Protests

Aug. 19 (UPI) — Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel has withdrawn from a high-profile libertarian summit in Argentina where he was scheduled to appear alongside President Javier Milei, days after protesters dressed as Gandalf demonstrated outside his $12 million Buenos Aires mansion.

Thiel had been scheduled as one of the central speakers at the “Vientos de Cambio,” or “Winds of Change,” summit on Sept. 1 and 2 in Buenos Aires, organized by the Libertad y Progreso Foundation. He was expected to hold a public conversation with Chilean commentator Axel Kaiser, while Milei was scheduled to close the gathering, according to Argentine news outlet elDiarioAR.

The foundation said Thiel canceled because of scheduling and logistical issues and did not connect his decision to the protest.

“Due to scheduling and logistical reasons completely unrelated to the organization of the event, Peter Thiel will ultimately be unable to travel to Buenos Aires,” Libertad y Progreso said in a statement cited by elDiarioAR. The organization said Thiel and his team had tried to reconcile the appearance with previous commitments but that travel difficulties made his participation impossible.

The summit is intended to showcase Argentina’s economic transformation under Milei and will bring together government officials, investors, academics and think tanks from Latin America, the United States and Europe. Economy Minister Luis Caputo and Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger are among the government officials scheduled to participate, according to La Nación.

Thiel’s withdrawal came after an unusual demonstration Monday outside his home in Barrio Parque, one of Buenos Aires’ most exclusive neighborhoods.

A group of protesters wearing gray robes, pointed hats and white beards dressed as Gandalf, the wizard from J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings, gathered outside the property carrying a banner reading, “You shall not pass,” La Nación reported.

The choice of character was a pointed reference to Thiel’s well-documented fascination with Tolkien. Thiel co-founded data analytics company Palantir Technologies, whose name comes from the “palantíri,” seeing stones in Tolkien’s fictional universe that allow their users to communicate across long distances and view faraway events.

The demonstrators protested Thiel’s growing presence and investments in Argentina, including a recently disclosed $76 million stake in oil producer Vista Energy, according to elDiarioAR.

Thiel Macro LLC reported holding 1,189,792 American depositary shares of Vista at the end of the second quarter, worth approximately $76 million and representing about 1% of the company, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing cited by La Nación. The Vista investment was the fund’s second-largest reported equity position behind Amazon and represented about 18% of its reported stock portfolio.

Vista is one of the major operators in Vaca Muerta, Argentina’s massive shale oil and gas formation, making the investment Thiel’s most significant publicly disclosed financial bet in the country.

His financial expansion has come alongside increasingly visible ties to Milei and senior members of his government.

Thiel met with Milei at the Casa Rosada presidential palace in April, part of a series of meetings between the two over the past two years. El País reported that the April meeting was their fourth since 2024, following encounters at the Casa Rosada in January 2024, at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles that May and another meeting in Buenos Aires.

During his latest stay in Argentina, Thiel also met with presidential adviser Santiago Caputo, while Economy Minister Luis Caputo received him at the Economy Ministry in May, La Nación reported.

Thiel temporarily settled in Buenos Aires with his husband and children in early April and purchased a six-bedroom mansion in Barrio Parque for about $12 million, according to La Nación.

His outreach has extended beyond Milei’s political circle. On June 3, Thiel held a more than three-hour meeting at his home with opposition lawmaker and social leader Juan Grabois, one of Milei’s most outspoken political opponents. Grabois later said the meeting was intended to help him understand the political and technological project of Silicon Valley’s emerging elite.

Russia summons Japan’s ambassador to Moscow over Prime Minister Sanae ⁠Takaichi’s ‘anti-Russian’ remarks.

Russia has strongly protested to Japan’s ambassador ‌to Moscow the “anti-Russian” comments made by ⁠Prime Minister Sanae ⁠Takaichi after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited one of the disputed Kuril Islands for the first time last week.

Putin’s controversial visit to the territories last Thursday prompted Japan to summon Russia’s ambassador in protest.

Japan’s prime minister called Putin’s visit to the disputed islands “grave” and “absolutely unacceptable”. “The Northern Territories are inherently part of Japan’s territory, both historically and under international law,” she said.

“This visit has further hardened anti-Russian sentiment within Japan and has made the restoration of relations over the medium- to long- term more difficult,” Takaichi added.

Japan’s ambassador to Moscow left the meeting at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday after 25 minutes without making any comment.

Disputed islands

Ties between Russia and Japan have long been dogged by the Kuril Islands, known in Japan as the Northern Territories.

The islands were seized in 1945 by the Soviet Union, which went on to expel the Japanese population.

The dispute over the southern Kuril Islands – Iturup, Kunashir, Shikotan and the Habomai Islands – prevented Russia and Japan from signing a post-World War II peace treaty.

Deteriorating relations

On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Takaichi’s comments on Putin’s visit had “crossed the line of decency” and criticised Tokyo’s “militaristic line”.

Relations between Moscow and Tokyo have worsened since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Japan has joined other G7 countries in sanctioning Russia and giving financial and non-lethal defence aid to Ukraine, which recognises Japan’s claim over the disputed islands.

Japan indirectly supports Ukraine’s air defence by exporting domestically produced Patriot interceptor missiles to the United States, helping replenish US stockpiles that have been reduced by military aid to Kyiv.

Analysts said Putin’s visit to the Kurils could be a warning to Japan not to deepen its support for Ukraine by supplying Patriot missiles directly to Kyiv or working closer with NATO.

In recent years, Japan has relaxed pacifist policies by lifting a ban on lethal weapons exports. But it remains unable to supply lethal military equipment directly to a country at war, including Ukraine.

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.”

New Delhi, India – On the night of August 4, in a counting hall in the eastern Indian city of Patna, some 1,000km (620 miles) from the national capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered one of its most stunning political setbacks in 12 years.

Bankipur, a constituency in the legislature of the state of Bihar, had been held by the BJP for three decades. But the fledgling Jan Suraaj Party, led by political strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor, ended that reign, winning a seat that the BJP’s national president, Nitin Nabin, had held until just a few months earlier.

The defeat came less than two weeks after India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, bowing to seven weeks of student-led protests that had shaken New Delhi and spread to several cities. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical outfit born on Instagram in May after India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, compared unemployed young Indians with “cockroaches” and “parasites”, had led those protests.

