Government

Kurdish leader appointed to the role days after the dissolution of the force he commanded.

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa has appointed Mazloum Abdi, leader of the now-dissolved Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as a presidential advisor.

Al-Sharaa issued Decree No 164, appointing Abdi as “as an advisor to the Presidency of the Republic” on Thursday, the Syrian state news agency Sana reported.

The move comes three days after Abdi announced the dissolution of the SDF and the completion of its integration with the Syrian military.

Abdi is the most senior of several Kurdish figures appointed to state posts. Another commander was made assistant defence minister for the eastern region earlier this year.

The advisory role is a lesser position than one offered in January, when al-Sharaa proposed making Abdi deputy defence minister and nominating him as governor of Hasakah province, in order to restore state control over the SDF-controlled provincial capital.

Al-Sharaa and Abdi first agreed to fold the SDF into the central government in March 2025. That deal made little progress before its year-end deadline, spurring state forces to battle into the northeast in January, taking the cities of Raqqa and Deir Az Zor from the SDF.

A ceasefire that ended the fighting placed Raqqa, Deir Az Zor and Hasakah under central government control and committed the SDF to join the defence and interior ministries under a 14-point plan.

One Kurdish-led force has yet to be absorbed. The YPJ, the SDF’s women’s units, asked to join the defence ministry but were told the army’s structure has no units for women.

Alongside the military track, al-Sharaa issued a decree in January recognising Kurdish as a national language and restoring citizenship to Syria Kurds, the first formal recognition of Kurdish rights since Syria’s independence in 1946.

The SDF was the largest force still outside the army, and its dissolution leaves Damascus with formal authority over almost all Syrian territory. Reunifying the country has been al-Sharaa’s central promise since former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in December 2024.

Voting from home

California’s mail-in voting system has also become a particular target for Trump.

Voting by mail surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, California passed a law to automatically mail a ballot to every registered voter.

More than 80 percent of the state’s voters cast a mail-in ballot in 2024 alone.

Moreles, the Santa Clara registrar, said his county has an even higher rate. More than 90 percent of voters in his jurisdiction use mail-in ballots to vote.

His county processed more mail-in ballots in the last general election than the entire state of Texas did. While Texas accepted roughly 342,000 mail-in votes, Santa Clara County sent out more than a million.

That widespread use suggests that voters do not share Trump’s scepticism of the mail-in system, according to Moreles. “They like the accessibility of it. They must believe it’s secure as well,” he said.

But mail-in ballots can continue to trickle in after the election ends, causing vote tallies to fluctuate in the days and weeks after polling stations close. In California, all mailed ballots are valid so long as they are postmarked by election day, and must also be received no later than seven days after.

Trump has pointed to those long vote counts and shifting tallies as evidence of fraud.

Even some Democrats have pushed for the process to be faster. By law, elections must be certified within 30 days of the election. But Moreles argued that not rushing can have its virtues, too.

“For the folks who are living here and are used to it, it makes sense and, to a lot of people, is reassuring,” Moreles said. “Taking the time to get it right is something that intuitively makes sense to people.”

Still, on August 24, the Supreme Court opened the door to additional uncertainty surrounding mail-in ballots.

In a six-to-three ruling, the court’s conservative majority allowed the Trump administration to begin implementing a March executive order that would impose new restrictions on mail-in voting.

The order could impact both the design of mail-in ballots and who is eligible to receive one.

But state officials have questioned the feasibility of redesigning and reprinting ballots with so little time before the midterm elections. Early voting in some states starts as early as September.

Others have speculated about whether the legal wrangling with cause confusion or discourage voters who rely on mail-in ballots.

On Wednesday, California announced it was co-leading a group of 24 state attorneys general in filing a new lawsuit to see the executive order blocked.

“Donald Trump does not run elections. States do. And his latest attack on democracy is proof of how weak he has become,” the state’s Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement accompanying the suit.

“California will continue to lead the way in defending democracy — using every tool at our disposal and every minute in our day. This perilous moment in history demands no less from us.”

A second court order pausing part of Trump’s plan for mail-in ballots remains in effect.

ICE agent Christian Castro faces criminal charges for shooting a Minnesota man in the leg during an immigration raid.

A United States judge has denied a request to compel the extradition of a federal immigration agent charged with shooting a man during an immigration raid in the state of Minnesota and lying about it.

Wednesday’s decision concerns the case of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Christian Castro, who has been detained in a county jail in Texas since May.

Minnesota has sought his extradition as he faces charges of assault and falsely reporting a crime in Hennepin County, which covers Minneapolis.

Under Texas law, the state cannot hold the subject of an extradition order for more than 90 days. At that point, the suspect must either be transferred or released. The deadline for Castro is set to expire on Thursday.

Minnesota argued in a lawsuit this month that Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has refused to authorise the extradition for political reasons.

But in Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr wrote that he could not intervene because Abbott has not yet acted – and has therefore not yet violated any law.

“The record reflects only that Governor Abbott has neither agreed nor refused to sign the rendition warrant as to Castro,” Rodriguez wrote.

Castro has been charged in connection with the non-fatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis during an immigration raid in Minnesota on January 14, part of a mass deportation effort under President Donald Trump.

Starting in December, Trump oversaw a large-scale deployment of federal agents to the Midwestern state, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

The operation, which lasted less than three months, sparked protests and allegations of civil liberty violations from residents and watchdog groups.

Prosecutors say Castro fired a gun through the front door of a Minneapolis home, shooting Sosa-Celis in the leg.

Afterwards, he and another agent accused Sosa-Celis and another man of assaulting federal authorities with a broom handle and snow shovel. Those allegations were later disproven after video of the incident emerged. Criminal charges against Sosa-Celis were subsequently dropped.

Todd Lyons, then-acting director of ICE, confirmed in February that the agents appeared to have made “untruthful statements”. Castro and the second agent were placed on administrative leave.

Castro is currently in custody in Brownsville, Texas. Minnesota officials have warned that he may flee the country if released, citing calls he made from jail to a woman in Mexico.

During those calls, Castro talked “about marrying her and buying a house in Mexico when he is released”, according to Minnesota’s lawsuit.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a request for a temporary restraining order last week to stop Castro’s anticipated release and force Governor Abbott to sign the extradition warrant.

Ellison has framed Abbott’s decision not to take action as a way of supporting Trump’s mass deportation campaign and skirting federal extradition law.

“For nearly three months, Greg Abbott has refused to return ICE agent Christian Castro to Minnesota, where he’s charged with shooting a Minnesotan in his own home,” Ellison wrote in a social media post.

“Abbott has a legal obligation to return him. Instead, he’s chosen to ignore the law.”

Dutch group Christians for Israel is taking the government to court in the Netherlands over its plans to introduce a ban on importing goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan Heights.

The ban, which was announced in July, is due to take effect on September 22 and will run for three years. It bars importing, buying and selling goods produced in Israeli settlements, as well as intermediary services and any attempt to circumvent the rules.

But the Israel Product Centre (IPC), part of Christians for Israel (CvI), a Dutch evangelical organisation which a recent study found has donated about $300,000 to illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, has responded by filing summary proceedings against the state, with the hearing due today.

Here’s what we know about this case.

What is the case about?

The IPC has issued summary proceedings against the Dutch state, seeking to block the July decree.

The IPC argues the measure is “one-sided” and that the window it now has to clear its existing stock – some 20,000 bottles of wine – is too short.

It is also arguing that a national ban conflicts with the European Union’s principle of free movement of goods.

A verdict is not expected for about two weeks.

How has this case come about?

EU rules have long required goods from illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank to be labelled by their origin – Palestine – rather than as “product of Israel”, but the bloc has not placed an outright ban on trading with Israeli settlements. That remains up to individual countries.

In February 2020, the Dutch advocacy group DocP urged consumers to file complaints with the Dutch food safety authority, NVWA, if they found wine and Dead Sea cosmetics had been mislabelled.

Following complaints, the IPC changed its labelling to “product uit een Israelisch dorp in Judea & Samaria [product from an Israeli village in Judea and Samaria],” which it argued accurately reflected the exact geographical and administrative reality of the origins of the products without deceiving the buyer. Judea and Samaria is the biblical name used by the Israeli government to refer to the West Bank. DocP argued this fell short of the requirement to label products correctly, and continued its campaign.

In 2021, the NVWA agreed and fined the IPC 2,100 euros (about $2,500) for mislabelling goods.

Then, in July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an advisory opinion that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end “as rapidly as possible”.

This shifted the legal argument beyond mere consumer labelling, with the court saying countries should take steps to prevent trade or investment relations which help to maintain the unlawful presence of Israeli settlers in the Palestinian territories.

