Global Pulse

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  • Pope and co-founder of Anthropic to launch pontiff’s AI encyclical on May 25

    Pope and co-founder of Anthropic to launch pontiff’s AI encyclical on May 25

    VATICAN CITY — The Vatican announced Monday that Pope Leo XIV will join Christopher Olah, co-founder of leading artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, for the official launch of the pontiff’s first-ever encyclical on May 25. The high-profile document, titled *Magnifica Humanitas* (Magnificent Humanity), centers on protecting and upholding human dignity amid the rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence.

    Olah’s invitation to participate in the launch carries major geopolitical and policy significance, already signaling that the U.S.-born pope’s stance on AI governance will emerge as a new point of friction with the Trump White House. Just three months prior, in February 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order banning all U.S. federal agencies from using Anthropic’s AI tools, and imposed additional sweeping sanctions on the company. The penalties came after Anthropic refused to grant the U.S. military unlimited access to its proprietary AI technology. Anthropic has since filed a lawsuit against the administration, alleging the penalties amount to illegal retaliation for the company’s commitment to building guardrails around harmful uses of its AI systems.

    Since taking office, Pope Leo XIV has identified AI ethics and governance as a core priority of his papacy, and has repeatedly voiced deep concern over the development of AI for military applications, calling for global mandatory monitoring of high-risk AI deployments.

    The format of the launch itself marks a break from Vatican tradition. Historically, new papal encyclicals are unveiled in the small Vatican press room, with only a small group of select officials and invited guests on hand to address reporter questions. For *Magnifica Humanitas*, however, the Vatican has organized a high-profile formal event in its main auditorium, featuring a roster of top religious and secular speakers.

    Leading the presentation will be two of the Holy See’s most senior cardinals: Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. Joining Olah as lay speakers are two prominent theologians, Anna Rowlands and Leocadie Lushombo. Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin will deliver the closing remarks, before Pope Leo XIV gives a keynote address and offers a final blessing to attendees.

    Pope Leo XIV signed the encyclical on May 15, a date chosen intentionally to mark 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed *Rerum Novarum* — the landmark 1891 encyclical that addressed workers’ rights, the excesses of unregulated capitalism, and the obligations of states and employers to working people amid the Industrial Revolution. That document laid the foundation for modern Catholic social teaching, and the current pope has already referenced it repeatedly in discussions of the AI revolution, arguing the technology poses the same fundamental existential questions about work, dignity and power that industrialization sparked more than a century ago.

    The new encyclical is expected to frame the global debate over AI through the lens of longstanding Catholic social teaching, which already encompasses principles of labor rights, global justice, and peace. A brief look at Anthropic’s background contextualizes why this collaboration is notable: the company was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and a group of researchers who left OpenAI over public disagreements with then-CEO Sam Altman over AI safety priorities. From its founding, Anthropic has centered its public mission on building safety guardrails for artificial general intelligence (AGI) — the advanced AI system that can outperform humans on most economic and cognitive tasks, a goal both Anthropic and OpenAI are pursuing from their San Francisco bases. As of early 2025, the privately held Anthropic reported a valuation of $380 billion, placing it as one of the world’s most valuable AI companies alongside OpenAI and Elon Musk’s combined SpaceX-xAI venture. Its flagship chatbot Claude competes directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok.

    The Associated Press’ religion coverage is supported through a collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP retains full editorial responsibility for this content.

  • Irish president to meet King Charles during official visit

    Irish president to meet King Charles during official visit

    Irish President Catherine Connolly has launched a landmark three-day official visit to the United Kingdom, with a high-profile meeting with King Charles III scheduled as the centerpiece of her itinerary. This trip marks Connolly’s first official visit to England since her inauguration last November, and her third overseas engagement since taking office, following earlier working visits to Northern Ireland and Spain.

    Connolly kicked off her schedule on Monday with a warm welcome at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, West London. During her stop at the hub, which has long served as a community home for Irish people in the British capital, the president led detailed discussions on the long history of Irish migration to the UK. She interacted directly with learners attending an on-site Irish language class, and took in traditional Irish musical and dance performances put on by local community groups.