Nabin, the BJP chief, had spent the Bankipur campaign denouncing the country’s Gen Z protesters as “a virus and a cockroach gang devoted to breaking the country”.

Instead, it was the BJP’s stranglehold over the constituency that was broken. That surprise electoral verdict has thrust upon India a broader question, say analysts: Will India’s most formidable political machine — the BJP — be forced to change?

A charm offensive, gone slightly wrong

The clearest sign that the BJP treats the Gen Z uprising as more than a passing nuisance is the sheer awkwardness of the party’s response. During the peak of the protests, Modi released a string of selfie-style videos on Instagram addressing the exam paper leaks that led to the protests. He reportedly told cabinet colleagues that young people were “just on Instagram”, urging ministers to court them on the platform with reels rather than media briefings.

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, the party has launched a Gen Z outreach initiative directing civil administrative officers into schools for career counselling sessions.

The BJP has also released a gym-set video in which young people trade internet slang with an older trainer who steers the talk towards the government’s development record. The slang was laid on so thick that many Instagram users mocked the party, joking that it had seemingly paid young people to write propaganda aimed at their own generation.

After another video of Modi that briefly vanished from Facebook, the parliamentary committee on information technology demanded an apology from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.

New Delhi-based analyst Asim Ali says this sudden scramble for social media relevance reveals a lot about the party itself.

The BJP once produced narratives that its own supporters would circulate unprompted. Today, he said, much of its messaging “feels more managed and paid for” – a mismatch for a decentralised space that rewards top-down discipline far less than Facebook and WhatsApp once did.

“The party’s communications machinery remains powerful, given its control over the mainstream media,” Ali told Al Jazeera. “But on social media, especially Instagram, it is unable to generate the kind of organic emotional identification that it could around 2011 to 2014.”

Gilles Verniers, a researcher at the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po in Paris, described the BJP’s outreach as “a battle for perception” rather than a policy shift.

“There haven’t been any proposals that fundamentally change anything,” he said. “There’s a new minister for education, but he comes from the same background, an old man from the RSS.” The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is the far-right ideological parent of the BJP.

Verniers argued that what was genuinely broken is the BJP’s usual playbook against dissent: branding protesters antinational, foreign-funded or terrorists, as they did during demonstrations against the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019-20. The changed citizenship law, for the first time, introduced a religious test for naturalised citizenship: non-Muslim asylum seekers from India’s neighbouring nations were given a faster track to citizenship.

That past approach towards protests failed this time partly because the movement mocked itself before the state could, and partly because it was pluralistic.

Unlike the anti-CAA or farmers’ protests, it could not be pinned to one religion or community, and also drew in young people from the BJP’s own so-called “upper-caste” Hindu base. It was a “truly caste-blind movement”, Verniers said.

The episode also punctured a notion pushed by the BJP, he said, that Modi held a natural command over the youth.

For the first time, the prime minister “appears his age”, Verniers said of 75-year-old Modi.

“What the movement has done is really turn him into a boomer in the public imagination, and that must really, really hurt,” he added.

Does any of this show up in the numbers?

The BJP lost two of the three by-elections held in the first week of August, in states it governs – Bankipur in Bihar and Datia in Madhya Pradesh. However, it comfortably retained the third, Manjalpur in Gujarat, Modi’s home state.

Opposition leaders drew a straight line from the losses to the student protests, but analysts were more cautious. Ali warned against reading too much into the Bankipur vote.

By-elections, Verniers added, are decided by a fraction of the electorate, “barely a third of the population vote”, and that the BJP’s system of power “has proved very resilient to absorbing setbacks”.

Verniers points to Haryana, where the BJP won a majority a few years after the northern state’s farmers joined a yearlong movement to oppose three controversial agricultural laws. It was an election fought “not on farmers, but on caste”, he said.

What had shifted was not the vote count but a surrounding story now building “into a broader narrative of challenges to the BJP”.

An MP on the ground

Few politicians visited Jantar Mantar, the epicentre of the Gen Z protests in New Delhi, as often as Pushpendra Saroj, 27, a Samajwadi Party member of parliament from Kaushambi in Uttar Pradesh. The Samajwadi Party is the main opposition to the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

Saroj watched a gathering of a few hundred swell into thousands after activist Sonam Wangchuk was hospitalised following a 20-day hunger strike. He credited this to “the aggression from the government” – weeks of silence, alleged cuts to power and water and the July 20 baton charge against protesters in New Delhi. The crowd had grown beyond its student base to include army veterans and even serving police officers.

The politician pointed out that the education minister’s resignation came only after “fingers got pointed at the prime minister directly”.

A simpler sympathy helped, too. “Nobody likes to see children getting beaten up,” Saroj said.

‘This is not a victory in any terms’

For many who marched in New Delhi, the story is bigger than a satirical “Cockroach” Instagram page or a single resignation. Anjali, a postgraduate student and secretary of the All India Students’ Association (AISA) at the University of Delhi, an older left-aligned group that mobilised alongside the CJP, reads the protests as the surfacing of a longer-term anger.

“We know for a fact that this did not originate from a particular remark or any particular leak,” she told Al Jazeera. “This is an accumulated anger of the youth of this country for the last 12 years. As long as communal, casteist, anti-women politics is not ended, this is not a victory in any terms,” she said.

Anjali was also critical of who paid the price once the protests ended. Muslim and Dalit students, she said, were “the first to be put behind bars”, the first to face intimidation and police complaints, echoing the 2019 raid on Jamia Millia Islamia, the New Delhi university at the heart of the anti-CAA protests.

In the western state of Goa, police detained two young men for allegedly backing jailed activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam while celebrating Pradhan’s exit, an episode she reads as part of the same pattern.

What comes next for the CJP movement?

Ali, Verniers and Anjali all agree that a leap into electoral politics is unlikely for the CJP.

Verniers called that restraint from the group so far “tactically smart”, citing the example of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a protest movement that built a successful party but, a decade into power, is “seen as a disappointment” and “on the verge of disappearance” in some former strongholds.

A national campaign demands money, volunteers and organisation that a young, often underemployed movement lacks. Its more durable influence, Verniers suggested, will be on other parties’ agendas, “as an interest group, rather than as a separate political force”, one the opposition has been unusually willing to embrace.

Anjali described AISA’s posture in similar terms: present at Jantar Mantar, but unwilling to let the fight narrow to one resignation. The group, she said, plans to keep building the argument against the government on campuses nationwide.

