Fraught

The wreckage still held the signatures of everyday life: a bottle of washing-up liquid, a packet of cucumber and vitamin E wax strips, baby talc, a tube of La Roche-Posay face wash. This was one of the buildings hit in central Beirut on a Wednesday at lunchtime, without warning. It was among the targets of 100 Israeli strikes launched in just 10 minutes, part of what became the deadliest day of the conflict in Lebanon so far. But even amid those intimate traces of lives interrupted, something else stayed with me more…

Opinion | Sovereignty Snafu: Israel’s Recognition of North Western State of Somalia Tests Somalia — and the Rules-Based Order Israel’s formal recognition of North Western State of Somalia in late December 2025 did more than tweak a diplomatic fault line in the Horn of Africa; it jolted a foundational principle that underpins Africa’s postcolonial settlement. In Mogadishu, the move was read as a direct challenge to Somalia’s sovereignty and an unsettling precedent for how borders — and the norms that protect them — can be…