Clare’s young family is one of thousands caught up in Fiji’s HIV crisis, with new cases more than tripling between 2023 and 2024. More than 1,200 people were diagnosed in the first six months of 2025 alone, the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemic amid a decline in global aid. The UN says Fiji’s location as a drug-running hub and escalating local methamphetamine use has fuelled the rapid spread, coupled with unsafe injecting practices and lack of access to clean needles. Low health awareness, cultural stigma and inadequate testing and treatment have exacerbated the crisis.

It has become a disease of the young and addicted, with half of those who contract HIV thought to have done so through contaminated needle sharing or drug preparation. Now, infections are growing among the most vulnerable: the wave of babies who are being born with – and dying from – complications due to HIV or Aids.

The health authorities told the Guardian that one baby a week is being diagnosed with HIV from mother-to-child transmission, with intensive care units seeing an influx of babies needing life support. One child under the age of five is dying every month, says Dr Jason Mitchell, the head of Fiji’s HIV epidemic response, as doctors frantically try to figure out what is wrong with them.

“It is the figure that I feel most pained by, because it is preventable,” he says. “It is inexcusable to have any more children born with HIV.”

The Royal Artillery is facing criticism after it emerged they are refusing public access to an “extraordinary object” looted by the British army in the 19th century from the Asante people in modern-day Ghana.

The glistening golden ram’s head would seemingly be worthy of any museum, but it remains hidden within the regiment’s mess at Larkhill in Wiltshire.

The artefact is among treasures pillaged by the British army from the sprawling old royal palace in the Asante state capital, Kumasi, in 1874, before soldiers set fire to the city and blew up the palace. The British returned in 1896 and looted the rebuilt palace. Their commander later recalled: “I had shown the power of England.”

The spoils of the Anglo-Asante wars were sold and dispersed among private and public collections, including to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, which, in 2024, together made the historic decision to return 32 pieces of gold court regalia to the Manhyia Palace Museum in Ghana – although only on long-term loan.

(Andrew) Lownie’s office, in his home a stone’s throw from parliament, is a monument to the success of his book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (along with his other books: one on the Mountbattens, one on Guy Burgess, one to come on Prince Philip). One desk is piled high with books about Andrew and Sarah, some of them by Ferguson herself, others warts-and-all, kiss-and-tell accounts from confidants and clairvoyants. Lownie has stacks of rejected freedom of information requests, from UK Trade and Investment; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; the Information Commissioner – “They sometimes took so long to respond that they haven’t even downloaded the request before it expires.” He approached 3,000 people from all the way through Mountbatten-Windsor’s life; only a tenth of them would speak to him, which to me feels quite unsurprising, and yet Lownie is indignant. “I wrote to ambassadors, and they said ‘not interested’. This was a matter of public interest. Others, very cheerily when I wrote to them a third time, said ‘nice try’, as if it was some sort of joke. These are the guys I want in the dock, in parliament, on oath. This is the thing that makes me upset. I, perhaps naively, expect standards in public life.”

Entitled was published last year, after four years of research. It builds a cradle-to-police-station picture (he is now updating the book for a new edition) of a royal whose long association with a known child sex offender may look like the nadir of his behaviour, but is also completely congruous with a priapic, exploitative and money-grubbing life in which nothing was ever refused him.

Before her death by suicide last year, Virginia Giuffre stated that she had been trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Mountbatten-Windsor, and raped by him on three occasions as a minor (under US law) when she was 16 and 17. The third time was an orgy on Epstein’s island at which girls were present whom she believed to be underage, but didn’t know for certain because they spoke no English. After a review, the Metropolitan police said last December that it would not be launching a formal criminal investigation into Giuffre’s allegations about Mountbatten-Windsor, which he has denied. He claimed first that he had “no recollection of ever meeting this lady”; then, after a photo emerged of them together, that he was “at a loss to explain this particular photograph”. She brought a civil case against him in 2021, which he settled out of court the following year on no admission of liability. There has been no transparency over the amount, though the figure of £2m to Giuffre’s chosen charity, fighting sex trafficking, is known to have come from the queen. King Charles’s office has always denied that he contributed to Giuffre’s own settlement – estimated at between £7m and £12m – but “since he was running the show with the queen [by 2022], he must have been aware of what was going on,” Lownie says. If 2022 was an obvious moment to strip Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal title, it was by no means the first.

