Top Issues to Watch at the 2025 UN General Assembly

The UN at 80: an institution under pressure in a multipolar age New York’s diplomats will soon reconvene in a familiar ritual of speeches, side meetings and cocktail receptions. But this year the atmosphere at the UN feels different — thinned by budget lines, sharpened by geopolitics and shadowed by hunger. As Secretary‑General António Guterres put it plainly this month: “We are gathering in turbulent, even unchartered waters.” That phrase captures why the United Nations’ 80th General Assembly resembles less of a…

British couple reunite with family after release by the Taliban

After eight months in Taliban custody, British couple reunited with family in Qatar For nearly eight months, Barbie and Peter Reynolds lived in a limbo few outsiders can imagine: detained in a Taliban facility in Afghanistan, separated, relying on distant diplomatic advocacy and the occasional hand of a mediator to maintain contact with the outside world. On arrival in Doha this week, the 76-year-old Barbie and her 80-year-old husband stepped down an aircraft and into the arms of the family who had spent months pleading for…

Russia rejects claims its military jets violated Estonian airspace

Estonia says Russian jets briefly crossed its airspace, raising NATO fears of spillover Estonia accused three Russian MiG‑31 fighters of violating its airspace near the tiny island of Vaindloo on Thursday, an incursion that lasted roughly 12 minutes and deepened Western worries that Moscow’s war in Ukraine could accidentally — or deliberately — spill beyond the battlefield. Moscow denied the claim, saying the aircraft remained over neutral waters. Quick scramble, sharp words Italian F‑35s operating under NATO’s Baltic Air…

Zelensky Confirms Meeting with Trump at UN Next Week

Ukraine hit by one of its largest overnight aerial assaults as Zelensky prepares to meet Trump at UN Ukraine scrambled on the ground and in the skies early on the eve of the United Nations General Assembly, after what President Volodymyr Zelensky described as one of the heaviest aerial barrages of the war. Moscow, meanwhile, painted the exchanges as reciprocal and defensive, underscoring how the conflict remains on a hair-trigger across multiple fronts even as diplomacy is scheduled to resume at New York. Massive strikes,…

Leading suspect in Madeleine McCann disappearance freed from prison

German man long identified as the prime suspect in Madeleine McCann case released from prison Christian Brueckner, the 49-year-old German man long named by British investigators as the prime suspect in the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, has been released from a German prison after serving a seven-year sentence, German authorities confirmed on Thursday. Brueckner had been serving time for the 2005 rape of an elderly woman at her home in the Algarve resort of Praia da Luz — the same Portuguese town where…

Yulia Navalnaya says international lab tests confirm husband Alexei Navalny was poisoned

Who killed Alexei Navalny? His widow’s claim reopens a fraught debate Yulia Navalnaya’s terse, emotional appeal this week — that two foreign laboratories have concluded her husband was poisoned — has turned a private grief into a renewed international crisis. Her demand that the laboratories publish their findings, and her insistence that “Alexei was killed,” sits at the intersection of personal loss, geopolitics and the fraught question of accountability inside a closed and increasingly securitized Russia. The allegation…

Gaza City Catholic Priest Shares Harrowing Accounts of Danger and Fear

Under the church’s roof in Gaza City: shelter, fear and a choice to stay On a cramped compound in Gaza City, a handful of nuns, a priest and 450 people — among them disabled children, the elderly and the wounded — are sheltering beneath the vaulted roof of the Holy Family Catholic Church. Father Carlos Ferrero speaks softly on the phone, his voice threaded with exhaustion and faith, and describes a place where the ordinary rhythms of worship have been folded into the thud of distant explosions and the constant calculus of…

Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, signals steady pace of further reductions

Fed pivots toward steady cuts to shield jobs, betting inflation will cool The Federal Reserve on Wednesday delivered a quarter-point interest-rate cut and signaled more to come this year, a shift that underscores a growing concern among U.S. policymakers: the danger of a weakening labor market now looks larger than the risk of rekindled inflation. The move, supported by most of President Donald Trump's appointees on the Fed’s policymaking committee, reflects a central bank juggling two aims — price stability and full…

Trump hails UK and US as “two notes in one chord” at Windsor banquet

At Windsor, pomp and protest — and the hedging of a modern “special relationship” Under a damp English sky, the ancient stones of Windsor Castle hosted a ritual that mixed pageantry, politics and pointed public dissent — emblematic of a transatlantic relationship trying to be both ceremonial and consequential. President Donald Trump called his second state visit to Britain “one of the highest honours of my life,” as he sat beside King Charles at a banquet in the castle’s glittering rooms. The king praised Mr. Trump’s…

German man declines interview concerning Madeleine McCann disappearance

British police say German suspect in Madeleine McCann case has refused interview as his prison release nears British detectives investigating the disappearance of three‑year‑old Madeleine McCann said Friday that a German man long linked to the case remains a suspect but has declined to be interviewed, even as he is due to be released from prison this month. "We have requested an interview with this German suspect but ... it was subsequently refused by the suspect," Detective Chief Inspector Mark Cranwell, the Metropolitan…

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