Global Pulse

分类： world

  • Man arrested after three injured in stabbing at Swiss train station

    Man arrested after three injured in stabbing at Swiss train station

    A violent stabbing incident at a major Swiss train station has left three people hospitalized and triggered a large emergency response, with law enforcement confirming the arrest of a local suspect on Friday morning. The attack unfolded just after 8:30 a.m. local time at Winterthur train station, located roughly 15 miles northwest of Switzerland’s largest city, Zurich, according to official police statements.

    Authorities confirmed that all three victims are Swiss citizens, aged 28, 43, and 52 respectively. All three were rushed to nearby medical facilities for treatment following the assault, which was carried out with an unspecified bladed weapon. The suspect taken into custody at the scene is identified as a 31-year-old Swiss man, and police have confirmed that no other assailants are being sought as of the latest update. Investigators are still working to establish a clear motive for the attack, with no conclusions drawn as of press time.
    Multiple eyewitness accounts have shed light on the chaotic scene of the incident. A worker in an adjacent office building told local reporters that he heard the suspect shout “Allahu Akbar” — Arabic for “God is greatest” — just moments before launching the knife attack on bystanders. At the time of the assault, a group of school children was passing through the station concourse, and quick action from a school teacher prevented the children from being caught up in the violence. Local media reports note the teacher positioned themselves between the suspect and the students, shielding them from harm.
    A taxi driver who was waiting at the station told the leading Zurich-based daily *Neue Zürcher Zeitung* that the attacker moved through the station’s underground underpass, targeting multiple people as he walked. Photographs published by multiple Swiss news organizations show significant sections of the station perimeter and surrounding areas cordoned off by law enforcement in the hours after the attack, as forensics teams worked to collect evidence at the scene. No further updates on the condition of the three injured victims have been released by authorities as the investigation continues.

  • Chilean American stolen as a baby reunites with his mom and gets a second chance at family

    Chilean American stolen as a baby reunites with his mom and gets a second chance at family

    Thirty-six years after he was trafficked out of Chile for an illegal international adoption, Kyle Adler — born Marcos Antonio Navarrete — has finally stepped into the arms of the mother who never stopped wondering where her baby went. His decades-long journey of identity discovery, from a comfortable upbringing in a Chicago suburb to an emotional reunion in Chile earlier this year, shines a long-overdue spotlight on the thousands of stolen children separated from their families during Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year military dictatorship, and the ongoing fight for accountability that continues today.

    Adler was just an infant when he was taken from his birth mother, Ana Maria Navarrete, a 19-year-old single working woman living in the southern Chilean coastal city of Coronel. Unable to afford housing that would allow her to care for her newborn full-time, Navarrete arranged for a local caregiver to house the baby while she worked night shifts at a local fish shop, visiting him every time her schedule allowed. But one day, she was told the baby had been placed with an American couple by a local priest, who claimed the infant was “in need of a family.” No one has ever been held accountable for his disappearance, and a police investigator later confirmed his case was tied to a sprawling illegal adoption ring that counted adoption agencies, immigration officials, judges, medical workers and nurses among its complicit members. For decades, Navarrete grieved her lost son, eventually abandoning hope of ever seeing him again, calling the years after his abduction the worst of her life.

    Adler, for his part, was adopted by a loving American couple when he was 9 months old in 1987, and raised in an affluent Chicago suburb. He describes his adoptive parents as kind, and says he has no doubt they had no knowledge of the illegal circumstances of his adoption; the couple passed away in 2022, after initially hesitating to support Adler’s search for his biological roots. As an adult, Adler achieved professional success, but still felt a hollow lack of meaning that pushed him to pursue answers about his origins. “I knew I was adopted and at that point, I was just like, I need to find my mom,” he explained.

    His search for answers gained momentum in 2017, when a Google search for “Chilean birth mom search” led him to *Nos Buscamos*, a Chilean nonprofit that tracks cases of stolen children from the Pinochet era. Founded by Constanza Del Rio, the organization maintains a public database of thousands of stolen adoption cases, and has helped hundreds of survivors reconnect with their birth families. According to Chilean government estimates, more than 20,000 children were stolen from their families between 1973 and 1990, when Pinochet’s dictatorship ruled the country. Human rights lawyer Jimmy Lippert Thyden González, himself a survivor of illegal adoption, explains that the campaign of child theft deliberately targeted low-income and Indigenous Chilean families as part of a state-backed effort to eliminate marginalized populations.

    “It was an effort to eliminate and eradicate the poor class. It was a way of eradicating the Indigenous population, the uneducated population,” Lippert Thyden González said. Three years ago, he filed a lawsuit against the Chilean government over the stolen adoptions, and plans to take the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to push for nationwide accountability. He also founded Grafting Hope, a nonprofit that educates U.S. policymakers and advocates for survivors of fraudulent adoption.

    Within three months of Adler connecting with *Nos Buscamos*, Del Rio confirmed his origins and arranged an initial virtual meeting with Navarrete. The revelation that his adoption had been illegal sent Adler into a years-long identity crisis that required intensive therapy, but it also steeled his resolve to pursue a full confirmation of his roots. Last year, he took a free DNA test provided by MyHeritage, a global genealogy company that partners with *Nos Buscamos* and another nonprofit, Connecting Roots, to provide free testing for Chilean adoption survivors. The test confirmed an immediate match with Navarrete, who now lives in Santiago.

    Connecting Roots founder Tyler Graf, himself a stolen adoptee who reunited with his own birth mother decades after his abduction, traveled with Adler to Chile for the long-awaited in-person reunion. Graf now devotes his work to reconnecting surviving stolen children and their families, saying, “Now it’s time to mend these families and bring everyone back home so they can see where they came from.”

    The emotional reunion took place in Chile on Valentine’s Day 2025, two days after Navarrete’s 56th birthday. When Adler stepped out of the international arrivals gate, tears flowed freely as Navarrete ran to embrace her son, who had grown into a 6-foot-tall man with dark hair. Both wore white to mark the joyous occasion, as Adler bent to press his face into his mother’s hair. Over the following week, the pair visited Coronel, the beach where Navarrete once dreamed of taking her son, the hospital where Adler was born, and the home where he was taken from as an infant. They recovered a copy of Adler’s original birth certificate, and Adler met three of his four biological siblings (he had already connected with one in Miami earlier). He brought Navarrete mementos from his life in the U.S.: framed copies of his college diploma, childhood photos, and the tiny baby shoes his adoptive parents had saved for decades.

