TODAY

The U.S. Air Force is in the process of taking back responsibility for the Airborne Command Post (ABNCP) mission, better known by the nickname Looking Glass. ABNCP is a nuclear command and control mission set, which involves relaying orders to nuclear-capable bombers and silo-based Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles. In turn, the service is working up new requirements for future aircraft serving in this role, which are commonly referred to as ‘doomsday planes,’ and one option might be the forthcoming Boeing 747-based E-4C Survivable Airborne Operations Center (SAOC) jets.

Air Force Gen. Stephen Davis, head of Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC), talked about the future of Looking Glass and the E-4C during an exclusive interview with TWZ‘s Howard Altman. The U.S. Navy is separately working to retire its fleet of Boeing 707-based E-6B Mercury jets that currently serve in the Looking Glass role with joint crews that include Air Force personnel. The E-6Bs also perform the Navy’s Take Charge And Move Out (TACAMO) mission, which entails the ability to relay orders to Ohio class nuclear ballistic missile submarines, even if they are submerged. The Navy’s replacement E-130J Phoenix II aircraft will only be configured for the TACAMO mission.

This is Davis’ first interview since taking up his current post last November. He also discussed ongoing work on the B-21 Raider and other areas of interest for his command.

“In terms of the Looking Glass platform, we did get recently assigned, the Air Force did, that mission [and] that will come to Global Strike,” Davis said. “We’re currently developing the capabilities documents, the requirements for that.”

“No decision has been made on if that will be a separate platform, or that might be collocated or brought into the SAOC program,” Davis added. “So, no decision on that at this point.”

The E-4Cs are set to supplant the Air Force’s current fleet of four E-4B Nightwatch aircraft, also known as the National Airborne Operations Center (NAOC). Three of those planes started their careers in the 1970s as E-4A Advanced Airborne Command Posts (AACP) before being upgraded to the E-4B standard. The fourth E-4B was acquired separately in the 1980s. The E-4Bs are all based on the older 747-200 models that have become steadily more difficult to operate and maintain. Boeing shuttered the 747 production line entirely in 2022. As such, the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is converting newer 747-8is acquired second-hand from Korean Air into E-4Cs.

The E-4Bs and future E-4Cs are both also described as ‘doomsday planes,’ but are also capable of acting as larger and more robust flying command centers than the E-6Bs.

For the Looking Glass mission, the current E-4Bs do lack a key feature: the Airborne Launch Control System (ALCS). With the ALCS, the E-6Bs can directly command the launch of Minuteman III missiles while in flight. This creates an additional obstacle to any adversary that might seek to prevent the use of these silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles with a first strike targeting ground-based command and control links. It is worth noting here that the main purpose of the Minuteman III force is as a ‘warhead sponge’ that would require an opponent to expend substantial resources on trying to neutralize it in any nuclear exchange.

Witness History: Unarmed ICBM Test Launch – 625th Strategic Operations Squadron

One E-4B was test-fitted with ALCS in the past, at a time when the Air Force envisioned those aircraft taking over the Looking Glass mission from EC-135Cs used in that role at the time. The service subsequently decided it was too expensive to use the NAOCs for that mission. Looking Glass passed to the Navy’s E-6s after the EC-135Cs were retired in the late 1990s.

The prospect now of using the E-4C in this role raises similar cost, as well as capacity questions. As noted, the SAOCs will be configured from the outset as more capable flying command centers for use by top U.S. officials, including the President of the United States. Looking Glass has somewhat similar, but different mission requirements, including when it comes to aircraft that have be available at all times.

All that being said, the SAOC fleet is set to be larger than the NAOC fleet. AFGSC’s Gen. Davis confirmed in the interview that the Air Force is looking to acquire six E-4Cs, at a minimum, and potentially up to eight of the jets. Previously released U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contracting documents had already discussed plans for improvements at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska to accommodate as many as eight SAOC jets. Offutt is currently home to the E-4B and E-6B fleets.

The Air Force could still look to other platforms to perform the Looking Glass mission. Last year, Congress pushed to have the service report back on whether a C-130 Hercules-based design like the one the Navy is now pursuing for TACAMO could be another option. A business jet might be another starting place. It is even possible that part of the mission could migrate in another direction entirely with the help of space-based communications capabilities.

Last month, the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) announced it would be hosting an industry day for a Looking Glass-Next (LG-N) program to provide information to prospective vendors.

“The LG-N program is aimed at recapitalizing missions currently executed on the E-6B,” according to the notice. “The Government is seeking information on industry’s ability to deliver a complete weapon system to include aircraft, mission systems, training systems, system integration lab, training, and ground support systems.”

Whether or not the E-4Cs end up being part of the LG-N solution, and what other aircraft might serve in this role in the future, remains to be seen. Regardless, the Air Force is now well on its way to taking back control of the Looking Glass mission.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

US President Donald Trump has announced he is raising tariffs on South Korean imports to 25% after accusing Seoul of “not living up” to a trade deal reached last year.

In a post on social media, Trump said he would increase levies on South Korea from 15% across a range of products including automobiles, lumber, pharmaceuticals and “all other Reciprocal TARIFFS”.

Trump said South Korean lawmakers have been slow to approve the deal while “we have acted swiftly to reduce our TARIFFS in line with the Transaction agreed to”.

South Korea says it had not been given official notice of the decision to raise tariffs on some of its goods, and wanted urgent talks with Washington over the issue.

It added that South Korea’s Industry Minister Kim Jung-kwan, who is currently in Canada, will visit Washington as soon as possible to meet US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

South Korea’s benchmark Kospi stock index fell on Tuesday morning but was trading about 1.8% higher later in the day as shares in major exporters recovered.

Seoul and Washington reached a deal last October, which included a pledge from South Korea to invest $350bn (£256bn) in the US, some of which would go to shipbuilding.

The following month, the two countries agreed that the US would reduce tariffs on some products once South Korea started the process to approve the deal.

The agreement was submitted to South Korea’s National Assembly on 26 November and is currently being reviewed. It is likely to be passed in February, according to local media.

Tariffs are paid by companies who import products. In this case, US firms will pay a 25% tax on goods they buy from South Korea.

Trump has frequently used tariffs as leverage to enact foreign policy during his second term in the White House.

On Saturday, he threatened Canada with a 100% tariff if it struck a trade deal with China.

On Monday, Chinese officials said its “strategic partnership” agreement with Canada is not meant to undercut other countries.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has said his country was not pursuing a free trade deal with China and has “never” considered it.

He added that Canadian officials have made their position clear to their American counterparts.

Before that, Trump said he would impose import taxes on eight countries – including the UK – who opposed US plans to seize Greenland, an autonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark which is a member of Nato.

He later backed down from the tariff threat over Greenland citing progress towards a “future deal” over the island, but the episode strained US relations with Denmark and other Nato allies.

A writer for a right-wing website asked the White House spokesperson a leading question about the killing of Alex Pretti by immigration agents in Minnesota, prompting an attack on the “liberal biased media.”

Mérida, January 26, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – Delegates from governments, parliaments, and social movements across the globe gathered in Bogotá, Colombia, on January 25 for the inaugural “Nuestra América” summit.

Convened by the Progressive International at the San Carlos Palace, the emergency congress aimed to establish a unified strategy against what participants described as a “rapidly escalating assault” on Latin American sovereignty.

The high-level meeting, featuring 90 people from more than 20 countries, took place against a backdrop of heightened regional tensions and the Trump administration’s express intent to impose its dictates in the Western hemisphere.

The summit was triggered by the events of January 3, when US forces launched “Operation Absolute Resolve,” involving targeted bombings in Caracas and surrounding areas. The attacks killed over 100 people and drew near-universal condemnation from progressive forces who blasted the operation as a flagrant violation of the UN Charter.

The military incursion saw special forces kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. The pair will face trial in New York on charges including narco-trafficking conspiracy, to which both pleaded not guilty during the arraignment hearing on January 5. Venezuelan officials have repeatedly denounced the kidnapping and demanded Maduro and Flores’ release and return.

The “San Carlos Declaration,” adopted at the close of the Bogotá summit on Sunday, characterized the current moment as a “new age of colonial violence” driven by a “revived Monroe Doctrine and a new ‘Trump Corollary’”.

The text asserted that “the defense of sovereignty in the hemisphere is inseparable from the defense of international law at the global level,” calling for a “coordinated international solidarity” to halt US coercive actions.

“We, the delegates at the inaugural convening of Nuestra América in Bogotá, Colombia, affirm the shared horizon of: a hemisphere that governs itself, defends its peoples, and speaks in its own voice,” the document read. Delegates committed to a “common strategy” to “project Nuestra América as a force for sovereignty and solidarity.”

The gathering featured high-level bilateral exchanges, as well as working groups led by grassroots movements. The final statement emphasized the importance of popular power to defend working-class interests and build international solidarity.

In the coming weeks, the “Nuestra América” movement plans to intensify its diplomatic activity, with a second major meeting already scheduled to take place in Havana, Cuba.

