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  • Cop31: Turkey signs $5.1bn loan deals to boost green transition

    Cop31: Turkey signs $5.1bn loan deals to boost green transition

    On the sidelines of the 31st UN Climate Change Conference (COP31) hosted in Antalya on Thursday, Turkey formalized 10 separate loan agreements totaling $5.1 billion with four leading multilateral development banks to fast-track its national low-carbon and climate-resilient transformation agenda.

    Delivering remarks at the official signing ceremony, Turkish Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek emphasized that no single nation could independently cover the massive capital outlays required for a full-scale green economic overhaul. “No national public budget is sufficient to single-handedly meet the enormous investment demands of this systemic transition, which is why targeted, structured support from multilateral development institutions is of critical strategic importance for our country,” Simsek stated. He noted that Ankara had completed rigorous pre-planning work, including vetting and finalizing bankable project pipelines to ensure the funds would be deployed efficiently as soon as disbursements begin. Since 2023, Turkey has secured roughly $50 billion in total external development financing from its global partner institutions, Simsek confirmed, marking a major step forward in its post-pandemic and post-earthquake economic recovery paired with climate action goals. The full portfolio of projects backed by the new $5.1 billion financing is projected to generate thousands of new formal jobs across green sectors, boost industrial competitiveness, and reinforce long-term macroeconomic stability.

    The four partner institutions that signed the latest loan pacts are the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), World Bank Group, and Islamic Development Bank (IsDB). Simsek highlighted that Turkey’s first formal loan agreement with the ADB was signed in November 2025, and the newly finalized deals will push the ADB’s total committed financing to Turkey to $3.1 billion within just 12 months, earmarked for scaling climate-focused investments and expanding affordable credit access for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). ADB President Masato Kanda outlined that the bank’s allocated funds would support construction of disaster-resilient hospitals, upgrade national public healthcare service delivery systems, and fund specialized training programs for the next generation of Turkish medical professionals. Additional targeted financing streams will extend long-tenure, low-interest credit to small businesses, with priority access granted to enterprises in underdeveloped regions, provinces affected by the 2023 devastating earthquakes, and women-led entrepreneurial ventures. “Extended repayment timelines will remove cash flow pressure for these businesses, allowing them to invest in upgrades, rebuild local economies, create local jobs, and scale sustainably. Today’s core thematic priority at COP31 is building resilient urban centers, and every clause of these newly signed agreements directly advances that shared global goal,” Kanda explained.

    AIIB President Zou Jiayi confirmed that her institution will allocate $1.6 billion to support the Turkey Climate Action Acceleration Program, plus supplementary additional financing to assist Ankara in fully rolling out and enforcing its national climate regulatory framework. The AIIB will also channel an extra $300 million in dedicated financing through Turkey’s official export credit agency Turk Eximbank. “This combined financing package will not only accelerate Turkey’s green transition milestones but also equip local domestic businesses with stronger buffers to absorb unforeseen economic and climate-related shocks,” Zou noted.

    World Bank Group President Ajay Banga announced that his institution had finalized three separate agreements on the same day, with a combined value of $1.5 billion, designed to deliver targeted support for sustainable urban development, low-carbon agricultural modernization, and green industrial upgrading. Banga added that this $1.5 billion figure does not include the additional private sector investment the World Bank Group expects to catalyze and mobilize through its de-risking mechanisms for complementary climate projects across the country.

    In a parallel announcement on the same COP31 sidelines, Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar revealed that Ankara had also signed a preliminary memorandum of understanding worth $15 billion with China’s National Energy Administration, focused on large-scale renewable energy deployment in Turkey. Under the terms of this preliminary deal, the partners will develop 7,000 megawatts of combined solar and onshore/offshore wind power capacity, deploy new grid-scale energy storage systems, and upgrade 4,000 megawatts of national electricity transmission infrastructure to support the influx of variable renewable energy. The MOU also includes binding provisions for targeted technology transfer, to support the full local manufacturing of wind turbine components within Turkish borders, a move that will significantly boost the growth of Turkey’s domestic clean energy industrial base.

  • Trump could hit Pickaxe Mountain, declare victory and end the war

    Trump could hit Pickaxe Mountain, declare victory and end the war

    Against a backdrop of sustained cross-border tensions and soaring domestic fuel costs that contributed to the Republican Party’s underperformance in the latest U.S. congressional elections, the Islamic Republic of Iran has emerged as a defining test of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s domestic political credibility and global geopolitical leverage. This electoral setback has given the Trump administration an urgent political incentive to deliver a publicly marketable, seemingly successful conclusion to the ongoing Iran conflict, after months of costly military engagement.