The lower house of the Dutch parliament acted on that in September 2025, proposing an import ban.

The national decree against importing goods from Israeli settlements was made in July this year.

Does Christians for Israel describe the West Bank as ‘Israel’?

CvI describes the West Bank as a “disputed territory” rather than accepting the international legal description of it as “occupied Palestinian territory”.

It says it believes that Israel has strong claims to sovereignty there and that Jews have a right to live there.

The vocabulary matters in a legal sense, as “disputed territory” is not the same as “annexed territory”, therefore, the legal apparatus which would make settlement trade unlawful doesn’t straightforwardly apply.

The group’s stated reasons for funding projects there, it says on its website, are rooted in the Bible; it cites Ezekiel 47:21-23: “Peace for the Jewish people and resident foreigners inheriting alongside the tribes of Israel.”

However, the ICJ’s July 2024 advisory opinion is clear that the Fourth Geneva Convention’s Article 49(6) and successive Security Council resolutions treat the territories as occupied and the settlements as unlawful.

How have other Christian organisations in the West responded to trade with settlements?

Western churches are split on the issue, with CvI sitting at one end of the spectrum.

Mainline Protestants, including the Presbyterian Church in the United States, have divested shareholdings in Caterpillar, HP and Motorola Solutions as early as 2014, and from Israeli bonds in 2024. The United Methodist Church has opposed Israeli settlements since 1996 and sold its Israeli bond holdings last August.

The World Council of Churches called for sanctions against illegal Israeli settlements in 2025, divestment and an arms embargo.

The Vatican calls settlements an obstacle to peace but has avoided divestment so far.

Christian Zionist bodies, however, including Christians United for Israel (CUFI) and the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, send funding for settlements and fight against boycotts.

How significant is this ban?

It is significant considering that the Netherlands is one of only four EU countries currently imposing a ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements.

Trade from illegal settlements to the EU is estimated to be worth up to $400m per year.

The Netherlands is also a big market for the illegal settlements; a recent investigation by legal advocacy group Global Echo, which analysed thousands of shipments from Israeli settlements between 2017 and 2026, shows that within the EU, the Dutch market is the largest importer of goods from illegal settlements, with about 30 percent destined for or passing through the country.

Which European countries have banned products from West Bank settlements?

Spain has banned all imports of products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, since September 2025. The decree also enforces an embargo on defence exports and dual-use technology to Israel, bans ships carrying military fuel for Israel from Spanish ports, and restricts advertising for services or goods linked to Israeli settlements.

Ireland’s parliament approved the text of its Israeli Settlements (Prohibition of Importation of Goods) Bill in May and the bill was signed into law in July. It covers all goods produced in Israeli settlements, but excludes services.

Belgium’s federal government approved a draft royal decree in July introducing a specific regime for goods from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The precise details of the new law will be determined by the government in due course.

Slovenia imposed restrictions on imports from Israeli settlements under its previous government, but the new conservative government reversed them in June 2026.

The EU as a bloc remains deadlocked over whether a ban counts as foreign policy requiring unanimity or trade policy needing only a qualified majority, with ministers not meeting again in a decision-making format until October.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar last year described the push by some European governments to implement the ICJ advisory opinion as “shameful”.

Which European countries still allow trade with West Bank settlements?

Nearly all of them.

Outside the three European Union states which still have bans in place, settlement goods can be sold legally everywhere, including in most of the EU.

At a July 2026 meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, which addressed trade from Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories, Germany, Austria, Czechia and Hungary were opposed to an EU-wide ban.

Beyond the EU, the United Kingdom does not forbid trade with illegal Israeli settlements, although new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is reportedly considering a ban. In a recent parliamentary briefing, Amnesty International called on the UK government to implement a ban.

It said: “The argument for a UK ban on trade with settlements is clear. The UK government itself accepts it should take stronger action in response to settlement expansion and annexation. The International Court of Justice has directed states not to trade with Israel in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory; and there is precedent in UK law and policy to not trade with illegally occupied lands, ie Crimea and other illegally occupied parts of Ukraine.”

For the first time in years, Venezuela is discussing institutional change as something more concrete than an opposition demand. The talks between the two National Assemblies have embraced the problem of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ), with the electoral authority next in line. New magistrates, new CNE rectors, new elections: after decades of institutional capture, replacing the people who run these bodies is obviously necessary.

The danger is believing it will be enough.

Venezuela has spent the last quarter of century demonstrating that its democratic decline cannot be reduced to bad people occupying important offices. Chavismo did not merely place loyalists inside the State. It gradually transformed the relationships between institutions so that political power could survive electoral setbacks.

The clearest example came after 2015. When the opposition won a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly, chavismo did not accept that voters had changed the institutional balance of the country. The TSJ then progressively neutralized the newly elected Assembly. When that was no longer enough, the government created a Constituent Assembly capable of bypassing it altogether.

This adaptability matters for the transition now being negotiated.

Chavismo’s institutional principle has never really been presidentialism. It has been simpler: power should remain wherever chavismo remains.

Venezuela is extraordinarily centralized, and there is good reason to believe that no political project can govern effectively without controlling the presidency. But it would be a mistake to assume that the presidency will remain as powerful after chavismo loses it as it was while chavismo controlled the rest of the State.

A democratic president facing a chavista supermajority in the National Assembly and a hostile Supreme Court could discover rather quickly that Venezuela’s supposedly omnipotent presidency is considerably less omnipotent than advertised.

Chavismo’s institutional principle has never really been presidentialism. It has been simpler: power should remain wherever chavismo remains. That is why replacing the people at the top of Venezuela’s institutions is only the beginning of reinstitutionalization.

We have tried this before

The CNE should make us particularly cautious.

In 2021, Roberto Picón and Enrique Márquez joined an electoral board that was widely regarded as the most balanced Venezuela had seen in years. Both pushed for meaningful improvements, and international observers recognized that the new composition produced a better electoral environment than the one that preceded it. The Carter Center described the board as “less unbalanced,” while still documenting structural problems surrounding electoral competition.

The episode demonstrated the limits of solving institutional problems through personnel alone. An election is not defined solely by what five CNE rectors do on election night. It also depends on who can register to vote, which candidates can run, whether parties can organize, how public resources are used, what media can report, what security forces do, and which court ultimately resolves a dispute.

Barinas provided the almost perfect illustration. After the 2021 gubernatorial election, the TSJ intervened while the vote was still being resolved, invoked a political disqualification against the opposition candidate and ordered the election repeated. Picón and Márquez publicly dissented. The independent rectors were there. The larger machinery around them remained capable of overruling the political meaning of the vote.

A good rector can behave honorably inside a bad system. The same is true of judges.

“Non-repetition” cannot mean guaranteeing that chavismo disappears from Venezuelan politics.

Replacing the current Supreme Court with independent jurists would be an enormous democratic achievement. Even so, courts lack enforcement mechanisms for a reason, meaning that the armed forces or the police could ignore their rulings, or that, as chavismo has already done, the president du jour could resort to the military court system. But Venezuela should also be asking whether a future court should retain all the powers that chavismo accumulated and exploited through it.

Otherwise, the transition risks producing institutions that are safe only for as long as good people control them.

That is not institutional reform. It is institutional trust.

And democracies are supposed to require less of it.

Political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell made this distinction precisely when he wrote about the weakness of “horizontal accountability” in Latin American democracies. Elections determine who governs, but democracy also requires institutions capable of restraining those winners once they do. A president who receives millions of votes is still bound by courts, legislatures, and rules that do not derive their legitimacy from his personal mandate.

Venezuela inverted that principle. Institutions increasingly became instruments for preserving whoever already controlled them. Changing their occupants without changing that logic would leave the central vulnerability untouched.

What non-repetition actually means

This is where the transition needs a more demanding definition of success. “Non-repetition” cannot mean guaranteeing that chavismo disappears from Venezuelan politics.

A democratic Venezuela should permit a chavista party to reorganize, contest elections and, if voters choose it again someday, return to government. Democracy cannot mean competitive elections until the people we dislike win one.

Nor does democratic consolidation require Venezuela to eliminate every trace of authoritarian nostalgia. Spain still contains defenders of Franco. Chile still contains defenders of Pinochet. Their democratic success is not that those political traditions vanished, but that political competition became overwhelmingly organized around institutions that survived changes of government.

Nicaragua, on the other hand, demonstrates what happens when that consolidation remains incomplete.

The Sandinistas lost the 1990 election and surrendered the presidency. Daniel Ortega remained in politics, competed repeatedly, and eventually returned through elections in 2006. This democratic failure was certainly exacerbated when Nicaragua’s institutions proved unable to stop Ortega from progressively dismantling the democratic constraints that had made his return possible in the first place. Research on Nicaragua’s backsliding traces how electoral rules, courts and other institutions were gradually eroded on the road back to authoritarianism.