    Though the joy of reunion was profound, the pain of 36 years apart lingers. Adler does not speak fluent Spanish, so the pair rely on translation help from Connecting Roots and language apps to communicate, and Adler returned to his home in Miami after the reunion. Navarrete said the week together left her grieving the loss all over again: “It took me so long to find him. And then to spend a week together only to have him leave, it’s like I found him but I’ve now lost him all over again.” Still, the pair are already planning a second reunion this December, and Adler is working to process the decades of fractured identity. For Navarrete, the reunion is just the first step: she is working with legal teams to push for criminal charges against everyone complicit in the theft of her son, saying she wants justice not just for herself, but for the life she and her son lost together.

    For Adler, the journey has brought a new sense of wholeness he never felt before. “It’s been so eye-opening to see who my people are,” he said. “I feel the love, I feel the compassion, the care — it’s nice to have a family again.” He now hopes his mother can let go of the trauma that defined her life for 36 years, telling her: “I’m not just the son that you lost, I’m the son that you found. I’m back to being your son.” The Chilean government has not yet responded to AP requests for comment on the case or broader efforts to address stolen adoption cases from the Pinochet era.

  • US, Iran trade strikes in most serious clash since truce began

    US, Iran trade strikes in most serious clash since truce began

    Four months after a fragile ceasefire paused open hostilities between the United States and Iran, a new round of mutual strikes has shattered the relative calm, triggering fresh fears of a wider regional conflict and roiling global energy markets already on edge over the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

    The escalation unfolded Thursday, marking the most serious confrontation between the two adversaries since the truce took hold in April, and came as violence surged along the Lebanon-Israel border, where Iran-backed Hezbollah has been locked in continuous low-intensity conflict with Israeli forces. The clash also drew in Kuwait, a key US ally in the Gulf, which activated its air defense systems to intercept incoming fire shortly after the exchange of attacks began.

    According to Iran’s state-run broadcaster IRIB, Iranian forces opened fire on four commercial vessels attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway that Iran has fully blockaded since the war began in late February, when US and Israeli forces launched a coordinated attack on Iranian targets. In response, a US official confirmed that American military forces targeted an Iranian ground control station located in the port district of Bandar Abbas, Iran’s primary Gulf shipping hub.

    Minutes after the US strike, IRIB quoted Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) confirming that it had retaliated against the American air base that launched the original attack. The IRGC declined to publicly disclose the base’s location, but the confirmation of a counterstrike aligned with Kuwait’s announcement that it was responding to an incoming attack on its territory, which hosts large contingents of US military personnel.

    Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei issued a formal condemnation of the US action, framing the strikes as a clear violation of the April ceasefire and emphasizing that Iran would take “all necessary measures” to protect its territorial integrity and national sovereignty. The US pushed back on this framing, with an unnamed official characterizing the American strike as a purely defensive action taken to preserve the terms of the existing truce.

    The latest escalation has cast deep uncertainty over the stuttering diplomatic negotiations aimed at reaching a permanent peace deal to end the conflict that began on February 28. While neither Washington nor Tehran has signaled a willingness to return to full-scale open war, the clash has reinforced fears that the fragile truce could collapse entirely. For ordinary Iranians, that uncertainty has become a constant part of daily life. “I feel like nothing is certain yet,” said Amir, a 27-year-old software developer based in Tehran, speaking before Thursday’s strikes. “The daily question is: Will there be missile strikes tonight?”

    At the heart of the ongoing diplomatic talks is the future of the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway that carries roughly a fifth of global oil and gas supplies. The Iranian blockade has cut off that key transit route, leaving global energy markets grappling with constrained supplies and volatile pricing. Thursday’s strike news sent oil prices jumping higher, erasing most of the gains from the previous session, which had risen on growing optimism that a peace deal to reopen the strait was close.

    The diplomatic wrangling over Hormuz took a dramatic turn this week when US President Donald Trump issued an unusual threat against Oman, another Gulf nation that has served as a neutral mediator in the conflict and has itself been targeted by Iran in recent months. When asked about a proposed short-term arrangement that would let Oman and Iran jointly manage transit through the strait, Trump rejected the idea outright. “No, the strait is going to be open to everybody,” Trump said. “It’s international waters and Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up.”

    Baqaein condemned the threat against Oman, calling it “a worrying sign of the normalisation of anarchy and intimidation in international relations.” The verbal threat came one day after the US Treasury Department announced new sanctions against Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority, the new Tehran-led agency established to collect transit fees from ships passing through the blockaded waterway.

    Beyond the Gulf, the violence has also escalated sharply in Lebanon, where a separate ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah has failed to stop continuous skirmishes that have intensified over the past week. On Thursday, the Israeli military launched new airstrikes against Hezbollah infrastructure around the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, a day after it issued a sweeping order declaring all territory south of the Zahrani River — roughly 25 miles from the Israeli border — an active combat zone and ordering all civilian residents to evacuate immediately.

    The evacuation order, the first large-scale such warning since the April 17 ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect, interrupted Eid al-Adha celebrations for thousands of Lebanese families in the region. Lebanon’s official National News Agency reported multiple airstrikes targeting residential areas in the city of Nabatieh, causing what it described as “huge destruction” to civilian property.

    As of Wednesday, Lebanon’s health ministry reported that the total death toll from the conflict that began on March 2 stands at 3,269 people. On Thursday, the Israeli military confirmed that one additional soldier was killed in a Hezbollah drone attack along the Lebanese border the previous day, bringing the total number of Israeli troops killed in the conflict with the Iran-backed group to 24. Iranian officials have insisted that any final peace deal between Tehran and Washington must also include a permanent ceasefire and resolution for the Lebanese front.

