LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

2026-04-06T19:49:00.004-07:00

Trump operating in a 'carnival framework' that allows rule-breaking in domestic and foreign policy

Issued on: 06/04/2026 - FRANCE24
10:46 min

US President Donald Trump's mixed messaging and conflicting signals have characterised the war in Iran. For more on the US president's increasingly bombastic rhetoric, and what's likely to happen next, FRANCE 24's Sharon Gaffney speaks with Lisa Gaufman, Assistant Professor at the Centre for Democratic Politics and Cultures at the University of Groningen and Author of 'The Trump Carnival: Populism, Transgression and the Far Right '.

BY:
Sharon GAFFNEY
VIDEO BY:
Sharon GAFFNEY

2026-04-06T19:46:00.004-07:00

White House posts then deletes Easter video of Trump insulting Macron

Issued on: 06/04/2026 - FRANCE24

The White House briefly published — then deleted — a video from Donald Trump’s private Easter luncheon in which the US president made a series of inflammatory remarks, and repeated false claims about several public figures. These extraordinarily candid comments were likely never supposed to be heard by the public. However, the closed-door footage was downloaded by a journalist before it was removed and later circulated online.

In the hour-long recording, Trump mocked the marriage of French President Emmanuel Macron and imitated him with a French accent, remarks that Macron later called "neither elegant or up to standard."

At another moment, Trump mused about being a “king," referring both to the Democrats' 'No Kings' protests held across the country against his leadership, and his $400 million project to build a ballroom in the White House.

His televangelist spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain also compared Trump's life and challenges to Jesus Christ, drawing parallels between assassination attempts and legal battles with the trials endured by Jesus. These comments have triggered backlash from Christian groups nationwide.

Trump also repeated false and xenophobic claims about US Congresswoman for Minnesota Ilhan Omar, and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, repeating baseless statements he's previously made despite having been debunked by fact-checkers.

The president also repeated false claims about US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, among others — statements that have circulated previously online but have been debunked by fact-checkers.

Vedika Bahl goes through what the US President said in this closed-door footage in Truth or Fake.

BY: Vedika BAHL
VIDEO BY: Vedika BAHL

2026-04-06T19:43:00.004-07:00

Could China's adoption of electric vehicles shield it from the energy crisis?

Issued on: 06/04/2026 - FRANCE24
Play (05:30 min)

As crude prices hover around the $110 per barrel mark on Monday morning, consumers worldwide are feeling the impact of the war in Iran and the closure of the Hormuz Strait when they head to the petrol pump. In China, where more than half of new car sales are for electric vehicles, that impact may be less pronounced, as France 24’s Bryan Quinn explains in his report. Also in this edition, "Super Mario Galaxy Movie" has achieved the best opening release of the year so far.

BY: Charles PELLEGRIN

Bryan QUINN

2026-04-06T19:35:00.010-07:00

AI-generated artists break through in country music

New York (AFP) – AI-generated singers routinely rank among the top-streamed country music artists in the United States -- a trend that for now is limited to

a genre that industry observers fear is becoming too formulaic.

Issued on: 07/04/2026 - FRANCE24

"Whiskey & Water," a song by Cain Walker featuring Cade Winslow, is one of many AI-generated country music tunes © TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP

Breaking Rust, Cain Walker, Aventhis, and Outlaw Gospel have more in common that cowboy hats, denim and leather. They are all completely computer-generated, from their faces to their melodies.

And they are all hitmakers.

"That's a phenomenon I didn't see coming," said Jennie Hayes Kurtz of the country music band Brother and The Hayes.

"I thought AI was going to be curing cancer or something."

Many of the AI country tunes tap into the genre's archetype of the lone cowboy: a rugged, taciturn, plain-spoken man who, above all, refuses to apologize for simply existing.

Lyrics are delivered in raspy, gravelly voices that sound as authentic as the real thing.

"It's scary as songwriters," said Kassie Jordan, who forms the singing duo Blue Honey with her husband Troy Brooks.

"We are starting to see a lot of people just putting words into these chatbots and it is writing songs for them," she said. "As a songwriter, it's kind of like, is anyone going to even think I really wrote this?"

Berklee College of Music professor Joe Bennett noted that a sampling of AI singers suggests that the words used to "prompt" AI songs were "not particularly detailed."

None of the producers behind AI-generated music projects responded to AFP's requests for comment.

So how did AI find a place in a genre that is fundamentally rooted in the human experience and storytelling, blending folk, blues, and even gospel influences?

For Bennett, the emergence of modern country music in the early 2000s -- with a highly polished, more pop sound and repeated "melodic shapes" -- is key.

AI models could become adept at replicating such a sound, when fueled with those elements, he explained.
'Superficial'

Once overshadowed by rap and Latin music, and hindered by the industry's shift to digital music formats, country music has nevertheless staged a comeback thanks to a generation of artists with stronger pop, not folk, sensibilities.

Following in the footsteps of country-turned-pop megastar Taylor Swift, today's headliners are more likely to sport baseball caps than wide Stetsons.

Their music breaks genre boundaries, while artists such as Beyonce and Post Malone win fans and sell albums with their crossover efforts.

Last year, country stars Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan were both in the top 10 most streamed artists on Spotify.

Some in the industry believe country's rebirth signifies a dulled-down formula designed to appeal to the widest possible audience.

"The lyrics aren't as deep as they used to be," Jordan said.

"A big portion of popular country music has become kind of shallow, so that is pretty easy to duplicate."

Bennett says the industry must do a better job of identifying AI-generated music, noting that Deezer is the only major streaming platform to clearly label such material.

"We need AI detection," Bennett maintained.

"It will happen, and there is a consumer demand for it."

Hayes Kurtz said there is a large audience of "passive" listeners who don't care whether music is made by AI, but there are also "active listeners" who attend concerts, buy band merchandise, and deeply respect the integrity of the artists.

"That audience seems to really care it the music is made by the actual humans they are going to see," Hayes Kurtz said.

Jordan says she remains optimistic about the future.

"There's another wave of country artists that are coming that is really into doing it the old school way and showing emotion," she said.

"That will be harder for AI to duplicate. That might save the genre."

© 2026 AFP

AI technologies could have saved ‘thousands of lives’ during Covid, expert says

Issued on: 06/04/2026

FRANCE24

PLAY 09:01 min

The health of humans, animals, and the entire ecosystem is inextricably linked. This message is at the heart of the One Health Summit, currently underway in France, where global health leaders are gathering. The summit aims to explore future strategies, particularly using emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, to ensure – and even improve – the delicate balance between these elements. We spoke to Antoine Tesnière, who advised the French government during the Covid pandemic, about how new technologies could have saved lives had they been available at the time.

BY:
Stuart Norval
VIDEO BY:
Stuart Norval

2026-04-06T19:24:00.002-07:00

'Vladimir Putin absolutely nervous' about Hungary's election, expert says

Issued on: 06/04/2026 - FRANCE24

Speaking with FRANCE 24's Mark Owen, Dr Marc Roscoe Loustau, Affiliated Fellow at the Central European University, says that "next to Viktor Orban, the person who stands to lose the most in case of a Fidesz party loss is Vladimir Putin". According to press reports quoting intelligence officials, the powerful explosives found near a Serbian gas pipeline to Hungary may be part of a "false flag" operation to influence the upcoming election.

Video by: Mark OWEN

Pro-Orbán actors accuse Meta of interference in Hungarian elections, despite lack of evidence

By Estelle Nilsson-Julien
Published on 06/04/2026 - EURONEWS

Meta has found itself embroiled in Hungary's tense election campaign, after supporters of the ruling Fidesz party claimed their posts are being restricted to favour opposition parties. In reality, there is no weight to the allegations.

Social media accounts backing Hungary's ruling right-wing populist party Fidesz have accused tech giant Meta of political interference in the country's upcoming elections, alleging that the party and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán are being censored.
Fidesz campaign chief Balázs Orbán also threw his weight behind the allegations.
"We have received numerous reports that some users have been unable to like Fidesz-related content on Facebook for the past few days", he said on 29 March.
However, The Cube, Euronews' fact-checking team, was not able to gather any valid evidence to back these claims.

Claims of interference

The claims emerged in an X post shared by Lebanese-Australian political commentator Mario Nawfal, who tends to align with populist leanings.
"EXCLUSIVE BREAKING: FACEBOOK RESTRICTS ORBÁN POSTS WEEKS BEFORE HUNGARY’S ELECTION," he said on 18 March.
Nawfal — who interviewed Orbán seven days later — alleged that ahead of the "crucial" elections on 12 April, Facebook was "reportedly restricting posts from the country's Prime Minister."
He suggested that this was sparked by a call from a member of the opposition Tisza Party — the pro-European conservative political party, led by former Fidesz party member Péter Magyar — who allegedly urged "supporters to mass-report" Orbán's content.
These allegations were subsequently picked up by the Polish conservative news outlet, wPolityce.pl, as well Mandiner, a Hungarian Fidesz-aligned newspaper. The Mandiner identified the "opposition member" referred to by Nawfal as Tisza MEP Dóra Dávid, a former legal adviser to Meta.
The Cube contacted Nawfal for further information about his claims, but did not receive a response at the time of publication. Meanwhile, there is no publicly available evidence that Meta targeted or censored posts shared by Fidesz or Orbán.
A Meta spokesperson told us that there were "no restrictions on the [Hungarian] Prime Minister's accounts" and that none of his posts had been removed.
"Our Community Standards and policies apply equally to everybody, and we have systems in place to detect any coordinated efforts to abuse our reporting systems," added the spokesperson.