If judicial independence depends on always selecting virtuous magistrates, the judiciary has not been fixed.

That is the warning Venezuela should take seriously.

Non-repetition does not mean ensuring that Venezuelans never again elect someone with authoritarian instincts. It means building institutions capable of surviving when they do. And that standard has an uncomfortable implication for whoever eventually replaces chavismo.

The next democratic government should not ask only which powers it needs in order to govern. It should ask whether it would be comfortable leaving those same powers to its worst political adversary. That is the test that should apply to the new TSJ, the new CNE and eventually every institution rebuilt during the transition.

If electoral integrity depends on always appointing five excellent rectors, the electoral system has not been fixed. If judicial independence depends on always selecting virtuous magistrates, the judiciary has not been fixed. If the survival of democracy depends on trusting whoever occupies Miraflores, Venezuela has learned very little from the last twenty-five years.

The current negotiations can replace officials. They can make credible elections possible again. They can remove some of the people who converted public institutions into instruments of political control. All of that is necessary. But Venezuela’s democratic challenge will not be solved by transferring those instruments to new hands. 

The institutions being negotiated today should be designed not merely to produce the next democratic government, but to survive the next authoritarian one. Otherwise, Venezuela may succeed in changing who holds power without changing what power allows them to do.

Netanyahu’s claim comes after US and Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader and four of his family members in a strike on Tehran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that Iran tried to kill one of his sons, but gave no details on when or where the alleged plot took place or which of his sons was targeted.

Netanyahu’s allegation on Monday came as his coalition trailed in opinion polls ahead of the general election in October, in the wake of the United States and Israel’s war on Iran.

The war began with a joint US-Israeli strike on Tehran that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and four members of his family, including his daughter, Boshra, and his 14-month-old granddaughter, Zahra.

According to The Jerusalem Post, Netanyahu made the claim about the alleged Iranian plot against his son during a phone interview with Channel 14, a conservative Israeli outlet known for favourable coverage of the government.

“This is an unbelievable case. Iran targeted one of my sons. Iran tried to murder him, tried to murder one of my sons,” Netanyahu said.

He was responding to reports that one of Israel’s security agencies had declined to provide a security detail for Gadi Eisenkot, the former army chief who is running neck and neck with Netanyahu for the next prime minister ahead of elections.

Netanyahu voiced support for around-the-clock protection for Eisenkot, saying it was “not a luxury”.

“Without that, [the Iranians] will succeed,” he said.

Netanyahu has two sons and a daughter. Both of his sons and his wife were granted extended personal protection by Israeli authorities in July, according to The Jerusalem Post.

His elder son, Yair, 35, has spent extended periods in the US city of Miami since early 2024, drawing controversy in Israel over the cost to taxpayers of protecting him.

Iran, meanwhile, has promised revenge for the killings of Khamenei and his family.

Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, was named the new supreme leader a week after Ali Khamenei’s death.

Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen in public since his appointment, but in a message published on the occasion of funeral ceremonies for his father, he pledged to “avenge the blood” of the former supreme leader.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, (MBS), is on the second day of his two-day state visit to France, where he’s meeting President Emmanuel Macron.

In this explainer, we outline what they are expected to discuss and examine how their latest meetings build on an already evolving relationship.

What is on the agenda?

MBS’s visit to Paris began on Sunday evening alongside President Macron at the closing ceremony of the Esports World Cup. It was the first time the Esports tournament, which includes competitions ranging from video games to chess, had been held outside Saudi Arabia.

On Monday, Macron and Bin Salman are expected to sign several agreements on health, transport and energy.

French media reported that a deal to build a Dragon Ball-themed amusement park, backed by a Saudi investment fund and inspired by the iconic Japanese manga series, could be signed.

Valerie Pecresse, President of the Regional Council of Île-de-France in Greater Paris, told French broadcaster TF1 that the regional government had been working on the project for 18 months.

“There is a very important meeting at the Elysee today that may result in the signing of this agreement. We are waiting for the signature,” she said, describing the project as “on the scale of Disneyland”.

Bin Salman and Macron are also holding bilateral discussions on regional security and their economic ties.

That is expected to include discussions about energy routes that bypass the Strait of Hormuz, such as new pipelines, capacity upgrades and alternative port networks.

France is a major buyer of Saudi oil and mineral products.

Since the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran on February 28, shipping has been severely disrupted in the Strait of Hormuz – the vital waterway on which oil exporters in the Gulf are heavily reliant and where 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas supplies are shipped from during peacetime. The disruption sent oil prices soaring.

Before the war, a barrel of Brent crude – the global benchmark – cost about $66. Over the course of the conflict, prices have climbed above $100 – hitting a high of $119 early on in the war.

On Monday, Brent was trading around $93 a barrel.

Bin Salman and Macron are also expected to discuss the war in Iran, the bloodshed in Palestine, as well as developments in Syria and Lebanon, where Israel occupies around one-fifth of its territory.

Other expected topics on Monday’s agenda include global events that Saudi Arabia is set to host in the coming years, including Expo 2030, focusing on sustainability and urban innovation, and the 2034 football World Cup.

How much trade does Saudi Arabia do with France?

The two countries have a fairly equal trading balance.

In 2024, France exported $4.5bn worth of goods to Saudi Arabia and imported $4.6bn worth, according to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), an online platform that compiles and visualises international trade statistics.

Refined petroleum accounted for 72 percent of Saudi Arabia’s exports to France in 2024. Besides refined petroleum, Saudi Arabia exported crude petroleum and other mineral products to France. It also exported small amounts of machinery, chemicals and cars.

France’s exports to Saudi Arabia in 2024 were more diverse, including airliners, helicopters, gas turbines, pharmaceutical products and perfume, among other products.

What have relations between Saudi Arabia and France been like?

Sunday’s visit marked the third time MBS has visited France after trips in 2022 and 2023.

In December 2024, Macron visited Riyadh, where the two countries founded the Saudi-French Strategic Partnership Council, which formalised and upgraded political and economic ties between Saudi Arabia and France.

The current visit is also MBS’s first international trip since the August 7 signing of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, known as the Mecca pact – the mutual defence agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan.

Signed by the prince, Turkiye’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, the agreement commits all three states to treat an armed attack on any one of them as an attack on all three.

Analysts say the pact shows that Saudi Arabia is taking steps to diversify its security partnerships beyond Washington.

Assam, India – Debiram Panika, a 37-year-old daily wage labourer from northeastern India’s Assam state, would speak to his wife and two daughters on video calls every day from Dimapur, a town in neighbouring Nagaland state where he worked.

But when his phone rang at about 11am on July 19, there was panic in the voice of his 30-year-old wife, Dipika.

“I could only see my wife telling me on the video call, ‘This is it for us. We are going to die,’ before the call was disconnected,” Panika recalled, speaking to Al Jazeera.

It was the last time they spoke. Moments later, rising waters from the nearby Dikhow River, which snakes past their village in Assam’s Sivasagar district, surged into their bamboo-and-mud home with a ferocious current and swept away Dipika and four-year-old daughter Radhika.

“The water came flooding like sea waves, and they were gone in a flash,” Panika said, as he stood in front of the ruined home he has since returned to.

Sivasagar is part of the eastern Assam region, also referred to as Upper Assam. Incessant rains between July 18 and July 20 submerged the region and the neighbouring Naga Hills of Nagaland.

Monsoon floods usually impact northern and western Assam, and parts of central Assam, the worst. But several Nagaland districts bordering Upper Assam received heavy rainfall on those three days, leading to dozens of landslides. This intense run-off swelled Naga Hills-origin rivers and caused devastation downstream.

The resultant floods killed more than 100 people, destroyed 2,700 villages, and displaced 700,000 people across the state. The state government says 1.2 million people were impacted in all, their lives disrupted.

Most waters have since receded, but Radhika’s body is yet to be found.

“I look for Radhika every day in the bushes, tirelessly,” Panika said, holding back his tears. “Her last words, calling me ‘Papa’, are still reverberating in my ears.”

Panika’s other daughter, Ridhika, 10, was at a relative’s place a few metres away when her mother and sister were swept away by the flood. Ridhika held onto a bamboo bush and was later rescued by locals.

‘Apocalyptic event’

Several riverine villages in Sivasagar have been wrecked by debris carried down by the waters of the Dikhow from the surrounding Naga Hills.

Tens of thousands of tree trunks lie piled up in places that used to be homes, as lush rice fields, the main source of livelihood, have been washed away.

