were also confirmed in Luanda, Cuanza Sul, and Malanje. Officials are continuing to assess the full scale of the damage. 

The storms caused significant damage to housing and infrastructure, including fallen trees, flooding from overflowed retention basins and landslides. Nearly 685 infrastructure facilities were affected, while dozens of families were left in vulnerable conditions. 

“In total, 55 families were affected, corresponding to approximately 275 people in a vulnerable situation, due to the collapse of homes mostly built with local materials,” Angola’s Civil Protection and Fire Department stated. The authorities reported the rains lasted from April 2 to April 6. 

Clean-up and recovery operations have been launched, including water removal, debris clearance and assistance to affected residents. 

Heavy rains that began in late 2025 have resulted in widespread flooding across parts of southern Africa, overwhelming drainage systems and causing rivers and dams to surge beyond capacity. In South Africa, prolonged downpours have inundated Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, killing at least 30 people, damaging thousands of homes, and prompting evacuations, including in Kruger National Park. 

Zimbabwe has also experienced extensive flooding, with at least 70 deaths, 51 injuries, and more than 1,000 homes destroyed since early January.

Plans for automated military conscription during a US national emergency are advancing and on schedule to be in place by the end of the year, according to the federal agency tasked with maintaining the list, the Selective Service System (SSS).

Provisions included in the FY 2026 National Defense Authorization Act passed last December in response to falling compliance shifted the responsibility from individuals to the SSS.

The changes drew renewed attention this week after media outlets highlighted a recent update on the agency’s website. The SSS is expected to finalize implementation by December 2026, aiming for a “streamlined registration process and corresponding workforce realignment.”

Currently, most adult males under the age of 26 living in the US – including undocumented immigrants – are required to register for potential conscription. The millions who fail to do so can face penalties of up to $250,000 in fines, five years in prison, and restrictions on obtaining citizenship. Under the new system, the SSS would instead build its registry using personal data from multiple government databases.

In recent years, the Pentagon has faced mounting challenges in both recruiting volunteers and maintaining the national draft list. Standards for enlistment have been lowered to address recruitment shortfalls, while the shift to automatic registration is intended to boost the pool for possible conscription.

Several anti-war organizations have urged Congress to reconsider the change. They argue the system “won’t produce an accurate or complete list of potential draftees,” but at the same time “will increase the likelihood of war and violate the privacy of US citizens and residents.” Critics believe that the aggregated database will be “vulnerable to misuse and weaponization” by both government entities and private actors.

The EU is relying on non-governmental organizations, bankrolled by billionaire financier George Soros, as well as controlled media to justify its push for more online surveillance and censorship, Telegram founder Pavel Durov has said.

On Wednesday, state-owned broadcaster France 24 reported on a study by NGO AI Forensics that said nearly 25,000 users in Spanish and Italian Telegram groups had shared thousands of images of naked women, often in exchange for money, while also engaging in doxxing and harassment of women.

The study said the images and videos were sourced from platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, with Telegram acting as “a hub” for organizing and circulating abusive content.

It added the platform’s privacy features such as end-to-end encryption and paid access to channels enabled abusive behavior to develop with a high degree of security and impunity.

AI Forensics blamed Telegram for failure to clampdown on such groups and advised the EU to classify it as a “very large online platform” (VLOP), which allows for stricter oversight under the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

However, the narrative by AI Forensics, which is “a Soros-funded contractor to the European Commission,” is being widely distributed by the press, including “globalist outlets” like El Pais, Der Spiegel and Wired along with French media, he said in a post on Telegram.

“I doubt anyone still takes these organizations seriously – most of them lost people’s trust during the COVID era. But it’s important to call out all such attempts at public manipulation, because they are used to take away what's left of our freedoms,” the Russian-born tech mogul stressed.

Durov is currently facing legal proceedings in France after being arrested and spending several days behind bars in Paris in 2024 on allegations that Telegram failed to deter criminal activity on the platform. The entrepreneur maintains that his prosecution is politically motivated.

Bangladesh has sought more fuel from India to offset a supply shortage triggered by the Middle East conflict.

Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman, who was in New Delhi on an official visit on Wednesday, met with India’s minister of petroleum and natural Gas, Hardeep Singh Puri, and conveyed Dhaka’s request.

Puri said the request would be considered “readily and favorably,” Bangladesh’s ⁠Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Dhaka has also sought higher volumes of fertilizer, Reuters reported.

Petroleum & Natural Gas Minister @HardeepSPuri met Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dr Khalilur Rahman.

The meeting focused on enhancing bilateral cooperation in the energy sector, with both sides discussing key areas of collaboration.

Follow the complete story on #PBSHABD. Register… https://t.co/amkMSQFKmf

— PB-SHABD (@PBSHABD) April 8, 2026

Bangladesh relies on imports for about 95% of its energy requirements for its 175 million people. India is expected to supply 180,000 tonnes of diesel to its neighbor each year.

Rahman also met with his Indian counterpart, S.Jaishankar, and Commerce Minister Piyush Goel.

The visit comes as Bangladesh’s new dispensation is seeking to build a fresh chapter in its bilateral relationship with India.

It is the first high-level visit from Bangladesh since Tarique Rahman was sworn in as prime minister in February.

The Bangladeshi side also reiterated its request to extradite former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and former Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, who have been handed the death penalty, to Bangladesh, the PTI news agency reported.

The two sides agreed that Hasina’s stay in India should not be allowed to impede ties between the two countries, according to the report.

Bilateral ties, which became strained after Hasina fled to India following an uprising in 2024, have been on the mend since Rahman assumed power in February.

The almost apocalyptic rhetoric from US President Donald Trump, who threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” suddenly gave way to de-escalation. By the evening of April 7, it was announced that the US and Iran had agreed to a two-week ceasefire; shortly afterward, Israel confirmed it would join. Over these two weeks, negotiations toward a permanent peace deal are due to be held with Pakistan acting as mediator.

This is exactly the scenario we saw as the most likely from the very beginning of the conflict.

The war could still resume (we’ll get to that below), but for now it looks like things are moving toward a reality where the Persian Gulf is, in fact, becoming Persian. Iran now effectively controls shipping in the Gulf and holds the Arab oil monarchies at risk – and the US appears to be accepting that.

Let’s assume the pause in hostilities lasts months – or even years. That’s entirely plausible: even if a formal peace deal doesn’t materialize, the ceasefire could simply be extended over and over again.

In that case, the top priority for the Arab states will be building a new generation of air defense. The blueprint is fairly clear: rely on cheap, mass-produced interceptors, whether ground-based (such as Russia’s Pantsir) or air-launched (like APKWS). Both Arab states and Israel will likely focus on this, alongside replenishing their traditional air defense stockpiles.

The second priority will be diversifying logistics – building new pipelines to the Red Sea and finding alternatives to Gulf shipping routes. The goal is obvious: break free from Iran’s Strait of Hormuz chokehold and reduce its leverage. That said, for countries like Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq, pipelines across the Arabian Peninsula would mean dependence on another regional power – Saudi Arabia. And, of course, transit fees would apply.

None of this solves the core problem. The geography of the Gulf makes full protection impossible. Across more than 500 nautical miles (about 1,000 km) – like something out of an old arcade shooter – every shipping lane is within Iran’s reach. Along the coastline, ports, factories, desalination plants, oil storage facilities, data centers, hotels, and skyscrapers sit exposed like targets at a shooting range. Defending all of that from the sea is extremely difficult, and for the time being, the Arab states will likely choose to pay for safe passage.

In the East, one of the highest marks of a wise ruler is the ability to impose tribute on neighbors and make them acknowledge your authority. That principle is well understood in both Iran and the Arab world. Ironically, the US and Israel may have helped bring about a new regional order that actually fits local political logic.

Now Washington and West Jerusalem will face a long, uphill battle to rebuild their influence – and any move they make will be viewed with skepticism by Arab states: what if it all falls apart again? The alpha wolf missed his mark.

Scenario 2: Renewed escalation

It’s entirely possible that in two weeks the war could flare up again – potentially with even greater intensity. Iranian negotiators could be targeted again, triggering an earlier collapse of the ceasefire. Still, we see this as relatively unlikely: despite the considerable military capabilities of the US and Israel, they currently lack a clear path to decisively defeat Iran through conventional means.

Realistically, short of a nuclear scenario, the coalition has two main options.

Meanwhile, Iran’s missile capabilities have not only survived but shown signs of recovery and increased operational tempo. And US forces have been unable to seriously disrupt Iran’s drone launch infrastructure (including Shahed-type UAVs). That means any large-scale bombing campaign risks triggering significant retaliatory damage – especially against the oil-producing Arab monarchies – prolonging and deepening the global oil shock and potentially pushing the world toward a financial crisis.

Israel would also be exposed. According to a JPMorgan report citing the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, the success rate of Iranian strikes on Israeli territory has surged – from 3% at the start of the war to 27% by late March and early April – largely due to the strain and depletion of Israeli air defenses.

The second option – a large-scale ground operation, either along Iran’s coastline or against Iranian-controlled islands – comes with all the risks of air warfare plus inevitable heavy casualties. The upside? Essentially none. Limited amphibious raids would achieve little, while a full-scale invasion aimed at regime change is simply not feasible.

None of this means escalation is off the table. It means that before escalating, US and Israeli leadership would have to solve the same equation they faced at the start of the war – but now with far fewer unknowns. Iran’s resilience, its military capabilities, and the extent of US-Israeli international isolation are now much clearer.

Scenario 3: Low-level clashes under Iranian control of Hormuz

This is essentially a variation of the first scenario – and, in our view, the most likely one. In fact, it already appears to be unfolding: Iran is accusing Israel of violating the ceasefire with new strikes and is threatening (and likely preparing) to retaliate.

If traffic through the Strait of Hormuz continues more or less uninterrupted, a pattern of ongoing tension and sporadic exchanges could become the new normal. Israel carries out strikes (or Iran claims it was attacked); Iran responds by temporarily shutting down the strait for a day or two – maybe launching a retaliatory strike of its own.

After a few weeks or months, this kind of news simply fades into the background – a constant, low-level risk. The region becomes less stable, but the rest of the world largely shrugs – as long as oil and other resources keep flowing out of the Persian Gulf.

Zimbabwe’s government has said it will impose export quotas on lithium concentrates and set conditions for the resumption of suspended shipments, tightening state control over a mineral critical to global battery supply chains.

The southern African nation’s Mines Ministry announced the measure in an April 2 letter to the Chamber of Mines, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Under the new rules, producers must publish annual financial statements and meet labor, safety, and environmental standards.

“Approved lithium concentrate export quotas will be communicated to each producer,” the ministry said, according to Reuters.

Mining companies will also have to provide written commitments and timelines for building lithium sulphate plants before January 1, 2027, when Zimbabwe’s planned ban on lithium concentrate exports is due to take effect. A 10% export tax on concentrate shipments will remain in place until then.

The country is Africa’s largest and the world’s fourth largest producer of lithium, a key component in electric-vehicle batteries and renewable energy storage systems. It reportedly exported more than 1.1 million metric tons of lithium-bearing spodumene concentrate, most of it to China, in 2025, accounting for about 15% of Chinese imports of the material that year.

Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt has built a $400 million lithium sulphate plant in Zimbabwe, while Sinomine and Yahua have also announced plans to build processing facilities at their mines.

Zimbabwe’s neighbor Malawi banned exports of unprocessed minerals last October in a bid to spur investment in local processing capacity, while Namibia prohibited bulk exports of unprocessed ores in 2023 to encourage domestic beneficiation.

India has restarted high-level talks with Türkiye after a gap of four years, the Foreign Ministry in New Delhi has said.

The 12th round of India-Türkiye Foreign Office Consultations (FOC) was held in New Delhi on Wednesday, according to an official statement. The event was co-chaired by Sibi George, Secretary (West), Ministry of External Affairs, and Berris Ekinci, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Türkiye.

The last FOC round was held in June 2022 in Ankara.

“The discussions focused on areas such as trade and investments, tourism, technology and innovation, energy, cooperation in educational and cultural fields, people-to-people ties, and fight against cross-border terrorism,” the Indian Foreign Ministry said.

12th round of Türkiye-India Political Consultations were held in New Delhi btw the delegations led by Deputy Min. Amb. Berris Ekinci and Amb. Sibi George, Secretary (West) of the MEA of India.

Bilateral relations, as well as current regional & global developments were discussed. pic.twitter.com/ANKdtjv6ft

— Türkiye in India (@TC_YeniDelhiBE) April 8, 2026

A comprehensive review of bilateral relations was also held, apart from an exchange of views on regional and global issues.

The next FOC round will be held in Türkiye.

Earlier this week, India held talks with Azerbaijan aimed at resetting bilateral ties.

New Delhi’s ties with Türkiye hit a low following Ankara’s backing of Pakistan during a military standoff in South Asia in May 2025.

India did not invite Türkiye to its briefing to foreign envoys on the military confrontation as a mark of protest against Ankara’s support for Islamabad.
Officials had also reportedly flagged concerns about the supply of military equipment by nations including Türkiye and Azerbaijan to Pakistan after the standoff.

Türkiye, along with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, had reportedly played a role in brokering a ceasefire in the US-Iran conflict.

Turkish Ambassador to India Ali Murat Ersoy has said the time was ripe for Ankara and New Delhi to “breathe new life into their diplomatic relations,” The Hindu reported.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Türkiye’s President Recep Erdogan in 2023 at the G20 summit in New Delhi, while Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar’s last meeting with his Turkish counterpart took place in February 2024 on the sidelines of an ASEAN summit.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is seeking to have OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman fired as part of his lawsuit against the artificial intelligence giant, court documents filed on Tuesday show.

The mogul sued OpenAI in 2024, accusing it of defrauding him of $38 million in initial funding he contributed when co-founding the company in 2015, under the understanding that it would remain a nonprofit. The AI startup, valued at $852 billion, restructured late last year, and is now run as a nonprofit that holds a 26% stake in its for-profit arm, which includes ChatGPT.

Musk’s lawyers are seeking to “strip Sam Altman and Greg Brockman of their positions of authority and the personal financial benefits they extracted from OpenAI’s illicit for-profit operations and conversion,” according to the latest filing.

Musk left OpenAI in 2018 due to disagreements with Altman, bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, and launched his own artificial intelligence firm xAI the following year.

In February, xAI and OpenAI announced deals with the Pentagon to integrate their artificial intelligence tools into the US military’s classified systems. Altman claimed that his company agreed to cooperate under the condition that its tools would not be used for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Anthropic’s newest AI model is “extremely autonomous,” can reason like an advanced security researcher and is far too powerful for public release, the company claimed on Wednesday, as it continues to fight the Pentagon in court.

In Washington, the two-week ceasefire with Iran has been hastily presented as the beginning of de-escalation and as proof that pressure had once again created the conditions for diplomacy. Yet once the political packaging is removed and events are viewed in their true strategic dimension, the picture looks very different.

What really happened is a forced interruption, reached under pressure and surrounded by incompatible interpretations in Washington and Tehran. The temporary nature of this pause, its mediated character, and the striking divergence in how its meaning is understood all indicate that this is not the end of a war, but a breathing space within an unfinished conflict whose core political contradictions remain unresolved.

More importantly, in the eyes of many outside observers and much of global public opinion, Iran now appears to be the clear winner of the present battle. It absorbed the blow, answered with force and dignity, refused capitulation, and most importantly, gradually shifted control over the very logic of a war imposed upon it. The US and Israel had expected to define the rules of the conflict and then present any compelled Iranian retreat as proof of their own victory. What happened in practice was the opposite. Iran not only refused externally imposed terms, but also raised the cost of war to a point where the American military campaign became a political liability for the US itself. That is why this moment is increasingly perceived as a sign that even under conditions of overwhelming technological and military superiority, the US can no longer automatically convert a campaign of strikes into the submission of its opponent.

Why Washington backed off

From the outset, the operation rested on a familiar formula of coercion. The US and Israel proceeded on the assumption that a series of destructive strikes combined with intimidating rhetoric would compel Iran to accept external demands. This logic has long been a hallmark of American policy in the Middle East. First a condition of maximal pressure is created, then the adversary is left with a choice between submission and devastation, after which any tactical retreat is presented as evidence that Washington has imposed its will. But Iran once again exposed the central weakness of that model. A large state with internal mobilization, a resilient political system, and a strong historical consciousness cannot necessarily be broken by a single cycle of punishment, even when that punishment inflicts enormous damage. Iran is not invulnerable, but it has shown itself to be extremely hard to break. Its leadership remained in place, the state system did not disintegrate, its capacity to retaliate was not reduced to irrelevance, and its influence over the strategic environment around the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, by all indications, remained intact.