  • Inside an African hotel where asylum seekers deported by the US are imprisoned

    Inside an African hotel where asylum seekers deported by the US are imprisoned

    Beneath the tropical sun off Central Africa’s coast, the Bamy Hotel on Bioko Island looks indistinguishable from any luxury resort from the outside: palm trees frame a sweeping driveway, polished marble lines the foyer, and a stately portrait of Equatorial Guinea’s long-ruling president hangs behind the mahogany front desk. But behind this polished facade, the once-bustling property has been transformed into an improvised prison for asylum seekers, part of a secretive $7.5 million agreement between the authoritarian Equatorial Guinean government and the former Trump administration, an Associated Press investigation has found.

    The AP gained rare access to the site during a recent trip accompanying the first papal visit to the country, making it the only international news outlet to directly report on conditions inside the locked-down hotel. Since the agreement took effect late last year, the property has remained eerily empty of the tourists and business travelers it was built to host. Only a small cohort of detainees, all asylum seekers deported from the United States, remain confined within its walls, held against their will far from their home countries.

    According to legal representatives for the detainees, at least 32 people have been held at the Bamy Hotel since November. Every single one had already received formal protection from deportation by U.S. judges, who ruled they faced grave danger if forced to return to their home nations across Africa. To date, 25 of these protected asylum seekers have already been forcibly transferred back to the countries they fled, while the remaining detainees face relentless pressure from Equatorial Guinean authorities to agree to repatriation.

    Immigration legal experts describe these third-country deportation deals as a deliberate legal loophole crafted by the Trump administration to bypass U.S. asylum protections. Rather than directly deporting at-risk seekers back to dangerous home countries in violation of U.S. court orders, the administration instead sends them to intermediate nations like Equatorial Guinea, where authorities can then force them to complete the journey home.

    As an authoritarian state with widespread reports of human rights abuses, Equatorial Guinea restricts nearly all access for foreign independent journalists, making on-the-ground reporting extremely rare. What the AP found inside the hotel is a surreal blend of luxury accommodation and psychological torture: detainees wander empty, ornate corridors, staring out at a shimmering swimming pool they are barred from using, trapped in a country most had never heard of before their arrival. Men and women from Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Mauritania make up the detainee population, and all have reported no physical abuse — but overwhelming psychological distress from the constant threat of forced return to countries where they face persecution, imprisonment or death.

    “I am scared and depressed,” a 26-year-old East African detainee told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, like the two other detainees interviewed for this report. Because of his ethnicity and his previous activism in his home country, he said he is certain he will be killed if he is forced to return. Human rights experts confirm all detainees held at Bamy Hotel face a high risk of severe persecution upon repatriation.

    The Trump administration’s third-country deportation strategy has resulted in thousands of asylum seekers being sent to roughly 24 nations not their own, according to advocacy group Third Country Deportation Watch. Most of these partner nations are in the developing world, with roughly a dozen located across Africa. Immigration policy experts say nations like Equatorial Guinea agree to take these detainees to earn political and economic goodwill from the U.S. in ongoing negotiations over trade, foreign aid and migration policy.

    The daily routine for detainees is mundane, the 26-year-old detainee recounted, but made deeply unsettling by the surreal setting and constant uncertainty. Detainees sleep in high-end hotel rooms that are rarely cleaned, and eat rice and meat at linen-covered tables in the closed hotel restaurant. After falling ill multiple times from contaminated food, the East African man said he now eats only the absolute minimum to survive. A local local lawyer provides basic supplies: new toothbrushes, cellphone SIM cards, and sanitary products for female detainees. Medical care is inconsistent at best: when the man developed an eye problem, he was taken to a hospital quickly, but when he contracted malaria and typhoid, authorities waited until his condition had severely deteriorated before arranging care, leaving him severely weakened and requiring intravenous treatment.

    The psychological abuse is even more severe. When the man recently complained to a local police officer about his unlawful detention, the officer responded by telling him his problems would end if he simply went to the fourth floor and jumped out a window. “What can I do now? It’s become worse,” he said, his frail body shaking as he spoke. “I started losing my mind.”

    The relationship between the U.S. and Equatorial Guinea is a complicated one, defined by deep economic ties even as U.S. officials repeatedly condemn the country’s abysmal human rights record and systemic corruption. A former Spanish colony, Equatorial Guinea descended into economic chaos after gaining independence in 1968, but the discovery of massive offshore oil reserves in the 1990s, developed largely by U.S. energy companies, turned the country into one of Africa’s wealthiest by per capita GDP. Almost all of that oil-fueled wealth has been siphoned off by long-ruling President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and his family, rights groups report. His son and heir apparent, Vice President Teodoro “Teodorin” Obiang Nguema, openly flaunts his corrupt fortune on social media, posting videos of private jet travel, infinity pool vacations and lobster feasts — even though the platform is banned for ordinary Equatorial Guinean citizens.

    International sanctions were previously levied against Teodorin Obiang over his role in systemic corruption, but the U.S. lifted those sanctions just weeks before the first deportees arrived at Bamy Hotel, allowing him to travel to New York for a high-level U.N. meeting. Today, U.S. companies remain Equatorial Guinea’s largest foreign investors, and the U.S. government funds military training for the country’s security forces. Independent dissent is virtually non-existent: the Obiang administration has been repeatedly accused by the U.S. State Department and global human rights groups of detaining, torturing and extrajudicially killing political opponents.

    For the remaining detainees at Bamy Hotel, every day brings new uncertainty: they know they could be deported at any time. The U.N. International Organization for Migration and the U.N. refugee agency visited the hotel in November and promised detainees they would return to assist with their cases. They have not been back since. The 26-year-old East African man is the only remaining detainee who has been allowed to meet with legal representation. Though Equatorial Guinea has no formal asylum framework, his lawyer submitted a formal asylum request to the prime minister’s office, a long-shot attempt to secure his release. He was told he would need to beg for mercy directly from Vice President Teodorin Obiang, and his claim was ultimately rejected. The next morning, authorities deported five other detainees, and told him he would be next.

