标签： Asia

In a political upheaval that has rewritten decades of electoral history in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, film superstar-turned-politician C. Joseph Vijay’s newly launched Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) has emerged as the single largest party in the 234-member state legislative assembly, shattering the long-standing duopoly of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK). But five days after vote counting concluded, the state remains mired in political uncertainty, with no clear timeline for the formation of a new government and competing constitutional debates over who should get the first chance to take power.

Vijay, a 51-year-old megastar popularly known by his fan nickname ‘Thalapathy’, led his fledgling party to a stunning 108 seats in the election, defeating the incumbent DMK government led by Chief Minister MK Stalin. The result leaves TVK just 10 seats short of the 118-seat majority required to form a government on its own. So far, India’s main national opposition party, the Congress, has pledged its five seats to Vijay’s bloc, leaving the celebrity politician just five legislators short of the required threshold.

Two days after the vote count, Vijay met with Tamil Nadu Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar twice to formally stake his claim as the leader of the single largest party to form the next administration. Following the second meeting on Thursday, however, the Governor’s office released a statement rejecting the claim, noting that Vijay had not yet demonstrated he holds the requisite majority support to form a stable government. The Governor has insisted that Vijay submit documented proof of the 118 committed legislators before being invited to form government, a move that has drawn sharp criticism from TVK leaders and their backers.

Constitutional experts are divided over the Governor’s decision. Many point to well-established constitutional precedent that grants the leader of the single largest party the first opportunity to form government, with a floor test of majority held after the government takes office. They argue that denying Vijay this opportunity is procedurally unfair. Analysts defending the Governor’s position note that his primary mandate is to ensure the formation of a stable administration that can survive a confidence vote, rather than inviting a minority government that could collapse shortly after taking office.

Vijay’s rapid rise to the top of Tamil Nadu politics has drawn widespread comparisons to MG Ramachandran, another iconic matinee idol who split from the DMK in 1977 to form the AIADMK and went on to become the state’s Chief Minister. For nearly half a century, Tamil Nadu’s politics have been dominated by a two-party system between the DMK and AIADMK, a status quo that TVK has already overturned with its election performance. Unlike Ramachandran and his successor J Jayalalithaa — another film star who led the state for decades — Vijay enters politics with no prior elected experience, though he followed the traditional path of celebrity-turned-politician by retiring from his 69-film acting career full-time after launching TVK in 2024.

As political uncertainty drags on, Indian media outlets have floated a range of hypothetical coalition scenarios, including a shocking power-sharing agreement between the bitter long-time rivals DMK and AIADMK to block TVK from power. Still, many analysts remain optimistic that Vijay can cobble together the required support from smaller regional parties and independent candidates to hit the 118-seat magic number and form the next government, closing out one of the most dramatic political upsets in recent Indian electoral history.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — On a high-profile visit to the self-ruled island democracy of Taiwan, Paraguayan President Santiago Peña delivered a clear message of diplomatic solidarity Friday, one day after China issued a formal demand that the South American nation cut its official ties with Taipei. Currently, Paraguay stands as the only remaining South American country that recognizes Taiwan, making it one of just 13 UN-unrecognized states worldwide that maintain full diplomatic relations with the island. For decades, Beijing has claimed Taiwan as an inalienable part of its sovereign territory, and in recent years, it has intensified two parallel campaigns to isolate Taipei: ramping up military pressure through frequent air and sea incursions around the island, and actively courting Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic allies to switch recognition to Beijing.

Speaking at a military honors reception outside Taiwan’s presidential office, Peña framed the event as a tangible symbol of the unshakable commitment between Taipei and Asunción to deepen their long-standing bilateral partnership. Through an interpreter, he noted that the two sides share core foundational values including democracy, personal freedom, and universal human rights, and reiterated that Paraguay would remain a steadfast international advocate for Taiwan. “Paraguay highly values this relationship,” Peña stated, later expanding on that commitment during closed bilateral talks with Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te. In that meeting, Peña issued a formal call to the global community: the people of Taiwan deserve the right to determine their own future in line with democratic and equitable principles. He also pushed back against Taipei’s exclusion from global bodies, arguing that barring Taiwan from the United Nations system is not only a fundamental injustice but also erodes the legitimacy of the UN as an institution that claims to represent democratic nations globally.

