Power

The national power grid comes back on after Cuba’s 10 million people were plunged into darkness overnight.

Cuba has reconnected its power grid and brought online its largest oil-fired power plant, energy officials said, putting an end to a nationwide blackout that lasted more than 29 hours amid a United States move to choke off the island’s fuel supply.

After the country’s 10 million people had been plunged into darkness overnight, the Caribbean island’s national power grid had fully come back online by 6:11pm (22:11 GMT) on Tuesday. However, officials said power shortages may continue because not enough electricity is being generated.

In addition to cutting off oil sales to Cuba, US President Donald Trump has escalated his rhetoric against the Communist-run island, saying on Monday he could do anything he wanted with the country.

A US State Department official blamed the Cuban government for the grid collapse, calling blackouts a “symptom of the failing regime’s incompetence”.

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel fired back at Washington, criticising its “almost daily public threats against Cuba”.

“They intend to and announce plans to take over the country, its resources, its properties, and even the very economy they seek to suffocate in order to force us to surrender,” Diaz-Canel wrote on social media on Tuesday night, shortly after power returned nationwide.

Cuba has yet to say what caused Monday’s nationwide grid failure, the first such collapse since the US cut off the island’s oil supply from Venezuela and threatened to slap tariffs on countries that ship fuel to the nation.

By midday on Tuesday, grid workers successfully fired up the Antonio Guiteras power plant, a decades-old behemoth that underpins the country’s power grid.

Daily blackouts

Electricity generation, hampered by dire fuel shortages and antiquated power plants, is still far below what is necessary to meet demand, providing scarce relief for Cubans already exhausted from months of blackouts.

Most Cubans, including those in the capital, Havana, were seeing 16 or more hours of blackout daily even before the latest grid collapse.

“It affects every aspect of our lives,” said Havana resident Carlos Montes de Oca, noting that the outages had thrown simple necessities such as food and water supply into disarray. “All we can do is sit, wait, read a book… otherwise the stress gets to you.”

Much of Cuba was overcast through the afternoon on Monday as a cold front neared the island, casting shadows on the solar parks that account for a third or more of daytime generation.

Cuba has received only two small vessels carrying oil imports this year, according to LSEG ship tracking data seen by Reuters on Monday. On Tuesday, a Hong Kong-flagged tanker that could be carrying fuel to Cuba resumed navigation after suspending its course weeks ago in the Atlantic Ocean, the data showed.

Cuba and the US have opened talks aimed at defusing the crisis, among the most acute since 1959, when Fidel Castro forced a US ally from power on the island.

Neither side has provided details of the ongoing negotiations, although Trump has portrayed Cuba as desperate to make a deal.

Cubans, no strangers to hardship, saw little choice but to stay calm.

“We still don’t have power at my house,” said Havana resident Juana Perez. “But we’ll take it in stride, as we Cubans always do.”

The decision by United States President Donald Trump to launch a war on Iran has left many international law experts questioning if the world order established after World War II is actually working.

In his second presidential term, Trump seems to be wielding total power without restraint, and the system of checks and balances enshrined in the US Constitution appears to be failing to limit his power.

Since Trump was sworn in in January 2025, he has ordered two unprovoked attacks on independent states, Venezuela and Iran; threatened to annex Greenland; strained traditional alliances with Europe; undermined the United Nations; and rattled international trade with his sweeping tariffs.

Previous constraints set by the UN system and international law appear supplanted by what Trump told reporters in January was a vision of power limited only by his “own morality”.

So what checks are there on Trump? Is he really free to attack states, set tariffs at will and, as leader of the world’s most powerful state, essentially dictate global policy? And if so, why are so many observers now saying his war on Iran is faltering?

Has international law put any checks on Trump?

Not so far.

According to analysts, both his attacks on Venezuela and Iran were in clear breach of international law and the UN Charter, principally the prohibition on the use of force under Article 2(4).

Debates about international law, how it has been geared over the decades to underpin the interests of the West and the US specifically, are hardly new. However, experts said, the Trump presidency has seen even the notional restraints of international law trampled underfoot.

Trump himself has brushed aside international law, saying in January that it would be up to him to decide when and how much international law applied to the US and his actions.

“In many respects, international law has historically served US interests, and self-interest should continue to generate US support for a rules-based order organised around the core principles enshrined in the UN Charter,” Michael Becker, a professor of international human rights law at Trinity College in Dublin who previously worked at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, told Al Jazeera, “But finding value in international law often requires adopting a long-term outlook that does not sit easily with short-term political agendas.”