Kukil Das, a 30-year-old Facebook vlogger in Debiram’s village of Nepali Khuti, told Al Jazeera that “the torrent of the flood was like an apocalyptic event seen in the movies.

“Trees as tall as 30 to 40 metres (100-130ft) came down from the hills, flooding the river, and wiped out everything as they crashed against our homes,” he said. “There is no home left. It was a tsunami.”

Das and his friend Shravan Prasad, from the neighbouring Bihubor village, said they saved at least 1,000 lives by using boats the two villages had at that time.

“We put together a group of friends with the seven boats and started rescuing people turn by turn for two days and nights without food and water,” Prasad said.

Das said the floods forced residents to take shelter on the roofs of concrete homes they could find, as cries for help and the sounds of the river washing away homes echoed in the neighbourhood.

Laxmi Sharma, who owned one such concrete house, said she provided shelter to at least 60 people on her terrace after the river water gushed into Nepali Khuti.

“People ran towards the roof of my building. We thought we were going to die,” Sharma, 46, told Al Jazeera. “But it is a miracle that we are still alive even though my house was barely out of water.”

Not everyone could escape the flood’s wrath, though.

In Sivasagar’s Simaluguri village, two friends – Reihana Ahmed, a Muslim, and Ratul Swarna, a Hindu, both in their 30s – were swept away in the torrent.

When Ahmed, a mother of two, was drowning as the deluge entered her village, Swarna, who did not know how to swim, jumped to save her without thinking about his life.

The two friends were later found dead in the paddy fields. “It was humanity that won in a disaster like this,” Ahmed’s husband Aminul Haque said with a sorrowful smile.

‘Human-made flood’

Besides the eroding banks of the Dikhow River in Prajabasti, another flood-affected village, 75-year-old Asor Ali sat in disbelief next to his wife, Jamila Khatun.

“Even the generations preceding me have not seen a flood like this,” he said, staring at the flowing river. “Even the 1950s earthquake that triggered the floods here did not do so much damage.”

A magnitude 8.6 earthquake hit Assam and Tibet across the border in 1950, altering the region’s riverine system. Nearly 5,000 people died. Since then, Assam has witnessed frequent floods, which intensify during the monsoons, says Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, a researcher on the basin of the Brahmaputra, the region’s major river: The Naga Hills rivers that flooded Upper Assam are its tributaries.

But residents say this year’s deadly deluge is not just a natural phenomenon.

Biren Gogoi, 43, says rampant stone and sand mining in regional rivers, coupled with aggressive deforestation and coal extraction in Nagaland’s Mon district, triggered the devastation.

Global Nature Watch, an open-source online platform that provides real-time data on deforestation across the world, showed that Nagaland lost 14 percent of its tree cover between 2002 and 2025, with Mon district bordering Assam’s Sivasagar being the most affected.

According to the latest report published in 2023 by the Forest Survey of India, Nagaland has lost about 794.88 square kilometres (306.9 square miles) of forest cover between 2013 and 2023.

Al Jazeera travelled along the Assam-Nagaland border and saw signs of deforestation on the hills and mining activities in both the states. Satellite images also confirmed rampant coal mining in Nagaland’s Mon district, and stone mining crushers on Assam’s side, especially in Bihubor, one of the epicentres of the Assam flood.

While Mon’s Deputy Commissioner Wennyei Konyak acknowledged the possibility of illegal mining in the district, he added that the land was protected under Indian laws to uphold the rights of Indigenous tribes, and therefore government interference in the area was limited.

“I would not blame mining activities for the flood. It was just the wrath of nature,” he told Al Jazeera.

But experts and political leaders in Assam say mining played a direct role in the floods.

Debabrata Saikia of the opposition Congress party, who is the legislator from Sivasagar constituency, accused Assam’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of allowing illegal excavations for stone and sand on the Dikhow riverbank, resulting in a cratered wasteland that worsened the floods.

“This unchecked plundering of riverbeds and hills under the ruling government has engineered this into a man-made disaster,” Saikia told Al Jazeera.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, however, rejected the allegation on August 4, blaming excessive rainfall in Nagaland for triggering the Upper Assam deluge. On August 14, Ranoj Pegu, a cabinet minister in the state’s BJP government, blamed erratic rainfall due to climate change for the deluge.

Rahman, the Brahmaputra river basin researcher, believes that while the climate crisis played a role, the flood was “purely human-made”, caused by the fracturing of the landscape.

“The unrestrained stone extraction from the Dikhow riverbed has damaged the river’s natural cushion,” Rahman said. “That means the river loses the capacity to resist high flows of torrents that break embankments and cause floods.”

An official document from 2022, seen by Al Jazeera, also highlights mining as a factor in possible large-scale floods downstream on the Assam side.

Al Jazeera reached out to senior district officials in Sivasagar as well as state government officials for their comments on allegations of unchecked coal mining but did not get any response.

Back in Prajabasti village, Ali, the septuagenarian, is mentally preparing himself for future floods.

“It will happen again, so long as there is greed for land and coal in humans,” he said. “Nature pays them back.”

For the first time since becoming vice president of the United States, JD Vance has returned to his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, with a goal of rallying Republican voters ahead of November’s pivotal midterm elections.

Vance delivered Friday’s speech at a symbolic location: the steel plant where his late grandfather once worked.

He used the appearance to tout a $1bn investment from the steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs that was supported by $500m in government awards.

That funding, he said, illustrated his party’s commitment to the manufacturing sector and reinvigorating the US economy overall.

“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy – or it’s all going to happen overnight – but in just 18 months, we have seen an explosion of rebuilding in the American heartland,” Vance said, crediting the growth to policies under President Donald Trump.

Vance’s speech comes at a critical time for the Republican Party and Trump in particular.

November’s midterm races will decide whether Republicans are able to maintain control over both chambers of Congress. Should their hold on the legislature slip, Democrats could stymie Trump’s policy priorities for the last two years of his presidency — or even impeach him, as Trump himself has suggested.

Polls have shown that the state of the economy remains the top issue ahead of the midterms.

But how voters perceive each party’s ability to address economic strain has shifted. Before the start of Trump’s second term, the Pew Research Center found that voters were more likely to favour Republican policies on the economy.

In July, however, the dynamic had switched: Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed backed the Democratic approach to the economy, compared with 36 percent for Republicans.

Another poll this month from the news agency Reuters and the firm Ipsos likewise found slightly more respondents siding with the Democrats on economic policy than Republicans, upending a longtime trend that stretched back to 2017.

Trump, for his part, has publicly appeared to dismiss cost-of-living issues as a partisan invention, calling questions of affordability a “hoax” and a “con job” engineered by Democrats.

At Friday’s speech, Vance took a different approach, trying to assuage concerns about the administration’s handling of the economy.

“We got a lot of work to do, but we’re making progress on all the things that matter the most,” Vance said, citing efforts to make homeownership more affordable.

The speech is part of an intensifying campaign under Trump to boost the prospects of Republican candidates ahead of the midterms, with the president and other top officials holding rallies for their party’s candidates.

Ohio, part of a historic manufacturing region known as the Rust Belt, has become increasingly conservative since Trump’s first White House victory in 2016.

But amid rising dissatisfaction with Republican leadership, Democrats see a chance to win back the state’s governor’s office, as well as the US Senate seat left vacant when Vance became vice president.

Whoever wins the special election in November will serve the remainder of Vance’s Senate term, which would have ended in January 2029.

The Republican nominee in the race, Senator Jon Husted, joined Vance on stage at the Middletown rally on Friday. Husted was appointed to fill Vance’s Senate seat until a special election could be held.

Vance, for his part, dedicated part of his speech to attacking Husted’s Democratic rival, former Senator Sherrod Brown, who lost his re-election race to Republican Bernie Moreno two years ago.

He accused Brown of being among the politicians “who pretend to be friends of the workers in this facility”, while instead advancing their own priorities.

“It’s hard to understand what these modern Democrats actually stand for,” Vance said, characterising the party as having strayed from its ideals.

He pointed to Brown’s record of siding with the policies of former Democratic President Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential race.

“[Brown] was a man who claimed to represent this state but never once raised his voice against Joe Biden’s border crisis or against the inflation that was brought on by Joe Biden underinvesting and trying to destroy American industry,” Vance said.

The vice president also singled out Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, repeating a false claim that the Democratic Senate candidate called for “Sharia law” in the US.

“I’d love to go back in time and tell my papaw that there’s a man who claims to stand for working people, who says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticise it, you are a white supremacist,” Vance said about El-Sayed.

Trump’s approval rating currently sits at 33 percent, according to Reuters-Ipsos polling from this month.

Washington, DC – Over the next two days, a portion of the United States capital will transform into a seven-turn professional-grade track for the city’s first-ever IndyCar race.