Code Pink’s Latin America coordinator Michelle Ellner attended the Bogotá summit and told Venezuelanalysis that it is urgent to confront a US project of “hemispheric domination that combines military intervention, lawfare, and repression.”

“No country or movement alone can confront the US military and financial apparatus,” she argued. “But together, states, peoples and social movements can continue building an anti-imperialist movement that can sustain those who are currently fighting politically.”

Ellner noted that progressive movements have historically been fractured but that they need to go from “reaction to action.” The Venezuelan-US organizer explained that Code Pink and allied groups are coordinating legislative pressure and mobilizations within the US to challenge the “normalization of intervention.”

Acting government promotes “coexistence and peace”

In Venezuela, Acting President Delcy Rodríguez launched the “Program for Democratic Coexistence and Peace” on Friday during a televised broadcast.

According to Rodríguez, the initiative seeks to “heal the fractures” caused by political violence and “eradicate expressions of hate” that threaten national stability in the wake of the US’ recent attacks and threats.

The program is overseen by a diverse committee led by Minister of Culture Ernesto Villegas alongside several other cabinet members, former business leader Ricardo Cusanno, and various social activists. 

The acting president emphasized the need for political dialogue among different Venezuelan political forces without meddling from Washington and other foreign actors. The government announced plans to present a new law to the National Assembly to institutionalize the initiative.

In recent weeks, Venezuelan judicial authorities have likewise released opposition agents, some of them having been accused of treason and terrorism, as well as people accused of involvement in the unrest that followed the July 2024 presidential elections. Caracas has reported 626 released and invited the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to accompany the process.

Edited by Ricardo Vaz in Caracas.

US federal immigration raids continue in Minnesota, and the operation has set the stage for a standoff between state officials and the federal government. Governor Tim Walz has readied Minnesota’s national guard, while the Pentagon has ordered troops to be on standby. A 2024 University of Pennsylvania simulation warned that similar state-federal standoffs could escalate into broader armed conflict.

In this episode: 

• Claire Finkelstein (@COFinkelstein),  Center for Ethics and Rule of Law, University of Pennsylvania

Episode credits:

This episode was produced by Chloe K. Li and Melanie Marich, with Phillip Lanos, Spencer Cline, Tamara Khandaker, Sonia Bhagat and our guest host, Manuel Rapalo. It was edited by Kylene Kiang. 

The Take production team is Marcos Bartolomé, Sonia Bhagat, Spencer Cline, Sarí el-Khalili, Tamara Khandaker, Kylene Kiang, Phillip Lanos, Chloe K. Li, Melanie Marich, and Noor Wazwaz. Our host is Malika Bilal.

Our engagement producers are Adam Abou-Gad and Vienna Maglio. Andrew Greiner is lead of audience engagement. 

Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad al-Melhem. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio. 

Connect with us:

@AJEPodcasts on X, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube

Verified videos emerging from Iran show bodies piled up in a hospital, snipers stationed on buildings and CCTV cameras being destroyed, following the unprecedented crackdown on protests earlier this month.

BBC Verify has been tracking the spread of protests across Iran since they first erupted in late December, but the near total internet blackout imposed by the authorities has made it extremely difficult to document the scale of the state’s deadly crackdown on protesters.

The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) says it has confirmed the killing of nearly 6,000 people, including 5,633 protesters, since the unrest began at the end of December. It says it is also currently investigating another 17,000 reported deaths received despite an internet shutdown after nearly three weeks.

Another group, the Norway-based Iran Human Rights (IHR), has warned that the final toll could exceed 25,000.

Iranian authorities said last week that more than 3,100 people were killed, but that the majority were security personnel or bystanders attacked by “rioters”.

The latest videos to emerge from the country are understood to have been filmed on 8 and 9 January, when thousands of people took to the streets following a call for nationwide protests from Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late Shah.

They are thought to be the deadliest nights for protesters so far and these newly verified videos show how Iran’s security forces have been violently cracking down on protesters.

Multiple clips analysed by BBC Verify and BBC Persian show bodies piled up inside a mortuary at Tehranpars hospital in east Tehran. We verified the location of the hospital by matching its interior to other publicly available images and videos of the building, and counted at least 31 bodies in just one video. Another clip shows seven body bags laid on the ground outside the hospital’s entrance.

Hundreds of people are seen protesting on a highway in west Tehran in another video before multiple rounds of gunfire can be heard and people begin to scream.

Protesters have also been seen trying to evade Iran’s heavy surveillance infrastructure by disabling CCTV cameras. Footage we verified shows one person in the capital climbing up a post and hitting a surveillance camera several times in an attempt to disable it. A huge crowd of protesters can be seen on the ground and heard cheering as the camera is damaged.

We have tracked the spread of the anti-government protests across 71 towns and cities in Iran, though the true number of areas where demonstrations have taken place is likely far higher.

In the south-eastern city of Kerman a video taken from high up in a building shows several armed men in military uniform walking down a road firing their weapons continuously, though it is not clear who they are shooting at. A small fire burns in the middle of the road while the sound of protesters chanting can be heard in the background.

Snipers have also been recorded on the roofs of buildings. In the north-eastern city of Mashhad verified video shows two men dressed in black on a rooftop of a building in daylight. One man is standing next to a large rifle that is lent against a wall and speaking on the phone. The other man crouches on the floor while smoking.

For most people there has been an almost-total internet blackout since 8 January, but some have managed to briefly access the internet using methods such as SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet and virtual private networks (VPNs).

More videos are likely to emerge in the coming days as the country’s economy has struggled during the blackout.

Additional reporting BBC Persian.

Seven of the 11 teams were running on Monday – Red Bull, Mercedes, Racing Bulls, Haas, Alpine and the new Audi and Cadillac teams.

McLaren said last week that they would not take their car on to the track until after day one as a result of trying to maximise design time. Ferrari, after an initial test at their factory last week, had also announced they would not run on Monday.

Aston Martin have said their new car will not be ready until Thursday, and Williams are missing the test entirely after delays to their design and production programme.

No times were issued, and all teams ran into at least some technical issues as they learned about their new cars.

Rival teams were impressed by the amount of mileage the two Red Bull teams managed considering it was the first full day of running with their new in-house engine, which has been developed in conjunction with new partner Ford.

Before the test started, McLaren and Red Bull revealed images of their 2026 cars for the first time.

McLaren, who won the drivers’ and constructors’ championship double last year for the first time since 1998, showed the car in the one-off testing livery it will run in this week.

Red Bull showed studio shots of their car, carefully chosen to disguise key design features.

Russell added: “We are pleased with our day, but I’ve also been impressed by several other teams.

“The Red Bull power unit has completed a lot of laps which, given that it’s their first engine they’ve built, means they’ve clearly done a good job.

“Haas also managed a similar amount of running to ourselves, so the Ferrari power unit has also put together plenty of mileage. It’s not quite how it was in 2014! The sport has evolved so much since then and the level, in every single aspect, is so high now.”

Audi have taken over the Sauber team for the German car company’s first entry into F1. They suffered a reliability issue that prevented Bortoleto driving in the afternoon.

Team principal Jonathan Wheatley said: “We had a technical issue, spotted it and decided to switch the car off. Plenty of testing this year and wanted to really understand the problems, see what the weather conditions are and decide whether we run tomorrow.”

Rain is forecast for Tuesday’s second day of the test, during which teams are permitted to run on a maximum of three of the available days.

Bortoleto said: “The cars are very different. I feel these are going to be slower but it’s very cool to have the power unit being 50% electric – you go out of the corner and you have so much speed being deployed and you can see how strong the engine is.

“You need to adapt but it’s still a racing car.”

Racing Bulls’ Lawson said: “[The car is] very different to drive and I haven’t got my head around it fully yet. We will keep learning. It feels like there is a lot more we can do as drivers to make a difference, potentially, but right now it’s very early days, very hard to know where we are for now just trying to optimise the car.

“[The power unit] feels good. But it’s very hard to tell – the main thing is reliability at the moment.

“We have done a good amount of laps today and the only issues we had today were safety precautions, not actual issues. But hard to know where we’re at compared to everyone else.”

The U.S. military buildup for a possible attack on or from Iran took another step forward Monday as the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group (CSG) entered the U.S. Central Command region, a U.S. official confirmed to The War Zone Monday morning. Meanwhile, Iran on Monday said it was “prepared to defend itself against any new aggression” while its proxies in Yemen and Iraq have vowed to enter the fight on Tehran’s behalf. The Houthis on Monday released a video suggesting an attack on the Lincoln. More on that later in this story.

Elements of the Lincoln CSG were dispatched to the region from the South China Sea by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to strike Iran over its brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests, resulting in thousands killed. The carrier, along with three Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers escorting it (and usually a fast attack nuclear submarine), is currently located in the Indian Ocean, a U.S. Navy official confirmed to The War Zone.

The arrival of the Lincoln CSG to the region follows a U.S. Air Force Central (AFCENT) announcement on Sunday that it will be conducting Agile Spartan, “a multi-day readiness exercise to demonstrate the ability to deploy, disperse, and sustain combat airpower across the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility.” AFCENT told us that Agile Spartan is “part of its regular exercise schedule and not in response to current tensions.” However, the optics of the timing are hard to avoid.