A video taken out of context

The claims targeting Dávid appear to misleadingly take some of her prior claims out of context, including a video she published on her social media in November 2025.
In the video,Dávid told her followers that "propagandists and the 'Mi hazánk' group" — a far-right Hungarian political group — had accused her of "manipulating Meta's algorithms", which she said was "not true".
"You can do a lot to help ensure that the algorithm doesn't pick up on the lying, false, misleading, and hateful posts from Fidesz and those close to Fidesz", said Dávid in the video.
"How? Like this: report them and select the most appropriate category", she added, as video instructions detailing how to report content displayed on screen.
Users can flag content that violates Meta's community standards to the platform.
This includes "hateful content" which targets people for their "race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease", according to Meta's guidelines.
Meanwhile, Meta labels misinformation as "different from other types of speech", arguing that there "is no way to articulate a comprehensive list of what is prohibited."
Users in Europe can flag content which they believe qualifies as fake news to Facebook, which is subsequently independently reviewed by fact-checkers.
However, things are different in the US: in early 2025, Meta announced that it would move away from professional fact-checkers to a "community notes" system similar to X, allowing users to write notes on posts deemed to be misleading.
Related
Founder Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that, under the old system, it was moderating posts "too aggressively".
Nevertheless, such a move would be more complicated to implement across Europe, due to the Digital Services Act (DSA), which aims to combat the spread of disinformation by making sure online platforms tackle any risks to democratic processes. Any platform caught flouting the rules is subject to heavy fines.
Indeed, Meta's fact-checking process appears to have stayed the same on this side of the Atlantic, at least for now. A spokesperson for the company told us that "third-party fact-checking remains in place outside of the US. This includes Hungary, where we work with AFP, and the EU."
"We are beginning with rolling out Community Notes in the US, and will continue to improve it before expansion to other countries. Building a robust Community Notes ecosystem will take time", the spokesperson added.
Therefore, Dávid's call for users to flag "lying, false, misleading, and hateful posts" does not constitute a breach of guidelines, as they fall in line with the DSA's aim for companies to mitigate the spread of disinformation and harmful content.
The Cube contacted Dávid for comment, but she declined to respond to what content from Fidesz she was referring to.
The claim against her follows a number of other allegations that Fidesz is using underhanded tactics against its rivals.
In recent months, the party has been accused of running a smear campaign to target its political opponents by spreading AI-generated images of rivals, such as false footage of Tisza leader Péter Magyar and fake videos of Hungarian soldiers carried in caskets to discredit support for Ukraine against Russia.
While Meta stipulates that it removes "content that is likely to directly contribute to interference with the functioning of political processes", according to disinformation researchers, there are still flaws in the filtering process and some of this content is still making it online.

Members of Meta’s team targeted by interference rumours

Dávid is not the only person who has been singled out and accused of driving a campaign against Fidesz via Meta.
A series of social media posts accused Meta's government and social impact partner for Central and Eastern Europe, Oskar Braszczyński, of spearheading a campaign against Hungary's ruling party.
On 18 March, Philip Pilkington, a conservative political commentator and visiting fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium — a think tank and higher education institution with close ties to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — shared an X post which he branded as "breaking news", alleging that Braszczyński was "suppressing" Orbán's social media.
None of the accounts that picked up these claims presented any tangible evidence to support the allegations.
Instead, X users described Braszczyński's outright support for Ukraine and LGBT rights on his Facebook account as the "classic hallmarks" of "progressive liberals who are tasked with election interference in Europe".
Philip Pilkington told The Cube that he could not provide further details about his claims, but that a "senior government source in Budapest" had provided him with the information.
Meanwhile, Braszczyński did not respond to our request for comment.
Meta did not provide a comment on allegations concerning Braszczyński and Dávid.

FASCISTS OF A FEATHER...

JD Vance heads to Budapest to give final campaign push for Orban

/ Facebook/JDVanceFacebook

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By bne IntelliNews April 6, 2026

US Vice President JD Vance will visit Budapest on April 7 for a joint press conference and rally with Prime Minister Viktor Orban, state news agency MTI reported on April 6. The press conference is scheduled for 1:20 PM CET at Orban’s office in the Carmelite Monastery, followed by a rally a few hours later, dubbed the "Day of Hungarian-American Friendship".

The visit comes just days ahead of the pivotal April 12 election and is widely viewed as a demonstration of support for Orban and his Fidesz party, which is currently trailing the opposition Tisza Party.

Although polls show a substantial lead for Peter Magyar’s party, with Polymarket giving him a 70-30% chance of winning, analysts caution that it is too early to declare an opposition victory, given Fidesz’s strong mobilisation, well-organised party structure, and an election landscape that remains tilted in their favour.

Politico has dubbed the visit the "Save Viktor Orban" plan, highlighting the effort to support the US administration’s top ally in Europe. Analysts note that the campaign rally reflects Washington’s willingness to intervene in the Hungarian election. The visit comes seven weeks after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio's trip to Budapest in February.

The US secretary of state openly endorsed Orban and avoided confronting his host on sensitive issues, such as Hungary’s engagement with China or its reluctance to reduce its dependency on Russian energy.

Orban, 62, is the longest-serving prime minister in Europe and is widely regarded by radical-right figures in Washington as a model of nationalist-populist leadership. His potential defeat could deal a blow to the MAGA movement and other Eurosceptic forces, leftist daily Nepszava writes. Analysts suggest that, with Orban losing power, his vision of illiberal democracy could lose appeal elsewhere.

At the recent CPAC Hungary conference, radical right-wing leaders reaffirmed their support for Orbán, and one of the day’s highlights was a video message from US President Donald Trump, who described Orban as a strong leader.

Balázs Ablonczy, an analyst for the conservative weekly Valasz Online, called Orban’s close alignment with Trump potentially politically risky. To illustrate Hungary’s alignment with Washington, Ablonczy recalled that after the first strikes against Iran, the foreign ministry framed attacks as carried out by Israel, omitting US involvement. He noted that Hungary’s highly ideological foreign policy contrasts with its claims of pragmatism and national interest.

The government’s narrative has widely exaggerated the economic consequences of disruptions to the Druzhba pipeline while downplaying the broader geopolitical tensions and potential energy crisis stemming from the war in Iran.

Peter Magyar, in a recent interview with 444.hu, said he expects the vice president to clarify that the United States does not seek Hungary’s potential military involvement in the Iran war. Magyar referred to a comment by cabinet minister Gergely Gulyas last month, who said that the government would consider providing military assistance to the United States if formally requested. Magyar also called on the prime minister not to sign any agreements in the coming days that could compromise Hungary’s security or limit the next government’s authority.

2026-04-06T19:23:00.002-07:00

How the Middle East war is impacting humanitarian aid to Africa

Since the outbreak of war in the Middle East, disrupted trade routes have caused delays to the delivery of medicines and other humanitarian aid to crisis zones such as Sudan and Mali.

Issued on: 06/04/2026 - RFI

Residents receive aid from the World Food Programme in the Al-Omada neighbourhood of Omdurman, Sudan on 11 March 2026. AFP - EBRAHIM HAMID

The Strait of Hormuz, which links Dubai to Port Sudan on the eastern coast of Africa, is a vital transit point for the delivery of medicines to the continent.

But this key waterway has been effectively blocked by Iran in retaliation to US-Israeli strikes which began on 28 February, with only a limited number of ships allowed through.

In recent weeks, goods have had to be diverted via the Cape of Good Hope and once they reach the West African coast, they are transported by road.

"For the few ships that are still sailing, this detour comes at a very high cost," explains Rodrigue Alitanou, a doctor and director of operations at the Dakar-based NGO Alima which provides emergency care in 13 countries in Africa.

"It adds more than €2,000 to the cost of each container. So this has an impact not only on our delivery delays, but also on the number of beneficiaries we can treat," he told RFI.
Fuel prices

Another source of pressure on the NGO’s financial resources is the rise in fuel prices due to worldwide shortages.

"Today, the price of a litre of petrol has risen by 40 percent on average across the countries where we operate," says Alitanou.

As a result, the overall cost of humanitarian operations has risen, as is the case in Sudan, for example.

"Today, the cost has almost tripled for every lorry that reaches us," laments Haruna Tarfa, the NGO’s medical coordinator in Tawila, North Darfur, where more than 630,000 displaced people live.

"In the coming days, we risk running out of maternal kits and general medicines. This also affects the malnourished children we are treating who need medication."
'Accessibility is already a challenge'

Sudan is one of the crisis zones where logistical difficulties are exacerbated by the international context.

"In North Darfur, accessibility is already a challenge," explains Tarfa.

"We have very limited options when it comes to getting medicines to people. With the current events, the impact will be such that it will be very difficult for us to adapt."

The same fear is being expressed in Mali, where the NGO has already had to scale back its activities.

With the embargo on fuel imports imposed by the JNIM jihadists, "dozens of villages no longer have access to healthcare because we can no longer get around," explains Alitanou.

If the international situation does not improve within the next three months, the NGO says it will be forced to scale back its activities significantly.

According to a report released on Saturday by the African Union and the African Development Bank (AfDB), the Middle East war "presents a serious risk to Africa."

The Middle East accounts for 15.8 percent of Africa's imports and 10.9 percent of its exports, the report noted.
Potential food disaster

"The conflict, which already has triggered a trade shock, could quickly turn into a cost-of-living crisis across Africa through higher fuel and food prices, rising shipping and insurance costs, exchange rate pressures, and tighter fiscal conditions," it added.

"The longer the conflict lasts and the more severe the disruption to shipping routes and energy and fertilizer supplies, the greater the risk of a significant growth slowdown across the continent."

Reduced deliveries of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the Gulf will impact fertilizer production, limiting its availability during the crucial planting period up to May, it added.

Countries like Italy have called for the establishment of a "humanitarian corridor" for fertiliser and other essentials through the Strait of Hormuz to avoid a food disaster, particularly among vulnerable nations in Africa.

This article was adapted from the original version in French by RFI correspondent Pauline Le Troquier with additional reporting by AFP.

2026-04-06T19:15:00.001-07:00

EU says strikes on civilian infrastructure 'illegal' as nuclear fears mount

The European Union on Monday warned warring parties in the Middle East that strikes on civilian infrastructure are illegal. This comes as the UN's atomic energy agency voiced concern over the heightened risk of a nuclear accident as hosilities intensify.

Issued on: 06/04/2026 - RFI

Workers remove debris at Tehran's Sharif University of Technology complex allegedly hit early Monday by a US-Israeli strike on Monday, 6 April 2026. The EU has warned that strikes on civilian infrastructure are illegal as the UN’s atomic energy agency raises concerns over heightened nuclear accident risks amid intensifying hostilities. AP - Francisco Seco

European leaders have underlined that targeting civilian infrastructure in conflict is illegal, as tensions continue to rise across the Middle East and fears grow over a wider escalation.