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix, championed by President Donald Trump, is one of several special events held to commemorate the country’s 250th birthday.

But the race, which has been billed as a means of “celebrating American greatness”, is not coming without a heavy dose of criticism.

Questions have been raised about potential disruptions to life in the capital, as well as Trump’s ties to the event’s sponsor, the transportation company Penske.

Here’s what you need to know about the weekend’s automobile tournament:

Why is this taking place?

In January, Trump signed an executive order establishing the race as a means of celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary and its history of motorsport.

“This will be like no other race ever,” Trump said in July. “It’ll be one of the most unforgettable racing events the world has ever seen.”

Trump, who has described himself as a racing fan, has participated in several high-profile motorsport events since returning to office in 2025.

Last year, Trump attended NASCAR’s Daytona 500 race, after serving as the grand marshal during his first term. A few months later, in April 2025, he hosted NASCAR and IndyCar drivers at the White House.

Have similar events been held?

The Grand Prix is one of several sporting events being held in honour of the country’s 250th anniversary.

Earlier this month, as part of the festivities, high-school athletes were invited to participate in the inaugural Patriot Games, broadcast on the sport channel ESPN. And in June, Trump hosted an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the White House lawn, dubbed the UFC Freedom 250.

But members of the Trump administration have compared the race to early moments in US history as a means of highlighting its historic nature.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Washington, DC, has not seen a competition like this since Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, helped mark the country’s 25th birthday in 1801 with horse races.

Is the IndyCar race part of Freedom 250?

Not officially. While the Grand Prix bears similar branding to Trump’s Freedom 250 initiative, they are separate entities.

Trump’s Freedom 250 task force was a public-private partnership that put together events like the Patriot Games and the Great American State Fair, which took place in June on the National Mall.

But critics argued that the task force undermined America250, a separate bipartisan organisation created by the US Congress to arrange festivities for the anniversary. There was also a backlash to the perception that Freedom 250 would be a vehicle for Trump’s political agenda.

The Grand Prix, meanwhile, is being “administered by INDYCAR in coordination with the America 250 Task Force”, according to the District of Columbia government website. IndyCar is a subsidiary of Penske.

What response has the race received?

The race is arguably the most ambitious of all the events Trump has hosted for America’s 250th celebration. It has also drawn concern from preservation experts.

A temporary track for the race will run 2.7 kilometres, or 1.7 miles, including through the National Mall. Part of the race will therefore take place near several buildings that contain priceless historical works and documents.

Immediately adjacent to the motor speedway will be the National Gallery of Art, featuring paintings spanning the history of Western civilisation, and the National Archives, which includes the original Declaration of Independence and US Constitution.

With race cars set to pass by at speeds nearing 321km/h (200mph), the National Gallery has boarded up some windows on its building and put barriers around several of its outdoor works.

A preservationist group has also warned that historic New Deal-era murals in the nearby Cohen Federal Building could be damaged “due to vibratory impacts”.

A Freedom 250 Grand Prix spokesperson told The Associated Press (AP) news agency that IndyCar has “tremendous respect for the history and the structures” surrounding the track.

But the race’s impacts are being felt by Washington’s residents and travellers as well.

In the days leading up to the race, commuters were plagued by hours-long congestion caused by the closure of some of the city’s popular thoroughfares as organisers prepared for the event.

The Federal Aviation Administration also announced that flights at the nearby Ronald Reagan Washington national airport will be paused for three hours on Sunday so flyovers associated with the event can take place.

Who’s paying for this?

With an expected price tag of $35m, the 147-lap race will be among the most expensive on IndyCar’s calendar.

Bud Denker, the president of Penske Corporation and chairman of the race, told AP his company will pay for the “vast majority” of the event, while the city will cover some “very limited” costs to repave streets and seal manhole covers.

A spokesperson for Washington, DC’s transportation department, German Vigil, told Al Jazeera the city “will be getting reimbursed” by the Grand Prix for those repairs.

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix website explains that the event is supported “by a group of key partners”, including Harbinger, a production company with ties to at least one previous Trump-hosted event.

CNN previously reported that the firm was hired to solicit corporate sponsors for the 2025 White House Easter Egg Roll.

The race’s website identifies Harbinger as an “official event partner” that will “coordinate logistics and the fan experience” for the Grand Prix. A spokesperson for Harbinger told Al Jazeera it was only handling “production”.

Several of the race’s sponsors have government contracts, including the aerospace firm Boeing and the telecommunications firm Verizon.

One, the building manufacturer WillScot, was in discussion with the second Trump administration about leasing mobile structures to house detainees slated for deportation, according to the publication Semafor.

Another, the aircraft company Gulfstream, was the recipient of nearly $200m in a controversial deal Trump’s Department of Homeland Security undertook to buy luxury jets for executive travel.

WillScot and Gulfstream did not return Al Jazeera’s request for comment.

How much does it cost to attend?

A reported 100,000 general admission tickets have already been given away for free, while premium viewing of the race comes at a steep price.

Tickets for the Champions Club, which offers views of the racetrack, cost $5,000 per person, while luxury suites are priced upwards of $250,000.

Will Trump attend?

Media reports have indicated that Trump himself is likely to attend the event.

The New York Post reported that the president may take a lap on Sunday around the track in his motorcade, to kick off the last day of the race.

But Trump’s involvement raises concerns, including from IndyCar drivers, that the event could be politicised. McLaren Racing’s Pato O’Ward, IndyCar’s only full-time racer from Mexico, has said it would be “ironic” if he won, given the president’s aggressive political stance towards immigration and Mexico itself.

The government has announced investments of about 2.3 billion reais ($444.2m) to bolster its artificial intelligence ecosystem.

Brazil will invest about 2.3bn reais ($444.2m) to bolster its artificial intelligence ecosystem, splitting projects between United States and Chinese tech firms in a strategic move that underscores its efforts to balance ties with both superpowers.

Just more than half the total, 1.3bn reais ($251m), will fund a supercomputing infrastructure project in Rio de Janeiro developed in partnership with China’s Huawei Technologies and iFlytek, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva‘s government said on Thursday.

The infrastructure will be used primarily to develop large language models for general and sector-specific applications, it said.

Separately, about 1 billion reais ($193.1m) will be allocated through a tender for a supercomputer that Brazil expects to rank among the world’s 10 most powerful AI processing machines.

The machine will be installed in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, chosen for its energy potential. Lula attended an announcement ceremony in the state on Thursday.

The Reuters news agency quoted unnamed government officials as saying they expect US chipmaker Nvidia to win the tender. Science and Technology Minister Luciana Santos told the Folha de S Paulo newspaper last week that she anticipated the company would be the supplier.

“The strategy is not to depend on a single company, technology or country,” Lula’s administration said in a statement, adding that the investments are aimed at strengthening national sovereignty over data.

China, a leading player in AI, has expanded its role as Brazil’s largest trading partner. The US, meanwhile, remains the biggest source of foreign direct investment in Latin America’s largest economy despite losing market share in trade and recently imposing additional tariffs on Brazilian goods.

The investments will be funded by the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FNDCT) through phased disbursements. The government expects the supercomputer to begin operating by the end of next year, while the cooperation agreement with the Chinese companies is scheduled to start in July 2027.

GUATEMALA CITY — The United States has deported nearly 2,300 Mexicans to Guatemala this year and sent at least dozens more to Honduras, according to official data, a shift from the beginning of President Trump’s second term when such transfers were minimal.

Until now, Mexicans deported from the U.S. were sent almost exclusively back to their country by air and land. Only a handful arrived in other countries.

Some civil organizations believe this change reported in recent days is a way to increase pressure on Mexico, whose government has protested the deaths of 17 Mexicans in U.S. immigration custody or during enforcement operations. This also comes as Trump has expanded agreements with allied Latin American countries to conduct joint operations in the region against criminal groups and has increased U.S. security demands on Mexico.

Sent to Central America by plane and Mexico by bus

Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo confirmed Wednesday night that, so far this year, 2,284 Mexicans deported from the U.S. have arrived in the country as part of a “transit stopover” before being taken to Mexico as part of an “arrangement” with the Mexican government, and without these individuals being under any refugee or asylum status.

“They are arriving on planes carrying Guatemalan returnees, and what we have done is bring them in transit so that, in coordination with Mexican immigration authorities, we can return them to Mexican territory within 24 hours of their arrival in the country,” he explained at a news conference.

The costs of these operations are covered by the Mexican government or, in some cases, by U.S. funding, he added.

Mexico’s National Migration Institute confirmed to the Associated Press in a brief message that Mexicans have been deported by the Trump administration to Guatemala and Honduras, primarily since April, and are then transported by bus to southern Mexico.