If Washington’s participation in Israel’s June 2025 war with Iran elevated U.S. military force to a perfectly viable instrument of the United States’ Iran policy, the success of current talks would signal the formal undoing of that logic. But should the failure of talks pave the way for another full-scale war, the United States and Israel will be fighting an Iran vastly different from June. For the Iran of today appears to have made its peace with the grim conclusion that while a decisive slog with Israel and the United States is sure to be agonizing, it is preferable to the recurring attrition of repeated wars and a chronic strategic vulnerability that only emboldens adversaries to target Iran and its regional allies.

Standing on her wooden canoe, a machete in her hand, Yuly Velásquez hacks away at reeds matted with blackened sludge. Close by, a burst oil pipe has released a slick of crude into the San Silvestre wetlands in Barrancabermeja, Colombia’s oil city, choking the water and its wildlife.

“The destruction is immense,” says Velásquez, president of Fedepesan, a sustainable fishing organisation. “For the fish, the animals and flora, it means immediate death.”

With its swamps, lagoons and forests, Barrancabermeja sits in a biodiversity hotspot – the home of endangered river turtles and manatees, and the wetlands act as a corridor for roaming jaguars.

Yet it is also Colombia’s biggest oil town. Gas flares shoot into the sky from a labyrinth of tanks, pipes and chimneys, producing up to 250,000 barrels of crude oil a day and serving 80% of the national demand for fuel.

For decades, this refinery, which is operated by the majority state-owned company Ecopetrol, has also been accused of releasing oil and toxic waste into nearby rivers and wetlands, and of causing leaks that pollute the region’s fishing grounds.

Environmental authorities and residents say the impact has been catastrophic: fish populations have crashed, water quality has deteriorated and numbers of manatees – once regarded as a guardian spirit of the wetlands – are now thought to be on the brink of collapse.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/43644795

Brad Reed
Feb 24, 2026

The Canadian government on Monday announced plans to send aid to Cuba, which is currently being squeezed economically by a US oil embargo.

As reported by the Associated Press, Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand revealed that the government is “preparing a plan to assist,” adding that “we are not prepared at this point to provide any details” of what it will entail.

A Canadian aid package to Cuba would be the latest rebuff to US foreign policy. The two long-time allies have been at odds since President Donald Trump took office last year and slapped hefty tariffs on Canadian products, while also vowing to make the country into the “51st state” of the US.

Canada wouldn’t be the first US ally to step up help for Cuba, as Mexico earlier this month sent two ships loaded with more than 2,000 tons of goods and food to the island nation.

President Trump has demanded President Claudia Sheinbaum confront the cartels. The killing of El Mencho suggests it might be working — but could come at a cost.

The killing of Mr. Oseguera shows how the tense interplay between Mr. Trump and Ms. Sheinbaum — two leaders with starkly different styles but an unlikely camaraderie — has fundamentally reshaped the U.S.-Mexico relationship, particularly on security.

“The pressure that Trump has put on her administration has been a force she’s taken advantage of,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a Mexican political analyst who studies U.S.-Mexico relations. “She wanted to change Mexico’s security, but Trump came at a very interesting moment to push her in that direction.”

Yet, Mr. Bravo added, Ms. Sheinbaum is also playing with fire.

“I don’t know if she wanted to go as far as she’s going,” he added. “This is clearly putting her administration under a lot of stress, and there is a big question now of what are the Mexican state’s capacities to govern the consequences of this operation.”

MBFC
Archive

About half of the country’s federal budget goes toward the fight in Ukraine, money that does little to support its long-term development.

For four years, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made the war against Ukraine the lodestar of his every move.

The single-minded approach has helped Mr. Putin salvage what began as a disastrous invasion, get his troops back on the front foot and dictate demands in peace talks mediated by Washington.

