Explainer

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.

Amid growing concerns about renewed attacks on Iran following Tuesday’s midterm elections in the United States, US forces have struck Iran’s Qeshm Island in what officials have reportedly described as a defensive measure.

In the first attack since June on Qeshm Island, which serves as the primary platform for Iran’s “asymmetric” naval power, according to analysts, the US strikes come as both sides continue to adopt military and diplomatic postures.

Mediation efforts led by Qatar are continuing in a bid to avert a return to all-out war, which began on February 28 when the US and Israel launched strikes across Iran, triggering the closure of the critical Strait of Hormuz, surging oil and gas prices and massive damage to military, civil and energy facilities around the Gulf.

Here’s what we know:

What happened in the attack on Qeshm Island?

Several explosions were heard on Qeshm Island late on Monday, as US media reported that the US military had carried out what officials called “defensive strikes” in the Strait of Hormuz.

The blasts came in rapid succession, according to Iran’s state-owned IRNA news agency. Witnesses told the agency they saw two planes flying over the island, located off Iran’s southern coast along the waterway.

According to The Wall Street Journal, which quoted an unnamed official, the strikes on Monday night appeared limited and were not a resumption of a major operation.

The Associated Press news agency also quoted an unnamed US official as saying Washington had conducted the defensive strikes against “Iranians using surface-to-air missiles against US assets”.

The attack came after IRNA reported that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had destroyed a US MQ-9 drone east of the Strait of Hormuz.

The US first struck a critical desalination plant on Qeshm Island on March 7 – one week into the war. The strike, which Tehran branded a “flagrant crime” against civilians, cut off freshwater supplies to 30 surrounding villages.

But isn’t diplomacy ongoing?

It is, but it is fragile, and mixed messages are coming from both sides.

Qatari mediators have been engaged in indirect talks with Iranian officials in recent days. They have passed messages between the two sides, but the talks appeared to come to an end on Monday with no news of a breakthrough.

An official briefed on the talks told the Reuters news agency that Iran’s delegation had departed from Doha on Sunday, but that a draft proposal was still being circulated, without elaborating on the content.

Qatari mediators travelled to Tehran on Monday night for talks with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi regarding a version of a draft US-Iran deal which has been under negotiation for the past eight days, an official told Reuters.

Araghchi told IRNA on Monday: “Consultations through mediators are very intensive. We have presented our conditions and proposals, and everything depends on the political rationality of Washington.”

Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei also told a news conference on Monday that the “ball” was in the US’s court as Iran’s demands were “clear and logical”.

He said the plan Iran submitted in September to end the war remained the focus of talks, but that the proposal could be shortened and implemented in “two days”, including reopening the Strait of Hormuz and returning to talks about Iran’s nuclear programme.

On Monday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian also said Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei had given the government “certain authorities” over talks with the US, local media reported.

The president added that Tehran would look to resolve the conflict through dialogue.

Khamenei’s apparent approval of diplomacy marks a change since the breakdown of the June memorandum of understanding, which allowed a brief ceasefire and peace negotiations, when the supreme leader said the US could not be trusted.

For the US side, Vice President JD Vance also told reporters on Monday that he was hopeful for a diplomatic solution – just hours before the strikes on Qeshm Island.

“The president and I both feel pretty good about the prospects for potentially coming to a negotiated settlement,” Vance said. “We’ve certainly made some progress. We’ll see if we can make some more.”

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf reiterated on Tuesday that Iran’s response to any US “miscalculation”, such as launching strikes, would be unpredictable.

“The enemy seeks to force the Iranian nation into submission through threats and military action, but they are sorely mistaken; Iran will not submit,” he said.

What has Trump said about diplomacy?

Oil prices dropped by more than 7 percent on Monday. In response, Trump wrote on his Truth Social account that people believe the war with Iran will not resume as mediation efforts continue.

“Iran wants a settlement, as soon as possible. It could happen!” Trump wrote.

He told media at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC, that it looked like efforts were “coming together very nicely”.

“That’s why I guess the oil prices dropped. People found out about it.”

However, Trump also told the US media outlet Axios before his post on Truth Social that he was “in no rush” to decide whether to resume strikes on Iran.

“One way or the other, we will do something, but there is no rush. We crippled them financially. They have no money, no gasoline, and their people are getting very tired of it,” Trump told Axios in an interview.

What happens next?

The US midterm elections are being viewed as the inflexion point for Trump’s decision on what path he takes next.

The president has suggested several times that he could attack Iran following the vote and told the Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN) on Sunday that the conflict would end “very soon one way or the other”, adding that Tehran would either “make a deal, or we’ll just end it”.

Observers say the US will likely renew strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities if they do resume.

In particular, this could include Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, a highly fortified site that contains two tunnel complexes buried deep underground, and which Trump told US outlet Newsmax last month could be a target. He said the US “may have to go there. We’ll take a shot at that one. We’ll knock it out fast.”

With one day to go before the United States midterm elections, campaigning has reached a fever pitch with Democratic and Republican leaders pulling out all the stops to mobilise voters.

Democrats are hoping to flip control of both chambers of Congress, which is currently controlled by US President Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats are up for grabs on Tuesday. Voting will also be held to elect governors in 36 of the 50 US states.

With the cost-of-living crisis, exacerbated by the US-Israel war on Iran, becoming one of the key talking points of these elections, here’s where things stand as of Monday:

What’s happened on the campaign trail in the past 24 hours?

In a dramatic political development on Sunday, Democratic Congresswoman Haley Stevens threw her support behind Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers over her own party’s nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, in Michigan – one of the most closely watched races of the US midterm elections. Stevens had lost Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary in August to El-Sayed.

Her announcement followed weeks of tension with El-Sayed over US support to Israel, which has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza. El-Sayed has opposed military support to Israel, arguing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed the US into the Iran war. Stevens has accused El-Sayed of anti-Semitism for his criticism of Israeli actions in Gaza.

El-Sayed said a vote for his rival Rogers “is going to be a vote for Donald Trump” as his campaign reportedly saw a fundraising surge after Stevens crossed party lines.

Democratic leaders have rallied behind El-Sayed, who has faced Islamophobic attacks during the campaign.

The chairman of the Democratic Party in Michigan criticised Stevens. “She does not speak for that larger community,” Curtis Hertel said in an interview with CNN.

The leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, slammed Stevens over her endorsement of the Republican candidate.

“This is a despicable betrayal from Representative Stevens,” he posted on X.

“Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan, unlike Mike Rogers, who is a tool of Donald Trump and billionaire donors.”

Meanwhile, the advocacy group Michigan Jews for Democracy has backed El-Sayed.

“Haley Stevens does not speak for Michigan’s Jewish community,” it said in a statement, which rejected her “attempt to divide our community” two days before the election.

While Democrats have been angered by Stevens’s action, Trump celebrated her decision.

During a rally in Iowa later on Sunday, the US president said he would “love” it if Stevens joined the Republican Party. “Haley said what few people are willing to say,” Trump added. “It’s a thing called bravery.”

The question now is whether Stevens’s endorsement could persuade some of her supporters to back Rogers or discourage them from voting altogether.

Polling suggested El-Sayed has largely consolidated Democratic support, according to the Reuters news agency.

Judge dismisses Trump’s Alaska election lawsuit

Meanwhile, a ⁠federal ⁠judge has thrown out a Trump administration ⁠lawsuit seeking to block Alaska from ⁠certifying a loss by Republican Senator Dan Sullivan. The administration has argued that a rival on the ballot with the same name could change the outcome.

Sullivan pledged to accept the election outcome, days after the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit seeking to decertify the results of the Senate race if he loses.

“I’m going to accept the election results,” Sullivan, an ally of Trump, told CNN on Sunday.