All these moves come amid a large surge of offensive and defensive assets to the Middle East. As we have previously reported, at least a dozen additional F-15E Strike Eagle fighters have been deployed to Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, along with cargo jets and aerial refueling tankers across the region. In addition, online flight tracking indicates the movement of new air and missile defense systems to the Middle East as well. As we projected, the U.S. is sending additional Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems to the Middle East for increased protection from any Iranian attack, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Despite the buildup, it remains unclear what orders Trump will issue. Aside from threatening to strike Iran, Trump on Jan. 13 also promised those taking to the streets that help was on its way.

However, he relented after being told the killings would stop and reportedly called off a strike against Iran last week. According to some accounts, Trump does not want to become involved in a protracted battle with Iran while still contemplating regime change. There are lingering concerns in Washington and Jerusalem about not having enough assets in the region to defend against an expected Iranian response, which in part led Israel to urge Trump to hold off any attack. This was also our analysis at the time.

Regardless of his intent, the influx of additional assets to the region will give Trump a greater range of potential action and allow for the ability to defend against an Iranian attack, whether in response to U.S. military actions or not. 

The Lincoln CSG would boost U.S. striking power in the region. Its embarked CVW-9 Carrier Air Wing consists of eight squadrons flying F-35C Lightning II, F/A-18E/F Super Hornets, EA-18G Growlers, E-2D Hawkeyes, CMV-22B Ospreys and MH-60R/S Sea Hawks. Its escorts, the Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers USS Frank E Petersen Jr., USS Michael Murphy, and the USS Spruance of Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 21 bring a large number of missile tubes that could be used to strike Iran. These vessels could also be used in the defense of U.S. and allied targets during a reprisal.

The presence of Strike Eagles in the region, especially those coming from RAF Lakenheath, is in itself not new. These jets have maintained a steady presence at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan for nearly a decade, and their recent arrival in the Middle East was largely expected due to the current instability and saber-rattling. F-15Es played a key role in defending against multiple Iranian drone and cruise missile barrages on Israel and they are now more capable of that mission than ever. Beyond its offensive capabilities, if Iran were to launch a major attack on Israel and/or U.S. assets in the region, preemptive or in retaliation, the F-15Es would play a key part in defending against those attacks.

In addition to U.S. assets, the Royal Air Force’s “joint Typhoon squadron with Qatar, 12 Squadron, has deployed to the Gulf for defensive purposes, noting regional tensions as part of the UK-Qatar Defense Assurance Agreement, demonstrating the strong and enduring defense relationship between the U.K. and Qatar,” the U.K. Defense Ministry (MoD) announced on Thursday.

RAF Typhoon jets have deployed to Qatar in a defensive capacity.

The UK and Qatar have been close defence partners for decades. This deployment builds on that relationship, supporting regional stability and keeping us secure at home and strong abroad. pic.twitter.com/83FkaBPJng

— Ministry of Defence 🇬🇧 (@DefenceHQ) January 22, 2026

While these are significant additions to the standing force posture in the region, more fighter aircraft would be expected for a major operation against Iran. We have not seen evidence of those kinds of movements just yet, although some movements are not identified via open sources.

Beyond tactical combat aircraft in the region, the U.S. can fly bombers there from the continental United States, as was the case when B-2 Spirits attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer last June. However, satellite imagery observed by The War Zone shows that no aircraft have arrived for a sustained operation in the Middle East.

As U.S. assets pour into the region, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad highlighted a warning Trump delivered to Iran last week.

“We have a big flotilla going in that direction, and we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters Thursday afternoon aboard Air Force One. “We have a big force going toward Iran. I’d rather not see anything happen, but we’re watching them very closely.”

Israel, for its part, is preparing for both offensive and defensive actions toward Iran, its longtime archenemy.

IDF Northern Command chief Maj. Gen. Rafi Milo said Sunday that the military is preparing for the possibility that a US strike on Iran could trigger Iranian retaliation against Israel, according to Israeli media.

“We don’t know where this is heading,” Milo said in remarks broadcast by Channel 12 News, as tensions continue to mount,” the Times of Israel noted. “We see the force buildup the Americans are carrying out, both in the Persian Gulf and throughout the Middle East.”

Milo said the military is on heightened alert for any escalation, should the US decide to attack Iran.

“We are prepared and ready so that if the U.S. decides to strike Iran, we understand it could affect Israel, with part of the Iranian response possibly reaching here,” he said.

“The IDF is preparing for a possible American strike this coming weekend,” a high-ranking IDF official told us on Monday. “But again, there is no certainty.”

“Everything depends on the mind of one man,” he added, referring to Trump.

In another sign of a potential new conflict, Israel’s civil authority has told foreign airlines that Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 could be a period of security sensitivity, a likely reference to a U.S. military strike on Iran. If Israeli airspace is closed, foreign airlines will be given priority of exit.

Israel civil air authority tells foreign airlines that 31 January & 1 February might be the start of a period of security sensitivity (hinting at possible US military strikes on Iran). If Israeli airspace is closed, foreign airlines given priority of exit. https://t.co/HStZIOjwtN

— David M. Witty (@DavidMWitty1) January 25, 2026

CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper was recently in Jerusalem to talk about regional security issues. Israel’s Channel 14 news, a right-wing outlet closely aligned with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that Cooper and IDF officials have yet to come up with an attack date, that the U.S. “will need time to build up a significant force,” but will strike immediately if needed.

The U.S., according to the news outlet, wants “a clean, swift, and inexpensive operation” to “focus on those who harmed civilians and protesters. America is “ready to replace the regime in Iran,” Channel 14 added.

The War Zone could not independently verify these claims. Neither CENTCOM nor the IDF put out official statements on these conversations.

Summary of the meeting between CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper and senior IDF officials:

— No date for an attack on Iran

— The Americans will need time to build up significant force

— US also for an immediate strike if necessary

— The Americans want a clean, swift, and… https://t.co/7CuO62LPSc

— Faytuks News (@Faytuks) January 25, 2026

Iranian officials maintain that they are prepared to fight both the U.S. and Israel.

Iran’s Defense Ministry spokesperson Gen. Reza Talaei-Nik warned Israel and the U.S. over any potential attack, saying it would “be met with a response that is more painful and more decisive than in the past.” Talaei-Nik was likely referring to the limited response Iran took in June 2025, attacking Al Udeid Air Base in retaliation for the Midnight Hammer strike.

“Iran is fully prepared to defend itself in the event of any renewed aggression,” said First Vice President Mohammad-Reza Aref. He stressed that “comprehensive forecasts have been made and a structured economic plan has been designed to confront a potential future war.”

Spokesperson of the Iranian Foreign Ministry:

“We face daily threats from the U.S. and Israel, as they aim to undermine regional security.”

“If we are subjected to any aggression, Iran’s response will be comprehensive.”

“Any attempts to destabilize the region will not target… pic.twitter.com/dGeWj2B6bI

— Global Insight Journal (@GlobalIJournal) January 26, 2026

Any U.S. or Israeli military action would come without the tacit support of the United Arab Emirates.

“The UAE affirms its commitment to not allowing the use of its airspace, territory, or waters in any military operations against Iran,” the UAE Foreign Affairs Ministry announced on X. “The Ministry of Foreign Affairs affirmed that the UAE is committed to not allowing the use of its airspace, territory, or waters in any hostile military operations against Iran, and not providing any logistical support in this regard. It renewed its affirmation of the UAE’s belief that enhancing dialogue, reducing escalation, adhering to international laws, and respecting state sovereignty represent the optimal foundations for addressing current crises, emphasizing the UAE’s approach based on the necessity of resolving disputes through diplomatic means.”

الإمارات تؤكد التزامها بعدم السماح باستخدام أجوائها أو أراضيها أو مياهها في أي أعمال عسكرية ضد إيران

أكدت وزارة الخارجية أن دولة الإمارات تلتزم بعدم السماح باستخدام أجوائها أو أراضيها أو مياهها في أي أعمال عسكرية عدائية ضد إيران، وعدم تقديم أي دعم لوجستي في هذا الشأن.

وجددت…

— Afra Al Hameli (@AfraMalHameli) January 26, 2026

Iran is not the only threat facing the U.S. and Israel. Iranian proxies like the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis of Yemen and Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah paramilitary group have all vowed to respond to any strike on Iran.

The Houthis, who waged a campaign against U.S. and allied military and commercial shipping from Nov. 2023 to May 2025, released a new video on Monday suggesting a missile and drone strike on the Lincoln.

The Israeli Air Force is stepping up attacks on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, partly to blunt the group’s ability to join any Iranian retaliation. Hezbollah is already a shadow of prior self after Israel executed a protracted campaign to decimate the group.

IDF says it killed Hezbollah artillery chief Muhammad al-Husseini in southern Lebanon

Separately eliminated Jawad Basma, a Hezbollah operative linked to weapons manufacturing pic.twitter.com/hs307ZbY6T

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) January 25, 2026

The death toll from the unrest that began in Iran on Dec. 28 over rising prices, devalued currency that saw the rial crater now to basically nothing, a devastating drought, and brutal government crackdowns may be in the tens of thousands.