“In the current geopolitical climate, the capacity of international law to provide a meaningful constraint on US action under Donald Trump has proven negligible,” Becker added. “That seems unlikely to change, especially given the failure by other states to strike a united front against Trump’s gangsterism.”

What about the UN?

Not so much.

From its founding, the role of the UN has been to promote dialogue instead of conflict and provide a global response to international challenges. However, Trump’s relationship with the body, like so many of the president’s associations, has rarely been so straightforward. On the one hand, while appearing to try to supplant the body with his members-only Board of Peace as well as sidelining UN aid efforts in Gaza, he has on occasion sought the legitimacy of the UN for a number of his projects, such as his calls in August for the UN to establish a Support Office in Haiti, to help limit migration to the US.

However, while the support of the UN may be helpful, it is clear that Trump has no intention of abiding by its charter, Richard Gowan, the Crisis Group’s UN director from 2019 to 2025, said.

“While other UN members see the US is breaking international law on a regular basis, they often hold back from criticising Washington too loudly in forums like the Security Council because they fear blowback from Trump,” Gowan said. “So Trump is learning he can sidestep the UN when he wants to and get away with it while occasionally using it for instrumental purposes.”

What about other powers?

Up to a point.

Many countries known as “middle powers”, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and other Western and European states, have proven successful so far in pushing back against Trump’s efforts to unilaterally annex Greenland. But European powers have failed to condemn Trump’s unprovoked war on Venezuela and Iran, exposing their double standards in conflicts in the Middle East and the Global South.

Many analysts expect that a withdrawal of investments in the US by Gulf states, which are bearing the brunt of Iran’s retaliation to US and Israeli attacks, may also hasten the war’s end.

“Middle powers can generate friction but not a veto,” HA Hellyer of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London said. “Collective action – European governments, Gulf states – can raise costs and extract tactical adjustments. The structural imbalance remains: The US retains decisive military, financial and institutional primacy.”

Smaller states often hedge their bets, follow Washington or look to regional alliances for protection, Hellyer added, continuing that while pressure was strongest in Europe, where the US is no longer seen as a reliable security guarantor, the idea of establishing an alternative continues to be a hurdle. “The logic of an alternative model is accepted; the capacity to execute it quickly is not. A prolonged interregnum follows. The Gulf Arab states are in an analogous position,” he said.

In the meantime, Trump and the US are free to act as they choose. “These are exposure-management strategies, pursued until structural dependence on the US security umbrella can be reduced,” he said.

China and Russia have so far criticised the breaches of international law while avoiding clear escalation, and India and other members of the BRICS bloc have largely stayed silent, suggesting a preference for strategic ambiguity over confronting Washington directly.

What about domestic restraints?

Not really.

The US Supreme Court was able to block Trump’s use of tariffs to manage large parts of his foreign policy by rewarding allies with lower tariffs and punishing critics with punitive import duties.

But none of the other traditional guardrails – such as Congress; the Department of Justice, which has provided unwavering support to the president; and even the news media – has contained the president’s ambitions. This isn’t entirely new. Previous presidents have ordered wars without congressional approval. However, with Trump, analysts suggested, it has been systematic.

Powerful US institutions have largely failed to hold the Trump administration accountable, analysts, such as Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University, said.

“His base of strong supporters are saying that they are willing to experience short-term increases in gasoline prices if it leads to a friendly government in Iran in the long term. His opponents have been his opponents on everything, so he simply ignores and threatens them,” Scheppele told Al Jazeera.

“Trump pays more attention to market performance than to public opinion, so he started saying that he was minimising costs and saying that the Iran war is short term to boost markets again.”

“What the US is spectacularly missing is leadership to oppose Trump. Congress is not doing its constitutional job to constrain him. The Supreme Court is in his pocket because he packed the court in his first term. Lower court judges are heroic and have done amazing work under serious pressures, but they don’t get foreign policy questions, given the difficulty of anyone getting ‘standing’ … in the area of international matters,” she said, referring to the requirement that parties to a lawsuit must show actual or future direct harm to themselves to bring a case to court.

She noted that lower federal courts, although limited on foreign policy, have repeatedly checked executive overreach on immigration, sanctions designations and emergency powers, often under intense political pressure.

So why are so many people saying Trump’s war is faltering?

In the eyes of many observers, Trump, with no clear war aims or a defined resolution, is in danger of losing control of a conflict that appears to be both growing and reaching into economic areas apparently unforeseen by his administration, so while traditional restraints don’t apply, market forces, like gravity, always do.

Trump has repeatedly said the war would be over soon despite none of his claimed war aims being achieved.