    Neither the Trump administration nor the Obiang administration responded to requests for comment on the $7.5 million deal or the conditions at the Bamy Hotel. A State Department spokesperson offered only a broad statement: “we remain unwavering in our commitment to end illegal and mass immigration.”

  • Temperatures likely to remain at record levels in 2026-2030: UN

    Temperatures likely to remain at record levels in 2026-2030: UN

    In a stark new climate outlook released Thursday, the United Nations’ leading weather and climate authority has sounded a clear alarm: global average temperatures will almost certainly hold at or near record levels between 2026 and 2030, with a high probability that the critical 1.5°C warming threshold set by the Paris Agreement will be breached on a five-year average basis.

    Every one of the 11 warmest years recorded in human history has occurred since 2015, and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed this long-standing warming trend is on track to continue, with a new all-time hottest year very likely to be logged before 2031. According to the WMO’s official five-year outlook, there is a 75% probability that the average global temperature across 2026 to 2030 will exceed 1.5°C above the pre-industrial baseline of 1850–1900, the ambitious upper limit for safe warming set out in the 2015 Paris climate accords. The forecast puts the chance of at least one single year between 2026 and 2030 temporarily surpassing 1.5°C at 91%, and an 86% chance that one of those years will knock 2024 off its current spot as the warmest year on record.

    Leon Hermanson, lead author of the WMO’s *Global Annual-to-Decadal Update*, pointed to a predicted El Niño event at the end of 2026 as a key factor that could push 2027 into record-breaking territory. El Niño is a natural recurring climate pattern marked by warmed surface waters in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, which reshapes global wind, pressure and rainfall patterns to drive higher global average temperatures. The most recent El Niño cycle already pushed 2023 to become the second-warmest year on record, and lifted 2024 to a new all-time high of roughly 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels. El Niño typically occurs every two to seven years and lasts between nine and 12 months.

    The WMO outlook projects that annual global mean near-surface temperatures between 2026 and 2030 will fall in a range of 1.3°C to 1.9°C above the 1850–1900 baseline. While the chance of any single year exceeding 2°C — the less ambitious upper warming limit set in the Paris Agreement — over the next five years is less than 1%, the organization warns that temporary breaches of the 1.5°C threshold will become more common in coming years. It is important to note that the Paris Agreement’s warming limits refer to long-term sustained warming, typically measured over 20 years, so short-term temporary exceedances do not permanently rule out meeting the long-term goal.

    The new forecast arrives as western Europe is already grappling with an early extreme heat event, with a stationary warm air “heat dome” pushing May temperatures past all-time records in both the United Kingdom and France. Beyond global averages, the report highlights disproportionate warming in the Arctic, where average temperatures across the next five Northern Hemisphere winters (November to March) are projected to be 2.8°C warmer than the 1991–2020 baseline — more than three times the global average temperature anomaly for the same period. For precipitation patterns between May and September 2026–2030, the forecast predicts wetter-than-average conditions across the Sahel, northern Europe, Alaska and Siberia, while the Amazon basin is expected to see drier-than-average conditions.

    Compiled by the UK’s Met Office at the WMO’s leading center for interannual to decadal climate prediction, the report draws together forecast data from 13 leading climate research institutes across the globe to build its consensus projections.

  • Iran war has complicated plans for an international force in Gaza that has yet to materialize

    Iran war has complicated plans for an international force in Gaza that has yet to materialize

    Three months after the International Stabilization Force for Gaza was launched with grand promises of bringing lasting peace and long-term prosperity to the war-ravaged Palestinian enclave, the ambitious U.S.-backed initiative has ground to a near-standstill, with no meaningful troops deployed and ceasefire efforts deadlocked between Israeli and Hamas forces. The 20,000-strong stabilization force was first unveiled in February at the inaugural gathering of U.S. President Donald Trump’s newly created Board of Peace, with U.S. Major General Jasper Jeffers tapped to lead the mission. Today, Jeffers commands no deployed forces, as none of the five nations that publicly pledged troop contributions have followed through on their commitments.

    The single largest blow to the plan came just over a week after the U.S. and Israel launched a joint military strike against Iran in late February, when Indonesia — which had promised the largest contingent of 8,000 troops — put its entire commitment on indefinite hold. Under the original schedule, 1,000 Indonesian personnel were set to deploy in April, with the remaining 7,000 arriving the following June. The other four contributing nations — Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Albania — have also failed to deploy any significant on-the-ground forces three months on.

    Indonesia’s defense minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin explained the suspension to parliament last week, citing a lack of clear implementation guidance from a Washington administration distracted by escalating tensions with Tehran. “New dynamics have emerged,” Sjamsoeddin told lawmakers. “Because the intensity of the conflict between U.S. and Iranian forces remains very high, the Board of Peace has tended to be left behind. Since the Board of Peace has been left behind, the International Stabilization Force has also been left behind.”

    Regional analysts note that domestic political and economic pressures also heavily influenced Indonesia’s decision. As the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, public opposition to the U.S.-Iran war runs extremely deep in the country. The conflict has already sent global energy prices soaring, pushing Indonesia’s already fragile economy into further strain, and public skepticism of the Trump administration’s Board of Peace initiative is widespread.

    “If you talk to the people on the street, I don’t think they believe that the Board of Peace will actually help the people of Gaza,” explained Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat, director of the Indonesia-Middle East/North Africa desk at Jakarta’s Center for Economic and Law Studies. Rakhmat added that there is broad public unease about deploying troops to the volatile Middle East while Indonesia’s domestic economy falters. Past experiences have also soured public opinion: four Indonesian peacekeepers serving with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon were killed during fighting between Israeli forces and Iran-backed Hezbollah, further eroding support for new international military commitments in the region.

    Still, Rakhmat argues that a complete Indonesian withdrawal from the initiative is not yet a foregone conclusion. Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, a former army general, has made expanding Indonesia’s global diplomatic and security profile a core priority, and is reluctant to jeopardize key economic ties with the United States. “Prabowo wants to strengthen ties to Washington and sign different agreements with the U.S., so to completely withdraw and completely cancel the plan, I don’t think it’s on the table,” Rakhmat said.