For that reason, Donald Trump’s sudden reversal in the final hours before the expiry of his own ultimatum should not be read as the confident gesture of a victor, but as the compelled maneuver of a leader urgently seeking an exit from an increasingly dangerous configuration. Shortly before the pause was announced, American rhetoric had already escalated to threats against civilian infrastructure if Iran did not ensure passage through Hormuz on Washington’s terms. Such signals were widely taken as evidence that the crisis had approached an extremely dangerous threshold. The subsequent pivot toward a temporary halt in attacks and toward negotiations means that pressure had begun to work not only against Iran, but against the American side itself. Continuing the war threatened Washington with multiple layers of cost. Military uncertainty remained high, allies were uneasy, markets were reacting nervously, and the prospect of a prolonged conflict without a swift and convincing outcome was becoming increasingly real.

Iran’s losses have hardened it

From a military standpoint, the US and Israel undeniably inflicted serious damage on Iran. Infrastructure was struck, losses were significant, economic pressure intensified, and social strain inside the country increased. But war cannot be measured simply by the number of destroyed targets. In the end, war is judged by whether force achieves the political outcome for which it was launched. And the internal political collapse that the architects of the campaign may have hoped for did not occur.

Iran, by contrast, responded not only militarily, but politically and psychologically. External pressure on this scale almost always produces a double effect. It heightens fear, exhaustion, and anger, yet it can also sharply strengthen a sense of historical community, especially when society perceives events not as pressure on a government alone, but as an attack on the country itself, on its sovereignty, and on its right to independent existence. That is precisely what appears to have happened here. Even if anxiety, confusion, and fatigue accumulated within Iran, the war simultaneously fostered internal consolidation, mass mobilization, and a strengthened conviction that national survival itself was at stake. This is one of the most important reasons why Iran now appears, in the eyes of many external observers, as the winner of the current phase. It turned its own resilience into a political resource, while its adversaries, having begun the war from a position of strength, ultimately found themselves searching for a formula to stop it.

This does not mean that Iran is free of internal problems. It remains a complex country marked by serious social, economic, and political contradictions. But the scale of the attack altered the hierarchy of threats within the country. When a state is subjected to direct strikes, when threats are made against its infrastructure, and when external aggression becomes openly demonstrative, internal dissatisfaction recedes behind the logic of national survival. In that sense, the US and Israel achieved the opposite of what they may have intended. Instead of loosening the internal fabric of Iranian society, they contributed to tightening it. The more the war came to be seen in Iran as an assault on the nation as a whole, the less likely internal political fragmentation became, and the greater society’s willingness to see resistance as the only dignified response.

The outcome for Iran is far from pure triumph. Yet politically it is of enormous importance. Yes, the losses were severe. Yes, economic pressure has not disappeared. Yes, the risk of renewed escalation remains. But in international politics, what matters is not only who suffered more destruction, but who could not be broken. Iran has not been reduced to a passive object of someone else’s will. On the contrary, it has managed to seize the political initiative. If one side begins a war in the expectation of forcing capitulation and ends by turning to mediation and bargaining over the parameters of negotiation, then its original design has already failed.

Ripples across the world 

The regional consequences of the war were equally revealing. The conflict very quickly ceased to be merely about the US, Israel, and Iran. It cast doubt on the entire security architecture of the Middle East, an architecture that for decades rested on the American military umbrella. For a long time, Arab monarchies were offered a relatively simple formula. The US would provide security, and regional partners would pay for it with contracts, political loyalty, and a partial limitation of their own autonomy. But a large war with Iran showed that this structure no longer appears either unconditional or reliable. Any major confrontation with Tehran automatically turns the bases, ports, energy infrastructure, and shipping routes of Washington’s allies into zones of heightened risk. That is why the reaction of Gulf markets to the ceasefire looked almost euphoric in its relief – enormous relief that the region had, at least temporarily, stepped back from the edge of catastrophe.

At the global level, the consequences also extended far beyond the regional theater. Any crisis around the Strait of Hormuz immediately affects the world economy, maritime logistics, insurance markets, energy prices, and the broader psychology of financial systems. The very reaction of markets to the halt in hostilities showed that this war was a systemic danger. This is especially painful for the US because it undermines one of the central pillars of America’s image in the world. For decades, it has sought to present itself not merely as a global source of order. Yet with the Iran war and its consequences, American power increasingly came to be seen as a producer of chaos, which then attempted to repackage a temporary pause as a diplomatic success.

What are the chances for a lasting peace?

The current pause looks not like a strategic settlement, but like a tactical stoppage. The reversal by the White House was simply too abrupt to be seen as part of a long-calculated design. Only recently, the rhetoric had approached an almost apocalyptic register, and suddenly Washington was speaking of a workable basis for future agreement. Such contrasts usually mean that the original scenario either failed or became too dangerous to sustain.

The negotiation process itself is of particular importance. Its structure points to a difficult and complex bargaining process. The American side seeks to present events as the result of successfully applied pressure, while Tehran emphasizes that a ceasefire does not cancel its sovereign claims and does not amount to recognition that the aggressor was right.

There already seems to be struggle over the interpretation of the pause itself. Iran has reportedly submitted to the US, via Pakistani intermediaries, a 10-point peace plan that has to be the basis for any lasting peace it will accept. This plan includes several conditions that Washington has already rejected in the past. But even the fact that such a plan is formally under discussion shows that the US is now compelled to discuss a framework for halting the conflict, while Iran is in a position to advance conditions of its own.

The mediated character of the negotiations suggests that direct trust between the sides is almost entirely absent, and that each fears being trapped within the other’s interpretive framework. In such a context, a mediator is needed to construct a formula sufficiently flexible for both sides to accept in practice without publicly abandoning their own narrative. Washington wants the pause to be seen as the fruit of force. Tehran wants it to be seen as the fruit of endurance and successful resistance. This is the central struggle within the negotiation process.

As for the conditions of the parties, they arise from opposite strategic imperatives. The US wants to restore navigational security, reduce Iran’s capacity for retaliation, and frame negotiations in a way that can be presented to an American audience as evidence that deterrence has been restored. The White House also needs to avoid allowing the conflict to become a prolonged, costly, and politically toxic campaign. Iran, by contrast, wants to fix in place the fact of its own steadfastness, obtain guarantees against renewed strikes, prevent the pause from becoming merely a prelude to a new wave of pressure, and preserve its right to dictate at least some of the terms of future discussion. That is why this conflict cannot be quickly dissolved. The sides are arguing not only over mechanisms, but over the meaning of what has happened. One side is trying to prove the effectiveness of coercion. The other has already, in effect, demonstrated its limits.

Israel was a direct aggressor and an active participant in the pressure campaign, yet in recent weeks its role noticeably receded into the background, because Trump’s sharp statements and ultimatums effectively overshadowed the Israeli factor in the international information space. As a result, Netanyahu largely succeeded in removing himself from the center of critical attention at precisely the moment when that was most advantageous for him. While much of the world was preoccupied with the war around Iran, Israel continued its occupation, destruction, and military pressure in southern Lebanon. This goes to show how easily, amid a larger crisis, attention to Israeli actions can be pushed to the margins even when Israel remains one of the principal sources of destabilization on adjacent fronts.

If the pause does not in fact extend to Lebanon, then that means that the war has not really ended – it has merely been partially reconfigured. One front has been temporarily cooled, another remains active, and the possibility of their renewed convergence remains. This is the clearest sign of a tactical pause. Strategic peace presupposes a new order and a new equilibrium. Nothing of the kind has emerged here. No actor has renounced escalation as such. No one has definitively accepted a new regional configuration. The confrontation has been interrupted, but not overcome.

In the end, the war exposed a structural miscalculation in American strategy. The US and Israel did not abandon the logic of coercion, but they were forced to recognize that this particular phase of coercion had failed to produce the political result they expected. Washington appears to have underestimated Iranian resilience, the scale of Iran’s response, the sensitivity of global markets, the anxiety of its allies, and its own domestic political risks. That is why there arose an urgent need to shift the crisis into a format of temporary ceasefire and mediated negotiation. For Iran, by contrast, the story, despite enormous losses, became a moment of political affirmation.

The most enduring outcome of these weeks will likely be measured by a change in global perception. The world saw that Washington is still capable of driving events to the threshold of a major regional catastrophe. But it also saw that Washington can no longer turn military escalation into stable political order with the same confidence and speed. The world saw that Iran can be gravely wounded, yet is difficult to break. It also saw that even though the war was imposed by the US and Israel, Iran responded in such a way that, in the eyes of many societies, it was Iran that displayed resilience, initiative, and strategic composure. That is why the present pause is perceived not as a triumph of American strength, but as evidence of its limits.

An Iranian delegation led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has arrived in Islamabad for talks with the US, as efforts to de-escalate tensions in the Middle East continue amid a fragile ceasefire.

US Vice President J.D. Vance is also en route to Islamabad for the talks, saying Washington is prepared to engage in good-faith diplomacy if Tehran does the same.

US President Donald Trump earlier said that he had asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to scale back the bombing of Lebanon, as Iran insisted that the two-week ceasefire with the US should also encompass fighting in that country.

Despite Trump’s request, Lebanese media reported Israeli strikes across the country on Friday. However, Iranian media claimed that Tehran forced Israel to stop attacks on Beirut as a precondition for Pakistani-mediated talks with the US delegation.

The exact outlines of a potential US-Iran peace deal remain unclear, after Iranian media shared a plan envisaging non-aggression, Tehran’s control over the strategic Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of some uranium enrichment, stopping Israeli attacks on Hezbollah, and the lifting of all sanctions. The US previously opposed many of the terms.

As the tentative US-Iran truce appears to be generally holding in the broader Gulf, Trump warned that Iran had “better stop” charging fees from vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz, after the Islamic Republic vowed to take the management of the strategic waterway to a “new stage.”

Shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains limited and under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has published a map of “designated routes” citing the risk of mines.

Key developments:

• President Trump previously said that American forces “will remain in place in, and around, Iran” until Tehran fully complies with the “real agreement.”

• Trump has also lashed out at NATO over the perceived lack of support in the Iran war. According to media reports, Washington is considering pulling out its troops to “punish” states that were most reluctant to participate.

• There are increasing signs that Israel’s continued strikes in Lebanon could derail the US-Iran two-week ceasefire, with leading American economist Jeffrey Sachs telling RT that Israel is now a “rogue state” and urging an end to its offensive.

• Oil industry executives are pressing the White House to oppose Iran’s plan to charge tolls on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Politico.

Follow our live coverage below for continuous updates. You can also read our previous updates here.

Nine deaths and disappearances of high-profile US scientists in the last three years has set a “disturbing pattern,” according to US intelligence sources cited by the Daily Mail.

In the latest incident, the body of missing cancer research scientist Jason Thomas was discovered in a Massachusetts lake last month. The month prior, retired Air Force General William McCasland, who reportedly worked on the US nuclear program, went missing, while astrophysicist Carl Grillmair was gunned down on his porch in California.

“You can say these are all suspicious, and these are scientists who have worked in critical technology,” the Daily Mail cited former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker as saying.

Foreign intelligence services belonging to both US allies and adversaries have targeted Americans in possession of top scientific secrets over the decades, he reportedly said. “It’s been happening since the Cold War… Especially when nuclear technology and missile technology were first coming to the forefront.”

Prior to his disappearance, McCasland led the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), where he reportedly oversaw the funding of a jet engine project by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) materials chief Monica Reza, who also went missing last year, just months after assuming the position.

Grillmair’s work on the US NEOWISE and NEO Surveyor orbital telescope is also tied to the Air Force, as both are used by the US military to track foreign satellites and missile launches, the outlet reports.

Anthony Chavez and Melissa Casias, who both worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which has cooperated with the AFRL on nuclear research, were reported missing last summer. Both reportedly left their New Mexico homes on foot and left their cars, keys, wallets and phones before disappearing.

Another respected physicist Nuno Loureiro, who was reportedly working on breakthrough fusion energy research, was fatally shot in Massachusetts in December.

The administration of US President Donald Trump is “weaponizing Christianity” to justify its actions in the Middle East, while Israel continues to act with impunity as much of the West turns a blind eye, Irish activist and satirist Tadhg Hickey has said.

Appearing on RT’s East Meets West show, hosted by Tara Reade and Olga Bataman, Hickey described it as ironic that Trump and other officials in his administration have invoked biblical messaging in their public statements on the war against Iran, when in reality their actions are “going further and further away from what Christ’s teachings were.”

“It’s a weaponizing of Christianity that I find really appalling. It’s really vulgar this idea that Jesus is this kind of agent of war for these people, and there’s nothing Christian about their values or their behavior,” Hickey said.

He described Israel as acting with total impunity in Gaza and elsewhere, and attempting to “get away with as much as they can” while Trump is in the White House, safe in the knowledge that they will face no resistance from Washington or the broader West.

Hickey also discussed his experience of being detained in Israel after attempting to deliver aid to Gaza as part of the Freedom Flotilla in 2025.

“We were abducted in international waters, brought to a terrorist prison… put into prisoner garb, denied medical attention, no access to lawyers, no yard time. There was a 75-year-old Irish guy, he was denied access to his insulin… it was a miracle he survived. I don’t think they actually would have tried to kill one of us, but if one of us had died in one their cells, that would have been a big bonus [for them], because it would have been a deterrent for people going again,” the activist said.

Watch the full episode with Hickey below.

A ceasefire deal struck by Washington and Tehran is a “disaster” and “failure,” several prominent Israeli politicians have said. Israel was left out of the equation, they argued, calling it a strategic mistake on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

US President Donald Trump announced a two-week pause to the US-Israeli war on Iran to negotiate a long-term solution to the conflict on the basis of a 10-point plan put forward by Tehran. It reportedly includes Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of its uranium enrichment, the lifting of sanctions, and the cessation of war on all fronts, including Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday it “supports” Trump’s decision while maintaining that Israel would continue its military campaign against the Iran-linked Hezbollah group in neighboring Lebanon.

“Netanyahu failed politically, failed strategically, and didn’t meet a single one of the goals that he himself set,” the lawmaker said in a post on X. Former Deputy Economic Minister Yair Golan, who leads the Democrats party, also branded the development a “total failure” in a social media post, adding that Iran emerged from the conflict stronger than before.

MP Avigdor Liberman, the head of the Yisrael Beytenu party, also claimed that peace with Iran under the conditions listed in its plan would only lead to another conflict later.

The US and Israel launched an unprovoked bombing campaign against the Islamic Republic in late February, openly stating they were seeking regime change and an end to Iran’s nuclear program. The conflict killed thousands and caused unprecedented disruption to global energy supplies, mainly due to Tehran’s effective closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Regardless of how the conflict between the United States and Iran formally concludes, its symbolism is already unmistakable. An ancient civilization, one of the oldest continuous states in human history, has emerged as the final obstacle to the project of American global dominance. That alone tells us something about the direction in which the world is moving.

For historians, the deeper meaning of the current Middle Eastern crisis lies in the confrontation between two powers at opposite ends of the historical spectrum. Iran is arguably the world’s oldest centralized state, with roots stretching back to around 530 BC. Since then, it has never ceased to exist as a unified political entity. That continuity is remarkable. Even Russia, the major Western European powers, India and China have all experienced fragmentation at various points in their histories.

The United States, by contrast, is among the youngest major nations – barely 250 years old. Its history is ten times shorter than that of Persia. In that sense, the present conflict pits antiquity against modernity, a civilization forged over millennia against a state that rose rapidly in a uniquely favorable historical moment.

In purely military terms, such comparisons mean little. The United States retains overwhelming destructive capacity. If it chose to do so, it could devastate Iran. This is, after all, the only country in history to have used nuclear weapons against civilian populations. That fact alone should temper any illusions about the limits of American power.

Yet the long-term significance of this confrontation lies elsewhere. It isn’t about whether Iran can defeat the United States in a conventional sense. It’s about whether the current international order, one shaped by American dominance, can continue to function as it has.

This doesn’t make it invincible. But it does mean that it must be taken seriously, not only as a military opponent, but as a political and historical actor. Iranian decision-making reflects a depth of strategic thinking that few contemporary states can match. It’s precisely this quality that makes Iran such a difficult counterpart, both for allies and adversaries.

