Explainer

Airlines are still scrambling to return operations to normal after the longest and only second nationwide stop of flights in the United States since the attacks of 9/11 in 2001.

More than 5,000 flights were cancelled in the US on Saturday after over 9,000 were scrapped a day earlier as the knock-on effects continued from Friday’s abrupt ground stop. The stoppage was halted after more than four hours on Friday night, but airports and carriers were still grappling with large backlogs and resulting delays.

The decision to suddenly ground all planes on Friday initially triggered speculation of a cyberattack.

But officials have since ruled that out and named the reason for the weekend disruptions as a routine replacement of the communications routers that connect the US air traffic control system.

Here’s everything we know about what went wrong:

What happened?

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a nationwide ground stop of flights at 3:54pm East Coast time (20:54 GMT) on Friday, citing a telecommunications outage affecting air route traffic control centres.

The outage caused thousands of flights to be cancelled or delayed across the US.

The ground stop was removed at 8:15pm on Friday (01:15 GMT on Saturday), but hundreds of flights were still delayed or cancelled that night, according to the aviation analytics firm Cirium.

Aircraft already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations and land during the ground stop while international flights were handled on a case-by-case basis with some allowed to depart despite the restrictions.

What caused the ground stop?

A routine upgrade was being carried out – maintenance work that ultimately overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the ground stop, US officials said.

L3Harris, a contractor, was replacing a section of the system’s old and discontinued copper wire with new fibre optic lines in a remote location on Friday afternoon, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said on Saturday.

The router in that location then started overloading the air traffic control system, causing communications disruptions. When officials couldn’t locate the cause of the overload, they grounded flights nationwide.

“When we see that, your safety is paramount. We shut down the airspace,” Duffy said.

The transportation secretary said “contractor error or a faulty piece of equipment” caused the router to start flooding other ones.

“We had 1,000 connection attempts every four to five seconds,” he told reporters.

The issue affected communications at 17 of the FAA’s 22 en route centres.

The Professional Aviation Safety Specialists (PASS), a union representing FAA safety employees, said the issue was isolated to two routers that were updated on Friday. An official told the Reuters news agency it was believed the routers were in Arkansas and Texas.

An FAA official said the agency conducted a safety assessment before the work. The union said PASS-represented technicians were not involved in the upgrades that led to the ground stop.

Ageing technology and equipment alongside a shortage of several thousand controllers have long been concerns plaguing the US air traffic control system.

Duffy on Friday called for $50bn in funding to upgrade these systems, up from his earlier request of $30bn after Congress approved $12.5bn last year.

So it wasn’t a cyberattack?

No.

White House officials had convened an emergency meeting in the Situation Room on Friday amid concerns that the incident was due to a cyberattack. But the US government has since said it did not believe that was the cause.

“Once we were able to isolate the work being done at this location, all of our systems came back online,” Duffy said. “So we don’t believe this was cyber at all.”

The FAA chief reiterated that view at Saturday’s news conference.

“We see zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI-related,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said.

Who has been named responsible for the incident?

L3Harris, a US-based aerospace and defence company, is the contractor behind the systems upgrade, the US Department of Transportation said.

Three-fourths of the company’s revenue comes from US government contracts, largely from the military, The New York Times reported.

“What we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it … installator error from L3Harris? Or did they install a faulty router?” Duffy said. “We haven’t determined what the fault was.”

Duffy added that L3Harris, which he said had performed decades of work for the FAA, “didn’t meet the moment”.

“They own this network. They’re our prime contractor. I can’t go somewhere else. They own it,” he said. “Frankly, we’re going to hold people accountable.”

In response to Duffy’s allegations, L3Harris told Al Jazeera it has been working “in close coordination with the FAA” and safety and reliability are its “highest priorities”.

“We are supporting the FAA in its investigation to understand the conditions that led to the November 13 ground stop of our nation’s air travel,” a spokesperson for the company said.

“L3Harris takes the nationwide ground stop and its impact on travellers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.”

L3Harris said it has been “modernising” the communications infrastructure supporting the National Airspace System in “close coordination” with the FAA.

It added that it has completed more than 70 percent of the planned airspace communications conversion from legacy copper wires to a fibre optic system.

The FAA said it was doing additional testing with L3Harris to see if there are any further risks.

When will flights in the US be back to normal?

Bedford, the head of the FAA, cautioned that it could take time.

“We have crews and aircraft that are out of position for 12,000 flights that were lost,” Bedford said. “These crews, pilots and flight attendants need to get to their points of reconnection with their schedules.”

He stated that he thinks “the worst is behind us”.

Duffy said airlines were expected to restore their full schedules by Sunday night.

Airlines have issued travel waivers for passengers affected to rebook flights for later dates at no cost.

Tens of thousands of people remain stranded in airports across the country while others have been left to pay surge prices for hotels and rental cars as airlines scramble to resume flights.

Southeast Asian countries that comprise the ASEAN economic bloc will meet in the Philippines this week as the region continues to bear the brunt of oil shortages caused by the US-Israel war on Iran, as well as by US-China rivalry, which has hit economies hard.

The Manila summit will be held from November 15 to 17 and will include US President Donald Trump and several other world leaders.

The 11-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) aims to establish a single market, although it cannot impose decisions on members. It comprises Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and East Timor, with a combined population of nearly 694 million, or 8.4 percent of the world’s population.

Several ASEAN meetings are held annually. This week’s summit is expected to be the final one for this year.

Beyond the energy crisis, other pressing issues include disputes over the South China Sea and trade.

Here’s what we know:

Who is attending?

In addition to leaders and representatives from the 11 member countries, other guests include:

• US President Donald Trump – Trump is expected to hold a special summit with ASEAN members on November 17 as Washington’s trade tensions with China continue. He is also set to hold a one-on-one meeting with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Afterwards, Trump is due to head to China for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting on 18-19 November.
• India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi – Although India is not part of ASEAN, India is a key trading partner to member states.
• Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney – Carney is set to give a speech at the summit.
• Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – His visit will be the first by a sitting Brazilian president to the Philippines. He is expected to discuss trade, defence and other areas of cooperation with ASEAN members.
• Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – His visit comes after the Russia-ASEAN summit in July.

What are the key issues?

US-Iran war

The summit is being held at a time when Southeast Asian countries have been hit hard by shortages in oil and gas supplies from Middle Eastern suppliers amid the US-Israel war on Iran.

The Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia are among the most vulnerable to the energy disruptions in the Gulf, with Manila declaring a state of national energy emergency in March.

Millions of ASEAN citizens also live and work in the Middle East, where the war threatens their safety and earnings.

Meanwhile, Asian countries are worried the conflict could spill into the Strait of Malacca, a narrow waterway between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.

Trade

The US’s tariff war has seen ASEAN countries slapped with 10-12.5 percent tariff hikes since the beginning of US President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, prompting the bloc to strengthen trade relationships elsewhere.

South China Sea

China and four ASEAN members – Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam – as well as Taiwan, have been locked in decades of territorial standoffs in the busy waterway.

The area is important as it is believed to host undersea deposits of oil and gas.

In 2005, the bloc began negotiating a “code of conduct” with China to discourage aggression and prevent major clashes. The negotiations have often stalled, however, partly due to flared tensions, especially between Manila and Beijing in recent years.

In 2023, the two sides agreed to speed things up and release a finished draft this year. At least 10 rounds of talks have been held this year, led by Malaysia, with a final round taking place in October.

However, analysts doubt a definite conclusion will be reached at the summit this week, meaning talks could continue into next year.

Thailand-Cambodia tensions

Armed clashes broke out between the two ASEAN member states late last year along an 800km (500-mile) contested border area, as well as over competing claims to sacred religious sites, such as the Preah Vihear Shiva temple.

At least 150 people were reported to have been killed, and nearly one million displaced.

ASEAN members, as well as China and the US, intervened, leading to talks. Although a ceasefire has been in place since December, the wider border dispute remains unresolved, and the bloc is calling for more dialogue and the participation of third-party observers.

Myanmar conflict

The ongoing civil war in Myanmar, which has compounded the Rohingya refugee crisis, has been at the top of the agenda as the bloc pushes for the restoration of democracy in the country.

Multiple rebel forces, some of them ethnic-based armed groups, have been fighting the military government since the country’s February 2021 coup.

ASEAN has already restricted Myanmar’s participation at important summits to non-political representatives as concerns about violence and a humanitarian crisis grow.

The bloc’s five-point Myanmar peace plan, launched in April 2021 and calling for dialogue and improved humanitarian aid access, has meanwhile failed to alleviate the situation.

Cross-border haze

Months of widespread wildfires in drought-hit Indonesia have scorched an estimated 2.88 million hectares (7.12 million acres) and resulted in at least 3,500 deaths.

The resulting haze has severely impacted not just the country’s residents, but also those in neighbouring Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and East Timor.

Jakarta has faced criticism for failing to effectively respond to the fires, but the government has defended its approach, saying thousands of responders have been deployed.

Secret votes, coloured ballot papers, straw polls and backroom efforts to force a consensus — with the threat of powerful vetoes hanging over it all. These could be the contours of how boards of mubil-billion dollar corporations decide on contentious issues.

It’s also the way the United Nations picks its secretary-general, the person at the apex of a vast and sprawling machinery tasked with upholding fast-fraying international laws and practices.

That process is now barrelling towards a tense climax, with the UN Security Council holding multiple straw polls in a bid to select its new secretary-general by December 31, when incumbent Antonio Guterres must step down.

Eight candidates are in the fray — from Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan, the head of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the organisation’s trade body, and Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to Lana Nusseibeh, the United Arab Emirates minister of state for foreign affairs.

The UNSC recommends a candidate who gets nine votes without a veto from its five permanent members. The process ends after the UN General Assembly (UNGA) gives its seal of approval to that candidate.

Here’s what we know:

Who chooses the secretary-general?

In effect, the 15-member UNSC chooses the UN chief.

The council has five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – who hold veto power.

Ten elected non-permanent members also make up the council. Bahrain, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Greece, Latvia, Liberia, Pakistan, Panama, and Somalia are the current UNSC members — non permanent members are elected by rotation every two years.

According to Article 97 of the UN Charter, the UNSC decides on a candidate and recommends them to the UNGA for a vote by all members.

There has never been a time when the council has picked a candidate who was voted down by the assembly, meaning that while, in theory, everyone has a say, the assembly have never gone against the 15-member security council. And because the five permanent members wield a veto, the secretary-general in effect is chosen by them, once they’ve convinced the non-permanent members.

However, one time, in 1950, the UNGA voted to extend the term of the then secretary-general without the UNSC’s recommendation after a deadlock in the council.

How does the Security Council make its choice?

The council holds informal, anonymous polls, also known as straw polls, on whether the members “encourage”, “discourage”, or “have no opinion” about a candidate.

Although it is expected to be secret, the number of encourage, discourage, or no-opinion votes is often leaked.

In later rounds of voting, coloured paper ballots are used to distinguish between the UNSC’s permanent members and the 10 elected members, providing a clearer sense of where members are leaning.

Once a straw poll confirms that a candidate has at least nine “encourage” votes and no vetoes against them, the council holds a formal vote to recommend them to the UNGA, which is expected to endorse that nomination.

Jane Kinninmont, CEO of United Nations Association UK, an independent, non-governmental organisation, explained that the process to select a candidate has traditionally been “closed and secretive” but has become more open as a result of campaigning by civil society groups and member states.

“However, the Security Council continues to guard its secrecy tightly – part of a political culture that many other countries regard as outmoded,” Kinninmont told Al Jazeera.

“One of the stated reasons is that no country wants to have a situation where it votes for one candidate, but another candidate actually is appointed and resents them for not voting for them,” she said.

Al Jazeera’s UN correspondent, Gabriel Elizondo, also explained that the secrecy behind the selection was just due to the way the system was set up.

“Now, there have been some talks in recent years, including this year, about trying to make the process more transparent in the Security Council, but the five permanent members just want to keep it the way that it is,” he said.

Who are the candidates this year?

Eight candidates are currently running to become secretary-general, after some dropped out earlier in the race.

Two leading candidates are IAEA chief Grossi from Argentina and Costa Rican Rebeca Grynspan, the UNCTAD head.

Grynspan, who, if successful, could become the first woman and first Jewish person to lead the UN, played a key role in brokering the Black Sea Grain Initiative between Russia and Ukraine in 2022. The deal allowed for millions of tonnes of food to be exported from war-torn Ukraine, much of which went to developing nations.

Grossi has headed the UN nuclear agency since 2019, and has been at the centre of the UN’s efforts to prevent nuclear escalations between Russia and Ukraine, amid their ongoing war. But Grossi has also faced criticism, especially from Iran, over perceptions that some of his reports critiquing Tehran’s nuclear programme helped serve as pretext that the US and Israel used to attack Iran.

The other candidates include:

• Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces (Former UNGA chief, Ecuador)
• Lana Zaki Nusseibeh (UAE minister of state at the Foreign Ministry )
• Feridun Hadi Sinirlioglu (Organization for Security and Co-operation chief, Turkiye)
• Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett (Guyana’s ambassador to the UN)
• Ivonne A-Baki (Politician, Ecuador)
• Olara Otunnu (Politician, Uganda)

What’s happened in the 2026 straw polls so far?

Eight polls have been held so far, but no consensus has emerged on a candidate who has received no discouraging votes.

According to the 1 for 8 Billion campaign, supported by organisations and individuals worldwide to call for a fair, open, and inclusive selection process for Guterres’s job, the eighth poll had Grynspan leading.

Last week’s poll saw Grynspan receive 12 encourage votes and three discourage votes.

In second place, Grossi received nine encourage votes, four discourage votes, and two no-opinion votes. He was followed by Birkett, who received eight encourage votes, five discourage votes, and two no-opinion votes.

While it is unclear how the permanent members voted and whether any had used a veto, candidates need zero discourage votes from them to secure the nomination.

According to Kinninmont, there is “growing resentment” about the five permanent members of the council using their vetoes that have often led to a paralysed council.

“The appointment of the SG is a different issue from any single conflict, but ultimately this person is supposed to be the world’s leading defender of the UN Charter and a spokesperson for the peoples of the world, in whose name the charter is written,” she said.

“Thus, it seems hard to defend the idea that any single power should be able to veto a candidate even if that candidate has the support of the majority of other countries on the Security Council and indeed a majority of the countries in the world.”

On more powers for the General Assembly in the selection process, Elizondo said that while there is talk of reforming the system, it would mean the permanent members would have to give up some of their power.

“None of them want to give up their power because, essentially, the truth is, while the United Nations is made up of 193 member states, it’s really the five permanent members (the US, Russia, China, France, and the UK) that really have the overwhelming amount of power to select who the next Secretary General is,” he said.

What happens if no one is picked by December 31?

It’s unclear.

There is nothing in the UN Charter about what happens if no candidate is picked before Guterres’s term ends.

The UNSC has some options if it is struggling to decide on a pick, including recommending a candidate for a shorter term or compromising on a candidate, as it did in 1996 to select Kofi Annan after a deadlock.

Member states could also let a senior UN official oversee operations in the meantime.

According to Elizondo, Guterres has also been asked if he would stay on if no secretary-general was selected.

“He gives a pretty noncommittal answer. He says as of January 1, he hopes to be and expects to be back home in Portugal. What would happen? Nobody knows because that’s never happened before,” Elizondo said.