Speaking on Monday, EU Council president Antonio Costa said any strikes on civilian facilities – particularly energy infrastructure – were "illegal and unacceptable". His comments came after US President Donald Trump threatened to devastate Iranian infrastructure if Tehran failed to reopen the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz.

Costa stressed that the principle applied universally, drawing parallels with Russia’s war in Ukraine. He warned that ordinary Iranians would bear the brunt of any escalation, describing them as “the main victim” of both their government and any widening military campaign.

The European Union also called on Iran to halt attacks in the region and restore full freedom of navigation through the strait, a crucial artery for global energy supplies.

After five weeks of conflict, Costa struck a cautiously hopeful note, arguing that "only a diplomatic solution" could address the root causes of the crisis.

Nuclear safety concerns mount

Alarm over the conflict has also been heightened by warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which said strikes near Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant pose a serious risk.

IAEA chief Rafael Grossi cautioned that attacks close to the facility could trigger a "severe radiological accident" with consequences far beyond Iran’s borders. One strike reportedly landed just 75 metres from the plant’s perimeter, underlining how narrow the margin for error has become.

While the agency confirmed the plant itself had not been damaged as of Sunday, the proximity of repeated strikes has raised concern. Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization says four incidents have occurred near the site since fighting began on 28 February, with the most recent killing a security guard and damaging a support building.

A view of a capsized ship following airstrikes at Bushehr naval base in southern Iran along the Gulf on 7 March 2026. AFP - -

Escalation on multiple fronts

Meanwhile, in northern Israel, the military confirmed that four people killed in a missile strike in Haifa were members of the same family. Rescue teams worked for 18 hours to recover the bodies from deep beneath the rubble, with officials noting that an unexploded warhead had complicated efforts and posed ongoing danger.

Israel also said it had killed Asghar Bakeri, a senior figure in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard linked to its overseas Quds Force operations. According to military officials, he had been involved in planning attacks against Israeli and US targets across the region.

In neighbouring Lebanon, an Israeli strike on an apartment building in Ain Saadeh killed an anti-Hezbollah politician, his wife and another woman. Israel said it had been targeting a militant but acknowledged reports that civilians were harmed and said it was investigating.

This comes as Israel has also turned on Iran’s critical energy infrastructure, having carried out a "powerful strike" on the South Pars petrochemical facility in Asaluyeh – a site responsible for around 50 percent of Iran’s petrochemical production.

Iranian media reported attacks on the wider South Pars gas field, blaming both Israel and the United States, though neither country immediately confirmed involvement.

Against this backdrop, Trump has reiterated threats of further action against Iran, including potential strikes on power plants and bridges if shipping through the Strait of Hormuz is not restored.

'Ball of fire'

A former director of the United Nations nuclear watchdog urged Gulf nations on Saturday to prevent Trump from turning the region into "a ball of fire".

"To the Gulf governments: Please, once again, do everything in your power before this madman turns the region into a ball of fire," Mohamed El-Baradei, who led the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009, wrote on social media platform X.

In a separate post also referencing Trump's ultimatum to Iran that it will face "all hell" unless it strikes a deal, El-Baradei tagged UN and European Union accounts, as well as French President Emmanuel Macron.

"Nothing can be done to stop this madness?!" he wrote, also tagging the Chinese and Russian foreign ministries.

2026-04-06T19:05:00.002-07:00

How can Ukraine help unlock the Strait of Hormuz?

By Sasha Vakulina

Published on 06/04/2026 - EURONEWS

US President Donald Trump threatened to unleash "hell" on Iran if it failed to meet his Tuesday deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping. Can Ukraine help unblock it?

For over a week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly stated that Kyiv is ready to help unblock the Strait of Hormuz, which has been disrupted since breakout of the Iran war.

However, so far Ukraine has received no requests, Zelenskyy said on Friday.

“Our signal to the United States and countries in the Middle East about the Strait of Hormuz was that we were open to discussing it," he said X.

Zelenskyy said no country can lift the blockade on its own at this stage as he insisted that Kyiv has experience with launching the Grain Corridor in the Black Sea "despite Russia’s attempts to block the flow of food and other goods."

"The situation now is similar, but it is about energy," he said, adding that from Ukraine’s experience "the war and the negotiations on reopening the Hormuz Strait can go in parallel."

"An alternative step would be to control the strait unilaterally, as Ukraine did with the Grain Corridor. Achieving this would require interceptors, military convoys to escort the vessels, a large integrated electronic warfare network, and other tools," Zelenskyy said.

Food security corridor in the Black Sea

In summer 2022 Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the UN signed the Black Sea Grain Initiative - an agreement that safely allowed the export of grain from Ukrainian ports to world markets, reducing global food prices.

It created a maritime humanitarian corridor, but the initiative was terminated one year later after Russia withdrew its participation and said it would view any vessel bound for Ukraine as a potential military target.

Zelenskyy said over the past days that Moscow used a "a wide range of equipment for the blockade, not only battleships."

However, Ukraine has since established new export routes.

"We crippled the Russian Black Sea Fleet and pushed them away from the corridor," he explained.

"Then we organised convoys for civilian vessels using sea drones to counter Russian helicopters and other offensive weaponry."

The Food Security Corridor has been under Ukrainian control since then.

"We can share this expertise with other countries, but nobody asked us to come and help with the Hormuz Strait. Partners only asked us to share our expertise."

What tools does Ukraine have?

Unblocking the Strait of Hormuz would most likely require clearing mines, suppressing threats from along the coast of Iran, and, most importantly, defending ships in real time.

This is where Kyiv has the knowledge and the know-how.

With Iran relying massively on Shahed-type drones, the interception is key. In parts of the Strait, ships come very close to the Iranian coast, and strikes could reach their targets in a few minutes or less, leaving a very short window for interception.

Kyiv’s experience in defending against fast, low-cost, short-range drones could be particularly valuable to the US and the Gulf countries.

A central element in defending ships in real time could be Ukraine’s naval drones.

Kyiv forces now operate a wide range of unmanned surface systems that can be used for both kamikaze strikes against surface ships and, in modified versions, to launch first-person-view (FPV) drones or to carry air defence systems.

The most famous among those are Magura V5, Sea Baby, and Mamay. These drones have already proven effective in destroying even large, like Russia’s fleet landing ship Caesar Kunikov.

They can be adapted to defend commercial shipping in the Strait by operating alongside vessels providing constant coverage.

Zelenskyy confirmed that the naval drones are indeed included in the defence deals Ukraine signed with the Gulf countries last week.

Why is Kyiv offering help?

Ukraine has agreed to provide Gulf states with its complete air defence system — including maritime drones, electronic warfare and interception technology — against Iranian drones.

Some of these systems can help unblock the Strait of Hormuz, Zelenskyy said earlier in March, announcing the 10-year agreements with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE.

For Kyiv the deals with the Gulf states are an opportunity to open its arms exports on a global scale.

It would allow Ukraine to improve its own air defence against Russian ballistic missiles, as well as secure financially lucrative deals for its homegrown defence sector.

Ukraine is also trying to use the momentum of the Iran war and the escalation in the Middle East as a window of opportunity to strengthen its geopolitical role and even transition from a recipient of security aid to a provider.

2026-04-06T19:00:00.000-07:00

Ukraine and Syria to cooperate on security in unexpected military alliance

SYRIA WAS A FORMER RUSSIAN CLIENT STATE

By Sasha Vakulina

Published on 06/04/2026 - EURONEWS

Ukraine's Zelenskyy arrived in Damascus in a surprise visit on Sunday, for his first official visit to Syria after the fall of the pro-Russian al-Assad regime.

Ukraine and Syria pledged greater security cooperation in talks in Damascus on Sunday as Kyiv pushes to deepen security ties across the Middle East amid Moscow's ongoing full-scale invasion and the Iran war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Syria and the meeting with interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa marked Zelenskyy's first trip to the country since Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad was ousted in 2024.

The visit follows Zelenskyy's trip to Turkey on Saturday and a Gulf tour last week against the backdrop of the Iran war as he sought to clinch security deals and exchange Ukrainian drone expertise for air defence missiles.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine supported Syria after the fall of the al-Assad regime and is ready to continue working with Damascus on stability and development. He said Kyiv and Damascus would work more closely together so that the two countries and people "can become stronger," and their "economies can grow".

"We discussed in detail how to overcome the consequences of the war, as well as the negotiation process regarding Russia’s war against our state and our people," Zelenskyy wrote on X.

“I am grateful to all Syrians who welcomed us today. Ukraine was among the first to support a new Syria after the fall of the Assad regime. We are ready to continue supporting stability and development.”

Syria's al-Sharaa said the two leaders focused on "ways to strengthen economic cooperation and exchange expertise."

"The visit underscores Syria’s commitment to expanding its international partnerships in support of development and enhanced stability."

Syria’s new partnerships

Unlike the Gulf states, which Zelenskyy visited last week, Syria is not known to have any modern anti-ballistic air defence systems that might be of interest to Kyiv.

As well as the other countries in the region, it is also not capable of dealing with Iranian drones or missiles.

However, Syria has something that other countries do not have — active Russian military bases.

The Kremlin was a key ally of al-Sharaa’s predecessor al‑Assad, now exiled in Moscow.

Since he came to power just over a year ago, al-Sharaa has been trying to build new diplomatic ties after more than a decade of war and global isolation.

He also seems to have been maintaining a certain balance with Moscow as of now.

In January, he met President Vladimir Putin and so far has not asked Russia to withdraw from its military bases on Syrian soil.

Russian military bases in Syria remain

Moscow kept two bases in Syria: Khmeimim and Tartus on the Mediterranean coast.

Both are of critical importance to Russia, as they provide Moscow with easier access to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean sea.

Established by the Soviet Union in the 1970s, the port at Tartus was then expanded and modernised by Russia in 2012. Since 2013, Tartus has housed what the Russian Navy calls its "permanent task force in the Mediterranean Sea".

Moscow used it to conduct naval exercises, station warships and even host nuclear submarines.

When Turkey closed the Bosphorus to foreign warships in March 2022 shortly after Russia went on its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Tartus base played a critical role in maintaining Moscow's naval presence in the Mediterranean.