Lai thanked Peña and the Paraguayan government for their public, unflinching support for Taiwan and its bid for meaningful international participation. “I believe the friendship between Taiwan and Paraguay will further deepen, and our cooperation will grow closer through this visit,” Lai said in his public remarks. Following their meeting, the two leaders oversaw the signing of several new bilateral agreements, highlighted by a memorandum of understanding focused on investment in an artificial intelligence computing center on Taiwan.

This public reaffirmation of ties came just 24 hours after Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian urged Paraguayan officials to “come to the right side of history as soon as possible” and sever all diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Lin emphasized that the one-China principle is a widely accepted norm of international relations, noting that 183 countries around the world currently maintain official diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China.

In comments to Taiwan’s Central News Agency ahead of his four-day visit, Peña revealed that he had met with Honduran President Nasry Asfura on the sidelines of a regional event earlier this year. While the pair did not directly discuss whether Honduras would reverse its 2023 decision to cut ties with Taiwan and establish relations with Beijing, Peña told Asfura that Paraguay has built a strong, mutually beneficial relationship with Taipei. Asfura, who was elected with open backing from former U.S. President Donald Trump, has already ordered a full review of all existing bilateral agreements between Honduras and China, stoking widespread speculation that Honduras could distance itself from Beijing as part of a broader Trump administration push to reduce Chinese economic and political influence across Latin America.

Peña’s visit is the latest high-profile diplomatic engagement for Lai, who just completed a trip last week to Eswatini, Taiwan’s last remaining diplomatic ally in Africa. Lai was forced to postpone that trip earlier after multiple regional countries denied his aircraft overflight permission, a move widely attributed to diplomatic pressure from Beijing. Beijing never publicly confirmed or denied that it pressured those countries, but did express “high appreciation” for their adherence to the one-China principle.

The cross-strait split dates back to 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Nationalist Party in a brutal civil war and established the People’s Republic of China on the mainland. The defeated Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan, which has since evolved from decades of martial law to a fully functional multi-party democracy. Today, the island maintains its own governance, military, and foreign policy, while Beijing continues to claim it as part of its territory.

Newly released government data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has exposed a widespread surge in detentions of Iranian nationals carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that coincided with American and Israeli military strikes on Iran in 2025, according to the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

The advocacy group announced Wednesday that ICE ramped up arrests of people of Iranian citizenship and descent immediately following the escalation of conflict in the Middle East that began in late February 2025. Between the opening of U.S. military strikes in June 2025 and the following month, ICE recorded 300 total arrests: 220 detentions in June alone, and an additional 80 in July. This crackdown aligned with a major U.S. bombing campaign targeting three key Iranian nuclear sites—Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan—carried out after Israel launched its initial attack on Iran.

As of December 21, 2025, the total number of Iranian nationals held in ICE detention facilities across the country has reached 577. The demographic scope of these detentions is remarkably broad: records show the oldest detainee is 77 years old, while the youngest is a five-year-old child. The child was taken into custody in November, alongside individuals believed to be members of their immediate family, and is currently being held at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas.

NIAC’s analysis of the released records notes that seven of the 577 detained Iranians are legal permanent residents (LPRs), commonly known as green card holders. ICE has cited past criminal offenses as the official justification for holding these seven individuals. The full legal status of all detained Iranian nationals has not been disclosed by NIAC, and it remains unclear whether U.S. authorities provided complete information on statuses in their response to the FOIA request.

This wave of detentions is part of a broader, escalating administration push to revoke legal residency for Iranian nationals already residing within U.S. borders. Earlier in 2025, the Trump administration revoked the green cards of three Iranian nationals, including the son of a figure connected to the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Seyed Eissa Hashemi, his wife, and his son all lost their lawful permanent residence status; Hashemi is the son of former Iranian politician Masoumeh Ebtekar.

