Global Pulse

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  • Europol task force nets 280 arrests as ‘violence for hire’ spreads across Europe

    Europol task force nets 280 arrests as ‘violence for hire’ spreads across Europe

    THE HAGUE, Netherlands — In a landmark first year of operations targeting an emerging dangerous trend in European organized crime, an international law enforcement task force focused on dismantling ‘violence as a criminal service’ networks has secured 280 arrests, Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement cooperation agency, announced Wednesday.

    The widespread arrests have pulled back the curtain on a growing cross-continental criminal pattern: criminal organizations are increasingly recruiting people — disproportionately young people — through social media platforms and encrypted messaging apps to carry out violent attacks, from brutal physical assaults to targeted assassinations. Europol officials have framed this model as a disturbing, illicit twist on the gig economy, where violence is contracted out on demand rather than planned and executed by established local criminal gangs alone.

    In an official statement, Europol emphasized that this shifting criminal landscape has moved far beyond the traditional boundaries of isolated, local incidents of violence. “Violence is no longer confined to isolated acts or local dynamics. It is increasingly offered as a service: accessible, scalable and driven by online ecosystems that enable recruitment, coordination, and execution across borders,” the agency noted.

    Launched one year ago, the task force brings together specialized law enforcement units from 11 European nations: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Over its first 12 months of coordinated investigations, the joint operation has identified more than 1,400 individuals tied to these transnational violence-for-hire networks.

    Among the high-profile arrests made through the task force’s work are a Dutch national charged with acting as a getaway driver for two minors suspected of carrying out a series of explosions across Germany in mid-2025. In a separate cross-border case, a minor was taken into custody in Sweden earlier this year in connection with a shooting outside a prison in the Dutch city of Alphen aan den Rijn.

    Beyond the arrests already completed, Europol has added three top suspected network leaders to Europe’s most-wanted online portal. Two of the men are Swedish nationals, and the third is German. All three are wanted on charges including murder, large-scale drug trafficking, and money laundering for their alleged leadership roles within the illicit violence-as-a-service structure.

  • Colombians are divided over the fate of hippos linked to Pablo Escobar

    Colombians are divided over the fate of hippos linked to Pablo Escobar

    Nestled along the banks of Colombia’s Magdalena River, the quiet riverside town of Puerto Triunfo holds an unexpected, dangerous legacy left by one of the world’s most infamous drug kingpins: a rapidly growing colony of invasive hippopotamuses that have divided local communities, spurred national debate, and put environmental policymakers in an impossible position.

    For local fishermen like Wilinton Sánchez, the semi-aquatic giants are a constant, deadly threat. Capable of charging 30 kilometers per hour across land and 8 kilometers per hour through water, hippos can surge from the river’s murky, tea-colored currents without warning. “We were out Saturday when one lunged … reared up and swung its jaws wide,” Sánchez recalled. “If it ever gets hold of you, it’ll tear you to pieces.”

    Álvaro Molina, another longtime fisherman who has lived along the river for decades, says dangerous run-ins have become routine. Around 11 years ago, the first two hippos settled on the nearby “Island of Silence,” a vegetated river island that offered ideal living conditions: no natural predators, a stable drought-free climate, and abundant vegetation far different from their native African range. Today, their population has surged, and Molina says encounters are so common he barely blinks anymore. A few years back, his boat drifted directly atop two resting hippos, which capsized the vessel in their surprise. Molina escaped unharmed, but he says the hippos have destroyed the local fishing industry, as fear has driven dozens of workers away from the water entirely. “Whether they are killed or taken away, it does us a favor,” he said.

    But for many other local residents, the hippos have become an unexpected economic lifeline. Several days a week, tour boats carrying domestic and international tourists crowd the river, visitors scanning the shoreline and murky water for a glimpse of the giants. Even the occasional sudden charge that sends boatloads of tourists screaming has done little to dampen the popularity of “hippo-watching” excursions.

    Diana Hincapié, a 48-year-old restaurant owner located on the banks of the Cocorná Sur River, a Magdalena tributary, says nearly 200 tourists visit her business each month, most traveling to the area specifically to see the hippos. She argues the animals have put down roots in Colombia after three decades of reproduction, saying, “They aren’t African anymore; they are Colombian, born and bred here for over 30 years.” If the government moves forward with its plan to cull the population, Hincapié says she is ready to join mass street protests, warning that losing the hippos would decimate Puerto Triunfo’s tourism economy.

    The hippo colony traces its origin back to the 1980s, when notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar imported four hippos to add to his private menagerie at Hacienda Nápoles, his sprawling, fortified valley estate. After Escobar’s death in 1993, the hippos escaped confinement and gradually spread across the Magdalena river basin. Today, the population numbers roughly 200, and Colombia’s Environment Ministry projects that without aggressive intervention, that number will surge past 500 by 2030, covering more than 43,000 square kilometers of river territory.

    To curb the unsustainable growth, the Colombian government recently approved a management plan that approves three main strategies: long-term confinement of local hippo populations, transfer of animals to international zoos or wildlife sanctuaries, and euthanasia, which is framed as a last resort for cases where non-lethal options are unworkable. The plan calls for euthanizing approximately 80 hippos starting in the second half of 2024.

    The announcement ignited immediate outrage across the country and beyond. Animal welfare activists have labeled the plan “mass murder” and “extermination.” Colombian Senator Andrea Padilla has called on the government to prioritize relocation over culling, arguing that responding to Escobar’s reckless illegal importation with mass killing is unacceptable. “This is a legacy left to us by a drug trafficker,” Padilla said. “How can we possibly close this chapter in the exact same way — by shooting the hippos?”