    Addressing attendees at the centre, Connolly contextualized the ongoing patterns of Irish population movement across the Irish Sea. She noted that for more than two centuries, mass migration from Ireland has largely been driven by economic pressures, with generations of Irish people settling in major British cities including London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. Even today, Connolly acknowledged, economic hardship continues to push some Irish citizens to leave their home country, singling out the Republic’s ongoing housing crisis as a key contributing factor pushing people to seek opportunities abroad.

    Following her visit to the Hammersmith centre, Irish Ambassador to the UK Martin Fraser hosted an official evening reception at the Irish Embassy in London in honor of President Connolly and her husband, Brian McEnery.

    The president’s packed agenda continues on Tuesday, with planned stops at the world-famous Chelsea Flower Show and the London Irish Centre in Camden. On Wednesday, the final day of the visit, Connolly will travel to the northern English city of Leeds, where she will tour the University of Leeds and the city’s Irish Centre. During her time in Leeds, she will receive a briefing on the services delivered by the city’s Irish Health Centre, which supports the local Irish community, and will hold meetings with representatives from Irish community organisations across the Yorkshire region.

    Since taking office, Connolly has repeatedly emphasized her administration’s commitment to strengthening ties with the global Irish diaspora, and this UK visit is framed as a key step toward delivering on that pledge. It also builds on longstanding diplomatic and cultural connections between Ireland and the United Kingdom, deepening people-to-people links between the neighboring nations.

  • Cuba accuses US of building ‘fraudulent case’ for military action

    Cuba accuses US of building ‘fraudulent case’ for military action

    Tensions between the United States and Cuba have spiked dramatically in recent weeks, as a crippling domestic fuel crisis worsened by longstanding US trade restrictions collides with escalating US pressure on Havana’s communist government and sharp Cuban accusations of Washington plotting military aggression.

    The crisis ignited after US news outlet Axios published a report on Sunday citing classified US intelligence claims that Cuba had acquired roughly 300 attack drones, and was weighing potential strikes on US targets in the region—including the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, US naval vessels operating nearby, and Key West in southern Florida. The report also repeated unconfirmed intelligence claims that Iranian military advisors are currently present in Havana, a development that echoes the growing role of Iranian drone technology in conflicts across the Middle East and Ukraine.

    In an immediate and forceful response posted to social media, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez rejected the claims outright, accusing the US of systematically constructing a “fraudulent case” to justify both its ongoing harsh economic war against the Cuban people and potential future military intervention. Rodríguez emphasized that Havana “neither threatens nor desires war” with the US, but confirmed that Cuba is actively preparing defensive measures in response to rising external aggression. He also criticized major US media outlets for complicity in spreading the unsubstantiated claims, calling their coverage coordinated slander aligned with US government messaging.

    Behind the escalating diplomatic row is a deepening humanitarian crisis inside Cuba, driven largely by an effective US oil blockade that has cut off nearly all of the island’s regular energy supplies. The last permitted Russian oil shipment to Cuba was exhausted earlier this month, and the loss of steady oil deliveries from former Venezuelan ally Nicolás Maduro—whose government fell to a US-backed raid earlier this year—has left the country with acute fuel shortages. Those shortages have triggered widespread rolling blackouts across the island that have disrupted critical services, including hospital operations, water pumping stations, public transportation networks, and municipal waste collection. When combined with already severe shortages of basic food and medicine, the energy crisis has sparked rare public protests against the Cuban government, which has overseen years of gradual infrastructure decline.

    For years, Cuba weathered broad Western sanctions with the support of regional allies, most notably Maduro’s Venezuelan government, which previously supplied an estimated 35,000 barrels of oil per day to the island. That support ended after US forces captured Maduro in a raid on Caracas earlier this year, where the former Venezuelan leader is now set to stand trial in New York on federal drug trafficking charges. The Trump administration framed that raid as justified by a prior federal indictment against Maduro, a playbook that Cuban officials fear will be repeated against their own leadership. US media has also reported that the US is preparing a federal indictment against former Cuban leader Raúl Castro, who took power from his brother Fidel Castro—the revolutionary leader who overthrew the US-backed Cuban government in 1959.

    The current escalation aligns with the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive posture toward Latin American left-wing governments, a marked shift from the policies of recent US predecessors. Trump has openly framed his regional policy as a revival of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which asserts US primacy over the Western Hemisphere, rebranding the policy the “Donroe Doctrine” and explicitly naming Cuba as the “next” target after Venezuela. Since capturing Maduro, Trump has repeatedly stated he expects to “take Cuba” in the near future.