The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which launched on February 28, 2025, has drawn increased scrutiny to the targeting of Iranian community members within the U.S. by federal immigration authorities. In early April 2025, ICE arrested two women who had publicly claimed to be relatives of assassinated Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani. Subsequent reporting by Drop Site News, which verified the pair’s identities through Iranian birth records, government identification, family estate documents and other personal records, disproved these claims, confirming the women had no familial connection to Soleimani at all. In fact, outlet reporting found one of the women, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, had participated in anti-Islamic Republic protests in Iran during the 1990s and 2000s, and served a week in prison for her activism before resettling in the U.S.

The targeting of Iranian nationals comes as ICE broadens its crackdown on legal permanent residents across the U.S. In a separate high-profile case, Mohsen Mahdawi’s legal team confirmed Thursday that the U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals has reinstated deportation proceedings against the Palestinian green card holder. Mahdawi gained national attention for helping lead high-profile anti-war protests on Columbia University’s campus last year, and was originally detained by ICE during a scheduled citizenship interview in Vermont in mid-April 2024.

A confidential CIA assessment delivered to the Trump administration this week has directly contradicted senior U.S. officials’ public claims about Iran’s weakened military standing and economic vulnerability to a U.S. naval blockade, according to a Thursday report from The Washington Post.

On the economic front, the CIA estimates that Iran can withstand the ongoing U.S. naval blockade for an extended 90 to 120 days (three to four months) before it faces severe, widespread economic hardship. This projection is far longer than timelines offered by other independent analysts: Middle East Eye analysts have suggested Iran only has weeks of remaining oil storage capacity, while energy analytics firm Kpler estimated 25 to 30 days of storage before depletion in comments to The New York Times Wednesday. The Trump administration has pushed even more aggressive claims, with former President Trump telling Fox News last week that Iran’s oil infrastructure would collapse within three days due to overflowing storage.

The intelligence assessment also challenges the administration’s claims about Iran’s devastated missile and drone capabilities, coming after weeks of joint U.S. and Israeli bombardment targeting Iranian military sites. The CIA confirmed that Tehran still retains significant ballistic missile capabilities, contradicting Trump’s Wednesday statement from the Oval Office that 80 to 82 percent of Iran’s pre-strike missile and drone infrastructure had been destroyed. Citing an unnamed U.S. official, The Washington Post reports Iran still holds 75 percent of its pre-conflict inventory of mobile missile launchers and roughly 70 percent of its original missile stockpiles, and has successfully resumed operations at underground missile storage facilities previously targeted in strikes.

This disconnect between classified intelligence and public messaging has been ongoing for weeks: Trump and his top advisors have repeatedly insisted that U.S. and Israeli strikes have left Iran’s military crippled, even as Iran has demonstrated it retains full command and control over its forces and the ability to launch offensive attacks at will. U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth claimed in early April that Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli strike campaign, had decimated Iran’s military and left it combat-ineffective for years. Yet just this week, Iran launched over a dozen missiles and drones at targets in the United Arab Emirates in retaliation for a U.S. warship’s attempt to traverse the Strait of Hormuz. Iran also claimed it struck a U.S. warship in the attack, a claim the White House has denied.

The current standoff centers on the Strait of Hormuz, a strategically critical waterway where both the U.S. and Iran have imposed blockades to assert control. While Iran has been unable to move its own oil tankers out of the Gulf of Oman and past Hormuz, it has also blocked oil exports from neighboring Gulf states. Notably, Iran has alternative trade routes to mitigate the impact of the Hormuz blockade: it maintains access to the Caspian Sea for trade with regional nations including Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, and shares overland borders with seven neighboring countries. For critical staple goods, Iran is already 80 percent self-sufficient, further reducing its vulnerability to the naval embargo.