    Scientists who back the cull as a necessary environmental measure have even received death threats amid the public backlash. Daniel Cadena, dean of sciences at the University of the Andes, explains that hippos are large, impactful herbivores that fundamentally alter local ecosystem structure, posing long-term risks to native Colombian wildlife. He supports a mixed strategy that includes euthanasia as a necessary component to stop uncontrolled population growth.

    Euthanasia is also logistically challenging, under official government protocol: hippos must first be lured into corrals with food, immobilized, then given a lethal injection. Alternately, they may be shot with high-powered long-range rifles, as the species’ famously thick skin makes penetration difficult for lower-powered weapons.

    Efforts to pursue non-lethal relocation have so far hit a dead end. The Environment Ministry confirmed that while some countries initially expressed interest in accepting transferred hippos, no nation has formally committed to taking in the animals. High transportation and care costs, as well as legal restrictions on importing invasive species, have deterred potential hosts, leaving the controversial cull plan on the table as the government weighs its options to address a problem decades in the making.

  • Sudan’s war leaves Khartoum with unexploded mines and other weapons

    Sudan’s war leaves Khartoum with unexploded mines and other weapons

    Three years into Sudan’s devastating civil conflict between the national army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, a hidden, slow-burning crisis is endangering thousands of civilians who have begun returning to recaptured areas of the capital Khartoum: tens of thousands of pieces of unexploded ordnance (UXO), including landmines, undetonated bombs, shells, grenades and rockets, scattered across residential neighborhoods, public spaces and vital infrastructure.

    Khaled Abdulgader experienced this threat first-hand last year, when he intervened to stop children playing with an unknown object he later learned was an explosive, mistaking it for a football. The device detonated in his hand, leaving him with two fingers amputated and deep shrapnel wounds to his chest. Even as he recovered, Abdulgader tried to frame his experience as a grim stroke of luck, saying, “I feel like, ‘Thank God it was just my hands.’” He is far from alone in his injury: official and aid data counts hundreds of Sudanese killed or maimed by accidental UXO blasts since the current war broke out, and children account for a shockingly high proportion of casualties.

    United Nations figures document 59 UXO-related casualties across Khartoum state in 2024, more than half of which were children. In just the first three months of 2025 alone, 21 of the 23 recorded UXO casualties were children. This deadly contamination is not an entirely new problem for Sudan: decades of successive conflicts across the country have left a total of 7,700 square kilometers of contaminated land — an area roughly equal to 7,700 standard football fields. But more than half of this current contamination stems from the 2023-present war, which has spread explosive hazards to previously unaffected areas including central Khartoum. Aid groups have documented that both warring parties, the Sudanese army and the RSF, laid extensive mines during their battle for control of the capital.

    Khartoum today remains a city visibly scarred by fighting: abandoned, burned-out buildings pocked with bullet holes line empty streets, but a growing wave of displaced residents is choosing to return home. According to the UN, roughly 1.7 million people have come back to Khartoum state since the army retook control of the capital last year, many of whom have no prior experience navigating the threat of unexploded ordnance. On a reporting trip through Khartoum’s streets, Associated Press journalists observed a military explosive specialist responding to a resident’s report of a suspected RPG tail fragment in a residential home, a tiny reminder of the danger lurking underfoot.

    Over the past 11 months, demining teams have cleared approximately 7.8 million square meters of land in Khartoum state, recovering and disposing of more than 36,000 explosive items, including hundreds of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. Recovered ordnance that can be safely transported is destroyed in isolated areas away from populated neighborhoods, while larger or unstable devices are detonated on site. But the scale of the task is enormous, and demining is an inherently painstaking process: each trained demining worker can only safely clear between 10 and 15 square meters of land per day. Juma Abuanja, team leader for Sudanese demining organization Jasmar, warned that full clearance will take years of sustained work. “The presence of land mines and other explosive ordnance is of great concern to everybody,” Abuanja said.

    One of Jasmar’s ongoing projects is clearing a popular public park in Khartoum, one of at least seven known minefields across the state that range from downtown locations to outer suburbs and critical bridge crossings. The 123,000-square-meter clearance operation began last August and is scheduled to wrap up in May 2025; to date, teams have found more than 160 explosive devices, including both anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. Before clearance work began, at least one civilian was killed in an accidental blast in the park, which is now cordoned off and marked with prominent danger warnings. On a recent workday, demining team members took a mid-shift break under park trees, shedding their heavy protective vests and face shields to escape Khartoum’s scorching desert heat.

    Sudan’s transitional government says it is doing everything possible to mitigate the UXO risk, but faces crippling shortages of funding and personnel, a crisis amplified by the ongoing war. A government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, told the AP that authorities are rolling out public awareness campaigns through mosques, market gatherings, radio, podcasts and school educational materials to teach civilians how to identify and report unexploded ordnance. But multiple injured civilians interviewed by the AP said they had never encountered any of these warnings, which launched in late 2024. Compounding the problem, many civilians are hesitant to report suspected ordnance to authorities: a 2025 Human Rights Watch report documented that Sudanese security forces have detained civilians in recaptured areas on unproven allegations of collaboration with the RSF, leaving many afraid they will face questioning or prosecution if they report explosive remnants of war in their communities. For others, the danger is unrecognizable until it is too late.

    For 18-year-old Mogadem Ibrahim, the fatal mistake came when he picked up a piece of metal outside his Omdurman home last August, assuming it was scrap car part. When the device stuck to his hand and he pulled it free, it exploded. The blast shredded his left hand, costing him multiple fingers and leaving him unable to continue his work as a day laborer to support his family. “I feel depressed and worthless. I was supporting my family and now I’m sitting here and doing nothing,” he told the AP.