Oil prices have surged due to his attacks on Iran, Tehran’s counterstrikes and threats to shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes.

The International Energy Agency’s decision on Wednesday to release 400 million barrels of oil from international petroleum reserves has failed to tame the prices. Iran has warned that oil could hit $200 a barrel as it continues its stranglehold of the waterway.

“Ultimately, the factors that might be most likely to constrain Donald Trump’s neoimperialist impulses – or his willingness to pursue the policy goals of those who have his ear – are the economic fallout from disrupting global energy markets and a broader disenchantment among US voters with his globe-trotting militarism, his rampant self-dealing and his callous disregard for the human costs of war,” Becker said.

Fans of the musical “Hamilton” know three things about the nation’s first Treasury secretary because of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s brilliance. First, that Alexander Hamilton cheated on his wife, Eliza. Second, he was killed by the vice president, Aaron Burr. Third, and most importantly, he was considered a highly principled man. And when it came to the topic of nationalizing elections, do you know how this Revolutionary War vet and founding father characterized doing so?

A threat.

Referring to corruptible public officials, Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers: No 59: “With so effectual a weapon in their hands as the exclusive power of regulating elections for the national government, a combination of a few such men, in a few of the most considerable States, where the temptation will always be the strongest, might accomplish the destruction of the Union, by seizing the opportunity of some casual dissatisfaction among the people to discontinue the choice.”

Hamilton’s prescient views became the framework for the Election Clause in the Constitution. And since returning to the White House, President Trump has been searching for ways to usurp it. Last month he made calls to nationalize elections. This month he’s at it again.

He’s also pushing Congress to pass his so-called SAVE Act, which would require voters to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote. It sounds innocuous until you realize a driver’s license isn’t good enough; a passport would often be required. But half the country doesn’t have a passport, and it costs roughly $200 and a few weeks to get one. The logistical burden is unreasonable and cruel: Consider that this year, during primary season, we’ve already witnessed natural disaster — such as the tornadoes that recently ripped through the Midwest or the fires in Texas — upend entire communities. Many people would not have been able to vote, simply because they had been separated from their papers during the disaster.

The financial obstacles that would be created by the SAVE Act are at least as onerous: Why would Congress choose to financially burden voters — with what is essentially an unlawful poll tax — at a time when the unemployment rate and gas prices are up and the approval rating for nearly everyone in office is down? There are a couple of reasons. One is that the party controlling Congress hopes to suppress voting in order to defy the will of the American majority and cling to power.

Another reason lawmakers support this terrible bill is simply that Trump wants it. Some Republicans in office are so afraid of angering a vengeful president that they would rather entertain his authoritarian tendencies than go through the fire of his opposition during a primary.

For politicians such as Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who this week changed his long-held position on the filibuster in order to push the SAVE Act, it’s simply about political survival. He needs the president’s endorsement heading into the runoff for his Senate seat.

Trump has called the election overhaul bill his top priority — not the war he started with Iran, not returning the billions collected from illegal tariffs, not justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Before there was a Constitution, there was a warning, written by Hamilton and other founders, whose concerns about nationalized elections are well documented and have proved to be well founded.

You would think a nation in the midst of beating its proverbial chest about our 250th birthday would take more heed from the country’s founders. But nope: This week Florida state lawmakers, in an attempt to appease their state’s most powerful resident, passed an election overhaul law that mirrors the federal SAVE Act. More red states are likely to follow, not because a national wave of voter fraud has been unearthed by authorities, but because the authorities want to stay in the good graces of someone who has yet to prove any widespread fraud other than his own.

The party that famously railed against “the bridge to nowhere” is now offering bills that solve nonexistent problems. Or in some cases, creating problems, particularly for women who changed their names after marriage so their state IDs don’t match their birth certificates.

Cornyn is not alone in exchanging his principles for Trump’s favor; he’s just the most recent. However, the manner in which he announced his flip flop was particularly tone deaf.

“If a man takes a swing at you and barely misses, that doesn’t make him a pacifist — it just means he has bad aim,” Cornyn wrote in an op-ed about the bill for the New York Post, the newspaper founded by Hamilton in 1801. “Standing still and giving him a second free swing wouldn’t be wise or honorable: it would be foolish.”

In 2016, then-candidate Trump took his first big swing at our elections when he implied — without evidence — that his opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz, had rigged the election after losing to him in the Iowa Republican caucus. Reportedly Trump even tried to get the state’s party chair to overturn the result. He’s been throwing jabs at our elections ever since. The Jan. 6 riot was a haymaker that barely missed. Given the president’s propensity to hand out Trump 2028 hats, it seems passing the SAVE Act would be, in Cornyn’s words, setting voters up to stand there while Trump takes another swing at our democracy.