Kinninmont said one way of achieving a more “transparent and democratic process” in selecting a candidate could be for the Security Council to agree on two or three candidates and the General Assembly to vote on those.

US President Donald Trump, China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin will hold their first trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China’s Shenzhen, the White House has confirmed.

On Friday, Washington also confirmed Trump’s attendance at the summit, which will take place from November 18-19.

Talks will focus on nuclear proliferation, the White House said. But they come amid significant global turbulence: Russia’s war in Ukraine, the US-Israeli war on Iran and ongoing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Not all the issues hold equal weight for the leaders, though. So what does each side want? Here’s what we know:

What’s on the agenda?

Each leader has his own priorities, but there are some issues all will want to discuss.

New nuclear treaty

A top issue for Russia and the US is the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which lapsed in February. The treaty was first signed in 2010 and caps US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals.

Russia currently possesses the largest number of warheads, followed by the US and then China, which is rapidly building up its own arsenal.

Trump previously rejected Russia’s proposal to extend the treaty after it expired, demanding instead a “new, improved and modernised” deal that includes Beijing.

China is understood, however, to be reluctant to join an agreement it was not involved in forming.

A senior Trump administration official told Reuters this topic will start the conversation but that “we do not expect to get any kind of agreement”.

US-Israel war on Iran

Officials also say the world leaders will discuss the Iran war, which the US and Israel launched on February 28. While full-scale strikes have, for now, ceased, the conflict remains in a deadlock.

After more than 100 days, the critical Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and oil and gas prices are still volatile as ships in the strait continue to face Iranian strikes and seamines. One-third of China’s crude oil supply transited the strait before the war. The conflict is also hampering demand for Chinese exports.

Russia, meanwhile, has profited from rising energy prices and recent sanctions relief from Washington amid supply crunches – particularly of diesel.

China-US trade rivalry

Trade wars and the race to control microchips used to power artificial intelligence are straining relations between Beijing and Washington.

Trump hit China with a 145 percent tax hike last year, while Beijing retaliated by imposing 125 percent levies on US imports. Tensions mounted further over China’s restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals needed to manufacture advanced chips and other technology.

The two countries have since reduced tariffs and struck several deals following Trump and Xi’s meetings in South Korea and Washington However, the recent scandal at chip firm Nvidia has prompted the US to allege that China was spying on CEO Jensen Huang. Beijing denies this.

Will the Ukraine war be discussed?

It is very unlikely. A Trump administration official told reporters the US president will not bring up Russia’s war on Ukraine, although Kremlin officials previously suggested the conflict could be discussed.

China, an ally of Moscow’s, has said the Ukraine war is a European issue.

US officials also note that Washington is pursuing peace talks, with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner visiting both Ukraine and Russia this week. “China is not really a part of that track, so it doesn’t seem appropriate to have the Ukraine discussion there,” an official told reporters.

President Trump has accused Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of “not wanting” to end the war, while Kyiv has reiterated allegations that the US has restricted its Starlink satellite connection that allows it to operate attack drones. Trump has also blamed Ukraine for soaring diesel prices because of its strikes on Russian oil facilities.

At the same time, Trump has feted Putin, agreed to allow Russian diesel into global and US markets, and lifted oil sanctions on Moscow.

What does each side want from this meeting?

Russia

For President Putin, the meeting could provide a positive photo opportunity and a platform to project power while sidelining the Ukraine conflict, analysts say.

It will give him a “first among equals” position that he can display at home to show that he can influence Europe’s security architecture following the Ukraine war, Alexander Bratersky, a Moscow-based journalist and political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

China

Beijing has already been pushing for a resolution to the US war on Iran, which has impacted its own energy supplies.

China will also want to avoid being pulled into a nuclear treaty it had no part in establishing.

Last month, China’s Foreign Ministry said it would be “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage”.

US

Trump’s priority is to include both China and Russia in a new nuclear proliferation treaty, according to administration officials. “The president has made it clear that, among other topics, he will discuss the reduction of nuclear weapons in the world. This proliferation, President Trump believes, is very dangerous,” Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, told reporters.

The president could also use the meeting to project his administration’s diplomatic influence, as Iran refuses to capitulate to US demands for ending the war and hand Washington a win.

Trump has also sought closer ties with Xi, Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, all seen as “strongmen”, and is likely to be perceived as influential in such circles, analysts say.

However, his Republican Party’s crushing defeat in midterm elections last week could undermine his leverage, experts note, as a new Democrat-led Congress is likely to support Ukraine more staunchly.

Is this the start of a new Yalta?

Pyotr Tolstoy, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee said it could lead to a “new Yalta”.

The 1945 conference in Yalta, in the then Soviet Union, saw USSR President Joseph Stalin, the US’s Franklin D Roosevelt, and the United Kingdom’s Winston Churchill divide Germany and establish the United Nations in what was seen as the template for a new world order.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, called the trilateral meeting now taking place between the leaders of the US, China and Russia as “extremely significant” but pointed out that any agreements reached at the meeting cannot be imposed on other nations.

The British government’s “Be Ready” campaign has caused a rush on tinned goods, bringing back memories of the COVID-19 pandemic when supermarkets ran dangerously low on toilet paper and online vendors were price-gouging on the internet.

In the 10 days since the campaign urging citizens in England and Wales to be ready for a national emergency was launched on October 22, sales of bottled water have risen by 67 percent; tinned and jarred food by 37 percent; and hand sanitiser by 83 percent, according to retail research firm Worldpanel by Numerator. Wind-up radios, torches and power banks have also sold out at several retailers.

British Defence Secretary Wes Streeting, the campaign’s most prominent public face, says the government wants people to be “alert but not alarmed”. So what is Be Ready, why now, and is it really necessary?

What is ‘Be Ready’?

Be Ready is a three-year public information campaign being run by the Cabinet Office. Its launch on October 22 marked its first stage.

The government is asking households in England and Wales to make sure they would be able to cope on their own for 72 hours if electricity, water, phone and internet services all fail in the event of a national emergency. The idea is that emergency services can then focus on people who require more urgent assistance.

The campaign’s website features a checklist, starting with bottled water and long-life food that does not need to be kept in a fridge, such as tinned food, dried fruit and nuts.

It also recommends having a torch, spare batteries, a charged power bank and a wind-up or battery-powered radio, along with cash in case card payments go down, a first aid kit, medication, warm clothing and blankets to hand.

The new website covers England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland receive their own advice through Ready Scotland and NI Direct.

More than 500 organisations, including charities, businesses and faith and community groups, have signed up to spread the message.

Official household preparedness guidance has existed since May 2024. What is new is the push to get people to act on it.

What’s this all for?

Officially, the focus of the campaign is to ensure households can get through “everyday emergencies” such as storms, floods, wildfires and burst water pipes. The campaign follows months of heatwaves, drought and fires across the United Kingdom this summer.

The government also highlights how unprepared Britons say they are. In a Cabinet Office survey this year, only 13 percent said their household was largely or totally prepared for an emergency, while 84 percent wanted more advice from the government.

Independent research points the same way. A 2025 survey of 931 people by Bournemouth University’s Disaster Management Centre, part of its EM-PREPARE project, found that only 52 percent felt they understood the hazards they faced, and 21 percent said they were not aware of the risks at all. The same study found that 81 percent were willing to do more to prepare.

In September, the National Audit Office, the UK’s spending watchdog, warned of threats facing Britain’s food supply chain.

The security backdrop features, too. Ministers have linked the campaign to the risk of cyberattacks and hostile state activity against critical infrastructure. On Remembrance Day, Defence Minister Lord Coaker said the 13 percent figure was exactly why the campaign had been launched.

The UK is also catching up with its neighbours. The European Commission’s Preparedness Union Strategy, adopted in March 2025, recommends that people be able to cope alone for at least 72 hours. Sweden posted 5.2 million copies of its crisis-preparedness brochure to households in November 2024, and Finland, Poland and the Czech Republic run similar campaigns.

What has the response been?

Shoppers in England and Wales have acted fast and enthusiastically. Supermarket chain Iceland said sales of tinned products rose 40 percent over the first weekend. Tinned-food producer Princes reported particularly high demand for tuna, meat and vegetables.

Worldpanel found the equivalent of 400,000 extra people a day bought tinned meat immediately after the launch.

Meanwhile, Canned Food UK, part of the Metal Packaging Manufacturers Association, has launched a consumer campaign featuring TV chef and author Theo Michaels, who demonstrates how to use canned food in tasty recipes.

The rush has extended beyond the food aisles. Electronics retailer Maplin said torch sales jumped 284 percent; radios, 92 percent; and power banks, 106 percent, within days. Hardware store group Robert Dyas reported a 160 percent rise in radio sales, and at least seven wind-up radio models sold out across several outlets.

Criticism has focused on tone more than substance. On BBC’s Question Time, an audience member accused Streeting of “scaremongering”, warning that the advice would trigger panic buying. Streeting replied that the campaign was about everyday threats such as wildfires, flooding and frozen pipes.

Opposition figures have largely accepted the principle. Conservative Shadow Foreign Secretary Tom Tugendhat called the advice “a perfectly reasonable thing”.

Analysts and charities are split on who should carry the burden. The British Red Cross, a campaign partner, has backed it, saying simple preparation helps people support friends, family and neighbours.

But more than 180 experts, academics, farmers and community food leaders signed an open letter warning that 29 percent of Britons cannot afford a three-day food reserve. They urged ministers to set up national, regional and community food stores rather than rely on the resilience of individual households.

How ready are British households for an emergency?

On November 2, Parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy took evidence on public preparedness. Among the witnesses was Lee Miles, professor of crisis and disaster management at Bournemouth University, who led the EM-PREPARE study of household resilience.

His research found that 75 percent of households had no major measures in place to cope with climate change, and about 69 percent were willing to spend no more than one day improving their preparedness.

Miles told the committee that the challenge was to move from raising awareness to helping people act. “The important thing about the ‘Be Ready’ campaign is turning it into a ‘Being Ready’ campaign,” he said.

Miles also warned that local resilience bodies would need proper funding if they were given more responsibility. “Otherwise, you set them up to fail in various aspects; they will not be able to deliver what they are supposed to,” he told MPs.

Is this all really necessary?

Supporters say the advice is modest and overdue. Having three days of supplies is standard across much of Europe, and the 2025 Iberian blackout showed how fast cash machines, card payments and mobile networks can fail.

That was when Spain, Portugal and parts of southwestern France were hit by a widespread power blackout that paralysed public transport, caused large traffic jams, delayed flights, and left residents unable to access cash from ATMs, as utility operators and the authorities scrambled to restore the electric grid.

With only one in eight Britons feeling prepared, they argue, a calm campaign now is better than a panicked one during a crisis. Retail data so far suggests most people have responded calmly.

The Bournemouth research highlights why the messaging could be critical. Households responding to that said they saw accidents at home as the hazard most likely to affect them – cited by 35 percent – while only 5 percent named war and conflict, and 4 percent terrorism.

Miles called for more targeted risk communication to the public, alongside education to help households build their resilience.

Just hours before Iran claimed it hit the United States military’s early warning radar system in Bahrain early on Friday, US President Donald Trump said he had told his country’s lead negotiator, Vice President JD Vance, that, “We don’t need a deal with Iran.”

Instead, Trump said, he has told Vance to focus on unearthing what the president says is corruption and crime in Democratic-controlled cities and states – after Democrats stunningly took over Congress in the midterm elections.

Vance is a known critic of the US-Israeli war on Iran. He has blamed Trump’s military strikes on Iran and the subsequent energy crisis and inflation in the US for the Republicans’ losses in Congress.

Meanwhile, several commercial vessels trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz have hit naval mines, or were struck by the Iranian military, over the past week – but Trump continues to claim that Washington controls the critical waterway nonetheless.

So, where is the war headed – and is Vance being sidelined by Trump?

What did Trump tell Vance?

Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he had asked Vice President Vance “to focus his complete and total attention on the Massive Corruption and Crime taking place in Democrat run Cities and States throughout the U.S.”

“We don’t need a deal with Iran,” he added. “Those days have long since passed. We’ve got their money, Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and we’ve got their Strait!”

The Trump administration has appeared increasingly divided on the foregoing arc of war on Iran since the midterm losses.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Washington’s economic pressure campaign against Iran is proving effective, so a resumption of large-scale military operations is unnecessary.

“The economic pressure on Iran is going to get even worse,” he added.

Trump has given mixed messages about his plans for the war. Despite threatening that he might “destroy” Iran last week, this week Trump has said that further strikes against Iran are “quite unlikely”.

What role has Vance played in talks with Iran?

Vance favours a deal with Iran, which Trump believes is not possible currently.

Vance led the US negotiations in April in Islamabad, where he helped secure the June memorandum of understanding with Iran. That quickly collapsed over glaring gaps in each side’s understanding of what had been agreed, however – particularly in reference to control of the Strait of Hormuz.

The US vice president also led direct talks with Iran in Switzerland and is part of renewed diplomatic efforts, engaging Qatari and Pakistani mediators and seeking continued negotiations with Iranian officials.

On November 4, following sweeping Republican losses in the midterm elections, Vance publicly questioned whether the war had been worth the political and economic costs. In a post on X, he wrote: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night,” endorsing diplomatic resolution as sound advice.

He added: “If you’d like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so.”

Political analysts say Vance’s rather blunt assessment is also an effort to distance himself from Trump’s war on Iran, when the president is facing his all-time low career approval ratings.

On June 17, speaking at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, France – when both parties had just signed the Islamabad MoU – Trump told reporters: “This way, if it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD. You better be careful, JD.”

The next day, Vance told reporters he believed the president was “joking”.

Where does the US-Iran war go from here?

It remains unclear.

On Friday morning, Tehran said it had attacked and destroyed an early-warning radar system belonging to the US military in Bahrain, in what it said was retaliation for an air attack on a telecommunications tower in southern Iran’s port city of Sirik.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, Trump said Washington’s allies in the Middle East had asked him to hold off on renewed large-scale attacks against Iran. He added that the US could destroy Iran’s energy infrastructure, bridges and manufacturing facilities within three days, if it wanted to.

“Saudi Arabia has asked me to please just let it be the way it is now for a while,” he said at White House, adding that Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain preferred the current approach.

Asked whether he would have launched further attacks without those requests, Trump replied: “Yes, I would.”

Though Trump acknowledged that rising fuel prices caused by the war contributed to the Republicans’ defeat in the midterm elections, he defended his decision to attack Iran.

Meanwhile, Brigadier General Ali Reza Belaili, an adviser to the aerospace force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said an order by Iran’s supreme leader to strike “enemies” without geographical limits will be implemented “at the appropriate time”.

Iran’s Mehr news agency quoted him saying that “the more Americans persist, the more they will sink into this swamp they created themselves”.

What’s the latest on diplomatic efforts?

This week, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliament speaker and top negotiator, told Al Jazeera that the Strait of Hormuz will “never return” to its status before the US-Israel war on Iran. That was when all commercial shipping was able to pass through the strait freely without having to pay tolls.

Iran in effect closed the strait, through which one-fifth of global oil supplies were shipped in peacetime, in early March following the start of US-Israeli strikes. That sent global energy markets into turmoil.

Ghalibaf said Tehran has sent a clear proposal for a ceasefire and for the reopening of the strait to Washington via Qatari mediators, laying out seven conditions, and added that Iran is now waiting for an official response from the US.

“The ball is now in the American court,” he said.