In a bombshell interview aired Wednesday on *The Tucker Carlson Show*, sitting Kentucky Republican Congressman Thomas Massie has made explosive claims that no less than 95 percent of campaign funding for his main primary challenger comes from national pro-Israel lobbying groups and out-of-state billionaires. The race, set to wrap up later this month, has emerged as one of the most heavily targeted Republican primaries in modern U.S. political history, according to Massie. First elected to Congress in 2012, Massie has carved out a unique niche on the American right as a vocal critic of endless foreign wars, unrestricted foreign aid, and a self-described skeptic of uncritical U.S. policy toward Israel. He has also drawn national attention for his uncompromising push to unseal all court documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein case, a stance that has put him at odds with establishment figures across both major parties. For years, Massie has also been a frequent target of former President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, which has thrown its full weight behind his opponent this cycle. Massie’s challenger, Ed Gallrein, is a former Navy Seal with low name recognition even among Kentucky voters, but his campaign has been flooded with outside cash from a coalition of pro-Israel advocacy groups led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Speaking to Carlson, Massie named additional backers including the Republican Jewish Coalition and Christians United for Israel, alongside three high-profile billionaires that have become major players in U.S. electoral politics: Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer, and John Paulson. None of these major donors are residents of Kentucky, Massie emphasized. “Their position is more war, more strife, more bombs, more foreign aid, and those are exactly the policies I have been voting against throughout my time in Congress,” Massie told Carlson. “That is the real reason this race has become competitive, and why I could lose. A foreign lobby has poured unprecedented funding into this race, on a scale they have never done in any Republican primary before.” To put the spending disparity in perspective: Massie’s own campaign has raised roughly $5 million total for this cycle, while pro-Gallrein forces have spent more than $10 million alone on negative attack ads targeting the incumbent. Among the attack content is an AI-generated deepfake video that falsely depicts Massie entering a hotel with members of “The Squad,” the high-profile group of progressive Democratic congresswomen. When Carlson asked why national pro-Israel groups and billionaires would care so deeply about the outcome of a small-state Republican House primary, Massie framed himself as a rare dissenting voice inside Congress on foreign policy matters. “If I lose on May 19, I’ll be out of Congress come January 3 next year,” Massie explained. “Nobody will follow my social media, I won’t be invited into the sensitive compartmented information facilities, the SCIFs, to read the classified interpretations of laws the executive branch uses to spy on American people. The one whistleblower, for all intents and purposes, inside Congress will be gone.” As public awareness of AIPAC’s election spending has grown in recent years, and American voters have increasingly grown weary of the U.S.’s unconditional diplomatic and military support for Israel, the lobbying group has adapted by obscuring its financial ties to preferred candidates, Massie claimed. According to his analysis, the groups are funneling direct cash from their donors to Gallrein’s campaign through an intermediary vendor named Democracy Engine, a platform that allows any donor to contribute to any candidate from any party without publicly linking the original donors to the spending. Carlson pushed back on the common narrative that criticism of pro-Israel lobbying amounts to anti-Israel or antisemitic rhetoric, noting that Massie’s position is simply rooted in opposition to U.S. foreign aid spending of any kind for foreign nations. “You didn’t even attack Israel. You’re not even hostile to Israel. That’s nothing to do with that at all,” Carlson said. “You just don’t think the U.S. government should be sending money for other countries, right?” Massie responded by confirming that stance, adding that it aligns with the views of his Kentucky constituents. This is not the first time AIPAC has poured massive sums of money into o sitting members of Congress it views as out of step with its policy goals. The group successfully defeated multiple progressive Democratic incumbents in recent cycles, including Missouri’s Cory Bush and New York’s Jamaal Bowman. This report originates from Middle East Eye, a media outlet focused on independent coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and global affairs. Late last year, the organization Democracy for the Arab World Now—founded by the late Washington Post and Middle East Eye journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in 2018—launched the “Faces of AIPAC” project, which published the identities and profiles of the key leaders who run the influential lobbying group.