The United States, meanwhile, has long sought to imprint itself on history as a transformative force. Yet its successes have been tied to exceptional circumstances rather than intrinsic durability. Its meteoric rise in the 20th century was made possible by a unique convergence of factors.

First, that century witnessed an unprecedented clash of ideas. For the first time in history, global politics was driven not only by states and interests, but by competing ideologies – liberalism, communism, socialism and nationalism – each claiming universal relevance.

Second, Western Europe, which had dominated world affairs for centuries, was exhausted by internal conflict. Russia and China, though powerful, were primarily concerned with preserving their independence rather than projecting global influence. This left a vacuum that the United States was uniquely positioned to fill.

Finally, the collapse of European empires created a vast number of new states, many of them vulnerable. The United States lacked the capacity to subdue major powers directly, but it could exert influence over smaller, weaker countries. This allowed it to construct a global system of influence that, under normal historical conditions, would have been difficult to sustain.

That illusion is now fading.

The United States is facing a profound internal crisis, intellectual and political. Its political system has become increasingly polarized, its strategic thinking narrower, and its ability to formulate coherent long-term policies more limited. These weaknesses are visible in the decisions and contradictions of recent administrations.

Even Western Europe, once firmly within the American orbit, is showing signs of resistance. The assumption that the transatlantic relationship would remain unchallenged indefinitely is proving to be misplaced.

In this context, the conflict with Iran takes on broader significance. It is not merely another regional war. It is part of a larger process in which the United States is being forced to adapt to a reality that other states have always known: that no single power can exercise uncontested control over global affairs.

Iran’s role in this process is, in many ways, symbolic. It’s not a perfect state. It lacks the economic resources of China, the mobilization capacity of Russia, or the intellectual traditions of Western Europe. Even a victory over the United States would not transform it into a global hegemon.

And yet, it may prove decisive in bringing an era to a close.

The consequences extend far beyond the Middle East. What is at stake is not simply the outcome of a particular conflict, but the broader structure of international relations. The idea that one state can impose its will universally, shaping the global order in its own image, is being tested, and found wanting.

History offers many examples of powers that aspired to such dominance. None succeeded in the long term. Even those that appeared closest ultimately encountered constraints, structural or strategic, that they couldn’t overcome.

The United States is no exception.

The end of this illusion will mark the true conclusion of the 20th century, an era defined by ideological confrontation, unprecedented globalization and the temporary ascendancy of a single power. What follows will be more familiar: a world of multiple centers of power, competing interests and shifting alliances.

The war between the United States and Iran is one of the moments through which this transition is taking place.

Regardless of how it ends, one conclusion is already possible. Iran, by standing its ground, has made a significant contribution to the evolution of the international system. It has become, in effect, the final weight that brings down a structure built on overreach and illusion.

The world won’t be the same. Not because of the destruction or the diplomacy that may follow, but because a fundamental idea, that of uncontested global hegemony, is losing its hold.

The US-Iran ceasefire, which was announced last night by US President Donald Trump, brings a cautious sense of optimism and hope that the war may eventually come to an end. However, a ceasefire is not a peace agreement. The two-week pause in hostilities could unfold according to different scenarios: it could lead to meaningful negotiations and ultimately a comprehensive peace deal, or it could be terminated, and the conflict would enter a new phase. 

Moreover, we shouldn’t underestimate the fragility of such agreements. A ceasefire can be broken at any moment – within days or even hours. It’s entirely possible that Washington could abruptly change its stance; for instance, Trump might claim that Iran is acting in bad faith and use that as justification to end the ceasefire and resume military operations.

At the same time, the very structure of the ceasefire raises important questions. Reports indicate that the agreement includes a 10-point plan proposed by Iran, which the US has acknowledged as the basis for current negotiations. These talks are expected to take place in Islamabad, with Pakistan playing the role of mediator.

Both the ceasefire and America’s acceptance of Iran’s proposal as a foundation for negotiations raise many questions. If Iran has truly been “defeated” as Trump has repeatedly claimed during the 39 days of intense conflict, or if it has been “effectively destroyed” as his comments suggest, then why is Washington considering Tehran’s offers as a starting point for peace talks?

The aforementioned 10-point plan – which is said to form the basis for a potential peace agreement and which, at least rhetorically, Trump seems willing to discuss – deserves particular scrutiny. The points include commitments to non-aggression, continued Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of Iran’s right to enrich uranium, the lifting of primary and secondary sanctions, the termination of UN Security Council resolutions and IAEA Board of Governors’ decisions, compensation payments to Iran, the withdrawal of American troops from the region, and the cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including in Lebanon.

Agreeing to this point would mean that the US is effectively endorsing a significant reduction of its geopolitical influence in the Middle East. Therefore, it’s reasonable to conclude that the US will be reluctant to take such a step. Moreover, with the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence coming up, it’s unlikely that Trump (who coincidentally is also celebrating his 80th birthday this year) would want to mark this occasion with what could be seen as a geopolitical capitulation.

The proposal to end hostilities across all fronts, including in Lebanon, also raises serious concerns. Even if such a demand is formally included in the negotiation package, its practical implementation is highly questionable. Reports are already emerging about continued strikes on Hezbollah militia positions in Lebanon, with no signs that Israel is prepared to fully scale back its military operations or alter its current strategy. In fact, Israel will likely be focused on securing at least some form of victory for itself. Thus, this appears to be more of a desired political outcome for Iran than a realistic commitment that could be swiftly and consistently executed by all parties.

Similarly, the idea of compensation payments to Iran seems even less feasible. Politically, it’s hard to imagine the US directly agreeing to compensate Tehran for war damage. This would not only impose financial costs on Washington but would also symbolize an acknowledgment of responsibility – something the US is unlikely to accept. Consequently, this point seems more like an element of Iran’s maximalist position rather than a genuine condition for any future agreement.

Of particular interest is the point regarding Iran’s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz. Here, we may find one of the key geopolitical priorities. If we were to hypothetically assume that the US agreed to such a formulation, it would signify much more than mere acknowledgment of the status quo. Essentially, it would equate to recognizing Iran’s dominance over one of the most crucial strategic nodes in global energy trade. In other words, Washington would be indirectly acknowledging Tehran’s geopolitical triumph.

In this context, other proposals appear more realistic – specifically, a partial or phased lifting of key sanctions, as well as a potential reevaluation or suspension of certain international legal restrictions, including UN Security Council resolutions and IAEA governing board decisions. These elements could become bargaining chips, as they allow for flexible interpretation, gradual implementation, and the potential for politically advantageous presentations for both parties.

When it comes to recognizing Iran’s right to enrich uranium, the US is likely to adopt a more complex and ambiguous stance. Washington may not directly deny Iran’s right to limited nuclear activities, but it will likely encumber that right with numerous conditions, technical constraints, verification mechanisms, and international oversight, effectively narrowing Tehran’s operational freedom. In essence, the US will probably seek a diplomatic framework that appears to be a compromise but fundamentally preserves pressure and control.

Therefore, viewing the 10-point plan not as a mere declaration but as a potential foundation for a real agreement reveals that its provisions vary significantly in terms of feasibility. Some points demonstrate Iran’s maximalist negotiating position and are unlikely to be fully accepted by the US. Others may serve as points for negotiation and compromise. Only a few points seem to form a realistic basis for further discussions. Consequently, the very act of discussing this proposal is important not so much as a sign of impending peace but as an indicator of the conditions under which Tehran seeks to solidify its military, political, and geo-economic positions in a post-conflict reality.

Firstly, Pakistan has traditionally maintained working relationships with both Iran and the US. Despite complicated relations with Washington in recent years, Pakistan remains a crucial regional player with communication channels to both sides. Its ties with Iran are bolstered not only by geographical proximity and shared security concerns but also by pragmatic cooperation in energy and border stability. Moreover, Pakistan is the only Muslim nation recognized as a nuclear power, which considerably elevates its stakes as a negotiator.

Secondly, selecting Pakistan as a mediator may indicate a desire to move away from traditional negotiation venues associated with the West or international organizations, opting instead for a more neutral or flexible diplomatic environment. This approach can reduce public pressure and facilitate negotiations in a more confidential format. 

In addition, for Pakistan, this represents a significant opportunity to elevate its international standing. By acting as a mediator in such a sensitive conflict, Islamabad positions itself to play a more prominent role in regional and even global politics. Moreover, it’s important to consider the broader context – specifically, the increasing influence of ‘Global South’ nations in conflict resolution when mediation increasingly extends beyond the traditional Western diplomatic sphere.

As for the ceasefire and the upcoming negotiations, the situation remains highly uncertain at this stage. The ceasefire should be viewed not as a resolution to the conflict but rather as a temporary pause, the outcome of which is still unclear. 

US President Donald Trump has, in the end, found a way out of the situation he created by embarking on a reckless war against Iran. The threat of destroying an entire civilization provided him with the pretext to step back.

Indirect negotiations between Tehran and Washington, conducted through intermediaries, primarily Pakistan and, behind it, China, have produced a ceasefire. Trump may claim that Iran was cowed by his threats, but the reality is different.

A ceasefire under conditions where the Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control suggests that Tehran has not backed down. Washington, in effect, has.

It is too early to speak of any “golden age” emerging from these talks. But the outlines of the conflict’s outcome are already visible.

1. Iran has held firm.

For decades, Iran faced the threat of joint aggression by the United States and Israel. That threat has now been tested, and has failed to break Tehran. Neither Washington nor Tel Aviv proved capable of imposing their will by force.

The result is clear: Iran has consolidated its status as a major regional power, standing alongside Israel as one of the decisive actors in the Middle East.

The Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf have discovered both their vulnerability and their dependence. In a conflict between the US/Israel and Iran, they proved unable to defend their own interests. Meanwhile, American bases on their territory, far from guaranteeing security, became magnets for Iranian retaliation.

Conclusion: US security guarantees have been shown to be unreliable. This lesson will not be lost on Washington’s allies.

3. Military power has reasserted primacy.

The conflict has underlined a broader truth about the emerging international order: military force outweighs economic and financial leverage.

As Pushkin wrote:

“All is mine on earth, said gold.
All is mine, said iron cold.
I will buy it all, said gold.
I will take, said iron cold.”

Sanctioned Iran, burdened by economic difficulties, has effectively withstood, and in strategic terms defeated, a global superpower. Meanwhile, its far wealthier southern neighbors have been reduced to little more than spectators, or worse, targets.

Conclusion: In today’s world, hard power determines outcomes.

Iran has emerged from the conflict intact, but transformed. During the war, a shift long anticipated by analysts appears to have taken place. Real power has moved away from the clerical establishment and toward the security apparatus.

The country is no longer defined primarily by its formal leadership, but by the senior ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Conclusion: Iran will remain an Islamic republic, but one in which the IRGC plays the decisive role. Its policy is likely to be firm, disciplined and pragmatic.

Moscow has navigated the conflict with a degree of strategic discipline. It has maintained its principles, calling aggression by its name, expressing solidarity with Iran, and vetoing what it viewed as an unbalanced UN Security Council resolution on the Strait of Hormuz.

At the same time, it has preserved working relations with key actors: explaining its position to Gulf partners, avoiding direct confrontation with Trump, and refraining from damaging ties with Israel.

The broader consequences of the conflict, a temporary spike in oil prices, strains in transatlantic relations, and a further diversion of US attention from Ukraine, have unfolded largely independently of Russia’s direct involvement.

Looking ahead

The war has opened new opportunities for Moscow. Iran, having endured a severe test, has strengthened its regional and international standing. This creates conditions for closer cooperation between Russia and Tehran.

More broadly, the outlines of a new Eurasian security architecture are becoming visible. Russia, China, Iran – alongside states such as Belarus and North Korea – form the core of this emerging system.

In the south, Iran has effectively halted an American geopolitical advance. In the west, Russia seeks to do the same in Ukraine. In the east, China continues to expand its military capabilities while advancing its diplomatic agenda.

It is through such developments, not declarations, but shifts in power and alignment, that a multipolar world is taking shape.

A two-week ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump appeared to have brought a temporary halt to the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Washington says it now aims to negotiate a long-term peace deal based on a “workable” 10-point proposal put forward by Tehran.

Over the past six weeks, the conflict has killed thousands, leaving much of Iran in rubble and its people defiant. It has also caused unprecedented disruption to global energy supplies, mainly due to Tehran’s effective closure of the strategic Strait of Hormuz. 

Here is what we know so far about the agreement, its terms, and the path ahead.

Who brokered the US-Iran deal?

The ceasefire was primarily brokered by Pakistan, which has been acting as a diplomatic intermediary between Washington and Tehran. In his announcement, Trump directly credited Pakistani leaders for his decision to suspend the bombing of Iran.

What is in Iran’s 10-point plan?

Iran has put forward a 10‑point proposal that Trump described as a “workable basis” for negotiations. According to Iran’s semi‑official Mehr News Agency, the plan includes:

What has Trump said about the peace plan?

Trump announced the “double-sided ceasefire,” stressing Iran’s agreement to ensure the “complete, immediate and safe opening” of the Strait of Hormuz through which roughly a fifth of the world’s daily oil supply passes. 

Trump has also stressed that Iran would no longer be allowed to enrich uranium and will have to dig up and remove all the “deeply buried Nuclear ‘dust’.”

In return, he said, the US has suspended planned strikes on Iranian infrastructure, including bridges, power plants and other key installations, pending negotiations. Trump said the US would also consider tariff and sanctions relief for Tehran. 

He also stated that the current Iranian plan is “not good enough” and warned that the US would resume its strikes if no final deal is reached by the new deadline.

What has Iran said about the ceasefire deal?

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council confirmed its acceptance of the ceasefire and said that negotiations with the US would begin in Islamabad on April 10, with a two-week period that may be extended by mutual agreement. 

The council stressed that the talks “do not mean the end of the war” and that Iran would continue military operations if its demands are not fully met.

Tehran framed the ceasefire as a “historic and crushing defeat” for the US, claiming Washington was forced to accept its 10-point plan as the basis for talks.

How has Israel responded to the truce?

Israel did not appear to be a part of the ceasefire discussions between the US and Iran, but has backed the deal. 

However, despite the temporary truce being ordered on all fronts, Israel has claimed the terms do not apply to Lebanon, where it has been conducting large scale airstrikes and has launched a ground invasion.

The death toll from Israeli strikes on Lebanon has exceeded 1,500 people since the start of the war, the country’s ministry of health has reported. Another 4,812 people have been injured, including hundreds of women and children, as well as dozens of paramedics and healthcare workers.

Is fighting still going on in the Middle East?

Despite the ceasefire, attacks have continued across the region. Israel has said it launched its largest wave of strikes on Lebanon since the war began, claiming to have fired 100 missiles in the span of just 10 minutes, supposedly targeting Hezbollah targets in Beirut and other areas across the country.

At least one oil refinery in Iran has also been hit, with several explosions reported at the Lavan refinery in southern Iran shortly after the ceasefire was announced. The cause of the blast is still unknown.

Iran also appears to have launched a wave of attacks on Gulf states. Kuwait reported it intercepted 28 drones, some of which had successfully struck oil facilities, power stations, and water desalination plants, causing significant damage.

How have markets reacted?

Financial markets have responded sharply to the ceasefire news. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures fell nearly 18%, last trading near $96 per barrel. Brent crude dropped more than 16% to around $94 per barrel. Asian stock markets surged, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 gaining 5%, South Korea’s Kospi soaring nearly 7% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rising by 3%. US stock futures also rallied sharply, while Treasury yields eased.

What has Moscow said?

Russia has welcomed the ceasefire. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that Moscow “was pleased with this news” and supports the decision not to continue down the path of armed escalation. He expressed hope that direct contacts between Iranian and American delegations would take place “in the coming days.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova added that the approach of an “aggressive, unprovoked attack on Iran has failed” and that the US had suffered a “crushing defeat.”

What happens next?

Negotiations between the US and Iran are scheduled to begin in Islamabad on April 10, with the ceasefire providing a two-week window for diplomacy. However, both sides have presented starkly different versions of what has been agreed upon, and the Iranian council has warned that any final agreement depends on securing Tehran’s conditions and that “this does not mean the end of the war.”

Despite the markets appearing to react positively to the ceasefire announcement, experts warn that the aftermath of the disruptions may be felt for months to come as energy prices are expected to remain high.

Bill Gates will testify before a US congressional committee about his interactions with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to media reports.

The Microsoft co-founder is set to sit for a transcribed interview on June 10, multiple outlets said on Wednesday, citing anonymous sources. It follows a March 3 request from lawmakers seeking details about his ties to Epstein.