Al Jazeera reached out to 18 BJP national spokespeople for their responses to this article, but did not receive any replies.

The gap between power and legitimacy

Ali said he did not expect the BJP to trade its Hindu majoritarian politics — an ideology known as Hindutva — for one built on jobs and education, as demanded by CJP-led Gen Z protesters.

“I don’t think the BJP would dilute its Hindutva agenda; if anything, it would double down on it, so that the most salient issue in any election is religious identity.”

That may be, but what has changed, Verniers suggested, is not so much the BJP’s raw political power as its legitimacy.

“Electorally speaking, they are as dominant as they’ve ever been, perhaps more,” Verniers said. He cited the party’s ability to win elections, engineer defections, and outspend rivals, as proof of their continued success and of the BJP having pushed “the boundaries of what is democratically admissible”.

But the authority behind that dominance is what the protests have dented. And that gulf “between the actual power that the BJP has, and its ability to have citizens comply and obey” is harder to repair with a by-election win or a polished reel, he said.

That gap, Verniers said, “is the really important, interesting disconnect” the party now has to live with.

New Delhi, India — Authorities dispatched workers early to New Delhi on the morning of July 26 to paint over the graffitied walls near the Jantar Mantar observatory.

A day earlier, protests over an exam leak scandal, led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), had led to the ousting of India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

The entry curve of the protest strip read: “#2026 Gen-Z REVOLUTION!!!”

A man in his early twenties climbed a tree carrying a powerful loudspeaker and blasted a song. “Azadi, give me freedom! Azadi, give me freedom! Azadi, give me freedom!” The crowd followed the words, with their hands raised in the air.

Azadi, translated as “freedom” in English, a popular hip-hop song from the Bollywood film Gully Boy, became the anthem of the student protests in one of the biggest challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government in years.

Fast-paced video footage of police personnel beating students at New Delhi’s Parliament Street gave a new lease of life to the nearly decade-old track.

It was not just in Delhi – the chants reverberated in other cities such as Jaipur, Lucknow and Mumbai.

Just a decade ago, Azadi was among the most radioactive words — and criminalised protest slogans — in Delhi, for which student leaders were jailed for treason.

After thousands of protesters returned home following the minister’s resignation last month, the lights at Jantar Mantar had gone out. But rows of bright-yellow metal police barricades still lined the street. Many of them were painted over by protesters. One of them read, in red: “Umar, Sharjeel, Gulfisha were here before you”.

The journey of the Azadi chant — from Pakistan’s feminist movement, the Kashmiri resistance, to the mainstream in India — charts the evolution of both a political slogan and student politics and activism in India under Modi’s rule over the last decade.

‘Criminalising university spaces’

December 9, 2016, was supposed to be a casual evening at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of India’s premier public universities that for decades has also been a cauldron of political activism.

A group of students coming together to meet was just another banal event. This meeting was to discuss capital punishment in India, looking at the case of a Kashmiri, hanged for an armed attack on India’s parliament in 2001.

At least, that’s how Banojyotsna Lahiri, a close friend of Umar Khalid and one of the organisers of the event, who spoke to Al Jazeera, remembered that winter evening.

Indian TV media channels, seen as friendly to Modi’s government, made the event a national political flashpoint, repeatedly airing footage of students chanting Azadi slogans, led by then JNU student union president Kanhaiya Kumar.

Pro-Modi media labelled the students as “sympathisers of terrorists” and some channels even aired doctored clips about the event.

Students like Khalid and JNU became household names as the controversy “blew out of proportion,” Lahiri said.

“Intense media trial picked up. It was a targeted campaign: propagating that antinational students lived off taxpayers’ money,” Lahiri recalled. Within days, sedition charges and arrests followed, with Khalid and others released on bail a few weeks later.

The JNU has been a traditional bastion of left-liberal politics, which also puts it in the crosshairs with the country’s Hindu majoritarian right, especially under Modi. But it was not the only university with popular anti-establishment politics at the time.

After a Dalit student, Rohith Vemula, died by suicide in Hyderabad, in southern India, alleging caste discrimination, the Central University there erupted in protests, followed by a government crackdown.

These events in early 2016 kicked off a government campaign that gradually eroded space for dissent and expression in India’s public universities. Students said this has worsened over the years.

Right-wing goons attacked student leaders. Khalid was shot at in New Delhi. Universities blocked permissions to hold discussions, film screenings or protests.

“It requires a lot of courage to be a student activist or leader in India, after coming from small towns,” Apoorvanand, a professor of Hindi at Delhi University, said.

“It is the first time in independent India where the government has undertaken a coordinated, well-thought-out attack on student activism.”

Lahiri said that the media campaign led to serious repercussions for those involved in the protests.

“The tag of antinational was accepted in wider Indian imagination, outside universities and these students [like Khalid] could never shed it,” Lahiri said.

In 2019, protests erupted against proposed amendments to India’s citizenship laws, which were seen as discriminatory against Muslims and rendering them second-class citizens.

Several Muslim student leaders in Delhi shot to national prominence for their fiery speeches and organising protests against the proposed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The government appeared to step back from a nationwide screening of who qualifies as an Indian citizen amid the protests.

Another crackdown followed, jailing dozens of prominent student activists and burying their cases under piles of charges, including terrorism.

After the citizenship protests in 2019, which ran into 2020, students say the spaces in universities for protest shrank even further.

Police presence and inquiries were beefed up; students allege that several politically biased appointments to university administrations were made, and funding for research and institutions was slashed.

Six years on, student leaders like Khalid, who was rearrested, and Sharjeel Imam continue to be imprisoned without trial.

The journey of ‘Azadi’

After the controversy in 2016, the visuals of JNU reverberating with Azadi slogans inspired a music producer, Dub Sharma, to layer electronic beats over the crowd chants, which flows as the central melody.

Those slogans called for freedom from caste-based hierarchy, capitalism, hunger, and to break free from the influence of the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Three years later, the track was tapped by director Zoya Akhtar for her 2019 Bollywood flick, Gully Boy, inspired partly by the poverty of rappers in Mumbai’s slums. Sharma recreated the song for the movie — and recruited popular Mumbai artist Divine to rap to it.

But the revised version of the song only retained “freedom from hunger” from the crowd’s original chants, omitting other calls for social justice. The film’s team faced criticism for hollowing out the original track but they defended it, arguing that the track was altered to suit the film’s own arc.