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow

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Rastriya Swatantra Party, founded just four years ago, set to dominate new parliament with near two-thirds majority.

A political party led by a rapper-turned-politician has won a sweeping parliamentary majority in Nepal, official results show, capping one of the most dramatic elections in the country’s recent history.

The Rastriya Swatantra Party of Balendra Shah, a 35-year-old former civil engineer and hip-hop artist known simply as “Balen”, secured 182 seats in the 275-member lower house of parliament, the Election Commission said on Thursday, with 125 won directly and a further 57 through proportional representation.

The Nepali Congress party finished in second place, with 38 seats. The Marxist party of veteran four-time Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, whose government was ousted in a youth-led uprising last year, won just 25 seats.

Shah himself defeated the 74-year-old Oli in his own constituency.

Oli, who had dominated Nepali politics for years, congratulated his rival on X, wishing him a “smooth and successful” term.

The September 2025 protests that reshaped the country’s political landscape were initially set off by a government ban on social media, but rapidly swelled into a mass movement against corruption and economic stagnation, leaving at least 77 people dead.

Shah, whose music had long targeted those same grievances, emerged as a figurehead of the unrest, his song Nepal Haseko, or Nepal Smiling, accumulating more than 10 million YouTube views during the turmoil.

His path to likely prime minister, from engineer to rapper to Kathmandu’s first independent mayor in 2022, reflects a generational shift in a country where more than 40 percent of the nearly 30 million population is under 35, yet whose established party leadership has long remained in its 70s.

Shah said his victory was a signal of refusal to take “the easy way out” and a reckoning with the “problems and betrayals that have affected the country.”

The RSP, founded the same year as his mayoral win, ran a highly organised campaign backed by diaspora funding, particularly from Nepali communities in the United States.

Nepalese journalist Pranaya Rana described Shah to Al Jazeera as embodying “the outsider spirit that many young Nepalis are looking for to shake up the status quo.”

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the vote a “proud moment” in Nepal’s democratic journey, pledging close cooperation with the incoming government.

Under Nepal’s constitutional process, parties must now submit names to fill proportionally allocated seats before parliament is formally summoned by the president. A new prime minister, who will need the support of at least half of all members, is not expected to be confirmed for several days.

Despite United States President Donald Trump’s repeated declarations of victory in the US-Israeli war on Iran, Tehran’s retaliatory strikes on Israel and US military assets in the region have continued, upending global financial and energy markets.

“We’ve had two decades to study defeats of the US military to our immediate east and west. We’ve incorporated lessons accordingly,” Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi wrote in a post on X on March 1, the day after US and Israeli strikes on Tehran killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials.

“Bombings in our capital have no impact on our ability to conduct war,” he wrote.

According to analysts, Iran has made use of “asymmetric” warfare tactics while striking the US and Israel. So, are Tehran’s war tactics working?

Here’s what we know:

What is ‘asymmetric’ warfare?

When the balance of capabilities is unequal in a conflict – as it is in relation to weapons in this one – the weaker party can turn to unconventional methods of warfare, John Phillips, a British safety, security and risk adviser and a former military chief instructor, told Al Jazeera.

This is known as “asymmetric” warfare.

This can include the use of guerrilla tactics, terrorism, cyberattacks, use of proxies and other indirect tools, Phillips said, in order “to offset conventional inferiority, avoid the enemy’s strengths, and exploit vulnerabilities in political will, logistics, and legal or ethical constraints”.

“Iran is conventionally weaker than the US and Israel, but relatively strong compared to many neighbours,” he said.

“What makes Iran distinctive is not that it uses these methods at all, but that they sit at the centre of its grand strategy rather than at its margins.”

Why is Iran using asymmetric warfare?

In the ongoing war between Iran and the US-Israel, Washington and Tel Aviv have been using expensive missiles and drones to attack Iran and to intercept missiles Iran has fired back. The Patriot and THAAD defence systems, for example, which launch interceptors to take out incoming drones and missiles, can cost millions of dollars for each missile they fire. This compares with the $20,000-$35,000 cost of each Iranian Shahed drone.

As a result, the US has reportedly spent $2bn a day in its war on Iran and there are fears it could run out of interceptor missiles altogether if the war goes on for more than a few weeks.

It is therefore in Iran’s interests to focus on holding out against strikes and protecting its own weapons supplies while it does so, military experts say.