“The reason is that the United States wants to prevent them from crossing back into its territory,” the institute said. It did not provide figures or further details.

Asked about why the Mexicans were sent to Central America and not their home country, and for more details, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration enforcement, said in an emailed statement that the administration “is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised.”

“The Mexican government has expressed its opposition to this practice to U.S. authorities and has reiterated that every Mexican citizen has the right to enter the country,” the Mexican foreign ministry said in a statement Thursday. It added that Mexico is coordinating with the countries involved to ensure the safe return of Mexican citizens.

Third-country deportations raise concerns for Mexican migrants

Historically, Mexico has always been willing to receive its deported citizens.

Since Trump’s first term, it has also accepted deportees from third countries, although the details of immigration agreements with Washington have usually been opaque. In 2025, Mexico received about 12,000 deported foreigners, mostly Cubans and Venezuelans, according to figures provided by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. The government has not updated these figures since December although the practice has continued.

Authorities in Honduras also did not respond to requests for comment, but according to official documents from the country accessed by the Associated Press, 82 Mexicans deported from the U.S. arrived in the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on two flights on Aug. 13 and Saturday. An additional 35 were scheduled to arrive Thursday.

An additional 165 Mexicans were deported to Honduras between May and mid-July, according to the website Third Country Deportation Watch, run by the nongovernmental organizations Human Rights First and Refugees International, which track U.S. deportation flights to third countries.

The website does not clarify the source of its nationality figures, but both organizations have expressed concern because these transfers could endanger migrants who possibly sought asylum in the U.S. or have few resources in an unknown country.

The deportation tactic “seems to be to put pressure on the Mexican government,” said Savitri Arvey of Human Rights First. “They really don’t want any Mexicans crossing the border.” Some of those deported arrived in Honduras on U.S. military flights, she added.

A recent change in the deportation pattern

At the beginning of his second term, with immigration control as one of his priorities, Trump reached agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama to act as “bridge” or destination countries for migrants from third countries expelled from U.S. territory. These agreements gradually expanded to more countries, including some African ones, most recently Liberia.

Until recently, only a handful of Mexicans had been expelled from the U.S. to countries other than Mexico.

Arévalo said Wednesday that Guatemala received 15 Mexicans in 2025. As of February 2026, Honduras had officially reported the arrival of six. Costa Rica has received 11 Mexicans since Trump’s return to the White House, and according to local immigration authorities, they remain in the country. Presumably, these individuals may have requested to not be returned to Mexico out of fear.

Immigration lawyers believe that the Trump administration is using deportations to third countries as a legal loophole to indirectly force asylum seekers to return to Mexico when the government cannot send them there because it would violate court orders from immigration judges that recognize the dangers. Organizations and politicians both inside and outside the U.S. have also questioned the use of force by U.S. immigration authorities.

Pérez, Verza and González write for the Associated Press. Verza reported from Mexico City and González from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

A first group of deportees, out of an expected total of 1,200, has landed at the Roberts International Airport in Monrovia, Liberia, from the United States.

Thursday’s flight is part of an expanding trend of third-country deportations under the administration of US President Donald Trump, whereby foreign nationals are sent to countries that are not their own.

The inaugural flight carried 20 people, largely from Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba.

After landing, the group boarded a bus and was taken away by Liberian authorities without being allowed to speak to reporters.

The flight follows an agreement, announced on Tuesday, between the US and Liberia that will bring up to 1,200 deportees to the African country over the coming year.

Liberia is part of a growing list of countries striking agreements with the Trump administration.

Since taking office for a second term as US president in 2025, Trump has inked deals with at least 35 countries to accept third-country deportees, according to the nonprofit Human Rights First.

In exchange, some of those countries have received financial aid and trade deals. Senate Democrats in February estimated that at least $40m had been spent on such deals in the first year of Trump’s second term.

The US, for example, awarded Liberia $5m this year for “migration management activities”.

But in announcing the transfer deal earlier this week, Liberia’s Ministry of Information denied any reports that it agreed to the deportations for financial motives.

“The transfer of persons to Liberia is not a transaction with a quid pro quo,” the ministry said in a statement. “Liberia has not demanded or received any compensation or promise of reward in exchange for its consent to participate in the program.”

Liberia’s Information Minister Jerolinmek Piah also told the news agency Reuters that the International Organization for Migration and the United Nations refugee agency would help provide services for the deportees.

Those brought to Liberia will be allowed to apply for asylum and are “free to depart the country when they so desire”, according to Tuesday’s statement.

Liberia has said that the deportees are not “criminals and are not being prosecuted in any manner”.

“Liberia, the first black African independent nation on the African continent, has a long history of accepting people seeking refuge from political and other crises,” the ministry’s statement said.

“As a matter of fact, Liberia itself was founded as a refuge for freed slaves from the United States of America and other parts of the world.”

But critics have questioned whether smaller countries in Africa and elsewhere are being used as a “dumping ground” for US deportees, and whether the immigrants forcibly sent abroad will have adequate access to the resources they need.

Some have characterised such third-country deportations as excessively punitive, stranding migrants and asylum seekers in places where they sometimes cannot even speak the language.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has framed the third-party deportations as necessary for immigrants whose home countries will not accept them. It has also framed the removals as a form of deterrence.

Guatemalan President Bernardo Arevalo on Thursday estimated that, this year alone, roughly 2,300 Mexican citizens have been deported from the US to his country, as opposed to being sent directly to Mexico.

Media outlets, including CBS News, have reported that the manouevre is part of an effort to disincentivize Mexican nationals from returning to the US without legal immigration status.

Arevalo explained, however, that such deportees are swiftly sent back to Mexico. “They are arriving in planes of Guatemalan returnees, and what we have done is process them as in transit, ‌in coordination with the Mexican immigration authorities,” he said.

The longtime publisher of Stars and Stripes, a newspaper focused on the United States military, has resigned amid what he described as disagreements with the Defense Department‘s leadership.

Max D Lederer Jr announced his retirement in a memo to staff on Tuesday, as well as in an interview with Stars and Stripes.

The memo suggested that Lederer clashed with the administration of President Donald Trump over government efforts to seek greater editorial control over the publication, The Associated Press reported.

In the memo, Lederer wrote that it has “become clear that my philosophy of leadership, and my understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes, differ in fundamental ways from the direction the leadership of the Department of Defence has for the organization”.

The announcement comes after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth accused the publication of promoting “woke distractions”.

The Trump administration has also slammed the outlet for bringing attention to poor conditions and declining morale on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, involved in the war on Iran.

Founded in 1861, Stars and Stripes has been an institution in the US military for well over a century.

While the newspaper receives a significant portion of its funding from the US government, it has sought to maintain editorial independence from the various administrations in power.

Critics, however, say the threats to the news outlet have increased in recent years.

During the first Trump presidency, from 2017 to 2021, the Pentagon sought to eliminate funding for the newspaper, though Trump pledged not to cut its budget “under my watch”.

“It will continue to be a wonderful source of information to our Great Military,” he said at the time.

In January, though, Trump’s second-term Defense Department announced that it would seek to bring the paper into greater alignment with the government’s priorities.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell framed the move as “returning Stars and Stripes to its original mission: reporting for our warfighters”.

The Pentagon also fired Jacqueline Smith, the newspaper’s ombudsman, who was charged with protecting its reporting from political interference. The move prompted outcry about eroding press freedoms, including from Smith herself.

“No one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence,” Smith wrote in a column responding to her termination.

Hegseth has overseen efforts to restrict access to the Pentagon for journalists across the board.

In June, for instance, reporters were banned from the Defense Department’s press office, which was abruptly designated as a classified area.

That same month, a judge paused a policy requiring journalists to have escorts to access the Pentagon, a rule that news agencies warned could violate their First Amendment freedoms.

Other policies have been struck down in the courts, including a set of rules that would have barred journalists from engaging with materials not explicitly authorised by the Pentagon.

Hegseth has also cracked down on policies he considers part of the “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” movement, or DEI.

Dismissing them as evidence of “wokeness” – a vaguely defined concept – Hegseth has argued that DEI hinders military effectiveness.

The Pentagon is currently embroiled in an ongoing war on Iran, which the US launched with Israel on February 28.

The war remains deeply unpopular in the US, and reports have emerged that the military offensive has strained US forces and munition supplies.

Stars and Stripes was one of two military publications to report on flagging morale and suicide attempts by US service members on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, one of the aircraft carriers participating in the war.

The USS Lincoln has broken the US Navy record for the length of its deployment without a port stop. It left port in November and was sent off the coast of Venezuela before being redirected to the region near Iran.