The airbase at Khmeimim has been operational since 2015 and was used to launch air strikes across Syria in support of al-Assad. It serves as a major logistical hub for Russian operations in Africa.

Russian military aircraft making their way south have frequently used Khmeimim to refuel.

Last year al-Sharaa requested al-Assad’s extradition so he could face a trial back home in exchange for maintaining the Russian military presence in the country. Moscow rejected the request.

Commenting on this last year, al-Sharaa admitted that Syria still needed Russia’s support.

“All weapons in Syria are Russian,” he said in April 2025, explaining that at that moment Damascus didn’t have offers and alternatives to replace Syrian weapons but was “negotiating new agreements,” specifically with Turkey.

Ukraine and Syria to cooperate on security in unexpected military alliance

By Sasha Vakulina

Published on 06/04/2026 - EURONEWS

Ukraine's Zelenskyy arrived in Damascus in a surprise visit on Sunday, for his first official visit to Syria after the fall of the pro-Russian al-Assad regime.

"We discussed in detail how to overcome the consequences of the war, as well as the negotiation process regarding Russia’s war against our state and our people," Zelenskyy wrote on X.

Syria's al-Sharaa said the two leaders focused on "ways to strengthen economic cooperation and exchange expertise."

"The visit underscores Syria’s commitment to expanding its international partnerships in support of development and enhanced stability."

Syria’s new partnerships

Unlike the Gulf states, which Zelenskyy visited last week, Syria is not known to have any modern anti-ballistic air defence systems that might be of interest to Kyiv.

As well as the other countries in the region, it is also not capable of dealing with Iranian drones or missiles.

However, Syria has something that other countries do not have — active Russian military bases.

The Kremlin was a key ally of al-Sharaa’s predecessor al‑Assad, now exiled in Moscow.

Since he came to power just over a year ago, al-Sharaa has been trying to build new diplomatic ties after more than a decade of war and global isolation.

He also seems to have been maintaining a certain balance with Moscow as of now.

In January, he met President Vladimir Putin and so far has not asked Russia to withdraw from its military bases on Syrian soil.

Russian military bases in Syria remain

Moscow kept two bases in Syria: Khmeimim and Tartus on the Mediterranean coast.

Both are of critical importance to Russia, as they provide Moscow with easier access to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean sea.

Moscow used it to conduct naval exercises, station warships and even host nuclear submarines.

The airbase at Khmeimim has been operational since 2015 and was used to launch air strikes across Syria in support of al-Assad. It serves as a major logistical hub for Russian operations in Africa.

Russian military aircraft making their way south have frequently used Khmeimim to refuel.

Last year al-Sharaa requested al-Assad’s extradition so he could face a trial back home in exchange for maintaining the Russian military presence in the country. Moscow rejected the request.

Commenting on this last year, al-Sharaa admitted that Syria still needed Russia’s support.

2026-04-06T18:59:00.001-07:00

Wildfires An Increasing Threat For Species During Climate Change

April 7, 2026

By Eurasia Review

Wildfires are becoming more frequent and are ravaging new parts of the world due to global warming. A study led by researchers from the University of Gothenburg shows that this change is increasing the vulnerability of thousands of plants, animals and fungi.

As global temperatures rise, the incidence of wildfires is increasing in many regions. This is mainly because higher average temperatures and changing weather conditions are drying out land and vegetation, making them more flammable. The study in Nature Climate Change shows that wildfires can break out closer to the poles than before. In some areas, the fire seasons may also double in length. This is under a medium scenario where the emissions don’t sharply increase or get cut till the end of this century.

“Our research shows that wildfires pose an ever-increasing threat to biodiversity. We find that nearly 84 per cent of species vulnerable to wildfires will face a higher risk by the end of this century,” says Xiaoye Yang, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg and the study’s lead author.

Combines 13 climate models

Previous research into how biodiversity is affected by global climate change has mainly focused on gradual changes to habitats. Less attention has been paid to how climate-driven wildfires affect the long-term survival of plants and animals.

The research team, including Chalmers University of Technology, combined 13 climate models with a machine learning-based method to forecast changes in the wildfire burned area and the length of the fire season up to the end of this century. They then assessed how these changes affect the risk to species worldwide, based on a Red List from the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). The Red List includes 9,592 species whose survival is currently threatened by the increasing occurrence and severity of wildfires.

– Species with small ranges are particularly vulnerable. The most affected species are concentrated in South America, South Asia and Australia, and a large proportion of them are already endangered. An increase in the frequency of wildfires could push some of them closer to extinction, says Xiaoye Yang.

Even species that have previously been spared from wildfires are facing a new threat, but there is a lack of research to assess how serious that threat is.

Global trends of increasing risk

The researchers calculated the increase in wildfires based on the IPCC’s various global warming scenarios. Under a moderate scenario involving a temperature rise of around 2.7 degrees compared with pre-industrial levels, the study shows that:

• The global area affected by wildfires could increase by around 9.3 per cent

• Fire seasons could be extended by 22.8 per cent

• Almost 84 per cent of species vulnerable to fire will face an increased risk of wildfires

The study highlights significant regional differences. Whilst the risk of wildfires is increasing in many parts of the world, certain regions in Africa may see a reduction in the area affected by fires due to a wetter climate in the future.

Climate action can reduce risk

The researchers also show that measures to limit emissions can significantly reduce the occurrence of wildfires. Compared with a high-emissions scenario, a future with moderate emissions could reduce the increase in species’ vulnerability to wildfires by more than 60 per cent. Regions such as New Zealand, South America and areas near the Arctic would benefit most from reduced emissions.

“Current conservation strategies for vulnerable plants and animals risk underestimating future threats if they do not take into account disturbances such as wildfires,” says Xiaoye Yang.

Wildfires an increasing threat for species during climate change

University of Gothenburg

image:

The ongoing climate change will lead to more wildfires. And this is increasing the vulnerability of thousands of plants, animals and fungi.

Credit: Photo: Tongxin Hu

Combines 13 climate models

Even species that have previously been spared from wildfires are facing a new threat, but there is a lack of research to assess how serious that threat is.

Global trends of increasing risk

• The global area affected by wildfires could increase by around 9.3 per cent

• Fire seasons could be extended by 22.8 per cent

• Almost 84 per cent of species vulnerable to fire will face an increased risk of wildfires

Climate action can reduce risk

“Current conservation strategies for vulnerable plants and animals risk underestimating future threats if they do not take into account disturbances such as wildfires,” says Xiaoye Yang.

Figure: Projected changes in wildfire burned area. Percentage increase in annual burned area relative to the reference period (1999–2014), projected for 2081–2100 under SSP2-4.5.

Credit

Xiaoye Yang

Journal

Nature Climate Change

DOI

10.1038/s41558-026-02600-5

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Article Title

Wildfire Risk for Species under Climate Change

Article Publication Date

6-Apr-2026

2026-04-06T18:54:00.005-07:00

Mitsotakis urges swift EU probe into MPs over Greek farm subsidy fraud

By Ioannis Karagiorgas with AFP

Published on 06/04/2026 -

Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis has asked EU prosecutors to swiftly charge MPs over alleged €23m farm subsidy fraud, as resignations and pressure mount.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Monday asked the European public prosecutor's office to launch "without delay" proceedings against lawmakers suspected of involvement in alleged fraud related to EU agricultural subsidies.

European Union prosecutors last week said they were probing numerous members of the ruling New Democracy party as part of an investigation looking into whether beneficiaries of agriculture subsidies had made false claims.

Greek authorities estimate that the network had defrauded at least 23 million euros ($27 million) since it started around 2018.

Mitsotakis said that he had requesting the lifting of immunity of the 11 MPs who are under investigation and who, according to Greek media, are all members of his party.

"I am asking the European Public Prosecutor's Office, once the immunity of our MPs has been lifted, to immediately take all investigative measures," he said in a statement broadcast on public television, adding that it would have to "rule on whether, against how many, and against which individuals it intends to bring charges."

Last week three cabinet members resigned over the scandal, which has piled pressure on Greece's government.

Bananas on Mount Olympus

EU prosecutors first detailed the scam last May, accusing some beneficiaries of agriculture subsidies of making claims for land they did not own and exaggerating the number of animals on farms.

Cases under investigation included banana plantations on Mount Olympus and pastures declared on archaeological sites. Most of the fraudulent subsidies went to the island of Crete.

The allegations led to a string of raids and arrests last October, as well as long-running protests by legitimate farmers whose lawful subsidies were held up.

Mitsotakis, who has underlined that the fraud began before he came to power in 2019, has vowed to imprison the "thieves" responsible and to reclaim the funds.

On Monday Mitsotakis blamed "the scourge of cronyism" in the country "that for decades has been passed on... from one government to another."

"Such crony relations have been the case in the Greek state since its creation," he said, adding, "they are one of the main reasons for our national backwardness compared with Europe".

Elections are scheduled in Greece next year. Mitsotakis's conservative party leads in opinion polls, but is not expected to secure an absolute majority.

2026-04-06T18:52:00.002-07:00

SPACE/COSMOS

Artemis II astronauts witness total solar eclipse after restoring contact with Earth

NASA’s Artemis II astronauts sent detailed observations of the Moon after traveling farther from Earth than any human before, breaking Apollo 13’s distance record. Mission control regained contact after a 40-minute blackout behind the Moon, with the crew expressing relief as communications were restored with Earth.

Issued on:07/04/2026 -FRANCE 24

In this fully illuminated view of the Moon, the near side (the hemisphere we see from Earth), is visible on the right, identifiable by the dark splotches that cover its surface, as viewed by the crew of the NASA Artemis II inside the Orion spacecraft on April 6, 2026. © NASA handout via Reuters

The four astronauts carrying out NASA's first lunar flyby in more than half-a-century were sending back detailed observations of the Moon after traveling further from Earth than any human before.

NASA's mission control in Houston regained contact with the crew after they temporarily lost signal for some 40 minutes, as their spacecraft passed behind Earth's natural satellite.

"It is so great to hear from Earth again," said astronaut Christina Koch, as the crewmembers were once again able to speak with humans on their home planet.