    As Sudan’s war enters its fourth year, the slow, dangerous work of clearing ordnance and protecting returning civilians continues, with no quick end to the crisis in sight. This reporting is part of AP’s Africa Pulse coverage, supported by the Gates Foundation; the AP maintains full independent editorial control over all content.

  • As Gaza is destroyed, a VR project preserves what Israel tried to erase

    As Gaza is destroyed, a VR project preserves what Israel tried to erase

    What began as a homesick graduate student’s quiet quest to reconnect with his long-unseen home has evolved into a powerful act of cultural preservation and political resistance, born from the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza.

    In 2022, Naim Aburaddi, a Gaza-born PhD candidate in media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, had not set foot in his native enclave for seven years, blocked from returning by Israel’s decades-long military siege. Cut off from the places that shaped him, Aburaddi, a scholar of media representation, turned to emerging technology to bridge the distance. He shipped a 360-degree camera to Gaza, where a local journalist friend guided it through the spaces Aburaddi ached to revisit: bustling Gaza City souks, crowded public squares, a 1,000-year-old Turkish bathhouse, and the beloved Mediterranean shoreline. After six months of slow transit through blocked borders, the camera captured footage that allowed Aburaddi to step back into Gaza — if only virtually, bypassing Israel’s total control over the enclave’s entry and exit. When the footage arrived, Aburaddi wept.

    Joined by Ahlam Muhtaseb, a media studies professor at California State University San Bernardino, and the research team at X-Real Lab, the small personal project quickly expanded. Between July 2022 and July 2023, the team hired Gaza-based videographer Ahmad Hasaballah to capture thousands of additional 360-degree clips, building an immersive extended reality (XR) experience that would allow displaced Palestinians across the West Bank and around the world to reconnect with a home many had never been able to visit. For generations of Palestinians displaced during the 1948 Nakba, who have been barred from returning to their ancestral lands, and for audiences around the world who only know Gaza through media narratives focused exclusively on conflict, the experience offered something unprecedented: an unfiltered, first-person look at everyday Palestinian life, on Palestinian terms.

    Then, on October 7, 2023, everything changed. Following the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel that killed around 1,200 people, Israel launched a full-scale military offensive on Gaza that has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials. Multiple human rights organizations, leading genocide scholars, and United Nations officials have formally concluded that Israel is committing genocide in the besieged enclave. One by one, the ordinary, beloved sites captured in the project’s pre-war footage began to be destroyed by Israeli airstrikes and ground operations. Hasaballah fled to southern Gaza for safety, and the team’s 360-degree camera was buried under rubble after an Israeli attack. Hasaballah’s father was killed in the same strike.

    Stunned by the scale of destruction that had erased much of the life they had documented, Aburaddi and Muhtaseb paused the project for months. Only in early 2024 did they realize the archive they held was something far more precious than they had ever imagined: the largest existing collection of 360-degree footage of pre-genocide Gaza, a time capsule of Palestinian daily life and cultural heritage that had survived an campaign intent on erasing it.

    “We had wanted to show the culture and the history. We never thought in our wildest dreams, in nightmares, that we were capturing history, and that everything we were creating and we were capturing was going to be like a memory,” Aburaddi told Middle East Eye.

    Aburaddi named the project *The Phoenix of Gaza XR*, a name he says honors the resilience of Gaza’s people: “The people in Gaza, again, will be like a phoenix that will rise from under the rubble and they will rebuild Gaza again.”

    Since early 2026, the immersive exhibit has toured universities and community spaces across the United States, inviting visitors to don VR headsets and step into Gaza as it existed before the 2023 war. Visitors can stand on the side of a street in a Gaza refugee camp as a skateboarder zooms past, wander the halls of the 1,500-year-old Church of Saint Porphyrius, admire the architecture of the Great Omari Mosque, or wander the stone alleys of Gaza City’s historic markets. They can stand beside children wading in the Mediterranean, listen to the hum of daily traffic, watch farmers harvest figs, grapes, and dates, or sit in a car winding along the beachfront Al-Rashid Street. Where the team captured 360-degree still photography instead of video, visitors can observe two elderly men reading the Quran in a mosque courtyard, as a young boy prepares for prayer at a nearby water fountain.

    By mid-October 2023, just weeks after the war began, many of these iconic sites were already destroyed or severely damaged. The Church of Saint Porphyrius, which had sheltered hundreds of Palestinians fleeing Israeli airstrikes, was bombed by the Israeli military on October 19, 2023, killing 18 civilians and destroying much of the historic structure. Today, many of the ordinary people captured in the pre-war footage are missing, dead, or displaced.

    Unlike traditional news footage that separates audiences from the reality of life in Gaza, the immersive sensory experience of the XR exhibit forces visitors to confront the contrast between the vibrant, ordinary life that existed before October 2023 and the total devastation that followed. “It made me wonder how and what it would be like if we were in that situation,” a 19-year-old Hunter College student who visited the exhibit told Middle East Eye.

    The project expanded further months into the war, when the team recovered the buried 360-degree camera from rubble and asked local Gaza journalist Yahya Sobeih to revisit the same sites the team had documented a year earlier, capturing the destruction left by Israeli attacks. Princeton University’s IDA B Wells Data Lab joined to support the expanded work, and the exhibit now offers visitors the option to compare the pre-war sites with their current state, walking among the rubble and debris that remain. Shardi Marji, a New York-based activist who has helped organize tour stops for the exhibit, called it a transformative work of art that compels action: “You are transported to the place to bear witness to what was destroyed,” she said.