Seven years ago, in the recreated version, Divine rapped about income inequality, politicians’ privileged children and called on people to take over a corrupt system — all of which have become the central theme of Gen Z protests across the world.

Under Modi, India has continued to slide in multiple democratic indices. This year, Sharma’s rehashed score became the anthem of the students’ resistance, calling for wider educational reforms.

The earliest modern political life of the Azadi chant can be traced to Pakistan’s feminist resistance to General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in the 1980s. The late Indian feminist activist Kamla Bhasin recalled being inspired by the chant’s fluidity and adopting it to the Indian subcontext, making the calls suitable to specific protests.

Kashmiri resistance to Indian occupation adopted the slogan in the late 1980s as well. The left liberal movement in New Delhi caught up, too. But their calls to freedom were specific to their unique contexts.

A year before Bhasin passed away in 2021, she referred to the Azadi chants in an interview as “a living, breathing slogan”.

“This slogan grows every day, it evolves every day. Its meaning is not set in stone.”

Beginners’ guide to protesting in Delhi

A month after India’s chief justice controversially equated India’s unemployed youth with cockroaches and parasites, the insult caught the national imagination last June.

A Boston University graduate, Abhijeet Dipke, casually wondered: “What if all cockroaches come together?” in a post on X. He then started a social media campaign, under the self-named Cockroach Janta Party, and went viral on the internet. It gained more than 22 million followers on Instagram, more than double Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power since 2014.

Dipke returned to India, pledging to launch an agitation, channelling support in calling for education reforms starting with the resignation of the former education minister, after a series of examination scandals that affected millions of Indian students.

On June 6, he landed in New Delhi and came straight to the Jantar Mantar protest site, where he stood with Neha Bora, the national president of All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

Bora, a slight 29-year-old, had been with AISA for eight years, since her college days in Delhi’s JNU.

“[The Cockroach movement] did not have any idea about what might happen, or what to expect here,” she told Al Jazeera, sitting cross-legged in a loose T-shirt. “They didn’t know what to do. They were excited but also scared.”

Bora said student unions, like hers, “helped the protest stand” and take shape.

After the protest occupied the Jantar Mantar strip, defying frequent police orders to vacate, Bora’s AISA, alongside the Student Federation of India (SFI), another prominent left-wing student organisation, organised a protest camp. Six students joined educator-turned-activist Sonam Wangchuk, 59, on a hunger strike.

For a month, student volunteers from these organisations took shifts at the protest site, making sure it was occupied at all times. They gave the protest slogans, placards, and a voice that helped bring it international prominence.

“Sit-in means a lot of repetition for those people who you’re appealing to join,” Bora said, describing challenges. “As a student organisation, we knew the science behind keeping protest alive: bring in different sections of society to support the movement, like lawyers, professors and farmers.”

The Jantar Mantar protest was particularly remarkable in ways that experienced protest organisers — whose politics for years has been criminalised or sidelined — quietly equipped a younger generation to organise what, from the outside, appeared to be a leaderless movement, political analysts say.

With this came the same playbook from opponents to delegitimise the students, said Bora. For weeks, they fought back against “baseless conspiracies and allegations of being antinationals or foreign-funded”. At one point, Education Minister Pradhan called the protesters the “B-team of terrorists”.

However, this time, criminalising the young protesters did not work, and the demonstration continued to grow in popularity. Rather, the movement, campaigning on education issues, gave the student organisation a shot at gaining a foothold in national politics, said Apoorvanand.

Rediscovering ‘Azadi’

This summer, the grammar of Indian politics appeared to flip in the Gen Z protest wave. A stroll through the protest strip, reverberating with Azadi chants, raised a question: what had changed in New Delhi since 2016?

Before peeling back the layers, Lahiri, Khalid’s friend, insists that one needs to settle on a baseline: “The earlier citizenship protests were for Muslims, led by Muslims. Their names were Muslims, therefore [they were] easier to criminalise.” Several political analysts agree.

By contrast, none of the most prominent names in this year’s student protests was Muslim — though the organisers repeatedly called out the “hate and divisive politics” of the ruling government, which has been criticised for alleged targeted attacks on minorities.

Mohammad Junaid, a volunteer at the site, became the most visible Muslim face at the Jantar Mantar strip. Even before everyone had returned home after the protest ended, Junaid and his family members were picked up and harassed by police, he said.

At one point, the Cockroach leaders asked the protesters to refrain from chanting “negative” Azadi slogans. That made no difference among the crowd, though.

N Sai Balaji, a student activist who served as AISA’s national president from 2019 to 2023, said there is a clear difference between the student leaders’ pre and post-citizenship protests, where they have moved on from being objects of representation to owning the narrative.

“It’s just not the same kind. They are tech-savvy 1786809159, know how to integrate their message, and they know the language of the internet so well because they grew up there,” he told Al Jazeera. He compared this with his own generation growing up watching TV.

“That is why the traditional media was useless for them. Rather, they became the media themselves,” Balaji said. “They owned their story. Something we could not do.”

Balaji stressed that social media influencers and alternative media spaces reported the protest and became the main medium of amplification. Many began boycotting traditional media outlets seen as friendly to the government. “And no one was calling them antinationals in this new space,” he said.

Instead, for instance, when videos of Bora on hunger strike were watched by millions, Balaji said, it made people question the status quo. “India’s aspirational class, who felt betrayed by the government’s broken promises, found hope in people who were sitting selflessly,” Balaji stressed.

“That’s where the whole propaganda vanishes. Suddenly, the so-called antinationals become humans too,” he added.

Lahiri said the current generation of student leaders broke through traditional moulds of activism. “With their language, imagery, and Instagram reels, people outside universities are now able to connect more,” she said.

And with spaces inside universities criminalised, the students’ politics are yet again spilling out onto the streets, added Lahiri. She went a step further to note that unlike her own generation, the new student protesters are “trying to do politics under even harsher circumstances”.

Call it shallow, Lahiri argued, breaking into a laugh, but just saying, “Fu** Modi,” is more of a slap in the face, instead of our sentiments coated in academic language.

Out of the flood of online memes and posters, one stayed with Lahiri. It read: “Umar Khalid walked, so Gen Z could run.” She is not sure if Khalid would agree with this, but she does.

For Bora’s part, she told Al Jazeera, the 2019 citizenship movement led by Muslims “inspired a revolution inside” her, which keeps her going even today.