Iran’s conditions include an end to the US naval blockade of Iran’s ports, the lifting of economic sanctions, the release of Iranian frozen funds, ending fighting on all fronts, and an explicit announcement of an end to the war.

The US has previously refused to agree to these demands without an agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme in place first. Iran wants to negotiate that separately.

Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the Chatham House think tank, told Al Jazeera: “We are still in a situation which is ‘no war, no peace’, and it’s unlikely to move for the time being.

“Major strikes are unlikely to happen in the imminent days, but things are likely to shift one way or the other in the next couple of weeks,” she said. “The Gulf countries are not necessarily endorsing this as a new normal, even if they prefer this to the prospect of a renewed war.”

What’s the latest on US strikes and ships hit in Hormuz?

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Ghalibaf said this week that “there are no ‘free waters’ [international waters] there, and the 1982 [UN Convention on the Law of the Sea] does not apply” to the Strait of Hormuz. The strait does, in fact, run solely through the territorial waters of Iran and Oman.

“The regulations within the Strait of Hormuz are governed by the laws of the two littoral states that border it,” he added, reiterating Iran’s position that it is tightly controlling the waterway.

Tehran has said that multiple “offending” vessels – which it says have used an “illegal” route, referring to the southern corridor of the strait – have caught fire during attempts to transit the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has previously told approved ships to use a northern route which passes closer to its own coastline.

At least 12 tankers have been hit in the past 12 days, according to Iran.

The US military’s Central Command (CENTCOM) says it has been “working round the clock” to keep the strait open.

On Wednesday, CENTCOM claimed that at least 4,000 ships had crossed the waterway with the US military’s assistance, carrying more than 1.7 billion barrels of crude oil.

However, all maritime agencies continue to advise against travelling through the strait, and insurers have raised prices sharply for such journeys, or are refusing cover at all.

United States President Donald Trump travels to the Chinese city of Shenzhen next week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, where he is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The trip comes as Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s outgoing chief executive and one of Trump’s closest allies in Silicon Valley, faces mounting scrutiny over his relationship with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive whom US officials suspect of working for Chinese intelligence. China has denied the allegations.

On Thursday, Nvidia announced that Huang would step down as chief executive.

Huang accompanied Trump on his May visit to Beijing.

His presence mattered for Nvidia, which has struggled to secure approval to sell its H200 AI chips in China. Now, his place in the next delegation is in doubt.

So could Trump’s closeness to Huang push his administration towards a tougher line on China? Here’s what you need to know:

How did Huang shape the US-China chip thaw?

As founder and CEO of Nvidia, Huang pushed Washington to ease restrictions on the sale of advanced chips to China, arguing that wider use of US technology would help Washington hold onto its lead in AI development.

In December 2025, Trump did approve sales of the H200, Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip, to China, with 25 percent of proceeds to be paid to the US government.

He did so despite opposition from China hawks in both parties.

Huang was a surprise late addition to Trump’s delegation to Beijing in May, in hopes of unlocking stalled H200 sales. Despite Trump’s decision to allow the sales, shipments were low because of slow import approvals from the Chinese government in a bid to support domestic chipmakers.

No breakthrough was announced.

Trump has stood by Huang throughout his recent personal scandal, calling him an “honourable guy”.

Will the Nvidia scandal prompt Trump to take a tougher stance with China?

Not immediately.

Huang’s removal from Nvidia’s board and the scandal leading up to that are unlikely to significantly affect relations between Washington and Beijing, which Steve Okun, a Singapore-based geopolitical analyst, told Al Jazeera is “a stalemate at best”.

Instead, if the US continues to impose restrictions on AI product sales to China, AI diversion and diffusion – how products are traded around the world both formally and informally – would be much more likely to cause tension between the two nations.

Gabriel Wildau, managing director at the advisory firm Teneo, told Al Jazeera earlier this week that Trump “shows no sign that he intends to disrupt the current US-China rapprochement”.

But he warned that the president “may face new pressure from Congress and hawkish voices inside his administration”.

Carsten Holz, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said Trump “would not seem to have a coherent China policy and therefore his position in the upcoming talks in Shenzhen is hard to predict”.

Huang’s personal affairs “will be of little relevance” to China-US relations, he told Al Jazeera.

Where is the pressure to be tougher with China coming from?

Mostly from Congress, where control of both houses will pass to the Democrats in January.

Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at the technology research group Omdia, said a tough US line on AI and China was not Trump’s alone, calling it “one of the rare political consensuses domestically across the aisle”.

Trump, he said, “will do whatever he can to protect his contribution and legacy on this matter”.

On Wednesday, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chris Coons asked Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House chief of staff Stephen Miller to preserve all records on Nvidia’s chip exports to China.

“This incident raises significant concerns about the federal government’s ability to effectively enforce our export controls and protect our national security,” the senators wrote.

The news website Axios reported that Lutnick had held up a planned crackdown on firms suspected of funnelling Nvidia chips to China.

Meanwhile, procurement notices seen by the AFP news agency show that a Chinese university linked to the country’s defence establishment bought Nvidia H200 chips through a third party in September and October.

How has China responded?

Beijing has rejected the spy claims and accused Washington of using them as cover to impose stronger restrictions and semiconductor export controls on China.

“The US side should stop fabricating such ‘spy’ narratives as a pretext for imposing a technological blockade,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning said on Thursday.

But Mao also said China is willing to work with the US to implement the consensus reached by the two leaders.

Omdia’s Su said China “has no interest in not engaging with Trump, given substantial interest in Nvidia graphics processing units”.

Chinese chipmakers may also gain from better access to US technology.

Shares in Moore Threads, MetaX and Cambricon, China’s leading makers of graphics processors, jumped nearly 10 percent on Thursday.

What happens after Shenzhen?

Holz, the Chinese economy expert, noted that the use of advanced Nvidia chips in Singapore data centres to serve customers in mainland China was “not new information”.

Still, Okun expects the pressure to build next year.

He said Congress could pass the Remote Access Security Act, aimed at stopping Chinese firms from reaching advanced chips through the cloud.

The Department of Commerce, he added, could put export controls on Megaspeed or require licences for advanced chips sent to countries such as Singapore and Malaysia.

If that happens, it will strain the US-China relationship in 2027, he said, adding “but that’s not going to happen next week”.

United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that Washington’s economic pressure campaign against Iran is proving so effective that a resumption of large-scale military operations is unnecessary.

His remarks are the latest in an often-evolving series of messages from US President Donald Trump’s administration on the conflict with Iran. They also come after a crushing midterm defeat for Trump’s Republican Party, which the president acknowledged was likely partly driven by public opposition to the war.

So how do Rubio’s latest remarks compare with the positions of other administration officials, and what do they say about the state of the conflict?

What have Trump, Rubio and Vance said about the conflict?

Rubio made his latest comments on Tuesday after meeting with foreign ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) forum in Paris.

He said he told G7 allies that “the economic campaign [against Iran] is so devastating that right now there is no need for major combat operations”.

“We don’t need to conduct military strikes if we’re achieving the same objective through economic means and economic pressure. That’s not stalemate,” Rubio said.

“The economic pressure on Iran is going to get even worse,” he added.

Rubio also pushed G7 allies to help “protect shipping” around the embattled Strait of Hormuz, where he said US forces would stay.

The secretary of state’s remarks were largely in line with Trump’s comments on Monday, when the president said further strikes against Iran were “quite unlikely”.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the US’s Gulf allies preferred a continuation of the “status quo”, referring to the US’s blockade of Iranian ports. Trump added that there appears to be “positive momentum” towards ending the conflict, but that the US remains “locked and loaded” should circumstances change.

Vice President JD Vance, who has been more critical of the war and recently wrote a lengthy social media post blaming the Republican Party’s midterm defeat on the conflict, favours a deal with Iran, which Trump does not believe is possible right now, the Reuters news agency cited an informed source as saying.

Between sanctions and diplomacy: What are the divisions on Iran war strategy?

Negotiations to end the US-Iran conflict have been largely stalled for months, as Iran continues to target vessels it claims are violating its conditions for transit through the Strait of Hormuz and the US ramps up sanctions against Iran and continues to blockade Iranian ports, with plans to block Iran’s land-based supply routes as well.

Back in September, Iran proposed a seven-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart talks. Tehran has since said that timeline could be brought down to two days. Tehran’s demands for the US include lifting sanctions Washington imposed after the collapse of a June memorandum of understanding (MoU), reducing the US military presence in the region, reinstating oil waivers and releasing frozen Iranian funds.

Trump, torn between restarting an unpopular war or pushing harder for a deal with Tehran, has for now settled on a middle ground: doubling down on the pressure campaign against Iran while avoiding a return to full-scale military action, according to officials quoted by Axios.

That strategy is backed by several key administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, as well as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Axios cited US officials as saying.

However, several US allies in the region, including Pakistan, Iraq and Turkiye, are concerned that a drawn-out US pressure campaign against Iran could hurt their own business interests, said one official cited by the news outlet.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said that a long-term US policy of intensive sanctions and a blockade against Iran would only prolong an “unstable status quo” that would eventually escalate into more military confrontation.

However, he said one “walk-away” option for Trump could be to quietly relax the sanctions and blockade while maintaining them “on paper”.

In this case, “Trump walks away and claims to retain the blockade and sanctions infrastructure, but in reality, allows it to imperceptibly wither away,” Parsi told Al Jazeera. “The blockade begins to loosen, sanctions enforcement begins to decay, and slowly but surely, Asian and Middle Eastern countries begin trading with and investing in Iran.”

“A new equilibrium emerges in which sanctions enforcement is strong enough for the US to claim the restrictions are still in place, yet weak enough to prevent Tehran from challenging the new status quo,” Parsi said.

Have the midterm election results impacted Trump’s strategy?

Yes, according to analysts.

Negar Mortazavi, senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC, said the Republicans’ resounding election defeat “dramatically raised the political cost of more escalation” and gave the Democrats a stronger mandate to challenge the war.

“If Democrats unite and use their new power aggressively, they can make it increasingly difficult for Trump to continue the war, pressuring him to end it,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera.

“A diplomatic breakthrough is not guaranteed, but the political and strategic costs of escalation keep growing, making another round of war less likely,” she added.

Both Trump and Vance have acknowledged that the Iran war was partly to blame for the Republicans’ loss, with Trump saying voters were not ready for petrol prices to rise.

According to a poll by Reuters/Ipsos completed on Monday, 71 percent of Americans – including 93 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans –  favour congressional legislation that would halt the Iran war.

What is Iran saying?

Iranian officials have upped their rhetoric even as Washington appears to be moving away from military escalation.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Tuesday said the war will “not end either through military means or by increasing sanctions”, but only through “using the language of respect”.

In comments carried by Iran’s IRNA news agency, he urged the US “to act on Iran’s demands and conditions”, adding that Trump “should have realised much earlier that he has not achieved, and will not achieve, any of his goals in the war with Iran”.

Iran’s top security chief Mohsen Rezaei, in a social media post on Monday, said the US government had been “wrecked” by the war and that it was time for it to “surrender” to Iran’s demands.

Al Jazeera’s Mohamed Vall, reporting from Tehran, noted that Iran’s language has become “more confident than ever before”.

“They’re trying to convey to the public, internally, and also to the Americans, that there is no way this war can be declared over without responding to those conditions presented by Iran during the negotiations,” said Vall.

What is the current status of diplomacy?

There are mixed messages.

The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday said that Doha is “working tirelessly” in its ongoing mediation efforts, and has received positive reactions from both sides.

Trump, the day before, after hosting Qatar’s prime minister at the White House, also spoke of “momentum towards the end of this conflict”, adding that “Iran is talking to us, and they’re talking very politely”.

Rubio, for his part, said the US remains “open to diplomacy”, but called Iran’s current demands “totally unrealistic”.

“We expect that could change – and if it does, we’re prepared for diplomacy,” he said.

Iranian officials, meanwhile, have appeared more sceptical of the latest reports of mediation, insisting that the US must accept their demands.

Rezaei on Tuesday said there ⁠were no negotiations taking place between Tehran and Washington and that Iran would retaliate against any new US attack by targeting US bases “far away”. He also said Iran would not let any of its enriched nuclear material leave the country, ruling out a concession the US has sought in potential nuclear talks.

In a social media post, Rezaei went on to accuse the US of “manufacturing FAKE NEWS about imaginary talks”.

The United States House ⁠of Representatives has blocked an attempt to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a surprise reprieve for President Donald Trump’s administration as Republicans reel from their midterm election defeat.

The impeachment articles were introduced by Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, but the effort was backed primarily by Democrats. They accuse Hegseth of abuses of power and conducting illegal military operations.

The Republican-led House voted 211-204 on Tuesday to refer the articles back to the House Judiciary Committee, where they could remain indefinitely. The procedural move in effect killed the impeachment drive for the duration of the current Congress’s term, which ends in eight weeks. On January 3, Democrats will take control of the House and Senate.

In a twist, the absence of 11 Democratic lawmakers during the vote proved decisive.

Here’s what to know about the vote to block Hegseth’s impeachment and what could happen next:

What was Tuesday’s vote about?

The vote was not on whether to impeach Hegseth. It was on whether to refer the articles of impeachment to the Judiciary Committee, where they may be further investigated or amended.

Such procedural moves are often used as stalling tactics. With the current Congress due to conclude soon, the resolution is unlikely to return to the House floor before its term ends.

Massie called the vote “a procedural motion to kill the resolution”.

What was the result of the vote?

It narrowly passed 211-204.

Massie was the sole Republican to oppose the measure. The remaining votes fell along party lines with Republicans supporting the measure and Democrats opposing it.

Eighteen representatives were absent from the vote – 11 Democrats and seven Republicans. Had the Democrats shown up and voted with their colleagues, they would have had the numbers to defeat the procedural move, forcing a full House vote on whether to impeach Hegseth as early as this week.

Trump cheered the result of Tuesday’s vote in a social media post, saying the Democrats’ impeachment effort had “miserably FAILED!”

Who were the 11 absent Democrats, and why did they miss the vote?

The Democrats absent from the vote were:

• Julia Brownley (California)
• Lou Correa (California)
• Nancy Pelosi (California)
• Laura Gillen (New York)
• Steven Horsford (Nevada)
• Jonathan Jackson (Illinois)
• Brittany Pettersen (Colorado)
• Melanie Stansbury (New Mexico)
• Haley Stevens (Michigan)
• Marilyn Strickland (Washington)
• Frederica Wilson (Florida)

The representatives have given varying explanations for why they did not show up.

Strickland, Jackson, Stansbury and Gillen all blamed a traffic delay in Washington, DC.

Pelosi said she was in her home state for a veterans event while Correa said he was in California before undergoing a health procedure. Horsford’s office cited a personal emergency.

Pettersen, who said she helped introduce articles of impeachment against Hegseth in April, said she had been “denied the ability to vote on this motion” without elaborating.

Jackson, Stansbury, Gillen, Strickland, Horsford, Pelosi and Pettersen all said they would have joined their Democratic colleagues in opposing the measure. Jackson and Stansbury also said they had formally recorded their opposition in the Congressional Record although this does not change the official vote count.

There was no immediate comment from Stevens, Brownley or Wilson on their absences.

Stevens previously criticised the Trump administration for launching the war on Iran with Israel and sought more congressional oversight. But days before the US midterm elections on November 3, the Michigan congresswoman, who had lost the Democratic primary for the state’s open Senate seat earlier to Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed Republican candidate Mike Rogers against her own party’s nominee.