    Efforts to shore up the already fragile Gaza ceasefire have stalled completely amid competing blame from both sides. Hamas has refused to disarm, a core requirement of the Trump administration’s 20-point ceasefire plan, while Israel has continued seizing additional territory in Gaza and carrying out repeated strikes on targets it labels militant positions — strikes that local health officials confirm have killed more than 880 Palestinians since the ceasefire was first agreed. Israeli troops currently control approximately 60% of Gaza’s total territory.

    The ongoing conflict with Iran has compounded these challenges, making it politically risky for Arab and Muslim leaders to openly cooperate with the U.S. and Israel, which are widely viewed as aggressors across much of the region. The resulting global energy crisis has also drained government resources that could have been used to support the stabilization mission.

    Board of Peace officials have placed the entirety of the blame for the deadlock on Hamas. Nickolay Mladenov, a former Bulgarian defense minister appointed by Trump to lead the Board of Peace, told the United Nations in May that the international force cannot begin operations until a second ceasefire phase — requiring Hamas to disarm and Israel to begin a troop withdrawal — is agreed and implemented. “You cannot build a future with armed groups running the streets, hiding in tunnels and stockpiling weapons,” Mladenov said during remarks in Jerusalem this month. “You cannot deliver reconstruction with militias on every corner.” Hamas’ disarmament, he added, remains “non-negotiable.”

    Hamas in turn blames Israel for the delay, accusing the Israeli government of repeatedly violating the ceasefire and Mladenov of openly siding with Tel Aviv. The group is demanding that Israel withdraw from all territory it has seized since the ceasefire went into effect, an Egyptian official with knowledge of closed-door mediation talks confirmed on condition of anonymity. The official added that most pledged troop-contributing nations have refused to deploy forces until a formal agreement on Hamas disarmament is reached.

    To date, only token, non-combat contributions have been confirmed, and no deployed troops are known to be on the ground in Gaza. Kazakhstan has limited its commitment to humanitarian support, including a planned field hospital and medical unit, but has not provided any update on deployment timelines. Albania’s defense ministry has described its contribution as a “dynamic and ongoing process,” with military chief Lieutenant General Arben Kingji confirming earlier this month that only a small contingent of personnel for the force’s headquarters will be sent, with no troops deployed to date even after preliminary reconnaissance work. Kosovo, which has pledged 20 troops, confirmed in April it was in the “final phase of preparations” but has not released an update since. Morocco has only committed to deploying high-ranking military officers to the force’s joint command, and has not shared further details. All four nations declined to respond to requests for comment on their current commitments.

    U.S. Central Command declined to comment on the status of the force or make General Jeffers available for interview, referring all inquiries to the Board of Peace. Board of Peace spokesman Brad Klapper also declined to comment on Indonesia’s suspension or the future of the mission, directing reporters to Mladenov’s May remarks to the United Nations.

  • Think it’s hot now? The next five years will smash records, UN says

    Think it’s hot now? The next five years will smash records, UN says

    New climate projections from the United Nations paint a stark near-term outlook for the global climate, finding that over the next five years, the planet is extremely likely to repeatedly cross the internationally agreed safe warming threshold and break the current record for the world’s hottest year.

    Released by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in collaboration with the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, the analysis projects a 75% probability that the average global temperature between 2026 and 2030 will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That temperature limit was formally established as a long-term global target in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, designed to avoid the worst impacts of human-caused climate change. Prior scientific research has confirmed that even a small overshoot of this threshold would sharply increase risks of mortality, extreme hazard, and mass biodiversity loss, with sensitive ecosystems such as tropical coral reefs and mountain glaciers unable to adapt to even minor additional warming.

    The report’s statistics are even more sobering for individual years: there is a 91% chance that at least one year between 2025 and 2030 will cross the 1.5°C threshold, and an 86% chance that one of those years will break the current hottest-year record set in 2024. WMO projects annual global temperatures for the 2025–2030 period will land between 1.3°C and 1.9°C above late 19th-century baselines.

    Contrary to common popular framing of the 1.5°C target as a hard “point of no return,” report co-author Melissa Seabrook, a climate scientist at the UK Met Office, emphasized that warming risk increases incrementally. “It’s important to note that 1.5 is not kind of a cliff edge that we’re going to fall off,” Seabrook said. “Every 0.1 of a degree brings more and more severe impacts.” She pointed to the unprecedented extreme heat that swept Europe in May 2025 as an immediate example of the hazards already unfolding.

    Outside experts echoed that warning. Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who was not involved in the report, noted that a full year or longer of temperatures above 1.5°C would unlock extreme weather events more intense than any modern societies have planned for. “This means a whole range of extreme weather events, probably many so hot/wet/dry that it exceeds anything we’ve experienced in the past and thus crucially, anything our city planning, agriculture etc. has anticipated,” Otto explained via email. “This will mean many people will lose their lives, we are in for a lot of food price shocks, and more intense wildfires.”

    A major contributing factor to the projected near-term warming surge is the expected return of a strong El Niño event, the natural climate pattern that warms surface waters in the central Pacific, boosts global average temperatures, and alters weather systems worldwide. The WMO projects this upcoming El Niño could persist as late as 2028, and Seabrook noted that 2027 is the most likely year to break the 2024 heat record as a result.

    If the 2026–2030 five-year average does exceed 1.5°C, that would mark a dramatic acceleration in the rate of global warming: the planet would warm 0.25°C per decade, up from the previous long-term average of roughly 0.2°C per decade. Seabrook noted that climate scientists are already divided over whether warming is accelerating, and the projection would add key evidence to the argument that the rate of climate change is speeding up. “That obviously is quite scary,” she added.

    The report’s projections highlight two particularly high-risk regions that will face disproportionate warming impacts. First, the Arctic is projected to warm 3.5 times faster than the global average over the next five years, creating a dangerous feedback loop. As rising temperatures melt sea ice, the dark open ocean that replaces bright reflective ice and snow absorbs more solar radiation, driving further warming. The report finds that average winter temperatures in the Arctic between 2026 and 2030 will be 2.8°C (5.1°F) warmer than the 1991–2020 baseline, following a 1.2°C (2.1°F) average winter warming between 2020 and 2025. Summer Arctic sea ice extent is also projected to continue shrinking.