    On November 9, Trump laid out a tentative approach to the standoff, stating his preference for maintaining the status quo of current military deployments, while issuing a stark warning that U.S. forces stood fully “locked and loaded” to escalate rapidly if conditions shifted on the ground. At the epicenter of this delicate strategic calculus sits a 1,600-metre granite peak codenamed Pickaxe Mountain by Western analysts, locally known as Kūh-e Kolang Gaz Lā, located just 1.6 kilometres south of Iran’s Natanz nuclear complex in the country’s central plateau. Trump has repeatedly singled out the site for public threats, declaring as early as October that U.S. military forces could dismantle the facility in a swift, decisive operation — a claim that faces significant logistical and operational hurdles that independent analysts have begun to flag for public scrutiny.

    The heavily fortified underground nuclear complex nested beneath Pickaxe Mountain was commissioned in the aftermath of a wave of unexplained, high-profile sabotage attacks that swept across Iran in 2020. Those blasts targeted a string of sensitive national assets, including military missile production sites, critical power infrastructure, and a key centrifuge assembly workshop at the Natanz nuclear facility on July 2 of that year. The damaged workshop, which was used to manufacture the precision machines that enrich uranium for both civilian power generation and nuclear weapons applications, prompted Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization to announce later that September that a new, hardened replacement facility would be constructed deep within the bedrock of Pickaxe Mountain, far more robustly protected than surface-level or shallow underground sites.

    Current intelligence assessments, including leaked briefings from Israeli security agencies and a September 2026 analysis from the U.S.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, indicate that Tehran has already begun moving sensitive centrifuge arrays and related uranium enrichment equipment into the mountain’s tunnel network. U.S. national security officials fear the hardened site could eventually be used to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, or host classified research and development work tied to a functional nuclear weapons programme. Public satellite imagery confirms ongoing, large-scale construction activity at the site, with heavily reinforced entry points being added to the mountain’s exterior, though independent international nuclear inspectors have never been granted access to the facility, leaving its exact contents, operational status, and internal layout entirely unconfirmed to the public.

    The site’s unique engineering makes it extraordinarily difficult to disable via conventional military strike. Buried an estimated 80 to 100 metres beneath solid, dense granite bedrock, Pickaxe Mountain’s defences far exceed the protections of Iran’s previously targeted nuclear sites at Fordow and Natanz, which were struck by the U.S. military’s largest conventional bunker-buster munition, the GBU-57, in June 2025. Military analysts note that existing public data on the GBU-57’s earth-penetration capabilities offers no reliable indication of how the weapon would perform against hundreds of metres of solid, high-density granite. The only U.S. military aircraft certified to deploy the 13,600-kilogram bunker-buster is the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, a limited fleet of aircraft that requires complex, high-risk mission planning to penetrate Iranian air defences.

    Even a targeted U.S. strike that successfully collapses surface entrances and external support infrastructure would at best delay the site’s operations, rather than fully destroy all assets buried deep within the mountain. There is no reliable method to verify the extent of damage to the deepest underground chambers via satellite surveillance alone, creating a strategic loophole that Trump could exploit to declare a decisive military victory even if the core of Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure remains intact. This scenario would allow the Trump administration to frame a limited strike as the successful neutralization of Iran’s most advanced nuclear threat, providing a politically palatable justification to draw down U.S. military operations and bring the costly, unpopular conflict to a close.

    This dynamic has not gone unnoticed by Iranian strategic planners, who have floated the possibility of allowing Trump to claim a public symbolic victory via visible surface damage to the site, and forgoing immediate retaliation to bring the wider war to an end and preserve Iran’s hidden, deeply buried nuclear capabilities. Tehran’s foreign ministry has publicly rejected reports that the Trump administration has reached out to negotiate such a quid pro quo, insisting that any unprovoked attack on Iranian territory will be met with a direct, proportional response. Even if a mutually agreeable face-saving arrangement were reached, a limited strike would fail to resolve the long-running standoff over maritime security in the Strait of Hormuz, and would leave outstanding core disputes including international nuclear inspection access, sweeping international sanctions on Iran, and a host of other geopolitical flashpoints that have sustained the years-long conflict. Arash Beidollahkhani, a research fellow at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute, contributed the core analysis underpinning this report.