“As many as 30,000 people could have been killed in the streets of Iran on Jan. 8 and 9 alone,” TIME reported, citing two senior officials of the country’s Ministry of Health. “So many people were slaughtered by Iranian security services on that Thursday and Friday, it overwhelmed the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead. Stocks of body bags were exhausted, the officials said, and eighteen-wheel semi-trailers replaced ambulances.”

As U.S. military assets continue to flow into the region, this remains an increasingly tense situation that could erupt without notice. We will continue to monitor it and provide updates.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

At least 80 people, including 19 members of an elite marine force, are missing and feared buried in a landslide in Indonesia’s West Bandung. The death toll has risen to 17. A massive search operation is underway including thousands of rescue workers.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says Europe will not ‘tolerate unthinkable behaviour, such as digital undressing of women and children’.

The European Commission has launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, regarding the creation of sexually explicit fake images of women and minors.

The commission announced on Monday that its investigation would examine whether the AI tool used on X has met its legal obligations under the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires social media companies to address illegal and harmful online content.

Brussels said the investigation would examine whether X had properly mitigated “risks related to the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, such as manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material”.

In a statement to the AFP news agency, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Europe will not “tolerate unthinkable behaviour, such as digital undressing of women and children”.

“It is simple – we will not hand over consent and child protection to tech companies to violate and monetise. The harm caused by illegal images is very real,” she added.

Grok has faced a recent outcry after it was uncovered that users could ask the chatbot to create deepfakes of women and children by simply using prompts such as “put her in a bikini” or “remove her clothes”.

EU tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen said the rights of women and children in the EU should not be “collateral damage” of X’s services.

“Non-consensual sexual deepfakes of women and children are a violent, unacceptable form of degradation,” Virkkunen said in a statement.

X has been under investigation by the EU over its digital content rules since December 2023.

This month, Grok said it would restrict image generation and editing to paying customers after criticism of the tool’s capabilities.

A nonprofit organisation, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, published a report last week that found Grok had generated an estimated 3 million sexualised images of women and children in a matter of days.

In December, the EU ordered X to pay a 120-million-euro ($140m) fine for violating the DSA’s transparency obligations.

The EU is not the only body investigating Grok’s tool; the United Kingdom’s media regulator, Ofcom, announced it had launched an investigation into X to determine whether it had complied with requirements under the UK’s Online Safety Act.

An overnight explosion at a biscuit factory in Trikala, Greece, has killed at least four workers. Investigators are working to determine the cause of the blast, which authorities believe may have originated near the factory’s ovens.

In 2007, Gustavo Petro was visiting Washington, DC, when he made an unusual request: to accompany his host’s friend on a school pickup run.

At the time, Petro was a rising star in the Colombian Senate who was in the United States to receive the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award for exposing politicians’ ties to paramilitary groups. His host was Sanho Tree, director of drug policy at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

“That’s something I can’t do in Colombia,” Tree remembered Petro telling him. “If your assassins know you’re going to pick up your kid at a certain time, that’s extremely dangerous.”

Such dangers were not new to Petro.

He began his career being hunted by soldiers as an armed rebel with the M-19, an underground student movement that sought a fairer, more democratic Colombia. After laying down his rifle, he became a whistleblowing senator, holding hearings on the shadowy alliance between politicians and paramilitary groups that reached the highest echelons of power – and earned him a price on his head from a paramilitary leader.

Throughout, he has pursued the same issues in a country torn apart by decades of armed conflict and where land has long been concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few.

“One thing we can say about Petro is that he’s been consistent,” said Alejandro Gaviria, Petro’s former education minister, who has been both a critic and ally of the president.

“If you watch an interview of his 20 years ago, he has exactly the same ideas. Then he was talking about peace, land reform; he was even ahead of his time talking about environmental issues.”

In 2022, Petro was elected the first left-wing president of the South American country and entered the presidential palace with promises to lead Colombia in a more equitable, eco-friendly direction.

On the international stage, he has been a rare figure among Latin American leaders as an outspoken critic of US President Donald Trump. After the US attacked Venezuela in early January and abducted the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, Trump threatened military action against Colombia. The former rebel responded by saying he would “take up arms” again to defend Colombia. A detente soon followed after a phone call between the leaders.

As Petro has struggled to put his ideas into practice throughout his term and faced tensions with Trump, what drives Colombia’s president?

Bookish rebel

Petro was born in 1960 to a middle-class family in the Caribbean coastal town of Cienaga de Oro, but spent much of his childhood in the rainy capital, Bogota, and his teenage years in the city of Zipaquira.​

From a young age, he questioned authority.

“He likes discussion, but not dogma,” his father, Gustavo Petro Sierra, once said in an interview where he recalled an incident when his son was three. He had tried to punish his son by slapping his hand, but missed and accidentally struck his face. Petro had looked his father in the eye and yelled, “Don’t hit me in the face, Dad!”

Petro’s father, a teacher, inspired his son’s love of reading, and Petro was particularly influenced by the celebrated novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His father gave him a copy as a birthday gift when he was a child, according to former Culture Minister Juan David Correa, who met Petro in 2021 as the editor of his memoir.

The magical realism epic immortalises Colombia’s civil wars and class struggles through the saga of the Buendia family through the 19th and early 20th centuries. After independence from Spain in 1810, Colombia experienced intermittent warfare between its two main political factions: the secular, reformist Liberals and the Conservatives, who wanted to maintain the Catholic, colonial status quo.

“That was a book that was definitive in our lives as Colombians,” explained Correa, noting Petro’s belief that Colombians must know their history.

“We have to know who these oligarchies or aristocracies are that ruled the country over the past 200 years of solitude [since independence], as [Petro] called it.”

In the colonial era, the Spanish oversaw a feudal-like system in which landless campesinos (rural workers) toiled for a pittance on behalf of wealthy landowners. In the Colombia that Petro grew up in, this system persisted. Even at the dawn of the new millennium, only 1 percent of landowners possessed half the arable land.

As a boy, Petro’s mother, Clara Nubia Urrego, would tell him stories about the turmoil in the country, including the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Gaitan, a presidential candidate for the Liberals, called for reforms, including land distribution, which landowners fiercely opposed. His murder in 1948 kicked off a decade of bloodshed, known as La Violencia, between Liberal armed rebels and the Conservative government.

A truce in 1958 led to a power-sharing arrangement between the Liberal and Conservative parties, known as the National Front. Things had seemingly calmed by the early 1960s, but in 1964, inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the remaining Liberal rebels roaming the countryside came together as the communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN).

Meanwhile, the National Front blocked any legitimate alternatives, going so far as to rig the election on April 19, 1970 against the populist ANAPO (National Popular Alliance), which attracted people fed up with the two-party system, including Petro’s mother, who had joined the party. Seeing his mother’s sadness at the election results became Petro’s political awakening. He was 10.

At his Catholic school in Zipaquira, Petro and three other friends formed a study group and pledged to dedicate their lives to a better Colombia. They read Alternativa, a left-wing magazine founded by Garcia Marquez, which ran interviews with Chilean and Argentinian rebels and criticised the US sway over Latin America. They became involved with local unions, bringing together workers, salt miners and teachers.

In his memoir, Petro recalls his “communist” beliefs did not make him popular with priests or his classmates whose parents hung portraits of Spain’s fascist dictator General Francisco Franco on their walls. But he credits his high school as the place where he learned about liberation theology, a strand of Catholicism that advocates uplifting the oppressed.

“Since then, love for the poor has remained by my side,” he wrote.

“I didn’t learn that from Marxism, but from liberation theology.”

Occupying a hillside

In 1978, after enrolling at university in Bogota to study economics, Petro was handed a document by Pio Quinto Jaimes, a teacher involved in activist circles. It outlined the goals of an underground student movement known as the 19th of April Movement or M-19, named after the 1970 election. Jaimes was impressed by Petro’s work with the unions and considered him a worthwhile prospect for the group.

Although often described as “urban guerrillas”, M-19 was distinct from the uniformed rebels of the FARC or the ELN. Whereas the FARC recruited from rural workers and wanted a Cuban-style Marxist revolution, M-19 mainly consisted of politicised students who sought social democracy, denied by the two-party system.

Unlike the FARC’s camouflaged commandos, who would raid army outposts before disappearing into the jungle, M-19 operated in the cities and preferred symbolic stunts such as stealing the sword of Simon Bolivar, Colombia’s 19th-century liberation hero, from a Bogota museum.

“Bolivar has not died,” read a note they left behind. “His sword continues his fight. It now falls into our hands, where it is pointed at the hearts of those who exploit Colombia.”

The M-19 hijacked milk trucks to redivert the goods to poorer neighbourhoods, and orchestrated kidnappings targeting Colombia’s wealthy elite.

Petro read the document from cover to cover.