    Second, the Amazon basin — the planet’s largest terrestrial carbon sink, a critical natural buffer against human-caused warming — is forecast to face prolonged unusually warm and dry conditions over the next five years. Those conditions would sharply increase wildfire risk, raising the alarming possibility that the Amazon could shift from absorbing heat-trapping carbon dioxide to releasing it, worsening global warming. The drought and wildfire risk also threatens the water security and livelihoods of millions of people who depend on the rainforest. By contrast, the already parched Sahel region of Africa is projected to receive above-average rainfall, increasing the risk of catastrophic flooding.

    UN climate leadership emphasized that the stark projections show current global efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions are insufficient to slow warming. “Despite the progress of recent years, it’s clear that global heating is still outpacing global efforts to contain it, and the baking temperatures in Europe, India and elsewhere show yet again the brutal human and economic impacts of humanity still burning colossal amounts of coal, oil and gas,” said UN climate chief Simon Stiell. “Whether it’s extreme heat, mega-storms, floods, massive wildfires or droughts hitting food supply and prices, every nation is already paying a huge price from this global climate crisis.”

    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations, with AP retaining full editorial control over all content.

  • Australia charges woman with terrorism over IS links

    Australia charges woman with terrorism over IS links

    In a major counter-terrorism development unfolding in Australia, federal law enforcement has levied formal terrorism charges against a 34-year-old woman accused of ties to the Islamic State (IS) extremist group, marking the latest high-profile case in a string of recent actions against IS-linked returnees from conflict zones in the Middle East. On Thursday, Australian authorities announced the woman faces two serious charges: membership in a proscribed terrorist organization and unlawful entry into a recognized active conflict zone, offenses that each carry a maximum prison sentence of 10 years if she is convicted.

    Counter-terrorism investigators allege the accused woman traveled to war-torn Syria between 2013 and 2014 alongside a male companion to join the then-expanding IS network. The man who accompanied her is currently confirmed to be in custody in the Middle East, police confirmed. Following the territorial defeat of IS in 2019 at the hands of Kurdish-led ground forces backed by a U.S.-led international coalition, the woman was captured by Kurdish security personnel and detained for years in the al-Hawl Internally Displaced Persons camp, a facility that holds thousands of relatives of suspected IS fighters in northeastern Syria. She was finally repatriated to Australia in September 2023, and was scheduled to make her first court appearance on the same day charges were announced.

    This latest arrest comes amid a wave of repatriations of Australians with IS connections that have unfolded over the past month. Shortly after this month’s first group of returnees arrived in the country, two women – a mother and daughter – were taken into custody immediately upon landing in Melbourne. Australian police have leveled serious allegations against the pair, claiming they traveled to Syria in 2014 to pledge support to IS and held another woman as an enslaved person during their time in the conflict zone. A third woman was arrested on arrival in Sydney, where she faces matching charges of entering a restricted conflict zone and joining a banned terrorist organization.

    Earlier this week, another cohort of 13 IS-linked Australians – four adult women and their nine minor children – completed repatriation flights from Syria to return to Australia. As of the announcement of Thursday’s new charges, none of the 13 returnees from this most recent group have been formally charged with any criminal offenses. However, senior Australian counter-terrorism officials have made clear that the absence of immediate charges does not mean the cases are closed. “It is important to note that a period of time without charges being laid is not an indicator that investigations have ceased,” Hilda Sirec, Deputy Commissioner for National Security Investigations at the Australian Federal Police, said in an official statement Thursday. “Investigations are continuing into all the recent adult female returnees from Syrian camps,” she added.

    The cases of these female IS-linked returnees, widely labeled in public discourse as “ISIS brides”, have ignited fierce and divisive public debate across Australia over the past several years. Human rights groups and government bodies including the Australian Human Rights Commission have pushed for compassionate policy, urging the federal government in March 2024 to prioritize repatriation for all remaining Australians held in Syrian displacement camps, citing the poor humanitarian conditions and uncertain legal status facing detainees. On the opposite side of the debate, many critics argue the women voluntarily severed ties with Australia to join a terrorist movement, and argue they should be forced to face the consequences of their choices outside of the country’s borders.

  • Minister: Israel won’t allow Trump to make a peace deal with Iran

    Minister: Israel won’t allow Trump to make a peace deal with Iran

    Tensions across the Middle East escalated sharply this week as Israel launched a major new bombardment of Lebanon just as the United States and Iran hold high-stakes indirect ceasefire negotiations, drawing accusations that the offensive is deliberately intended to derail diplomatic progress. The attack, which has already left dozens dead and hundreds of thousands displaced, comes amid parallel developments exposing alleged abuses against international humanitarian activists attempting to break Israel’s years-long siege of Gaza, with organizers demanding a full investigation into direct U.S. complicity in the mistreatment of their members.

    On Tuesday, Israeli forces carried out more than 120 airstrikes targeting areas across southern Lebanon and the eastern Bekaa Valley, in a direct violation of the 45-day ceasefire that took effect last month. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the government would intensify its military campaign, confirming the expansion of Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon beyond the country’s previously declared “security zone.” Israeli officials have ordered residents of dozens of Lebanese villages to remain out of their homes, as the military pushes to establish a new buffer zone extending between 5 and 10 kilometers into Lebanese territory.

    Lebanon’s health ministry confirmed that 31 people were killed in the Tuesday strikes, including 14 residents of the southern town of Burj al-Shamali — among them two children and three women. More than 40 others were wounded. Since Israel launched its full-scale offensive in Lebanon in early March, the death toll has climbed to over 3,200 killed and more than 9,700 injured. Even after the April truce went into effect, more than 600 people have lost their lives to ongoing violence.

    Israel’s military strategy in Lebanon follows what Defense Minister Israel Katz has called the “Gaza model”: widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure to force mass displacement. Before last month’s ceasefire, more than 40,000 homes across southern Lebanon were either destroyed or damaged, with demolition operations continuing after the truce. The offensive has displaced more than 1 million Lebanese people, a humanitarian catastrophe that has gone largely underreported in global media. In response to the renewed Israeli strikes, Hezbollah launched drone attacks against Israeli targets, continuing the cross-border exchanges that have persisted through months of declared ceasefires.