    In recent weeks, US military activity around Cuba has ramped up significantly: the *New York Times* reported Friday that surveillance flights over Cuban airspace have increased, and the US is planning a build-up of military forces in the Caribbean region. Just one day before the Axios report was published, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Havana for talks with Cuban officials, where he issued a demand that Cuba end its status as “a safe haven for adversaries in the western hemisphere.”

    Cuba and the US have held quiet talks for months to resolve longstanding bilateral tensions, but those negotiations have been sidelined by the Trump administration’s escalating pressure campaign. With energy supplies exhausted and US military momentum growing, the island now faces the dual crisis of domestic humanitarian collapse and rising risk of foreign military intervention.

  • After years of tension, Hungary and Ukraine hold talks on Hungarian minority rights

    After years of tension, Hungary and Ukraine hold talks on Hungarian minority rights

    Diplomatic relations between neighboring Hungary and Ukraine are poised for a potential turnaround, after the two nations’ top foreign policy officials announced Monday that high-level talks focused on securing the rights of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority will get underway as early as this week. The move marks the first concrete sign of improved relations following the April general election that ousted long-time pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose 16-year tenure left bilateral ties at a historic low.

    For years, Orbán’s nationalist-populist government refused to extend military or financial aid to Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, consistently blocked critical European Union funding for Kyiv, stalled EU sanctions on Moscow, and repeatedly threatened to derail Ukraine’s accession process to the bloc. In the lead-up to the April election, Orbán’s administration ran a harsh anti-Ukraine campaign, framing the war-torn neighboring country as an existential threat to Hungary’s economic stability and national security, claiming it would drag Hungary directly into the ongoing conflict.

    Orbán repeatedly justified his administration’s anti-Ukraine stances by pointing to long-running disputes over minority rights for the roughly 100,000-strong ethnic Hungarian community based in Ukraine’s western Zakarpattia region. Tensions over the issue flared in 2017, when Kyiv passed a new education law mandating Ukrainian as the exclusive language of instruction for all students beyond the fifth grade. Drafted primarily to curtail Russian influence in Ukrainian public life, the policy ultimately restricted education access in other minority languages, drawing widespread anger from Hungarian, Romanian and Bulgarian minority groups across western Ukraine.

    Following the landslide electoral victory of the center-right Tisza Party and its leader Prime Minister Péter Magyar, however, observers have held out hope for a major shift in Hungary’s approach to its eastern neighbor. The new administration’s break from Orbán’s pro-Moscow stance was already on display last week, when new Hungarian Foreign Minister Anita Orbán – who is not related to the former prime minister – summoned the Russian ambassador to Budapest to condemn a massive Russian drone strike on Zakarpattia. That step would have been nearly unthinkable during Orbán’s tenure, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the move as an “important message” that demonstrated a clear break from the previous government’s approach.

    In a public post on X on Monday, Anita Orbán confirmed that expert-level consultations focused on resolving the long-running dispute over ethnic Hungarian minority rights will launch this week. She framed the talks as “an important foundation for the prompt and reassuring settlement of minority rights issues,” adding that she expects the dialogue to be constructive and yield tangible progress for the Hungarian community in Zakarpattia in the near term.

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha echoed that optimistic tone in his own X post Monday, confirming that Kyiv is ready to move forward with a new era of cooperative relations. “We are ready to open a new, mutually beneficial chapter in Ukrainian-Hungarian relations without delay, with the aim of restoring trust and good-neighborly relations between our countries,” Sybiha wrote. He added that during a recent phone call with Anita Orbán, he thanked the Hungarian foreign minister for her government’s “principled and swift reaction to the latest Russian strikes against Ukraine.”

  • From indemnity to indispensability: China’s 125-year reversal

    From indemnity to indispensability: China’s 125-year reversal

    One hundred and twenty-five years ago, in August 1900, eight foreign military powers raised their flags over occupied Beijing, marking one of the lowest points in modern Chinese history. Few in the imperial Forbidden City could have predicted that in 2026, the same capital would welcome the sitting president of the United States as an honored state guest, followed just days later by the leader of Russia — a stark reversal of power dynamics that reads like a carefully crafted historical drama.