Painting her predecessors as antinationals and traitors of India, Bora said, the Modi government criminalised the mere expression of the word Azadi by “creating so much noise around it.”

However, “when students faced police brutality — when the wounds of those batons were fresh on their bodies — one understands that the Azadi slogan is the most radical assertion of fundamental rights in India”, Bora said.

Indian PM said the Maoist-influenced Naxalite armed rebellion is largely gone, but its ideological backers still pose threat.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said the country has largely eliminated a Maoist rebellion which it battled for decades but still faces a threat from the movement’s ideological backers.

Speaking on India’s Independence Day on Saturday, Modi said India had succeeded in “getting rid of armed Naxals” – referring to members of the Maoist-influenced Naxalite movement that challenged state authority across swaths of central and eastern India.

However, he said “dimagi Naxals” (intellectual Naxals) are looking for opportunities to create violence, and need to be “identified and isolated”.

The phrase “dimagi Naxal” echoes the politically charged label “urban Naxal,” a term Modi and leaders of his Bharatiya Janata Party have previously used for activists, academics, intellectuals and other government critics.

The remarks come weeks after a youth-led protest movement, the Cockroach Janta Party, emerged as a rare challenge to Modi’s government and helped force the resignation of his education minister.

While Modi did not mention the protests, he repeatedly highlighted initiatives aimed at young Indians, including AI skills training and free online coaching for competitive exams.

He said India had transformed from a “fragile” economy into the world’s fastest-growing major economy over the past decade and reaffirmed his government’s goal of turning the country into a developed nation by 2047, the centenary of its independence.

India’s Naxalite movement began in 1967 with an uprising in the village of Naxalbari in eastern India, and grew into a decades-long armed rebellion championing the rights of landless farmers, the rural poor and Indigenous communities. Thousands of civilians, rebels and security personnel died in the fighting.

Modi said the Maoist movement had “destroyed the future” of generations of young people and credited his government’s security and development policies with sharply reducing Maoist violence since taking office in 2014.

Rights groups have for years accused India’s government of using anti-terror laws, sedition-related provisions and foreign-funding rules to squeeze civil society and target activists, journalists and groups critical of its policies.

A new LAPD report released Tuesday blamed poor planning and coordination for issues with the department’s response to protests that erupted on city streets last summer in opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

But apart from identifying those problems, the report concluded that police officers performed well in the face of “unprecedented” unrest that sometimes devolved into violence and vandalism.

Missing from the 62-page report — at least in the view of some longtime department observers — was any reflection about officers’ use of less-lethal weapons that left hundreds of people injured and drew strong condemnations from human rights groups.

The report largely blamed protesters for instigating violence and injuring officers, saying “agitators” intent on taking advantage of the disorder made it impossible to avoid using force.

The report said the LAPD was not prepared to deal with the protective equipment and “improvised weaponry” employed by some protesters, including people with oven mitts who picked up and lobbed tear gas canisters back in the direction of officers and others who used leaf blowers to redirect the gas.

During the department’s presentation of the report, one police commissioner, Jeff Skobin, pointed out that demonstrators and journalists who spoke at the meeting felt as though their perspectives weren’t reflected in the report whatsoever. He suggested that LAPD officials consider reaching out to journalists or press organizations as the department reevaluates its media policy.

Commission President Rasha Gerges Shields said the department could have examined whether reforms that were called for in 2020 had been implemented — and areas where the department still needed to improve.

“I just want to make sure that this isn’t just the end-all, be-all of this conversation,” she said.

In response, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said the report had considered past lessons learned, but the “unprecedented” nature of the protests justified the department’s actions.

“The level of violence — I have been doing this for 45 years, I have not seen that here or anywhere else in the country,” he said, noting that nearly 50 officers were injured.

The report said officers were targeted with rocks, bottles, commercial-grade fireworks and Molotov cocktails. Timely communication was a concern at times, the report said, with the department lacking a necessary number of radio wave frequencies.

When less-lethal weapons proved ineffective, the department deployed tear gas on two occasions, June 8 and 14, to disperse “violent groups” and restore order. It was the first time the department had used the measure since at least the 1970s. The decision to use gas “reflected the extreme conditions faced at the height of the unrest,” the report said. The report doesn’t specify who authorized the deployment of the gas.

But the gas also created tactical challenges, since many patrol and Metropolitan Division officers lacked protective masks, increasing their risk of exposure. The report said the chemical agents were “the only viable option to reestablish control.”

In just two weeks of protests, the report said, the department spent $17.47 million in personnel costs, including $12.14 million for overtime. Ultimately, the report concluded, the department “contained the unrest” without any loss of life or “major breaches of critical infrastructure.”

Some critics said the report failed to answer basic questions, such as how many less-lethal rounds were fired or how many officers were disciplined for misconduct.

Like past after-action reports, the review was hyper-focused on the threats faced by officers, critics said. But, they noted, it had little to say about how officers’ use of less-lethal weapons — sometimes in clear violation of the department’s own policies — that were widely documented documented on social media and in news accounts.

“If the department can’t even recognize the possibility that they might have a problem with how they police protests, after last summer, how can anyone expect them to do anything differently next time?” said Peter Bibring, a civil rights attorney who previously served as director of police practices at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

According to the city attorney’s office, more than 120 claims for damages have been filed against the city in connection to police actions during pro-immigration protests as of April. The city is still facing lawsuits stemming from the 2020 protests over the police killing of George Floyd. The latest spate of civil actions could tie the city up in costly litigation for years to come.

At Tuesday’s commission meeting, the 45-minute public comment period was extended to accommodate dozens of speakers, many of whom criticized the report for whitewashing what they described as the department’s heavy-handed response to the protests.

Despite years of costly lawsuits, oversight measures and promises by leaders to rein in indiscriminate use of force during protests, officers were shown on video last year trampling demonstrators on horseback and aiming so-called less-lethal launchers at people’s heads in a violation of department policy, speakers said. None of that, observers said, was mentioned in the report.

Others argued that the report seems to cast members of the media as nuisances to be dealt with, while ignoring instances in which journalists were targeted by law enforcement.

“It’s an insult,” said Nick Stern, a British news photographer who is suing the Los Angeles County after being struck by sheriff’s deputies while covering a protest in Paramount. “Journalists only show up as logistical problems.”