However, Phillips explained that precision strikes and sabotage by Israel and the US have demonstrated that Iran is not able to fully shield its missile, drone and nuclear‑related assets, while sanctions and domestic pressures have limited its capacity to sustain a very high‑tempo confrontation.

“As a result, Iran’s asymmetric approach is best understood as an effective ‘survival and leverage’ mechanism that produces a chronic, costly ‘shadow war’, rather than a path to decisive regional hegemony or victory,” he said.

Iran began using asymmetric warfare techniques following the 1979 Iranian revolution, which overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

“Instead of trying to match high‑end aircraft, precision munitions, or blue‑water fleets, [Iran] has built a ‘forward deterrence’ posture that operates in the grey zone between war and peace,” Phillips said.

“This is backed by large inventories of ballistic and cruise missiles, mass‑produced drones [often handed to proxies], cyber-operations, and a posture of underground, dispersed and hardened facilities that make preemption difficult and preserve some retaliatory capability.”

What asymmetric tactics has Iran been using?

Enemy depletion tactics

Since US-Israeli strikes on Iran began on February 28, Tehran has launched a wave of ballistic missiles targeting Israel and US military bases across the Gulf region.

Using a mix of short and medium-range ballistic missiles, as well as drone swarms through this defence system, Iran aims to deplete Israeli and US interceptor stockpiles.

Economic warfare

Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz through which about 20 percent of global oil and gas supplies are shipped. Linking the Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, the strait is the only waterway to the open ocean available to Gulf oil producers.

On Thursday, Iran attacked fuel tankers in Iraqi waters. Instability in and around the Strait of Hormuz drove Brent crude oil prices past $100 a barrel last week, with wild swings ongoing, prompting fears of a global energy crisis.

Iran has also targeted civilian infrastructure like airports and desalination plants which are crucial for water supply in the region, and it has launched drones targeting oil depots.

War on global finance

Meanwhile, on Wednesday this week, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) threatened to attack “economic centres and banks” with links to United States and Israeli entities in the Gulf region after what it claimed was an attack on an Iranian bank, with the war in its 12th day.

Since then, many banks like Citibank and HSBC in Qatar, have begun shutting, further threatening global financial stability.

Top technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle, as well as the listed offices and infrastructure for cloud-based services, are also located in several Israeli cities and in some Gulf countries, which Iran has also threatened to attack.

Use of proxies

Iran has aimed to keep the much more powerful US military and its allies off balance through proxies in Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen. Hezbollah in Lebanon, for example, has fired missiles and drones into northern Israel since March 2 as part of Iran’s retaliatory strikes.

“At the core of this [asymmetric] approach is a network of proxies and partners – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shia militias in Iraq, groups in Syria, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen – which receive weapons, training, funding and ideological guidance from Iran,” Phillips said.

These actors allow Tehran to threaten Israeli and US forces, as well as regional shipping lanes, on multiple fronts, “often with a degree of deniability and at a fraction of the cost of deploying its own regular forces”, Phillips noted.

‘Mosaic’ defence system

Iran has organised its defensive structure into multiple regional and semi-independent layers instead of concentrating power in a single command chain that could be paralysed by a decapitation strike. This concept is most closely associated with the formation of the parallel military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), particularly under former commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, who led the force from 2007 to 2019.

The doctrine has two central aims: to make Iran’s command system difficult to dismantle by force, and to make the battlefield itself harder to resolve quickly by turning Iran into a layered arena of regular defence, irregular warfare, local mobilisation and long-term attrition.

What damage have these tactics done to the US and Israel?

Iran’s asymmetrical playbook has made the war more expensive for the US. It has been forced to spend money on replacing stockpiles of expensive missiles like Tomahawks and defensive systems such as Patriot and THAAD interceptors.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the first 100 hours alone of Operation Epic Fury – the codename for the US-Israeli assault on Iran – cost the US approximately $3.7bn, mostly unbudgeted. Israel, already reeling from the economic strain of its prolonged wars in Gaza and Lebanon, faces mounting domestic pressure as daily sirens force millions into bunkers.

While the Pentagon has not yet announced an official estimate for the cost of the war, late last week, two congressional sources told US broadcaster MS NOW that the war is costing the United States an estimated $1bn a day.

A day later, Politico reported that US Republicans on Capitol Hill privately fear the Pentagon is spending close to $2bn a day on the war.

Meanwhile, officials from President Donald Trump’s administration estimated during a congressional briefing this week that the first six days of the war on Iran had cost the US at least $11.3bn, a source familiar with the matter told the Reuters news agency.