    For Ali Bashar, a 26-year-old New York visitor who said he had become desensitized to endless war footage from Gaza, the immersive experience was impossible to look away from. “I felt I could watch it over and over and still learn or see something new,” he said.

    Leading experts on genocide emphasize that the crime of genocide is defined not only by mass death, but by the intentional effort to erase a people’s history, culture, and connection to their land. In an October 2024 report titled *Genocide as Colonial Erasure*, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese noted that Israel’s campaign in Gaza has been marked by multiple forms of targeted erasure: domicide, the destruction of homes; urbicide, the destruction of urban spaces; scholasticide, the destruction of educational institutions; medicide, the destruction of healthcare systems; cultural genocide, the destruction of cultural heritage; and ecocide, the destruction of Gaza’s natural environment. “As Israeli leaders promised, Gaza has been made unfit for human life,” Albanese wrote. *The Phoenix of Gaza XR* lays bare the scale of this intentional erasure.

    Muhtaseb, speaking to a crowd of more than 100 visitors at Hunter College in April 2026, explained that the project’s purpose has shifted from its original goal to now act as deliberate resistance to erasure. Originally, it was designed to counter one-dimensional media narratives that only frame Gaza as a site of conflict, erasing the ordinary joy, culture, and humanity of its people. Today, it is a bulwark against the total erasure of that life. Muhtaseb paused, overcome with emotion, as she told the crowd that Sobeih, the journalist who captured the post-attack footage, was assassinated by Israeli forces in May 2025. The 32-year-old had been sitting in a restaurant celebrating the birth of his daughter Sana when he was killed. He is one of roughly 270 journalists killed in Gaza since the war began. After his death, his wife Amal, a professional photographer, insisted on joining the project to carry on his work.

    For Aburaddi, the project is the fulfillment of the goal that led him to study media in the first place: challenging harmful stereotypes about his home. Raised in a one-room tent in a Gaza refugee camp, he grew up watching international media misrepresent his people and their homeland. After leaving Gaza for journalism studies in Turkey in 2014, he focused his academic work on Palestinian media representation. Today, beyond its role as public education and resistance, the project has practical value for legal and reconstruction efforts: the 360-degree archive is already being consulted by Amnesty International for war crimes investigations, and the team is collaborating with urban designers at Brown University and computer engineers at Boston University to build 3D models of destroyed historic sites to support future reconstruction of Gaza.

    Since the project launched in 2022, it has been presented to audiences in Uganda, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, and more than 50 colleges and community spaces across the United States. After completing a tour of East Coast US universities in mid-April 2026, with stops at Hunter College, Brown University, and MIT, a special screening was held at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Fisk Planetarium later that month. The exhibit is set to travel to South Africa in June 2026, with future stops planned in Japan and Spain.

    “Here we are preserving these memories. We are preserving them in virtual reality, in immersive media, where Israel cannot attack them, and a lot of people across the world can visit and access, and we are preserving this for the next generation,” Aburaddi said. “They were able to attack the locations, they were able to kill a lot of people, but they couldn’t kill the memory.”

  • ‘Empowered’: UAE’s exit from Opec appeases Trump, delivers blow to Saudi Arabia

    ‘Empowered’: UAE’s exit from Opec appeases Trump, delivers blow to Saudi Arabia

    The United Arab Emirates’ planned departure from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries next month is far more than a simple energy policy shift. Analysts and regional diplomats frame the move as both a direct challenge to Saudi Arabia’s longstanding dominance of the cartel and a calculated geopolitical gesture to the United States, underscoring how the ongoing war on Iran has deepened historical divides in the Gulf rather than uniting regional powers against a common foe.

    On its face, the split stems from years of simmering disagreement between the UAE and Saudi Arabia over OPEC production quotas. For decades, Riyadh has championed supply caps to keep global oil prices elevated, a strategy aligned with its economic priorities: as a nation of 35 million people with more than double the UAE’s proven oil reserves, it relies on sustained high per-barrel prices to fund domestic spending and infrastructure.

    The UAE, by contrast, has long pushed for looser production rules. With just 1 million citizens sharing the country’s oil revenue, and massive investments in expanded extraction infrastructure that have left it with OPEC’s largest spare production capacity relative to current output, the Emirates has opted for a volume-focused strategy. Many of its economic planners argue that leaving oil in the ground carries growing long-term risk, as the global energy transition could erode the value of fossil fuel reserves over the next decade.

    “The UAE is the OPEC country with the largest amount of spare capacity compared to production,” explained Arne Lohmann Rasmussen, chief analyst and head of research at Global Risk Management. “You can argue that this is the right economic calculus because what’s inside the ground might not have the same value that it will in five or ten years.”

    Yet while these policy divides stretch back years, experts note that a major shift had already occurred before the outbreak of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Once famous for warning oil traders they would be “ouching like hell” if they bet against its supply-cut commitments, Saudi Arabia has recently pivoted to a strategy of recapturing global market share, backing massive production increases that aligned it much closer to the UAE’s position. That makes the timing of the exit a clear signal that geopolitics, not just energy economics, are driving the decision.

    “The policy differences between the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been there for a long time, but Saudi Arabia has pivoted to taking back market share, and the war has actually made their old argument less salient. This exit is much more political,” said Greg Priddy, a senior fellow for the Middle East at the Center for the National Interest.