  • Yair Netanyahu to release book on ‘deep state’ war against his father

    Yair Netanyahu to release book on ‘deep state’ war against his father

    Yair Netanyahu, the high-profile activist son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is preparing to launch a new book via major global publishing house Simon & Schuster that lays out his unsubstantiated claims of a coordinated domestic ‘deep state’ plot to oust his father from power. Titled *Two-Front War: Inside Israel’s Fight for Survival – Against Foreign Enemies and Domestic Saboteurs*, the volume is framed on Simon & Schuster’s official website as an exposé of a purported wide-ranging scheme to destabilize Western nations and dismantle the core pillars of free democratic civilization.

    The publisher’s promotional materials characterize Yair Netanyahu as a lifelong proud Jew and staunch Zionist who gained unprecedented access to hidden state machinery after he observed what he describes as a coordinated campaign by Israel’s prosecutorial bodies, judicial system, intelligence bureaucracy, military leadership, mainstream media outlets, and foreign-funded non-governmental organizations to force his father out of office. The book is billed as a ‘report from within the Matrix’ – a reference to a phrase popularized by controversial influencer Andrew Tate, which has since become a common talking point among global conspiracy theorists to describe a perceived fabricated illusion system that controls mainstream public discourse.

    The announcement of the book comes in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s 27 October parliamentary elections, where Prime Minister Netanyahu’s long-dominant right-wing bloc secured 53 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, falling 8 seats short of the 61 required to form a governing majority, even as it retains status as the single largest parliamentary faction. The centrist opposition alliance led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot captured 48 seats, while Arab-led political parties won a historic high of 19 seats, positioning them as kingmakers with decisive leverage over ongoing coalition negotiation processes.

    Yair Netanyahu, who has for years shared far-right conspiracy theories to his large following on social media platform X, has repeatedly claimed since the election results were released that a diverse coalition of shadowy forces, including funding from hostile Arab states, orchestrated widespread electoral fraud to deny his father’s bloc a governing majority. In a public X post published on Tuesday, he doubled down on these unproven assertions, claiming the election was ‘stolen by enemy states that bribed Arab voters.’

    He has also pushed parallel unsubstantiated claims that the multi-year corruption trial against Benjamin Netanyahu is part of the same domestic sabotage plot. The prime minister has faced formal charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust across three separate corruption cases since 2020, though he has skipped a large number of scheduled court appearances, almost always citing official prime ministerial duties as justification for his absences.

    Israeli investigative outlet Haaretz further revealed that the imprint producing Yair Netanyahu’s book is RatPac Press, a publishing venture co-founded by Australian billionaire James Packer – a long-time personal friend of the Netanyahu family and a named witness in the prime minister’s ongoing corruption trial – and prominent American film director Brett Ratner, who relocated to Israel after facing multiple public sexual assault allegations. Court documents from Netanyahu’s corruption indictment explicitly note that Packer provided the prime minister with large quantities of premium cigars and luxury champagne as gifts over multiple years, and that Packer previously owned a high-end Tel Aviv residential apartment that Yair Netanyahu used on multiple occasions.