Another speaker noted the inflammatory language used in the report seemed to justify the aggressive tactics by describing protesters as operating in “cells,” likening them to Al-Qaeda.

Lt. Joseph Fransen, the study’s chief author, told the Commission that he took inspiration from the federal government’s 9/11 after-action report, which dissected mistakes leading up to the terrorist attack.

“These aren’t necessarily points of failure, these are just lessons to be learned in the future,” Fransen said of his report.

Officials have promised thorough investigations of all uses of force. The department limited its use of the launchers after a federal judge issued an injunction in January, but has deployed other types of crowd control weapons in subsequent protests. The judge ruled that officers have repeatedly violated previous court orders that allow the weapon to be used only to subdue protesters who pose a threat of violence.

The report found that, on several nights, the LAPD didn’t have enough personnel to process and transport all the people who were arrested. Between June 7-16, 2025, the department made 435 protest-related arrests, including 182 on June 10 alone. Three out of every four arrest was for unlawful assembly, while 16 arrests were made for violent crimes, including assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer or attempted murder of a police officer. Most people were released on citation. Four-fifths of those arrested came from the county, while others traveled from surrounding counties or outside the state.

The pro-Kremlin nationalist party Rodina accused Yabloko of receiving undeclared campaign support, notably from Western sources – an allegation Yabloko denied.

Russia‘s Supreme Court has barred the only officially registered party opposing Moscow’s war in Ukraine from running in next month’s parliamentary elections.

The court upheld a suit on Monday brought by the small pro-Kremlin nationalist party Rodina to annul the registration of Yabloko, stripping voters of the chance to express their discontent with the four-and-a-half-year conflict at the ballot box.

Last month, the Central Election Commission had initially allowed Yabloko on the ballot along with 10 other parties.

“The claims seeking to annul the registration of the federal list of candidates for the State Duma of the ninth convocation, nominated by the Yabloko political party, were granted,” Judge Vyacheslav Kirillov said.

Rodina alleged that Yabloko had received undeclared campaign support, including from Western sources, among other accusations.

During a day-long hearing, Yabloko leader Nikolai Rybakov said there was no evidence to support the allegations and described the case as an unconstitutional attack on freedom of thought by political opponents seeking to clear the field of rivals.

About 100 supporters, mostly young people, gathered outside the courthouse as police stood by, chanting “Shame! Shame!” after the ruling was delivered. Some carried apples to display their affiliation with Yabloko, which means “apple” in Russian.

Addressing them after the hearing, Rybakov said the party would appeal the decision.

“We have a long way ahead, and we have a big and important task: to stop deaths and bring the peace back,” he said. “Everything we do should be dedicated to that.”

With most of President Vladimir Putin’s opponents jailed, exiled or dead, Yabloko is the only liberal party still operating in Russia.

The party has received the backing of several exiled opposition figures, including Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Both are listed as “extremists” in Russia.

A poll conducted earlier this year showed Yabloko at just three percent support – short of the five-percent threshold needed to enter Russia’s lower house.

With the Kremlin tightening its control over elections, Yabloko has failed to win seats in the State Duma since 2003.

Since then, every parliamentary vote has been won by the ruling United Russia party, which backs Putin.

Efforts to end the Ukraine war through diplomacy have so far failed, with Putin pushing hardline territorial demands to end the fighting and ruling out talks with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Independent polls show most Russians favour peace negotiations with Kyiv.

Indian police have used batons, tear gas and water cannons against protesters in Jharkhand. They were marching to the state assembly to demand an overhaul of ‌the state’s examination system after alleged irregularities in government recruitment tests.

Hundreds of people marched on Saturday in the town of Soller, in the island of Mallorca against mass tourism. Protesters exclaimed that tourism has had an impact on the cost of living for locals, and that access to housing has become more difficult.

Al Jazeera’s Teresa Bo reports from Buenos Aires, where police fired tear gas as thousands protested against a private property bill. Opponents fear it will lead to foreigners owning too much land, while the Milei government says the law would attract investment.

Min Aung Hlaing stressed that his government was focused on ending the civil war and restoring peace.

The head of Myanmar’s military-backed government has met Thailand’s prime minister in Bangkok as he seeks to boost his government’s legitimacy more than five years after seizing power.

President Min Aung Hlaing arrived in Thailand’s capital on Thursday, on his first official visit to the country since taking power in a coup in 2021.

Myanmar remains in the midst of a bloody civil war triggered by the coup, which has killed more than 100,000 people, according to monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED).

During a meeting with Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, Min Aung Hlaing stressed that Myanmar’s military-backed government was focused on ending the civil war and restoring peace to the resource-rich country.

“Myanmar has now reestablished itself on the path to democracy and is moving toward a better future,” Min Aung Hlaing said. “As the new government, we have now begun working on national stability, peace, and national reconciliation.”

Min Aung Hlaing is pushing for Myanmar to be readmitted to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), from which his government was barred after failing to implement a peace plan agreed with member states in 2021.

Thailand is one of Myanmar’s top foreign investors and has called for a “calibrated re-engagement approach” with its neighbour, with which it shares a 2,400km (1500-mile) border.

Following the meeting, the two leaders delivered speeches at the Thailand-Myanmar Business Forum.

Anutin said Thailand and Myanmar are ready to “step into the new chapter of economic cooperation that is built upon mutual trust and benefit for the people of the two countries”.

Min Aung Hlaing told attendees they could “invest with confidence” in Myanmar’s energy, agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare, technology and other sectors.

The visit has drawn criticism from activist groups such as Justice For Myanmar, which stated that the trip lends “false legitimacy” to Min Aung Hlaing and the ruling generals.

About a dozen demonstrators gathered outside the United Nations regional headquarters in Bangkok to oppose the visit. Some protesters could be seen holding placards denouncing him as a “criminal” who was not welcome in Thailand.

Min Aung Hlaing was sworn in as president of Myanmar in April following an election that UN experts dismissed as a “sham”.

Western governments have shunned and sanctioned Min Aung Hlaing and his associates for overthrowing Aung San Suu Kyi’s government. Subsequent serious rights violations followed a deadly military crackdown on protests, which subsequently triggered a nationwide armed resistance movement and a bloody civil war.

Aung San Suu Kyi, who was overthrown in 2021 and remains under house arrest, was allowed to meet a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Monday.