“The movement connected me with the reality of the country, with my mother’s stories about Gaitan, Bolivar, and the ANAPO,” he wrote in his memoirs. “It was as if it had struck a chord that intensely stirred some fibres within me.”

Petro, along with two of his high school study group friends, joined the M-19.

Although he learned to use a gun, he did not take part in armed operations. He was instead tasked with disseminating propaganda. He took on the nom de guerre Aureliano, after a rebel leader in Marquez’s novel.

After graduation, Petro returned to Zipaquira and was elected an ombudsman, a public advocate, in 1981, to hear residents’ complaints about the local government.

In the early 1980s, Petro edited a newsletter – Letter to the People – where he called on readers to occupy a hillside on the outskirts and turn it into a housing project for poor people. Some 400 impoverished families answered the call and found 22-year-old Petro and a group of young activists measuring out 6-by-12 metre (19.7×39.4 feet) plots. There were no wells or sewage, and residents had to collect rainwater.

The squatters were eventually granted permission to stay by the mayor, and the community evolved into a neighbourhood named Bolivar 83.

‘My youth was over’

By 1984, as peace negotiations between the government and M-19 gained momentum, Petro publicly acknowledged his involvement in the group.

“I did so at a demonstration that was one of the largest in the municipality’s history,” he said in an interview. “From then on, my life changed. My youth was over.”

After telling the crowd he belonged to M-19, Petro stepped back to applause.

But not everyone was pleased.

Petro’s father, who had no idea about his son’s secret life, was shocked by the risks he had been taking.

The talks with the government soon fell apart, meaning M-19 members were once again targets for arrest. Petro was forced to go underground.

He lay low in Bolivar 83, sleeping in different beds each night, and wore a disguise, a yellow dress and a wig, pretending to be a woman.

Around this time, Petro had a psychedelic revelation under the guidance of a shaman on a sacred mountain. Drinking ayahuasca, a powerful Amazonian brew, he experienced intense visions. The first showed an Indigenous princess descending from above as he was enveloped by roots.

“What does this mean?” he asked the shaman.

“Well, you are like a spirit taking care of nature,” the spiritual healer replied.

Petro, who recounted this experience in the book Children of the Amazon (2023), said this was the moment he realised his responsibility towards the environment. His second vision was more troubling: he saw his own death during an ambush.

In October 1985, soldiers poured into Bolivar 83, scouring the neighbourhood for M-19 rebels and intimidating residents. A terrified boy revealed the secret tunnels where Petro was hiding.

Petro was arrested, tortured for four days in a military barracks, and imprisoned. He served 16 months for possession of weapons, which he claimed were planted.

While imprisoned, he missed the birth of his first son, Nicolas. Katia Burgos, his wife, who he had known since childhood, was also with M-19.

Meanwhile, Colombia’s internal armed conflict escalated beyond the rebels and the government.

The rise of narcos

The emergence of drug cartels or narcotics traffickers, aka narcos, added another dimension to the conflict.

Cocaine, a white powder refined from coca leaves, gained popularity in the 1970s, fuelled partly by US disco culture. Initially, Colombia was mainly a transit point for cocaine smuggled from Peru or Bolivia, but it was not long before coca cultivation expanded within Colombia, soon becoming the most viable livelihood in rural areas.

Cocaine barons and other wealthy businessmen began bankrolling private armies and paramilitaries to protect their families and property from armed rebels.

Although both were engaged in criminal activities, the rebels sought to overthrow the ruling elite, but the narcos wanted to become part of it, pitting them on opposite sides of the conflict.

After his release from Bogota’s La Modelo prison in 1987 at age 26, the unease of Petro’s rebellion days stuck with him, and he even took to sleeping with an assault rifle under his bed.

The following year, he met Mary Luz Herran, an ardent M-19 member since she was 14. They would go on to marry and have two children, a daughter named Andrea and a son named Andres, before splitting.

Soon after they met, in 1990, the M-19 became the first significant rebel group to demobilise, transforming into the M-19 Democratic Alliance party.

But it was a dangerous time to be in Colombian politics.

In the 1980s and 90s, some 6,000 members of the left-wing Patriotic Union party were killed by narcos, paramilitaries and the security services.

M-19 were not spared, either. In 1990, their presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, was shot on board a passenger plane mid-flight.

While serving a term in Congress, Petro began receiving death threats from a paramilitary group called Colsingue, or Colombia Without Guerrillas, and for his and his family’s safety, he agreed to a diplomatic posting in Belgium in 1994. While there, he studied environmentalism and economics at the University of Louvain, and he became deeply interested in the work of Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, who warned that while the global economy relies on constant growth, the Earth cannot be exploited forever.

But Petro grew restless in Brussels. “I felt bored, nostalgic, and eager to return to the political arena,” he writes in his memoirs.

He returned to Colombia, where he was re-elected to Congress in 1998. Two years later, he met his third wife, then a 24-year-old law student named Veronica Alcocer. They soon married, and despite initial tension with Veronica’s father — whom Petro described as an “almost fascist” in an interview with a Colombian magazine — Petro and his father-in-law grew close through their shared love of reading and intellectualism. His funeral in 2012 was one of the few times Petro cried in public. They have two daughters, ​​Sofia and Antonella.

Meanwhile, in a bid to start peace talks in 1998, then-President Andres Pastrana conceded territory roughly the size of Switzerland to Colombia’s largest armed group, the FARC. It was meant to be neutral ground, but the rebels used it to recruit and train child soldiers, grow coca, hold captives and enforce their own brand of justice.

Enter Alvaro Uribe. A right-wing hardliner, Uribe won the 2002 presidential election by promising to quash the rebels with an iron fist.

With US support, Uribe’s beefed-up military inflicted devastating defeats on the FARC. Washington had an interest in stopping the flow of cocaine from the source to the US, and in the 2000s and 2010s, Colombia was the third-largest recipient of US military aid after Israel and Egypt.

Defying death squads

Overall, security improved, but the Uribe era revealed that the authorities had been colluding with paramilitaries for years. While presenting themselves as anti-communist vigilantes, the paramilitaries were responsible for the lion’s share of civilian deaths, terrorising vast swaths of the country.

In one particularly brutal episode in 1997, a band of armed men descended on the village of El Aro in Antioquia. Villagers were brutally tortured and raped, and up to 17 people were killed. The paramilitaries burned the village down as they left, and witnesses reported seeing a helicopter circling above — a yellow aircraft belonging to the Antioquia governor’s office, which at the time was occupied by Uribe.

The ghosts of El Aro were reawakened in the parapolitica (para-politics) scandal of 2006 after journalists and prosecutors revealed that several lawmakers were in league with far-right paramilitary groups, allowing them to murder and intimidate opponents while enriching themselves through bribes and illegal land grabs.

What happened next became one of the defining periods of Petro’s career. He held public hearings and accused the perpetrators of the El Aro massacre of operating with Uribe’s blessing while he was governor, such as by helping establish civilian “self-defence” groups as a front for the militias.

“Why the silence, Mr President?” Petro pressed him at a hearing. “Or does the government accept that violent narcoterrorists have a presence in its ranks?”

The then-president fired back, calling the senator a “terrorist in civilian clothes”. Uribe’s alleged paramilitary ties later landed him in a years-long court case from 2012, ending in his conviction for witness tampering last year, which was soon overturned on appeal.

Having lost comrades like Pizarro to the bloody purges of the 1980s and 90s, Petro knew all too well what he was up against. The scandal established him as a fearless crusader, but won him few friends.

“He was the one to [expose the paramilitaries] at a time when it was incredibly dangerous,” said Gimena Sanchez-Garzoli, a human rights advocate at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

“The impunity was so rampant … he was speaking to a Congress where 30 percent of it was linked to these groups.”

Tree, who nominated Petro for the human rights award in DC, remembered how the senator was on edge during this period.

“When I would meet with him in the mid-2000s in Bogota, he couldn’t stand near a window, and every night he had to go home by a different route,” Tree recalled.

Petro’s paranoia about standing near windows was not unwarranted; Salvatore Mancuso, the strongman behind the El Aro massacre, later confirmed that Petro’s name had indeed been on his hit list.

Mayor of Bogota

In 2010, Petro launched his first presidential bid but found himself at odds with his own party, the Democratic Pole, which sidelined him in favour of another candidate. Petro ran anyway and came in third overall.

He founded a new party, Humane Colombia, and successfully ran for mayor of Bogota in 2011.

While the previous mayor and his brother profited from corruption, Petro implemented many progressive reforms. A ban on brandishing firearms in public saw murder rates plunge to a three-decade low. Petro’s administration addressed animal cruelty, stopping the practices of using horse-drawn carts for rubbish collection and bullfighting, and pioneered mobile clinics for homeless drug users, treating addiction as a matter of public health.

“We were the first organisation to propose these [drug] reform ideas,” said Julian Quintero, director of Social Technical Action (ATS), a Bogota-based NGO focused on harm reduction and drug policy reform.

“Petro participated with us, and he sort of embraced the proposals we made to him.”

But Quintero noted that Petro’s governing style was also uneven, characterised by a rapid turnover of staff – a preview of his presidential years.