Gates is the latest high-profile figure to agree to testify before the House Oversight Committee as part of the probe into the disgraced financier, who died in a New York jail cell in August 2019.

The inquiry has already included testimony from former US President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

”While he never witnessed or participated in any of Epstein’s illegal conduct, he is looking forward to answering all the committee’s questions to support their important work,” the spokesperson also said in a statement.

Last November, US President Donald Trump signed a law requiring the Justice Department to release files from its Epstein investigations. More than 3 million documents have since been made public in total, including those describing details of Gates’ communications and relationship with the late financier.

Other documents suggest Gates may have leveraged Epstein’s network for health-related influence, with DOJ files citing meetings in which healthcare issues were discussed.

Earlier this year in an interview with 9 News Australia, Gates apologized for his ties to Epstein, calling it “foolish” to have spent time with him and saying their interactions were limited to dinners and did not include visits to Epstein’s island.

He claimed the meetings were focused on fundraising for global health initiatives linked to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

US Vice President J.D. Vance has condemned Vladimir Zelensky’s “completely scandalous” threat to send soldiers to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s home to “talk to him in their own language.”

Speaking in Budapest on Wednesday, Vance said that he hadn’t heard about Zelensky’s threat – made early last month – until Orban told him this week.

”Viktor actually told me that and I went and looked it up. I almost couldn’t believe it’s true, but it’s true,” he said. “It’s completely scandalous. You should never have a foreign head of government or a foreign head of state threatening the head of government of an allied nation. It’s preposterous. It’s unacceptable.”

Zelensky made the threat in early March while complaining about Hungary vetoing a €90 billion EU loan package for Kiev and on the same day Budapest impounded up to $100 million worth of cash and bullion being brought to Ukraine in security vans by former spies.

“We hope that one person in the European Union will not block €90 billion,” he said, referring to Orban. “And that the Ukrainian soldiers will have weapons. Otherwise, we will give the address of this person to our armed forces, our boys, let them call him and talk to him in their own language.”

At the core of the dispute is the Druzhba pipeline, which carries Russian oil to Hungary and Slovakia via Ukraine. Zelensky claims that the pipeline – which Hungary depends on for more than 80% of its oil imports – was damaged in a Russian attack.
Budapest and Bratislava, however, claim that it is visibly operational in satellite photos, and the Zelensky is keeping it shut to punish Hungary. Orban has refused to consider lifting his veto on the loan package for as long as the pipeline is out of service.

Orban claims that Zelensky is keeping Druzhba shut to hamper his reelection campaign by driving up energy costs. Ukraine has reportedly provided covert aid to Orban’s leading opponent, Peter Magyar of the pro-EU, pro-Kiev Tisza party.

Vance, who arrived in Budapest this week to boost Orban’s campaign, condemned the EU and Ukraine for “interfering” in the Hungarian election. “Foreign influence is when other governments threaten, cajole, and try to use economic influence to tell you how to vote. That is fundamentally an assault on your sovereignty.”

Israel has stepped up air strikes across Lebanon, pounding central Beirut, just hours after the US and Iran announced a two-week ceasefire, according to RT correspondent Steve Sweeney, who was caught up in the attack with his cameraman Ali Rida Sbeity.

The escalation comes in an apparent violation of the truce, which mediators said was meant to include Lebanon, despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisting it does not apply.

The strikes hit the densely populated Barbour area of the Lebanese capital, where Sweeney’s footage shows thick smoke rising near a bridge following the strike. One of the targets was a mosque. Videos from the scene show heavily damaged and destroyed buildings, with residents still present in the area.

“The very clear message from Israel is that there is no ceasefire in Lebanon,” Sweeney said. “In fact, Israel has escalated its bombing starting in the early hours of the morning...”

Strikes were also reported across southern Lebanon, including the cities of Tyre and Nabatieh. The Lebanese state news agency NNA reported continued Israeli shelling, including artillery fire and a dawn air strike on a building near a hospital that killed four people.

Lebanon’s health ministry said an Israeli strike on the southern city of Sidon killed eight people and wounded 22 others. 

The escalation comes after Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, a key intermediary in the talks, announced that the warring parties had agreed to an “immediate ceasefire everywhere, including Lebanon and elsewhere.”

However, Netanyahu, while expressing support for the US decision to suspend strikes on Iran, stated the ceasefire “does not include Lebanon” and that the Israeli operations against Hezbollah will continue.

Hezbollah has not claimed any attacks since the deal was announced and halted strikes on Israeli targets early on Wednesday, according to sources cited by Reuters. The group said it is on the “threshold of a major historic victory” and warned displaced residents not to return home until a formal ceasefire was clearly confirmed.

Hezbollah is reportedly expected to issue a statement clarifying its position on the ceasefire and Israel’s stance.

Israel launched a military operation against Hezbollah in early March after the militant group carried out waves of strikes against the Jewish state in retaliation for the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a joint US-Israeli operation against the Islamic Republic.

South Africa is on high alert for possible vessel diversions around the Cape of Good Hope as turmoil in the Middle East affects shipping routes, Transport Minister Barbara Creecy has said.

Responding to parliamentary questions from ActionSA MP Malebo Kobe, Creecy said there was an increase in maritime traffic in recent months, but it has not translated into a noticeable increase in port calls as of March 25.

“This is attributed to the fact that vessels will only need to make a stop to take bunkers and stores, undertake repairs, and any other marine services required.

”It is worth mentioning that the cargo that was not originally destined for South African ports is highly unlikely to come to our ports, especially the liquid bulk,” Creecy added.

Kobe asked whether the department has noticed a surge in maritime traffic in recent months, and what revenue opportunities the surge presented for the South African ports, and the challenges experienced. In response, Creecy said the department has not quantified the monetary value from the diverted vessels around the Cape of Good Hope. She also said no identified challenges have been experienced so far.

“The potential challenges for the South African port system as a result of an increase in maritime traffic mean that the department and the South African Maritime Safety Authority must be on high alert and ensure that the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) is well capacitated to ensure that the standby or salvage tug is always available for any eventuality at sea.”

”The vessel management, in liaison with MRCC, is available and ready to respond to emergencies along the 3,000-kilometre coastline of South Africa’s territorial waters.”

She further said the MRCC remained operational for 24 hours to issue distress alerts to all parties.

”The Department of Transport contracted a pollution prevention tug boat that is ready to assist any vessel in distress, and a special call out to any other vessel along the coastline to provide search and rescue capabilities and support safe navigation when so required, in line with the principles of freedom of navigation and safe passage.

“However, no major vessel diversions within the SA port system have been experienced thus far due to the Middle East conflict and closure of the Strait of Hormuz, according to the live data from the MRCC.”

Creecy also said about six additional vessels have called for bunkers and stores, and only one for cargo operations.

“This shows that there is no significant increase in vessels taking bunker fuels under ship-to-ship bunkering.”

However, she stated that the Cape Sea Route served as an important alternative maritime passage to the Strait of Hormuz, which is typically the shorter route for global oil shipments but remains vulnerable to geopolitical tensions and potential disruptions.

“As vessels divert around the southern tip of Africa, Algoa Bay plays a strategic role by facilitating ship-to-ship bunkering services for vessels transiting along the Cape Sea Route that require refuelling,” she said.

”In addition, all South African ports have bunkering facilities capable of accommodating vessels that require fuel. This activity supports maritime logistics and reinforces South Africa’s position within global energy shipping networks.”

First published by IOL

India will not be an ally of the United States against China, former Vice President Hamid Ansari has told RT India.

In the latest episode of In Conversation with Salman Khurshid, Ansari said he did not think it was “realistic” for India to partner with the US to offset Beijing.

The US has always expected India to be “some kind of a distant ally helpful in Asia,” he said, adding, “But we’ve never been able to come to that equation.” 

New Delhi should be realistic in its ties with the US, which seeks certain economic advantages, the former vice president said.

“We have relations with the United States which are under stress. We have [had] relations with the Soviet Union, which have survived from the past,” Ansari said, adding, “we still don’t know where we stand with China.”

New Delhi needs to adopt a new approach in its ties with Beijing, he said, explaining that India “misread” China in the 1950s and 1960s.

Ansari said then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai visited India in 1959, but nothing much came out of the trip. “Zhou Enlai had come here to seek a solution,” he added. “A solution, which I think subsequently we have willy-nilly hinted at. That misunderstanding led to the India-China war [of 1962].”

Ansari described China as a big, populous, developed country, and said India needed “to think of a new way of coming to terms with Chinese existence.”

The former vice president said NATO membership for Ukraine was a red line for Russia and that “no ruler of Moscow. Mr. Putin or anybody else, can accept the situation.” 

Ansari served as the vice president of India from 2007 to 2017.

Moscow is close to completing its diplomatic network in Africa, with four new embassies set to open in the near future, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said.

Speaking at the 46th meeting of the Foreign Ministry’s Council of the Heads of Constituent Entities of the Russian Federation on Wednesday, Lavrov indicated that only a few African countries don’t have permanent Russian missions.

“Currently, there are 45 Russian embassies operating on the continent, and four more will open soon,” he said. “There will literally be four or five countries where we have yet to establish full-fledged embassies and then we will completely cover the entire African continent with our diplomatic presence.” 

Russia expanded its diplomatic presence in Africa last year, reopening embassies in Niger, Sierra Leone, and South Sudan. In January, Lavrov said the total number of Russian missions on the continent would reach 49 once new embassies open in Gambia, Liberia, Togo, and the Comoros.

He added that Moscow, St. Petersburg, as well as several regions such as Astrakhan, Novosibirsk, and Leningrad, along with Krasnodar and Perm territories, are among the most active participants in this cooperation.

The minister further confirmed that preparations are underway for the third Russia-Africa Summit, expected to take place in Moscow at the end of October. Lavrov noted that a new cooperation roadmap through 2029 is likely to be approved at the event.

“We are very interested in your specific proposals, reflecting the interests and specifics of each federal subject, which could be included in the next Russia-Africa action plan for 2027-2029, which will be approved at the summit in October,” he added.

US artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic has built a new model it claims is too powerful to make publicly available, according to the company’s executives, as cited by several media outlets.

The firm said on Wednesday that it is discussing the model dubbed Claude Mythos Preview and its capabilities with the US government.

The news comes a month after US President Donald Trump banned government agencies from using Anthropic’s AI for six months, accusing the company of pressuring the Pentagon and endangering national security. At the time, the US Department of Defense struck a deal with the company’s rival, OpenAI, to use its tools in classified military systems.

Internal materials on the unreleased Claude Mythos model were inadvertently leaked in February after thousands of documents were left in a public data cache.

Also earlier this month, Anthropic accidentally published over 500,000 lines of secret code for its Claude AI, including unreleased features and developer notes, calling it “human error, not a security breach.”

In an interview with the New York Times, Graham stressed that the model marks “the starting point for what we think will be an industry change point, or reckoning, with what needs to happen now.”

In a Wednesday blog post, Anthropic said the Mythos model will be available only to a select group of tech and cybersecurity companies, citing concerns over its ability to find and exploit security flaws. The company added that it won’t be made publicly accessible until safeguards are in place to limit its most dangerous capabilities.

Rather than releasing the technology widely, Anthropic plans to provide access through a new industry partnership, Project Glasswing. The initiative, which includes over 40 organizations such as Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA, will test the model’s ability to identify and help fix vulnerabilities in critical software.

Armed men have killed at least 20 people and abducted an unspecified number of residents in the latest attacks on villages in north-central Nigeria, according to a local group.

Niger State police spokesperson Wasiu Abiodun said two community guards and a driver were killed and others were injured, Reuters reported. Residents cited by the outlet, however, put the death toll at about 20 and said homes were destroyed.

The attack took place in Bagna and Erena in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State on Tuesday, where the militants also destroyed property, the Coalition of Northern Groups (CNG) said in a statement on Wednesday.

“This senseless act of violence is a stark reminder of the deteriorating security situation in our state and the failure of the government to protect its citizens,” the group stated.

They residents cited by Reuters added that the attackers operated for several hours and overwhelmed security personnel in the area, forcing some villagers flee to the ⁠neighboring towns of Gwada Zumba and Galadima Kogo.

The Coalition of Northern Groups has denounced the continued attacks in Niger State as “unacceptable” and urged the federal and state authorities to deploy more troops and strengthen security in affected communities.

On Sunday, the Nigerian army said troops rescued 31 people taken during an Easter church service in Kaduna State. A week prior, gunmen raided Angwan Rukuba in Jos North, Plateau State, killing at least 28 people, according to police. During a visit to the area on April 2, President Bola Tinubu vowed to track down those behind the “dastardly acts” and ensure they face justice.

Democratic congressman John Larson has filed articles of impeachment against US President Donald Trump over his actions connected with the Iran war. 

Larson, a Connecticut Democrat, said on Tuesday he had filed 13 charges, accusing Trump of waging an “illegal war” and escalating threats against Iran that endangered US security and American lives. He added that Trump is becoming “more unhinged” and “more unstable by the day.”

“Donald Trump has blown past every requirement to be removed from office. And it’s getting worse,” Larson said in a statement.

Larson also pointed to threats, including “open the Strait … or you’ll be living in hell,” saying such remarks “foreshadow war crimes.” He said Trump was “unable or unwilling” to faithfully execute his duties.

“They have an obligation to put patriotism over politics and invoke the 25th Amendment,” Larson said.

Some Democrats intensified the call. Representative Jim McGovern said the administration should “immediately invoke the 25th amendment,” while Congresswoman Lauren Underwood said Trump was “unstable, dangerous, and unable to function as Commander in Chief.”

US strikes had already hit key Iranian infrastructure, including bridges, rail lines and a train station, as well as the strategic oil hub on Kharg Island, with civilian casualties among the over 1,500 deaths since late February, according to reports.

Republicans and Trump supporters defended the strikes, saying they were aimed at preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Tehran has denied that accusation, insisting that its program was purely peaceful. 

Impeachment would require a majority vote in the House and a two-thirds vote in the Senate to remove the president.

A Russian defense developer is testing a tracked robotic drone capable of launching a mortar using an integrated mechanical arm, according to newly released footage.

The video, published online on Monday, shows a snow-covered training ground where the small unmanned vehicle operates its weapon system. The drone is seen picking up mortar shells from an onboard supply and dropping them into the tube.

The system is part of a broader family built on the Kurier chassis, first introduced in 2024. The state-backed design bureau behind the project has been experimenting with multiple weapons configurations for small electric-powered vehicles. One version is armed with a small arms turret and is already being used in the Ukraine conflict, while another variant carries an incendiary rocket launcher.

The mortar module, named Bagulnik-82 (after a plant known in English as Labrador tea), appears to incorporate a Soviet-era 82 mm 2B14 Podnos mortar – weighing around 42 kg and originally designed for airborne and light infantry units. In the footage, the robotic arm takes about five seconds to load each round, resulting in a slower firing rate compared to a trained human crew.

However, the platform’s key advantage lies in its ability to operate in high-risk environments without endangering personnel. Its mortar has a relatively limited maximum range of under 4 km, which can be a major drawback in conditions where enemy FPV kamikaze drones pose a constant threat.

The Ukraine conflict has significantly accelerated the development of drone-based military technology on both sides. A notable trend has been the shift toward inexpensive, mass-produced systems that can be rapidly adapted by troops in the field.

Hollywood star Milla Jovovich has stepped into artificial intelligence with an open-source memory tool, MemPalace, released on GitHub, a platform where developers share and collaborate on software projects.

Announcing the move on Tuesday, Jovovich, known for roles in films such as ‘Resident Evil’ and ‘The Fifth Element’, said she developed the project with collaborator Ben Sigman, describing it as a free system designed to improve how AI handles long-term memory.

The tool was published under an open-source license, according to project materials released that day. Jovovich said MemPalace is “an agentic memory tool that scored 100% on LongMemEval… higher than any other published results,” adding that it is available for developers to use and modify on GitHub.

The idea behind MemPalace came from frustration with how existing AI systems retrieve information, the actress said. “AI is just not great at finding things… every system out there still has it using keywords,” she said, describing current approaches as “clunky and messy.”

She compared existing systems to “a huge warehouse… a pile of junk,” saying users often struggle to locate relevant information even with well-organized files. “I wanted to create a new way to make filing and retrieving more intuitive,” she said.

LongMemEval, the benchmark cited by the project, is designed to test long-term memory capabilities in AI systems, including multi-session reasoning and temporal tracking across conversations, according to its developers.