    The 1900 invasion was led by a loose Eight-Nation Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Roughly 52,000 alliance troops marched into the capital, looting and damaging the Forbidden City and the Old Summer Palace, destroying irreplaceable ancient literary collections including the *Yongle Dadian* and *Siku Quanshu*, and forcing the Qing Dynasty to sign the punitive Boxer Protocol one year later. This unequal treaty imposed crippling indemnities on China, granted extraterritorial rights to foreign powers, and allowed permanent foreign troop garrisons on Chinese soil, stripping China of core sovereign control.

    By May 2026, the geopolitical table had turned entirely. On the same Beijing soil, the same eight nations’ modern successor states watched from the sidelines as China, not foreign diplomatic missions, set the agenda for high-stakes great power diplomacy. The 2026 Trump-Xi summit stood as the complete opposite of the 1901 humiliation: it was the visiting U.S. president who offered effusive praise to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, calling him “my friend” and “tall, very tall,” while the Chinese delegation offered measured diplomatic language and made no concrete concessions on key sticking points including Taiwan, trade, fentanyl control, and artificial intelligence. In 1901, the Qing court was forced into exile in Xi’an and coerced into signing away national interests; in 2026, Air Force One departed Beijing before the U.S. president even publicly addressed the Taiwan issue.

    This contrast is not a simple moral judgment, but a structural observation of shifting global power. Where Beijing once was a conquered prize for foreign armies, it now operates as a central convening power for global diplomacy, and the long-standing pattern of great powers forcing their agendas on China has been quietly inverted.

    The 1900 Eight-Nation Alliance was never bound by a formal treaty or official declaration of war; it was only held together by a temporary convergence of anti-China interests. In 2026, the language of strategic friendship now sits firmly on Beijing’s side of the negotiating table. Xi has long referred to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a friend, having built a “no limits” strategic partnership with Moscow since 2022, marked by joint official statements, high-profile informal summits, and deepening bilateral coordination. Putin’s visit to Beijing immediately following Trump’s summit, which he explicitly framed as an opportunity to “share opinions on the contacts that the Chinese had with the Americans,” confirms that triangular great power diplomacy now runs through Beijing, not around it.

    Yet today’s asymmetric relationships mirror the 1901 asymmetries in reverse. Russia relies on China for more than one-third of its imports and one-quarter of its total exports, while Russia accounts for only 4% of China’s total trade volume — a smaller share than Vietnam. The position of the supplicant has shifted, even as the geographic stage of Beijing remains the same.

    It would be easy to frame this historical arc as a story of unbroken linear ascent for China, but the underlying data tells a more nuanced story. Arguments that China has reached its economic and demographic peak draw on hard evidence: a national fertility rate of just 1.0 in 2025, a fourth consecutive year of population decline, a growing share of young Chinese people reporting no desire to have children, and 2021 marking the highest point of China’s nominal GDP convergence with the United States. The Belt and Road Initiative has faced stalled progress in multiple partner countries, unforgiving demographic headwinds persist, and China’s global cultural soft power remains modest by standard international metrics.

    The 2026 back-to-back summits in Beijing therefore capture not a permanent new global order, but a specific, possibly peak moment where China’s industrial scale, deliberate diplomatic patience, and the relative disorganization of its global competitors have converged. The Eight-Nation Alliance arrived at a historic low point for China; today’s summits are taking place at, or very near, a historic high. Both moments are snapshots of a particular time, not permanent destinies.

    Three key conclusions emerge from this historical comparison. First, national sovereignty is now the default starting point for all global negotiations, rather than a prize to be won. The 1901 Boxer Protocol made Chinese sovereignty conditional on foreign approval; the 2026 Beijing summits take full Chinese sovereignty as an unchallenged given. Any future regional order in Asia will be negotiated between sovereign equal states, or it will not emerge at all — regardless of which great power is ascendant in any given decade.

    Second, personality-driven diplomacy has clear limits for all parties. Trump’s bet on personal charm yielded only vague non-binding commitments around Boeing aircraft purchases and soybean exports, which Beijing declined to confirm in any detail. This lesson is not limited to U.S. partisan politics, but is a procedural reality: centralized governance systems reward structured preparation, not off-the-cuff improvisation, regardless of whether a visiting leader comes from Washington, Moscow, or Tokyo.