Alaska’s Senate race is one of seven key toss-up races that will likely decide whether Republicans keep their majority in the upper chamber of the US Congress.

How many Americans have already voted?

This year, out of about 210 million registered voters, 54.5 million had voted early as of 10am US East Coast time (15:00 GMT) on Sunday, according to a University of Florida analysis. This includes 30 million in-person votes and 24 million mail-in ballots.

In the 2022 midterm elections, 46 million people voted early.

Early voting enthusiasm has been higher among Democrats this year with more than 11 million registered Democrats having voted early, compared with about 8 million registered Republicans, according to the university’s analysis.

Early voting has particularly surged in the state of Texas, a key battleground, where more than 7.7 million people have voted early.

According to an Associated Press polling analysis, in South Carolina, where Trump won by nearly 18 percentage points in 2024, early voting has surged 83 percent compared with the same point in 2022. The state has open races for governor and US Senate this year.

Kansas, Michigan and Maine have also seen a surge in early voting.

Early turnout figures, however, don’t show which candidates voters have chosen or what the final results will be.

On Tuesday, Americans head to the polls for the United States midterm elections, held halfway through a president’s four-year term. Voters will choose all 435 members of the US House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats. The voting will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years.

Although the president’s name won’t appear on the ballot, the vote is widely seen as a verdict on the presidency, and the president’s party almost always pays the price.

In 18 of the 20 midterms held from 1946 to 2022, voters took House seats away from the party in control of the White House. The average loss was 26 seats. Only Bill Clinton’s Democrats in 1998 and George W Bush’s Republicans in 2002 bucked the trend.

Political scientists call this the “presidential penalty”, or the “midterm penalty”. The president’s party tends to lose seats simply because it holds power as voters use the midterms to put a check on the White House.

The House: 18 losses in 20 midterms

The chart below shows how many House seats the president’s party has won or lost in each midterm since 1946 from Harry S Truman to Joe Biden.

Democratic presidents have suffered the biggest midterm defeats since 1946. On average, their party has lost about 29 House seats in a midterm, compared with about 23 under Republican presidents.

The largest loss came in 2010, two years after Barack Obama became the first African American elected president, when Democrats lost 64 House seats and Republicans took control of the chamber. The Democrats under Truman lost 56 seats in 1946, and under Clinton, they lost 54 in 1994, each time losing control of the House.

The worst Republican defeats came under Dwight D Eisenhower when the party lost 50 seats in 1958 and Gerald Ford when it lost 48 in 1974. Donald Trump’s first midterm in 2018 cost Republicans 42 seats and control of the House.

Big losses often cost the president’s party its majority. In seven of the 20 midterms since 1946 (1946, 1954, 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022), the House changed hands.

The Senate: 13 losses in 20 midterms

The president’s party has lost Senate seats in 13 of the 20 midterms since 1946 but lost control of the chamber in only six: 1946, 1954, 1986, 1994, 2006 and 2014.

Unlike the House of Representatives, where every seat is up for election every two years, only about a third of the Senate’s 100 seats are contested in each cycle because senators serve six-year terms and their elections are staggered. That means which states are voting can matter as much as the national mood.

Eisenhower’s Republicans suffered the biggest Senate loss in the period, giving up 13 seats in 1958. Truman’s Democrats lost 12 in 1946, and Obama’s Democrats lost nine in 2014, handing control of the chamber to Republicans.

At times, the two chambers have moved in opposite directions. In 1982, Ronald Reagan’s Republicans lost 26 House seats but gained one in the Senate. In 2018, Trump’s Republicans lost the House but added a Senate seat, and in 2022, Biden’s Democrats lost the House while gaining one seat in the Senate.

These split results show that a backlash against the president does not land evenly across Congress. A party can hold its ground on a favourable Senate map while losing competitive House districts.

What does it mean to lose the House or Senate?

Losing seats and losing control are not the same thing. Lyndon Johnson’s Democrats lost 47 House seats in 1966 but kept their majority. Twenty years later, Reagan’s Republicans lost only four House seats but lost the Senate after an eight-seat setback.

Control of the chambers decides who sets the agenda and passes legislation. A bill must pass both chambers before it reaches the president for his approval or veto, so an opposition majority in either can block the president’s plans.

A House majority can also mean a party is able to launch investigations and impeach a president while a Senate majority can reject the president’s nominees, including federal judges, who serve for life.

This year, Democrats need to gain three seats to win the House and four to win the Senate. A 50-50 split in the Senate would leave Republicans in control because Vice President JD Vance may cast tie-breaking votes.

Iranian officials have been speaking with Qatari mediators about a two-day plan to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, according to Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, in the latest effort to find a diplomatic path out of the US-Israel war on Iran that has caused a serious global energy crisis.

But even amid signs of diplomatic progress, officials from both sides say they are ready for renewed military escalation.

President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly suggested the United States could attack Iran after the November 3 midterm elections, said the latest negotiations were “going fine”, but added that the US still had several Iranian targets to “take care of”.

Meanwhile, Araghchi has also said Iran’s military was more prepared than ever for renewed war, while the country’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, threatened Iran would use “new weaponry” in response to any future attack.

Here’s what we know about the latest diplomatic efforts and the sharp rhetoric from both sides, and what it could mean for what lies ahead:

What is the status of talks?

Araghchi said on Saturday that an Iranian delegation, including one of his aides, travelled to Doha to meet Qatari mediators. Earlier, Qatari officials also travelled to Tehran for consultations.

The latest discussions in Doha centred on a plan that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a global energy chokepoint, within two days and restart peace talks with the US, provided Washington meets a set of demands from Tehran, Araghchi told Al Jazeera.

Those demands include the lifting of recently imposed US sanctions, the reinstatement of oil waivers granted in June, a reduction in the US military presence in the region, recognition of new shipping routes in the Strait of Hormuz designated by Iran and Oman, and an end to the conflict on all fronts, including Israel’s attacks on Lebanon, said Araghchi.

Qatari and Pakistani mediators were “continuing consultations regarding our conditions”, said the top Iranian diplomat.

Pakistan has been mediating between the US and Iran, with its army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, visiting Tehran several times as part of the diplomatic efforts to end the war. Doha and Islamabad played key roles in the signing of the June memorandum of understanding (MoU) that collapsed in August.

Iran’s Rezaei said the US had “indicated its readiness” to accept its conditions, although Washington has not confirmed this.

On the US side, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed Qatar-led talks were ongoing, but said he was not aware of a timeframe for them.

“There are multiple talks. Talks have actually never stopped,” said Rubio. “If there is a diplomatic solution, we would be open to it.”

Why has Iran noted a change in the US’s ‘tone’?

The renewed diplomatic activity comes after US Vice President JD Vance sent a letter earlier this week to Rezaei, reportedly seeking to gauge the prospects of restarting negotiations and averting another round of military escalation.

Rezaei confirmed on Saturday that he had read the letter, whose tone he said had “completely changed” compared with earlier correspondence from Trump.

Araghchi also said he had studied Vance’s letter, which he described positively.

“The American side’s attempt to open the door to dialogue and understanding more broadly is a positive step,” Araghchi told Al Jazeera.

However, he warned, “If Washington’s goal in sending this letter is to stir up discord, it would be yet another mistake to add to its previous ones.”

What has Iran said about prospects for peace and war?

Iranian officials have said they are open to new peace talks if the US meets their conditions, but also ready to act more aggressively in any new military confrontation.

“I know that our armed forces are more prepared for war than any time before, and we are ready for any scenario,” Araghchi told Al Jazeera.

In the event of any new military threat from the US or Israel, Iran’s response would be “immediate” and “without geographical limitations”, according to a statement by Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.

Khamenei ordered commanders to update Iran’s target list to include “all types of tangible and intangible assets belonging to the American-Zionist enemy”.