Wilson, 83, on Monday attended the groundbreaking for a housing project in Miami-Dade County. Wilson and Brownley, like Stevens, previously opposed Trump’s handling of the war on Iran and demanded the administration seek congressional approval for the fighting.

What has been the reaction?

Democratic politicians and progressive commentators have expressed outrage that poor attendance from Democrats impacted the outcome of the vote.

Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove from California said: “We knew that this vote was coming, so people should have gotten their raggedy selves up these steps to vote.”

“There is no reason why we should have lost this vote because of attendance issues,” she added.

Senator-elect El-Sayed, responding to a question about the absent Democrats, said: “You should show up and do your job.”

Some pundits pointed the finger at Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to become the new speaker of the House in January. They accused him of failing to exert sufficient pressure on party members to defeat the measure.

Political commentator Krystal Ball called the vote “a major Hakeem Jeffries fail”.

“You could have impeached the war criminal Pete Hegseth but Dems didn’t show up to vote,” she said.

Progressive writer Laura Bassett said: “Jeffries didn’t even whip the vote. He told people to ‘vote their conscience’, and 11 members of his caucus didn’t show up. This is why people want a stronger leader.”

Could Hegseth still be impeached?

Yes. When the new Democratic-controlled Congress convenes in January, they could begin the process again and will be in a stronger position to advance impeachment articles.

Jeffries has said he will consult members about another potential bid to impeach Hegseth next year. “We’ll have that conversation at the appropriate time,” he said.

However, a vote to impeach Hegseth does not necessarily mean he will be removed from office. Impeachment itself means the House has formally brought charges against a federal official, similar to a criminal indictment.

A successful impeachment vote triggers a trial in Congress’s upper chamber, the Senate, on whether to convict.

A conviction, which immediately removes the official from office, requires at least two-thirds support in the Senate. That means Democrats, even with their incoming majority in the chamber next year, would likely need about a dozen Republicans to join them to secure Hegseth’s removal.

Only eight officials – all federal judges – have ever been convicted by the Senate. Trump has been impeached twice – in December ⁠2019 and January 2021 – but the Senate acquitted him on both occasions.

Islamabad, Pakistan – In the spring of 2025, Pakistan and India severed most of their remaining links after years of acrimony.

Gunmen had killed 26 people in Pahalgam in India-administered Kashmir that April. New Delhi blamed Pakistan for the attack – Islamabad denied any role – and put the Indus Waters Treaty, governing the sharing of rivers flowing into Pakistan, in abeyance. Pakistan retaliated by closing its airspace to Indian airlines, shutting the Wagah border crossing and suspending trade.

By May, the nuclear-armed neighbours were exchanging missile and drone strikes. Four days of fighting ended in a ceasefire on May 10, for which United States President Donald Trump claimed credit.

Eighteen months later, data from Pakistan’s central bank suggested trade is gradually recovering.

Pakistan imported goods worth $61.7m from India from July to September this year, up 69 percent from the same period a year earlier, according to the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP).

Here is what the data show, what Pakistan buys from India and how the trade is continuing:

What do the latest figures show?

The SBP records payments made by Pakistani banks for imports, broken down by country. From July to September 2025, payments for Indian imports totalled $36.6m.

After the conflict, monthly payments fell from $20m in April 2025 just before the four-day war to $9.2m in June and $8.2m in July before recovering to $19.6m in September.

Over the full 2025-2026 fiscal year, which ended this June, Pakistan paid $203.8m for Indian imports, 7.6 percent less than the previous year.

Monthly averages suggest payments have largely recovered: $19.3m in the 12 months before the conflict and $19.1m in the 13 months from September 2025.

Government trade data, which break down imports by commodity, put the value of imports in the latest quarter slightly lower at $62.6m, compared with $66.6m a year earlier.

What does Pakistan import from India?

Organic chemicals and pharmaceutical products accounted for 96.2 percent of imports from India in 2025-2026, compared with 93 percent the previous year, government trade data show.

The largest category was vaccines, blood products and similar items worth $93.6m, up from $70.3m. Within this group, imports of vaccines for human use rose to $32.3m from $11.1m.

Khaqan Najeeb, a former adviser to Pakistan’s Ministry of Finance, said the reliance was driven by price and supply.

“India has developed a competitive pharmaceutical industry, particularly in active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), which are essential for medicine manufacturing,” he told Al Jazeera. “Pakistan’s pharmaceutical industry has historically sourced some of these inputs from India because of competitive prices, product availability and geographical proximity.”

How does trade continue during the ban?

Pakistan’s restrictions on Indian goods predate the 2025 conflict.

On August 9, 2019, days after India revoked the special autonomous status of India-administered Kashmir, Pakistan’s Ministry of Commerce banned the import of goods originating in India or shipped from the country.

Less than a month later, however, it exempted therapeutic products regulated by the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP).

After the 2025 Pahalgam attack and India’s decision to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan’s National Security Committee (NSC) imposed further restrictions.

“All trade with India including to and from any third country through Pakistan is suspended forthwith,” the NSC said in a statement on April 24, 2025.

But Muhammad Zubair Motiwala, a former chief executive of the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan (TDAP), a government body responsible for facilitating the country’s international trade and exports, said some Indian goods still entered Pakistan through third countries.

“Indian goods actually come through Dubai and Malaysia and others, but they are counted by country of origin,” he told Al Jazeera.

Najeeb, however, cautioned against drawing conclusions about the routes through which such goods reach Pakistan.

“Some supplies may reach Pakistan through international supply chains, but the precise routes and volumes are not publicly established,” he said.

A DRAP official speaking on condition of anonymity said that ultimately, despite the tensions with India, Pakistan’s trade decisions were determined by one factor above all: It would import from India if needed in the national interest.

Could Pakistan buy elsewhere?

Nowhere is that interest clearer than in the field of pharmaceuticals.

Overall, India accounted for only about 0.3 percent of Pakistan’s $64.5bn total import bill in 2025-2026, according to SBP data. Pakistan paid $19.5bn for imports from China, its biggest trading partner.

But the pharma sector is a different story. In 2024 before the four-day war, India was Pakistan’s second-largest supplier of pharmaceuticals, marginally behind Belgium, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.

Motiwala said replacing Indian suppliers could significantly increase costs for some businesses.

“We actually want this [trade] to reopen. Our raw material comes from them, and it comes from other places. It adds 40 to 50 percent to the cost if we import from other places,” he said.

Najeeb said the impact of switching suppliers would vary depending on the product.

“Freight, insurance, quality certification, regulatory approvals and delivery reliability all influence the economics. Alternative sourcing may increase costs for some products although this will vary across ingredients,” he said.

Are there signs of a thaw?

Motiwala said relations between the neighbours appeared to be easing.

“I do think the ice is melting. It seems like it. Fishermen were recently released, and there was a handshake between the two teams,” he said.

On August 29, India repatriated 25 Pakistani nationals, including fishermen, through the Wagah-Attari border crossing.

Last week, Indian and Pakistani footballers shook hands before and after India’s 3-2 win in a SAFF Championship match in Dhaka, a departure from the recent practice of teams from the two countries avoiding such gestures in other sports.

Najeeb said closer economic ties could benefit both countries.

“However, economic considerations cannot be divorced from the prevailing political and security environment. Where conditions permit, a gradual and mutually agreed resumption of trade could be examined, beginning with areas of clear economic and humanitarian benefit,” he said.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) says it has lifted its self-imposed 2,000km (1,250-mile) limit on the range of its ballistic missiles, raising questions over whether Tehran now considers hitting targets beyond the Middle East.

“This limitation has been lifted for us,” IRGC spokesman Brigadier-General Hossein Mohebbi announced at a news conference in Tehran on Saturday.

Mohebbi did not say whether Iran already had missiles that exceed the cap, but added that Iran would show its capabilities through action rather than statements, as Tehran has hardened its position and shifted towards an “offensive” military doctrine.

The announcement came days after Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei warned that “any kind and level of threat” from the United States or Israel would be met with a response unlimited by geography. Mojtaba has said Iran needs to end the “no war, no peace” situation amid the volatile status of the Strait of Hormuz and the US naval blockade on the Iranian ports.

It also comes as the diplomatic push to end the US-Israel war on Iran has intensified, with Trump on Monday saying there is “positive momentum” towards ending the military hostilities after talks with Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani in Washington, DC.

So what does lifting the limit actually change, and why is Iran doing it now?

Where could Iran’s missiles reach?

Iran already has operational capabilities to launch missiles beyond 2,000km, but it has kept a cap on them amid focus on regional deterrence. Iranian missiles can reach the entire Arabian Peninsula, the Levant and most of Egypt, as well as parts of Southeastern Europe, including Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia.

For Gulf states, the announcement changes little. They already sit well within Iran’s 2,000km range and have come under repeated Iranian missile fire since the US and Israel launched the war on February 28.

The change can help Iran to position some of its rocket launchers in the country’s east, from where it would require a bigger range to reach Israel. The US and its European allies fear Iran can target US bases in the Indian Ocean and Europe.

In March, the United Kingdom accused Iran of firing missiles towards the joint US-UK base at Diego Garcia, some 4,000km (about 2,500 miles) from Iran. Tehran denied targeting the base located in the Indian Ocean, saying it was “an Israeli false flag” operation.

In 2019, the UK, France and Germany said their modelling put a lighter-warhead version of Iran’s Khorramshahr missile at a range of approximately 3,000km (about 1,900 miles). US officials have also said technology from Iran’s space programme could be repurposed to build intercontinental ballistic missiles, The Associated Press news agency reported. Iran currently does not have intercontinental ballistic missiles in its arsenal.

Muhanad Seloom, assistant professor of international politics and security at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told Al Jazeera that the Diego Garcia launch had already made Iran’s point. “Iran denied doing that, but they wanted to signal that they have the capacity. So yes, they do have the capacity,” he said.

Seloom, who is also an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter, pointed to Iran’s space launches over the past decade, saying the same rockets could in theory reach anywhere in the world. “How effective, that’s a totally different story,” he said, adding that Iran could probably field missiles with a range of about 5,000km (3,100 miles).

Iranian security analyst Mohamed Taheri made a similar case on Iran’s state-run Channel 3, saying range had stopped being a technical obstacle for Iran by the mid-2010s. “Even now we have no technical limitation in reaching ranges above 2,000km,” he said.

“If we were to increase that range to 4,000km, we would certainly have most of Europe within our missile range, and roughly most of North Africa as well,” Taheri said.

How has Europe responded to Iran’s missile threat?

The IRGC announcement about ending its self-imposed limit seems to be a shift from Tehran’s assurances to Europe on missile range. Europe’s relations with Iran have deteriorated over its nuclear programme and regional geopolitical ambitions. The European Union’s designation of the IRGC as a “terrorist” group and its allowing the US to use bases on the continent have attracted Iran’s ire.

Iran warned Bulgaria repeatedly this year over US aircraft on its soil. In April, Tehran sent a diplomatic note cautioning Bulgaria against letting US military aircraft use its airports for operations against Iran.

When Bulgaria’s parliament approved hosting up to eight US KC-135 refuelling tankers at Bezmer airbase in July, Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said Bulgarian decision-makers “must bear responsibility” for the move. It was Tehran’s third warning to Sofia.

In August, two Iranian insiders told the Financial Times that the US bases in countries such as Bulgaria had been assessed as possible targets, describing the threat to Europe as real but confined to the continent’s south and southeast. Two US tankers left Bezmer on August 21.

Last month, the UK spy chief said Iran is stepping up targeting of military bases in Europe. It came after UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the IRGC was “almost certainly” behind a suspected plot against Royal Air Force (RAF) Fairford, an airbase used by US bombers to carry out strikes on Iran. The incident prompted the US to withdraw its military jets from the facility over security concerns earlier this month. Tehran has denied involvement, saying it was a “false flag” operation.

On Monday, the US military evacuated aircraft from a second British base, RAF Mildenhall, “in the wake of a threat from Iran”, according to The Wall Street Journal. The refuelling tankers were moved to Germany and elsewhere, and US officials were still discussing the precise nature of the threat.

The UK Ministry of Defence did not confirm the reason. “Aircraft and other assets move regularly according to operational requirements,” a spokesperson said.

Bases in the UK, Germany and Romania are among other European locations the US has used during the conflict.

“It’s possible that in this war we may set aside the geographic restraint we’ve observed stemming from our diplomatic relations with certain countries and even be able to strike the bases that exist in Europe,” Iran’s Taheri said.

For European governments, the announcement is “worrying … but not alarming”, Doha Institute’s Seloom said. Missiles would have to travel far to reach mainland Europe or the UK, he explained, giving NATO members with assets in the region early warning and time to intercept them.

He said threatening Europe would not serve Iran’s interests, since European governments did not back Trump’s war and have pushed for a diplomatic solution despite paying a heavy price in energy costs. That could change if Iran comes to be framed as a threat to international security, he warned, pointing to Iraq, where successive UN Security Council resolutions preceded European support for the 2003 invasion.

“No one could defend Iranian policies when it comes to threatening Europe or the UK,” Seloom said. Lifting the limit, he added, suggests Tehran “is reading this conflict as existential now”.

That, he argued, is what should concern the whole region. “When you give them the idea that you have only one option, is to die … they can do anything. There would be no red lines,” he said.

Why is Iran doing this now?

Because the cap was self-imposed, Iran could have dropped it at any time. For years, the IRGC said the limit was meant to reassure European countries that they would not be targeted.

Mohebbi, the IRGC spokesman, went further, saying that if Iran decided to change its nuclear doctrine and build a bomb, the necessary preparations would be made.

One reading is deterrence: a warning to Washington, and to European governments hosting US aircraft, that renewed strikes could bring a wider response. Iran’s earlier threats to Bulgaria were seen in similar terms, as an attempt to discourage European governments from supporting US operations.

Tehran is also eyeing diplomatic leverage amid efforts to end the conflict. It can offer the cap as a concession, suggesting that any restraint on range now has a price at the negotiating table.

“It’s both,” Seloom said. He argued that Tehran sees a narrow window before the new US Congress convenes in January, in which Trump will want a deal he can present as a success.

The decision to lift the limit, he said, “is basically to push the Trump administration to go for a deal, not to launch another campaign of military action”. With Trump threatening to hit bridges and the power grid, Iran is “signalling that they can go even crazier”.

What has the West historically said about Iran’s missiles?

Western concern over Iran’s missiles has run alongside the nuclear file for more than a decade.

The 2015 nuclear deal signed under US President Barack Obama put a limit on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorsed the nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), put a curb on Iran’s ballistic missile programme.

Those curbs expired in October 2023, following which Western countries expressed concerns about Tehran’s missile activities. In September 2025, France, Germany and the UK reimposed sanctions on Iran over its nuclear enrichment. But Tehran defended the enrichment boost after blaming Trump for withdrawing from the 2015 deal.

Trump put the destruction of Iran’s missile and nuclear programme as the main goals of the war launched in February. “We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” he had said.

US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said days later the goal was to destroy Iranian offensive missiles and missile production. Experts and US intelligence assessments, however, indicated Iran’s missile programme was years away from threatening the US homeland.

Before the war, Iran held the largest ballistic missile stockpile in the Middle East, estimated at between 2,500 and 6,000 missiles.

United States President Donald Trump has said the US plans to seek compensation from countries it “protected” during its war on Iran.

In an interview with CBS News correspondent Ross Douthat that aired Sunday, Trump said such countries would “pay us any and all costs we had for the war”.