  • Israeli strike on Gaza hospital kills surgeon, child and patients

    Israeli strike on Gaza hospital kills surgeon, child and patients

    In the pre-dawn hours of Thursday, an Israeli aerial bombardment struck the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, claiming the lives of at least six Palestinian people and injuring 20 more, according to on-site health and medical officials. The strike, which deployed two missiles that pierced the facility’s roof, passed through the third floor and detonated on the second, hit the hospital’s surgical blocks at approximately 1 a.m. local time. At the time of the attack, the overstretched, only partially operational complex stood as the final remaining major referral hospital serving the entire southern Gaza Strip, operating at maximum capacity to care for tens of thousands of displaced civilians and critical patients who had nowhere else to seek care. Among the confirmed fatalities was 53-year-old senior surgeon Dr. Rizq Abu Shaira, who was mid-treatment for patients inside the ward when the missiles hit, local Palestinian media confirmed. Additional victims included a young child, a disabled immobile patient, and other admitted patients, while the 20 wounded count includes other hospitalized people, female medical staff, and accompanying children present in the facility at the time. The blast inflicted catastrophic structural damage across the hospital’s intensive care unit and full surgical department, including separate male and female surgical wings, forcing the entire surgical service to cease all operations immediately following the strike. The Palestinian Ministry of Health issued a sharp, formal condemnation of the attack within hours, labeling it an unambiguous, flagrant breach of established international humanitarian law. “The unrelenting campaign of targeting hospitals and critical medical infrastructure deepens the agony of the sick and wounded across Gaza, and systematically erodes what little remaining capacity the already collapsed health sector has left to deliver life-saving care to civilians,” the ministry’s official statement read. The Israeli military publicly confirmed it carried out the strike, claiming it had targeted “a senior terrorist and additional Hamas terrorists who were hiding inside Nasser Hospital.” Israeli outlet Ynet later identified the purported target as Khaled Abu Anza, the named commander of Hamas’s Khan Younis Brigade, though independent news outlet Middle East Eye noted it could not corroborate these military claims independently. For months leading up to the airstrike, the Israeli military had circulated unsubstantiated assertions that Hamas was using the Nasser Medical Complex for covert military operations, a pattern that human rights observers note has consistently preceded Israeli assaults on Gaza medical facilities since the outbreak of hostilities in 2023. Hamas has repeatedly rejected all such allegations, and in its Thursday statement following the strike, the group labeled the Israeli military’s claims “repeated, baseless lies manufactured solely to provide diplomatic cover for the deliberate, systematic targeting of Gaza’s entire healthcare system.” The group also held the international community’s so-called peace oversight bodies accountable for the attack, arguing that continued global silence on Israeli violations has allowed the state to act with total impunity without facing any consequences for its actions. Data published by the World Health Organization confirms that 94% of all hospitals operating in the Gaza Strip prior to 2023 have now been either fully destroyed or rendered partially non-functional by sustained Israeli military operations. Hundreds of doctors, nurses, and frontline medical workers have been either killed or arbitrarily detained by Israeli forces across the enclave. Prior to the 2023 outbreak of the conflict, Nasser Medical Complex was the second-largest healthcare facility in the entire Gaza Strip; it has now been targeted at least seven separate times since October 2023. A previous Israeli double-tap strike on the facility in August 2025 killed 20 people on site, including two Middle East Eye contributing journalists, Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, alongside other medical staff and emergency first responders. Multiple independent international law analysts have assessed that this latest Thursday strike, and the broader pattern of attacks on Gaza medical facilities, may qualify as prosecutable war crimes under the statutes of the Geneva Conventions.

  • Democrats preview plan to roll back US-Israel defense integration

    Democrats preview plan to roll back US-Israel defense integration

    On November 10, a cohort of 12 Senate Democratic lawmakers led by Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland — who is currently weighing a leadership challenge against incumbent Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — formally called on top congressional leaders from both parties to scrap a set of bipartisan provisions that would deepen formal military and defense integration between the United States and Israel. The group issued a formal bipartisan letter warning that the proposed measures would erode U.S. national security autonomy and lock Washington into long-term commitments that could further implicate the U.S. in widely condemned Israeli military actions across Gaza, the West Bank, and broader regional hotspots. None of the signatories included Majority Leader Schumer.
    The three targeted clauses are slated for inclusion in the pending Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and its accompanying Intelligence Authorization Act (IAA), which is traditionally folded into the final defense spending package. Two overlapping provisions, Section 1217 from the Senate-passed NDAA draft and Section 219 from the House counterpart, would codify a new bilateral U.S.-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative designed to accelerate joint research, testing, evaluation, and cross-border industrial collaboration for advanced defense systems. The third targeted clause, Section 618 of the 2027 IAA, would mandate the executive branch to expand and formalize enhanced intelligence sharing with Israeli security agencies, stripping the president of discretionary authority to scale back that sharing even when U.S. national security interests demand a pause.
    In their public letter, the Democratic senators argued the proposed rules would severely constrain the White House’s independent ability to calibrate U.S. national security strategy, creating binding long-term commitments at a moment when the Israeli government’s ongoing regional operations run directly counter to stated U.S. values and strategic priorities. They emphasized that Washington does not extend the same level of access to sensitive defense technology to even core NATO treaty allies, warning that embedding Israeli systems and supply chains into the U.S. defense industrial base would create costly, hard-to-reverse dependencies that grant Israel unprecedented leverage over America’s most classified military capabilities. The signatories also cited recent public reports that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had elevated the counterintelligence threat posed by Israeli actors to its highest official risk tier, calling the mandatory intelligence sharing provision deeply irresponsible.
    The push to strip the clauses comes as House and Senate negotiators prepare to reconcile differences between their respective versions of the 2027 NDAA before final passage, creating a narrow window for opponents to remove the controversial text. The legislative push also arrives just one week after former President Donald Trump, speaking on U.S. midterm election day, announced he had reached a tentative deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to phase out the roughly $4 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel. Independent defense analysts have warned that the proposed defense integration provisions could be used to shift that aid into untransparent, off-the-books funding streams that bypass standard congressional appropriations oversight. House progressive Democrat Ro Khanna of California has also echoed the Senate group’s demands, posting on social media that removing the Section 219 military integration language from the NDAA must be a top priority for the upcoming lame-duck session of Congress, and that he is actively lobbying all Democratic colleagues and party leadership to support the effort.