Jovovich has not previously been associated with AI development. Born in Kiev and raised in the US, she has worked across film, music, and fashion.

China became India’s largest trading partner in the 2025-26 financial year, overtaking the US, Beijing’s embassy in New Delhi has said.

Bilateral trade between India and China reached $137 billion in the period between April 2025 and February 2026, Xu Feihong, Beijing’s ambassador in New Delhi, said in a post.

“Glad to know that China has become India’s largest trading partner in FY2026 – for the 11th straight month,” Xu posted on X.

India’s bilateral trade with the US stood at $127.8 billion in the same period.

Glad to know that China has become India's largest trading partner in FY2026 — for the 11th straight month. 🏆 pic.twitter.com/2jz2mppJAF

— Xu Feihong (@China_Amb_India) April 7, 2026

Washington was New Delhi’s largest trading partner for four years in a row until 2024-25.

In February, Qin Jie, China’s consul general in Mumbai, said bilateral trade between the neighbors would not be affected by external factors.

“Because India is a very big economy and China is also a very large economy. We are countries that both support multilateralism and multilateral trade and multicultural exchange,” PTI quoted Qin as saying.

The US imposed 50% tariffs on India in August 2025, half of them as a punitive measure for New Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil.

In February, India and the US announced an interim trade deal, effectively bringing down tariffs to 18%.

New Delhi’s trade talks with the US came to a halt after the US Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports from various countries.

India signed a trade pact with the European Union earlier this year, after entering into similar agreements with the UK, Oman, and New Zealand in 2025.

Global energy markets will take months to recover from the shock caused by the US‑Israeli war on Iran, Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev has warned, noting that the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz is unlikely to have an immediate effect.

His comments come after US President Donald Trump announced a “double-sided” two-week ceasefire with Iran to negotiate a long-term peace agreement based on Tehran’s 10-point plan that would see it retain control over the strait.

While oil prices have dropped in response to the news, Dmitriev, who serves as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy for investment and economic cooperation, has warned that energy markets “will take months to normalize even if the Strait of Hormuz remains open.”

Dmitriev’s prediction came in response to a Bloomberg report in which several Asian airline chiefs cautioned that jet fuel prices would still require “many, many more months” to stabilize. The director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), Willie Walsh, noted that if the Strait of Hormuz “were to reopen and remain open, it will still take a period of months to get back to where supply needs to be, given the disruption to the refining capacity in the Middle East.”

More than 800 vessels also remain trapped in the Persian Gulf after the Strait of Hormuz was virtually closed following the US and Israeli strikes in late February. According to Bloomberg, traders and shipowners are now closely monitoring which ships will begin to transit the strait under the fragile ceasefire. An International Maritime Organization tally from late March estimated that some 20,000 seafarers are stuck aboard trapped ships, facing dwindling supplies, fatigue, and psychological stress.

A recent Newsmax report, released just before the ceasefire announcement, also warned of a looming global commodity shock, noting that the true scale of the disruptions caused by the US-Israeli war on Iran has yet to materialize. The outlet cautioned that the world could soon face sudden and severe shortages that will quickly spread from energy to fertilizers, food production, and consumer goods.

South Sudanese President Salva Kiir has removed Speaker Jemma Nunu Kumba and her deputy, Permena Awerial Aluong, according to a decree read in parliament on Tuesday.  

Kiir appointed Joseph Ngere Paciko as the new speaker and Abuk Paiti Ayiik as deputy speaker. 

Kumba had served in the role since 2021 and was the first woman to do so. Her removal came after members of the Salva Kiir’s ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) party parliamentary caucus filed a petition raising concerns about her leadership. 

The petition accused Kumba of corruption and mismanagement of parliamentary funds and called for her dismissal. Several lawmakers supported the move and demanded that she step down. Neither Kiir nor parliament immediately provided further public details on the allegations, according to the reports.

“The Office of the Speaker has taken note of the concerns raised and stands ready to address these matters through the institutional channels,” the statement said.  

South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 but it has remained volatile since the end of a five-year civil war that erupted in 2013 over a feud between President Salva Kiir Mayardit and First Vice President Riek Machar, who is currently under arrest. The conflict displaced millions and left an estimated 400,000 dead. 

The decision follows a series of recent leadership changes by Kiir. In February the president dismissed Finance Minister Bak Barnaba Chol after about three months in office without giving a reason.  

Madagascar has declared a state of energy emergency for 15 days, citing a worsening fuel supply crisis and disrupted shipments caused by bad weather and the conflict in the Middle East.

The move comes as the wider African energy squeeze deepens amid the US-Israel war against Iran and the resulting disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping chokepoint. A recent joint report by the African Union, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, and the World Bank warned that the conflict risked turning a trade shock into a broader cost-of-living crisis across Africa through higher fuel and food prices, rising transport costs, and pressure on already fragile currencies.

In a statement on Tuesday, Madagascar’s cabinet said the southern African country is “facing a deep crisis due to disruptions in energy supply across the island,” with the island of Nosy Be, where the supply usually comes from the Middle East, among the hardest-hit areas.

”The declaration of a state of energy emergency allows authorities to take exceptional and urgent measures to restore energy supply and ensure the continuity of public services,” the government stated.

Senegal has banned non-essential foreign travel by ministers as surging oil prices strain the budget, while Kenya has said it is closely monitoring fuel, fertilizer, trade, and port flows to prevent supply disruptions.

Nigeria’s Dangote refinery has also said it is ramping up fuel and fertilizer exports to African markets to ease some of the pressure. Its owner, Aliko Dangote, said the 650,000-barrel-per-day refinery is operating at full capacity and has already shipped 17 gasoline cargoes across the continent as buyers sought alternatives to disrupted Middle East supply.

Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump has announced a two-week ceasefire to negotiate a long-term peace agreement, which could ease shipping in Hormuz.

The US and EU are engaged in a political “proxy war” in Hungary, with Washington and Brussels backing rival sides ahead of the country’s parliamentary elections, according to former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl.

Kneissl made the remarks in an interview with RT as US Vice President J.D. Vance visited Budapest on Tuesday in a show of support for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

During the trip, Vance criticized “bureaucrats in Brussels, who have done everything that they can to hold down the people of Hungary,” ahead of Sunday’s vote.

According to Kneissl, Vance’s decision to visit Europe while the US was simultaneously involved in a contentious war with Iran “says a lot” about the importance Washington places on the elections. She noted that the move aligns with the US National Security Strategy released last December, which identifies “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” as a priority.

She said the language is “very telling” about how the Americans “feel about Brussels,” noting that Washington is known for being persistent in pursuing its geopolitical objectives. “Yes, you can call it interference – what the Americans are doing. The same thing they did in Yugoslavia, Serbia in 2001,” the former diplomat said.

She also pointed to Brussels apparently backing Ukrainian efforts to bar Hungary’s access to Russian oil – for which Budapest retaliated by blocking a joint EU loan for Kiev – as well as discussions in the bloc about potentially suspending Budapest’s voting rights if Orban remains in power.

”They will just put a member state… paralyze it. And some people even speak of – they use the word ‘Maidan,’ they use the words ‘color revolution.’ Not in a third country, but inside an EU member country,” Kneissl said.

Watch the entire interview.

Iran has thanked Pakistan for its mediation efforts following the announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the war with the US and Israel. 

Pakistan has invited Iran and the US to its capital, Islamabad, on Friday to settle all disputes and end the conflict.

“I express gratitude and appreciation for my dear brothers Prime Minister of Pakistan [Shehbaz] Sharif and Field Marshal [Asim] Munir for their tireless efforts to end the war in the region,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in astatement on behalf of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran.

Statement on behalf of the Supreme National Security Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran: pic.twitter.com/cEtBNCLnWT

— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) April 7, 2026

Araghchi said the ceasefire comes in response to a US request for negotiations based on Washington’s 15‑point proposal and President Donald Trump’s acceptance of the general framework of Iran’s 10‑point plan.

“For a period of two weeks, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces and with due consideration of technical limitations,” the Iranian Supreme Council statement shared by Araghchi said.

Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif announced a ceasefire earlier on Wednesday, saying Iran and the US have agreed to halt the hostilities.

“Both parties have displayed remarkable wisdom and understanding and have remained constructively engaged in furthering the cause of peace and stability,” Sharif said in his post.

The Pakistani leader added that he hoped the Islamabad talks would succeed in achieving sustainable peace.

Trump also announced the ceasefire to negotiate a long-term peace agreement based on a “workable” 10-point proposal from Tehran delivered via Pakistan. The US leader stated that he agreed to the ceasefire following talks with Sharif and Munir.

Sharif had previously asked Trump for a two-week deadline extension after the US president threatened “a whole civilization will die” if Tehran does not yield to his demands.

“I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social.

Trump has, however, warned that the Iranian plan is not satisfactory to the US in its current form and that he would order devastating new airstrikes if no final deal is reached by the new deadline.

US President Donald Trump allegedly conceded in private that Canada is unlikely to become part of the US, despite previously hinting at annexing the neighboring country, a snippet from an upcoming book by British journalist Robert Hardman has indicated.

Over the past year, Trump has on multiple occasions floated the idea of absorbing Canada as the 51st state and described its border with the US as “artificial.” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose 2025 election campaign was helped considerably by the outlandish statements, has consistently stressed that “we will never, ever, in any way, shape, or form, be part of the United States.”

On Sunday, the Daily Mail newspaper published an excerpt of Hardman’s ‘Elizabeth II. In Private. In Public. The Inside Story’ – the journalist’s sixth book on the British monarchy, due to be released later this week.

This allegedly gave the US president pause, and he eventually acknowledged that the “Canadians have got 200 years of history and all that ‘Oh, Canada’ thing.”

“You can’t deal with that in three-and-a-half years. I guess it’s not going to happen,” Trump concluded, according to the excerpt.

“This was the closest I had heard to an acknowledgement that, as long as Canada had the King, Mr. Trump was not going to usurp him,” Hardman wrote in his book, as quoted by the Daily Mail.

Nevertheless, the US president did allegedly complain about “terrible” Canadian politicians, who are “nice to my face and then they say bad things behind my back.”

Trump previously repeatedly claimed that the US was subsidizing Canada’s economy to the tune of $200 billion a year, musing that it would be more feasible to absorb the country as the “cherished” 51st state.

Dark rumor has long held that the Roman emperor Nero set Rome ablaze in search of inspiration for a song on the destruction of Troy. Judicious historians and classicists dismiss this account as apocryphal.

A prosaic arsonist in the White House

Today, a powerful ruler, US President Donald Trump, stands accused not by rumor, but by unfolding reality. The American leader himself has struck the match, setting not only Iran and the wider Gulf region, but the entire world, alight, all at Israel’s behest. Trump revels in the spectacle of fire on a grand scale, even as he shows no inclination to transmute destruction into epic.

Seven systemic consequences, distinct yet interwoven, will reverberate globally far beyond the contingencies of the present conflict. This holds true even were the US–Israeli war of choice against Iran to cease forthwith. For the visible toll in human suffering and material destruction, grave as it is, constitutes only the most immediate and tangible register of harm. Beneath it lies a deeper and less visible yet more insidious and enduring transformation: the erosion of norms, the enfeeblement of restraint, and the gradual dislocation of an order once presumed resilient.

Forces long gathering beneath the surface have been violently quickened; trajectories once gradual now race toward their culmination. What is currently set in motion most likely will come to be remembered not as an episode among many, but as a threshold: the point at which the long arc of American ascendancy bent irreversibly toward its twilight.

In the current age of viral geopolitics, the apt hashtag for the US-Israeli war on Iran might be: “Make America diminished again” (MADA). The US, afflicted by imperial overstretch, persists in behaving as an empire it can no longer sustain, thereby risking a long-term reversion, at best, to a position reminiscent of the pre–First World War era.

First, Trump is dismantling America’s global alliances. His conduct signals to allies that alignment with the US entails exposure without protection.

Gulf partners, not consulted by the US before the war, face potential devastation from Iranian retaliatory strikes – a cost that Trump, with remarkable selfishness and callousness, appears all too willing to impose on his loyal allies. European and Asian partners, already strained by punitive American tariffs, are again harmed despite opposing the war.

Given Trump’s hostile action towards friends, it comes to no surprise that core partners have hesitated to support the war by providing bases; the response to Trump’s calls for “teamwork” in securing the Strait of Hormuz after the US and Israel had caused its closure has been muted. Subsequently, Trump even exhorted allies to secure the desperately needed oil themselves, calling the massive dislocations a small price to be paid for his “excursion” to Iran.

The pattern of America’s betrayal, evident in its treatment of the Kurds and Afghan allies alike, now extends system-wide. Trust, the foundation of alliance politics – above all the expectation that the US will come to the aid of its allies – is broken; and once broken, it is exceedingly difficult to restore. As in a breach of marital fidelity, the damage endures. Among other consequences, NATO itself may collapse under the corrosive strain.

Remarkably, Trump even betrays his domestic allies, worsening their prospects in the upcoming midterm elections by the day; global partners will take note of how readily he abandons his friends.

Second, America’s claim to act as a liberating force is profoundly discredited. Iranian opposition figures who imprudently had placed their hopes in the US, betraying their own country by inviting foreign intervention, now confront a stark reality: At Israel’s behest, Washington is devastating Iran in the dissidents’ name, killing thousands of innocent compatriots, including countless children, through strikes on densely populated areas, while dismantling the country’s intellectual, cultural, and material foundations – including heritage sites and water plants without any military value – thereby precipitating a humanitarian catastrophe.

Trump asserts, implausibly, that Iranians welcome further bombardment and acquiesce in their own suffering. In reality, the war will induce a classic “rally-around-the-flag” effect, prompting Iranians to set aside internal divisions and unite in the face of external threat, thereby strengthening the very state the enemies sought to weaken.

Third, the war exposes and accelerates America’s overextension, precipitating its self-disarmament and undermining its global deterrence.

The large-scale destruction of US bases in the Gulf has turned strategic assets into liabilities, which may prompt host states to expel American forces rather than remain exposed without credible protection. Similar foreign pressures for the US to close its bases may emerge elsewhere, including in Europe and Asia, while the worsening of America’s fiscal situation, accelerated by the very expensive war, increasingly renders the global military architecture unsustainable even if political will should persist.

The sustained operations deplete American weapons and munitions, with replenishment constrained by industrial limits and external dependencies. At the same time, the war highlights the effectiveness of Iran’s asymmetric capabilities against America’s high-cost platforms. The cumulative effect is a visible erosion of American deterrence: the gap between assumed and actual power narrows and credibility diminishes, while Iran increased its deterrent potential.

Fourth, the moral basis of US leadership is further weakened by perceptions of double standards and opportunistic expediency. A state is attacked over alleged nuclear ambitions while a close regional ally, Israel, retains undeclared capabilities, commits acts of genocide, and continues to destabilize the world as a whole; sovereignty is disregarded abroad even as foreign interference is condemned at home. Reports of market-sensitive signaling on prediction markets, opportunistic rhetoric, and shifting justifications deepen cynicism. The result is not merely reputational damage but strategic loss: In an order where legitimacy underwrites influence, the erosion of moral authority constrains power itself.

The US–Israeli war accelerates the transition toward a multicentric world order, in which power diffuses away from a single hegemon toward several sovereign centers. In this shifting landscape, the principal beneficiaries are Russia and China, both positioned at the core of this emerging configuration.

Through a contrast effect, the US appears increasingly as a destabilizing force, its missteps amplifying the appeal of alternative models and strengthening the strategic position of adversaries. In operational terms, rivals need only observe a familiar maxim: Never interrupt an adversary in the midst of error.

For Russia, the conflict yields both short-term and long-term gains. Supply chain disruptions reopen its markets across the world due to the relaxation of sanctions – undermining the long-term credibility of the punitive regime – and generate windfall revenues from the export of a larger amount of higher-priced natural resources, even as Moscow continues to support Tehran.

The diversion of Western attention and resources weakens Ukraine’s position, as financial and military commitments become harder to sustain, while Russia’s leverage increases correspondingly.

At the same time, Moscow consolidates an alternative international power bloc. Its diplomatic competence, in stark contrast to American ineptitude, is evident in its maintenance of ties across opposing camps and its positioning as a mediator, thereby enhancing its global standing. Europe’s severance from Russian energy appears increasingly costly and may prompt renewed large-scale sourcing from Russia.

Finally, Russia will also grow increasingly attractive as an immigration destination for mentally healthy Western talent with sound moral values who seek stability and a traditional, culturally rich lifestyle.