Suu Kyi’s son Kim Aris welcomed the development but cautioned that he has not yet received independent confirmation of his mother’s condition or wellbeing.

Critics say the visit was a government stunt as it tries to rehabilitate its image.

MINNEAPOLIS — A crowd of critics and supporters of Indiana guard Sophie Cunningham’s stance on transgender participation in women’s sports gathered around and inside Target Center on Sunday as the Fever faced the Lynx in Minnesota.

Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wore a light blue shirt under her jacket that said “Trans kids belong” as she directed her team — the top team in the WNBA — to a 108-100 win over the Fever. There were fans in the stands wearing T-shirts that read, “Trans kids belong in sports.”

It’s the third straight Fever game that drew a rally after Cunningham recently voiced support for barring transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s sports in an ESPN article published last week.

Before the contest, Cunningham and Reeve held a conversation at midcourt. Reeve didn’t want to share the exact nature of their talk.

Lynx guard Olivia Miles shoots over Fever guard Sophie Cunningham Sunday in Minneapolis.

(Abbie Parr / Associated Press)

“Both of us understand that we have platforms and we both talked about wanting to, more than anything, educate,” Reeve said. “There are some things that we have in common, and maybe some things you differ on, just like any issues. I think it’s how you handle things. It was nice to be in person, for sure.”

Cunningham was booed by the crowd on her first touch of the game and throughout.

Outside the arena, dozens of fans gathered near the entrance. A person using a loud speaker repeatedly said, “Protect trans women.” There were signs held up that read, “Love is truth” and “Thank you Sophie.”

Asked how she and the team are navigating the outside conversations, Caitlin Clark said after the game, “I think we’re excellent.

“I think it’s for leagues and governing bodies to work with their athletes to find solutions,” Clark said. “Our focus is on basketball. That’s what we talk about and how we can get wins and obviously we didn’t do that tonight. So we need to find an area to improve in that way.”

Any reaction?

“I just answered,” Clark said.

Cunningham said Friday in Portland that she wasn’t concerned about rallies against transgender participation in women’s sports becoming a distraction for the Fever.

“I think everyone who knows me personally, they know that I’m full of love. I’m bubbly. I love the people around me,” Cunningham said Friday. “I love basketball. I love inspiring the next generation and doing that in a positive light. And so that doesn’t even cross my mind. Doesn’t cross my teammates’ minds.”

Minnesota rookie sensation Olivia Miles spearheaded an efficient offense with 28 points and Courtney Williams added 27 points, helping the Lynx win their 10th straight game despite the controversy surrounding the contest.

People hold signs and point in defense of and opposed to trans athletes in women’s sports before a Lynx-Fever game Sunday.

(Abbie Parr / Associated Press)

Minnesota had a 96-82 lead with 6:41 to play before the Fever, who had scored 100 in a record sixstraight games, pulled within 100-98 with more than 2 1/2 minutes to go. Miles and Williams both came up with big baskets as the Lynx won their 10th straight for the first time since 2016.

The league’s No. 1 offense definitely made life difficult for the league’s No. 2 defense, but the Fever, who played in Portland on Friday night, couldn’t stop the Lynx on the offensive end. Both teams shot 57% with 11 three-pointers and went 11 of 15 from the foul line with a combined 55 assists. The big difference was Indiana had 12 turnovers compared with six for Minnesota, which had an 11-5 advantage in offensive rebounds.

Napheesa Collier had 18 points, eight rebounds and seven assists for the Lynx (25-6). Natasha Howard scored 13 points and Kayla McBride had 10.

The Fever (19-11), who had their five-game winning streak halted, were led by Kelsey Mitchell with 37 points, her fifth 30-point game of the season and 14th straight 20-point game, second in league history behind A’ja Wilson’s 15 straight in a single season. Clark added 19 points and 10 assists and Aliyah Boston had 15 points, eight rebounds and seven assists.

Police cases, social media takedowns and online abuse have followed many who took part in India’s Cockroach Janta Party-led demonstrations that ended on July 25. Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he forgives ‘misled children’ who abused him during the protests.

Police detained several protesters in Lahore, Pakistan as they rallied in solidarity with Pakistan-administered Kashmir. A banned Kashmiri activist group says that at least 30 people have been killed in clashes during regional elections this past week.

Warsaw asserts missile recently made, illustrating Russia’s nightly barrage against Ukraine is draining arsenal.

Poland has summoned the Russian ambassador in protest over a missile incursion into one of its eastern regions.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced on Friday that the ambassador had been summoned after Warsaw confirmed that the projectile, which landed in the village of Tarnawa Kolonia in the Lublin region on Thursday, was a Russian Kh-101 missile. No casualties or injuries have been reported.

An investigation into the incident suggested that Russia’s weapon stockpiles may be running low as it continues to launch nightly barrages of drones and missiles at Ukraine while its more than four-year war drags on.

“The ambassador was informed of our unequivocal condemnation of hostile actions directed against the security of a sovereign state and its citizens,” Maciej Wewior, spokesman for Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told journalists.

“We emphasised that any escalation at the border of the European Union and the North Atlantic alliance [NATO] is unacceptable,” he added, underlining that the root of the incident was “the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation”.

The incident marked the latest in a series of incursions on NATO’s eastern flank. Drones and missiles intruding on the territory and airspace of Poland, Romania and the Baltic states have fuelled fears that the war in Ukraine may spill over the alliance’s borders.

NATO and European leaders have been swift to support Poland and condemn Russia for the missile.

Depleted stockpiles

Poland has identified the missile as part of an attack that killed at least eight civilians in Ukraine and injured more than 50.

Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz reported that Warsaw had established that the missile was produced near Moscow in the second quarter of this year.

“This means that Russia is using newly produced missiles to strike Ukraine,” he wrote on social media. “It confirms reports that Russian wartime stockpiles have been depleted.”

An expert from Ukraine who arrived at the scene “did not have the slightest doubt” about the origins or model of the missile, Marcin Kozak, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Lublin, said.

“I will point out that this type of missile is used exclusively by Russian strategic aviation,” Wewior noted.

Palestine Action’s co-founder Huda Ammori has been granted permission to challenge the UK government’s decision to designate the group a terrorist organisation at the Supreme Court.

Pakistan is facing accusations that its security forces have killed dozens of unarmed protesters in the past week of demonstrations in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Al Jazeera’s James Bays asked panellists on Inside Story if Islamabad is borrowing tactics from Indian-administered Kashmir.