Trump and his allies have lashed out at critical reporting about the war, with the president suggesting that journalists who highlight the troubles faced by the military are traitors who want to see their country fail.

State Attorney General Keith Ellison has called for the transfer of an ICE agent accused of lying about a nonfatal shooting.

Minnesota’s attorney general is suing the governor of Texas to force the extradition of a federal agent charged with shooting and wounding a man during President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis.

In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison argued that Texas Governor Greg Abbott has refused to fulfil his “mandatory” obligation to transfer Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Christian Castro, so that he may stand trial.

“Governor Abbott has withheld the warrant and held up Castro’s extradition for nearly three months,” Ellison told reporters on Tuesday. “He has no discretion to decline to do so.”

Ellison also asked the US district court in southern Texas to bar Cameron County Sheriff Manuel Trevino from allowing Castro’s release from jail.

Castro’s case has become part of a national debate over transparency and excessive violence during Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The agent was involved in the January 14 shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan man living in Minnesota. Officials allege that Castro fired a gun into Sosa-Celis’s front door, striking him in the leg.

Initially, the Trump administration said the agents had fired in self-defence, accusing Sosa-Celis and two other people of attacking officers with a broom and a snow shovel during an immigration enforcement operation.

Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went so far as to call the incident the “attempted murder” of an ICE agent.

But video emerged contradicting the ICE agents’ testimony, and in February, federal prosecutors dropped the charges they had filed against Sosa-Celis and his housemate, Alfredo Aljorna.

In a statement that month, ICE’s then-Acting Director Todd Lyons confirmed that Castro and a second ICE agent appeared to have lied about the incident. The two officers were subsequently placed on administrative leave.

“A joint review by ICE and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of video evidence has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers appears to have made untruthful statements,” Lyons said in a statement at the time.

In May, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office charged Castro with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime.

“Mr Castro is an ICE agent. But his federal badge does not make him immune from state charges for his criminal conduct in Minnesota,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement.

Castro was arrested on May 29 in Texas, and he has remained in detention since.

But Ellison has expressed concern that Texas officials – including Abbott, an ally of President Trump – could seek Castro’s release rather than have him face trial.

The Minnesota attorney general described Castro as a flight risk, likely to flee across the US border to Mexico.

“We know that [Castro] has some connections to Mexico, and we know that he has some thought of at some point going to Mexico,” Ellison said. “So, we do believe he’s a risk.”

Abbott’s office told The Associated Press in a statement that it would not comment on “pending extradition matters”.

Under Texas law, Ellison said the 52-year-old Castro could be released from custody as soon as next week – 90 days after he was detained – if Abbott does not agree to his extradition.

The Sosa-Celis shooting was one of several cases this year that prompted questions about the use of deadly force during immigration proceedings.

The Minneapolis area was the subject of one of Trump’s most intense immigration enforcement campaigns, dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

Lasting from December to February, Operation Metro Surge saw what critics considered to be escalating tactics from immigration officials, including warrantless house searches.

Two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretty, were killed by agents during protests against the operation.

Lawmakers in the United States have renewed calls for answers about conditions on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, suggesting that reports emerging from the aircraft carrier may belie a troubling pattern.

In at least three separate appeals, Democrats called for more information about how the Navy prepared for the vessel’s record-breaking deployment.

The aircraft carrier has been involved in military operations against Venezuela as well as the US-Israel war on Iran since it departed from San Diego, California, in November.

The ship has yet to dock for a port call in the time since. Having spent more than 260 days at sea, it has broken the US Navy’s record for the longest deployment without a stop.

Reports have emerged in recent weeks about crew members attempting to jump overboard amid shortages of food and other supplies.

On Tuesday, US Representative Pat Ryan published a letter sent to acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and signed by 22 members of Congress.

It noted that the lengthy deployments “have become a pattern in the Administration’s handling of its war against Iran”.

The war, which began on February 28, shows no sign of ending. Ryan pointed out that the USS Gerald Ford had also broken records for the length of its deployment as part of the Iran war, and it, too, was the subject of worrying reports about strain on sailors’ health. The ship returned to the US in April.

“The reported conditions on the Lincoln, following so soon after the reported conditions on the Ford, leave Congress and the public concerned that the Department is not adapting quickly enough to the conditions,” Ryan wrote in his letter, dated August 14.

He also questioned whether US Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees military operations in the Middle East, was “taking the appropriate steps to mitigate the continued challenges in our fleet”.

A delegation of California lawmakers, including Senators Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, has also sent a letter to the Pentagon calling for an inquiry.

Separately, a group of Democratic senators addressed another letter, dated August 15, to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, demanding answers and calling for accountability.

“This is a symptom of poor planning by both you and the President and exacerbated by the deeply unsound decision to start a war with Iran,” that letter said.

“Open-ended deployments driven by an open-ended war have real consequences for our servicemembers, and we are seeing those consequences now.”

The appeals for more information come as the USS Lincoln prepares to navigate home.

Cao revealed last week that the USS Lincoln would soon return to the US. The announcement coincided with reports that the USS George Washington has been rerouted from the Pacific Ocean to replace its fellow aircraft carrier.

But the USS Washington’s departure leaves no aircraft carrier in the Western Pacific, long portrayed as a region of strategic interest for the US as it seeks to check China’s territorial ambitions.

President Donald Trump and his defence officials, meanwhile, have argued that reports about the USS Lincoln’s conditions have been overblown.

Hegseth, for instance, has called the reports of conditions “completely misrepresented”. Trump last week also said the vessel had not been deployed “nearly long enough”.

On Monday, the president brushed aside questions about the USS Lincoln’s conditions as part of a “CNN fake report”.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of US Central Command, has also released a statement on social media this week, saying he has visited the USS Lincoln in recent days and found the crew “awe-inspiring”.

“This doesn’t mean that all is perfect,” he wrote. “Find any of the nearly 4 million Navy veterans in America today and they will likely tell you that service at sea for long periods isn’t for everyone.”

But he applauded the USS Lincoln’s leadership for having made “mental health and crew resilience” a priority.

Unlike Democrats, members of Trump’s Republican Party have largely not responded to the reports of mental health strain and supply shortages on the USS Lincoln.

However, Representative Don Bacon voiced concern during an interview on CBS News’s Face the Nation programme on Sunday.

“We should have oversight,” he said.

New Delhi, India — On August 13, Abdul Hafeez returned to the primary school he once went to, in Karisunda, a village in Bankura district in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal.

The 26-year-old was visiting his alma mater as part of a campaign by the Cockroach Janata Party, a popular Indian pressure group, to audit conditions of the country’s under-funded, often dilapidated government-run schools.

The CJP had just succeeded in forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, in July, after a 37-day sit-in in the national capital that prompted antigovernment Gen Z protests across the country.

But in Bankura, things would turn deadly. Hours after Hafeez’s visit to his school, he alleged that local workers of Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) arrived at his home and assaulted him and his father, Mohammad Mafik. Two days later, Hafeez’s 51-year-old father died from his injuries.

On Sunday, Suvendu Adhikari, the chief minister of BJP-ruled West Bengal, said the attackers were “criminals with no BJP connection” and assured action.

But a day after burying his father, Hafeez told Al Jazeera that he stands firm in calling for accountability and reforms in government-run schools. “We will fight for justice for my father, but these attacks will not stop us from demanding better education,” he said.

That demand marks a new line in the sand for the CJP. Fresh from successfully forcing Modi and his government onto the defensive — the Indian PM has only rarely sacked ministers even in the face of credible accusations of wrongdoing or public pressure — the group has now announced its next battleground: India’s public-funded schools.

CJP leaders have asked their supporters, who thronged the protests in New Delhi from different parts of the country, to visit their nearby schools and audit their conditions.

They are working around a basic four-point checklist for what the CJP is calling its Fix the Schools campaign: drinking water and functional toilets; electricity and usable classrooms; boundary walls and campus safety; and midday meals and teacher attendance.

And the murder of Hafeez’s father has raised the already high stakes in a battle between the well-oiled machinery of Modi’s BJP and the fledgling, thin-on-organisation CJP.

“Abdul went to inspect the [government] school in Bengal where he once studied,” said Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the CJP. “It makes my blood boil that people are being murdered simply for demanding better schools.”

‘A disruptive change’

Ashutosh Ranka, a co-convenor of the Cockroach group, appeared emotional after meeting Hafeez’s family on Monday. He told reporters that the group proposed to press the government for compensation; however, Hafeez requested that a school be named after his father.

In Rajasthan, Ranka’s home state in western India, the group has faced other challenges.

Ranka joined a sit-in with primary school students in Alwar district on August 14 to demand additional rooms, clean toilets and drinking water. Local publications reported that the officials accepted the demands.