    Third, the window for China’s current strategic advantage is narrower than triumphalist narratives suggest. If current demographic and economic growth trends hold, the broad strategic latitude China enjoys in 2026 may not still exist by 2046. This reality calls for strategic patience from all major capitals: for Beijing, the best long-term strategy is to exercise restraint while it holds advantageous cards, and for Washington, the most effective response is consistent institutional competence rather than performative political spectacle.

    History reminds us that the 1900 Eight-Nation Alliance dissolved within just a year of its victory, as it never had a binding formal framework to hold it together. Coalitions assembled for a single moment rarely outlast that moment. The same caution applies to every strategic partnership, whether it is the Sino-Russian alignment, transpacific relations, or any other cooperation that looks unbreakable in the glow of a state banquet. The most reliable lesson of history, from 1901 to 2026, is that a single photo of leaders on a palace steps never tells the full story.

  • Mark Latham’s ex denies insider trading, punching former Labor leader in extraordinary reply

    Mark Latham’s ex denies insider trading, punching former Labor leader in extraordinary reply

    A high-profile political drama has unfolded in New South Wales parliament, where Nathalie Matthews, the former partner of ex-Labor and One Nation NSW leader Mark Latham, has issued a scathing full-throated denial of a series of explosive claims made against her by her ex-partner, including allegations of insider trading, a drunken drug-fueled assault, and unethical financial arrangements.

    Matthews, a one-time Liberal Party local council candidate who is currently fighting separate, unrelated revenge porn criminal charges (to which she has already pleaded not guilty), laid out her rebuttal in a formally tabled citizens’ reply last week, pushing back against what she describes as false, damaging defamation that has gutted her professional standing.

    According to Matthews’ submission, Latham invoked her name a staggering 44 separate times during a November 12 debate in the NSW Legislative Council, where he leveled multiple incendiary accusations. Among these claims were assertions that she had accepted a $145,000 payment and confidential insider trading tips from Richard White, the billionaire tech co-founder of logistics software firm WiseTech, that she had carried out a “zombie-like drunken and drugged attack” that ended with her punching Latham in the head following their breakup, that she had engaged in a sexual relationship with businessman Paul Byrne, and that Byrne had covered the cost of her London flight.

    Matthews has rejected every single one of these claims point-by-point. “I never punched Mr Latham and I was not under the influence of any prescribed drug or illicit narcotic,” she stated in her reply. She further denied any romantic or financial connection to Byrne, refuting the claims of a paid flight entirely. On the insider trading allegations, she made clear she has never received the $145,000 payment from White, never been given confidential market information by him, and has never received any correspondence or regulatory notice from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) related to insider trading claims.

    The former Liberal candidate emphasized that Latham’s false remarks have triggered widespread negative media coverage that has eroded public trust in her character and left her professional reputation irreparably harmed, to date.

    The NSW Parliament Privileges Committee ultimately voted to release Matthews’ full rebuttal, though the move was not without opposition. Independent Member of the Legislative Council Rod Roberts issued a dissenting opinion, arguing that the submission was “frivolous and vexatious and it contains inaccuracies.”

    This public back-and-forth is only the latest chapter in a long-running bitter public dispute between the two figures. Last year, Matthews applied for and received an apprehended violence order against Latham, alleging he had committed serious domestic abuse including defecating on her – all claims Latham has repeatedly and categorically denied.

  • Protesters light bonfires during public transport strike in Kenya over fuel prices

    Protesters light bonfires during public transport strike in Kenya over fuel prices