China’s gains are more structural still. As strategic overreach hastens America’s imperial decline, Beijing advances toward primacy by default as much as by design. Its strategy is one of calculated restraint: allowing rivals to exhaust themselves while it consolidates economic, technological, and geopolitical advantage.

More consequential than material gain is China’s self-presentation as a force of stability, a proponent of sovereignty, and a reliable partner in economic development rather than an erratic agent of military intervention. In contrast to Western neocolonial violence, China’s benign model acquires growing appeal across the Global South and beyond.

The broader lessons are stark: Pressure begets counter-pressure; attempts at domination hasten the rise of alternatives. In a multicentric world, influence accrues not to those pursuing coercive, antithetical strategies of hegemony and suppression, but to those who cultivate durable, wide-ranging relations across divides. By undermining its alliances while confronting its rivals, the US destroys the very order it purports to defend.

3. Undermining of ochlocracy and personalistic authoritarianism

Another consequence of the US–Israeli war on Iran is the simultaneous discrediting of two opposed systems of rule: democratic governance in its degenerate, mob-driven form, and authoritarianism in its personalistic, leader-centric variant. Far from vindicating either model, the crisis exposes the vulnerabilities inherent in both.

Classical political theory, from Polybius to Cicero, describes the recurrent degeneration of regimes in a cycle of political systems, termed anacyclosis. Democracy slides into ochlocracy, the rule of the mob, when demagoguery displaces deliberation and institutional safeguards falter. What presents itself as popular sovereignty thus reveals its terminal form: not self-government, but the volatility of the crowd.

The elevation and sustained support of figures such as Trump, despite manifest unfitness – as evidenced by his felony conviction and mental disorders (such as excessive narcissism) – illustrates the absence of effective mechanisms for selection and correction. According to the ancient theory, this invites the eventual reassertion of one-man rule.

Yet authoritarianism fares no better where it rests on the cult of personality. Systems overly dependent on a single leader, reminiscent of Thomas Carlyle’s dictum that the history of the world is but the biography of great men, prove inherently fragile: Where figures are elevated beyond their measure, distortion follows and collapse becomes a systemic risk. Remove the individual, and the structure falters.

A simple diagnostic applies: Where a regime can be reduced to the name of its leader, it stands exposed to failure. By contrast to personalistic regimes, Iran’s model displays a degree of institutional resilience grounded in continuity rather than singular indispensability.

This pattern disconfirms the prevailing assumptions of many multicentric theorists. The emerging multicentric order does not herald the unqualified ascent of illiberal or authoritarian forms, but rather underscores the necessity of balance: domestic constitutional systems capable of restraining both mass impulse and personal ambition, and an international framework that embeds states within cooperative structures without extinguishing sovereignty. For those inclined toward democracy, it calls for stronger checks and balances; for those inclined toward authoritarianism, for less personality-centric rule.

4. Rehabilitation of belligerent ideologies

Another crucial intangible repercussion of the US–Israeli war on Iran is the normalization and spread of radically belligerent ideologies, embraced either as defensive shields or postures for expansions, following the precedent set by Washington and Jerusalem. Right-wing forces are thereby strengthened globally, including new anti-Israel nationalist parties.

First, even leaders who recognize the dangers of the triad of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism may conclude that such postures are once again necessary for survival in a world reverting to great-power rivalry reminiscent of the pre-1914 and pre-1939 eras.

A key means of motivating a people – soldiers in particular – is to frame actions as the continuation of a “proud” military tradition. Yet where history has been written by the victors, as in Germany, it serves their interests and undermines the defeated. In such cases, strong incentives arise to revise the past into a more empowering nationalist narrative. Trump’s casual, euphemistic rhetoric, reducing large-scale violence to the register of schoolyard conflict, recalls the pre-First World War trivialization of war that prepared entire societies for catastrophe.

Moreover, leaders of states that feel threatened by aggressive actors are induced to emulate them: adopting militarist postures and expansionist doctrines, pursuing territorial revisionism in the name of security. Perceived existential pressures, whether demographic or resource-driven, further intensify expansional ethnonationalism, including renewed quests for Lebensraum (living space).

Second, anti-Zionism moves from the margins into the mainstream. As Israel is increasingly perceived as the central driver of mass destruction and global destabilization, criticism once suppressed by discursive constraints becomes socially acceptable.

Mainstream commentators, including senior former officials, now openly discuss the influence of the pro-Israel lobby on US policy, claims previously neutralized as taboo. Scandalous revelations surrounding the extensive degenerated power network built by Jewish financier Jeffrey Epstein further erode trust and amplify suspicion toward a global political-economic elite perceived as aligned with Israeli interests.

Such criticism can slide from policy critique into broader ideological hostility. The distinction between criticism of the State of Israel and attitudes toward the Jewish people in general can become blurred in public discourse, especially given Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state and the broad domestic support among its Jewish citizens for the unrestrained violence it unleashes on its neighbor, heightening the risk of conflation and further polarization.

An increasing number of commentators question Israel’s narrative of victimhood, express understanding and sympathy for the historical opposition to Zionism, and challenge the scope and application of antisemitism laws as constraints on criticism and mechanisms for entrenching Zionist supremacy. What began as political critique thus threatens to spill into civilizational hostility, as normative barriers weaken and long-suppressed narratives re-emerge.

5. Discreditation of Christianity and re-normalization of barbarism

The war also highlights the politicization of religion. In particular, the US-Israeli war on Iran risks discrediting Christianity through its instrumentalization by powerful actors. Christian Zionist currents, predominantly Protestant, have provided unwavering support for the war, cast the conflict in sacred terms and blessed destruction as destiny. This continues a long pattern of Protestants accommodating faith to the zeitgeist, exemplified by their churches lending strong support to National Socialism.

Political leaders in turn invoke divine sanction for large-scale destruction, fusing religious belief with state violence and reinforcing the perception of religion being deployed to justify the indiscriminate use of force.

The instrumentalization of religion in the pursuit of war crimes reached a new height when Trump wrote on social media with respect to Iran: “48 hours before all Hell will reign [sic!] down on them. Glory be to GOD!” The rhetoric crossed into blasphemy when the rescue of a US airman was cast in terms evocative of Christ’s resurrection.

Such rhetoric erodes the perceived political neutrality of a pivotal faith tradition and exposes it to global backlash. Audiences unfamiliar with authentic Christian theology may fail to see that Christian Zionist positions run counter to Jesus’ injunction to love one’s enemies; what is preached as morality appears, in practice, as license. They may thus, erroneously, perceive Christianity as an aggressive, censorious creed and mobilize opposition against it.

The consequences are profound, encompassing not only the erosion of legal norms but also the discrediting of the very values invoked to justify them. Absent Christianity’s civilizing influence, barbarism gets normalized once more.

The US, long proclaiming itself the leader of the free world, has a record steeped in large-scale brutality, from the annihilation of indigenous peoples and the slave trade (officially classified as gravest crimes against humanity) to the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which rendered it the first and so far only state to have unleashed nuclear weapons upon civilian populations). The US has also furnished Israel with extensive financial, military, diplomatic, and discursive support, enabling operations widely criticized as grave violations of international law, including genocide in Gaza.

Yet Washington has traditionally at least maintained the fiction of restraint, denying the breach of legal norms. The war on Iran marks a decisive departure, not merely the breach of norms, but the erosion of any semblance that such norms still bind. What emerges instead is a doctrine of unbounded force: The US, under Trump’s leadership, now appears increasingly willing to dispense with even the pretense of legal justification and prudent restraint and acts unashamedly as state terrorist and state plunderer.

The shift is evident in both atavistic rhetoric and conduct. The line between the military and civilian spheres collapses under a single elastic claim: everything sustains the enemy, therefore everything may be destroyed.

Among other things, US–Israeli attacks on Iran have indiscriminately killed thousands of civilians and destroyed residential quarters, mosques, sports complexes, hospitals, schools, universities, research centers, industrial plants, pharmaceutical facilities, nuclear and other energy sites, water and desalination plants, transport infrastructure, and heritage sites (which, if destroyed at large scale, makes it extremely difficult to rebuild a nation). The toxic pollution from strikes on Iranian oil refineries has been likened to the effects of chemical weapons. Elsewhere, Israel has continued its campaign of assassinating journalists. All of this has occurred not as a last resort, but as an opening move.

Trump openly avows his intent to effect not only the complete destruction of Iran’s civilian infrastructure, but the eradication of the entire civilization – acts that constitute grave war crimes.

In one social media post, the US president wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran…Open the F***in’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH!”

Trump has also openly boasted that he will “blast Iran into oblivion…back to the Stone Ages” and threatened to “take out Iran” in a single night if his extortionary demands are not met within the allotted time. Such an outcome would exceed even the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and could well be brought about by a renewed resort to nuclear weapons, the chilling logic being that they must be used to preserve their usability.

The US and Israeli leadership appear driven by a satanic relish for cruelty and bloodshed, evident in their use of dysphemisms (the deliberate use of coarse or degrading language to describe violent acts).

Such bloodlust is evident in Trump’s own words: “We will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their electric generating plants, oil wells, and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalination plants!), which we have purposefully not yet ‘touched’.” He also spoke of bombing Kharg Island again “just for fun” and continuing to bomb “our little hearts out,” even suggesting: “You never know with Iran because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.”

Trump’s war crime rhetoric culminated into the following delirious and outright maniacal proclamation with reference to Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again… God Bless the Great People of Iran!” After failing to subdue Iran, Trump now resembles a burglar who, thwarted in a break-in, proceeds to indiscriminate vandalism in frustration.

Even peremptory demands and binding deadlines no longer command observance: Israel, in a brazen display of contempt for norms, destroyed Iranian civilian infrastructure even before the expiry of Trump’s ultimatum and restricted civilian movement in Iran, prohibiting rail travel. Prior to the normalization of totalitarian control during the Covid-19 pandemic, such conduct would have been unthinkable; today, it is met with numbed acquiescence by outside observers.

Equally striking is the normalization of extrajudicial assassination of Iran’s leaders and their extended family, which are acts of collective punishment. The method recalls crude Stalinist logic, eliminating individuals pre-emptively, before any act is committed. Trump has even boasted of killing Iranian leaders merely for the purpose of revenge, not a legitimate justification, describing such killings a “great honor.” One need only imagine the outcry were Iran to adopt similar methods and target the US president.

Trump has also openly boasted of intended plunder, expressing his preference for seizing the oil from the Iranians, retaining it, and making “plenty of money” from it. His logic is disarmingly blunt and atavistic: that the resource is “there for the taking” and that “there’s not a thing they can do about it.”

At issue are the core principles of the Geneva Conventions: distinction, proportionality, and military necessity. These prohibit attacks on civilian objects and forbid strikes causing excessive civilian harm relative to military advantage.

By contrast, the cumulative effect of overwhelming destruction inflicted by the US and Israel with collectively punitive and retaliatory intent – causing widespread, severe, and long-term harm – and targeted killings outside active battlefields is the perception of two states not constrained by the moral and legal frameworks established after the Second World War.

Justifications, where offered, follow an expansive logic in which legality yields to expediency: Virtually any human and material target is framed as contributing, however indirectly, to the adversary’s war effort. In the extreme, a bridge becomes a legitimate target because officials might traverse it, and even the air becomes culpable because they breathe it, thus, by such logic, sustaining the “regime.” Under such reasoning, the distinction between civilian and military objects collapses, and with it the central restraint of modern warfare and core principles of international humanitarian law.

Domestic checks have thus far failed to impose meaningful limits on Trump, raising the question of whether institutional safeguards are effective. It remains to be seen whether the US military will continue to execute unlawful orders or refuse complicity in Trump’s war crimes. The citizens in uniform should understand that if leaders are unchecked, law, once the boundary of action, becomes an instrument of justification: elastic, adaptable, and ultimately expendable.

A central justification of the US–Israeli war of choice on Iran is that it allegedly will make the world safer. The opposite is more likely.

By hollowing out the authority of the United Nations and openly disregarding international law, Washington and Israel establish a precedent of unrestrained force, effectively licensing others to invade, strike, and plunder at will, with no credible multilateral constraint.

The so-called “rules-based order,” long denounced by Russia and other countries as unilaterally created and selectively enforced in a self-serving manner, is further hollowed out. Yet rules governing war remain indispensable. Even those who publicly contest the rule-based order display indignation when international law is violated to their detriment and invoke the rules to further their interests.

As legal norms erode, violence will become more widespread, more brazen, and increasingly difficult to contain. Western states are not exempt from this pernicious trend: With domestic systems under strain, incentives arise to resort to external conflict and other crises, such as a new global pandemic, as diversions from underlying structural problems.

The strategic consequences of the war on Iran are severe. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons risks sliding into irrelevance as states – including Iran under its new resolute leadership – draw the obvious lesson: Only nuclear weapons guarantee survival. Proliferation will accelerate; more states will seek their own arsenals or host those of others. The threshold for nuclear escalation, once unthinkable, is lowered.

At the same time, a logic of perpetual war takes hold. Israel’s repeated strikes across multiple theaters, often continuing despite so-called ceasefires, have normalized a pattern of ongoing, intermittent destruction, denying societies any chance of sustained recovery. Trump appears to think in such intervals, contrasting current damage in Iran that he deems remediable within a decade with possible additional destruction that would take a century to repair.

Violence becomes cyclical, self-perpetuating, and increasingly indiscriminate. Grievances deepen; demands for revenge intensify; escalation becomes the default trajectory. The result is systemically entrenched instability.

European responses compound the damage. Severe punishment for Russia over Ukraine contrasts with tolerance of US and Israeli actions, entrenching the perception of systemic double standards. Such asymmetry does not preserve order, it accelerates its collapse by signaling that power, not principle, governs outcomes, thereby emboldening unilateral use of force.

The cumulative result is a world less restrained, more heavily armed, and more volatile: legal norms eroded, conflicts perpetuated, nuclear risks multiplied, and the likelihood of retaliatory violence, including global terrorism, significantly increased.

7. Structural economic shock and forced energy shift

The US–Israeli war on Iran is poised to trigger a global economic crisis of exceptional severity. Unlike previous oil shocks, this is not merely a disruption of supply but the destruction of production itself. Key energy infrastructure is being eliminated, with reconstruction measured in years, not months. The result: Structurally broken supply chains, surging energy prices, entrenched inflation, and a slide into recession.

One particular pattern becomes difficult to ignore: Successive crises – from the COVID-19 pandemic, which most likely was man-made, to the Ukraine war and now Iran – are locking the global economy into a state of permanent crisis.

Whether by design or consequence, these shocks function as cover, obscuring deep structural failures in Western economies, above all unsustainable debt and chronic stagnation. These strains stem from policy failures, as leaders sacrifice public welfare on the altar of ideological commitments. As a form of self-inflicted harm, politicized priorities and misaligned appointments in the name of diversity and have weakened institutional competence and contributed to costly strategic missteps, whose economic consequences are now evident.

Adverse economic indicators again can be conveniently subsumed under the broader narrative of a global crisis. A sharp increase in the price level may even appear fiscally attractive, quietly eroding sovereign liabilities at the expense of creditors’ wealth. Yet the subsequent rise in interest rates required to rein in inflation will further depress growth and increase the debt burden, necessitating tax increases, spending cuts, or both.

At the same time, the war on Iran will also speed up de-globalization. Energy insecurity will drive massive investment shifts toward domestically produced renewable energy, alongside an expanded deployment of nuclear power.

Repeated supply chain breakdowns, already occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic and the onset of the Ukraine war, will further spur a shift toward economic sovereignty and autarky, fueling protectionism and import-substitution. Thus, the gains from international specialization realized through trade and investment are sacrificed in favor of resilience.

Conspiracy theorists may discern a pattern: COVID-19 entrenched remote interaction, the conflict in Ukraine underscored the imperative of energy independence, and the Iran conflict accelerates energy investments required to sustain artificial intelligence, which facilitates more intrusive forms of societal control.

Financial markets, long buoyed by speculative narratives, particularly centering around artificial intelligence, are exposed to a harsher reality. Fossil fuels, for the time being, remain a foundational input to economic activity; sustained shocks to their supply can unravel entire systems. Overvalued markets face sharp corrections, with the attendant risk of cascading failures, including bank failures.

Even after the immediate global damage of the Iran war has been eventually repaired, with inflation subdued and growth renewed, the deeper and more consequential loss remains: the erosion of trust in Western political and economic systems. What follows the conflict thus is not recovery, but a more brittle equilibrium: an economy profoundly fragile and prone to recurrent crisis.