    The timing of the renewed offensive has sparked fierce criticism from inside and outside Israel, with many observers arguing the attack is intended to sabotage ongoing ceasefire negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. The influential far-right Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir openly acknowledged this framing Tuesday, stating explicitly that the entire Israeli cabinet is unified in opposing any potential peace deal that would end the current conflict. “This is an agreement that can harm the state of Israel, and we will not allow this to happen,” Ben-Gvir said in remarks to reporters, adding that the government should cut off electricity across Lebanon, occupy territory up to the Zahrani River, and return to full-scale massive war. Fellow far-right cabinet member Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich doubled down on the aggressive rhetoric, calling for Israel to destroy 10 buildings in Beirut for every Hezbollah drone attack, and expand demolitions to other major Lebanese cities if necessary.

    Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a former Israeli foreign ministry diplomat and current prominent critic of the country’s regional policy, explained that the deepening incursion into Lebanon is designed to kill both the proposed Lebanese ceasefire and the U.S.-Iran talks entirely. “Israel was “moving to bury not only the supposed ceasefire in Lebanon but also talks on Iran” because its policy “is an endless and wide regional war,” Ben-Ephraim said, adding “Israel forced the US into war and won’t let us end it.”

    The negotiations, which do not include Israeli representatives, come as U.S. President Donald Trump has framed the latest round of talks as promising, even as details of the proposed framework remain contested. On Wednesday, Reuters reported, citing Iranian state television, that Tehran has received an unofficial U.S. proposal that would restore pre-war commercial shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz for a 30-day period, in exchange for a U.S. troop withdrawal from the region surrounding Iran and an end to the U.S. naval blockade. The U.S. has publicly disputed this account of the proposed framework. While Iran has condemned recent U.S. attacks as acts of bad faith and clear violations of prior ceasefire commitments, it has not walked away from the negotiating table. Nuclear issues, which were a core sticking point in earlier U.S.-Iran negotiations, have been pushed to future talks, but Iran has made clear that a lasting peace deal requires an end to Israel’s assault on Lebanon.

    Separately, international activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla, an organization that organizes humanitarian voyages to break Israel’s siege of Gaza, released detailed testimonies this week documenting widespread abuse, torture, and sexual assault of their members at the hands of Israeli forces after their latest flotilla was intercepted in international waters. The activists are calling for a full investigation into U.S. complicity in the abuses, noting that both the ship used by Israeli forces to detain participants and the weapons used to attack them were built and paid for by the United States government.

    Testimonies from the 428 abducted participants describe brutal, systematic abuse. According to the GSF media statement, detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container, where groups of three to five soldiers beat each person while other waiting captives heard their screams. One participant, Yassine Benjelloun, described being beaten repeatedly within minutes of being detained: “What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

    Dr. Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician on the flotilla, documented 35 participants with fractured or dislocated bones, severe head injuries including concussions and eye and ear trauma, and 14 confirmed cases of sexual assault. Dr. Jihan, who was herself assaulted, forcibly stripped of her hijab, and choked by Israeli soldiers, described the experience of being unable to treat injured captives as devastating. “Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people. But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and most horrible feeling that I have,” she said.

    The Israeli amphibious landing ship used to detain the activists, the INS Nahshon, was built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding in Louisiana and fully financed by U.S. taxpayers. The vessel was previously used to detain participants from an earlier Gaza-bound flotilla, where dozens of activists required medical care for broken bones sustained during beatings. The weapons used against the civilian activists, including stun grenades and metal projectile rounds, were manufactured by Combined Tactical Systems, a Pennsylvania-based U.S. weapons manufacturer. GSF reports that these weapons were fired at close range into enclosed spaces at participants who were sitting or sleeping, in direct violation of the manufacturer’s own safety guidelines.

    Josh Paul, a former U.S. State Department official who resigned in 2023 to protest U.S. arms transfers to Israel amid its war in Gaza, confirmed that the use of U.S.-origin equipment for this abuse violates U.S. law. “Under US law, arms transfers must only be made for purposes authorized by law,” Paul said. “INS Nahshon‘s use by Israel to conduct an illegal seizure in international waters, and then to act as a base for the torture and sexual assault of foreign civilians, including Americans, who had broken no laws, and were acting from conscience to serve an urgent humanitarian need, plainly and grievously violates those terms.” Paul noted that the risk of misuse was clear decades ago, after the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla raid that killed nine activists, including a Turkish-American teenager, but U.S. officials continued to approve arms transfers regardless. “Anything we transfer to Israel, Israel will find a way to misuse – whether it is a bomb, a bulldozer or a boat,” he said.

    GSF emphasizes that the abuse of their members is not an isolated incident, but a direct consequence of decades of unconditional U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel, which GSF says has enabled the Israeli government to commit sustained war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinian people. Successive U.S. administrations, under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have provided tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Israel and used United Nations Security Council vetoes to block dozens of ceasefire resolutions for Gaza. Since the October 2023 Hamas attack that triggered the latest Gaza war, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians in Gaza, displaced roughly 2 million more, and subjected the enclave to widespread deliberate starvation and lack of access to clean water and medicine.

    Israel’s actions in Gaza are currently the subject of a genocide case at the International Court of Justice brought by South Africa and supported by nearly 20 United Nations member states. The International Criminal Court has also issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza, including murder and forced starvation. A United Nations panel of experts concluded last year that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a finding endorsed by dozens of governments, hundreds of human rights groups, and leading legal scholars, including prominent Israeli and Jewish Holocaust experts.

    Flotilla organizers stressed that the abuse their members endured for a few days is nothing compared to the ongoing suffering of thousands of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli detention, many held without charge or trial under the country’s administrative detention system. Israeli authorities are currently investigating the deaths of dozens of Palestinian prisoners, with multiple reports of extrajudicial execution, torture, rape, and widespread sexual abuse of detained Palestinians. “What GSF participants survived for days, many Palestinians endure indefinitely without lawyers or consular access,” the GSF statement said.