    On a Monday morning in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, widespread public protests erupted alongside a coordinated national public transport strike, called to oppose a historic surge in national fuel prices that has sent shockwaves through the East African economy. The industrial action brought the country’s most populous urban center to a standstill: commuters were left trapped across suburban neighborhoods, with central business districts largely empty of daily activity. Protesters set fire to tires along major arterial roads, prompting most private motorists to avoid travel entirely and keep their vehicles parked at home. In response to the unrest, the Kenya Association of Private Schools issued guidance for member institutions to prioritize student safety, leading the vast majority of schools across the affected region to shift to remote online learning for the day. The catalyst for the unrest came just four days prior, when Kenya’s energy regulators announced a new round of fuel price adjustments that pushed costs to all-time record highs. The update set diesel prices up by 23.5% and gasoline prices up by 8% nationwide, a jump far steeper than many households and businesses had anticipated. As of Monday, President William Ruto—who is currently traveling outside of Kenya—had not issued any public statement addressing the new price levels or the resulting protests. This is not the first time Kenya has faced a politically charged fuel price crisis: during an earlier price review in April, Ruto attributed a previous jump to global market volatility tied to the Iran conflict, and intervened to cut fuel taxes in order to prevent a similarly sharp increase at that time. Kenya’s leading business advocacy group, the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, sounded the alarm over the price hike within hours of its announcement Friday. In an official statement, the chamber warned that elevated fuel costs would ripple through every sector of the national economy, driving up prices for nearly all consumer goods and public services. The organization also pushed back against claims that the surge is driven solely by global market trends, noting that between April and May, global crude oil prices rose only around 10.7% — less than half the percentage increase seen for Kenyan diesel prices over the same window. “This points to the continued role of domestic cost buildup,” the statement read, indicating that internal factors beyond global shifts are contributing to the extreme price jump. The political opposition has seized on the crisis to criticize the Ruto administration. Former Deputy President Rigathi Gachagua, who was impeached on corruption charges in October 2024 before aligning with the national opposition, has placed the blame for the sharp surge on corrupt business elites he says are inflating prices to pad their own profit margins. Gachagua pointed out a striking comparative inconsistency: neighboring landlocked nations that import all of their fuel through Kenyan ports—including Uganda—actually have lower retail fuel prices than Kenya, despite the additional cross-border transport costs those imports incur. As a regional trade hub, Kenya handles the vast majority of fuel and goods imports for multiple East African inland nations, with all cargo moving overland from the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa. As the strike and protests enter their first day, the Kenyan public is waiting for a formal response from President Ruto, with widespread anxiety over how the fuel price increase will erode already strained household budgets across the country.

  • Philippine senate convenes as impeachment court to try vice president as political storm rages

    Philippine senate convenes as impeachment court to try vice president as political storm rages

    MANILA, Philippines — A high-stakes political crisis has engulfed the Philippines, as the country’s Senate convened an impeachment court Monday to try Vice President Sara Duterte on a slate of criminal allegations, just days after a violent gunfight erupted inside the chamber amid escalating power struggles between the nation’s top two leaders. The proceedings mark the climax of weeks of growing tension between Duterte and her former political ally, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., that has laid bare the deep ideological and partisan divides that have long troubled the Southeast Asian democracy.

    The impeachment proceedings got their start one week prior, when the Philippine House of Representatives voted by a wide majority to advance three core charges against Duterte: unexplained unexplained wealth, misuse of public state funds, and a public threat to assassinate President Marcos Jr. if she were killed amid their ongoing political feud. A rising political figure who has already publicly announced her intent to run for the presidency in the 2028 national election, Duterte has issued a blanket denial of all charges but has declined to respond to the specific allegations in any detail.

    The crisis is deeply tied to the legal troubles of Duterte’s father, former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who was taken into custody by the International Criminal Court (ICC) earlier this year on charges of crimes against humanity. Those charges stem from the former president’s deadly nationwide anti-drug crackdown, launched during his six years in office, that left thousands of mostly low-level, petty drug suspects dead. Sara Duterte has publicly blamed Marcos Jr. for orchestrating what she calls the “kidnapping” of her ailing father, referring to his March arrest and transfer to ICC custody in The Hague.

    The path to this week’s impeachment trial has already been marked by dramatic, unprecedented chaos in the Senate. Last Monday, 13 of the chamber’s 24 senators — led by a bloc of close Duterte allies — launched a surprise power grab to oust the sitting Senate president and install their own candidate, Alan Peter Cayetano, leaving the final outcome of the impeachment trial deeply uncertain. The power play relied entirely on the unexpected appearance of Senator Ronald dela Rosa, a long-time Duterte confidant who had spent months in hiding to avoid an ICC arrest warrant.

    Dela Rosa, who served as national police chief during Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-drug crackdown, was named by the ICC as a co-conspirator in the alleged crimes against humanity, and the court unsealed an arrest warrant for him just last Monday. After months in self-imposed hiding, Dela Rosa emerged last week, traveling to the Senate in a van arranged by Cayetano. When National Bureau of Investigation agents moved to arrest him upon his arrival, Dela Rosa fled into the Senate complex, darting up a stairwell to the plenary hall, where Cayetano and his bloc placed him under the chamber’s official “protective custody.”