“Petro did very well as a senator because he’s a very good analyst who trembles with accusations when he’s in the opposition,” Quintero said.

“But when he takes office, he doesn’t stand out for his bureaucratic and technical skills. He’s not a good administrator. He changes teams very quickly, not allowing for continuity in his projects.”

Moreover, he added, in Colombia, “the left isn’t used to governing”.

Quintero noted that deeply entrenched right-wing interests also made Petro’s job more difficult. A failed attempt to overhaul the capital’s waste management system in 2013 ignited a political battle that saw Petro ousted from office by the arch-conservative Attorney General Alejandro Ordonez. That decision drew mass protests, and Petro was reinstated a month later – a sign that his brand of politics was gaining momentum.

Path to victory

In 2010, Petro had lost his presidential bid to Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s defence minister, who oversaw his campaign against the FARC in the 2000s. But it was Santos who – to Uribe’s dismay – brokered peace with the rebels in 2016.

When Uribe’s protege Ivan Duque took office in 2018, however, the government largely abandoned that agreement, and violence surged.

“[The Uribe faction] wanted a candidate, basically a puppet, who was to rip up the peace agreement and not let it advance,” WOLA’s Sanchez-Garzoli explained.

Armed groups, including rogue FARC commanders, drug cartels and paramilitaries, rushed to fill the power vacuum, where they once held sway.

Then, in 2021, Duque’s attempt to raise taxes prompted mass protests that were met with police brutality and dozens of deaths. The unrest and growing public disillusionment with the status quo, now fully exposed by the collapsing peace process and the pandemic-ravaged economy, meant Colombia finally had an opening for its first progressive president; a break from the conservative elite such as Uribe and Duque, who came from, and represented the interests of, the wealthy landowning class.

A leftist coalition called the Historic Pact rallied behind Petro for the 2022 elections.

Eager to include Liberals as well, Petro reached out to economist and former government official Gaviria.

“It’s kind of funny because when you see him at a rally, he’s really energised, but in a one-on-one interaction, he is timid, he is quiet, he is difficult to engage in conversation,” Gaviria said, recalling Petro’s visit to his home as he tried to build a coalition.

“When he visited my apartment, I was trying to ask him questions, and he never said anything to me. He stayed silent for five minutes.”

The presidential hopeful eventually proposed that Gaviria, then the Liberals’ presidential candidate, ally with his progressive forces.

Ultimately, in the second round of the election, Gaviria threw his support behind Petro, who offered him a place in his new cabinet as education minister when he took office that August.

International stage

As president, Petro took his message to the world. At his first United Nations speech, he warned, “the jungle is burning” while global powers were fighting over drugs and resources. He highlighted what he saw as the hypocrisy of vilifying cocaine while protecting coal and oil.

“What is more poisonous for humanity, cocaine, coal or oil?” he asked. With Colombia’s cocaine industry having fuelled decades of civil war, Petro has called for cocaine legalisation, calling the so-called war on drugs a failure.

“Cocaine is illegal because it is made in Latin America, not because it is worse than whisky,” he told a broadcast government meeting in February 2025.

In confronting the climate crisis, he has halted fracking and new gas projects to shift Colombia towards clean energy. In an economy reliant on fuel exports, however, this decision has been met with fierce scrutiny.

Petro has also sought to address the country’s armed conflict.

Influenced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who believed true forgiveness meant forgiving the unforgivable, Petro presented Congress with a plan to bring all remaining cartels, armed rebels and paramilitaries to the table, including by suspending arrest warrants and empowering local leaders as mediators.

The plan was called “Total Peace”.

‘A dream’

Petro’s peace initiative was put to the test in Buenaventura, a key Colombian port on the Pacific Coast. The port had long been a strategic hub for cocaine smugglers loading cargo onto ships bound worldwide.

Then, in 2019, a deadly turf war exploded. Residents were terrified to leave their homes. In desperation, local archbishop Ruben Dario Jaramillo performed a mass exorcism of the city by spraying the streets with holy water from a convoy of vehicles.

But in October 2022, the leaders of two rival gangs met and shook hands at a church service, thanks to a truce brokered by Jaramillo, building on the Total Peace initiative. The following six weeks saw only one killing, compared with the previous monthly death toll of 25.

The broader peace plan, however, has had flaws. Anticipating a deal, armed groups consolidated their positions to get the upper hand in negotiations while taking advantage of ceasefires to recruit and resupply.

As Quintero observed, the groups calling themselves “guerrillas” today are mostly criminal gangs using the label to legitimise their actions. “There are no guerrillas with the ideology to overthrow the state,” he said.

“[Instead], today there are gangs of very well-armed drug traffickers posing as guerrillas.”

The two most problematic ones are the Gulf Clan and the ELN. The Gulf Clan is a powerful narco-paramilitary crime syndicate demanding talks to negotiate their surrender while aggressively expanding its empire. The ELN continues to carry out attacks and kidnappings and is battling a renegade FARC faction in the dense jungles of Catatumbo, a fertile coca-growing region near Venezuela, displacing tens of thousands of people and prompting Petro to declare a temporary state of emergency last January.

Gaviria said that while reining in heavily armed drug dealers hiding in mountains and jungles would be challenging for any government, Petro has not really had a plan.

“He thought political will was enough to achieve Total Peace, which is completely wrong,” Gaviria said.

He compared Petro’s approach with Santos’s.

“Santos had a strategy, a group negotiating with the FARC. He met with that group every week, having conversations with his experts around the world … he was very disciplined in the way he was conducting this difficult topic.

“Petro was just completely different. No strategy at all,” Gaviria added. “Big announcements and political will. [Petro] thought that was enough, and now we know that no, it was not enough, especially if you’re dealing with such a complex problem.

“Total Peace was not a strategy. Total Peace was an idea, a dream.”

The chaotic nature of Petro’s cabinet has also complicated matters. The turnover rate is high, averaging a new minister every 19 days. Gaviria resigned in early 2023, along with three other ministers, during a fallout over health reforms. And 13 ministers lost or left their jobs in just three months between late 2024 and early 2025.

“I think this is a direct result of his style of policymaking,” said Gaviria, describing it as “undisciplined”.

Petro tends to replace ministers with loyalists and former members of the M-19, while publicly squabbling with former staff and accusing them of disloyalty. Some connect Petro’s perilous past to this governing style.

“Petro has a paranoid style of government that almost defines him,” said Gaviria.

“He is always thinking that there is a conspiracy against him. And probably this idea is related to being a former guerrilla member and living [in hiding].”

Correa agreed, noting that Petro does not trust many people.

The replacements he selects, too, are not necessarily the best-qualified.

For example, Sanchez-Garzoli believes the ELN peace process collapsed because Petro appointed “an ideologue and less of a real negotiator”.

“They basically blew apart a process that could have demobilised thousands,” she explained.

For Gaviria, Petro is these days more interested in ideological battles on social media than in leading the country. “I think he knows that he has not been an effective president,” he said. “Governing a country can be difficult, boring … [and to be successful] you have to engage in difficult conversations. You have to change your mind.”

Petro, he believes, has struggled to accept that “tragic destiny”.

Legacy

Petro’s advocacy on Palestine – and the severing of diplomatic ties with Israel over its genocidal war on Gaza – the climate crisis, drug reform and willingness to confront Trump have won him international praise. Trump, without any evidence, has accused Petro of running cocaine mills and called him a “sick man” on several occasions.

Back home, Petro points to having reduced poverty and infant mortality rates, increased agricultural production, and provided greater access to education, but his criticised peace strategy has failed to deliver broad demobilisation, and stark inequality persists. His approval rating has dropped from 56 percent when he took office to almost 36 percent.

Petro’s presidency has been overshadowed by scandals, including his eldest son Nicolas’s arrest for alleged money laundering linked to narco campaign funding. He calls such attacks targeting his inner circle “lawfare”, aimed at weakening him, something he experienced when he was briefly ousted as mayor of Bogota.

“The first thing they tried to destroy was my family,” he told Spanish daily El Pais last February. “They wanted to destroy the emotional ties because a man without emotional ties becomes hard, bad, and errs.”

He conceded that the presidency is a role that brings him “absolute unhappiness”.

As Petro faces the end of his presidency this year, his legacy may be that of a polarising figure, a revolutionary who tried to overthrow the system from within — yet was unable to solve Colombia’s toughest challenges.

Still, Petro’s supporters see his presidency as the start of a social transformation.

“Our country is a very conservative society; our values, our classism are very, very evident,” said Correa.

“I think that it will take two generations to reconstruct the society … And I think that this government represents only a beginning, a seed for the new generation.”

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders says it will provide Israeli authorities with the personal details of some of its Palestinian and international staff working in Gaza and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territory.

But critics warn Israel, whose army has killed more than 1,700 health workers – including 15 employees of the charity, also known by its French initials MSF – during the genocide in Gaza, could use the information to target more humanitarian workers in the besieged Strip and the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

MSF said it faced an “impossible choice” to either provide the information or be forced by Israel to suspend its operations.