    In recent months, the UAE has steadily deepened its security and diplomatic alignment with the U.S. and Israel, even as other regional powers have taken more cautious stances on the Iran war. Earlier this month, Axios reported that Israel deployed an Iron Dome air defense system and supporting technicians to the UAE amid repeated Iranian drone and missile attacks on the Gulf state. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which has supported the U.S. war effort while backing Pakistani-mediated talks to de-escalate tensions between Washington and Tehran, the UAE has lobbied aggressively behind the scenes and in public for the U.S. to continue military operations, and has worked to block diplomatic outreach that could bring an end to the conflict.

    Leaving OPEC now, as the Trump administration weighs whether to pursue a negotiated deal with Iran or escalate military action, aligns directly with a longstanding Trump administration criticism of the cartel as an anti-competitive body that “rips off” global consumers. Analysts have even raised the possibility that the exit is part of a broader trilateral bargain between the UAE, U.S. and Israel.

    “It is possible that this break could also be the result of some sort of ‘deal’ between the UAE and Israel and the US, wherein they helped defend the UAE from Iran in exchange for delivering a major blow to Opec, which Trump has long sought,” Ellen Wald, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and leading expert on Gulf energy politics, wrote in a recent public post. Wald added that she would not be surprised to see a formal U.S.-UAE defense agreement announced in the near future.

    The move also fits into the UAE’s preparations for prolonged regional volatility. Recent reporting confirms that UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed told U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Abu Dhabi is prepared for the war to last up to nine months, and the country has already approached the Trump administration to request a currency swap line to protect access to U.S. dollars in the event that its foreign reserves are depleted amid sustained conflict.

    Beyond alignment with the U.S., the exit is widely viewed as a major escalation of the UAE’s long-running regional rivalry with Saudi Arabia, which has dominated OPEC’s agenda since the cartel’s founding 65 years ago. As the two largest Gulf powers, both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi harbor ambitions to project regional influence, and their competing interests have already spilled into multiple conflicts: Saudi Arabia launched strikes against UAE-backed forces in Yemen just before the Iran war began, and the two states back opposing factions in Sudan’s ongoing civil war. Most recently, Middle East Eye revealed that Saudi-paid weapons shipments from Pakistan began arriving in eastern Libya in March to support commander Khalifa Haftar, in a bid to pull his faction away from the UAE’s sphere of influence.

    While many hoped the Iranian attacks on Gulf states would push the two rivals back into a united bloc, the war has instead accelerated their competition, and the UAE’s exit from OPEC creates an irreversible shift in the regional balance of power.

    UAE Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei has framed the move as a long-planned objective that was simply timed correctly amid the current chaos, noting that “the timing in our view is right because it has a minimum impact on all of the producers.” Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University who has followed the UAE’s debate over leaving OPEC for years, agreed that the war created a unique opening for the dramatic move.

    “They finally did it, probably because of the war. Everything is up in the air, and there is an opportunity to make dramatic decisions,” Haykel said. “In practical terms, the Emiratis have very considerable spare capacity. If they want to play the role of market regulator like the Saudis have, they can do it. This empowers them in a big way.”

    Energy analysts largely agree the timing is strategically shrewd. Competing blockades of the Strait of Hormuz by the U.S. and Iran have all but halted traditional Gulf oil shipping, cutting the UAE’s exports from a pre-war 3.5 million barrels per day to roughly 1.9 million barrels per day, all of which are now exported via the Fujairah pipeline that bypasses the Strait. That means any additional spare capacity the UAE brings online will not immediately flood the global market, avoiding a sudden price crash that would trigger widespread backlash. Even after the war ends, analysts note that major supply disruptions from the conflict have left global oil inventories depleted enough to absorb higher UAE exports without major disruption.

    In the longer term, however, experts warn the departure of OPEC’s third-largest producer could spell the end of the 65-year-old energy alliance. “This is a big blow to OPEC,” Rasmussen said. “We could be writing its obituary.”

    This report draws on independent analysis from Middle East Eye, a publication specializing in coverage of the Middle East and North Africa.

  • Rare earth mining is poisoning Mekong River tributaries, threatening ‘the world’s kitchen’

    Rare earth mining is poisoning Mekong River tributaries, threatening ‘the world’s kitchen’

    For 75-year-old Thai fisherman Sukjai Yana, each morning on the Mekong River brings the same grim routine. Perched on the bow of his weathered long-tail fishing boat in Chiang Saen, a generations-old fishing hub in northern Thailand, he pulls in his net to sort a meager catch of small fish, his disappointment growing as he wonders whether buyers will even take his contaminated-looking haul. Some days, he earns nothing at all.

    Yana is far from alone in this crisis. He is one of an estimated 70 million people across mainland Southeast Asia who depend on the nearly 5,000-kilometer Mekong River, a waterway that has sustained communities and ecosystems for millennia. Today, a surging global demand for rare earth minerals has sparked an unregulated mining boom that is poisoning the Mekong and its tributaries, putting millions of lives, livelihoods, and even global food supplies at risk.

    The epicenter of this boom is war-torn Myanmar, but operations have rapidly spread east into Laos, sending toxic runoff from mining sites downstream through Thailand, toward Cambodia and Vietnam. While the Mekong has long struggled with cumulative pressures—from plastic pollution and upstream hydropower dams to destructive riverbank sand mining—environmental experts warn that mining-related toxic contamination could prove an existential threat to the entire river basin.

    ## A Growing Danger to Public Health and Food Systems
    Rare earth mining works by stripping away riverbank rock and flushing soil with harsh chemicals to extract the sought-after minerals, leaving behind a trail of waste laced with dangerous heavy metals: arsenic, mercury, lead, and cadmium. These toxins seep into tributaries and flow into the main Mekong, accumulating in fish and irrigating farmland across the region. Exposure to these elements raises the risk of cancer, organ failure, cognitive impairment, and developmental harm, with children and pregnant women facing the most severe consequences.