"We will always choose Earth, we will always choose each other."

The Artemis II mission's Orion capsule leaves Earth on its way to fly by the moon after launching from the Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, April 2, 2026 © REUTERS - NASA TV

Earlier the Artemis II team broke the distance record set by the 1970 Apollo 13 mission, which they were expected to surpass by 4,105 miles (6,606 kilometers) when they reached the journey's anticipated furthest distance from Earth -- 252,760 miles (406,778 kilometers).

It was one of the voyage's most notable achievements yet.

Astronaut Jeremy Hansen said the moment was "to challenge this generation and the next, to make sure this record is not long-lived."

The lunar flyby observation period will continue until approximately 9:20pm eastern (0120 GMT).

Soon astronauts will witness a solar eclipse, when the Sun will be behind the Moon.

'Wow'

The more than six-hour task of observing and documenting the lunar surface brought human perspective to features of the Moon that we primarily know through photographs taken by robots.

Victor Glover detailed the "terminator" -- the Moon's boundary between night and day.

"Wow -- I wish I had some more time to just sit here and describe what I'm seeing," he said, before creating a vivid portrait for the scientists listening in from Earth.

"But the terminator right now is just fantastic. It is the most rugged that I've seen it from a lighting perspective."

Kelsey Young, the lead scientist for the Artemis II mission, responded with elation. "Oh my gosh, that was an amazing picture you just painted," she said.

"Those types of observations are things that humans are uniquely able to contribute, and you just really brought us along with you."

Fellow astronaut Christina Koch meanwhile offered a colorful rendering of lunar craters.

"What it really looks like is like a lampshade with tiny pinprick holes and the light shining through," she said. "They are so bright compared to the rest of the Moon."

This image provided by NASA, astronaut and Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch peers out of one of the Orion spacecraft's main cabin windows, April 2, 2026 © Nasa via AP

Moon memorials

The Orion capsule is zipping around the Moon before U-turning and heading back to Earth in a so-called "free-return trajectory," a return-trip that will take about four days.

Adding to the historic nature of the mission led by Reid Wiseman, the Artemis II crew includes several firsts.

Glover will be the first person of color to fly around the Moon, Koch will be the first woman, and Canadian Hansen the first non-American.

Monday's celestial workday included a poignant moment just after the crew broke the distance record, when they proposed designating two previously unnamed craters.

The first they requested to name in honor of their spacecraft's nickname, "Integrity."

They offered a second name, "Carroll," for another crater, which they asked be named after the late wife of mission commander Reid Wiseman, who died of cancer.

"It's a bright spot on the Moon," said Hansen, his voice breaking with emotion. "And we would like to call it Carroll."

The astronauts embraced, and mission control in Houston held a moment of silence.

"Integrity and Carroll crater, loud and clear. Thank you," said Gibbons.

NASA said they would formally submit the name proposals to the International Astronomical Union, the body charged with naming celestial bodies and surface features.

Watch NASA's coverage of the lunar flyby by clicking on the player here:

NASA's Artemis II Live Mission Coverage

Nasa’s Artemis II crew to reach unseen far side of the Moon on flyby

By Malek Fouda

Published on 06/04/2026 - EURONEWS

NASA’s Artemis II crew are expected to reach their destination on Monday where the four astronauts aboard the Orion will – for the first time – look at the lunar far side with the naked eye. The fly-by will last approximately six hours before the astronauts head back home.

Astronauts aboard NASA's Artemis II lunar mission are more than halfway through their historic expedition, during which they will fly by the Moon and push deeper into space than even Apollo astronauts did more than 50 years ago.

Three American astronauts and one Canadian astronaut lifted off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on the 1st of April for a nearly 10-day mission, during which they will photograph the mysterious lunar far side as they travel past it.

The mission, humanity’s first trip to the Moon since 1972, is chasing Apollo 13's record for the farthest distance from Earth. That will make them our planet’s farthest emissaries as they swing around the Moon without stopping on Monday and then hightail it back home.

Their roughly six-hour lunar flyby promises views of the Moon’s far side that were too dark or too difficult to see by the 24 Apollo astronauts who preceded them. A total solar eclipse also awaits them as the Moon blocks the Sun, exposing snippets of shimmering corona.

“We’ll get eyes on the Moon, kind of map it out and then continue to go back in force,” said flight director Judd Frieling. The goal is a Moon base replete with landers, rovers, drones and habitats.

Apollo 13's astronauts missed out on a Moon landing when one of their oxygen tanks ruptured on the way there in 1970.

With the three lives in jeopardy, Mission Control pivoted to a free-return lunar trajectory to get them home as fast and efficiently as possible. This routing relies on the gravity of Earth and the Moon, and minimal fuel.

It worked for Apollo 13, turning it into what was later dubbed as NASA’s greatest “successful failure.”

Commander Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert reached a maximum 400,171 kilometres from Earth before making their life-saving U-turn on Apollo 13.

Artemis II’s astronauts are following the same figure-eight path since they are neither orbiting the Moon nor landing on it. But their distance from Earth should exceed Apollo 13’s by more than 6,600 kilometres.

The mission’s Christina Koch said late last week that she and her crewmates don’t live on superlatives, but it’s an important milestone “that people can understand and wrap their heads around,” one that merges the past with the present and even the future as new records are set.

During the flyby, the astronauts will split into pairs and take turns capturing the lunar views out their windows with cameras. At closest approach, they will come within 6,550 kilometres of the Moon.

Because they launched on 1 April, the rendezvous will not see as much of the far lunar side illuminated as on other dates.

But the crew still will be able to make out “definite chunks of the far side that have never been seen” by humans, said NASA geologist Kelsey Young, including a good portion of Orientale Basin.

Once Artemis II departs the lunar neighbourhood, it will take four days to return home. The capsule will aim for a splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego on April 10, nine days after its Florida launch.

During the flight back, the astronauts will link up via radio with the crew of the orbiting International Space Station, where NASA colleagues are poised to have a cosmic chitchat.

"Ancient Immigrant" star puzzles, delights astronomers

Sloan Digital Sky Survey

image:

An image of our Milky Way galaxy with the position of the Ancient Immigrant star (SDSS J0715-7334) marked with a star symbol. The solid red line shows the path the Ancient Immigrant has taken through our galaxy; the dashed blue line shows the path expected for a star born in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Credit: Image Credit: Vedant Chandra and the SDSS collaboration Background ESA/Gaia image, A. Moitinho, A. F. Silva, M. Barros, C. Barata, University of Lisbon; H. Savietto, Fork Research, under a Creative Commons license CC BY‐SA 3.0 IGO.

A class of undergraduate students at University of Chicago has used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to discover one of the oldest stars in the universe, a star that formed in a companion galaxy and migrated to the Milky Way.

The ten students found the star as part of their “Field Course in Astrophysics” course at the University of Chicago, led by Professor Alex Ji, the deputy Project Scientist for SDSS-V, and graduate teaching assistants Hillary Andales and Pierre Thibodeaux.

SDSS, an international collaboration of over 75 scientific institutions across the globe, has been operating for 25 years with a commitment to make data from its survey publicly available and broadly usable to all. In its latest phase, it uses robots to rapidly acquire spectra of millions of objects across the sky with the aim of improving our understanding of how stars, black holes and galaxies grow and evolve over cosmic time.

In Professor Ji’s class, SDSS is embedded into the curriculum. The students spent the first several weeks looking through data from the newest phase of the SDSS, searching for interesting stars. After examining several thousand, they made a list of 77 to further observe on a field trip to Las Campanas Observatory.

They then spent their Spring Break at Carnegie Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, using the Magellan Inamori Kyocera Echelle (MIKE) instrument on the Magellan telescopes. The night of March 21st, 2025 was their first night on the telescope. The second star they observed, named SDSSJ0715-7334, turned out to be the one that justified the trip.

“We found it the first night, and it completely changed our plans for the course,” Ji said.

The plan was to observe each star for 10 minutes, but the second night the students observed it for three hours. “I was looking at that camera the whole night to make sure it was working,” said Natalie Orrantia, one of the students who made the discovery.

The star turned out to be the most pristine ever found, composed almost completely of hydrogen and helium. This composition suggests it is one of the oldest stars ever seen. Analysis of its orbit shows it formed in the Large Magellanic Cloud and migrated into the Milky Way billions of years ago. These two facts led Alex Ji, the students’ Professor at University of Chicago, to call the star an “ancient immigrant.”

“This ancient immigrant gives us an unprecedented look at conditions in the early universe,” said Ji. “Big data projects like SDSS make it possible for students to get directly involved in these important discoveries.”

Astronomers refer to any elements heavier than hydrogen and helium as “metals,” and the amount of those elements present in a star is known as its “metallicity.” With only 0.005 percent of the metals found in our Sun, SDSSJ0715-7334 has the lowest metallicity of any star yet observed in the Universe – more than twice as metal-poor as the previous record holder.

“We analyzed the star for a large swath of elements, and the abundances are quite low for all of them,” said Ha Do, another of the students who discovered the star.

What does it mean for a star to have low metallicity? Because elements heavier than hydrogen and helium can only be produced in supernova explosions, stars with few of these elements must have formed from gas before most of the supernovae in the Universe ever occurred. In other words, the star must be ancient, from the first few generations of stars that ever formed.

The team also used data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to find the distance to the star and its motion through our galaxy. By tracing its motion back through the billions of years the star has existed, the team identified the birthplace of the star: in the Milky Way’s largest companion galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The Ancient Immigrant contained further surprises for the students who discovered it. Ji divided the class into groups, each focusing on a different type of analysis of the star. Orrantia and Do led the team that studied the carbon content of the star, which turned out to be so low that it was undetectable.

“The star has so little carbon that it suggests an early sprinkling of cosmic dust is responsible for making it,” said Ji. “This formation pathway has only been seen once before.”

Contributing to such a discovery so early in their careers has helped Orrantia and Do decide to continue to pursue graduate careers in astronomy.

“To be able to actually contribute to something like this, it’s very exciting,” Do said.

“These students have discovered more than just the most pristine star.” said Juna Kollmeier, the Director of SDSS-V. “They have discovered their inalienable right to physics. Surveys like SDSS and Gaia make that possible for students of all ages everywhere on Earth and this example shows that there is still plenty of room for discovery.”