Rezaei told Al Jazeera that Iran would use “new weaponry” in its response to any future attacks. He also said Iran’s government was weighing a change to its “nuclear doctrine”, which currently includes a ban on nuclear weapons.

Iran’s nuclear programme has been a major point of contention in the conflict with the US, and Trump has repeatedly said Iran must never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon. Tehran insists its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.

What is the latest from Trump?

The US president has sent mixed signals about the status of peace talks. On Saturday, he said negotiations were “going fine” but added that they were “not very reliable”.

He also said the US military still needed to “take care of” several Iranian sites, singling out a suspected underground nuclear complex known as Pickaxe Mountain.

Trump added that the US could achieve its military objectives “very quickly” and was not in a hurry.

Previously, he threatened to renew attacks that would “finish off” Iran, while the US has reportedly warned its Gulf allies to prepare for a short, high-intensity round of conflict after the midterm elections.

Rubio said Trump had not yet decided on whether to carry out new strikes, but warned the US “can achieve military objectives if we seek to”.

How could Israel play into the calculation?

Israel, which joined the US in initiating the war against Iran in February, is preparing for another round of potential conflict right after the US midterm elections, according to a senior Israeli official cited by Israel’s Ynet News site.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israel has a “historic, one-time opportunity … to remove the Iranian threat once and for all”. While Netanyahu’s coalition lost its parliamentary majority in recent legislative elections, the 77-year-old leader remains in office as caretaker until a new government is formed.

Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of security studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that Netanyahu’s threats complicate Iran’s calculus because Tehran fears “even a nuclear agreement with Washington may not end the threat of another Israeli attack”.

Brigadier-General Yadollah Javani, the deputy for political affairs of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Iranian forces are operating on the assumption that the US or Israel could strike at any moment.

What explains the parallel diplomatic efforts and war rhetoric?

Hamidreza Azizi, a senior Iran analyst with the Crisis Group, said Tehran is pursuing diplomacy while also “attempting to redefine” the military implications of another potential conflict.

“For now, diplomacy and military preparations are proceeding simultaneously,” he wrote in a post on X. “The emerging Iranian position seems to be that an agreement remains possible, but another war would be fought under different rules and on a much wider battlefield.”

He added, “Whether Washington takes these warnings as credible deterrence or further escalatory threats could significantly influence what happens next.”

Krieg said the November 3 elections give Iran an incentive to delay concessions to deny Trump a diplomatic victory. But that calculus could change afterwards when he has fewer domestic political restraints on military action.

“We could therefore reach a situation where Iran becomes more willing to compromise precisely when Washington becomes more willing to strike,” said Krieg.

Democrats need a net gain of at least four seats in November’s midterm elections to take control of the United States Senate from Republicans, as voter discontent with President Donald Trump, the Iran war, and rising prices heighten the races in once-safe Republican states.

Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority, and a Democratic takeover seemed highly unlikely at the start of the year – before the US launched its war on Iran.

Here are the key races that could decide the control of the Senate:

Alaska

Republican Senator Dan Sullivan is seeking re-election against Democratic former US Representative Mary Peltola and an independent candidate who shares Sullivan’s name.

Alaska uses ranked-choice voting, allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference. Four candidates are on the ballot, including Sullivan, Peltola and another Dan Sullivan, a candidate Republicans accuse Democrats of recruiting deliberately to confuse voters.

“It was a scheme. It was election fraud. Total election fraud,” Trump said. Peltola has rejected the accusations, saying the dispute is distracting from voters’ concerns.

“I feel like this is yet another diversion from the issue that Alaskans want to talk about, which is affordability,” she explained.

Peltola has raised $33m in October, compared with nearly $14m for Sullivan. Republicans have also spent more on the race, $42m compared with $38m by Democrats.

Trump won Alaska by 13 points in 2024, but recent opinion polls suggest Peltola narrowly leading over Sullivan.

Iowa

Iowa has been a Republican stronghold in recent elections, with Trump winning the state by 13 points in 2024. But his declining popularity, trade tariffs and the Iran war have put Republicans on the defence in Iowa.

The state’s agricultural economy has been hit hard by trade tariffs as well as rising fuel and fertiliser costs as a result of the strained oil supplies amid the Iran war.

Republican US Senator Joni Ernst’s decision not to seek re-election has left an open-seat contest between Republican US Representative Ashley Hinson and Democratic state Representative Josh Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medallist.

Republican Hinson has called for an “immediate end” to the Iran war and said Iowans should not have to pay higher fuel or grocery prices as a result of it. However, according to Politifact, Hinson has voted against six resolutions seeking to end US involvement in the Iran war.

Turek has outraised Hinson $20m to $14m, but recent polls show Hinson with a narrow lead.

Kansas

Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, but rising farming costs, opposition to Trump’s immigration crackdown and discontent over the Iran war have made this year’s race unexpectedly competitive.

Trump won the state by 16 percentage points in 2024.

Republican Senator Roger Marshall is facing Democrat Adam Hamilton, the founding pastor of a Methodist megachurch.

The race has drawn attention from Republican leaders, with both Trump and Vice President JD Vance campaigning in the state.

Agriculture is central to Kansas’s economy, and farmers have struggled with rising diesel and fertiliser prices as a result of the Iran war. Many have also expressed frustration with Trump’s tariffs.

Immigration has become another major issue. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in southwest Kansas have disrupted businesses. Even Republican Marshall has criticised aspects of the agency’s operations in his state.

Democrat Hamilton has outraised Marshall, $14m to $6m. Democratic groups have also outspent Republicans in Kansas, $28m to $22m.

Recent polls show Hamilton narrowly ahead.

Maine

Maine is one of the Democrats’ biggest opportunities to gain a Senate seat, as Republican Senator Susan Collins faces a close re-election battle in a state which voted against Donald Trump in 2024.

Collins faces Democrat Troy Jackson, a former Maine Senate president who entered the race in July after the party’s original nominee, Graham Platner, withdrew following sexual assault allegations, which he denied.

Collins has sought to distance herself from Trump, acknowledging during a debate earlier this month that she was not the president’s favourite senator and that he would not be campaigning in Maine.

She was among the Republicans who voted to convict Trump following his impeachment over the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Democrats say Collins only votes against Trump when it doesn’t matter, however. Democrats also hope voters will hold her accountable for helping confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court, which led to the overturning of a federal right to abortion.

Jackson has faced criticism over his treatment of women, including his refusal to apologise for telling Collins to “shut up” during a debate.

Jackson has outraised Collins, bringing in about $26.9m compared with $25.2m through mid-October. Republican groups have also outspent Democrats, $76m to $40m.

Recent polls show a close race.

North Carolina

Republicans appear to have conceded North Carolina, where even Trump has suggested the Democrats will win. At a campaign rally last week in Greenville, Trump told supporters it was “crazy” that former Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, was going to be their next senator.

Trump won North Carolina by 3 points in 2024, but Republican Senator Thom Tillis’ retirement made this year’s Senate race an open contest.

Trump recruited former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley to succeed Tillis, but he has been unable to compete with Cooper’s fundraising, and Republican allies who invested heavily in holding North Carolina ‌have begun shifting their focus ⁠to other states.

Affordability has dominated the campaign as farmers struggle with rising diesel and energy costs amid the Iran war.

In eastern North Carolina, Kelly Spivey, who runs a community food pantry, told Al Jazeera that rising prices are forcing families to make difficult choices.

“They’re trying to decide if they’re going to pay for their medicine or they’re going to buy food or they’re going to pay for day care so they can actually go to work,” she said.

Whatley, meanwhile, has closely aligned himself with Trump, who told supporters at a campaign rally: “I just want you to go out and pretend I’m on the ticket because essentially I am.”