Reporting from Washington, DC, following the publication of the CSIS analysis last week, Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan said the Pentagon had put together a $50bn supplemental budget request in order to replace Tomahawk and Patriot missiles and THAAD interceptors already used in the first week of the war, along with other equipment that had been damaged or worn out so far.

Are Iran’s tactics working?

To a certain extent, they are.

According to a report by The Soufan Center, the “pattern of Iranian counterattacks suggests a layered operational approach designed to generate pressure on Gulf states, create regional disruption on land, sea, and air, while simultaneously attempting to exhaust US and allied defensive resources”.

“Tehran appears to be fighting a war of endurance: prolong the conflict, expand the economic battlefield, make the costs increasingly prohibitive, ration advanced capabilities, and impose steady human and financial costs on its adversaries. All with the hope that political tolerance erodes faster in Jerusalem and Washington than in Tehran,” the report noted.

This may be working. Questions about the cost of the war are already causing a political headache for the Trump administration in Washington.

Congress’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference last week that President Donald Trump is “plunging America into another endless conflict in the Middle East” and “spending billions of dollars to bomb Iran”.

“But they can’t find a dime to make it more affordable for the American people to go see a doctor when they need one,” he said. “Can’t find a dime to make it easier for Americans who are working hard to purchase their first home. And they can’t find a dime to lower the grocery bills of the American people.”

Trump won the presidency in 2024 largely on the back of a promise to handle the rising cost of living and he faces mid-term elections this year. It is likely that the cost of the war will not play well with voters, analysts say.

In Israel, opposition politician Yair Golan has also criticised his government’s economic management of the war.

In a post on X on Sunday, he wrote: “The war with Iran has been planned for months. The fact that the Israeli government has not prepared an orderly economic plan to support citizens during the war period is a disgrace.

“The serving and working public should not be the one footing the bill for the war out of its own pocket while billions of shekels go to the evading and non-working sector,” he said, adding that the opposition will soon replace the government.

Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that at a fraction of the cost – and despite a significant technological gap – Iran has demonstrated an ability to hold the global economy at risk, to pressure Washington into “blinking first”.

“A steady stream of inexpensive drones and limited missile strikes can disrupt the thriving economies of Israel and the Gulf, sending shockwaves through energy markets and ultimately translating into higher prices at American gas stations,” he said.

Phillips, the British safety, security and risk adviser, said the strategy has worked in important but limited ways.

“It has helped the Islamic republic survive intense sanctions, clandestine campaigns and periodic strikes while maintaining a credible ability to hit US bases, Israeli territory and Gulf infrastructure, which in turn raises the political and military cost of any attempt at regime-change war,” he said.

“Iran’s reach – stretching from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen – allows it to shape crises, quickly raise the stakes of local conflicts, and force adversaries to devote substantial resources to missile defence, counter‑UAV systems, naval protection and regional coalition management,” he noted.

“However, there are clear constraints and growing problems. Key proxies such as Hezbollah and various militias have suffered leadership and infrastructure losses; the network has become more fragmented and sometimes less controllable, increasing the risk of unwanted escalation even as its coherence as an instrument of policy erodes,” he added.

PHOENIX — When he was selected with the 13th pick of the 2024 MLB draft, outfielder James Tibbs III envisioned himself roaming the outfield of Oracle Park in a San Francisco Giants uniform for many years.

He could never have foreseen that a year and a half later, he’d be playing for a longtime Giants rival, already at the third stop of his young career.

The Giants packaged Tibbs along with Kyle Harrison, Jordan Hicks and Jose Bello in a trade to the Boston Red Sox in exchange for three-time All-Star Rafael Devers last June.

A month and a half later, Tibbs’ life was uprooted yet again, as the Red Sox moved him and Zach Ehrhard to the Dodgers in a trade for Dustin May.

MLB Pipeline prospect analyst Jim Callis has covered the draft for over 30 years, and can’t recall a situation quite like it.

“Tibbs is the only player I can think of who was taken in the top half of the first round and then traded twice during his first full pro season,” Callis said. “He really took off after joining the Dodgers, and I bet we see more consistency out of him when he’s not bouncing between [organizations] in 2026.”

Tibbs seems to have found a comfortable landing spot with the Dodgers. He posted seven home runs, 32 RBI and a .269/.407/.900 slash line over his 36 games in the Dodgers organization, rounding out his season at double-A Tulsa. And during his first camp with the Dodgers, Tibbs has turned heads. Through 15 Cactus League games, he’s hit two home runs, batting .281, with a .351 on-base percentage and .914 OPS.

