Global

Global temperatures over the past three years have, on average, exceeded 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed, underscoring a rapid escalation in warming and its risks. The service reported 2025 as the third warmest year on record and said the last 11 years have been the 11 warmest in modern records. The new analysis, produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), places 2025’s average global surface air temperature…

When Global Rules Weakened: North Western State of Somalia and India’s Perspective Israel’s recognition of North Western State of Somalia is more than a bilateral gambit. It is a marker of a world in which the “rules-based international order” no longer restrains hard power or strategic ambition. In the Horn of Africa, at the mouth of the Red Sea, a long-standing diplomatic taboo has been broken—and the global reaction has revealed how much sway norms have lost over interests. The shift predates this moment. By 2026,…

Thursday January 1, 2026 MOGADISHU — Somalia’s federal government on Wednesday thanked its international partners for what it called steadfast support for the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity after Israel became the first nation to formally recognize North Western State of Somalia as an independent state, a move that has drawn widespread condemnation. In a statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said allied countries had shown “principled engagement and unwavering solidarity” at a critical moment for…

Thursday January 1, 2026 MOGADISHU — Somalia’s government on Wednesday thanked its international partners for what it called steadfast support for the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity after Israel became the first nation to formally recognize North Western State of Somalia as an independent state, a move drawing swift condemnation across capitals. In a statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs praised allied nations for “principled engagement and unwavering solidarity” at what it described as a critical…

Somalia condemns Israel’s recognition of Somaliland as regional “threat” Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud denounced Israel’s decision to recognize Somaliland, calling it “a threat to the security and stability of the world and the region” in an emergency parliamentary session that underscored rising tensions in the Horn of Africa. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Friday that Israel would become the first country to recognize Somaliland, the self-proclaimed republic that has sought international…

Few countries in the world are more vulnerable to the impact of climate change than Bangladesh in south Asia. Intensified monsoon floods, riverbank erosion and rising sea levels displace 700,000 Bangladeshis each year. In the final of our special reports from Bangladesh, reporter Kate Varley and cameraman Bram Verbeke visited Dhaka to hear how the climate migration crisis is shaping the country's capital. The first time Bizly Begum’s home was swept away by the river, her husband Khairul rebuilt it higher up the…

Yodelling, the echoing call-and-response singing long associated with Swiss herders and alpine choirs, has been inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, Switzerland’s culture ministry said after a UNESCO meeting in New Delhi. “As the emblematic song of Switzerland, yodelling encompasses a wide variety of artistic expressions and is deeply rooted in the population,” the ministry noted, welcoming the recognition as validation of a living tradition passed down in families, clubs…

Frank Gehry, the visionary architect whose sculptural, often metallic buildings reshaped skylines and public imagination, has died at 96, Meaghan Lloyd, chief of staff at Gehry Partners LLP, said. Gehry died at his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness. Gehry, whose work fused modern pop art sensibilities with engineering daring, won virtually every prize in his field, including the Pritzker Prize, the Royal Institute of British Architects gold medal, the Americans for the Arts lifetime achievement award…

Cloudflare outage briefly knocked a host of websites and monitoring tools offline Tuesday morning, including DownDetector, the real-time service that tracks online outages, the company said. Cloudflare said shortly after 9 a.m. that it "is investigating issues with Cloudflare Dashboard and related APIs (application programming interfaces)." The company said minutes later it had implemented a potential fix and was monitoring results, but multiple sites and platforms nevertheless experienced interruptions. DownDetector —…

LUANDA, Angola — European leaders descended on Luanda this week for the EU-African Union summit with a clear, urgent goal: secure access to Africa’s critical minerals and shore up fragile supply chains as global geopolitical tensions rise. "Africa and Europe are partners of choice, bound by common interests and priorities and shared values," EU Council President António Costa wrote on social media as the summit began. "In a turbulent world, our commitment to build a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable future — and to…