  • US envoys arrive in Moscow for Ukraine talks with Vladimir Putin

    US envoys arrive in Moscow for Ukraine talks with Vladimir Putin

    Fresh off the conclusion of two days of high-stakes Ukraine peace negotiations in Abu Dhabi, senior U.S. diplomatic envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff touched down in Moscow for a scheduled closed-door meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, multiple Russian state media outlets confirmed via shared footage showing the pair disembarking their private aircraft and being greeted warmly by longstanding Kremlin representative Kirill Dmitriev with handshakes and embraces. The meeting with Putin was slated for 12:00 local Moscow time, equivalent to 09:00 GMT, following which the two American negotiators are set to travel immediately to Dublin, Ireland, for a separate in-person discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ahead of the Moscow visit, Kushner told reporters Tuesday that U.S. negotiators had identified “tangible openings and actionable opportunities” to advance de-escalation, and that the Moscow talks would be focused on capitalizing on that momentum to move closer to a formal ceasefire. The back-to-back presidential meetings with Putin and Zelensky were only publicly announced on Wednesday, after the Abu Dhabi negotiations that were framed as centered on outlining a long-term post-war European security framework, nearly five years on from Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine that has displaced millions and left thousands dead. To date, Moscow has given no public indication it is willing to soften its maximalist demands, which include formal recognition of its claims to large swathes of sovereign Ukrainian territory, as well as binding commitments from Western nations to abandon any future security guarantees that would come to Kyiv’s defense in the event of subsequent Russian attacks. For the first several years of the conflict, most European Union and NATO member states severed nearly all formal diplomatic channels with the Kremlin and refused to participate in direct bilateral negotiations with Russian representatives over the Ukraine war. In recent months, however, widespread anxiety has grown across European capitals over the current U.S. administration’s perceived wavering commitment to European collective security and its increasingly conciliatory posture toward Moscow, pushing European leaders to demand a formal seat at the negotiating table to ensure their own security interests are not sidelined. The recently concluded Abu Dhabi talks, which were led exclusively by U.S. mediators and only included Russian and Ukrainian delegations, did not feature European representatives. Kushner confirmed that during his Moscow meeting with Putin, he would formally request the Russian leader’s sign-off to extend invitations to European envoys for future negotiation rounds, particularly for discussions focused on building the continent’s long-term post-war security architecture, and he urged European governments to appoint a single unified representative to speak on behalf of the entire bloc in those upcoming talks. Russian officials have so far publicly pushed back against that proposal, arguing that Europe’s ongoing military and humanitarian support for the Ukrainian government makes it an unfit neutral party to the negotiations. Vladimir Medinsky, who led the Russian delegation at the Abu Dhabi talks, claimed in a public statement that all participating parties had “moved measurably closer to a lasting peace settlement,” but added that final progress now “depends heavily on Ukraine’s position, the United States’ consistency, and whether Europe abandons its confrontational stance.” Even as the Moscow talks were underway, Zelensky issued a public statement noting that Ukrainian frontline military forces were once again facing widespread, systematic disruptions to Starshield, the SpaceX-operated satellite internet service owned by Elon Musk that serves as the primary communications backbone for Ukrainian troops operating near the front lines. A similar week-long wave of connectivity disruptions was reported in October, which Musk previously denied was the result of intentional throttling of Ukrainian access. Zelensky emphasized that the latest service interruptions have severely hampered Ukrainian forces’ ability to intercept incoming Russian jet-powered drones, stating that the connectivity gaps are “directly aiding Russian forces in killing more Ukrainian civilians and service members, and carrying out more precise, devastating strikes across Ukrainian territory,” and that his government is actively working with U.S. officials to resolve all outstanding questions around the service disruptions.