“We’re going to get all that money back,” Trump said. “They’re going to do it, 100 percent. Because without us, they wouldn’t exist.”

For the first time, Trump also explicitly spoke of compensation from Israel, which he said “wouldn’t exist” without US military intervention.

The reimbursement demand comes after Trump and his Republican party took a drubbing in midterm elections, which the president has conceded was partly due to public discontent over the Iran war.

The US president has since declared the war “effectively over” militarily, while defending his decision to start the conflict as “a very good decision”.

Here’s what to know about Trump’s demand for repayment, and what it could mean for the US and its allies:

Which countries does Trump want compensation from?

Trump — for the first time — singled out Israel, which was a direct participant in the war against Iran from the outset.

“We decapitated their [Iran’s] nuclear arsenal,” he said. “If I didn’t do that, there would be no Israel right now. Israel would be gone.”

Previously, Trump has said he would seek repayment from Gulf countries that benefit from the US military presence around the embattled Strait of Hormuz, where US forces have been escorting vessels.

“We’re protecting a very rich portion of the world, we’re spending money, and so what we’ve done is we’re going to be reimbursed for protection,” Trump said during a press briefing in July.

He named Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait as countries that should pay.

But while Israel jointly launched the war on Iran with the US, Gulf countries have said that they were not even informed about Washington’s plans, and have since borne the brunt of Iran’s retaliatory attacks. As members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), they have called for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.

How much has the Iran war cost the US?

$47.1bn as of mid-October, according to the US military.

But the full cost is likely to be even higher, as that figure excludes the cost of repairing damage to US military bases across the Middle East.

The Congressional Budget Office in September estimated the conflict would carry an additional cost of $2bn-$3bn for each month it continues.

Will Trump actually seek repayment from allies?

Probably not directly, analysts say.

Neil Quilliam, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s comments are “best understood as political signalling rather than a serious policy proposal.”

Gulf states in particular are likely to take Trump’s comments “with a grain of salt,” added Bader al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University and associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa programme.

“I think what [Trump] stated on an American news channel was for domestic consumption, and I think that’s how most of the Gulf states will take it,” said al-Saif.

Stefan Lukas, an analyst specialising in Middle East and North Africa security and foreign policy, also pointed to Trump’s domestic political considerations, saying the US president has been “looking for someone to blame … and has been doing everything in his power to divert attention from the midterm election results”.

Lukas told Al Jazeera it is unlikely that Washington’s Arab allies in the region will face large compensation payments “or anything similar”.

However, he suggested that Trump could be more serious about seeking economic concessions from Israel, particularly after announcing that the country would no longer receive US aid after the end of this year.

That is partly because, from Trump’s perspective, “Israel pushed him into a disastrous war with Iran”, Lukas said.

What would compensation look like?

Al-Saif said Trump could be “very innovative” in defining what constitutes repayment for the war, potentially pointing to existing trade agreements or investment from the Gulf.

“There’s many agreements for him to go back to and to claim,” said Al-Saif. “There have been a lot of [Gulf] pledges for investment in the US.”

Farid Boussaid, an assistant professor in Middle East politics at the University of Amsterdam, said Washington could push for further Gulf investment and present it as compensation.

“This will most likely be indirect and take the form of commercial investments in the US, buying of US weapons systems – on top of what has already been ordered – and investments into close associates of Trump’s financial dealings,” said Boussaid.

Trump has repeatedly made misleading claims about foreign investment and trade agreements in the past, portraying them as payments or gifts to the US.

After a July 2025 trade deal with the European Union, Trump claimed the bloc had given the US a $600bn “gift” that could be invested in “anything we want”. However, the framework agreement referred only to an expectation that European companies would invest $600bn across strategic sectors in the US through 2028.

The same month, Trump described a $550bn investment pledge from Japan, under a new US-Japan trade agreement, as being “like a signing bonus that a baseball player would get”.

During Trump’s first term, he repeatedly claimed that Mexico would pay for a border wall – which was never completed and which Mexico did not pay for. Trump later qualified his claim to say that Mexico would reimburse the US for the wall or pay for a “piece” of it, which also never happened. Trump at one point claimed that the benefits of a trade pact he negotiated with Mexico would cover the cost of the wall.

How will US allies react to Trump’s demands?

Having already suffered extensive financial losses during the war, the US’s Gulf allies will not take well to being asked to pay more for a war they did not start, say analysts.

Quilliam said Gulf leaders would likely respond to any demand for direct repayment with “quiet resistance”, arguing that they “already contribute significantly to the cost of regional security through defence cooperation, investment and economic partnerships with the US”.

Gulf states also pay for the maintenance of several large bases that the US uses for military operations in the region.

Boussaid said Gulf states will be particularly averse to such a demand as “the US-Israeli war led to considerable damage to their [civilian] and military infrastructure when Iran struck back”.

Al-Saif added that Trump’s “condescending language does not bode well for partners long invested in the relationship with the US”.

As for Israel, it looks unlikely to “reverse its longstanding role as a recipient rather than a provider of support in its relationship with the US”, according to Marzieh Kouhi Esfahani, assistant professor of politics and international relations of the Middle East at Durham University.

“While Israel and the United States continue to share intelligence and coordinate on regional security issues, any request for Israel to shoulder a meaningful share of the financial burden would run against established practice and Israel’s present resource constraints,” she said.

World leaders and delegates are gathering in Antalya, Turkiye, for COP31, the annual climate summit of the United Nations, which runs from November 9 to 20.

They meet as global emissions continue to climb. The world emitted 54.1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2025, 0.7 percent more than the year before and 68.5 percent more than in 1990, according to the latest figures from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide and methane, trap heat in the atmosphere, raising global temperatures and fuelling heatwaves, droughts, floods and other extreme weather conditions.

In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera breaks down which gases are warming the planet, which industries and countries emit the most, and how their emissions have changed over time.

Which gases are warming the planet?

Carbon dioxide (CO2) made up 73.8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2025. It is released mainly when fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas are burned, while deforestation removes trees that would otherwise absorb it.

Methane (CH4) accounted for 17.6 percent of emissions that year, followed by nitrous oxide (N2O) at 5.3 percent and fluorinated gases (F-gases) at 3.3 percent.

Global CO2 emissions have risen by 76.3 percent since 1990, according to the JRC.

How is a warming planet affecting the world?

As these gases build up in the atmosphere, they trap more heat. In 2025, the heat stored in the world’s oceans reached its highest level on record, and the rate of ocean warming has increased sharply over the past two decades, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Extreme weather has killed tens of thousands of people and forced millions from their homes in 2026, according to the WMO.

In Europe, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires between May and August caused more than 30,000 excess deaths, and 220,000 people were evacuated in France alone.

On August 26, a glacier collapse and the resulting flash flood in the Himalayas killed more than 1,500 people in Nepal along its border with China, while about 5,600 remain missing, according to the UN.

In June and July, Typhoon Bavi forced three million people to evacuate in China and killed 26 in the Philippines. Weeks later, severe Tropical Storm Maysak killed 171 people and caused more than $3bn in losses in China.

Earlier in the year, floods and windstorms across the western Mediterranean displaced more than 180,000 people in Morocco, while extreme cold and snow in North America killed 174 people.

The map below shows some of the most extreme weather events of 2026.

Where do the world’s emissions come from?

The world’s greenhouse gas emissions have more than doubled since 1970, rising from about 23 billion tonnes to 54.1 billion tonnes in 2025, according to the JRC.

The power industry, which generates electricity, is the largest source, producing nearly 30 percent of global emissions in 2025. Its emissions have roughly quadrupled since 1970, driven by soaring demand for electricity in fast-growing economies such as China and India.

Industry, including manufacturing and mining, is the second-largest source at 21 percent. This covers fuel burned in factories as well as gases released when producing cement, metals and chemicals. Industrial emissions climbed steeply in the 2000s as China’s manufacturing boomed.

Transport, including cars, shipping and aviation, is third at 16 percent.

Together, these three sectors produce about two-thirds of the world’s emissions. The rest comes from agriculture (12 percent), the extraction of coal, oil and gas (11 percent), buildings (6.6 percent) and waste (3.6 percent).

Global emissions have fallen only a handful of times since 1970, including in the early 1980s, after the 2008 financial crisis and during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Each time, they rebounded.

Who are the largest emitters of greenhouse gases?

In 2025, the three largest emitters produced almost half of the world’s greenhouse gases. China emitted almost 16 billion tonnes (29.5 percent), the United States 6.02 billion tonnes (11.1 percent) and India 4.51 billion tonnes (8.3 percent).

The 27 countries of the European Union together accounted for 5.8 percent, followed by Russia (4.8 percent), Indonesia (2.5 percent), Brazil (2.4 percent) and Iran (2.1 percent).

International shipping and aviation, which fall outside any single country’s total, together produced 2.6 percent of global emissions, more than most countries.

It was not always this way. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries drove up emissions first in the West, particularly in the United Kingdom and the US, as they built factories and moved to mass manufacturing. Global emissions then rose sharply after World War II and have more than doubled since 1970.

China’s emissions surged in the early 2000s as its economy boomed, and it overtook the US as the world’s largest emitter in the mid-2000s.

But measured over time, the picture changes. Since the mid-18th century, the US has produced 23.5 percent of all CO2 emissions, compared with 15.4 percent from China, according to the Global Carbon Budget.

Which industries drive each country’s emissions?

In China, the power sector is the largest source, producing 42 percent of the country’s almost 16 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases. Industry accounts for 31 percent and fuel production for 9.5 percent.

In September 2025, Chinese President Xi Jinping, for the first time, pledged to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 7 to 10 percent from their peak by 2035.

In the US, transport is the largest source at 29 percent, mostly from cars and trucks. The power sector accounts for 26 percent and industry for 14 percent.

In India, which still relies heavily on coal for electricity, the power sector produces 35 percent of emissions, followed by industry at 24 percent and agriculture at 19 percent.

Explore the table below to see which sectors produce the most greenhouse gas emissions in each country.

In the occupied West Bank, a barrier of concrete and fencing cuts Palestinians off from their land, their families and nearby towns.

Israel began building its separation wall in 2002. Planned to stretch 712km (442 miles), it runs deep inside Palestinian territory rather than along the boundary with Israel. In 2004, the International Court of Justice ruled it illegal.

Today’s date carries extra weight. Thirty-seven years ago on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.

Built by East Germany in 1961 to stop its citizens fleeing to the West, it encircled West Berlin for 155km (96 miles), dividing the city and its people for 28 years.

Since 2003, Palestinians have marked the same date as an international day of action against Israel’s wall, which is more than four times as long and still being built. In urban areas, its concrete rises to about 9 metres (30ft), more than twice the height of Berlin’s.

But the wall is more than a physical structure. It operates alongside a wider network of checkpoints, roadblocks, gates and permits that restricts Palestinian movement across the occupied territory.

Where does the wall run?

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), about 456km (283 miles), or 64 percent, of the planned route had been built by April.

About 85 percent of it runs inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, the 1949 armistice line separating Israel from the West Bank. That route determines which communities, roads and farmland are cut off from their surroundings.

In some urban areas, the barrier is a concrete wall. Elsewhere, it is made up of fences, patrol roads, ditches and other security infrastructure.

For Palestinians, the comparison with Berlin carries a message. “It doesn’t matter how high the barriers will be, they will fall,” a Palestinian activist in Bir Nabala told Al Jazeera. “Like the Berlin Wall fell, the Palestinian wall will fall.”

How many people are cut off from their land?

The wall’s impact reaches far beyond the structure itself. Its route cuts Palestinian communities off from neighbouring towns, workplaces and farmland, disrupting livelihoods and everyday life.

More than 14,000 Palestinians live between the wall and the Green Line in an area known as the Seam Zone. To reach basic services, markets and relatives on the other side, they must pass through checkpoints.

Farmers are among the hardest hit. According to OCHA, about 150 Palestinian communities have land in this area. Reaching it depends on permits, prior coordination with Israeli authorities and access through designated agricultural gates.

There are about 62 such gates along the wall, and most stay closed for much of the year. During the 2025 olive harvest, 74 percent opened only on a limited number of days.

In Qalqiliya, the wall wraps around much of the city, cutting it off from nearby Palestinian communities and the land around it. Journeys to neighbouring towns that were once short can now mean passing through checkpoints or taking long detours.

The wall restricts more than movement. It reshapes how communities relate to their land and places that are part of their everyday lives.

Israel’s wider system of control

The wall is only one part of a much wider network restricting Palestinian movement across the West Bank.

As of December, OCHA documented 925 checkpoints, road gates, earth mounds and other obstacles across the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. They restrict the movement of about 3.4 million Palestinians, often forcing long detours to reach work, school, hospitals and other services.

The network includes 89 permanently staffed checkpoints, 218 partial checkpoints, 232 road gates, 167 earth mounds, 114 linear closures and 105 roadblocks.

Checkpoints and road gates now make up nearly 60 percent of these obstacles, up from 15 percent two decades ago when temporary blockages, such as earth mounds and roadblocks, were far more common.

Crossing the wall itself requires permits. Of its 13 checkpoints, only three can be used by Palestinians with West Bank IDs and Israeli-issued permits to enter East Jerusalem and Israel. OCHA said these permits are hard to get and many have been revoked or suspended since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel and the start of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023.

The wall stretches for hundreds of kilometres, but its impact cannot be measured by distance alone. It is measured in the farmland farmers struggle to reach, the communities cut off from nearby towns and the checkpoints between people and the places they need to go.

On the sidelines of this month’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Shenzhen, China, an unprecedented three-way meeting between United States President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin could take place.

“China is in communication with relevant parties regarding a meeting between the three heads of state,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday.

“Work is under way to coordinate such a meeting,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday, adding: “We hope that it will be finalised in the coming days.”

Trump has said he is open to three-way talks focused on nuclear weapons. “If President Xi wants to have it, I’d have it,” he told reporters last month.

The three leaders have met separately but have never held formal talks together.

So could the meeting, pencilled in for November 18-19, actually happen, and what would it mean for the rest of the world? Here’s what we know:

What would Russia get out of a three-way meeting with the US and China?

At the very least, a photo opportunity.

“It is a big event,” Alexander Bratersky, a Moscow-based journalist and political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

He pointed to Pyotr Tolstoy, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, who he said has described the meeting as a path towards a new Yalta – the 1945 conference where the leaders of the Soviet Union, the US and the United Kingdom shaped the post-war order in Europe.

That allows Moscow to “talk big”, Bratersky said, while putting Ukraine on the sidelines.

Simply being at the table would make Putin “first among equals”, he added, giving him a photo opportunity to show the world that he will be among those deciding the future of Europe’s security architecture after the war in Ukraine.

If the meeting produced results, he said, it would reflect China’s influence on Russia.

“We should take into account that we are dealing with a much weaker US leader after elections,” Bratersky said.

Trump remains in charge of foreign policy, he explained, but will have less leverage if Democrats, who won control of both chambers of Congress in this week’s midterm elections, start sending money to Kyiv.

“A meeting by itself will be a success,” he said. “Putin will be able to sell it at home”.

Whether anything comes of it should become clear within a month or so, Bratersky said, and the meeting could lead to another during the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Miami in December.

If nothing is produced before Christmas, he added, “it will be just a photo op.”

What does Trump want?

Optics and leverage.

Trump wants “a personal, high-drama encounter” that lets him claim he is “dealing with” the other two great powers on his own terms, Inderjeet Parmar, a professor of international politics at City St George’s, University of London, told Al Jazeera.