Cooper has raised $50m and has $9m in the bank. Whatley has raised $14m and has just $900,000 on hand through mid-October. Recent polls have Cooper leading by double digits.

Ohio

Democrat Sherrod Brown, who has longstanding ties to labour unions and working-class communities, is seeking to win back voters in the industrial Rust Belt state.

Brown faces US Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed to the Senate to replace US Vice President JD Vance when Vance left the Senate for the White House.

The cost of living has become a major campaign issue.

The winner of the special election will be on the ballot again in 2028 for a full six-year term.

Republican and Democratic outside groups have each spent nine figures on the race, with Republicans investing $232m and Democrats pouring in $118m.

Brown has more than tripled Husted’s fundraising through October 14, bringing in $68m to Husted’s nearly $20m. Recent polls show Brown leading by three to five points.

Texas

No Democrat has won statewide in Texas since 1994.

James Talarico, a state representative, could break the streak.

Talarico faces Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Trump won Texas by nearly 14 points in 2024. Yet Republican outside groups have already spent $300m to hold the seat after run-off voters nominated the scandal-plagued Paxton over ⁠incumbent Republican US Senator John Cornyn.

Trump endorsed Paxton even though Cornyn was widely believed to have an easier path to victory.

Leaked audio has exposed daylight between Trump and Paxton, who privately told donors that the president’s midterm convention hurt his campaign.

Democratic groups have spent $76m on this race. But Talarico’s campaign has outraised Paxton’s by $110m and reported $9.6m more in its campaign coffers as of September 30.

Musk has given $158m to a Republican super PAC to invest in Paxton’s race. Recent polls show Talarico narrowly leading or tied.

Georgia

Georgia was initially seen as one of the Republicans’ main opportunities to gain a Senate seat after Trump won the state by 2 percentage points in 2024. But Republican US Representative Mike Collins has struggled to gain traction against Democratic US Senator Jon Ossoff, a potential 2028 presidential candidate.

Ossoff has ⁠outraised Collins by nearly $126m up to October 14 and began mid-October with $15.1m in his war chest, compared with Collins’ $1.1m.

Polls have consistently shown Ossoff leading, and Democrats narrowly lead Republicans in outside spending, $19m to $17.9m.

Michigan

Republicans are more hopeful about flipping an open seat in Michigan, especially after the Democratic establishment failed to get its pick nominated.

Progressive outsider Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated centrist US Representative Haley Stevens during the primary, putting him on a collision course with Republican Mike Rogers, a former US representative, in what could be the tightest race for a Democratic-held Senate seat this year.

Michigan, a key battleground state which Trump won in 2024, has been hit by tariffs affecting trade with neighbouring Canada and rising living costs, making the economy a central issue in the campaign.

The race has also attracted heavy spending from outside groups. A pro-Israel super PAC has spent at least $493,000 opposing El-Sayed, after spending $30m in an unsuccessful effort to prevent him from winning the Democratic nomination. The group could spend as much as $9m more during the general election.

El-Sayed raised $45m up to September, more than double Rogers’s nearly $21m.

Republican groups have spent $136m on the race, compared with about $70m by Democrats.

Most recent polls show El-Sayed narrowly ahead.

New Hampshire

Democrats are defending an open Senate seat in New Hampshire after Senator Jeanne Shaheen announced her retirement, giving Republicans an opportunity to compete in a state Kamala Harris won by nearly three percentage points in 2024.

Democratic US Representative Chris Pappas faces former Republican Senator John Sununu, who is seeking a return to Washington nearly two decades after losing his seat to Shaheen in 2008.

Sununu comes from one of New Hampshire’s best-known political families. His brother, Chris Sununu, served as governor until 2025.

Pappas has a substantial fundraising advantage, raising $24m compared with Sununu’s $6m.

Republican outside groups have also outspent Democrats, $37m to $20m, as both parties compete for the open seat.

Recent polls have consistently shown Pappas leading Sununu by five to eight percentage points.

Over the past week, Washington and Tehran have sent mixed signals about whether their eight-month war is heading back to full-scale strikes or towards a peace deal.

On Thursday, the head of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), Admiral Brad Cooper, briefed US President Donald Trump on options for renewed attacks on Iran, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

The US and Israel have drawn up joint plans to attack Iran after the November 3 US midterm elections, The New York Times (NYT) reported last week.

Yet on the same day, The Washington Post reported that Vice President JD Vance had offered to meet Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, in person to negotiate an end to the war.

On Friday, Qatari mediators returned to Tehran for talks coordinated with the US, an official told Reuters.

So is Washington heading back to war, or towards a deal? Here’s what we know:

Why are there conflicting reports?

Essentially, Washington is preparing for war while keeping a diplomatic channel open.

The WSJ reported that the US has boosted air defences and munitions in the region and moved some troops away from bases vulnerable to Iranian retaliation.

Ten US military cargo planes landed at the Ovda and Nevatim air bases in Israel’s Negev region on Thursday, with more sent to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who said he had been briefed on the plans, called them “insane” and warned of a devastating escalation.

Can diplomatic efforts hold off a return to strikes?

Diplomacy has not stopped.

Vance’s letter, delivered to Rezaei through Qatari mediators on Sunday, proposed direct talks led by Vance, with Iran’s nuclear programme on the table from the start, according to the NYT, in a bid to prevent a renewal of strikes.

Whether it might have any influence over what happens next is a matter for debate. Rouzbeh Parsi, an Iran analyst who is an affiliated researcher at Lund University’s Department of History and Human Rights Studies in Sweden, described Vance as the “voice of reason” on Iran within the Trump administration, saying his signals have been “the least volatile and unpredictable”.

But he also told Al Jazeera that Vance’s position has “never proven to be sturdy enough to actually sway Trump”.

“Thus, while the optics with Vance look better than anyone else in the Trump administration, I doubt that they [Iranian officials] give the outreach much credence until Vance proves able to actually deliver something on his own,” he said.

Furthermore, Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle East politics at Georgetown University, told Al Jazeera that “Rezaei is just one voice among many” adding that the “reality is that decisions are made collectively inside the Islamic republic”.

Wolfgang Pusztai, a security and defence analyst and Austria’s former defence attache to Libya, has a different view, however, telling Al Jazeera, “There is no doubt that the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] currently calls the shots in Iran.”

In February, Iran’s then supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the initial attacks by Israel and the United States, and his son became the new supreme leader, but Pusztai says he “simply does not have the influence his father did”.

“Without the IRGC’s approval, there will be no agreement with Iran,” Pusztai said, adding it is safe to assume that when Rezaei makes a statement or endorses a proposal, “it reflects the position of the IRGC leadership” and that the US was “absolutely right to negotiate with him”.

Pusztai said it is unclear whether Rezaei is indeed ready to make a serious compromise, but under sustained US pressure, Rezaei, who holds a doctorate in economics, could come to see that “Iran’s interests and the regime’s survival can be better secured without nuclear weapons and through a less aggressive foreign policy”.

“He certainly knows that peak oil is approaching and that time is running out for Iran’s economic recovery through the use of its oil revenues,” he said.

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said progress depends on Iran’s seven conditions being met – including the lifting of sanctions, ending the US naval blockade of Iranian ports, guarantees to an end to US-Israeli strikes, and the unfreezing of Iranian assets – adding that the “carrot-and-stick approach has no effect on Iran”, according to the semi-official Tasnim news agency.

Vance, meanwhile, told Fox News on Thursday that Trump would “never” let the conflict become “a forever war”.

Which of all these signals matter most?

The diplomacy may say more than the threats.

Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of security studies at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera that Vance’s offer of direct talks “suggests that the Americans do have second thoughts” and that they are less ready to strike than they publicly suggest.