  • Marsh dodges Khawaja claims as Cummins vows to ‘respond properly’

    Marsh dodges Khawaja claims as Cummins vows to ‘respond properly’

    As Australia’s men’s 50-over cricket side prepared to kick off a highly anticipated three-match one-day international series against England on Friday, the lingering shadow of the 2018 Cape Town ball-tampering scandal, widely dubbed “sandpapergate,” dominated pre-match press briefings and public discourse this week, reignited by newly released claims from former batter Usman Khawaja’s autobiography. Thirty-five-year-old all-rounder Mitchell Marsh, who is stepping in as stand-in ODI skipper for the opening fixture in place of regular captain Pat Cummins, faced repeated questioning about his recollections of the 2018 incident during a Thursday media appearance, but consistently declined to share any new details about his experience of the saga. Marsh, who was part of Australia’s bowling unit on the day the team was caught using sandpaper to alter the condition of the ball to generate reverse swing during that year’s South Africa Test, told assembled reporters he had no intention of revisiting the events of nearly seven years prior. “This is my choice not to go back there,” Marsh stated. “Who knows, maybe I will write a book one day to share my side of things. I know there’s been a lot of noise around this week, and I respect that certain people have chosen to tell their stories, but I’ve moved on, and my sole focus right now is preparing the team for our match against England tomorrow. I hope my decision not to rehash these old events today is respected.” Cummins, who has not spoken publicly at length about Khawaja’s new allegations since the autobiography launched, announced via social media that he and Cricket Australia would host an impromptu press conference early Friday morning (22:30 Thursday GMT) to address the controversy. “I’ve taken some time to work through the full, long list of Uzzy’s allegations to understand their full extent, so that I can respond properly to all questions from the media,” Cummins wrote. Cricket Australia’s interim chair David Boon, a former Australian Test batter, moved swiftly this week to publicly reaffirm full support for Cummins’ leadership, pushing back against any suggestions the scandal’s resurgence could threaten his captaincy tenure. “We absolutely stand behind Pat,” Boon told *The Australian* newspaper. “He has been an exemplary captain, leading this team with integrity and enormous success across his time in the role, and there is zero question about our full confidence in him continuing in that position.” The renewed public debate sparked by Khawaja’s memoir centers on longstanding unaddressed questions over whether Cummins and the other three leading bowlers who remain core members of Australia’s international set-up – Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, and Nathan Lyon – had prior knowledge of the 2018 plan to use sandpaper on the match ball. The four players released a joint statement back in 2021 asserting that they “did not know a foreign substance was taken on to the field” during the Cape Town Test. But in his new book, Khawaja states that “it was all of us” who bore collective responsibility for the incident, revealing that the team had held explicit discussions about using sandpaper to rough up the ball to encourage reverse swing during the Test series in the lead-up to the day the tampering was caught. The controversy has completely overshadowed the build-up to the high-profile bilateral ODI series, which is scheduled to get underway at 03:30 GMT on Friday. England’s stand-in skipper Harry Brook told reporters his squad was deliberately tuning out the off-field drama to stay focused on their competitive goals. “I haven’t really followed much of that debate at all,” Brook said. “Obviously I’ve heard bits of the conversations going around, but none of us were in that Australian dressing room back then, so we have no way of knowing exactly what happened. We’re just here to focus on our own preparation, and we’re excited for the big challenge of playing against one of the best sides in the world.”