Journal

Nature Astronomy

DOI

10.1038/s41550-026-02816-7

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A nearly pristine star from the Large Magellanic Cloud

Article Publication Date

3-Apr-2026

Main image: students Ha Do (left) and Natalie Orrantia (right) observe the Ancient Immigrant star

Inset: The Irenee duPont telescope is the site of SDSS-V’s Southern sky component, which is rapidly surveying the cosmos. This telescope was reinvigorated with a new instrument suite and a new robotic focal plane to enable SDSS-V (left hand photo).

Credit

Main image: Ha Do (University of Chicago); Inset: SDSS Collaboration

Found: Most pristine star in the universe

An ancient immigrant: SDSS J0715-7334—which exists about 80,000 light-years from Earth—was born elsewhere and got pulled into our Milky Way galaxy over time

Carnegie Institution for Science

image:

An ancient immigrant: an artist's conception (not to scale) of the red giant SDSS J0915-7334, which was born near the Large Magellanic Cloud and has now journeyed to reside in the Milky Way.

Credit: Navid Marvi/Carnegie Science

Pasadena, CA—An unusual team of astronomers used Sloan Digital Sky Survey-V (SDSS-V) data and observations on the Magellan telescopes at Carnegie Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile to discover the most pristine star in the known universe, called SDSS J0715-7334. Their work is published in Nature Astronomy.

Led by the University of Chicago’s Alexander Ji—a former Carnegie Observatories postdoctoral fellow—and including Carnegie astrophysicist Juna Kollmeier—who leads SDSS, now in its fifth generation—the research team identified a star from just the second generation of celestial objects in the cosmos, which formed just a few billion years after the universe began.

“These pristine stars are windows into the dawn of stars and galaxies in the universe,” Ji explained. Several of his and Kollmeier’s co-authors on the paper are undergraduate students from UChicago, whom Ji brought to Las Campanas on an observing trip for spring break last year. “My first visit to LCO is where I really fell in love with astronomy, and it was special to share such a formative experience with my students.”

The Big Bang birthed the universe as a hot murky soup of energetic particles. Over time, as this material expanded, it began to cool and coalesce into neutral hydrogen gas. Some patches were denser than others and, after a few hundred million years, their gravity overcame the universe’s outward trajectory and the material collapsed inward. This became the first generation of stars, which were formed from just pristine hydrogen and helium.

These stars burned hot and died young, but not before producing new elements in their stellar forges, which were strewn outward into the cosmos by their end-of-life explosions. And from this detritus, new stars were born, which now comprised a wider array of elements than their predecessors.

“All of the heavier elements in the universe, which astronomers call metals, were produced by stellar processes—from fusion reactions occurring within stars to supernovae explosions to collisions between very dense stars,” said Ji. “So, finding a star with very little metal content in it told this group of students that they’d come across something very special.”

Astronomers like Ji and Kollmeier are interested in finding ancient stars from the second and third generation after the universe first developed structure. This would reveal how star formation has changed over the ensuing eons.

“We have to look in our cosmic backyard to find these objects, because we can’t yet observe individual stars at the dawn of star formation. Since these stars are rare, surveys like SDSS-V are designed to have the statistical power to find these needles in the stellar haystack and test our theories of star formation and explosion,” explained Kollmeier.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been one of the most successful and influential surveys in the history of astronomy and its fifth generation, which Kollmeier leads, takes millions of optical and infrared spectra, across the entire sky. This pioneering effort deploys both the du Pont telescope at Las Campanas in the Southern Hemisphere and the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico in the Northern Hemisphere.

The wealth of SDSS-V data enabled Ji and his students to identify stars with very few heavy elements. Then, at Las Campanas, they used the state-of-the-art Magellan telescopes to take high-resolution spectra of these candidates. Amazingly, the magic occurred in the wee hours of the morning on their first Magellan observing run and SDSS J0715-7334 was confirmed as the new gold-standard of stellar purity.

“The ecosystem of telescopes at Las Campanas was critical to nearly every aspect of this breakthrough work, from the du Pont data collected as part of SDSS-V’s Milky Way mapping efforts to the Magellan observations that showed exactly how special SDSS J0715-7334 really is,” said Michael Blanton, Director and Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair of the Carnegie Science Observatories.

Las Campanas is home to four Carnegie telescopes, and this project made spectacular use of two of them, showcasing how innovations in instrumentation can drive discovery throughout a telescope’s life.

This interconnectedness is driven home by Ji and the student’s itinerary at Las Campanas. The night of their arrival they visited the du Pont telescope to see SDSS-V observers hard at work taking new data that will be added to the project’s enormous volume of resources for amateur and professional astronomers. The very next evening, they made their own observations on the Magellan Clay telescope.

Luckily, after the discovery, Ji was able to reconfigure the rest of the semester so that

the students could spend their time digging deeper into their find—a real-world example for his students of how the ability to pivot is critical to making scientific breakthroughs.

“When I was an undergraduate, I greatly preferred doing research to taking classes. I’m delighted that Alex’s course was transformed into a curriculum of discovery and I’d like to ensure surveys like SDSS-V and Gaia have the power to make that the norm and not the exception,” Kollmeier said.

Deeper analysis of the Magellan spectra showed that it has less than 0.005 percent of the Sun’s metal content. It is twice as metal-poor as the previous record holder for most-pristine star and has particularly low abundances of iron and carbon. In fact, it is 40 times more metal-poor than the most iron-poor known star.

By incorporating data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, the students were also able to determine that SDSS J0715-7334—which exists about 80,000 light-years from Earth—was born elsewhere and got pulled into our Milky Way galaxy over time.

“Training the next generation of astronomers is critical to the future of our field. And building excitement about the practice of science by undertaking projects like this is a great way to ensure that curious-minded young learners can see themselves in astrophysics,” Ji concluded. “My time as a postdoc at Carnegie was pivotal to my professional growth and I am thrilled that I was able to pay that experience forward by bringing my students to Las Campanas.”

Students from University of Chicago professor Alexander Ji’s “Field Course in Astrophysics” class pose in front of the Magellan Clay telescope at Carnegie Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. They are using their bodies to spell MIKE, referencing the Magellan Inamori Kyocera Echelle (MIKE) spectrograph instrument that they used on the telescope to make their breakthrough discovery. From left to right: Hillary Diane Andales, Pierre Thibodeaux, Ha Do, Natalie Orrantia, Rithika Tudmilla, Selenna Mejias-Torres, Zhongyuan Zhang and Alex Ji.

Credit

Zhongyuan Zhang

Journal

Nature Astronomy

DOI

10.1038/s41550-026-02816-7.

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A nearly pristine star from the Large Magellanic Cloud

Article Publication Date

3-Apr-2026

How did this get made? Giant planet orbits small star

Carnegie Institution for Science

image:

An artist’s conception of the gas giant planet TOI-5205 b orbiting a small, cool red dwarf star.

Credit: Katherine Cain, Carnegie Science.

Washington, D.C.—Observations of the highly unusual—sometimes called “forbidden”—exoplanet TOI-5205 b taken by JWST suggest the giant planet’s atmosphere has fewer heavier elements than its host star. These findings have implications for our understanding of the giant planet formation process that occurs early in a star’s lifespan.

Published this week by The Astronomical Journal, these findings represent the collaborative work of an international team of astronomers led by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Caleb Cañas and including Carnegie Science’s Shubham Kanodia.

TOI 5205 b is a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a star that is itself about four times the size of Jupiter and about 40 percent the mass of the Sun. When it passes in front of its host star—a phenomenon astronomers call a “transit”—the planet blocks about six percent of its light. By observing this transit with telescope instruments called spectrographs that split the light into its constituent colors, astronomers can try to decipher the planet’s atmospheric makeup and learn more about its history and relationship with its host star.

Planets are born from the rotating disk of gas and dust that surrounds a star in its youth. While it is commonly accepted that giant planets form in these cloudy disks that result from the birth of the host star, the existence of massive planets like TOI-5205b orbiting cool stars at close distances raises many questions about this process.

To shed more light on this, Kanodia, Cañas and Jessica Libby-Roberts of the University of Tampa are leading the largest JWST Cycle 2 exoplanet program, Red Dwarfs and the Seven Giants, which was designed to study unlikely worlds like TOI-5205 b—sometimes called GEMS (for giant exoplanets around M dwarf stars).

Back in 2023, Kanodia led the effort that confirmed TOI-5205 b’s existence, following up on information from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which first identified it as a planetary candidate. Now, he’s co-leading the team that made the first observations of its atmospheric composition.

Their observations of three transits of TOI5205-b revealed something that the astronomers couldn’t easily explain. They were surprised to see that the planet’s atmosphere has a lower concentration of heavy elements—relative to hydrogen—than a gas giant planet in our own Solar System like Jupiter. It even has a lower metallicity than its own host star. This makes it stand out among all the giant planets that have been studied to date.

Additionally, although less shocking, the transits revealed methane (CH₄) and hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) in TOI-5205-b’s atmosphere.

To contextualize their findings, team members Simon Muller and Ravit Helled at University of Zurich deployed sophisticated models of planetary interiors to predict that the entirety of TOI5205-b’s composition is about 100 times more metal rich than its atmosphere, as measured by the transits.

“We observed much lower metallicity than our models predicted for the planet’s bulk composition, which is calculated from measurements of a planet’s mass and radius. This suggests that its heavy elements migrated inward during formation and now its interior and atmosphere are not mixing,” Kanodia explained. “In summary, these results suggest a very carbon-rich, oxygen-poor planetary atmosphere.”

The research is part of the GEMS Survey, a program dedicated to studying transiting giant planets around M-dwarf stars to understand their formation, structure, and atmospheres. The research group also includes Carnegie astronomers Peter Gao, Johanna Teske, and Nicole Wallack, as well as recently departed Carnegie postdoctoral fellow Anjali Piette, now on faculty at University of Birmingham.