A three-way meeting would allow Trump to present himself as “the indispensable deal-maker”, Parmar said, talking up potential deals on Ukraine, trade, energy or arms control.

“After the midterms the domestic political need for a foreign policy ‘win’ is real,” he said.

Any image of Trump sitting with Xi and Putin could be spun as evidence that American power still commands the table, he said, “even if the substance is limited or largely symbolic”.

“The domestic audience, and his eroding MAGA base, matters at least as much as the diplomatic one,” Parmar said.

What does China want?

Not a summit on Ukraine.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he raised the idea of discussing Ukraine with Xi when they met in Beijing on October 30, and could see the “surprise” on his face, Germany’s DPA news agency reported.

Steinmeier told public broadcaster ARD that Xi said the three presidents would probably meet in Shenzhen, but not to discuss Ukraine.

He said Xi explicitly pointed out that the Russia-Ukraine war is a European conflict in which the “Europeans must sit at the table”.

Beijing is also likely to swat away Trump’s push for nuclear talks.

Last month, China’s Foreign Ministry said it would be “neither fair, reasonable nor realistic to ask China to join the so-called trilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations at this stage”.

What would a meeting mean for the rest of the world?

Allies could be sidelined.

Parmar said a three-way meeting would mark “a clear break from the post-1945 pattern”, in which Washington coordinated closely with its European and Asian allies before engaging with Moscow or Beijing.

“A free-standing trilateral [meeting] risks treating those allies as secondary players whose interests can be managed after the fact,” he said, adding that those interests could even be traded.

That would be a shift towards “personalised great-power diplomacy”, he said. But the Trump administration still has hopes to drive a wedge between Russia and China, Parmar added.

Fears of a “G3” are “understandable but overstated in institutional terms”, he said, because the three capitals’ interests diverge sharply on Ukraine, Taiwan, technology and the rules of the international economy.

“The real risk is not a formal G3 secretariat, but the normalisation of great-power deals struck with little consultation of those most affected,” he said.

“History offers many examples of such moments. They rarely produce stable order and often leave the excluded feeling the costs,” Parmar said.

Iran has stepped up diplomatic efforts amid suggestions by United States President Donald Trump that the US could resume full-scale strikes on the Islamic republic.

The US news website Axios quoted a US official saying that US Central Command (CENTCOM) was preparing for the resumption of major military operations in Iran, and that it was just waiting on orders from Washington. On Thursday, Trump told reporters the US may have to “destroy” the rest of Iran, adding that people will “know soon enough” if he acts.

Tehran’s intensified diplomatic push comes after Iran downed two US reconnaissance drones near Qeshm island in the Strait of Hormuz, which the US struck earlier this week. Iran says it will retaliate if the US resumes larger strikes.

What diplomatic efforts is Iran engaging in?

On Thursday, Iran offered the US a new nuclear and peace proposal via Qatari mediators, to be discussed only after Washington meets Tehran’s seven demands, a senior Iranian official told Reuters. The US is examining the proposal, Reuters reported.

Iran has made meeting its seven demands a condition for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and restarting peace talks, including on its nuclear programme. The demands include the lifting of sanctions on Iran, the unfreezing of Iranian assets and the end to the US naval blockade of its ports in and around the Strait of Hormuz, among other things.

It has also stepped up ties with Russia, with its top security official, Mohsen Rezaei, travelling to Moscow for talks on Thursday. During that visit, Rezaei said: “On the issue of diplomacy, we have announced seven conditions ⁠to the Americans. As long as they do ⁠not execute our seven conditions, we will neither open the Strait of Hormuz nor have negotiations.”

Meanwhile, the US has insisted a deal on Iran’s nuclear capacity must be part of any ceasefire agreement before wider peace talks can restart.

How is Iran deepening ties with Russia?

On Thursday, Rezaei met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin to deliver a message from Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. Iranian state media did not elaborate on ⁠the contents of the message.

Rezaei called it “an extremely important exchange” according to remarks reported by the Iranian embassy, but also did not give further details.

However, The Financial Times reported that Russia previously agreed to supply Iran with 90 helicopter-mounted launchers for precision-guided missiles, despite needing its own weapons for the Ukraine war. The newspaper cited a Russian defence manufacturer’s production schedule for 2024 and 2025, which it has examined, showing an order for helicopter-mounted launchers being assigned a code used to refer to Iran in Russian defence documents.

Relations between Russia and Iran have deepened since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and during the US-Israeli war on Iran that saw the two countries become the most heavily sanctioned in the world. Iran has provided Shahed drones, which Russia has modified and used heavily against Ukraine.

In return, Russia has also reportedly helped Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles, sold it Verba shoulder-launched anti-air missiles and shared information with Tehran potentially relevant to nuclear weapons.

“It is indicative of Russia’s willingness to continue supplying Iran despite its own wartime demands and with far less concern about Western objections than in the past,” Nicole Grajewski, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the FT.

In early October, Putin said Russia was prepared to take part in mediation to bring an end to the war.

Images released by the Kremlin showed its foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov and chief of the Russian military intelligence, Igor Kostyukov, attending a meeting with Iran’s security chief alongside Putin.

The meeting also strengthened Iran’s economic ties with Russia.

“During the meeting with Mr Vladimir Putin, discussions were held regarding the construction of gas pipelines from Russia to Iran,” said Rezaei, Iranian state TV reported.

He said the gas pipelines would address Iran’s gas shortages and facilitate the sale of Russian energy to neighbouring countries.

Tehran said Iran’s natural gas refineries had been hit during the most intense phase of US-Israeli strikes on Iran earlier this year, which lasted 40 days.

Separately, Russia’s Foreign Ministry advised citizens against travel to Iran “In light of the remaining risks of a new escalation around Iran”.

How is Iran negotiating with regional leaders?

During the most intense fighting of the war, Iran struck bases in Gulf countries hosting US military assets, as well as civil and energy facilities and infrastructure.

Senior Iranian officials have repeatedly warned that any state helping the US to target the Islamic republic will be a “legitimate target” should US attacks resume.

On Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi held phone calls with several Gulf leaders, including the foreign minister of the UAE, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

They discussed regional developments as well as diplomatic efforts for stability in the region, according to Araghchi’s Telegram channel.

Araghchi spoke with Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud about efforts to improve security and stability in the region, according to the Saudi foreign ministry.

Araghchi also discussed de-escalation efforts with the foreign ministers of Kuwait and Turkiye.

In a separate call, Araghchi talked with Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani about coordinating to reduce tensions, the Qatari foreign ministry said.

Sheikh Mohammed stressed support for efforts to secure freedom of maritime navigation.

In a statement, Oman’s foreign ministry said the safety of passage through the Strait of Hormuz was a main topic of discussions, in a call between Araghchi and Oman’s foreign minister.

Iran continues to tightly control shipping lanes through the strait, where several ships have been damaged in recent days. It has granted exemptions to shipping restrictions to Iraq and Qatar, in the Gulf region, as well as to India and China.

What is Trump saying?

Despite his Republican Party suffering a drubbing in this week’s US midterm elections – largely because of public anger over the war on Iran and the resulting rise in energy prices – US President Donald Trump has refused to rule out further strikes on Iran.

On Thursday, Trump told reporters at the Oval Office that he may have to “destroy the rest” of Iran.

Former Iranian diplomat Hadi Afghahi told Al Jazeera that Tehran can ease the path to a settlement if the US also shows flexibility. He argued that Trump “really does not want to go to war, because war again will cost him more”. However, the US president’s next move is unpredictable, observers say.

Afghahi cautioned that Trump “is still surrounded by a group of hawks”, including the energy and treasury secretaries.

Trump has shown willingness to engage in diplomacy, however. Qatar’s ⁠Emir ⁠Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad ⁠Al Thani discussed diplomatic ⁠efforts to ease regional tensions in a ‌phone call with Trump on Friday, according to the Qatari Emiri Diwan.

The leaders reviewed international diplomatic efforts, including the Doha-led mediation efforts to support negotiations in recent weeks, in a bid to reach “a comprehensive agreement that puts an end to the crisis”, the Diwan said in a statement.

How has Iran responded to Trump’s rhetoric?

Tehran warned it will retaliate on a wider scale than it has done so far if the US resumes the war. It has also said talks will become unfeasible.

Iranian officials said Iran has the capacity to strike further than the Gulf using weapons manufactured in Iran.

On Thursday, a spokesman for the Supreme Advisor to the Commander of the Aerospace Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said: “In the event of a new aggression, any country or force that helps America attack Iran can be a legitimate target of the Islamic Republic.”

Iran’s state media outlet Tasnim News reported: “Our missile bases have a suitable range to target the Zionist regime and American bases,” adding “Iran’s response to the possible new aggression of the enemies will not be geographically limited.”

Iran has also previously warned that cables, data centres and artificial intelligence (AI) facilities across the Gulf region could be attacked if war with the US erupts again.

What strikes have there been in recent days?

In the run-up to the midterm elections, the US said it had conducted “defensive strikes” on Iran’s Qeshm island and Bandar Lengeh in the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps navy says at least seven tankers have caught fire after sailing into mines while attempting to transit through the Strait of Hormuz using “unauthorised routes” near Oman this week.

Two oil ‌tankers caught fire and were brought to a stop after hitting ⁠mines on Friday, the IRGC said. They had been trying to cross the waterway “with the support of the aggressor and terrorist American military”, the IRGC added.

Control over the Strait of Hormuz has been a main stumbling block in negotiations to end the Iran war since it began in February.

Tehran has sought to limit traffic through the strategic waterway, which normally carries about one-fifth of global oil supplies.

The US has also imposed a blockade on Iranian ports and escorted tankers through the strait.

Maritime organisations have not confirmed the latest incidents.

Flights across Europe have been diverted, grounded and escorted by fighter jets in response to a wave of bomb threats, marking a second major outbreak of false alerts in less than a week.

On Thursday, planes departing from 16 countries, including Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain and Denmark, were affected. Flights have either been forced to divert to alternate locations or undergo additional security checks. On Friday, the threats continued.

Authorities have deployed bomb disposal teams and military fighter jets in several countries. So far, security inspections following threats have yielded no evidence of explosives or suspicious materials on board aircraft, and no passenger has reported being harmed.

What happened?

On Friday, a Ryanair flight landed in Lisbon, Portugal at 8am after a bomb threat was made by phone to the authorities, Italian media has reported. A security operation was mounted as soon as the plane landed. Separately, the control tower in Fiumicino, Italy, received an alert about a device aboard a Wizzair flight to Rome from Paris. The Wizzair flight was diverted to Venice where police were clearing the area around the plane.

On Thursday, there were numerous threats, including the following:

• In Poland, authorities received a warning about a potentially dangerous object on board a Polish Airlines flight already taxiing on the runway at Warsaw Chopin Airport. The flight to Paris was prevented from taking off and passengers disembarked, but a search by security services found nothing dangerous on board, an airline spokesman told local media.
• In Warsaw, a LOT flight to Paris was also halted and passengers were transferred to another ‌aircraft.
• A LOT flight from London Heathrow to Warsaw-Chopin Airport was forced to land at the Polish capital’s other airport, Warsaw-Modlin, following a threat. Nothing was found on board.
• The Italian Air Force escorted a Finnair plane into Rome after an anonymous bomb-threat email was sent to Aeroporti di Roma (ADR) and other companies at Fiumicino. The plane arrived safely.
• In Bulgaria, a Ryanair flight from London to Sofia was diverted to make an emergency landing in Plovdiv, the country’s second city, following a bomb threat.
• In the space of just 20 minutes, Spanish authorities reported receiving three emailed bomb threats regarding two Air Europa departures from Madrid to Paris and four inbound Iberia flights from Rome and Milan, Spain’s Guardia Civil said.
• A flight ⁠from Cork in Ireland was delayed for 90 minutes when the airport received a threat, the airport operator said.
• A Ryanair flight from Pescara in Italy to Charleroi in Belgium was subject to a false bomb alarm, state news agency Ansa reported. Local media in Belgium reported that security protocols were triggered after the word “bomb” was found written in one of the aircraft’s restrooms.

What happens when a threat is received?

When an airline is notified of a threat to an aircraft, it is passed to a team of assessors, said Joji Waites, director of flight safety, policy and regulation at BALPA, the British Airlines Pilots’ Association.

“These assessors use standard processes to grade the threat and decide whether the threat is red (credible), amber (partially credible) or green (not credible). Amber is not considered an appropriate assessment if the plane is airborne,” said Waites.

After receiving a threat, an aircraft is directed to an area well away from the airport buildings. Passengers are disembarked and screened while border police with sniffer dogs inspect the plane, according to an airport official.

Is this the first time threats like this have been made?

No.

The incidents follow a series of hoax bomb threats earlier this week. On Monday, a flight from the UK to Bulgaria was diverted after a threat that turned out to be without substance. On Tuesday, seven planes across Europe were searched or diverted because of malicious hoax bomb alerts.

And also this week, there have also been cyberattacks on supermarkets in several European cities, with hackers changing the temperature on refrigeration in an apparent attempt to spoil food.

How unusual is this?

Philip Baum, a visiting professor of aviation security at Coventry University, said the scale and coordinated nature of these latest incidents are unusual.

“There are indeed individual airlines that experience a bomb threat every day, but most of those are very quickly evaluated and determined to be non-specific, and the aircraft do not divert,” said Baum.

What sets the latest incidents apart, he said, is that authorities across several European countries appear to be treating the threats as credible enough to require planes to land and undergo security inspections. Baum noted that each flight disruption could cost airlines as much as $250,000.

The UK’s government called the latest disruption “malicious hoax threats”. London Heathrow, the busiest airport for passenger traffic in Europe, was also targeted. It says it has one of the most robust aviation safety systems in the world, but countries still have to take the threats seriously and figure out how to stop any actors from creating further disruptions to air travel across Europe.

Who is behind this?

The European Commissioner for Transport said it is too early to say who’s behind these attacks or whether the incidents are even connected.

European governments have so far refrained from blaming anyone. But those which have supported Ukraine are wary of hybrid attacks. Germany has directly pointed the finger at Russia for recent drone incursions at Leipzig-Halle Airport. Moscow rejected the accusations.

EU officials are aware of the possibility that Russia would step up its hybrid campaign. In September, the Danish Defence Intelligence Service warned that this could happen to pressure adversaries in the West and NATO.

However, Moscow has denied being involved in the threats to aviation in Europe and there is no evidence of any involvement by Russia, Iran or any proxy groups linked to them.

Iran has exempted ships from India, China, Iraq and Qatar from its Strait of Hormuz restrictions, a senior Iranian lawmaker said on Tuesday.

“Ships from these countries pass freely, and the Americans do not intercept them either,” Amir Hayat Moqaddam, deputy chairman of the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, told the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).

Iran effectively shut the strait early in the US-Israel war on Iran, which began on February 28, and the United States reimposed a naval blockade on Iran’s southern ports in July.

So why have these four countries been granted passage through the critical strait, and can their ships really sail freely while the blockade remains in place?

What does Iran get in return for letting ships pass?

It will receive medicine from India and political backing from China, according to Hayat Moqaddam. Iran already receives diplomatic support from Qatar, which is leading mediation efforts to end the US-Israel war on Iran.

Hayat Moqaddam said Tehran will also collect transit fees from Indian and Chinese ships, while Qatari vessels pass free. He did not say whether Iraqi ships will pay a toll.