The US and Israel have branded Iran’s leaders “lunatics.” In truth, it is they who have normalized madness. Acting as unhinged state terrorists, with Israel as the driving force and Washington in tow, they push the world toward the edge of nuclear catastrophe. By contrast, Iran’s leadership again presents itself as comparatively prudent, measured, and restrained to the extent permitted by circumstance.

America’s action is no aberration, but continues a long record of industrial-scale state violence, including the firebombing of German cities, the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later savage campaigns of mass destruction in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Trump’s apparent irrationality may partly reflect a calculated “madman” posture, intended to terrify adversaries with the promise of limitless escalation. But such theatrics are not a shield; they are an accelerant.

Madness, once performed, has an insidious way of becoming real. Incendiary behavior provokes escalatory retaliation; cruelty leaves scars that endure across generations. Russia to this day remembers the devastation wrought by the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus.

What we are witnessing is the logic of unbounded power: unjustified, unrestrained, and indiscriminate violence, the defining characteristic of unhinged and barbaric tyranny.

When the pretext for the Iraq War, weapons of mass destruction, was exposed as fabricated, a global outrage ensued. Today, even the perceived need for pretense has vanished. No reasonable, coherent justification is offered for the war of choice on Iran – only force, naked and unapologetic.

Israel’s and America’s sustained, overt disregard for ethical norms have fostered widespread cynicism and moral apathy. Repetition has numbed the public, much of it bereft of a moral compass and critical faculties, blunting outrage and resistance, for now.

The ultimate questions are stark: Why should societies tolerate unhinged leaders who imperil both their own citizens and populations abroad? Why should the world at large continue to countenance – and bear the cost of – the brutal crimes perpetrated by a small circle of Israeli leaders and their US accomplices?

No political order endures without a noble and credible moral foundation. A system that abandons moral constraint cannot command lasting loyalty; it corrodes from within.

Over time, a growing number of Western citizens will question the wisdom of supporting governments that impoverish them in pursuit of external, chiefly Israeli, objectives. The unrestrained conduct of Western elites will ultimately destroy confidence in and loyalty to liberal-democratic regimes.

In apocalyptic language, one might speak of a Persian Armageddon, a final contest between good and evil. Yet the roles differ from those commonly assigned in familiar narratives.

While no actor in this human drama is without fault, the final verdict is clear: Israel, and its backer, the US, are emerging as the truly destabilizing agents and vectors of egregious perversion, whereas Iran presents itself as a staunch defender of civilization, wisdom, tradition, order, legality, sovereignty, and restraint, thus functioning as an indispensable counterweight to the unhinged duo.

The US-Israeli war of choice on Iran is not merely a conflict but a turning point, eroding norms, accelerating America’s imperial decline, and propelling rival powers to prominence in a rapidly fragmenting and increasingly dystopian multicentric world.

As their global influence dissipates, Western leaders would be well advised to heed the following lesson: As a rule, empires do not fall because they are defeated; they fall because, in abandoning all restraint, they first defeat themselves.

[Part 7 of a series on viral geopolitics. To be continued. Previous columns in the series:

• Part 1, published on 10 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 45: The epoch of viral geopolitics – How the Kanzler sloganizes war;
• Part 2, published on 12 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 46: Dirty work by proxy – The ethics of the Kanzler’s outsourced war;
• Part 3, published on 14 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 47: Viral war for narrative primacy – The Kanzler’s rhetoric of war;
• Part 4, published on 20 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 48: Fabricating the war story – Iran ploy patched into plausibility;
• Part 5, published on 20 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 49: Donald at the Eastern crossroads – Win big or lose it all;
• Part 6, published on 24 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 50: Game-changing offramp for the US – Trump’s shortcut to an Iran win]

US President Donald Trump has suspended his looming attack on Iran’s energy infrastructure, announcing a two-week ceasefire to negotiate a long-term peace agreement based on a “workable” 10-point proposal from Tehran.

Just hours after warning that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran refused to open the Strait of Hormuz, Trump reversed course following a direct appeal from Pakistani negotiators.

“Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran, and subject to the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz, I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks,” Trump posted on his social media platform.

LIVE UPDATES: Iran claims victory as Trump announces two-week ceasefire

Trump described the move as a “double sided CEASEFIRE,” adding that the US has “already met and exceeded all Military objectives.”

Trump warned, however, that the Iranian plan is not good enough in its current form, and that he would order devastating new airstrikes if no final deal is reached by the new deadline.

Iran’s Supreme National Security Council has announced that negotiations with the United States will begin on Friday, April 10, in Islamabad, allocating a two‑week period that may be extended by mutual agreement.

The plan allegedly includes US commitments to non‑aggression, Iran’s continued control over the Strait of Hormuz, acceptance of uranium enrichment, the lifting of all sanctions, termination of UN Security Council and IAEA resolutions, the payment of war reparations, withdrawal of US combat forces from the region, as well as a halt to the war on all fronts, including against the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon.

The Council stressed that national unity must be preserved and that these negotiations are “an extension of the battlefield.” 

It warned that if the enemy’s “surrender” on the battlefield does not translate into a political achievement, “we will fight side by side on the battlefield until all the demands of the Iranian nation are met.”

The American Orion spacecraft, part of the Artemis II mission, has reached the Moon. The journey took around four days, excluding the first day spent in Earth orbit, and the return will take roughly the same time.

Yet unlike the Apollo missions of half a century ago, Orion will not enter lunar orbit. Instead, it will follow a so-called free-return trajectory, looping around the Moon and using its gravity to swing back toward Earth. This is the same maneuver that saved the crew of Apollo 13.

The choice is deliberate. Artemis II is, above all, a test flight. NASA has opted to minimize risk. Rather than sending Orion directly to the Moon, the spacecraft first entered low Earth orbit using the rocket’s upper stage, and then set off using its own relatively low-thrust engine.

Had that engine failed, Orion would simply have re-entered Earth’s atmosphere after a few orbits and landed. Its trajectory was deliberately conservative: at its lowest point, the spacecraft skimmed just 185 kilometers above Earth, effectively “clinging” to the atmosphere. Once the engine had fired successfully, however, repeated burns became less critical.

This cautious approach comes at a cost. Orion hasn’t passed particularly close to the Moon. Its nearest approach was about 6,500 kilometers, nearly twice the Moon’s diameter. As a result, expectations of spectacular imagery should be tempered. The mission’s lunar science component is largely symbolic. Its real purpose is to test systems and procedures.

Even so, Artemis II has set a record. Never before have humans travelled so far from Earth. The previous record, set by Apollo 13, was surpassed on Monday. As Orion passed behind the Moon, communications were lost for around 40 minutes. Splashdown in the Pacific is scheduled for Saturday. 

The most significant recent development is not in space, but in Washington. The US lunar program is undergoing a fundamental overhaul.

On March 24, NASA Director Jared Isaacman unveiled the ‘Ignition’ initiative. In practice, this marks the end of Artemis as it was originally conceived in 2019.

The first sign of change came with the announcement that Artemis III, previously scheduled for 2028, would be brought forward to 2027, but without a lunar landing. Instead, the mission will focus on testing lunar landers in near-Earth orbit.

Two competing systems are currently under development: one by SpaceX, the other by Blue Origin. If at least one is ready, NASA will proceed. Orion will dock with the lander or landers, conduct maneuvers, and test control systems. The mission could last up to three weeks.

A human landing is now pushed back to Artemis IV, planned for 2028. That mission, if it proceeds on schedule, will see two astronauts spend up to a week on the lunar surface, while two others remain in orbit, comfortably exceeding the Apollo 17 record of three days.

There are also tentative plans for an Artemis V mission in the same year, although given the program’s history of delays, this seems optimistic at best. More striking, however, is what has been removed. The Lunar Gateway, a small space station intended to orbit the Moon, has effectively been cancelled.

Yet the Gateway was deeply embedded in US planning. Its origins go back to earlier programs under the Obama administration, when it was conceived less as a lunar outpost and more as a stepping stone to deep space. The Moon, in this context, was merely a convenient staging point.

Integrating Gateway into the Artemis program created additional complications. Orion, for example, was designed with a relatively weak engine, optimized for reaching the Gateway’s energy-efficient orbit rather than operating flexibly around the Moon.

Meanwhile, the size of SpaceX’s proposed lander raised serious technical questions about docking with such a small station. Despite these issues, significant funds have already been invested in Gateway. To address concerns about wasted resources, NASA now plans to repurpose its components.

One proposal is particularly ambitious: combining the station’s propulsion system with a prototype nuclear reactor and a descent module equipped with four helicopters, creating a new spacecraft designated SR-1 Freedom. This would be sent to Mars as early as December 2028.

In theory, it would become the first unmanned interplanetary station powered by a nuclear reactor. In practice, the timeline appears highly optimistic. Even by the standards of the space industry, such a project would be challenging. And NASA’s budget remains constrained, with priority still given to achieving a lunar landing.

Looking further ahead, US ambitions remain expansive. By around 2033, according to current plans, a permanent lunar base could be established, with astronauts working there for up to a month at a time. The base would be powered in part by a small nuclear reactor, and its primary purpose would be to test the use of lunar resources.

All of this aligns with the broader direction of US space policy. In December 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled ‘Ensuring American Space Superiority’. The objective is clear: to secure technological and strategic dominance in space.

The scale of these ambitions is impressive. But so too are the uncertainties. Artemis II may be proceeding according to plan. The program as a whole is not.

This article was first published by Kommersant, and was translated and edited by the RT team.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has claimed that “not a single cent” from Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya found its way into his 2007 election campaign, at an appearance before a Paris appeals court on Tuesday.

He is appealing a five-year prison sentence handed down in 2025 after being found guilty of criminal conspiracy in a case centered on alleged efforts to secure covert Libyan funding for his presidential bid between 2005 and 2007. He briefly served part of the sentence before being released under judicial supervision pending the outcome of the appeal, and has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

At the opening of his questioning on Tuesday, Sarkozy attacked the case against him, calling it a “construction” built on “lies and hatred” and claiming there had been “not a single cent” of Libyan money in his campaign. He denied that Gaddafi had any hold over him “financially, politically or personally,” telling the court: “I am innocent.”

Nine co-defendants are reportedly being retried alongside Sarkozy, including former ministers and senior aides. Several have also denied wrongdoing.

Sarkozy, who led France from 2007 to 2012, was at the forefront of a NATO-backed regime-change operation which destroyed Libya and led to Gaddafi’s murder.

The war brought thousands of jihadist fighters into the country, devastated Libya’s economy, and opened a migration route toward southern Europe that precipitated an ongoing crisis.

Prosecutors say the suspected dealings predated the conflict. Some observers have suggested the war effectively buried any potential evidence linked to the alleged funding arrangements.

Days out from the most consequential European election of the year, the EU has aimed every weapon in its arsenal at Hungary, as Brussels prepares for its best shot yet at taking out Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Orban’s animosity toward the EU establishment runs deep. For more than a decade, the Hungarian prime minister has often been the bloc’s sole dissident: railing against its open-door migration policies, embrace of LGBT ideology, and “suicidal” plan to welcome Ukraine into the union. Orban has secured carve-outs from the EU’s anti-Russian sanctions that enabled Hungary to continue purchasing Russian oil, and is currently vetoing a €90 billion loan package for Kiev.

After the European Council failed to find a workaround to Orban’s veto at a March 19 meeting, the EU’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, hinted that work was underway on a “Plan B.” Based on the strategy playing out in Budapest, ‘Plan B’ clearly involves a full-scale campaign of censorship and subversion to influence Hungary’s upcoming elections.

Rapid Response Unleashed

On March 16, European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier quietly announced that the EU had activated its Rapid Response System (RRS) to “combat potential Russian online disinformation campaigns” in the runup to the Hungarian election. The mechanism will be active until one week after the vote, Regnier said.

The RRS has been a key tool in the commission’s censorship arsenal for years. It empowers EU-approved “fact-checkers” to flag online content as “disinformation” and request its removal from platforms – Regnier cited TikTok and Meta as two examples.

Theoretically, platforms such as Meta and TikTok participate in the system voluntarily. However, all major social media companies have to sign up to the EU’s ‘Code of Practice on Disinformation’. However, a trove of documents published by the US House Judiciary Committee in Washington this year revealed that these companies were threatened – often explicitly – with punishment under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) if they refused to tow the bloc's line.

The premise resembles a Mafia-style protection racket, with the deputy chief of the commission’s communications directorate telling platforms in 2024 that refusal to sign the codes of conduct “could be taken into account… when determining whether the provider is complying with the obligations laid down by the DSA.”

Peter Magyar’s allies in Meta

The argument that these fact-checkers favor Magyar is well founded. Over four European elections in which the Rapid Response System was activated, the Judiciary Committee found that fact-checkers “almost exclusively targeted” right-wing and populist candidates and organizations. “Moreover, the requirement that these fact-checkers be approved by the European Commission creates a clear structural incentive for the participants to censor Euroskeptic opinion and content,” the committee noted.

Hungarian MEP Dora David, a former Meta employee and member of Magyar’s Tisza party, boasted last year that “we’ve seen companies change their behavior” based on the threat of DSA enforcement, citing Meta’s removal of pro-Orban content as an example.

The fact-checkers can count on sympathetic staff within the social media companies. After several members of Orban’s Fidesz party claimed that Meta has already started restricting the reach of their Facebook posts, commentators Joey Mannarino and Philip Pilkington identified Oskar Braszczynski as the employee likely responsible. Braszczynski, who works as Meta’s ‘Government and Social Impact Partner for Central and Eastern Europe’, has shared pro-Ukraine, anti-Orban, and pro-LGBT content on his personal social media accounts.

🚨 BREAKING: The guy who is suppressing @PM_ViktorOrban's social media has been leaked. His name is Oskar Braszczyński and he is Meta’s Government & Social Impact Partner for Central and Eastern Europe. Let's have a look at who is putting their thumb on the scale!

🇭🇺 Oskar has… pic.twitter.com/PskLJuazGP

— Philip Pilkington (@philippilk) March 18, 2026

”The European Commission is outsourcing the task of content moderation to so-called external civil society actors, all of whom have a progressive orientation,” Fidesz MEP Csaba Domotor said in Brussels on March 18. Regarding Braszczynski’s role in the censorship program, Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesman for Orban’s office, said that having “a highly politicized figure overseeing the region undermines platform neutrality and raises questions about potential interference in Hungary’s election.”

Strong-arming social media platforms

The links between Magyar’s party and Meta may streamline the EU’s censorship efforts, but Brussels is not above strong-arming platforms that refuse to play by its rules. This exact scenario played out in Romania in 2024, when Euroskeptic candidate Calin Georgescu won a shock first-round victory. Romanian and EU authorities immediately declared that Russia had interfered in the election and had run a coordinated campaign on TikTok to help Georgescu win, and the election was annulled.

The day after the annulment, TikTok wrote to the European Commission stating that it had found no evidence of a Russian-linked campaign in support of Georgescu, and that it had in fact been asked to censor pro-Georgescu content by authorities in Bucharest. This content included “disrespectful” posts that “insult the [ruling] PSD party.”

The commission pressed forward and demanded that TikTok make “changes” to its “processes, controls, and systems for the monitoring and detection of any systemic risks.” TikTok complied, and agreed to censor content implying that democratic processes had been undermined in Romania “for the next 60 days to mitigate the risk of harmful narratives.”

Ten days later, and despite its compliance, the European Commission opened formal proceedings against the platform for “a suspected breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in relation to TikTok’s obligation to properly assess and mitigate systemic risks linked to election integrity.”

How the EU outsources its smear campaigns

In Hungary and Romania – and in elections in France, Germany, and Moldova – the EU has used the threat of “Russian online disinformation campaigns” to justify its activation of the RRS. When no such threat exists, Brussels can outsource the job of manufacturing it.

Just over a week before Regnier announced the activation of the RSS, journalists at the Polish nonprofit Vsquare claimed to have uncovered evidence that Russian “election fixers” were working in Hungary to swing the election for Orban. In a tale reminiscent of an espionage thriller, the outlet claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin had dispatched “a team of political technologists” from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, to Budapest, where working under diplomatic cover at the Russian Embassy, they are likely running “vote-buying networks, troll farms, and on-the-ground influence campaigns.”

The report cites “multiple European national security sources,” without disclosing any further details.

Almost all of Vsquare’s published work – which includes investigations tying Orban’s government to Russian intelligence, as well as hit pieces on populist leaders Robert Fico in Slovakia and Andrej Babis in the Czech Republic – is based on information provided by European intelligence agencies, and interviews with pro-EU politicians and NGOs.