Deadly clashes reported in Pakistan-administered Kashmir amid first round of voting for regional elections on July 27.

Watchdogs have raised concerns over mounting reports of deadly clashes during regional elections in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where a banned activist group has boycotted the vote and staged protests.

The clashes between police and protesters earlier this week killed more than 30 people in the region, according to the leaders of the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC).

In a video statement on Wednesday shared by Arab News Pakistan, JAAC committee member Sardar Umar Nazir claimed 20 of the group’s supporters had been killed during a march on Monday, when the first round of voting took place.

He listed reports of at least 10 other protesters being killed the following day in the towns of Rawalakot, Mirpur and elsewhere, including during sit-ins.

“Our demand was peaceful, it was peaceful, we tried to keep it non-violent and bullets were fired at it,” said Nazir in the video statement.

Pakistani authorities said a member of the security personnel was killed and five more were injured in clashes on Monday.

Rights group Amnesty International called the reports of lethal force against protesters in the area “disturbing” and urged an investigation.

Pear Pandya, a senior analyst at conflict monitor ACLED, said the violence in Pakistan-administered Kashmir “is bound to overshadow the legitimacy of the entire electoral exercise”.

Monday’s first-round vote – covering the districts of Mirpur, Kotli and Bhimber – will be followed by two more rounds on August 2 and August 10.

Pakistan’s primary governing party, ⁠the PML-N, won nine out of the 13 seats that were up for election on Monday.

No justification to ‘mete out violence’

JAAC was banned by the local government under “anti-terrorism laws” in June, causing deadly protests to erupt in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Banking, roads and internet services have largely been disrupted since then, hindering the flow of information.

Pakistani officials have justified the crackdown by alleging that armed and India-backed fighters joined the Kashmiri protesters. India has rejected similar accusations in the past.

Amnesty has called the ban on JAAC unlawful and said it does not provide justification for authorities to “mete out deadly violence against protesters”.

The rights group has also urged Pakistani authorities to ”restore all communications access and allow media and independent observers into the area”, its acting regional director for South Asia, Isabelle Lassee, said.

‘Controversial’ seats

One of JAAC’s central demands regarding the regional elections is the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees.

JAAC supporters say the seats are used by major Pakistani political parties to tip the composition of the local parliament in their favour with those who mostly live outside the region.

To form a regional government, the PML-N would likely need the support of some of the 12 representatives, said Hasan Askari, ‌a political analyst.

“But when their government is dependent on those 12 controversial seats, how would it be able to find a solution for this issue?” Askari told the Reuters news agency.

Even among the candidates that did not boycott the vote on Monday, the results were contested. Parties accused each other of ballot ‌box ‌stealing and vote rigging.

Caracas, July 29, 2026 (venezuelanalysis.com) – The Venezuelan government headed by Acting President Delcy Rodríguez has delivered a note of protest to Iranian authorities over “derogatory and inappropriate comments.”

The Foreign Ministry summoned the Iranian Ambassador Ali Chegini on Tuesday to formally communicate Caracas’ position.

“The Venezuelan government demanded an end to references that undermine the country’s dignity, sovereignty, institutionality, or reputation,” a press release from the Foreign Ministry read.

The Venezuelan government went on to emphasize its commitment to international relations based on “mutual respect and non-interference in countries’ internal affairs.”

The controversy stemmed from a recent interview where Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi defended Tehran’s resistance against US-Israeli aggression and affirmed that “Iran is not Venezuela.”

“Iran is not Venezuela where you take one person and everyone else gets scared and backs down,” Araghchi said in an interview with Mehr News, referencing the January 3 operation that saw US aircraft bomb Caracas and nearby states while special forces kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores.

The attack killed over 100 people, including 32 Cuban soldiers who were part of Maduro’s security detail. Venezuelan officials, including Acting President Rodríguez and then Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, justified the decision not to respond to the military aggression, instead prioritizing “diplomacy” with Washington.

Following the Venezuelan government’s protest, the Iranian embassy in Caracas sought to ease tensions, recalling the “deep and historic” ties between the two nations and suggesting that Araghchi’s words had been taken out of context and “twisted.”

“The Iranian Foreign Minister’s words in no way convey a negative judgement about the proud Venezuelan people, their authorities, or their national sovereignty,” the statement read. The Iranian Foreign Ministry in Tehran, for its part, has yet to comment on the matter.

The recent diplomatic spat is indicative of the growing rift between the two formerly strategic allies since January 3. In the 2000s, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez pushed for stronger ties with Iran, then under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, grounded on the countries’ shared opposition to US aggression and violations of international law.

The two nations forged bilateral agreements on energy, defense, technology, and other fields. With Venezuela suffering from acute fuel shortages under US sanctions in 2020, Iran defied US threats to send multiple gasoline cargoes to the South American country.

However, following the January 3 strikes, the acting Rodríguez government fast-tracked a diplomatic reengagement with Washington. The Trump administration has exercised significant influence on Venezuelan affairs, with Venezuelan export revenues presently managed from a US Treasury Department account.

The rapprochement with the US has coincided with a broader shift in Venezuela’s geopolitical alignment. In February, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry issued a statement condemning Iran’s response to the February 28 US and Israeli aggression. The communiqué was deleted a few hours later following strong criticism.

During the US-Israeli war against Iran, the acting Venezuelan administration manifested its “solidarity” with Washington allies Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. 

In the wake of the June 24 double earthquake, Rodríguez welcomed a military and diplomatic mission from Israel. The acting leader praised the Israeli team, which included multiple IDF officers, as “highly trained and professional” and thanked them for their on-the-ground work. Tel Aviv is reportedly set to continue assisting Caracas in “reconstruction” planning. Chávez severed ties with Israel in 2009, excoriating its occupation and genocide in Palestine and Lebanon, a stance maintained by Maduro.

Caracas’ objection to the Iranian official’s comments contrasted with its lack of response to recurring statements about Venezuela from Trump and other administration officials.

On Saturday, the US State Department applauded Venezuela’s decision to withdraw from the International Criminal Court while implying that the Caribbean nation does not have a “competent and independent judicial system.” It also boasted that Maduro is “facing justice in a US court.”

Maduro and Flores have pleaded not guilty to charges including drug trafficking conspiracy. Their trial is set to begin in June 2027.

Edited by Lucas Koerner in Cali, Colombia.