    Thailand is currently bearing the brunt of the contamination, with toxins already threatening its $10 billion-plus annual export market for rice, fruits, and vegetables that feed consumers from U.S. grocery stores to Japanese kitchens and Malaysian dinner tables. In the hilly Thai village of Tha Ton, 63-year-old farmer Lah Boonruang points to the full range of toxin-exposed crops he grows—rice, garlic, corn, onions, mangoes, and bananas—all irrigated with water from the Kok River, a Mekong tributary that flows out of Myanmar carrying heavy metal pollution. “If we can’t export, a farmer is the first to die,” he said, echoing widespread fear across agricultural communities.

    For Thailand’s 63-year-old Lahu ethnic elder Sela Lipo, the contamination has severed a centuries-old cultural tie to the river. Famed as skilled fisherpeople, the Lahu have been officially warned to avoid using river water for drinking, fishing, or irrigation. “The Lahu’s way of life is always with a river,” Lipo explained. “The contaminated river has cut off our lifeline.”

    Thai environmental leaders warn that the contamination could unravel the country’s most iconic agricultural industry. “Our worry is that toxins accumulate in the rice we export. This would make our rice farming industry, which is our culture, collapse,” said Niwat Roykaew, founder of The Mekong School, an environmental institute based in Chiang Khong, northern Thailand. Thai scientists have already recorded elevated heavy metal levels in other key Mekong tributaries, including the Sai and Ruak rivers.

    ## Limited, Local Action Amid Cross-Border Barriers
    Addressing the crisis has proven extraordinarily difficult. Thailand’s government has acknowledged it has little political or diplomatic leverage to shut down unregulated mining operations across its borders in conflict-riven Myanmar and Laos. Domestic action is also constrained by limited scientific expertise, incomplete data, and insufficient funding, according to Aweera Pakkamart of Thailand’s Pollution Control Department.

    Currently, most of the work to track and address contamination falls to local governments, public universities, and regional bodies such as the Mekong River Commission, which focus primarily on monitoring heavy metal levels and educating at-risk communities about the dangers they face.
    Warakorn Maneechuket, a researcher at Thailand’s Naresuan University, has confirmed that recent samples of water, fish, and sediment from Mekong tributaries contain dangerously high concentrations of mining-related heavy metals. Dissecting a catfish caught from the Kok River in her lab, she points to clear signs of toxic exposure: tumor-like growths, discolored scales, and abnormal eye pigmentation.

    To expand monitoring and raise public awareness, Naresuan University researcher Tanapon Phenrat has helped develop a custom smartphone app that trains local fishers to identify and upload photos of suspicious, contaminated fish. The app builds a crowdsourced citizen science database that researchers hope will help quantify the full scale and spread of contamination across northern Thailand. “Each and every sample is very important,” Phenrat noted.

    ## The Global Demand Driving a Local Disaster
    The unregulated mining boom flooding the Mekong with toxins is fueled by exponentially growing global demand for rare earth elements, materials that are foundational to nearly all modern technology. From smartphones and electric vehicle batteries to military hardware including F-35 fighter jets, submarines, missiles, and radar systems, rare earths are a critical input for both civilian and defense industries. While the elements themselves are geologically common, costly mining and complex refining processes have left global supply chains heavily concentrated, making new sources highly sought after.

    Researchers at the U.S.-based Stimson Center used satellite imagery analysis to identify nearly 800 unregulated and suspected rare earth mining sites along Mekong tributaries in Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia. Regan Kwan, a Stimson Center researcher tracking the expansion, explained that Myanmar’s ongoing civil war has driven a geographic diversification of mining operations, with new sites popping up along 26 different river stretches across Laos. Most of Myanmar’s rare earth output is exported to China, with more than $4.2 billion in heavy rare earths shipped between 2017 and 2024, a majority of that trade occurring after the 2021 military takeover of Myanmar.

    At the same time, the U.S. has prioritized securing new independent supplies of critical rare earth minerals for its own defense stockpiles, which have been drawn down by military commitments in the Middle East and support for Ukraine. This global competition for new sources has created a race to extract that has bypassed all environmental regulations and cross-border cooperation, leaving the Mekong to pay the price.

    Brian Eyler, another Stimson Center expert on the Mekong, called the toxic runoff crisis one of the most devastating events to hit the river basin in modern history. Only 20th century conflicts including the Vietnam War and the Khmer Rouge genocide caused more widespread harm, Eyler noted, adding that mining contamination ranks a close second. He described the crisis as an “atomic bomb” for the Mekong basin, far more damaging than other well-documented threats such as large upstream dams—and it is still growing, with no signs of slowing down.

  • The loyal, lonely keepers of Sudan’s pyramids

    The loyal, lonely keepers of Sudan’s pyramids

    Three full years into Sudan’s devastating civil conflict between the national army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), one of the country’s most precious cultural treasures, the ancient Meroe Pyramids, stands protected only by a tiny band of caretakers bound by generations of legacy and devotion.

    Mostafa Ahmed Mostafa, 65, is the latest descendant in a family line of groundskeepers that has tended to these desert monuments for decades. Clad entirely in white, he walks as a near-solitary sentinel across the 2,400-year-old Bajrawiya necropolis, part of the Island of Meroe UNESCO World Heritage Site that holds 140 pyramids constructed during the peak of the ancient Kingdom of Kush. “These pyramids are ours, it’s our history, it’s who we are,” he says, standing in the shadow of the weathered dark sandstone structures.