The outlet is funded by grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an agency of the US State Department that helped foment the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine, sponsored meetings of anti-Beijing officials and delegates in Taiwan, and financed a UK-based organization working to drive right-wing American news outlets out of business. It is also financed by USAID, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and two EU-backed journalism funds.

Whatever the role these agencies played in concocting the story, it served the dual purpose of giving the EU an excuse to switch on its censorship machine, and giving Magyar political ammunition against Orban.

Is the EU’s election interference working?

Magyar currently holds a nine-point lead over Orban, according to an aggregate of polls compiled by Politico. However, the polling organizations showing the clearest advantage to Magyar are those affiliated with the opposition or funded by the EU: the 21 Research Center, which is financed by the European Commission, has Tisza leading Fidesz 49% to 37%; the IDEA Institute, which has accepted EU and NED money, shows Magyar’s party leading 48% to 38%; Median, which was founded by a member of the liberal SZDSZ party linked to the opposition HVG newspaper, shows Tisza beating Fidesz by 55% to 35%.

Despite the rosy polling, “many” EU leaders secretly believe that an Orban victory is “likely,” Politico has reported. Hungarian EU Affairs Minister Janos Boka told the outlet that he believes that by sponsoring one-sided polling, Magyar and his allies in Brussels are “building the narrative that if they lose the election, then this is an illegitimate result.”

The fact that the European Commission extended its RSS measures until one week after election day suggests that this might be the case, and that the EU may be preparing to fight a long and bloody battle to win its decade-long war on Orban and bring Hungary back under its control.

Germany’s military spending shot up by over 23% to €39 billion ($45 billion) last year, pushing the budget deficit to the highest level in four years, the Federal Statistical Office has reported.

Following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, Berlin began a military buildup, with defense expenditure projected to exceed €500 billion by 2029. The German government has stated it wants the country’s armed forces to be “war-ready” by then, citing a perceived Russian threat.

Moscow has repeatedly dismissed as “nonsense” allegations that it harbors aggressive plans against the European members of NATO.

In a press release published on Tuesday, the Federal Statistical Office estimated that Germany was €127.3 billion in the red in 2025, with all levels of government operating at a deficit. According to the analysis, the shortfall was €22.9 billion higher than in 2024.

Among the reasons for this trend, the agency cited the government’s decision to increasingly fund certain areas, including military spending, through borrowing.

Last year, Germany’s central bank warned that it expected the government shortfall to reach 4.8% of economic output by 2028, the highest level since 1995, when deficits peaked in the years following German reunification.

The Bundesbank attributed the trend to higher defense allocation and continued financial support to Ukraine, among other factors. Germany’s economy saw two years of recession in 2023 and 2024, and a period of near-stagnation in 2025.

Despite the adverse economic outlook, Chancellor Friedrich Merz has pledged to transform the German armed forces into the “strongest conventional army in Europe.”

On Monday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that the “last time the German political elite set out to make their country ‘the main military power in Europe,’ it ended in tragedy for all of humanity.”

Aliens have visited our planet traveling in an otherworldly craft and have made contact with humans, US Congressman Tim Burchett has claimed, citing unnamed government officials.

In the US, interest in UFOs and related phenomena has grown in recent years, due to the federal government backing the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and established channels for pilots and the public to report sightings.

“And they gave specifics, they gave addresses, they gave times and dates and people that were in the meeting,” Burchett said during a Monday livestream interview with TMZ. “And this went all the way up to the executive branch of previous presidents, not this current president.”

Answering the hosts’ questions, the 61-year-old congressman stressed that the claims referred both to “life that is not earthly” and to “something mechanical that’s not earthly.”

In an interview with Newsmax a week earlier, the lawmaker also warned that releasing classified information about alleged alien encounters could shake public confidence.

“I’ve been briefed by just about every alphabet agency there is, and if they released what I’ve seen, you’d be up at night worrying about it,” he said.

Tim Burchett has emerged as a leading voice on disclosure of files regarding unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), pushing for greater government transparency.

He has alleged that various agencies, including NASA, have been “lying” about what they know and claims that many files on the subject remain undisclosed.

In February, US President Donald Trump announced plans to order the Department of War and other agencies to release government files related to UAPs and UFOs due to “tremendous interest.”

Shortly after that, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed that the American public would learn whether his department holds records proving the existence of aliens, but cautioned against expecting a swift release.

In March 2024, the Pentagon said it had no proof that any unidentified aerial phenomena are in fact alien technology, adding that many cases involved weather balloons, spy planes, satellites, and other routine activity.

A war launched by the US and Israel with the stated aim of preventing a nuclear crisis could end up causing one.

With repeated strikes reported near the Russian-built Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant in Iran, discussions about the US potentially forcibly taking Iranian uranium reserves, and seemingly zero room for compromise, the likelihood of radioactive fallout across the Middle East is steadily increasing.

Strikes getting closer to Bushehr reactor

Since the US-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28, Tehran has reported four separate military strikes near its Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant on the Persian Gulf coast. The facility’s roughly-square territory spans some 500 meters across, with a single reactor unit located at its center.

In the most recent incident on April 4, one of the projectiles landed just 75 metres from the site’s perimeter, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported, citing satellite imagery analysis. In mid-March, the UN nuclear watchdog reported that an attack had destroyed a structure around 350 metres from the reactor.

Risking damage to Bushehr site ‘suicidal’

The plant was constructed by Russian specialists and still hosts a Russian team, although operator Rosatom has reduced staffing to a skeleton crew since hostilities began. The company stated that the March 17 strike marked the first time a weapon landed within the facility’s protected zone, hitting near a meteorological building.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry also condemned the incidents near Bushehr, warning on April 6 that “the shadow of a radiological disaster more severe than Chernobyl now looms over the Persian Gulf” and surrounding areas.

Worst case scenario for Bushehr

Modern nuclear power plants are designed with multiple layers of protection to prevent the release of radioactive material. However, disasters such as Chernobyl in 1986 – caused by a catastrophic reactor failure during a botch experiment – and Fukushima in 2011 – triggered by a natural disaster – demonstrate that severe accidents remain possible and warrant abundance of caution.

The recent incidents near Bushehr serve as “a stark reminder: a strike could trigger a nuclear accident, with health impacts that would devastate generations,” World Health Organization head Tedros Ghebreyesus cautioned, echoing calls from the IAEA for deescalation.

I join the @iaeaorg in raising the alarm again over the safety of nuclear facilities in #Iran.

The latest incident involving the Bushehr nuclear power plant is a stark reminder: a strike could trigger a nuclear accident, with health impacts that would devastate generations.… https://t.co/mvFRC23EpT

— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) April 5, 2026

A worst-case scenario involving a large-scale release of radioactive material from Bushehr could render not only parts of Iran but also neighboring states such as Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAE uninhabitable, even without direct fallout, according to Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.

“If Cesium-137 contaminates water supplies, it becomes extremely difficult to remove,” he explained to RT. Some regional countries get 100% of their drinking water from desalination systems that would likely be compromised, should Bushehr be seriously damaged. “This war is so reckless and out of control at this point that anything is possible,” he said.

As in Ukraine, so in Iran

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has criticized what he described as a lack of Western condemnation over threats to Bushehr, compared to accusations of Russia related to the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.

The formerly Ukrainian facility, under Russian control since 2022, has faced repeated attacks or nearby incidents as Kiev continues to pursue its recapture. The IAEA maintains a monitoring mission at the site but does not assign blame for strikes, citing limitations of its mandate – a policy it also follows in Iran. Supporters of Kiev lay the blame squarely on Moscow.

Threats beyond Bushehr

The stated justification for the US-Israeli campaign is that Iran was allegedly close to acquiring nuclear weapons – despite the damage the two nations inflicted on its nuclear infrastructure last year.

Tehran has long denied any intention to develop nuclear weapons, citing religious prohibitions against weapons of mass destruction. However, the targeted assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening shot of the war may have shifted political calculations in Iran.

Ahmad Naderi, an influential MP, has urged Iran to follow North Korea’s example, arguing that “if we were also armed with nuclear weapons, Trump would not dare to threaten bombing.” The NPT’s core deal is that a signatory gets IAEA help in building up the nuclear industry in exchange for oversight preventing weaponization.

Hunt for the uranium stockpile

The greatest contamination risk may stem from Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, believed to be stored in underground facilities in Isfahan and Natanz following the US-Israeli attacks last summer.

The IAEA estimated in June 2025 that Iran possessed over 440 kg of uranium hexafluoride enriched to 60%, while some assessments suggest the stockpile could be larger by as much as 100kg.

There has been speculation that a large-scale US military operation – officially described as a rescue mission for aircrew of an F-15E jet downed in Iran on April 3 – may have been linked to efforts to locate and secure the uranium. The mission involved around 150 aircraft, including transport planes that were stuck on the ground and destroyed to avoid capture, according to American officials.

Emerging evidence suggests that U.S. operations south of Isfahan (marked in red on the map) were unrelated to any pilot rescue mission.

The downed American pilot was reportedly located in southwest Iran, near Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province (marked in blue on the map), not… https://t.co/xcyFel3Plg pic.twitter.com/5pZezRrNYb

— Arash Reisinezhad (@arashreisi) April 5, 2026

The other nation with nuclear sites

Israel, widely believed to possess a nuclear arsenal, faces similar vulnerabilities. Following the attack on Natanz on March 21, Iran retaliated with strikes near Dimona and Arad, two towns close to the heavily fortified Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center.

“Our air defense system is among the best in the world, but it is not hermetic,” a senior Israeli air defense commander commented. “There are errors and malfunctions.”

The implied threat to the facility was later reinforced in an Iranian AI propaganda video depicting the country’s new leader considering a direct attack on the Iranian nuclear reactor.

First appearance of the new Iranian supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei in an AI-generated video.
The main message: the Nuclear Research Center in Dimona. pic.twitter.com/sXXtAwk6Uc

— Baxtiyar Goran ☀️ (@BaxtiyarGoran) April 5, 2026

Running up the escalation ladder

Although already highly destructive, the conflict still has significant room for escalation, including the potential use of nuclear weapons.

Israeli officials and pro-war Trump aides reportedly swayed him with a promise that his political legacy would be secured if he were to do what no president had done before him and launch a regime-change war against Tehran. “Trump has broken every custom, every norm, every tradition, every international law, most US laws,” Kuznick noted “The same psychology applies to the nuclear taboo.”

Likewise, Israel came close to using nuclear weapons during the 1973 Yom Kippur War but ultimately then-Prime Minister Golda Meir refrained after battlefield conditions shifted against Egyptian and Syrian forces.

What decisions Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu might take, should the latter’s 40-year dream of crushing Iran slip away, is becoming an increasingly concerning question.

Netenyhu - ""Teaming up with US allows Israel to do what I’ve been wishing to do for 40 years"' pic.twitter.com/8t3HXsg0ZZ

— Ounka (@OunkaOnX) March 1, 2026

Shortages have been worsening at filling stations across France, with around 18% of them having run out of at least one type of fuel, Energy Minister Delegate Maud Bregeon has said. Demand has risen amid capped prices, as Middle East war disruptions have pushed global energy costs up.

The disruptions have been most pronounced at sites operated by energy major TotalEnergies, which account for the majority of affected stations after capping prices below market levels and drawing increased traffic, Bregeon said on Tuesday.

Total said it was maintaining a price cap of €1.99 ($2.30) per liter for unleaded petrol in April, while raising the cap on diesel to €2.25, bringing it closer to market levels. The company had previously warned that traffic across its network has increased sharply since mid-March, warning of “localized supply tensions,” particularly for diesel.

Authorities have blamed logistical issues linked to holiday delivery slowdowns rather than a national supply shortage, claiming most stations will be restocked in the coming days. 

However, rising diesel and gasoline prices have driven up costs for businesses and households, prompting protests in parts of France. Roadblocks have set up around Nantes by truckers and construction firms, while fishermen in Corsica have blocked ports. The response echoed the widespread fuel price protests which took place during the 2018–2019 Yellow Vests movement.

The EU has already been grappling with the fallout from its decision to cut energy ties with Russia following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict, alongside the costs of its green transition policies. 

The European Commission has said there will be no return to Russian energy, and it will continue to pursue a full phase-out of the country’s fossil fuels by 2027. However, earlier this month it put plans for a complete ban on oil from Russia on hold, due to what some officials have reportedly called “current geopolitical developments.”

One of Australia’s most-decorated soldiers has been arrested on war crimes charges related to the alleged murders of several unarmed Afghan civilians between 2009 and 2012.

Former special forces (SAS) soldier and Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith has been charged with five counts of war crimes and refused bail. He is expected to appear in court on Wednesday.

At a press conference on Tuesday, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett said that the SAS veteran is suspected of personally executing two captured Afghan civilians and ordering his subordinates to shoot three others, including in a so-called ‘blooding’ ritual involving a rookie soldier.

Roberts-Smith allegedly kicked an Afghan man off a cliff and ordered his execution on one occasion, and supposedly murdered another prisoner with a leg prosthesis in a separate episode. 

According to Barrett, “it will be alleged the victims were not taking part in hostilities,” and “were detained, unarmed, and… under the control of [Australian Defence Force] members when they were killed.”

His arrest was preceded by a five-year investigation, during which the authorities tapped phones in Australia and offshore and secured incriminating testimonies from other SAS veterans, according to Australian media.

In 2023, Roberts-Smith lost a defamation case against journalists who had reported that he murdered civilians during his deployment in Afghanistan. The ruling was upheld by Australia’s Federal Court in May last year.

Roberts-Smith has consistently denied the allegations.

In 2023, another Australian soldier was charged with murder while deployed in Afghanistan. The trial is expected to commence next February.

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK would stop issuing visas to nationals from any country that demands slavery reparations from Britain, the party’s home affairs spokesman has announced, dismissing the compensation claims as “insulting.”

Speaking to The Telegraph, Zia Yusuf stated that a growing number of nations are seeking compensation for the UK’s historical role in the transatlantic slave trade, but are ignoring that Britain “made huge sacrifices to be the first major power to outlaw slavery and enforce this prohibition.” 

Yusuf expressed outrage that over the past two decades, successive Conservative and Labour governments had issued 3.8 million visas to people from countries demanding reparations and also sent those nations £6.6 billion ($8.7 billion) in foreign aid.

Under Reform’s proposed ‘Reparations Lock’, the UK would halt the issuance of all new visas, including work, study, family, and visitor visas, to nationals of any country that formally demands reparations. The party has already pledged to scrap foreign aid for such nations.

“The United Kingdom is not an ATM for ethnic grievances of the past, and we will no longer tolerate being ridiculed on the world stage,” Yusuf said, stressing that “enough is enough.”

At least 17 countries have demanded reparations from Britain, including the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and Belize. 

A 2023 report by a former International Court of Justice judge concluded that the UK alone owes more than $24 trillion in reparations to 14 Caribbean countries – a sum nearly seven times the size of the British economy. Of that sum, nearly $9.6tn is due to Jamaica, the study claimed.

The UK government had previously ruled out reparations, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves stating the country “cannot afford” the sums demanded. The Conservative opposition has also described reparations as a “scam.”

American journalist Tucker Carlson has accused President Donald Trump of mocking Christians by issuing an expletive-laden threat to Iran at Easter.

On Sunday, Trump again demanded Tehran to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, which has remained effectively shut since the US-Israeli attack on Iran on February 28.

“Open the f**king strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” the US leader wrote on his Truth Social platform, threatening to demolish Iranian power plants and bridges if it does not comply by Tuesday.

Responding on his show on Monday, Carlson said: “How dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country. Who do you think you are? You’re tweeting out the F-word on Easter morning?”

By mentioning Allah, the US president is also “mocking the religion of Iran,” the journalist said. “OK, if you seek a religious war, that’s a good idea,” he added, sarcastically.

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, reacted to Trump’s obscene post by saying that he “won’t gain anything through war crimes.” The US president’s “reckless moves” could mean that “our whole region is going to burn,” he warned.

When asked by journalists about Trump’s rant on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that “we have seen those statements, but we prefer not to comment on them.” Russia has long warned about the “dangerous and very negative” consequences of attacking Iran, Peskov added.

Carlson, who has been generally supportive of Trump, came out as a harsh critic of the US-Israeli war on Iran, prompting the US president to claim last month that the journalist “has lost his way” and is no longer part of the MAGA movement.