    GSF is calling on the U.S. government to open an immediate investigation into Israel’s use of U.S.-origin arms and equipment to abuse American citizens, suspend all arms transfers to Israel until the probe is complete, and end the longstanding policy of unconditional military and diplomatic support for what GSF calls a regime actively committing genocide. Legal proceedings are already active in Turkey, Italy, and Spain, with Italian prosecutors opening an investigation into kidnapping and sexual assault connected to the flotilla incident, but the U.S. government has so far declined to take any action, matching its pattern of turning a blind eye to Israeli violations of international law.

  • Fund for climate-exposed Pacific nation invests in fossil fuels

    Fund for climate-exposed Pacific nation invests in fossil fuels

    An investigation by Agence France-Presse has uncovered a deeply contradictory revelation: the $200 million trust fund established to support low-lying Pacific island nation Tuvalu, one of the countries most vulnerable to catastrophic climate change, holds investments in coal mining, natural gas exploration, and the world’s highest-emitting crude oil refinery. As Tuvalu braces to host a pre-COP31 climate summit this year to draw global attention to the existential threat rising seas pose to its territory, the disclosure has sparked urgent calls for transparency and a full review of the fund’s portfolio.

    A chain of tiny coral atolls situated halfway between Australia and Hawaii, Tuvalu faces some of the most severe climate impacts on Earth: ocean acidification is eroding its coral foundations, storm surges and chronic sea-level rise are increasingly inundating its limited land, and tropical disease risks are growing. With just 26 square kilometers of dry land across the entire archipelago, infrastructure is stretched so thin that the main international airport’s runway doubles as a community sports field. With almost no natural resources and a deeply fragile economy, Tuvalu relies almost entirely on its government-managed trust fund to cover the skyrocketing costs of climate adaptation and disaster response.

    Established in 1987 with founding financial support from Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the Tuvalu Trust Fund has long served as the nation’s largest single financial asset, providing critical ongoing revenue for a state heavily dependent on international aid. Management of the fund was handed to global advisory firm Mercer in 2022, with formal investment guidelines that explicitly require the portfolio to align with Tuvalu’s unique climate vulnerability: the fund’s official objectives state Tuvalu is “particularly susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change” and mandate that managers minimize exposure to fossil fuel reserves and carbon emissions wherever possible.

    AFP’s review of public financial records and government reporting, however, tells a different story. Analyzing holdings data from 14 Mercer-managed funds held by the Tuvalu Trust Fund as of December 2025, investigators found that Tuvalu’s money is tied to some of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies and highest-emitting energy projects.

    Among the most high-profile investments is a stake in Indian multinational Reliance Industries, held through Mercer’s emerging markets fund. Reliance owns the Jamnagar petrochemical complex in western India, the world’s largest single-site crude oil refinery. Non-profit climate monitoring group Climate Trace recorded the facility emitted nearly 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2022, making it the planet’s top-emitting oil refinery.

    Further holdings include investments in U.S. utility giants The Southern Company and Duke Energy, ranked the second and third largest greenhouse gas emitters in the United States, according to data from the Political Economy Research Institute. A 2024 report from the U.S.-based Energy and Policy Institute documented that The Southern Company spent $60 million funding groups behind climate disinformation campaigns between 1993 and 2004.

    Tuvalu’s portfolio also includes stakes in mining giant Rio Tinto and Australian oil and gas supermajor Woodside Energy, both listed among Australia’s 10 largest greenhouse gas emitters in official government data. The Woodside investment is particularly striking: earlier in 2025, when the Australian government approved a 40-year extension of Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project, Tuvalu’s Climate Change Minister Maina Talia publicly condemned the decision, warning the project’s emissions threatened Tuvalu’s very survival and urging Australia to reject the extension.

    Roughly 12% of the entire Tuvalu Trust Fund, equal to around $25 million, is allocated to Mercer’s Australian shares fund, whose single largest holding is BHP Group, the world’s biggest mining firm and one of Australia’s most valuable companies. While BHP has divested most of its thermal coal assets in recent years, it still retains stakes in Australian thermal coal mines that produce the fossil fuel for steel manufacturing.

    For Tuvalu’s climate activists, the findings are deeply disheartening. “It was really shocking to see our nation tied up with fossil fuel companies,” Richard Gokrun, a Tuvaluan climate advocate and former weather forecaster, told AFP from the capital Funafuti. “We stand strong for the phase-out of fossil fuels, because we see the impacts to our country every day. The major changes that we are seeing are sea-level rise. We are starting to see new places are getting flooded or inundated.”

    The contradiction comes at a pivotal moment for Tuvalu’s global climate advocacy: later this year, the nation will host global leaders for a special pre-COP31 summit ahead of the United Nations’ next major climate conference, an event designed to highlight the devastating toll climate change is already taking on small island developing states. A September 2025 government report also shows Tuvalu is actively courting new donors to contribute additional capital to the trust fund through the UN climate process, with Prime Minister Feleti Teo repeatedly stating that opening new fossil fuel projects is “immoral and unacceptable” and a “death sentence” for his nation.

    Climate finance experts say the current portfolio fails utterly to meet the fund’s stated climate commitments. Sebastian Gehricke, a climate finance specialist at the University of Otago, told AFP the investments appear to show “virtually no formal consideration for climate change.” Ivan Diaz-Rainey, a finance professor at Australia’s Griffith University, said AFP’s findings “clearly warrants further investigation” and called for “full disclosure of holdings and a clear account of what actions have been taken to give effect to the fund’s commitments to climate action.”

    In response to AFP’s reporting, a spokesperson for the Tuvalu Trust Fund said the fund is currently reviewing its fossil fuel exposure in light of the new findings, reaffirming that “since Tuvalu is particularly susceptible to the adverse impacts of climate change, the TTF continues to seek to minimise the fund’s exposure to fossil fuel reserves and carbon emissions.” When contacted for comment, Mercer declined to address the holdings, stating it “does not provide commentary or analysis on our clients or their investment portfolios.”