    What followed was a days-long tense standoff between Senate security personnel and NBI agents, who had positioned themselves in an adjacent government building. The standoff boiled over into open gunfire Wednesday night, when Senate security fired what their chief Mao Aplasca described as warning shots toward the agents. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Marcos addressed the nation in a late-night national television broadcast, urging the public to remain calm amid the escalating unrest.

    In a new twist that deepened suspicions of political sabotage, Cayetano later confirmed that Dela Rosa had disappeared from the protected Senate chamber. Government investigators are now probing whether the gunfight was deliberately instigated by Duterte allies to create enough chaos to allow Dela Rosa to slip away from custody entirely. With the impeachment trial now underway and control of the Senate still contested, the Philippines faces one of its most severe political crises in recent decades, as the rivalry between the Marcos and Duterte political clans spills out into open institutional conflict.

  • Registrations to teach international students in Australia to be paused for 12 months

    Registrations to teach international students in Australia to be paused for 12 months

    In a sweeping move to repair systemic flaws exposed in Australia’s visa framework, the Albanese administration has instituted a 12-month moratorium on new registrations for providers seeking to teach English and vocational training to international students. The policy shift comes in direct response to the damning findings of the Nixon Review, formally titled the Rapid Review into the Exploitation of Australia’s Visa System, which uncovered widespread exploitation of student visa pathways and deep vulnerabilities within the national immigration system.

    The suspension applies to all new applications to two key national regulatory bodies: the Commonwealth Register of Institutions and Courses for Overseas Students (CRICOS), which oversees official registration of education providers and programs for international enrollees, and the Australian Skills Quality Authority (ASQA), the national regulator for the vocational education and training (VET) sector. Critically, the pause does not extend to public education providers, including state-run government schools, public TAFE institutions, and Australia’s Table A public universities.

    Assistant Citizenship Minister Julian Hill framed the decision as a necessary step to protect Australia’s standing as a world-leading destination for international education. He emphasized that long-term success in the international education sector depends on unwavering focus on quality, systemic integrity, and positive student experiences. “Australia welcomes genuine international students seeking a premium Australian education, and the Government is committed to further strengthening integrity and sustainability in the international education sector,” Hill stated in a press briefing Monday.

    The minister added that the 12-month pause was not made hastily, noting that it would give regulators time to root out integrity risks posed by unvetted new entrants and address widespread oversaturation in the VET and ELICOS (English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students) sub-sectors. “Frankly, it raises suspicions when at the same time student numbers in these parts of the sector are moderating the regulator continues to see a rush of new market entrants,” Hill said.

    The 12-month suspension will grant ASQA additional time to clear existing backlogs and address long-running integrity concerns raised by both the Nixon Review and the 2023 federal Migration Review. During the pause, the regulator will conduct a full sector-wide assessment to evaluate risks associated with potential new providers and analyze the scope of oversaturation in the two affected segments. Currently registered providers will not be impacted by the change: they will still be permitted to apply to add new instructional locations for existing courses and register updated courses that replace existing offerings.

    The policy forms part of the government’s broader push to shore up public confidence in Australia’s immigration system, as political pressure around migration levels and their impact on national housing supply has grown. The issue has become a key electoral battleground, dominating campaigns for recent state elections in South Australia and the federal by-election for the New South Wales seat of Farrer. Opposition Leader Angus Taylor recently made migration policy a centerpiece of his budget reply speech, where he pledged to tie future national migration caps to annual housing construction completion rates. The government already secured legislative authority for the suspension last year, when it passed the Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Act 2025.

  • G7 finance chiefs meet to seek common stance on unstable ground

    G7 finance chiefs meet to seek common stance on unstable ground

    Against a backdrop of escalating geopolitical tension, global economic volatility, and ongoing conflict in the Middle East, top finance officials from the Group of Seven major industrialized nations kicked off two days of closed-door negotiations in Paris on Monday. The core goal of the summit, hosted by France in its term as rotating G7 president, is to build a coordinated collective stance amid a landscape of overlapping economic and political risks that have put global growth projections on shaky ground.