But his stubborn pursuit of the war has come at a huge cost. It has killed or wounded as many as 1.2 million Russians, by some estimates, while reordering Russia’s economy and society in ways that many economists believe jeopardize the nation’s future.

“You have lots of money spent on tanks, shells, bombs, military benefits and other things — no long-lasting value, nothing that works on what we call development,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official who is now a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

MBFC
Archive

When Bill Clinton testifies later this week at a congressional investigation into Jeffrey Epstein there is unlikely to be any reference to his most precious foreign policy achievement – helping to bring peace to Northern Ireland.

Whether Clinton is linked to Epstein’s predations or turns the tables on his inquisitors, his legacy in Northern Ireland might appear to stand apart, a jewel of his presidency that is immutable, enshrined in history.

It is not. The fallout from proximity to Epstein threatens to cast radioactive dust over the former president’s role in ending the Troubles and has already contaminated his Northern Ireland point man, the former Democratic senator George Mitchell, who brokered the Good Friday agreement.

With each release of Epstein files, Mitchell and, to a lesser extent, Clinton have lost admirers in a part of the world that rained honours on them for three decades.

“How should we react when we discover that someone, once accorded almost god-like status, turns out to have feet of clay?” the commentator Alex Kane asked in the Irish News, a Belfast daily. For the institutions and public figures that once feted Clinton and his envoy, it is an agonising question.

Global Affairs Canada says Canadian staff are still in Lebanon despite growing military tensions in Iran.

“At present, Canadian staff and their dependents remain in place, and the Embassy of Canada in Beirut continues to operate normally, providing essential services to Canadians, including consular support,” Global Affairs Canada said.

This follows the U.S. embassy's decision to pull all non-essential staff from the region and urging some of its diplomats and their families to leave.

Tensions have escalated between the U.S. and Iran as Trump builds the largest military presence in the Middle East in decades and threatens action if Tehran does not negotiate a deal to constrain its nuclear program.

When European Commission and Council Presidents Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa arrive in Kyiv for a day of remembrance on Tuesday, they will have little to offer other than condolences.

Four years to the day since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the EU hoped to bring some comfort in the form of fresh sanctions against Moscow and a €90 billion loan to Kyiv.

Hungary has stopped that happening.

If Iran’s leaders believe U.S. strikes threaten their hold on power, they may opt to launch large-scale retaliation aimed at causing American casualties or disrupting the oil industry in the Persian Gulf, former U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and experts say.

Although weakened and facing a domestic crisis, Iran’s regime still has substantial firepower that could inflict damage on American interests and allies in the region, disrupt the global economy and trigger a protracted conflict in response to a U.S. military attack, according to former U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and regional analysts.

The prospect of Iranian retaliation has factored into Donald Trump’s deliberations over whether to order a military attack in Iran following strikes on its nuclear program in June, as well as discussions between the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East, according to current U.S. officials.

While Iran retaliated in June against Israel and a U.S. base in Qatar, it stopped short of more dramatic actions that could have caused casualties among American forces or destabilized Persian Gulf economies. Iran’s response to U.S. military action could play out very differently this time if Trump makes that decision, the former officials, diplomats and analysts said, particularly if Iranian leaders perceive a threat to their survival.

With the Russian military performing poorly, Ukraine is clarifying strategy and pushing back with modest success

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth grim year, has already gone on longer than the entire fight on the eastern front in the second world war. The Soviets marched from the gates of Leningrad to Berlin in a little over 15 months in 1944-45; today the Russian rate of gain in Pokrovsk in Ukraine is 70 metres a day, in Kupiansk, 23 metres, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

The gains are trivial, given Ukraine’s size, amounting to 1,865 sq miles during 2025 (about 0.8% of the country) – so the idea touted by the Russians, sometimes accepted by a credulous White House, that Ukraine is suffering a slow-motion defeat, is not accurate. In reality, even allowing for the fact that hundreds of thousands of homes are without electricity, heating and water after Russian bombing, Ukraine is clarifying its strategy and pushing back with modest success.