But he warned that Cooper, whom he called “quite hawkish”, could give Trump false confidence “that there is a military way out of it, when in reality there isn’t a military way out of it”.

“This idea that there is a short and crisp military operation to solve this issue is obviously an illusion,” he said.

Paul Musgrave, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera the White House could be sending signals to coerce Tehran, but that “the better interpretation is the simplest one”.

He believes “the United States is getting ready to carry out substantial attacks relatively soon”. He said he does not expect Washington to accept what he called the unfavourable deal Tehran is offering “without another round of attacks”.

Pusztai said Trump’s main focus is now the midterms, making it “very unlikely that he will order another large-scale attack on Iran before the elections”.

“Starting in mid to late November, there could be a major wave of attacks aimed at advancing the American agenda,” he said, adding that the aim would be to weaken the IRGC enough to push it towards a deal on US terms.

Whatever the vote’s result, “in the short term it will not change much”, Musgrave said.

A strong Republican showing could encourage more aggressive tactics, while a Democratic win could push Trump to show his unilateral powers, including by attacking, he said.

Hasn’t this all happened before?

It has. Iran was attacked by Israel or the US while talks were under way in both 2025 and 2026.

“We’ve seen this pattern of behaviour before from the United States,” Hashemi said, describing it as “talking diplomacy while preparing for war”.

On June 13, 2025, Israel launched major strikes on Iranian nuclear and military sites, two days before a sixth round of US-Iran talks was due in Oman. The US joined on June 22, bombing Iran’s Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan nuclear sites.

This year, the US and Israel attacked on February 28, two days after talks in Geneva that mediator Oman said had made “significant progress”.

A day before the strikes, Oman’s foreign minister said Iran had agreed to reduce its nuclear stockpiles to “the lowest level possible”.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told Al Jazeera in September that Iran no longer trusts negotiations with Washington because attacks had come during previous rounds of talks.

Hashemi said he suspects “the same pattern is repeating itself”, with the US preparing “a massive bombing campaign in Iran, replete with war crimes like we haven’t seen before”, citing his reading of Murphy’s comments.

What is blocking a deal?

“The issue is mostly around sequencing and the lack of trust on the Iranian side that the Americans will actually follow through with their commitments,” Krieg said.

Tehran wants sanctions and the US naval blockade lifted quickly, fearing that a slow process gives Trump room to backtrack, he said.

Some IRGC hardliners do not necessarily see war as a bad thing if it tightens their grip on the Hormuz strait, he added, and “the Iranians have been prepping for this war for the last three weeks, so they are ready to fight”.

Krieg said he expects “nothing is going to happen until the 3rd of November [the date of the US midterm elections]”. After that, he said, the likelihood of war will “increase exponentially”.

Any new escalation would be worse than in February and March, he said, with Iran readier to strike critical infrastructure in Gulf countries.

He said the threat to the Gulf “will be unprecedented”.

Dock and port workers have long had a tradition of solidarity with the oppressed, upheld by strong labour unions and workers’ rights.

In February 2025, nearly a year and a half into Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, dockworkers’ unions from Mediterranean countries came together to disrupt weapons shipments to Israel and Western countries’ military support of the onslaught.

“Weapons need transport, infrastructure, and workers’ hands to reach their destination,” Markos Bekris, leader of Greece’s dockworkers’ union, ENEDEP, at the Port of Piraeus in Athens, told Al Jazeera. “That is where our power lies.”

Now, dock and port workers in 22 countries across five continents are holding a strike on Friday, which workers and researchers told Al Jazeera is expected to be “historic” in scale. The International Day of Action of Dockworkers and Port Workers – also called “Dockworkers do not work for war” – involves 110 ports and 25 trade unions.

“Every union will do what they choose, but be connected to the same principles and struggle,” Francesco Staccioli, the national secretary of transport and ports in Italy’s USB trade union, told Al Jazeera.

The unions’ main demand is “an immediate end to the genocide of the Palestinian people and all imperialist wars”.

Mohammed al-Attar, a dockworker who left Gaza in 2015 and is now based in Hamburg, Germany, said the workers “are the power”.

“We can save thousands of lives if we stop working just for two days,” he said.

Al-Attar feels hopeful about the global strike, but is “deeply disappointed” in his trade union Ver.di in Germany, which he accused of “incomprehensible silence” over Gaza.

What is the International Day of Action of Dockworkers and Port Workers?

In early 2025, dockworkers in the Mediterranean area came together to discuss how to concretely act “against privatisation, and against the genocide in Palestine”.

The original meeting included five unions organising in 20 ports across five countries, but continued to grow. The unions met several times, first in Athens, then in Genoa, and later in Istanbul. That was where unions from more than 35 ports published the Istanbul Declaration in May this year, and declared October 30 as their day of action.

In a statement, the unions called for the “recognition of an independent Palestinian state, recognised by the international community, within the 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital”, and “an end to the US-Israeli wars of aggression in the Middle East and against Iran, and full solidarity with the peoples of Cuba, Venezuela and Sudan”.

“Refusing the war is giving humanity a chance to live better. This is what I’m really convinced about,” the USB’s Staccioli told Al Jazeera.

How many ports and unions are taking part?

More than 25 dockworkers’ trade unions, representing more than 110 ports in 22 countries and regions across five continents, are taking part. Most of the strikes will happen at regular working hours, but in France, Italy, India, Greece and Turkiye, 24-hour strikes have been called.

Strikes of up to two hours have also been announced in Morocco, Cyprus and other ports.

Organisers told Al Jazeera that workers and trade unions from other sectors have been called on to join with port workers, notably in Greece, while in Italy the USB has called for a general strike.

“It’s bigger than we thought,” Staccioli said. “This has spread all over the world.”

No Harbour for Genocide (NHG), a campaigning collective that researches weapon supply chains, supports the action. A spokesperson told Al Jazeera that maritime infrastructure was important in “facilitating military trade within the context of the genocide in Palestine”.

Dockworker unions in India, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay and the west coast of the United States have all pledged to take part, the spokesperson added.

The Palestinian labour movement endorsed the strike and called on more to join, urging unions to “escalate Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) pressure to end all state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide.”

How are these ports involved in wars?

Of the ports participating, Genoa, Livorno and Gioia Tauro in Italy, Marseille in France, Piraeus in Greece, and Tangier in Morocco all have proven links to weapons shipments to Israel, according to No Harbour for Genocide.

The group said that between August 2025 and September 2026 it tracked 315 shipments of components for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest arms manufacturer, moving through 56 commercial ports in 29 countries. All these 56 ports are expected to be on strike on October 30 , representing a major disruption, even if only for a day.

NHG said it expects that more than $2bn worth of cargo will sit idle on October 30 .

“Up to 95 percent of Israel’s imports and exports travel by sea, relying on port infrastructure across the Mediterranean,” the campaign’s spokesperson said. “Tangier, Piraeus, Gioia Tauro and Genoa, where the largest vessels unload containers onto smaller ships for the rest of the sea, are a few of the Mediterranean’s most frequently used transshipment hubs. All four are taking part on Friday.”

“The participating Mediterranean ports handle 63 percent of all container activity in the sea,” the spokesperson added, noting that “between southern France and Piraeus, the striking ports hold 74 percent of container activity. Worldwide, the ports taking part [in the strike] handle 13.5 percent of global shipping.”

Linda Maggiore, an Italian journalist and activist, said that she has discovered several examples of increasing weapons shipments from Italy’s major ports to Israel since the start of the war on Gaza.

“In Europe, a regulation on military mobility is about to be approved, which will make it even easier for arms to be transferred without scrutiny,” Maggiore told Al Jazeera. “Blockades are essential actions, because they make it clear that civil society does not wish to be complicit.”