On January 1, Israel withdrew the licences of 37 aid groups, including MSF, the Norwegian Refugee Council and International Rescue Committee and Oxfam, saying they failed to adhere to the new “security and transparency standards”.

The measure could exacerbate an already dire humanitarian situation for people in war-shattered Gaza, as they endure continued attacks.

Here’s what you need to know:

Why did Israel corner NGOs?

Last year, Israel said it would suspend aid groups that did not meet new requirements on sharing detailed information about their employees, funding and operations.

According to rules set out by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs, the information to be handed over includes passports, CVs and names of family members, including children.

It said it would reject organisations it suspected of inciting racism, denying the state of Israel’s existence or the holocaust. It would also ban those it deems as supporting “an armed struggle by an enemy state or a terrorist organisation against the State of Israel”.

The measures were roundly condemned, given that Israel has weaponised aid throughout the genocide and falsely accused the United Nations humanitarian agencies of working with Hamas fighters and sympathisers.

Israel has also accused MSF – without providing evidence – of employing people who fought with Palestinian groups.

MSF said it would “never knowingly” employ people engaging in military activity.

Why did MSF agree to Israel’s demands?

MSF runs medical services in Gaza as well as the occupied West Bank, providing critical and emergency medical care, including surgical, trauma, and maternal care. It also helped run field hospitals in Gaza during two years of Israeli genocide.

In a statement on Saturday, MSF said following “unreasonable demands to hand over personal information about our staff”, it has informed Israeli authorities that, as an exceptional measure, “we are prepared to share a defined list of Palestinian and international staff names, subject to clear parameters with staff safety at its core”.

It said MSF’s Palestinian employees agreed with the decision after extensive discussions.

“We would share this information with the expectation that it will not negatively affect MSF staff or our medical humanitarian operations,” MSF said. “Since 1 January 2026, all arrivals of our international staff into Gaza have been denied and all our supplies have been blocked.”

How have observers reacted?

MSF’s decision was condemned by some doctors, activists and campaigners, saying it could endanger Palestinians.

A former MSF employee, who requested to remain anonymous, told Al Jazeera, “It is extremely concerning, from a duty of care perspective, from a data protection perspective, and from the perspective of the most foundational commitment to humanity, that MSF would make a decision like this.”

“Staff are extremely concerned for their wellbeing and futures. Other NGOs have been in uproar, since it further exposes their decision not to concede to Israel’s demands,” they said. “MSF faces profoundly difficult decisions – concede to the demands of a genocidal regime, or refuse and face complete expulsion and an abrupt end to all health activities in the coming weeks. But what is humanitarianism under genocide? There must be alternatives – alternatives that demand a much bolder and more disruptive approach to humanitarianism amid such brutal political decline.”

Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British surgeon who has volunteered in Gaza several times, said, “The moral bankruptcy lies in the implication that during a genocide, Palestinians are capable of making free consent. Their employees have as much choice as the Palestinians who knowingly went to their death at the feeding stations to feed their families.”

He added that the decision was “in clear contravention” of European Union data protection laws.

Hanna Kienzler, a professor of global health at King’s College London, said on X, “MSF, you have withdrawn your teams from war-affected settings before when you felt a mission’s integrity and/or safety were compromised. What makes you think Palestinian staff can be treated like cannon fodder so you can continue your mission in Gaza?”

Have other groups heeded Israel’s demands?

Israel says 23 organisations have agreed to the new registration rules. The others are understood to be weighing their decisions.

Al Jazeera contacted Oxfam and is awaiting a response.

Is aid being delivered to Gaza?

Gaza has been pulled back from the brink of famine, but needs far more aid to support the population amid continued Israeli attacks – more than 400 people have been killed since a fragile ceasefire came into place in October, large-scale displacement and a healthcare crisis.

Food shortages persist.

Israel said it would commit to allowing 600 aid trucks per day to enter the Strip, but in reality, only 200 or so are being let in, locals say.

At least five health centres in the Lubero territory of the North Kivu region were shut down following persistent attacks and civilian killings by the Ugandan Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

On the night of Jan. 21,  the rebels killed five civilians, injured many others, and destroyed at least ten houses during an attack that took place in the Mavwe-Mavwe village. 

Congolese officials revealed that the health centres recently shut down include Mausa, Pombi, Mandelya, Musenge, and the Masoya referral health facility, which was closed last week. The awful situation intensifies the dire humanitarian crisis in the region, which is heavily impacted by insecurity.

Some civil society organisations have expressed concerns over the authorities’ silence amid persistent insecurity, which has paralysed all socio-economic activities within the Baswagha chiefdom, leaving the people feeling completely abandoned.

“In view of the situation we are passing through, we think the nurses have very much helped the population. Already, members of armed groups and their wives receive medical treatment free of charge. The pressure on the Biambwe health centre has forced our nurses to close down our structure. That complicates the lives of the population, because all the health facilities have closed their doors in Mandelia, Pombi, Mausa, Masoya, and Musenge. They have locked themselves everywhere,” said Kambale Muthano, the leader of the Congolese New Civil Society.

Kambale noted that the civil society community has no issues with health agents. He said their main demand from the government is to guarantee the safety of the populations, including healthcare facilities, so that health professionals can work under suitable conditions.

Amid the ongoing crisis, however, health professionals have made an urgent appeal to military authorities to intervene and reactivate “Operation Shujaa”, a joint military effort between the Congolese army and the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF).

Since 2024, the Mwenye tribal group in the North Kivu region has been gripped by chronic instability marked by the massacre of civilians, massive displacement of populations, the closure of schools, and health facilities. A similar incident occurred in 2022 when eighteen healthcare facilities in Kamango were shut down due to repeated attacks by the  Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebels, leaving civilians at risk. 

Lebanese government says it documented 2,036 Israeli breaches of Lebanon’s sovereignty in the last three months of 2025.

Lebanon has filed a complaint with the United Nations about repeated Israeli violations of a November 2024 ceasefire, calling on the Security Council to push Israel to end its attacks and fully withdraw from the country.

The Lebanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Emigrants said the complaint, sent on Monday, stressed that Israeli abuses are a “clear” violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended a war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

The ministry said it called on the 15-member body to compel Israel to “completely withdraw to beyond the internationally recognised borders”, end its repeated violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty and release Lebanese prisoners it is holding.

“The complaint included three tables detailing Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty on a daily basis during the months of October, November and December 2025. The number of these violations amounted to 542, 691 and 803 respectively, totaling 2,036 violations,” it added.

The complaint was made a day after Israel launched a wave of air strikes across Lebanon, killing at least two people.

Despite the 2024 ceasefire, the Israeli military has been launching near-daily attacks in Lebanon, which have killed hundreds of people. In November last year, the UN put the number of civilians killed in Israeli attacks at at least 127.

Israel also continues to occupy five points within Lebanese territory as it blocks the reconstruction of several border villages that it levelled to the ground, preventing tens of thousands of displaced people from returning to their homes.

Meanwhile, Israel is estimated to be holding more than a dozen Lebanese prisoners, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians who were taken from border villages in 2024. Israel has resisted calls to submit a list of the Lebanese citizens it is holding, leaving the fate of many missing people in southern Lebanon in limbo.

Israeli forces have also repeatedly opened fire at peacekeepers in the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) in southern Lebanon.

The Foreign Ministry in Beirut said on Monday that “it called for pressure to be exerted on Israel to stop its attacks on UNIFIL, which continues to make the ultimate sacrifices to bring security and stability to the region.”

Lebanon has filed similar complaints to the UN in the past, but Israeli attacks have not relented.

On Monday, Israeli drones dropped two stun grenades in the southern village of Odaisseh, Lebanese news outlets reported.

Israel had severely weakened Hezbollah in an all-out war late in 2024, killing most of the group’s military and political leaders. Israel’s campaign has helped it establish a new balance of power and allowed it to launch regular assaults in Lebanon without a response.

Meanwhile, the Lebanese government has been pushing to disarm Hezbollah.

This month, Beirut said it had completed the removal of the group’s weapons south of the Litani River, 28km (17 miles) from the Israeli border.

Despite that announcement, Israeli air strikes have continued both south and north of the Litani.

Hezbollah has tacitly agreed to disarmament south of the Litani in accordance with UN Resolution 1701, but it has warned that it will not completely give up its weapons, arguing that they are necessary to stop Israel’s expansionism.

The next phase of the Lebanese government’s plan to remove Hezbollah’s weapons will target the region about 40km (25 miles) north of the Litani River to the Awali River.

Storm Chandra is hitting hot on the heels of Goretti and Ingrid, bringing more soaking rains with little time between for the water to flow away and the rivers fully recover.

This continuing rain really heightens the flood risk.

The wind will also be a threat, as strong winds from Goretti and Ingrid have already battered parts of the UK this month, notably in south-west England.

As a result, many structures may have been weakened, trees may have been left vulnerable as well as power lines.

Blessing William crouched by the stream in Bole-3 at dawn, scrubbing pots and dishes. The water surface had a milky tint, and a faint aftertaste lingered each time she drank from it. Still, this remains the only source of flowing water for her family and the wider community.