  • Ugandan police investigate deaths of four pupils in suspected school poisoning

    Ugandan police investigate deaths of four pupils in suspected school poisoning

    A tragic incident has unfolded at Ta’aliim Primary School and Quran Memorisation Centre in Uganda’s capital Kampala, where four young female pupils aged 9 to 11 lost their lives this week following a suspected poisoning event. According to preliminary accounts, a fellow student shared a batch of oranges with eight peers at the facility, after which five of the children began experiencing severe vomiting symptoms on Tuesday. Three of the victims died at their respective family homes, while the fourth succumbed to their condition while receiving urgent emergency care at a local medical facility. One additional pupil remains in hospital receiving ongoing treatment for related symptoms. Law enforcement officers with the Uganda Police Force have formally taken the institution’s head teacher into custody to support ongoing investigative efforts. The entire school compound has been sealed off as an active crime scene to preserve all relevant physical evidence for forensic review. Police representatives confirmed that full post-mortem examinations are currently underway to identify the precise cause of the four children’s deaths, and that investigative teams plan to travel to the rural village where the consumed oranges originated to trace their supply chain and identify any potential contaminants. Local Ugandan media outlets have circulated footage of grieving family members recounting their children’s final painful moments, with multiple bereaved parents publicly criticizing the school administration for failing to share clear, timely updates about the emergency as it unfolded. The Uganda Police Force has issued an official statement extending sincere condolences to the grieving families and the broader affected school community, noting that additional verified details will be released to the public as soon as investigations progress. This devastating tragedy has amplified widespread existing public concerns about inadequate health and safety oversight across educational institutions nationwide. A string of prior recent incidents involving suspected contaminated school food and unregulated exposure to hazardous substances have left dozens of Ugandan pupils hospitalized with symptoms ranging from acute abdominal pain and vomiting to life-threatening respiratory distress. The latest fatal event has sparked renewed, intensified public demands for national education and health authorities to implement stricter, regular monitoring of all school feeding programs, enforce standardized hygiene protocols across all learning facilities, and take concrete action to guarantee safe, secure environments for all school-aged children in the country.

  • Ukraine, AI and hybrid threats in Europe to dominate EU summits in Dublin

    Ukraine, AI and hybrid threats in Europe to dominate EU summits in Dublin

    As Ireland holds the rotating six-month EU presidency through the end of 2024, the nation has rolled out the most extensive domestic security and policing deployment in its state history, led by the national gardaí force, to host two landmark consecutive high-level gatherings this week: the European Political Community (EPC) summit and the informal European Council meeting, both hosted at Dublin’s Convention Centre on Thursday and Friday respectively. For weeks, sections of Dublin’s central business district have been cordoned off, leading to widespread public traffic disruptions, as security teams respond to a recent spate of non-credible hoax bomb threats targeting local schools and media outlets, a trend that follows a wave of flight disruptions across Europe last week triggered by similar false security alerts.
    The EPC, an informal strategic leadership forum launched in 2022 in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale military incursion into Ukraine, convenes twice annually, with roughly 50 global leaders confirmed to attend this Dublin iteration themed “Europe – strong, secure, and connected”. Confirmed attendees include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, all EU member state heads of government, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, though a small number of delegations will be absent, most notably Turkey, which is occupied with preparations to host the upcoming COP31 global climate summit. The summit agenda is structured to cover four core priority areas: cross-border economic security, ongoing military and humanitarian support for Ukraine, coordinated responses to rising hybrid threat activity across the continent, and frameworks to bolster pan-European democratic resilience. Hybrid threats, a widely referenced operational term in recent European security discourse, encompass a spectrum of non-kinetic destabilization tactics ranging from state-sponsored cyber intrusions, critical infrastructure sabotage, and coordinated disinformation campaigns designed to erode public trust and pressure targeted nations without triggering formal military conflict.
    A day ahead of the official EPC opening, Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin held bilateral closed-door talks with President Zelensky on Wednesday, where the two leaders publicly signaled their intent to forge a formal cooperative partnership to co-produce unmanned aerial drones for Ukraine’s defense needs. Thursday’s formal proceedings will open with an official welcome address from Taoiseach Martin, followed by the full plenary session, before all attending leaders move to a hosted official dinner at the National Gallery of Ireland. Parallel to the main summit agenda, a side event co-hosted by the United Kingdom and Ukraine for the “Friends of Ukraine” working group will take place on the summit margins, where President Zelensky is scheduled to deliver a detailed briefing to attending partners on frontline developments and ongoing humanitarian needs. In a separate, unconnected diplomatic track that falls outside the official EU summit framework, senior US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are set to meet Zelensky in Dublin later this week, an arrangement Kushner confirmed shortly after Ukrainian and Russian negotiating teams concluded two days of US-mediated peace talks in Abu Dhabi.
    When the informal European Council convenes on Friday, the gathering will make history as the first dedicated EU leaders’ level discussion focused exclusively on artificial intelligence governance, with pioneering AI researcher Professor Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the “godfather of AI”, lined up as a featured guest speaker to share expert insights on the risks and opportunities of advanced AI deployment for European regulatory and economic strategy.