From the Vietnam war to Iraq, the USB’s Staccioli said that “dockworkers have a long tradition of rallying against any imperialist war or aggression in the world.”

Are protest actions prosecuted?

In Greece, union leader Bekris is facing prosecution for a protest in which he and other workers blocked the loading of a container holding 21 tonnes of ammunition destined for Israel in October 2024.

“We carry forward the tradition of workers who refuse to load weapons against other people,” Bekris told Al Jazeera on the eve of the global strike. “Our hands get covered in grease and sweat every day. We refuse to let them be stained with the blood of other people.”

With four days to go before the United States midterm elections, Democrats are leading in national polls as both parties make their final push for votes.

Meanwhile, a legal dispute threatens to delay the Senate result in Alaska, and President Donald Trump has cancelled two weekend rallies in favour of campaigning by phone.

Here’s what you need to know.

What do the latest US midterm polls say?

Democrats lead Republicans by 51.4 percent to 43.2 percent, according to RealClearPolling, with a difference of 8.2 percentage points.

Charles Franklin, professor of law and public policy and director of the Marquette Law School Poll in the US, said Trump’s declining approval ratings and economic concerns are alarming Republicans.

The latest Marquette Law School poll, conducted in Wisconsin from October 14 to October 22 and released on October 28, put Trump’s approval rating at 37 percent and disapproval at 61 percent.

Only 16 percent of respondents said they were better off financially than a year ago, while 42 percent said they were worse off and another 42 percent said things were about the same.

“Democrats are more enthusiastic and more certain they will vote,” Franklin told Al Jazeera.

“That is giving Democrats an important edge, and reflects Republican disappointment in current national conditions,” he added.

In Arizona, where voters are experiencing increasing living expenses, a retiree told Al Jazeera that the cost of groceries had become a major concern.

“We’re retired, and every time we go to the grocery store, it makes me wonder what the heck is going on,” the voter said.

In Texas, Democrat James Talarico is polling at 49 percent against Republican Ken Paxton’s 43 percent, according to a CNN survey released on Thursday. In Michigan, the same pollster found Democrat Abdul El-Sayed ahead of Republican Mike Rogers, 49 percent to 42 percent.

However, Franklin warned: “Polls are not perfect predictions of outcomes.

“We could see those close races go either way, either due to polling errors or due to voters moving just a little more in one direction or the other.”

In Alaska, however, there is also a complication: a legal dispute that could delay the result of a Senate race.

What is happening in Alaska’s Senate race?

The battle for Alaska’s seat could continue in court after ballots close on November 3. The dispute centres on two candidates named Dan Sullivan: the incumbent Republican senator and an independent candidate with the same name, who is also registered as a Republican.

Trump has accused Democrats of recruiting an independent candidate to confuse voters and take support away from the Republican senator.

“It was a scheme. It was an election fraud. Total election fraud,” Trump said.

The Justice Department has taken legal action over the dispute, while Democrat Mary Peltola denied the accusations.

“I feel like this is yet another diversion from the issue that Alaskans want to talk about, which is affordability,” she said.

Al Jazeera’s US correspondent Alan Fisher said the dispute could have consequences beyond Alaska if the Senate’s control depends on the result.

“If this becomes the key seat in the battle for the Senate, we might not actually know who has control there for several days, maybe even weeks after November 3,” Fisher said.

What has happened on the campaign trail in the past 24 hours?

Trump travelled to South Carolina to campaign for Republican senator Darline Graham – sister of the late Lindsey Graham – who is running against Annie Andrews in a closely contested race.

In Rock Hill, Trump encouraged voters to cast their ballots and cautioned his supporters not to take the election outcome for granted. About Graham, Trump said that she was in the lead but that he still had to campaign there. “In politics you never know, right? So you got to get out and vote.”

He also addressed his supporters directly and asked the crowd to pretend that he was on the ballot.

“And I am on the ballot because all of these things that we’ve done, all of these incredible successes that we have,” he added.

In Texas, Vice President JD Vance attended a rally in Weatherford, near Dallas, alongside Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, as Republicans called on supporters to vote.

“Texas ain’t surrendering. Texas is not becoming California. It’s going to stay Texas, ain’t that right?” Vance told supporters.

Well-known Democrats have also joined the campaign trail.

On Wednesday, former President Barack Obama gave a speech in Georgia supporting Senator Jon Ossoff, criticising Trump’s management of the economy and his approach to the war with Iran.

When Al Jazeera asked about Obama’s visit, Ossoff’s Republican opponent, Mike Collins, said it showed “the desperation of Jon Ossoff because he knows he’s losing”.

“If he was winning so big, he wouldn’t have brought anybody in,” Collins said.

Democrats also campaigned in Texas and Georgia on Thursday.

In Dallas, Senate candidate James Talarico held a rally as part of his final campaign tour, while former Vice President Kamala Harris joined Ossoff at Clark Atlanta University, urging young people to vote.

Harris also campaigned in Macon, Georgia, where she criticised the Trump administration over rising living costs.

“We have a moment now to turn pain into purpose,” Harris told Democratic volunteers. Harris also urged supporters to participate in local and statewide contests.

Later, at Clark Atlanta University, she asked students to stay engaged.

“Don’t overlook those races, because those are the folks who make decisions about your life every day,” she said.

What happens next on the US midterms campaign trail?

Trump has cancelled weekend scheduled appearances in Kansas and Iowa, replacing them with telephone rallies across nearly 20 states in the final days before Tuesday’s elections.

Trump had been set to appear in Salina, Kansas, on Saturday and Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday.

Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said the change would allow Trump to reach more voters than he could with in-person appearances.

“Voters across the country want to hear from President Trump before Election Day, and this 72-hour sprint will be a huge boost in the closing days,” Gruters said.

Asked about the cancellations on Thursday, Trump questioned the need to travel to Kansas, where Republican Senator Roger Marshall is facing Democrat Adam Hamilton.

“I don’t feel I have to go to Kansas,” Trump said.

When a Reuters reporter asked whether the decision had anything to do with fatigue from travelling, Trump rejected the suggestion. “I feel perfect,” he said, before insulting the reporter.

Trump is still scheduled to hold a rally at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida, on Friday at 23:00 GMT.

At the same time, Harris is due to address the Fulton County Democratic Party’s Fulton Forward dinner in Atlanta, Georgia.

Vance had also planned a news conference with the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud in St Cloud, Minnesota, on Friday, but the visit was cancelled on Thursday. No reason was immediately given.

Student protests that began in September in France have spread to more than 11 European countries as anger rises over high rents and fuel prices and cuts to public services.

Many young protesters said they no longer expect to be better off than their parents, and household wealth data show a wide gap between generations.

Across the eurozone and two other European countries, households headed by someone under 35 have a median net wealth of about 25,000 euros ($27,870) while those headed by 55- to 64-year-olds are worth about 208,000 euros ($231,882), more than eight times as much, according to the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) 2023 Household Finance and Consumption Survey.

In this visual explainer, Al Jazeera compares wealth by age groups across 22 European countries and looks at how much more expensive life has become since 2000.

Where is the wealth gap widest?

The Household Finance and Consumption Survey, run by the ECB and national central banks since 2010, tracks household wealth and debt in the eurozone, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

It measures net wealth, which includes property, cars, valuables and savings, minus debts. Under-35s hold just 2.8 percent of all household wealth in the 22 countries while 55- to 64-year-olds hold the largest share at 24 percent.

In Finland, under-35s hold 0.8 percent of household wealth, the lowest share of any country surveyed, while over-55s hold more than 71 percent. Young people’s shares are also small in Ireland (1.4 percent), Austria (1.6 percent), Greece (1.8 percent) and Germany (2 percent).

Rising housing costs mean many young people cannot afford what their parents or grandparents could.