Other co-authors are: Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, Erin May, and Kevin Stevenson of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University; Shang-Min Tsai of the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics; Dana Louie of Catholic University; Giannina Guzmán Caloca of the University of Maryland; Kevin Hardegree-Ullman of Caltech; Knicole Colón of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Ian Czekala of University of St. Andrews; Megan Delamer and Suvrath Mahadevan of Penn State University; Andrea Lin and Te Han of the University of California Irvine; Joe Ninan of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research; and Guðmundur Stefánsson of the University of Amsterdam.

The researchers worked together to correct for the effects that starspots on TOI-5205 b’s host star had on their data. Because the star is heavily spotted, it left an imprint on the data—brightening some wavelengths and masking potential signatures in the atmosphere. Wallack and Kanodia are now validating this method in a more-recent JWST project in the same planetary system, which will prove useful for future investigations of this and other planets around active stars.

Journal

The Astronomical Journal

DOI

10.3847/1538-3881/ae4976

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

GEMS JWST: Transmission Spectroscopy of TOI-5205b Reveals Significant Stellar Contamination and a Metal-poor Atmosphere

Astronomers thought the early universe was full of hydrogen. Now they’ve found it.

A new study has now increased the known number of hydrogen gas halos by a factor of ten: from roughly 3,000 to over 33,000.

University of Texas at Austin

image:

An enormous halo of hydrogen gas found in Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) data and superimposed over its location as seen in deep imaging from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Present 11.3 billion years ago, this system glows from the combined light of many galaxies within it, with the brightest region represented in red. Using data from HETDEX, astronomers have increased the known number of these haloes by more than a factor of ten - from roughly 3,000 to over 33,000.

Credit: Credit: Erin Mentuch Cooper (HETDEX), JWST image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.

Astronomers using data from the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. Known as Cosmic Noon, this is an epoch in the early universe when galaxies were growing their fastest. To spur this growth, they would have needed access to vast reservoirs of hydrogen gas, a key building block for stars. However, until recently, astronomers had only found a handful of these essential structures.

A new study published in The Astrophysical Journal has now increased the known number of hydrogen gas halos by a factor of ten: from roughly 3,000 to over 33,000. This confirms suspicions that they are not rare curiosities. The study also increases the range of known sizes, providing a more representative sample for astronomers to study as they continue to tease out the origin and evolution of the first galaxies.

“We’ve been analyzing the same handful of objects for the past 20 or so years,” said Erin Mentuch Cooper, HETDEX data manager and lead author on the study. “HETDEX is letting us find many more of these halos and measure their shapes and sizes. It has really allowed us to create an amazing statistical catalogue.”

Hydrogen gas is notoriously hard to detect because it doesn’t generate its own light. However, if it’s near an object that’s throwing off a lot of energy – say, a galaxy or group of galaxies full of UV-emitting stars – that energy can cause the hydrogen to glow. To detect this, you need to dedicate a lot of time on precise instruments, which are often in high demand.

While previous astronomical surveys have found some of these halos, their instruments were only able to pick up on the brightest, most extreme examples. And targeted observations of early galaxies are usually so zoomed in that they cut off all but the smallest halos. As a result, everything in between the little guys and the big honkers has remained elusive.

Observations from HETDEX are starting to fill in this gap. Using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory, it is charting the position of over one million galaxies in its quest to understand dark energy. “We’ve captured nearly half a petabyte of data on not only these galaxies but the regions in between,” said Karl Gebhardt, HETDEX principal investigator, chair of The University of Texas at Austin’s astronomy department, and co-author on the paper. “Our observations cover a region of the sky measuring over 2,000 full Moons. The scope is enormous and unprecedented.”

“The Hobby-Eberly Telescope is one of the largest in the world,” added Dustin Davis, a postdoctoral fellow at UT Austin, a HETDEX scientist, and co-author on the study. “And the instrument HETDEX uses produces 100,000 spectra in each observation. So, we have huge amounts of data and there are all kinds of neat, fun, weird things waiting for us to find.”

The newly revealed halos measure from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of light years across. Some are as simple as a football-shaped cloud surrounding a single galaxy. Others are sprawling, irregular blobs containing multiple galaxies. “Those are the fun ones,” said Mentuch Cooper. “They look like giant amoebas with tendrils extending into space.”

To find them, the team selected the 70,000 brightest of the over 1.6 million early galaxies that have been identified by HETDEX so far. With the help of supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, they looked to see how many of these showed evidence of a surrounding halo: a compact central region of hydrogen and a thinner cloud extending beyond it.

Nearly half did. What’s more, this fraction is likely an underestimate, explained Mentuch Cooper. “We suspect the faintest systems simply aren’t bright enough to fully reveal how large they are.”
The team hopes their discovery will help others study the early universe: how its structures evolved, the distribution of matter, the movement of objects, and more. With 33,000 halos to study, the problem will no longer be where to find them, but which one to choose.

“There are various models for galaxies in this epoch that largely work and seem to make sense, but there are gaps and holes,” explained Davis. “Now we can focus in on individual halos and see at a greater detail the physics and mechanics of what's going on. And then we can fix or throw out the models and try again.”

Journal

The Astrophysical Journal

DOI

10.3847/1538-4357/ae44f3

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Lyα Nebulae in HETDEX: The Largest Statistical Census Bridging Lyα Halos and Blobs across Cosmic Noon

Did impacts from meteors help start life on Earth?

Research synthesized by a recent graduate suggests vents generated from the impacts of space rocks may have enabled suitable environments for the first living cells

Rutgers University

image:

Scientists looking for sources that generated life on Earth are considering hydrothermal vents of different types, from vents found in the deep sea to others created by meteor impacts.

Credit: Richard Lutz/Rutgers University

Meteor impacts may have helped spark life on Earth, creating hot, chemical-rich environments where the first living cells could take shape, according to research integrated by a recent Rutgers University graduate.

“No one knows, from a scientific perspective, how life could have been formed from an early Earth that had no life,” said Shea Cinquemani, who earned her bachelor’s degree in marine biology and fisheries management from the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences in May 2025. “How does something come from nothing?”

Cinquemani is the lead author of a scientific review, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, examining where life may have first formed on Earth. The paper focuses on hydrothermal vents, places where hot, mineral-rich water flows through rock and emerges into surrounding water, creating the chemical conditions and energy gradients needed for complex reactions.

Her research points to hydrothermal systems created by meteor impacts as a potentially critical and underappreciated setting for the origin of life, strengthening the case beyond conventional deep-sea vent theories. Cinquemani said such systems would have been widespread on early Earth, making them especially compelling environments for life to begin.

The paper, co-authored with Rutgers oceanographer Richard Lutz, marks a rare achievement for a recent undergraduate whose work began as a class assignment and was transformed into a publication in a highly respected scientific journal.

“It’s amazing,” Lutz said. “You often have undergraduates that are part of papers –

faculty choose undergraduates all the time to work on papers and projects. But for an undergraduate to be the lead author is a huge deal.”

The project started in the spring of Cinquemani’s senior year in a course called “Hydrothermal Vents,” taught by Lutz, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences. Cinquemani’s assignment was to examine whether hydrothermal vents on Mars could have been harbingers of life there.

“I was like, ‘I know nothing about this topic,’” she said. “Thinking about the origins of biology on another planet was like, whoa. Not sure how I’m going to do this.” The topic went beyond her usual comfort zone of biology and extended into chemistry, physics and geology, she said.

Cinquemani expanded the assignment after graduation into a full scientific review of both impact-generated and deep-sea vent systems, which was accepted after what Lutz described as a demanding peer-review evaluation.

“I have never seen such a rigorous review process,” Lutz said. “There were 15 pages of comments and five different rounds of reviews. She had the patience and perseverance, and the paper turned out magnificently.”

Deep-sea hydrothermal vents have long been considered a possible birthplace of life. Discovered in the deep ocean in the late 1970s, these systems host entire ecosystems that thrive without sunlight. Instead of photosynthesis, microbes use chemical energy from compounds released by vent fluids, such as hydrogen sulfide, in a process known as chemosynthesis.

Some deep-sea vents are powered by heat from the Earth’s interior near volcanic activity while others are driven by chemical reactions between water and rock that generate heat without magma. This heat facilitates chemical processes and provides a warm oasis in the otherwise barren seafloor of the deep ocean.

Cinquemani’s paper places more focus on a different category that has recently begun gaining attention: hydrothermal systems created by meteor impacts.

When a large meteor strikes Earth, the impact generates intense heat and melts surrounding rock. As the area cools and water fills the crater, a hot, mineral-rich environment can form, similar in some ways to deep-sea vents.

“You have a lake surrounding a very, very warm center,” Cinquemani said. “And now you get a hydrothermal vent system, just like in the deep sea, but made by the heat from an impact.”

To explore how these systems might support life, she examined research on three well-studied crater sites that span vastly different periods of Earth’s history. The oldest is the Chicxulub impact structure beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, formed about 65 million years ago and later shown to have hosted a long-lived hydrothermal system. Next is the Haughton impact structure in the Canadian Arctic, formed about 31 million years ago. The youngest is Lonar Lake in India, created about 50,000 years ago, where the crater still contains water and offers clues about how these systems evolve over time.

These impact-generated systems may last thousands to tens of thousands of years, giving simple molecules time to form more complex structures that could lead to life.

Scientists say such environments may have been especially important on early Earth, which experienced frequent asteroid impacts. In that sense, events often seen as destructive also may have helped create the conditions for life.

The idea builds on decades of research into deep-sea vents while expanding the search for life’s origins into new territory.

Lutz helped explore these deep-sea environments several decades ago when they were still a scientific mystery. As a young postdoctoral researcher, he joined the first biological expeditions to study hydrothermal vents and descended more than a mile beneath the ocean surface in the research deep-sea submersible Alvin, where he observed thriving communities of organisms in total darkness.

Those dives helped open a new field of research and shaped scientists’ understanding of how life can exist in extreme environments without sunlight.

“We have talked for many years about the possibility that life may have originated at deep-sea hydrothermal vents,” Lutz said.

Cinquemani’s work brings together those long-standing ideas with newer evidence that impact-generated systems also could play a role and may in some cases offer favorable conditions for early chemical reactions.

The implications extend beyond Earth. Hydrothermal activity is thought to exist on the ocean floors of icy moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, and may have existed in impact craters on young Mars. If these environments on Earth can support the chemistry of life, they could become key targets in the search for life elsewhere.