    Even before the first session convened, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure publicly acknowledged the significant challenges facing negotiators, admitting candidly that reaching full consensus across all topics would not be a simple task. The gathering comes at a moment of unprecedented friction, with trade disputes triggered by U.S. President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff policies amplifying existing geopolitical divides, alongside the economic shockwaves rippling out from the Middle East conflict.

    One of the highest-priority items on the meeting agenda is a coordinated push to reduce the G7’s collective reliance on China’s dominant position in global rare earth supplies, a critical input for the artificial intelligence boom that has driven much of advanced economy growth in recent years. Lescure outlined his view that the current trajectory of the global economy, shaped over the past decade, is no longer structurally sustainable. He highlighted a series of interconnected threats: the rapidly expanding U.S. federal budget deficit, stagnant technological progress across European economies, and China’s efforts to counter falling domestic consumer demand and persistent industrial overcapacity by pushing its domestic firms to increase their market share in international export markets.

    “Multilateralism can work,” Lescure told reporters ahead of the summit, “but these discussions are not easy — I’m not going to tell you that we agree on everything, including obviously with our American friends.” Trump’s combative, transactional approach to international relations with both allies and adversaries has left many G7 leaders uneasy, as they simultaneously grapple with dual threats of stagnant growth and persistent elevated inflation fueled by the Middle East war.

    German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil emphasized that the G7 serves as the ideal forum for discussions with the U.S. focused on bringing the conflict to an end, noting that the war has inflicted severe damage on global economic development. “This war is massively damaging economic development. That is why everything must be done to bring the war to a permanent end, to stabilise the region again, and to ensure free shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz,” Klingbeil said in a pre-summit statement. The G7 finance chiefs are scheduled to wrap up their talks with a closing press conference at midday on Tuesday.

    For the French presidency, even a collective shared recognition of the core challenges on the table would be counted as a major success. Officials aim to release two joint statements following the conclusion of negotiations. To set the stage for the full G7 heads of state summit scheduled for June 15-17 in Evian, France, finance ministers from four major emerging and advanced economies — Kenya, Brazil, India, and South Korea — have been invited to join Tuesday’s discussions.

    The meeting comes just days after Trump’s high-profile trip to Beijing for talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping failed to deliver a clear breakthrough on two critical issues: rolling back U.S.-China tariffs and advancing progress on ending the Middle East conflict. In recent years, China has expanded its economic influence across regions traditionally aligned with G7 powers, and as a key global supplier of both critical raw materials and low-cost finished goods, it has become increasingly willing to take hardline stances in trade negotiations.

    Pierre Jaillet, a senior researcher at France’s Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS), explained that the G7’s approach to global economic imbalances has shifted dramatically in recent years. “Up to now, the problem of macroeconomic imbalances was addressed… with regards to global financial stability,” Jaillet told AFP. “But now officials are looking through the optic of economic security: trade surpluses or deficits can reflect vulnerabilities or dependencies, in particular with critical minerals or energy, and the risk of supply chain disruptions.”

    While Lescure avoided publicly naming China, he made the G7’s goal clear: “The G7 goal is to ‘ensure that we don’t depend on any one country… for our rare earth supplies.” Beyond critical minerals, energy security has moved to the top of the agenda as well, driven by the ongoing conflict in the oil-rich Middle East. Lescure framed the current challenge as parallel to the global energy crisis of the 1970s, saying “We must do for critical materials what we did with energy in the 1970s,” and build a shared framework to respond to future crises.

    To address these risks, the French presidency is pushing for the creation of a “common toolbox” that member states can use to counter market disruptions affecting key raw material supplies. Proposed measures include targeted strategic trade agreements, and interventionist policy tools such as price floors, import quotas, and targeted tariffs. France is also seeking to promote multilateral collaborative projects to build out domestic rare earth extraction and refining capacity across G7 nations. A key example currently underway is a joint French-Japanese factory under construction in southwest France that will produce and recycle rare earths, magnets, and other critical minerals. The French state has already committed 106 million euros ($124 million) to the project, which is on track to meet 100 percent of France’s domestic rare earth demand by 2030. Leveraging public development finance to secure agreements in developing countries that encourage private sector investment in critical mineral supply chains is another core policy path on the table, Lescure added.