“Whatever the lawmaker says is the rationale – the big question is if it works and, if yes, to what extent?” Rouzbeh Parsi, an Iran analyst and affiliated researcher at Lund University’s Department of History and Human Rights Studies, told Al Jazeera.

“Iran has been under sanctions for a very long time, so bartering and quid pro quos in trade are nothing new,” he said. The difference now, he added, is that “it’s about poking holes in an embargo and getting crucial goods/services in and out”.

Nader Hashemi, an associate professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown University, said that “most likely Iran is charging a transit fee or a percentage of the cargo value to allow those ships to go through without being harassed”.

“It’s a clever move by Tehran for several reasons,” Wolfgang Pusztai, a security and defence analyst and Austria’s former defence attache to Libya, told Al Jazeera.

“If successful, this move will generate significant revenue for Iran, as China is by far the largest purchaser of Iranian crude oil, buying nearly 90 percent of Iran’s total oil exports,” he said.

By including Qatar, with its many liquefied natural gas (LNG) buyers, and India, Iran is also “trying to undermine acceptance” of Washington’s strategy in the conflict, especially as it charges Qatar no tolls, he added.

Why does it matter to these four countries?

All four are highly dependent on the Strait of Hormuz for exports.

Of the 10.23 million barrels a day of Gulf crude that passed through the strait in October, about 42 percent went to China and 13 percent to India, Muyu Xu, a senior crude oil analyst at the analytics firm Kpler, told Al Jazeera.

“China is the country most able to cross US interests. The question is whether Beijing considers it worth the potential political cost,” Parsi said.

Asia is particularly reliant on Gulf oil and gas usually shipped out via Hormuz. Countries there have much to offer in return for allowing ships to pass.

“For India, the shutdown of oil from the Gulf has been a great loss – and it is a big producer of the pharmaceuticals that Iran cannot manufacture itself,” he said.

Qatar, which is mediating between Washington and Tehran, shipped no LNG through the strait in August, but managed 1.8 million tonnes in October, Xu said.

Its crude transits fell over the same period, from 517,000 barrels a day to 193,000, while Iraq’s rose from 1.69 million to 2.65 million.

Kpler has been unable to trace the origin of up to two million barrels a day of Middle Eastern crude, so both countries’ flows may be higher, Xu said.

“India and Qatar have closer relationships with DC they need to maintain – while both of them also feel let down by Trump,” Parsi said, adding, “For Qatar, maintaining a relationship with Iran is also vital since it’s an unavoidable neighbour.”

“So for all of them, there are upsides for these exemptions from Iranian restrictions but also political dangers,” he said.

Is this announcement new?

Not entirely.

Iran began letting some vessels from countries it considers friendly pass within weeks of the war starting. And in April, its military command said “brotherly” Iraq was exempt.

With the Iraqi exemption, Iran “probably intends to support the economic recovery” of its western neighbour, a fellow Shia-majority country, Pusztai said.

Will ships be able to get past the US blockade?

That depends on Washington.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) has said the blockade applies to “all vessels of all nations entering or leaving coastal areas or ports in Iran”, while vessels avoiding Iranian ports are not affected.

It has also said humanitarian shipments, including “food and medical supplies essential for the survival of the civilian populations”, can pass after inspection.

But Hayat Moqaddam did not appear to limit the exemptions to ships trading with other Gulf states, Pusztai noted. “If this is really the case, this would also have a significant impact on the other Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia,” he said.

“This could make the continuation of the American naval blockade more difficult and less effective, assuming Washington accepts this Iranian move,” he said. The main change, he added, is that the exemption “would also cover Chinese/Indian ships from/to Iran”, if the US accepts it.

It is also unclear whether “ships of these countries” means the flag a vessel flies, its owner, its operator or some other link, Pusztai said.

Ending the blockade is one of Tehran’s demands before it will commit to broader peace talks with the US, which will include discussions about Iran’s nuclear programme. Qatar-mediated talks currently centre on an Iranian proposal to reopen the strait if the US meets seven conditions, including this and lifting sanctions.

“It seems to be that Iran tries to separate the questions of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz and oil exports from the nuclear question,” Pusztai said, adding, “The American reaction will show if this is successful.”

Will this make a difference to oil markets?

Not much, for now.

“I think they make only limited difference at present,” Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG Group, told Al Jazeera.

“Markets are back to pricing in a peace deal, but if conflict flares up at full tilt, then Iranian commanders may not have time to distinguish their targets,” he said, adding: “At present, the focus remains squarely on the prospects of a broader deal.”

An exemption has not guaranteed safety. On October 30, the Qatari LNG carrier Al Mayeda was struck by “unidentified objects” in the Gulf, said its owner, Qatar Gas Transport Company.

More than 120 commercial ships have been hit in the region since the war began, with October being the worst month, according to data from the International Maritime Organization and United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations.

Days ahead of New Zealand’s election, polls show the governing centre-right National Party and the opposition centre-left Labour Party neck and neck, with neither on course to win enough seats to govern alone.

The outcome of the November 7 election could be decided by smaller parties under the country’s unique electoral system.

Here is what you need to know:

How does the election work?

New Zealand holds a general election every three years under a mixed-member proportional (MMP) system.

Voters cast two ballots: one for a candidate in their local electorate and one for a party.

Winning candidates in each of the country’s 71 electorates take their seats automatically. There are seven electorates reserved for Maori, New Zealand’s Indigenous people. Maori voters can choose to enrol on either the Maori electoral roll or the general roll.

The party vote decides how many seats each party gets overall. About 49 more seats are filled from party lists so that each party’s share of parliament matches its proportional share of the vote.

A party needs either 5 percent of the party vote, or one electorate win, to get a seat. In New Zealand’s 120-seat parliament, a majority usually means 61.

If a party wins more electorates than its share of the party vote entitles it to, it keeps them and extra seats are added to parliament. That happened in 2023, when Te Pati Maori won six of the seven Maori electorates, but had only 3.1 percent of the overall party vote.

Because seats in parliament closely track with the party vote, one party rarely wins a majority.

Every government since the MMP system was instituted in 1996 has been a coalition headed by Labour or National, except in 2020, when Labour under then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern won big and governed alone.

Who are the two main candidates?

Incumbent Prime Minister Christopher Luxon is seeking a second term.

A former Air New Zealand chief executive, he entered parliament in 2020 as the MP for the Auckland seat of Botany and became leader of the National Party a year later.

He led National back to power in 2023, promising better economic management and ending six years of Labour-led government. He now governs in a three-party coalition with New Zealand First and ACT.

But his leadership has come under pressure. He survived two attempted no-confidence votes by National MPs in April and August, the second orchestrated by his own defence minister at the time.

The challenges came as his popularity declined, with rising economic pressure and political tensions within the governing coalition.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins, 48, is bidding to return to the top job.

First elected to parliament in 2008, he became prime minister in January 2023 after his predecessor, Ardern, resigned.

He lost power in an election that October but stayed on to lead Labour in opposition.

What are the key issues?

Most parties are campaigning on the economy, but their suggested remedies differ widely.

National is pledging to return the budget to surplus through fiscal discipline while expanding the national pension scheme.

Labour is focusing on the cost of living, promising cheaper healthcare and transport. It also plans to invest in jobs, housing and infrastructure, and to strengthen public services.

Smaller parties on both sides are taking aim at power companies and supermarkets. The right-wing populist New Zealand First party wants to break up major electricity companies and split one of the largest supermarket operators in two.

The Greens want a state-owned power company, a publicly owned supermarket chain and tougher rules against excessive grocery prices. They are also calling for a wealth tax and higher taxes on big companies and banks, while cutting income tax for most people.

Opportunity, a centrist party, wants a land value tax.

Immigration and voting rights are on the agenda too. ACT wants to deport serious offenders regardless of how long they have lived in New Zealand. New Zealand First is seeking to restrict voting to citizens. Currently, the right to vote also extends to legal residents who have lived in New Zealand for more than 12 months continuously.

Why is there no clear winner?

The real contest is between two rival blocs. National would need both its current coalition partners again, while Labour would depend on the Greens and possibly Opportunity.

Recent polls show no clear winner. A handful of seats either way could decide who governs.

That makes the 5 percent threshold for party participation in parliament crucial. If a smaller party narrowly misses it and also wins no electorate, its votes produce no seats, which could cost its bloc the majority.

Opportunity, for example, must either clear the 5 percent threshold of party votes or win an electorate for its votes to help Labour secure a majority coalition.

The final size of parliament is another unknown. Polls suggest Te Pati Maori may again win more electorates than its share of the party vote entitles it to, adding extra seats.

Each extra seat raises the bar for a majority. If parliament grows to 122 seats, a bloc would need 62 to govern instead of 61.

Who are the smaller parties?

New Zealand First is led by Winston Peters, who has said he wants the country to leave the Paris climate agreement and the central bank to target employment and inflation.

ACT, led by David Seymour, describes itself as a classical liberal, right-libertarian party. It holds 11 of parliament’s 123 seats.

The Greens, a left-leaning environmental party led jointly by Chloe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson, have made social justice, living costs, nature and political funding reform their central themes.

They also want to expand home insulation and offer zero-interest loans for household solar panels and batteries.

Te Pati Maori is co-led by Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. Its campaign has centred on enrolling more voters on the Maori electoral roll, housing, health, education, environmental protection and constitutional transformation.

Opportunity, founded by economist Gareth Morgan in 2016, has never won a seat in parliament, peaking at 2.6 percent of the vote in 2017.

Its leader, Auckland businesswoman Qiulae Wong, says the party is neither left nor right and is focused on boosting economic growth.

Who will be the kingmakers?

Smaller parties often end up deciding which of the two main parties governs.

In 2017, although National won 56 seats to Labour’s 46, it could not form a majority. Labour took power instead by forming a coalition with New Zealand First, supported by the Greens.

New Zealand First has played kingmaker for both sides, having also backed National after the 1996 election, the first held under MMP.

Te Pati Maori, now in opposition, has helped the two main parties govern too, supporting National-led governments after the 2008, 2011 and 2014 elections.

The role can secure senior posts in government for the junior parties. Winston Peters secured the role of deputy prime minister in Luxon’s government until May 2025, and ACT’s David Seymour has held the job since mid-2025.

This time, the newest potential kingmaker is Opportunity. If Labour needs its seats to govern, the party would play the role for the first time, a decade after it was founded.

The Democrats have wrested control of the United States Congress from Republicans by winning majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in a stunning blow to US President Donald Trump.

Democratic Senate candidates have shattered decades-old electoral records across traditional Republican strongholds, in particular flipping key seats in Kansas, Texas and South Carolina.

How big is the Republican midterms loss? Is there any silver lining for the political party?

Here’s what we know:

How big is the Republican Party’s loss?

The Republican Party has suffered a historic, worse-than-expected rout, losing control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate to the Democratic Party.

According to the results, in the House of Representatives, Democrats have so far won 228 seats, while the Republicans have won 139.

Democrats are also leading in 34 other seats which have yet to be called. If they win all of those, they could end up with more than 260 seats in the House, the party’s biggest majority since 1990, when the Democrats won 267 seats in the lower chamber.

Democrats also had a large majority in the House in 2008, with 257 seats, while the Republicans had 178 seats.

In the Senate, the upper chamber of Congress, Democrats have won with a majority of 54 seats while the Republicans have won 44 seats. They have not had such a clear majority in the Senate since 2008, when the party won 56 seats in the slipstream of Barack Obama’s historic first presidential election.

While President Donald Trump told voters to imagine he was on the ballot for this election, many of the Republican candidates he endorsed in key battleground states have been defeated by the Democrats.

In South Carolina, which had not elected a Democratic senator since 1998, Trump backed Darline Graham. But Democrat Annie Andrews won the seat.

In North Carolina, Trump had endorsed former national Republican campaign official Michael Whatley, who was beaten by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.

In Texas, Trump promoted Attorney General Ken Paxton. But Democrat Talarico won the race.

Then in Michigan, Former US Representative Mike Rogers, Trump’s choice in Michigan, was defeated by Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

How significant are these losses for the Republican Party?

It is usual for the governing party to lose some seats in the US midterms, but not on this scale.

A Republican Party member told Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher in Washington, DC that the results have been much worse than expected.

“Certainly their internal polling was telling them that they might hold on to the Senate. That obviously was so far off,” Fisher reported.

Chris Featherstone, a political scientist at the University of York in the United Kingdom, said the midterm results represent a “seismic loss” for the Republicans.

He noted that many Trump-backed Republican candidates have lost throughout the country, and to both progressive and centrist Democratic candidates.

“Texas is a great example of the extent of the loss, where [James] Talarico won [the Senate seat] by almost 10 points. Texas has long been a Republican stronghold, and has been close to the heart of the intellectual and emotional heart of the party,” he said. He added that Democrat Gina Hinojosa’s win over Texas governor Greg Abbott has “come as a huge shock”, especially after redistricting which took place ahead of the midterms and through which the Republicans had hoped to win five additional seats.

“The results will change the relationship between Congress and the White House, with a huge likelihood of significant investigations and potentially impeachments for several members of the administration,” Featherstone said. “They will also change the makeup of the Democrats in Congress, increasing the appetite for aggressive opposition to Trump.”

Sudha David-Wilp, vice president of external relations at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said that the midterm elections are usually viewed as a referendum on the party in power. She said, “a blue wave was not out of the realm of possibility”.

She told Al Jazeera that the Democrats have not just flipped seats in places like Texas, Iowa and South Carolina, where Trump is highly popular, but may have also “ushered in a new political epoch”, following these elections.

“President Trump still has a loyal following but MAGA [his voter base] has splintered and it will be hard for the GOP [Grand Old Party, a nickname for the Republican Party] to run on his brand in 2028,” she added.

Are there any silver linings for the Republicans?

All is not doom and gloom for the Republicans who have had some wins in these elections.

In Florida, a state where Trump is very popular, Republican Senator Ashley Moody defeated Democratic state Representative Angie Nixon. Republican Byron Donalds also defeated Democrat David Jolly to win the Florida election for governor. Donalds will be Florida’s first Black governor.

In Wyoming, Republican Harriet Hageman won a Senate seat and, in Alabama, Tommy Tuberville won the race for governor of the state, defeating Democrat Doug Jones.

Republicans have also had victories in Idaho, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kentucky and West Virginia, among others.

The party has experienced similar scenarios in US election history.

In 1992, for example, when George HW Bush was president, the Republicans won only 176 seats in the Congress, compared with the Democrats who built on their majority by winning 258 seats.

Even in 2008, when George W Bush was president but Barack Obama was elected as the country’s next president, the Republicans won only 178 seats compared with the Democrats who won 257 seats.

In both those cases, however, the Republicans were able to turn things around within two years.

In 1994, while Bill Clinton was president, the Republicans won back majorities in both houses of Congress. In 2010, while the Democrats held on to control of the Senate under Obama after the midterms, they lost control of the House of Representatives.

This year could be different, for one main reason. Laurel Rapp, director of the US and North America Programme at Chatham House, said that midterms are rarely a referendum on a US president’s foreign policy, but this year, amid the US and Israel’s war on Iran, Trump’s foreign policy agenda has been a major source of ire among American voters.

She said voters have increasingly connected the Trump administration’s international affairs with rising fuel and food costs.

“And they delivered a pretty resounding verdict to the president that they would like to see a change,” she told Al Jazeera.