    None of the Meroe pyramids remain fully intact. The first wave of destruction came in the 1800s, when European treasure hunters used dynamite to blast apart tombs in search of ancient artifacts. Two more centuries of wind-blown sand and erosive rain have reduced many structures to rubble, leaving broken remnants of the once-majoric Kushite burial monuments.

    A three-hour drive from Sudan’s capital Khartoum, Meroe was once the country’s most-visited heritage attraction. Today, the only sound cutting across the silent desert is the occasional grunt of a lone camel. Mostafa shares site duties with just two other people: Mahmoud Soliman, lead archaeologist and site director, and young archaeologist Mohamed Mubarak, who has worked at Meroe since 2018. The small team cobbles together what limited resources they can find to slow the damage caused by shifting sand and seasonal rainfall.

    Apart from a brief early-war influx of displaced people seeking distraction from the crisis, the site has remained largely abandoned. That reality is a stark contrast to Meroe’s pre-war revival, when Sudanese heritage enjoyed growing national attention following the 2018-2019 popular uprising that ousted longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir. Soliman recalls peak weekends bringing busloads of 200 tourists at a time from Khartoum, as young Sudanese embraced their ancient history and organized group trips to explore the site. A popular protest chant of the era even wove Kushite heritage into the revolution: “My grandfather Taharqa, my grandmother Kandaka,” referencing a legendary Kushite pharaoh and the title of ancient Kushite queens, who became symbols of the revolution’s women leaders.

    Local communities also relied on Meroe’s tourist trade. Nearby Tarabil village, named for the local word for “pyramids,” was home to dozens of artisans who sold handcrafted souvenirs and rented camels to visitors, with livelihoods entirely tied to the site. On a recent April visit, Khaled Abdelrazek, a 45-year-old local artisan, hurried to the entrance as soon as he heard visitors had arrived, displaying his hand-carved miniature sandstone pyramids and reminiscing about the days when dozens of vendors plied their trade at the site.

    Months before war erupted in the final days of Ramadan 2023, Meroe was gearing up for a busy season: documentary film crews had visited, a music festival had been hosted, and big plans were in place for post-Eid tourism. All of those plans were dashed the moment fighting broke out.

    Today, the team’s primary concern is constant vigilance against decay. Soliman walks the site scanning for new cracks, shifting sand dunes, and unstable scaffolding that needs repair ahead of each rainy season. Unlike the larger, more gradual-sloped pyramids of neighboring Egypt, Meroe’s smaller, steeper structures were originally engineered to shed rainwater and withstand sand movement, but every new crack opens the door to accelerated erosion.

    Queen Amanishakheto’s pyramid, the largest on site, built for the 1st century CE Kushite ruler, offers one of the most stark examples of the site’s history of destruction. In 1834, Italian adventurer Giuseppe Ferlini — who destroyed dozens of Meroe’s pyramids in search of treasure — completely levelled Amanishakheto’s tomb and stole her royal jewelry, which now remains on display in Egyptian museums in Berlin and Munich. Today, the queen’s tomb is little more than an empty sandbox, though the outer wall of her mortuary temple still stands, bearing a larger-than-life carving of the queen holding a spear and smiting enemy captives, a reminder of the power she held 2,000 years ago.

    Wandering past ancient reliefs of the Kushite lion god Apademak, Egyptian-derived deities Amun and Anubis, lotus carvings, and Meroitic hieroglyphs, Soliman shared his quiet hope for the future. For now, large-scale restoration and a return of tourism remains a distant dream, he says, but he cannot help but hold onto hope: “This place has so much potential.”

    For the small team guarding Meroe, even amid a national crisis that has left most Sudanese focused solely on securing food, water, and shelter, protecting this heritage for future generations remains a non-negotiable mission. “Now, everyone’s top priority is of course food and water and shelter. But this is also important,” Mubarak says. “We need to protect this for future generations, we can’t let it be destroyed or wither away.”

  • Europe climate report signals rising extremes

    Europe climate report signals rising extremes

    A landmark new climate report released on Wednesday has delivered a stark warning about the accelerating climate crisis unfolding across Europe, documenting a year of unprecedented extreme weather events in 2025 that spanned from the Mediterranean basin all the way to the Arctic Circle. Co-published by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the 2025 European State of the Climate report confirms that the continent, already the fastest-warming on Earth, continues to face worsening and more frequent climate extremes that touch every corner of the region.

    WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo emphasized in a public briefing that Europe’s warming trajectory has outpaced the rest of the globe by a significant margin since 1980. “Since 1980, Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average, making it the fastest warming continent on Earth,” Saulo stated. “Heatwaves are becoming more frequent and severe. And in 2025, we saw long duration heatwaves from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle.”

    The report’s temperature data confirms that over 95 percent of Europe recorded annual temperatures above the long-term average, with the United Kingdom, Norway, and Iceland all setting new all-time records for their warmest years ever measured. One of the most striking findings came from the Fennoscandia region, which encompasses sub-Arctic Finland, Norway, and Sweden. In July 2025, the area endured a three-week heatwave of historic proportions, with temperatures pushing above 30 degrees Celsius inside the Arctic Circle. Large portions of the region experienced nearly two straight weeks of strong heat stress, where apparent temperatures climb above 32 degrees Celsius – a stark contrast to the typical two days of such conditions the region sees in an average year.

    Extreme heat was not limited to northern Europe. In southern Europe, Turkey recorded temperatures above 50°C for the first time in its history last July, while roughly 85 percent of Greece’s population was exposed to extreme temperatures at or above 40°C. Western and southern Europe faced two major back-to-back heatwaves in June, impacting most of Spain, Portugal, France, and southern parts of the United Kingdom, with a third intense heatwave hitting the same three countries in August. Looking ahead, climate officials warn that another extremely hot summer could be on the horizon for Europe and the globe, as the El Niño weather phenomenon – the same pattern that drove global temperatures to record highs in 2024 – is projected to return in the second half of 2026.