On Sunday, the Rajasthan government, also led by Modi’s BJP, imposed restrictions on so-called outsiders entering government schools and on taking photos and videos, citing students’ privacy.

The government notice, which ordered the school management to pursue criminal action against such surveys, came after Ranka had announced visits by CJP volunteers across the state.

Samina Bano, an education-policy expert who has advised several Indian states on reforms, told Al Jazeera that “it is essentially the system itself that is not working anymore for the people”.

In the last 10 years, Bano said, she had found “drunk teachers on duty during spot checks”, fake appointments in rural areas that many teachers do not want to go to, and other systemic failures that she insisted are common in the Indian public school system.

“Education in government-run schools a sorry state of affairs.
 It requires a disruptive change,” Bano said.

“The real problem is the quality of teaching, learning outcomes and the food,” Bano added, crediting the Cockroach pressure group for bringing the demands for reform into mainstream politics.

“They are bringing it into the discourse, but once people start demanding, there needs to be actual institution building, and that’s different work altogether,” Bano said. “There has to be an appetite to reimagine public education in India.”

‘Playing to strength’

After Gen Z protesters returned from the streets in New Delhi, the internet was instead flooded with videos of school-going children asking for better facilities across several states. They were blocking roads, circling local administration offices and fighting with bureaucrats.

The Cockroach party tapped into the momentum and announced its next phase in a smart mobilisation strategy, said Asim Ali, a political analyst in New Delhi.

“It plays to their strength of leveraging social media. Without many volunteers [like a traditional political party], they can outsource the grassroots work to followers on social media itself,” he said.

“By leveraging the power of social media, which is now felt in the remotest of corners in India, the Cockroach party has dramatically driven down organisational resource costs of a movement,” Ali added.

But Ali cautioned that this approach of relying on volunteers without political or organisational skills, protest experience or institutional support also exposes them to violence, as happened with the Hafeez family in West Bengal.

Yet the blood spilled in the eastern state hasn’t dimmed the drive from the CJP to demand accountability from authorities.

On Tuesday, Ranka announced on X that multiple venues in West Bengal’s capital Kolkata had cancelled or refused permission to the CJP to hold meet-ups with students.

“This only reinforces the fact that the BJP is scared from the cockroaches,” he wrote. “Cockroaches of Bengal will continue to visit govt schools and push the Bengal govt to get them fixed.

“The more you stop us, the bigger we become.”

Wealth, perhaps second only to loyalty, has been a prized attribute for Donald Trump during his second presidency.

The number of people worth at least $100 million whom the Republican president has appointed to his administration is more than four times the combined total under the three previous presidents, according to a report from the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.

It’s the numbers for the Trump administration, in the context of previous administrations, that stand out in Public Citizen’s report, published on Monday. In all, 57 Trump officials are worth at least $100 million, including 17 ambassadors and the remaining 40 in senior posts across the executive branch.

Look no further than Trump’s Cabinet. Eight of its 23 members fit the category, notably Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, both billionaires.

The president, himself a billionaire, has described his inclination toward appointing the ultrawealthy as deference to financial success. And yet, Trump, who owes his White House comeback to support from middle-income, working Americans drawn to his pledge to lower everyday costs, now faces a midterm election electorate decidedly less keen on his handling of the economy.

Presidents have long sought counsel from the nation’s wealthiest people and tapped some for high-profile administrative leadership roles. Likewise, presidents routinely reward wealthy and influential supporters with ambassadorships.

Among the most notable examples is Andrew Mellon, the aluminum, oil and banking tycoon who was among the handful of the nation’s wealthiest people in the 1920s and served as treasury secretary for three presidents.

The Trump officials worth at least $100 million include Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg and Small Business Administration Administrator Kelly Loeffler, who are also billionaires, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and special envoy Steve Witkoff, both worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

By comparison, Republican George W. Bush’s administration and Democrat Joe Biden’s each included five members worth $100 million or more. Democrat Barack Obama’s included three, the report states.

A government populated by so many of the economic elite presents potential problems, the report’s authors said.

“When the people holding the reins of government are drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of the ultra-rich, it leads to misplaced incentives and corruption, and begs the question, ‘Whose interests they are truly serving?” said Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen’s co-president.

The list does not include Trump, whose net worth Forbes estimates at more than $6 billion. Nor does it include space and social media giant Elon Musk, who advised Trump last year on an effort to reduce the federal government’s size, scope and workforce and is the world’s wealthiest person, with a net worth Forbes estimates at about $860 billion.

Trump’s views are well established: Financial success is evidence of executive mastery and negotiating strength.

“They have great competence, those people. Incredible competence. Some of the smartest business leaders,” Trump said last year in explaining why he put considerable weight on advice from business executives.

He has also pointed to investments by wealthy people as a signal of future economic growth. To encourage billionaires to deliver, Trump, in his first year back in the White House, pursued policies on artificial intelligence and financial regulation that could benefit wealthy people, along with tax cuts and reduced regulatory burdens for large-scale investments.

Still, last month, only 32% of U.S. adults approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 40% at the beginning of his second term and as his Republican Party faces headwinds in its attempt to hold both majorities in Congress in November.

Beaumont writes for the Associated Press.

Thousands of people are waiting for aid in the eastern Indonesia region hit by a powerful earthquake that killed dozens of people, as rescuers combed through collapsed buildings in search of people trapped beneath the rubble.

Late on Monday, the death toll was raised from 54 to 68, said Berton SP Panjaitan, an official at Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency, adding that more than 200 ⁠have been injured.

Many residents on Flores island in East Nusa Tenggara province spent Monday searching for loved ones and waiting for aid to arrive in communities still cut off by the magnitude 7.7 earthquake.

During Indonesia’s Independence Day ceremony in the capital, Jakarta, President Prabowo Subianto asked participants to pray for people affected by disasters in East Nusa Tenggara and other parts of the country while leading a nationwide moment of silence honouring the nation’s independence heroes.

More than 1,300 homes were damaged when the quake struck East Nusa Tenggara on Saturday. Nearly 250 were destroyed on Flores alone. Dozens of public buildings, including educational and health facilities as well as government offices, were also affected.

The province’s governor declared a 14-day state of emergency on Sunday.

About 12,800 people were unable to return to their homes by Monday morning and were dispersed among temporary shelters in several towns on Flores, Berton Suar Pelita Panjaitan, spokesman for Indonesia’s BNPB national disaster agency, told the AFP news agency.

Thousands of people on Flores camped outside collapsed homes under tarpaulin tents overnight into Monday, sleeping outside because of the danger of more aftershocks.

“Our houses are no longer liveable because many have collapsed and are full of cracks, so we can’t go inside any more,” Mbay resident Junaidin, 32, told AFP outside his self-made tent that was sleeping about 30 people.

For many residents, the disaster revived painful memories of a powerful earthquake and tsunami that struck Flores in 1992, killing about 2,500 people.

“We’re on our own here,” said Junaidin, who like many Indonesians has one name. He expressed frustration with a perceived lag in the arrival of aid.

“As for help from the government, there hasn’t been any – no tents, no medicine, no food, no drinking water, nothing,” Junaidin said.

The Indonesian air force said it was bringing 13 tonnes of emergency aid airlifted in two Hercules transport planes and a Boeing.

It was also deploying helicopters to bring emergency supplies directly to survivors in isolated communities, the Antara state news agency quoted the commander of El Tari airbase in Kupang on Timor island as saying.

The aid included food, clothes, clean water and emergency medical equipment.

The military has deployed personnel to help with distribution in key hubs.

Rescuers were combing the stricken area for victims despite not receiving any reports about missing people, search and rescue official Fathur Rahman told AFP on Monday.

Indonesia will also build an emergency field hospital in several areas to treat the injured, Deputy Health Minister Benjamin Paulus Octavianus said.

Al Jazeera’s Jessica Washington, reporting from Ruteng in East Nusa Tenggara, said medical staff there had to quickly assemble a tent hospital after the hospital was damaged.

While doctors said they have a sufficient supply of medicine, they weren’t able to get to essential equipment that allows them to perform blood tests and X-rays, which means they are “having to treat patients in very difficult conditions”, Washington said.

Many elderly patients “are being exposed to the intense heat of the daytime” and the “rather cold” evening temperatures, which complicates doctors’ ability to treat them, Washington added.

Indonesia experiences frequent earthquakes due to its location along the Pacific “Ring of Fire”, an arc of intense seismic activity stretching from Japan through Southeast Asia and across the Pacific basin.

A magnitude 9.1 tremor in 2004 struck off the coast of Sumatra and triggered a tsunami that killed 220,000 throughout the region, about 170,000 of them in Indonesia.

It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history.