He likely won’t open the season on the Dodgers’ big-league roster, but manager Dave Roberts sees his potential.

“I like James Tibbs,” Roberts said. “I like him a lot. He loves baseball, he is obsessed with getting better at the game and he just fits who I am as a baseball coach, and the players that we want, so he’s going to play in the big leagues. He’s a championship-type player.”

Tibbs was thrown for a loop by both trades, and taught him a lesson about facing adversity.

“Honestly, I might be one of the first first-round draft picks to be traded twice in their first year,” Tibbs said. “For me it was hard. I’m not going to sugarcoat it; it was hard. And really, mentally draining. [I] felt like I got punched in the face a bunch of times, and really had to learn how to get back up, and keep competing, and figure out how to be true to myself, and true to what I do well.”

Tibbs said that joining the Dodgers helped him to rediscover himself and return to his form from his time at Florida State.

“[When I joined the Dodgers, they] were like, ‘Hey, you know, we just want you to be yourself,” Tibbs said. “We want you to do what you need to do to be successful. Like, we believe in you, we believe in what you did in college. We want you to get that back and be able to be successful with how you swing the bat and how you play defense, and like, we don’t want to take that away from you.’ So obviously, there was tweaks being made, and there was things we needed to change a little bit to get to that spot, but I think for the most part, they just allowed me to be me and work within those boundaries to help figure out how to continue to make that better and better and better.

“And with that being said, I just felt a lot of relief from that.”

Tibbs clubbed 28 home runs in his junior year at Florida State, powering the Seminoles to their first College World Series trip since 2019. He received ACC Player of the Year and consensus First-Team All-American honors.

“Tibbs was one of the best offensive prospects in a loaded 2024 college class,” Callis said. “He makes good swing decisions and hits balls hard, giving him the ingredients to hit for average and power. Most of his value will come from his bat, but it’s a potentially potent bat.”

For now, Tibbs is content to be fulfilling his potential with one organization.

“Props to the Dodgers, they did everything they could to help me transition to that smoothly and make that a better process,” Tibbs said. “And it’s been a lot easier for me to go out and play every night, with the way that they’ve encouraged me and believed in me. It’s just been a blessing to be here.”

Brazzaville, Republic of Congo – On main roads and public squares across the Congolese capital, posters are up featuring the seven main candidates vying for president.

But at the Moukondo Market in Brazzaville’s fourth district – between lively discussions, people jostling for space and saleswomen trying to attract customers – many voters are less than enthusiastic about this weekend’s election.

Fortune, a 27-year-old unemployed university graduate who did not want to give his last name, said he does not expect much to come from the polls.

“When you see how money is spent during the campaign, you wonder if those in power really care about the living conditions of the population,” he said.

While Congo is the third largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa, about half the country’s population of about six million people live below the poverty line.

A few metres away, Gilbert, 44, shared similar sentiments. The civil servant explained that his salary is not enough to cover all his household expenses.

“I do odd jobs to supplement my income. At my age, believing that these elections will change our daily lives would be almost suicidal,” he said.

“I’ve known practically the same leader all my life,” Gilbert added. “Some call it stability. Others say that nothing changes.”

It’s a sentiment shared by many in the country: That after 40 years under a single leader, political continuity has become the norm.

President Denis Sassou Nguesso, 82, who is once again standing in the election, first came to power in Congo in 1979. After a period of political transition in the early 1990s, he returned to the presidency in 1997 after a civil war and has ruled the country without interruption ever since.

Two major constitutional revisions have marked his political trajectory. The 2002 constitution and the one adopted in 2015 notably changed certain eligibility requirements, allowing the head of state to continue to run for office.

For Nguesso’s supporters, this political longevity is primarily attributed to the stability the country has managed to maintain in a region often marked by conflict.

Congo’s neighbours include the conflict-racked Central African Republic; Gabon, which witnessed a coup in 2023; and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the government is facing armed groups, most notably M23.

In official discourse, peace and institutional continuity are regularly presented as the main achievements of the Nguesso government.

However, several foreign observers painted a more nuanced picture of the political situation. The pro-democracy organisation Freedom House classified Congo as a “not free” country while the Ibrahim Index of African Governance highlighted limited progress in democratic participation and political accountability.

‘Asymmetrical political competition’

In the last presidential election in 2021, the official results gave Nguesso more than 88 percent of the votes cast with a reported voter turnout of 67 percent.

Nguesso is widely expected to win again when the country goes to the polls on Sunday.

Some analysts said the president’s political longevity can be partly explained by the country’s political structure.

