President Donald Trump was told that the war with Iran would be quick and decisive. Five months later, with missile stockpiles dangerously depleted by 80%, a furious Trump confronted his defence secretary at Camp David. Inside the hidden crisis reshaping American power.`

MUZAFFARABAD / RAWALAKOT / ISLAMABAD — The Pakistan-administered territory of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) is convulsing through its gravest political and humanitarian crisis in decades.

With Damascus silent, weekly incursions and home raids turn Quneitra countryside into a militarised frontier. Human Rights groups warn of war crimes, while settlement expansion on the Golan moves forward.

A spiralling confrontation in the Persian Gulf, the collapse of a fragile ceasefire, and the shadow war over the world’s most vital maritime artery.

From Virginia’s Data Centre Valley to the parched communities of Uruguay and Gaza, the hidden water appetite of artificial intelligence is straining aquifers, poisoning environmental justice, and exposing a collision between big tech’s ambitions and the human right to water.

TEHRAN — The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps declared on Thursday that the Strait of Hormuz “is not re-openable” as long as the United States continues its military threats and maritime interference, effectively locking down the passage through which a fifth of the world’s oil usually transits. The announcement came hours after US forces overnight bombed several Iranian cities, including a residential neighbourhood on Qeshm Island that killed a two-year-old child and his parents, and as Tehran retaliated with a new barrage of missiles aimed at American bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Jordan and Iraq’s Kurdistan Region.

A tour of illegal outposts reveals the machinery of dispossession. New government billions, a fresh settlement approval, global real estate fairs selling occupied land, and a plan for military-agricultural outposts in Gaza show the project speeding up at breakneck speed.

Multiple UN and human rights reports now converge on a single, devastating finding: Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has systematically dismantled the conditions for Palestinian life to continue, before, during and after birth. This is not collateral damage, investigators say, but a deliberate architecture of what one major new study calls “reproductive genocide”.

MURIDKE, SHEIKHUPURA DISTRICT - The floodwater swallowed Muhammad Ramzan’s world in the dead of night. At around three in the morning, a wall of murky, debris-choked water surged through his village on the outskirts of Sheikhupura, collapsing his mud-and-brick home before he could grab a single belonging. “Everything was destroyed. We couldn’t save a single thing,” the 45-year-old daily-wage labourer told this reporter, his voice hollow with exhaustion as he stood on a narrow embankment, watching rescue boats crisscross fields that had become lakes.

This article examines a hypothetical, but increasingly discussed, scenario in Westminster: what a Labour government under Andy Burnham would mean for welfare reform. While Burnham's premiership is growing in influence, and the ideas he champions are shaping the party’s policy trajectory. The narrative that follows draws on actual policy debates, leaked proposals, actual quotes repurposed from the political arena, and fresh reporting to explore the fault lines that would define a Burnham premiership and the human consequences of making benefits harder to claim.

RAMALLAH, West Bank — July 27, 2026 — The notice arrived without warning, a terse military order delivered to the municipality of Deir Dibwan, a town of some 7,000 people east of Ramallah. Its language was cold and bureaucratic, but its meaning was unmistakable: the Israeli military was seizing privately owned Palestinian land to carve a new road through the hills, a road that local officials and anti-settlement watchdogs say will serve not the declared purpose of security, but the relentless expansion of nearby Israeli settlements.

At least 28 dead. Highways severed. Pilgrimages halted. Entire villages swept away. As the debris settles across the western Himalayas, an investigation reveals that the tragedy was not a random act of nature, but a compound disaster decades in the making — fuelled by a warming atmosphere, fractured geology, and a brutal arithmetic of unplanned development.