Wealth is more evenly spread in Central and Eastern Europe. In Lithuania, under-35s hold 13.2 percent, against 15.9 percent for 55- to 64-year-olds. Their share is 12.3 percent in Croatia, 10.1 percent in Slovakia and 9.8 percent in Estonia. Malta, at 11.1 percent, is the exception outside the two regions.

The graphic below shows how household wealth is split between age groups in each country surveyed.

“What we’ve seen is actually a very strong increase in housing prices both in terms of the rental market as well as the ownership market,” Evelyn Astor of the European Social Observatory told Al Jazeera’s Counting the Cost programme.

“All of this is also reinforcing a sense of inequality because ultimately ordinary families are struggling to pay their rents or be able to purchase their homes whereas wealthy people with capital are able to make rather significant investments in the European housing market,” she said.

How much more expensive is it than 2000?

Prices of everyday goods and services, such as food, energy, transport and household bills, have risen by 67.2 percent in the eurozone, Hungary and the Czech Republic since 2000.

Of the countries in our chart, Hungary has seen the steepest rise with prices more than tripling, according to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency. Its harmonised index of consumer prices is the EU’s official measure of how much everyday goods and services cost.

The chart below shows how consumer prices have changed in each country since 2000 with prices in 2000 set at 100 on the index.

Eastern European countries have seen the sharpest increases – particularly since 2022 when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began – because many relied heavily on Russian energy supplies.

Prices rose by about 2 percent a year on average until 2022 when annual inflation in the EU hit 9.2 percent.

The surge was driven mainly by energy costs. Inflation has since eased, but the price rises of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have not reversed.

Gulf countries have stepped up diplomacy with Iran in a bid to de-escalate tensions across the Middle East, amid fears of renewed US strikes on Tehran and intensifying hostilities between Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

The three nations that signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement in August – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye – and diplomats from Qatar met with high-ranking Iranian officials on Monday in an effort to prevent the resumption of all-out war.

Underscoring the high stakes, the meeting in Tehran was attended by Saudi Minister of Defence Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, just days after Iran-aligned Houthi fighters struck Saudi airports, ports and oil facilities.

Meanwhile, during a diplomatic visit to the United Kingdom’s University of Cambridge on Monday, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi called for a regional security framework, including a “non-aggression pact”, between the Gulf countries and Iran under which the United States would no longer be the primary provider of security.

While Gulf countries appear determined to avoid another round of conflict – which has already restricted passage through the Strait of Hormuz, disrupted global oil and gas supplies and wreaked havoc on energy facilities and infrastructure in Gulf states – questions remain over whether a regional agreement is possible and where it would leave relations between the US and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

Regional security or de-escalation?

On Friday, US President Donald Trump repeated warnings that Washington may carry out another military operation against Iran as rising fuel prices weigh on the US midterm elections scheduled for November 3. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) said Iran would respond more forcefully to any renewed US military action, stoking fears of an even wider escalation.

While this week’s talks in Tehran mark the first high-level ‌contact between Iran and the Mecca mutual defence pact nations since the US-Israel war on Iran began on February 28, reports suggest they have stopped short of landing an agreement.

Reuters reported that Qatari mediators ⁠presented ⁠Iran with a draft deal on Sunday, which Tehran was expected to respond to by the end of the week. On Wednesday, the news agency quoted Iranian officials as saying Qatar had put ‌forward ideas that were unacceptable and that Tehran would ⁠show ⁠no flexibility regarding the nuclear ‌issue.

Khaled Batarfi, a Saudi political analyst and academic, said the visit to Tehran indicated that Saudi Arabia was willing to give Iran a “last warning” and “submit to the region’s concerns”, but that Iran has so far refused.

“The gap is [wide] and what makes it worse is that there is no trust,” Batarfi told Al Jazeera.

Observers say diverging views are unlikely to turn the current diplomatic efforts into a lasting infrastructure. “It’s really hard to see a regional security framework coming out in the coming months or even years,” Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London, told Al Jazeera.

“What we are seeing is more small groups, flexible groups of countries that are taking the lead in trying to reach either bilateral or multilateral solutions,” the analyst said. “A regional security framework would need the same vision for the region, which is not necessarily shared… among the GCC countries themselves.”

Challenges ahead

Hamidreza Azizi, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, said Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye share concerns that a prolonged confrontation between Iran and the US could further destabilise the region.

“The main obstacle remains the fundamental disagreement between Tehran and Washington over the sequence of commitments,” Azizi told Al Jazeera. “The US wants Iranian concessions, particularly on the nuclear issue, while Tehran insists that its conditions for ending the war must be met first.”

“Regional mediation could help bridge this gap, possibly through an interim arrangement, but the willingness of regional actors to facilitate an agreement does not necessarily mean that the two principal parties are prepared to make the necessary compromises,” he added.

As for a new security order, Azizi said regional countries do not share a common understanding of what it should look like and what role the US – which has so far been the GCC’s main security partner – would have left to play.

Iran has long advocated for a regional security architecture that would reduce or eliminate the US military presence. “Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, however, remain deeply integrated into the US security system, and there is little indication that they intend to abandon it,” Azizi said.

“The recent war has certainly raised questions about the reliability of American security guarantees, but this has encouraged these countries to diversify their security partnerships rather than fundamentally redefine their strategic alignments.”

Trade and security are expected to be on the agenda as delegations and leaders from dozens of African countries gather in Moscow for a two-day summit with Russia.

The third instalment of the Russia-Africa Summit will run through October 28–29 and will be chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the current African Union chair, Burundian President Evariste Ndayishimiye.

Russia has boosted security and trade cooperation with African nations as it grapples with Western sanctions imposed in response to its war against Ukraine.

So who will be attending and what is at stake?

Here’s what we know.

What is the Russia-Africa Summit?

The Russia-Africa Summit is a two-day diplomatic and economic meeting being held in Moscow on Wednesday and Thursday.

Leaders and delegations from 48 African countries are meeting to discuss bilateral cooperation spanning politics, defence and technology.

This high-profile forum is the third of its kind. The first summit took place in October 2019 in Sochi, marking an unprecedented turn in Russian-African relations.

What’s on the agenda for the summit?

The event’s official theme is Developing Mutually Beneficial Cooperation and “unlocking the potential of every African country”.

More than 40 sessions and about 100 speakers will cover trade, investment, technology transfer, food and energy security, healthcare, education and youth exchange.

There will also be a business programme, culminating in a plenary session.

Who is attending?

Representatives from 48 African countries will participate, as well as 22 heads of state, according to Kremlin presidential aide Yury Ushakov. Heads of state from 17 countries attended the last summit in 2023.

Fewer leaders came to the last two summits, compared with the first gathering in 2019, when 43 took part, a decline which Moscow blamed on Western pressure.

Russian President Putin is scheduled to meet with his Egyptian counterpart Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

The guest list includes leaders closely tied to Russia’s growing security role in Africa, including Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore and Niger’s Abdourahamane Tchiani.

Kenya’s William Ruto, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Namibia’s Netumbo Nandi-Ndatiwah are also expected, as well as Sudan’s Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Mohamed al-Menfi, the chairman of the Presidential Council of Libya.

What is the relationship between Russia and Africa like?

Russia has gained far more influence in Africa through security than trade, according to a report by the African Security Analysis group (ASA), a security consultancy.

Russia’s security presence has risen significantly in the region. In 2023, Russian forces, mostly from the Wagner Group, operated in only a few African countries, but the ASA now counts Russian missions or troops in at least nine countries.

Trade between African countries and Russia has exceeded $28bn. It was estimated to be about $16.8bn in 2019, when the first summit was held. But trade is mainly concentrated in a few countries and overshadowed by that of China and the European Union.

