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NEW YORK: In the final, frantic stretch of a high-stakes midterm election cycle, television screens across battleground states flashed with a cinematic video. Set to dramatic music, the footage cut between sweeping shots of Mount Rushmore, footage of border fences, and President Donald Trump walking through grand corridors. His voice resonated over the images, warning of "the deep state," "globalists," and "Marxists," while proclaiming that "this is the final battle".

Britain’s Brexit debate has re-entered political centre stage after Prime Minister Andy Burnham urged ministers to examine every future relationship with the European Union, including eventual membership. His intervention challenges years of political orthodoxy, revives arguments over economic costs, and offers Labour a strategic opportunity and a potentially dangerous electoral gamble.

NEW YORK: At approximately 8:48 p.m. on Wednesday, September 30, inside the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee, the State of Tennessee attempted to do what it had spent years preparing to do: end the life of Christa Gail Pike.

NEW YORK: It began as a routine flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. Within minutes, passengers were screaming, a pilot was bleeding inside the cockpit and the aircraft was plunging thousands of feet toward the darkness below.17,000 feet reportedly. For those aboard Flydubai Flight FZ1073 on Wednesday, the question was brutally simple: Was the aircraft still under control — and would anyone on board survive?

Iron ore fundamentals have deteriorated significantly since the beginning of this year. Against the global benchmark iron ore prices averaging $105.53 a tonne in January, trade is now done around $95 a tonne. Largely because of seasonally low demand from the top buyer China plus falling margins of its steelmakers, the Singapore benchmark futures fell to a 13-mnth low of $93.65 a tonne on August 4. The most active Dalian contract also continues to show weaknesses. What certainly does not help the market sentiment is the unchecked fall in steel production in China with output in the first six months of 2026 at 499.95m tonnes showing a contraction of 3% over the same period of 2025.

NEW YORK: The attacks against Cuba currently led by the Trump administration have crossed all barriers. The destructive U.S. policies over six decades have finally led to a total humanitarian crisis. Suffering and death rates are up on the island, despite collective resilience.

Nearly a month after the shocking glacial slide in the Himalayas close to the China/Nepal border that killed hundreds of people, angry Nepalis are pressing for immediate 'climate justice' in well attended rallies at home and abroad. Sadly international response to one of the worst natural disasters the world has seen has not measured up to expectations.

Africa has already served the notice. From now on the world will be seeing the rise of this continent, the repository of resources from iron ore to bauxite to oil in most cases of yet to be discovered quantity but of their high quality established, as a significant producer-exporter of the basic raw material from which steel is made. The emergence of Africa as a major exporter of iron ore, signalled by the progressive commissioning of Simandou mines in Guinea in West Africa will usher in structural changes in seaborne trade in the mineral by way of shifts in global trade flows.

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraqi-Kurdistan announced that its Peshmerga forces had completed unification. The goal of this unification process was to eliminate the role of the political parties within Peshmerga units. Now all the units of the Peshmerga forces are under the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs (MOPA); most notably, Units 70 and 80 have been unified, which together have around 100,000 troops. Unit 70 was affiliated with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and Unit 80 with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).

Following the defeat of fascism in Germany – above all by the Soviet Union – the country was divided into four zones administered by the USSR, the US, Britain and France. With the onset of the Cold War, the three Western zones were consolidated into one, separate from the Soviet zone, which comprised about a third of the country in the north-east. In May 1949, the Western zones unilaterally established the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG); four months later, the Soviet Union responded with the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although the Allied agreements signed at the end of the war had clearly called for thorough denazification, the division of the country resulted in starkly different approaches to the Nazi past. While the GDR pursued rigorous denazification, removing hundreds of thousands of former Nazis from public office by 1947, by 1960 over 70 per cent of senior FRG public servants and 77 per cent of Justice Ministry officials were former Nazis, most of whom simply returned to their former jobs. The first chancellor of the Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer, found nothing strange in appointing Hans Globke as his chief of staff. Globke was co-author of the Nuremberg Race Laws that had led directly to the Shoah. The GDR, by contrast, was led by anti-fascists such as Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker. The land reform of 1945–48 expropriated all estates over 100 hectares, distributing 2.1 million hectares to 500,000 small farmers, workers, and refugees. The industrial reform placed nearly 10,000 enterprises into public ownership. These measures destroyed the Junker class and created the economic foundation of the new state.