Rapp said that while Trump may face some constraints when it comes to navigating the global affairs landscape in the next two years, he will still have a lot of authority.

“The president still retains wide latitude to approach relations with foreign countries unilaterally, to continue to send US troops where he desires and to continue to wage wars,” she said.

Supermarket refrigerators and freezers across Europe have been targeted by a cyberattack that raised the temperature of internet-linked units, destroying and damaging large quantities of food.

On Monday, fridges and freezers at more than 100 shops in several European countries ran hot. Cyberattacks on supermarkets began last month, when hundreds of French supermarkets were left with spoiled food and damage to units which had overheated, costing millions of euros.

So far, it remains unclear why hackers targeted the supermarkets, but attacks have spread across the continent and even to the United States.

Here’s what we know:

Which countries in Europe have been targeted?

On Monday, several supermarkets in Europe were affected, including the following:

• Dutch supermarket operator Delhaize said dozens of its shops in Belgium and Luxembourg were hit by an “IT incident”.
• French retailer Carrefour said about 15 of its 700 Belgian locations were hit by refrigeration problems.
• The Colruyt group, which runs Spar stores in Belgium as franchises, said five of its shops were affected.
• Swedish Coop said cooling systems at seven of its 800 stores were affected, with disruptions ranging from complete shutdowns to partial operation.
• Swedish furniture retailer IKEA, which also operates restaurants at its stores, said one site in Mons, Belgium, had been affected by a cyberattack.
• De Laet & Van Haver, the Belgian butchery chain, said the temperature in its fridges at its store in Hove, south of Antwerp, was raised as high as 18 degrees Celsius, ruining meat worth about 15,000 euros ($16,764).
• The food wholesaler Musgrave said a cyber-incident affected refrigeration systems in 13 of its SuperValu stores in Ireland.
• In October, hundreds of French supermarkets suffered cyberattacks, spoiling tonnes of food, causing fires and melting parts of refrigeration units.

What has happened in the US?

In August, freezers at a market in Fort Huachuca, an Army base in Arizona, went into defrost mode, spoiling all the frozen food they contained, according to a post on Facebook by the base.

The same month, the naval station in Newport, Rhode Island, reported on Facebook that its refrigeration system was affected, leaving only dry goods were available for purchase.

The Pentagon considered the freezer malfunctions on the military bases to be a suspected hack, the Reuters news agency reported late last month, citing four officials close to the matter.

One official said Pentagon investigators were communicating with the French authorities about the issue.

How are cyberattackers targeting fridges and freezers?

Hackers can access the controls of fridges and freezers which use internet software and raise their temperature in order to spoil frozen food.

In some cases, hackers have increased the temperature of appliances to as high as 50C (122F) in European supermarkets, causing them to melt or even catch fire.

Awais Rashid, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Bristol in the UK, explained that many supermarket refrigeration systems which are remotely managed and, often by third parties, have not been given necessary software updates to prevent hackers.

“In line with established cyber security practices, these systems should be managed via secure networks. However, this is not the case in these incidents and they are accessible on the Internet,” Rashid told Al Jazeera.

“A remote managing party can access a web server on the controller to configure the system including temperature changes and maintenance. There are known vulnerabilities in several controllers (many of which are past their end of life),” he said.

Rashid added that vulnerabilities include “easily guessable” passwords, which would mean anyone could gain access.

Why are hackers doing this?

The motive behind the attacks is unclear, but authorities believe it may be a deliberate attempt to disrupt food supplies.

On Monday, the European Commissioner for Agriculture and Food, Christophe Hansen, said the attacks on fridges were a “deliberate attempt to disrupt” the bloc’s food supply and to undermine consumer confidence.

He added that while “food security is not currently at risk … the food waste and impact on businesses are real”.

Rashid said that while there are few details about who may be behind the attacks or what their motives are, it is likely that these are “the motive here is likely disruption”.

“This has financial impacts on the supermarkets but also societal impacts in terms of security of the food supply chain. Critically, this risks undermining trust in infrastructures on which people rely daily,” he said.

Who is behind the attacks?

On Monday, Belgium’s prosecutor’s office announced that it had opened a criminal investigation into the latest fridge cyberattacks. But so far, no one has taken responsibility.

Theories have emerged linking state actors to cyberattacks generally, with North Korea most recently accused of being behind last week’s $6.3bn Binance cryptocurrency heist, which forced the crypto group to freeze accounts.

European intelligence officials have also warned that Russia is escalating its shadow war on the continent amid the ongoing conflict with Ukraine, with cyberattacks among the methods it uses.

On Tuesday, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warned that Britain needs to be prepared for an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cyberattack on its critical national infrastructure within the next two years.

“By 2028, it is highly likely that Russia, China and other nation states will routinely use AI-cyber to achieve their geopolitical goals, with the UK facing an increase in scale and speed of sophisticated cyberattacks,” the NCSC said in a report.

The report comes shortly after the UK launched its “Be Ready” campaign, calling on citizens to stockpile enough tinned food, bottled water and cash to last three days in the event of a cyberattack or national emergency.

Rashid said that as our infrastructure becomes increasingly digitised, the risk of disruption from cyberattacks, especially “cyber-physical infrastructures such as refrigeration systems”, has risen.

“However, we should also note that a lot of our digital infrastructures operate safely everyday because good security practices enable that. The world works because cyber security works effectively. So it is important that all businesses follow good cyber security practices,” he said.

Bengaluru, India — India lifted nearly 500 million out of poverty between 2011 and 2023, with extreme poverty dropping from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent in the world’s most populous nation during the same period, according to a new report by the World Bank.

The only other parallel in poverty reduction on this scale is China, which lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty — though that was over a period of 40 years.

Yet despite the substantial fall in poverty in India — home to 1.4 billion people — the income and wealth inequality gap has widened significantly since it opened up its economy in the early 1990s.

According to the 2026 World Inequality Report, inequality in India remains among the highest in the world.

We take a look at how India managed to almost eradicate extreme poverty, and at the contrast between that accomplishment and the deep economic inequality that remains in the world’s most populous nation:

What does the World Bank data say?

Based on an extreme poverty threshold of $3 a day, the World Bank said extreme poverty in India declined from 27.1 percent to 2.6 percent between 2011 and 2023.

Extreme poverty is defined as the minimum amount of money needed to afford basic essentials such as food, water, shelter and clothing.

Estimating poverty metrics based on three official household surveys, the Bank also said that an estimated 496 million people have been lifted out of poverty as the share of India’s population living below the lower middle-income poverty threshold of $4.20 a day fell from 57.7 percent to 16.1 percent.

The authors of the report, led by World Bank’s South Asia poverty economist Ayago Wambile, wrote that poverty in India is “projected to continue declining, albeit more gradually with the poverty rate at the $4.20/day line expected to fall from 14.2 percent in 2026 to 12.1 percent by 2028.”

“This progress was mainly driven by strong consumption growth, rising employment, especially among women, and expanded social transfers, including food subsidies,” they added.

How significant is India’s poverty reduction?

India lifting nearly 500 million out of poverty in 12 years has been lauded as “remarkable progress” by the World Bank. It added that the downward trend represents “one of the fastest poverty declines in the world.”

To determine India’s poverty rates, the World Bank used Household Consumption Expenditure Surveys (HCES) which were conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), an Indian government body.

A 2022 report, jointly produced by the World Bank and the Chinese Finance Ministry, said that China had lifted 800 million people out of poverty, but it took 40 years to achieve.

Last month, the World Bank also raised its economic growth forecast for India to 7.1 percent.

In a post on Instagram on Sunday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi lauded the country’s progress in tackling poverty. “A historic fall in poverty. A generational rise in opportunity,” he said.

Last November, the southern state of Kerala, which has been ruled either by the centrist Congress party or a coalition of communist parties since independence, became the first in the country to officially declare itself free from extreme poverty. Kerala has the best education and health statistics of major Indian states.

Santosh Mehrotra, a development economist formerly in India’s planning commission, and currently a visiting professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, noted that India is the only low-middle-income country among G20 nations, which are otherwise upper-middle- or high-income nations.

“The absolute number of the poor in our country is still the highest in the world for sheer size of population. So therefore, if we are going to genuinely reduce the incidence of poverty and more importantly, the absolute number of the poor, then it makes a huge difference globally,” he told Al Jazeera.

Coming from the World Bank, the credibility of the analysis that has concluded India’s success in reducing poverty so majorly is also above question, said Surjit Bhalla, economist an a former executive director at the International Monetary Fund. Any data that comes from the World Bank, he said, is the “gold standard”.

He said the institution carries out a poverty analysis for every country using a per capita consumption level that is normalised globally by invoking purchasing power parity.

How did India dramatically cut poverty?

There are no easy answers.

But economists point to a series of factors and programmes that might have contributed to India’s success in pulling record numbers of people out of poverty.

Overall, poverty in India has, however, been declining since the country opened its economy in the early 1990s, when the Congress party was in power, setting the stage for more than three decades of fast economic growth. Successive governments have launched, continued or reworked a series of social welfare schemes that economists say have helped combat poverty.

Prime Minister Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh, for example, launched an employment scheme that guaranteed rural jobs for a minimum of 100 days per year.

Since coming to power in 2014, Modi has launched several other welfare schemes, including direct cash transfers, free rations and housing, to tackle poverty. While the Modi government has significantly diluted the rural job guarantee scheme that Singh had launched, the current administration now provides free food grains to about 800 million Indians.

Under Modi, the government has also significantly expanded the construction of toilets, especially in rural India, where open defecation has historically been common in many villages. Access to piped drinking water has risen from 17 percent of rural homes in August 2019 to more than 80 percent, according to government statistics.

“The reduced sickness from accessing safe water may have helped families earn more income,” economists Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin wrote in a research paper on India’s poverty alleviation efforts for the Brookings Institution in March 2024.

Before the latest World Bank report, Bhalla — a former executive director at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — and Bhasin had used Indian consumption data in early 2025 to also conclude that the country was making major gains in ending extreme poverty.

Why some economists are concerned

Despite the decline in poverty, Bhalla and Bhasin pointed in their 2025 paper that free food grains supplied by the Indian government to 800 million people only fulfilled their calorific needs. “More balanced food subsidies that are better targeted to the genuine poor will improve nutritional outcomes and would represent a better approach to food insecurity,” they wrote.

It is also unclear whether continuing to provide free food supplies indefinitely to more than half of the country’s population is sustainable for the government — and whether that programme points to deep economic distress mitigated only by state assistance.

Some economists, like Mehrotra, question why the Indian government no longer determines its own poverty level and its own estimates of the numbers of those below it.

Mehrotra said that since 2014 — when Modi came to power — the Indian government has stopped calculating its own poverty levels, instead relying entirely on World Bank estimates.

“We are a strange country in having adopted an international organisation’s poverty line as our own,” he said.

For a country as large, diverse and complex as India, he argued, a standard set by an international agency alone is not enough to capture shifting economic and consumer patterns. “For example, 10 years back everyone didn’t have phones; today even in rural areas people do. So consumption baskets [used to determine price indices and poverty levels] change over time and hence India should have done its own poverty line,” Mehrotra said.

But Bhalla pushed back against criticism of India’s use of World Bank data.

“The methodology that the World Bank uses and the estimates it comes up with are vetted by every country before the final data is published,” he told Al Jazeera. “So in this case India’s poverty analysis has been gone through by Indian scholars and the government of India. So there is no ideological basis for questioning this data.”

Jayati Ghosh, an economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, however said that India’s healthcare and nutrition indices also remained major causes for concern. The country spends just over 1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on public healthcare, ranking far behind global peers in per capita health investment and leaving public hospitals chronically underfunded and overburdened. Citizens also end up bearing the brunt of total health expenditures, a financial burden that pushes millions of Indians into poverty or debt every year.

Ghosh pointed out that real wages have stagnated in India. According to the World Bank report, while poverty has declined in India, wage disparities remain. “Median earnings among the top 10 percent of workers were about 13 times those of the bottom 10 percent in 2023,” the report said.

“These are not signs of a dynamic economy with falling poverty,” Ghosh said.

Nitin Kumar Bharti, a lecturer at the University of Western Australia, said that the World Bank’s report is encouraging. But he added that the drop in extreme poverty should not be seen as a mission accomplished, as “233 million people still live below” the $4.20 per day poverty line.

Bharti, who co-authored a study by the World Inequality Lab (WIL) on India’s income and wealth disparities published in 2024, also pointed to uneven growth within the country as a major challenge.

“Even if extreme poverty has declined, the extent of improvement in people’s overall wellbeing remains an important question,” he said.

Why is income inequality growing in India?

Bharti said that inequality is growing because gains from economic growth are distributed unevenly, with those at the top capturing a growing share of national income.

According to the 2026 World Inequality Report, India is among the world’s most unequal countries, with the top 10 percent of earners capturing about 58 percent of national income, while the bottom 50 percent receives only 15 percent.

“This is reinforced by longstanding structural inequalities — the historical caste system, unequal ownership of assets, and decades of inadequate attention to primary education have limited opportunities for disadvantaged groups,” he said.

“Insufficient public investment in quality education and healthcare — both important equalisers — means that family resources continue to shape access to skills, good jobs and economic security.”

Growing income inequality and a lack of job opportunities have triggered discontent among India’s youth, who have staged a series of nationwide protests in recent months.

According to government data released earlier this year, youth unemployment in the country stood at 13.8 percent in April 2025 and rose to 15.2 percent in March 2026.

The State of Working India 2026 report, from the Bengaluru-based Azim Premji University, noted that nearly 40 percent of young graduates aged 15–25 and roughly 20 percent of those aged 25–29 are unemployed. Among those who have a diploma or postgraduate degrees, the unemployment rate has climbed to 29.4 percent.

Does inequality matter if poverty is falling?

Yes, say economists.

“One reason is that the distribution of growth influences how effectively growth improves ordinary households’ lives. For a given level of average income, a more equal distribution generally leaves fewer people below a poverty line,” Bharti said.

“A second concern is inequality of opportunity. With rising inequality, families differ enormously in their ability to pay for education, healthcare, housing, capital to start a business or searching for a better job,” he added.

“A third concern is the concentration of economic and political influence. Large concentrations of wealth can create opportunities for a small group to shape policies and institutions in their favour.”

How can India tackle poverty and income inequality at the same time?

Dipa Sinha, a development economist at Azim Premji University, said that in order to tackle poverty and widespread inequality, India would need to prioritise some redistribution of wealth.

“India talks about poverty eradication only. But government policies need to implement a more progressive taxation policy that actually tackles inequality head-on,” she said.

“The second thing I think is very important is that the government should begin investing in universal public services like health and education. This can reduce both poverty and inequality,” she added.

Bharti said that one strong lesson for India is that sustained poverty reduction requires several policies working together.

He said China offers important lessons in economic transformation and rural income growth, pointing to its success in improving agricultural productivity, accelerating industrialisation, facilitating rural-to-urban migration, and investing heavily in both physical and human capital.

“In contrast, India’s current policy focus is more heavily tilted towards physical infrastructure, often addressing the needs of the top 10 percent rather than the bottom 90 percent,” Bharti said.

“Roads, transport, and basic infrastructure matter because they connect people to economic opportunities. But equally important are good government schools and hospitals that enable people to benefit from these opportunities.”

Bharti suggested that India’s government should pursue poverty reduction and broader economic inclusion together.

“Progressive taxation can help finance these investments while ensuring that the costs are distributed according to the ability to pay,” he added.