Russia’s strongest ties to the continent are in energy, fertilisers, defence and nuclear power, where the state-owned firm Rosatom has signed a string of agreements.

Russia has been an essential supplier of fertilisers and wheat to many countries in the region.

In 2023, Russia exported 200,000 tonnes of grain to Mali, Somalia, the Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Eritrea and Zimbabwe. 

Why does this summit matter?

This is the first summit since 2023, so it will be an indicator of how far the relationship has developed and where it is heading, analysts say.

A final declaration and a Russia-Africa Partnership Forum plan should be adopted by the end of the Summit to cover 2027-2029.

Analysts have said that meetings on the sidelines could be more important than the main event, as talks between African delegations and Russian defence officials can illustrate where Moscow plans to expand its military ties.

The recruitment of Africans to fight in Ukraine could also be a growing problem for Moscow, as it has already caused diplomatic concern in countries such as Kenya.

Amnesty International has used the run-up to the summit to raise the issue of Africans being recruited to fight with Russia.

In an open letter, the directors of Amnesty’s African section urged leaders attending the summit to demand that Moscow end what the group describes as deceptive and coercive recruitment of Africans to fight in its war in Ukraine.

British Chancellor John Healey will set out the country’s autumn budget, the government’s tax and spending plans, the first under Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s premiership amid high inflation and government spending levels.

While the budget will be announced in parliament on Wednesday at 12.30 GMT, speculation about what it will lay out has ranged from a series of tax announcements to commitments to defence spending.

But the country continues to deal with a rising cost-of-living crisis and energy bills are expected to see their biggest rise in four years in January due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

As total United Kingdom borrowing broke through the 3 trillion pounds ($3.99 trillion) barrier for the first time in September, the country is already spending 100 billion pounds ($133bn) each year just on servicing that debt.

Despite that challenge, the chancellor has said the budget will move “money and power out of Westminster and into every postcode around Britain”.

In a speech last month, Healey said that he and Burnham were in “lockstep” in meeting fiscal rules, “to balancing the books, with a buffer to protect against uncertainty, to control borrowing to bear down on inflation, and reducing long-term pressures on our public finances”.

Following the two budgets from former Chancellor Rachel Reeves, which included big tax and spending increases, Healey’s budget is expected to take a more “steady as she goes” line, which some say is the wrong approach.

Here’s how he will be expected to achieve that.

Defence spending

On Monday, Burnham said Healey would set out a plan to fully fund the government’s defence plans and commitments, telling ITV’s Good Morning Britain that his government’s first challenge was financing the already announced defence investment plan.

Announced in June, the plan is backed by 298 billion pounds ($396bn) of investment and will transform the armed forces as the country moves to “warfighting readiness” and stepping up “European security”, according to a government policy paper.

But Burnham said it was “crucial that we have a funded plan that we can then implement, and we will set out more details on Wednesday as to how we’ve done that”.

He added that NATO commitments of spending 3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence spending by 2030 and 3.5 percent by 2035 are included in the pathway, explaining that national security issues were “at the top of the priority list”.

As it stands, Britain spends about 2.6 percent of its GDP on defence.

The Guardian reported that on defence spending, Healey aims to close a 4.7-billion-pound ($6.2bn) funding gap in the government’s plan inherited from the previous Labour Party leader, with cuts to other departmental budgets likely to fund it.

Inflation

Government borrowing and inflation continue to rise, which is a potential spanner in the works for proposed spending.

Last week, UK inflation and government borrowing both hit their highest levels in a year.

According to the Office for National Statistics, borrowing was nearly 25 billion pounds ($33bn) last month alone, “a little higher than a year earlier, as spending, including higher debt interest costs, increased more than government income, partly reflecting the impacts of inflation”.

ONS added that in the financial year to September 2026, borrowing remained below the same period last year, but it was higher than the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast.

However, debt at the end of last month exceeded 3 trillion pounds ($3.99 trillion), much of it due to the Iran war and the fallout from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as the government borrowed more than expected.

According to Jasper Kanter, a professorial research fellow in ecological economics at Aberystwyth Business School, for the government to grow the economy without raising inflation levels, there needs to be an understanding of what kind of economy is created.

“The strongest policies improve prosperity, resilience and sustainability at the same time,” Kanter said.

“Growth is less likely to be inflationary when it comes from increasing the economy’s productive capacity rather than simply boosting spending. Measures that improve skills, reduce energy dependence, strengthen local economies and regenerate ecosystems are likely to deliver more lasting benefits than short-term stimulus,” he added.

Moreover, Helen Miller, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said in a media release ahead of the budget that Healey “faces a forecast in which borrowing is still expected to fall in coming years, and the fiscal rules are still being met”.

“Despite that, a ‘steady-as-she-goes’ budget is not an option available to the chancellor. Choosing to stay the course with the inherited tax and spending plans would mean allowing inflation to blow departments’ spending plans off course,” Miller said.

Tax on banks, online sellers

The budget is also expected to reveal new taxes on banks and online marketplaces such as Amazon, Temu and eBay, as well as a funding boost for mayoralties and local authorities.

The biggest four banks collectively made about profits of 15 billion pounds ($19.9bn) in the first six months of this year. Trade unions are calling for higher taxes on those earnings, the BBC has reported.

According to the BBC, the Treasury is leaning towards changing a 2023 surcharge rate on banks, which would raise about 2 billion pounds ($2.6bn).

On marketplaces such as Amazon, Healey is reportedly looking to crack down on foreign sellers who avoid paying VAT – a UK sales tax – which is expected to raise as much as 1 billion pounds ($1.3bn) and help fund business rate cuts for high street shops, The Times reported.

Paying for social care and benefits

According to The Guardian newspaper, Healey is expected to allocate about 1.42 trillion pounds ($1.8 trillion) this year for day-to-day spending and public investment, with about 100 billion pounds ($132.8bn) going on debt interest.

Kanter, of Aberystwyth Business School, told Al Jazeera that he expects “targeted support rather than large-scale tax cuts or rises” in the budget announcement.

“The government appears keen to signal empathy with the pressures many people are facing. Addressing the harsh cliff edge in carer’s allowance and expanding parental pay are good examples of this,” he said.

Some of the budget’s contents have already been announced, including ending the carers’ allowance limit and removing tariffs on a range of food items, including chocolate and beans, to make them cheaper for shoppers.

Pensioners are also expected to be shielded from income tax through the introduction of a new personal allowance, while Healey is expected to add another 1 billion pounds ($1.3bn) to the 39 billion pounds ($51.8bn) planned for social and affordable housing in England over the next decade.

“Pensioners will benefit from another substantial increase in the state pension, while low-paid workers will benefit from increases in the minimum wage. For most households, the bigger determinants of living standards will remain wages, inflation and energy costs rather than any new tax measures announced in the budget,” Kanter explained.

Last month, Burnham announced a new national care service to provide free personal care for elderly people. As costs of care for the elderly have soared in the UK, this was a major issue from the outset of Burnham’s premiership.

He said the plan would be introduced in phases and would be fully funded from public spending and savings from scrapping the state pension triple lock – an annual increase in state pension that goes up with inflation, wages or a fixed rate of 2.5 percent, whichever is highest.

A report on how this will be implemented is due in summer 2027.

Energy bills

Amid high gas and oil prices as a result of the US-Israeli war with Iran and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, energy prices worldwide have increased, with Brent crude futures at $115.90 a barrel on Wednesday.

In the UK, energy prices are predicted to reach nearly 2,000 pounds ($2,655) a year for households in January after energy consultancy Cornwall Insight projected in its latest forecast last month that the government’s cap on energy prices is expected to increase by 16 percent.

On energy bills, reports suggest the chancellor is expected to announce help for households in the budget by scrapping standing charges for energy supply, among other things.