    Beyond record heat, the report documents dramatic ice and snow loss across the continent. Every European glacier experienced net mass loss in 2025, with Iceland recording its second-largest annual melt event on record. Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which runs the Copernicus program, highlighted the scale of ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet: the massive ice body lost approximately 139 billion tonnes of ice in 2025 – equal to one 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools of ice lost every single hour. That single year of ice loss raised global average sea levels by 0.4 millimeters. Europe’s seasonal snow cover also hit its third-lowest level on record in 2025. The report notes that regardless of future carbon emission reduction scenarios, glaciers across Europe and the globe are projected to continue losing mass through the end of the 21st century.

    Marine environments also faced unprecedented stress last year. 2025 marked the fourth consecutive year that Europe’s annual average sea surface temperature hit a new record high, with 86 percent of European ocean waters experiencing at least one day of strong marine heatwave conditions. Claire Scannell, report author and principal meteorologist at Ireland’s national weather service, explained that these extreme ocean heat events pose severe risks to critical marine biodiversity, particularly Mediterranean seagrass meadows. These meadows act as natural coastal flood barriers and serve as vital nursery habitats that support thousands of fish species per acre, making their protection critical to both ecosystems and coastal communities.

    On land, the total area burned by wildfires across Europe reached a new record high of 1,034,550 hectares in 2025. While extreme rainfall and widespread flooding were less extensive than in recent years, the report still recorded that storms and flood events killed at least 21 people and displaced or affected more than 14,500 residents across the continent.

    Against this grim backdrop, the report did note one positive trend: for the third year in a row, renewable energy sources produced more electricity than fossil fuels across Europe, accounting for 46.4 percent of total continental power generation. Solar power in particular hit a new record, contributing 12.5 percent of Europe’s total electricity. Even so, EU climate officials stressed that this progress is not enough to address the accelerating crisis. Dusan Chrenek, principal advisor at the European Commission’s climate office, emphasized that “that’s not sufficient. We need to speed up. We need to work on transitioning away from fossil fuels.” European Commission official Mauro Facchini echoed that urgency, noting that all the report’s key climate indicators are “quite worrying,” and another EU official added that the findings underscore an urgent need for European nations to both accelerate their clean energy transitions and invest in adaptation measures to cope with unavoidable warming already locked into the climate system.

  • Kim Jong Un praises troops who ‘self-blasted’ to avoid capture by Ukraine

    Kim Jong Un praises troops who ‘self-blasted’ to avoid capture by Ukraine

    In a high-profile public event that has drawn international attention, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has publicly celebrated North Korean troops who carried out suicide attacks using hand grenades while fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine, formally confirming an extreme battlefield policy that intelligence communities have suspected for months.

    The comments, delivered during a Monday ceremony unveiling a memorial for fallen North Korean soldiers in Pyongyang, were carried by North Korean state media outlet KCNA. Kim labeled troops who “unhesitatingly opted for self-blasting suicide attacks to defend the great honor” of the country as true heroes, and framed their actions as the pinnacle of military loyalty. “Their self-sacrifice expecting no compensation, and the devotion expecting no reward… This [is] the definition of the height of loyalty of our army,” Kim told attendees, which included top Russian officials: Russian Defence Minister Andrey Belousov and State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin.

    South Korean intelligence estimates that Pyongyang has deployed at least 15,000 troops to support Russia’s efforts to retake territory in western Kursk Oblast, with more than 6,000 of those service members killed in combat to date. Neither North Korea nor Russia has publicly verified these casualty and deployment figures. Multiple intelligence agencies and North Korean defectors have long corroborated that North Korean troops are under standing orders to take their own lives rather than allow themselves to be captured by Ukrainian forces. Within North Korea’s military doctrine, capture by enemy forces is classified as an act of treason against the state and ruling party.

    Evidence of this policy has emerged through multiple channels in recent months. Last year, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service recovered handwritten orders from deceased North Korean soldiers that explicitly outlined the requirement for self-harm to avoid capture. Earlier this year, South Korean broadcaster MBC released an interview with two North Korean prisoners of war held by Ukraine, where one fighter expressed open regret for failing to take his own life, saying, “Everyone else blew themselves up. I failed.”

    Beyond his praise for suicide attackers, Kim also extended recognition to all troops who have died in combat in Ukraine. He noted that even those who fell while leading frontline charges, or who died frustrated at failing to complete their assigned duties rather than mourning their physical wounds from bullets and shrapnel, deserve recognition as faithful party warriors and patriots.

    The public commemoration comes amid rapidly deepening military and political cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow. In June 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un signed a mutual defense pact that committed both nations to provide mutual assistance in the event of armed aggression against either party, with Kim describing the agreement as the “strongest ever” bilateral treaty between the two countries. Beyond deploying combat troops to support Russia’s war effort, North Korea has also pledged to send thousands of civilian workers to assist with reconstruction efforts in war-damaged Kursk Oblast.

  • War deepens generational rift inside Iranian-American households

    War deepens generational rift inside Iranian-American households

    While a fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran has paused open military hostilities, the fragile peace has done little to mend deep, often painful divisions that have torn through the Iranian-American diaspora community. What outsiders see as explosive clashes on social media and competing street protests—one side cheering US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, the other condemning them—masks the most wrenching friction that plays out far from public view: inside family homes, across dinner tables, where differing visions for Iran’s future have pitted loved ones against one another.