Charles Abel Kombo, a Congolese economist and public policy observer, described the political system as a hybrid model.

“The Congolese political system combines formally pluralistic institutions – elections, political parties, parliament – with a high degree of centralisation of executive power,” he explained. “Nguesso’s political longevity can be explained in part by the structure of the institutional apparatus and the predominant role of the executive branch in the management of the state.”

According to him, the continuity of power is also linked to perceptions of stability in a country marked by the conflicts of the 1990s.

“In this historical context, this continuity can be seen as a factor of stability. But it is also accompanied by asymmetrical political competition.” In other words, political change remains theoretically possible but politically difficult.

For the economist, however, the issue goes beyond political change alone.

“The central challenge remains the ability of political actors to propose a credible plan for economic transformation. Countries dependent on natural resources need a strategic state capable of diversifying the economy and guiding productive transformation.”

Other observers took a more critical view of this political longevity.

For economic and political analyst Alphonse Ndongo, the stability often touted by the authorities must be examined with caution.

“There is indeed a stabilising regime because it has succeeded in maintaining peace. This is what is being sold today as the main recipe for success: There is no war, so the country is at peace. But this peace also allows those in power to remain there. We are in a kind of democratic illusion where elections often resemble a deal,” he said.

According to him, the current political architecture makes a change in leadership unlikely in the short term.

“It is difficult for the institutions responsible for managing elections to produce a result that differs from what everyone already expects. Everything is structured, from voter registration to the organisation of the ballot. Under these conditions, a surprising result seems unlikely,” he said.

‘Political alternatives exist’

As the debate continues in Congolese society over whether the country’s political continuity is a mark of stability or a system that is hard to change, the opposition appears fragmented and weakened.

Some established parties are boycotting the vote while some prominent potential ⁠candidates are in prison or exile.

In June, the party of opposition leader Clement Mierassa was removed from the official list of recognised political parties.

For him, the conditions for a truly democratic election are not in place.

“We have always called for essential reforms: a truly independent national electoral commission, reliable voter rolls and a law regulating campaign spending,” he said. “Without these guarantees, it is difficult to talk about free and transparent elections.”

Other political actors, however, have chosen to run in the election.

Christ Antoine Wallembaud, spokesperson for candidate Destin Melaine Gavet, said participation remains a way of defending the political space.

“The electoral system has flaws, but that does not mean that those who participate in it condone fraud. Participating also serves as a reminder of the need for reform and shows that a political alternative exists.”

For many observers, access to the media is also a key issue during election campaigns.

“Access to public media remains a recurring problem for opposition candidates. The ruling party candidate always gets the lion’s share even though the High Council for Freedom of Communication has established a list of appearances on state media so that all candidates can present their programmes,” said a Congolese journalist who requested anonymity.

Faced with these difficulties, opposition candidates often turn to private media outlets to spread their messages.

Congolese authorities, for their part, insisted that civil liberties are fully guaranteed for all.

The prime minister and spokesperson for Nguesso, Anatole Collinet Makosso, recently said freedom of opinion and expression “is doing very well”.

“Freedom of expression is alive and well in Congo. The proof is the multitude of foreign journalists here to cover this election. No journalist has been arrested because of their work or prosecuted,” he said.

For the government, this international media presence is evidence of the transparency of the electoral process and the ability of the media to work freely in the country.

However, some press freedom organisations paint a different picture. In its World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders regularly highlights the difficulties faced by local journalists, particularly in terms of access to public information, political pressure and economic constraints.

Adapting to circumstances

In the working-class neighbourhoods of Brazzaville, reactions to Sunday’s election range from resignation to pragmatism.

In Bacongo, a young man on the street explained that he has learned to adapt to circumstances.

“When the country goes left, we go left. When it goes right, we go right. Doing the opposite can be dangerous,” he said while refusing to give his name.

Beyond the political debate, economic concerns remain central.

The Congolese economy is heavily dependent on oil, which accounts for about 70 percent of its exports and nearly 40 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), according to the World Bank. This dependence exposes the country to fluctuations in international energy prices.

Public debt has also reached high levels in recent years, exceeding 90 percent of the GDP before being partially restructured under agreements with international creditors.

In this context, several economists said the electoral stakes go beyond the single issue of political change.

Diversifying the economy, creating jobs for a predominantly young population and improving public services are major challenges in the years ahead.

But many Congolese aren’t hopeful that Sunday’s election will make a difference to their material reality because political and economic power will likely remain in the same hands.

“We all understand the system in this country,” Fortune said. “The [economic] crisis doesn’t affect everyone, nor does poverty.”