أرشيف الوسم : Analysis

Fossil fuel firms have been given no official role in the Cop26 climate summit, it can be revealed, against a background of growing concern among UK officials that big oil’s net zero plans do not stack up.

Adraconian police and crime bill is making its way through parliament, and on Tuesday the home secretary, Priti Patel, told her party’s conference that she planned to remove even more rights from political protesters. New offences of disrupting motorways and national infrastructure will be added to legislation that already dramatically expands police powers.

The environment, especially Germany's plan to stop using coal for energy by 2038 at the latest, is one of the biggest issues in the campaign ahead of the country's federal election on September 26.

Against the backdrop of the 9.0-magnitude man-made earthquake that was the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, two Christian leaders, Pastor Johnnie Moore and Juliana Taimoorazy, convened a news conference last week under the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Morocco’s moderate Islamist party suffered major losses in parliamentary elections on Wednesday, a stinging setback in one of the last countries where Islamists had risen to power after the Arab Spring protests.

The Taliban took over Afghanistan with great ease that few expected. Now that all foreign troops have withdrawn, the group faces the more difficult task of governing the country. Will it be able to cope?

Pashtana Durrani knows that she is on the Taliban’s radar. The 23-year-old teacher has been fiercely advocating for girls’ education since the group started making advances in Afghanistan after the U.S. announced it would withdraw troops from the country by Aug. 31. But despite being told that she is not safe, Durrani is staying put.

While Taliban atrocities are widely understood, those committed by western forces and their allies have been wilfully ignored. As the author and Afghanistan expert Anand Gopal told me, the Taliban all but evaporated in 2001. But Afghan politicians in the new government exploited a US desire to eliminate “bad guys” by falsely claiming their opponents were Taliban supporters.

Afghanistan’s president, Ashraf Ghani, held urgent talks with local leaders and international partners on Saturday as Taliban rebels pushed closer to Kabul, capturing a town south of the capital that is one of the gateways to the city.

US President Joe Biden has launched his first official overseas trip with a warning to Russia that it faces "robust and meaningful" consequences if it engages in "harmful activities".