As a child, the 30-year-old mother of four used to come to the local stream to wash, fetch water, and swim. Back then, the water was clear and safe to drink without filtration.

“There are a lot of changes now,” she said. “We now struggle to get clean water.” 

Her experience reflects a wider reality of over 500 residents in Bole-3, a community you would describe as disadvantaged. There is no electricity, no proper road network, and no primary health care centre. For decades, the local stream has been its most precious resource.

Today, the stream has dwindled to a shallow trickle. Large stretches of the riverbed lie exposed, the current barely moving. In July 2024, white sediments began to cloud the stream, and many residents complained of a strange aftertaste that lingered on their tongues after drinking.

What went wrong?

These changes began shortly after a company run by Chinese nationals started mining operations in the community. Located in Yola-South, Adamawa State, in northeastern Nigeria, Bole-3 sits atop large deposits of fluorite beneath its rocky ground. When the mining company arrived a year ago, it built a dam to supply water for washing extracted minerals, which residents say has reduced the stream’s flow and contaminated the remaining water.

“As a result of how they blocked it to construct the dam, we don’t have enough water flowing into the stream this year,” Williams Ayuba, the village head, told HumAngle. “Although the water level naturally dwindles in November every year, it has not been this severe.”

When the community’s only borehole collapsed, water scarcity worsened. The village head mobilised some residents to meet with the company. The borehole was later repaired by the company’s representatives, but it stopped functioning three months later. However, the community has been unable to reach the company since then. 

Like several other residents, all of Blessing’s children, who drink from the river, have been coming down with diarrhoea, which she described as chronic. 

Celestina Jasckson, another resident of the Bole-3 community, echoes Blessing’s concern. “The water gives us diarrhoea all the time, and that’s how we are suffering,” she said, adding that she continues to consume it despite the risks.

However, diarrhoea is not the only health issue locals have been battling since the suspected contamination became pronounced in Bole-3. Eden Dimas, a healthcare provider who runs the only dispensary in the community, noted that “a lot of residents” have been arriving at the centre regularly with rashes covering different parts of their bodies.

“I am sure it is the chemicals. You could taste it while drinking the water,” Eden said.

The skin condition remains undiagnosed as the dispensary lacks lab equipment. The facility does not admit patients or offer delivery services; it only administers painkillers and provides other basic treatments. For childbirth and more complex care, residents travel an hour to a primary healthcare centre in Lakare, a neighbouring community. 

When cases exceed what he can manage locally, Eden often refers residents with issues like the itchy skin to hospitals in Yola, the state capital, where many cannot afford treatment.

In the past, Ekklesiyar Yan’uwa a Nigeria, the Christian denomination that owns the dispensary, used to supply drugs whenever stocks were running short, but that has dwindled, leaving the dispensary barely functional. Part of the building has even been converted into a single room now occupied by a family.

Eden now buys drugs from Yola only when a sick person provides money for medication.

The stream and the unnamed mine

As contamination of the stream worsened, locals dug small ponds nearby. HumAngle learned from residents that the water in the pond is less polluted than that of the stream, so while the main stream serves their other needs, they use the pond for drinking and cooking. 

“We did everything we could. We wrote to the company, but we have not seen any results yet. It’s like we don’t have anyone to help us,” the village head said. He added that locals have now resigned themselves to their fate.

Residents in Bole-3 refer to the mining company as the “China Company”. It is located on the outskirts of the host community, and it takes less than an hour by motorcycle to reach the mine.

The mine stretches across a wide, open area covered with fluoride and some monazite rocks. Fluorite is a valuable mineral that is used in refining hydrofluoric acid, aluminium smelting agents, optical lenses, gemstones for jewellery, flux for steelmaking, ceramics, and opalescent glass. 

When HumAngle visited the mine, heaps of smaller rocks were scattered around, and labourers were also seen working under the watch of a Chinese supervisor.

Philip Ezra*, a Bole-3 resident, worked at the mine but resigned due to frequent illness and severe body aches. He was responsible for manual excavation and sorting, working at least 10 hours daily for a monthly compensation of ₦70,000. 

During his employment, he recalled that a small pond had been dug at the mine for workers’ water consumption. “As time went by, I began to come down with typhoid and realised that it was from the water. I was always weak,” he said. “The water conditions and the strenuous nature of the work made me sick.”  

When he returned home in June 2025 after resigning, Philip observed that the stream level had dropped and the water quality had deteriorated. “I noticed that the water tasted like the one from the labourer’s pond at the site,” he said. 

Like other residents, Philip believes the significant reduction in water level in the stream is due to the dam built around the mine. “They trapped a large quantity of water from the source and turned it into a source for washing extracted minerals and carrying out other mining activities,” he said. 

When HumAngle visited the mine, the supervisors did not respond to the inquiries. A letter submitted in November last year has yet to receive a response. 

No signage at the site shows the company’s name, and workers who spoke to HumAngle claimed they did not know it. One employee, who asked not to be named, said the company was licensed and approved by the state government, but that “its name had yet to be formally ascribed”. 

This explanation is highly unlikely, as companies registering with the Corporate Affairs Commission and the Nigeria Mining Cadastre Office are required to provide a name and board details. We reached out to the Adamawa Ministry of Environment and Natural Development and have not received a response. 

To independently verify residents’ claims, HumAngle collected water samples from the Bole-3 stream in November 2025 and submitted them for laboratory analysis at Modibbo Adama University, a public research institution in Yola. The samples were tested twice for fluoride concentration and overall water quality, including heavy metal levels.

A Yola-based laboratory scientist who analysed and interpreted the results, and asked not to be named, said the water was unsafe for drinking, cooking, bathing, or other domestic use.

According to the scientist’s interpretation of the findings, the samples contained elevated levels of heavy metals, including Lead, Cadmium, Copper, and Chromium. Prolonged exposure to these substances, the scientist explained, can cause chronic diarrhoea, skin rashes, gastrointestinal irritation, and other long-term health problems.

“The health symptoms reported by residents, particularly skin rashes and chronic diarrhoea, are consistent with known effects of chronic heavy-metal exposure,” the scientist added. 

Expert recommends solutions 

In communities with long-standing mining activities, exposure to toxic dust and heavy metals poses severe health risks. A study at Arufu, a mining community in Wukari, Taraba State, found high concentrations of heavy metals, and the water was declared unsafe for consumption.

“There are rocks that bear the fluoride. So, naturally, it can enter through the dissolution of fluoride-bearing minerals in all these soils. However, human activities can also elevate fluoride in the water,” said Hamza Muhammad Usman, the Executive Director of Environmental Care Foundation in Adamawa State. 

Hamza explained that mining disrupts large volumes of rock and wells, exposing the minerals buried beneath them. “It can increase the release of fluoride and other heavy metals, including other contaminants into the water,” he added. 

The environmental expert also noted that contaminants move faster through fractured drainage, a geological feature caused by blasting, which forms gully erosion. “This lets contaminants move quickly because mining creates new channels where none existed before. Pollutants can then reach streams and rivers that recharge groundwater,” he said.

Hamza emphasised that the geology and duration of mining activity, rainfall, and even groundwater flow, determine contamination levels. He added that contamination can occur within months in some cases, or take years in others, depending on the intensity of human activity.

He also recommended some cost-effective options for removing contaminants from water, including the Nalgonda technique, which uses lime and alum.

“There is also the bone char,” he said. This involves burning animal bones until they are nearly charcoal. “It is good for absorbing things like this. If they are burnt completely, it becomes like charcoal, you can use them, which is very effective to absorb fluoride and is viable in rural communities,” Hamza said. 

The Yola-based scientist, who analysed the lab results, advised the immediate cessation of the water’s use, the provision of alternative safe water supplies, confirmatory lab testing, and medical screening for affected residents, highlighting the particular risks to children, pregnant women, and vulnerable adults.

“It is a public health hazard requiring immediate intervention,” the scientist added.

And yet, on the lips of the residents is the same urgent question: “If we can no longer use the Bole-3 stream, what should we drink?”

*Names with asterisks have been changed to protect the sources. 

Keys had previously insisted she would refuse to eat the delicacy, but she admitted defeat and said she would accept the terms of the wager.

“A bet is a bet, so I’ll do it. I hope it’s less gross than I think it’s going to be but we’ll find out I guess,” Keys said in her post-match news conference.

Had the ninth seed won the fourth-round match and continued her title defence, Keys’ side of the bet involved Pegula – whose billionaire parents own NFL side Buffalo Bills – wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey.

“She wanted me to wear a [Travis] Kelce slash Taylor Swift Chiefs jersey,” Pegula said. “Honestly I had a lot of motivation today not to wear that.”

The 2024 US Open finalist wrote “no Chiefs jersey today” on a courtside camera lens after her victory and the pair were seen chatting and laughing in the locker room straight after the match.

Keys, who beat Sabalenka in last year’s final at Melbourne Park, said she was “still really proud of herself” despite her exit.

“Coming back and being defending champion, and dealing with all of the extra pressure and nerves – I am really proud of myself for the way I handled it,” she said.