  • Ukraine’s power supply close to critical as Russian strikes bring darkness and cold

    Ukraine’s power supply close to critical as Russian strikes bring darkness and cold

    In a seventh-floor Kyiv apartment, single mother Daryna Kulchytska struggles daily to maintain a semblance of normalcy for her two children, 12-year-old Kyryll and young daughter Olena, amid unpredictable, rolling power outages that have stretched on for months. Since Russia escalated targeted assaults on Ukraine’s energy grid last October, households across the country have been subjected to erratic electricity access: recent weeks have seen some Kyiv families endure up to 20 consecutive hours without power, far harsher than the outages recorded during the previous winter. For Daryna, every extended window of available power becomes a frantic race to cook meals, complete remote work assignments, help her children finish schoolwork, and stock up on basic supplies before the lights cut out unexpectedly. On one recent evening, power lasted an hour longer than the official schedule projected, but the reprieve was fleeting: shortly after 7:30 pm, the entire apartment plunged into total darkness that would last until dawn, disabling the building’s elevator, cutting off running water (which requires electric pumps to reach upper floors), and leaving the family huddled in thick winter coats indoors as temperatures steadily drop. With no electricity for heat or entertainment, the trio gathers by the glow of LED candles to play Uno, a small comfort amid widespread disruption. Kyryll, who spent two years living in the United States and speaks fluent English, does not mince words about the toll of constant blackouts: “There’s no light, no water, no heat, no electricity. And no fun. All the fun got sucked out with the electricity.” He notes the family’s full shelf of board games has been played dozens of times over, and daily life is punctuated by jarring, unplanned interruptions: returning home from school exhausted, only to face air raid sirens, sudden blackouts, and piles of unfinished schoolwork that is impossible to complete without light. Daryna describes walking through a once-bustling Kyiv neighborhood at night to find total darkness, the entire cityscape smothered in shadow with no streetlights to illuminate the roads. The capital’s public transit systems, including metro lines and trolleybuses, have been repeatedly brought to a standstill by widespread outages, and hundreds of thousands of residents across the country have lost consistent power access in recent weeks. A visit to one of Ukraine’s largest, un-named power stations (the location is withheld for operational security) lays bare the scale of the damage: the facility was hit by a devastating ballistic missile strike, the most powerful attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure to date, leaving twisted heaps of metal, shattered pipes, and buried turbines that have taken the plant entirely offline. Volodymyr Kovalenko, a 25-year veteran employee who followed in his parents’ footsteps to work at the station, was on duty in the control room when the missiles struck at 3 a.m. “It was a very powerful attack. We’d never experienced anything like it. We’d had strikes before – part of the roof had collapsed, it was pretty grim. But this time it was particularly severe,” he recalled. Recovery teams led by Vadym Bobyr, who has spent half his life working at the plant, face nearly insurmountable obstacles: air raid sirens blare every 15 to 30 minutes, forcing workers to drop their tools and seek shelter in chimney foundations or thick reinforced walls, as incoming drones and missiles are regularly intercepted just kilometers from the site. During a four-hour media visit, seven separate air raid alerts were triggered, and workers were limited to barely one or two productive hours of repair time each day. Since August, near-daily assaults on energy facilities have killed several workers every week, and the plant’s management confirms it will not be operational again before the end of the current winter, with full reconstruction projected to take until next summer. Maxim Timchenko, CEO of Ukraine’s largest private energy provider DTEK, warns that the scale and intensity of this winter’s attacks far exceed last year’s campaign, with Russian forces deploying new “waiter drones” that cling undetected to power pylons and cables until remotely detonated. While President Volodymyr Zelensky has stated Ukraine still retains enough total generating capacity to meet public demand, widespread damage to transmission lines and substations has made it nearly impossible to deliver that power to households, and overstretched air defences cannot shield every piece of critical energy infrastructure. Millions of Ukrainians now face the prospect of life becoming completely unsustainable if they cannot access a minimum of four hours of power per day, a threshold many Kyiv families are already failing to meet. Many residents have chosen to flee the capital, or the country entirely, to escape the coming months of freezing, unheated darkness. Daryna admits she is torn between her desire to stay close to friends and family in her lifelong home, and the growing fear that the unrelenting strain will permanently harm her children: Olena now suffers frequent nightmares, and the constant stress has taken a heavy toll on her own mental health. Even so, she remains unshaken in her resolve to remain in Ukraine, despite the daily hardships. “I don’t want to live without light. But actually people in Ukraine say, OK, without light, but without Russians. Yes, we’re scared, we’re scared a lot. But better for us to be without power, but [also] without Russians.”