For Cinquemani, the work is driven by curiosity.

“Humans are insanely curious beings,” said Cinquemani, who works as a technician at Rutgers’ New Jersey Aquaculture Innovation Center in Cape May, N.J., where she supports aquaculture research while preparing to pursue advanced study in marine science. “We question everything. We may never know exactly how we began, but we can try our best to understand how things might have occurred.”

Explore more of the ways Rutgers research is shaping the future.

Journal

Journal of Marine Science and Engineering

DOI

10.3390/jmse14050486

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vent and Impact-Generated Hydrothermal Vent Systems: Insights into the Origin of Life

The depths of Neptune and Uranus may be “superionic”

Carnegie Institution for Science

image:

Illustration of the predicted hexagonal carbon hydride compound under Neptune-like interior conditions. In this structure, carbon forms the outer spiral chains (yellow) and hydrogen forms the inner spiral chains (blue), consistent with the quasi-one-dimensional superionic behavior identified in first-principles simulations.

Credit: Cong Liu

Washington, DC—The interiors of ice giant planets like Uranus and Neptune could be home to a previously unknown state of matter, according to new computational simulations by Carnegie’s Cong Liu and Ronald Cohen.

Their work, published in Nature Communications, predicts that a quasi-one-dimensional superionic state of carbon hydride exists under the extreme pressures and temperatures found deep inside these outer Solar System bodies.

More than 6,000 exoplanets have been discovered. As this number grows, astronomers, planetary scientists, and Earth scientists are crossing disciplinary boundaries—combining observation, experimentation, and theory—to define and probe the factors that help us understand the dynamic processes that shape them, including the generation of magnetic fields.

As such, interest has grown in understanding the processes that are occurring deep beneath the surfaces of planets and moons in our own Solar System, which can inform our understanding of planetary dynamics, and even planetary habitability in more-distant neighborhoods.

Measurements of Uranus and Neptune’s densities indicate that the interiors of these giant planets contain intermediate layers of unconventional “hot ices,” which exist below their hydrogen and helium atmospheric envelopes and above their rocky cores. These layers are believed to be composed of water (H2O), methane (CH4), and ammonia (NH4), but due to the extreme conditions, it is thought that exotic phases would emerge.

The physics in these high-pressure, high-temperature regions can give rise to unconventional states of matter, which is why theorists and experimentalists attempt to predict and recreate what would be found there.

Using high-performance computing and machine-learning, Liu and Cohen performed fundamental quantum physics simulations of carbon hydride (CH) under pressures ranging from nearly 5 million to nearly 30 million times atmospheric pressure (500 to 3,000 gigapascals) and at temperatures ranging from 6,740 to 10,340 degrees Fahrenheit (4,000 to 6,000 Kelvin).

Their tools predicted the emergence of an ordered hexagonal framework in which hydrogen atoms move along spiral pathways, creating a quasi-one-dimensional superionic state.

Superionic materials occupy an unusual middle ground between solids and liquids—one type of atom remains arranged in a crystalline framework and another becomes mobile.

“This newly predicted carbon–hydrogen phase is particularly striking because the atomic motion is not fully three-dimensional,” Cohen explained. “Instead, hydrogen moves preferentially along well-defined helical pathways embedded within an ordered carbon structure.”

This directionality of this movement has important implications for how heat and electricity move through planetary interiors. Such behavior could influence interior energy redistribution, electrical conductivity, and possibly the interpretation of magnetic-field generation in ice giants.

Their findings also expand our understanding of the behavior of simple compounds under extreme conditions, suggesting that even simple systems can organize into unexpectedly complex phases.

“Carbon and hydrogen are among the most abundant elements in planetary materials, yet their combined behavior at giant-planet conditions remains far from fully understood,” Liu concluded.

Beyond planetary interiors, the ability to identify strongly directional emergent phenomena in condensed matter could have ramifications for materials science and engineering.

Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-70603-z

Article Title

Prediction of thermally driven quasi-1D superionic states in carbon hydride under giant planetary conditions

2026-04-06T18:43:00.007-07:00

How Unsupervised Screen Time Harms Vulnerable Preschoolers

For children ages 2 to 5, the American Psychological Association recommends no more than one hour of daily screen time. About half of young children in the U.S. spend more than two hours a day on screens during the week, with even higher use on the weekends. CREDIT: Florida Atlantic University

April 7, 2026

By Eurasia Review

Early problems with language can have a lasting negative impact on social and emotional development. Building on this foundation, a new groundbreaking study from Florida Atlantic University and Aarhus University in Denmark tests the hypothesis that unsupervised, solitary screen time during early childhood increases the likelihood that language difficulties will lead to socioemotional difficulties.

The study, published in Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology, found that pathways from poor communication skills and low productive vocabulary to later adjustment problems were particularly strong among preschool- and kindergarten-aged children who averaged at least 10 to 30 minutes of solitary screen time per day across the course of a week.

Study participants were 546 4- and 5-year-olds (264 girls, 282 boys) attending 24 population-based childcare centers across 13 municipalities in Denmark. Teachers completed assessments twice of child adjustment difficulties, such as conduct and emotional problems, over the course of about six months during a single school year. At the outset, teachers administered standardized tests of child language abilities, including communication skills and productive vocabulary. Parents reported on solitary screen time, which was defined as the average number of hours per week that children spent alone viewing handheld devices or television, excluding screen time supervised by or consumed with an adult.

Consistent with several previous studies, there were longitudinal associations from oral language problems to later adjustment difficulties. Across the six-month period, poor communication skills and high levels of solitary screen time separately predicted escalating emotional difficulties.

Unique to this study was the finding that solo screen time magnified problems arising from language difficulties. Associations from low productive vocabulary and poor communication skills to increases in conduct problems were strongest among children whose parents reported that their children were well above average in solitary screen time exposure.

“Unsupervised screen time forecloses opportunities for social engagement that might mitigate the behavioral risks that follow from language problems,” said Brett Laursen, Ph.D., senior author and a professor of psychology in FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.

Laursen uses an economics model to explain the results. Economists define opportunity costs as losses attached to a choice. If an adult stays up late with a book, the opportunity cost of reading is a good night’s sleep.

“The opportunity costs of solitary screen time can be particularly steep for vulnerable youth. Children have a finite number of free time hours in a day,” said Laursen. “Every hour a child spends alone with a device is an hour they aren’t engaged in social interactions that boost language skills. It is an hour not spent practicing the social and emotional skills required to build friendships. Screens don’t demand compromise, sharing or dialogue – the exact skills that children with communication difficulties need to practice.”

Young children learn language from in-person interactions – very little is acquired from video screens. Further, electronic media cannot replace the rich social experiences children gain from play and engagement with peers.

“Young children with limited language skills are already at risk for social and emotional challenges,” said Molly Selover, lead author and an FAU doctoral student in psychology. “There is little reason to expect that screens help children overcome the adaptive challenges posed by oral language problems and many reasons to suspect that they make matters worse.”

Excessive screen use by young children is widespread: the World Health Organization recommends no more than one hour per day for children ages 2 to 5, yet a global review found that two-thirds of households exceed this limit. In the United States, about half of young children spend more than two hours a day on screens during the week, with even higher use on weekends. Of course, both content and supervision matter.

For children ages 2 to 5, the American Psychological Association encourages parents to limit screen time to no more than one hour per day and to co-view and interact with their children during this time rather than using the screen as a babysitter. They also note that the quality of the content on screens is extremely important, perhaps more important than the total amount of time spent viewing.

The authors say that high caliber content has documented benefits for children, especially as children get older. Unfortunately, when left to their own devices, many young children prefer fast-paced, brief and highly stimulating content, some of which may be age-inappropriate.

“Electronic media is as an integral component of the home learning environment; many children spend more time with tablets and phones than with toys, books and friends,” said Selover. “Like other home environment risks, solitary screen time poses a unique peril to young children with heightened vulnerabilities. Adults tend to think of screens as pleasant distractions and may use them as convenient babysitters. But for preschool children with language vulnerabilities, unsupervised screen time is not benign – it can be an active barrier to well-being.”

The authors acknowledge that their findings may not be popular. Screens are a ubiquitous part of everyday life. Nevertheless, they encourage parents to carefully scrutinize how young children engage screens.

“The findings matter because they show that an all-too-common environmental risk – elevated solitary screen time – can worsen behavioral and conduct challenges for children who face an already difficult developmental path,” Selover said.

2026-04-06T18:40:00.007-07:00

Why Cats Stop Eating, It’s Not Just Fullness

April 7, 2026

By Eurasia Review

In a series of controlled feeding experiments, cats were given food in six consecutive cycles, each consisting of a 10-minute feeding period followed by a 10-minute interval. The researchers found that when the same food was repeatedly presented, cats gradually reduced their food intake over successive cycles. In contrast, when different foods were presented sequentially, the decrease in intake was significantly attenuated.

In further experiments, the researchers tested whether the decline in intake caused by repeated presentation of the same food could be reversed by introducing a different food. Cats were given the same food for five consecutive trials and a different food in the sixth. Intake decreased significantly from the first to the fifth trial, but increased again when a new food was introduced, regardless of whether it was more or less palatable than the original one.

Remarkably, even without changing the food itself, simply introducing the odor of a different food restored intake. The researchers also found that continuous exposure to the same food odor between feeding cycles led to a further reduction in subsequent food intake. However, this effect was mitigated when a different odor was introduced during the intervals.

“These findings suggest that cats do not stop eating simply because they are full. Rather, their feeding motivation decreases as they become accustomed to the smell of the food, and it can be restored by introducing a new odor. Sensory novelty, especially olfactory novelty, can reactivate feeding motivation in cats,” says Professor Miyazaki.

This study provides the first experimental evidence that odor-dependent habituation and dishabituation may help explain the characteristic pattern of frequent, small meals in domestic cats. Beyond advancing our understanding of feline feeding behavior, the findings may also have practical implications. They could help inform new feeding strategies for cats with reduced appetite, improve nutritional management for aging or sick cats, and support the development of pet foods designed with olfactory variation to help maintain feeding motivation.

2026-04-06T18:40:00.005-07:00

Parasitic Tapeworm — A Risk To Domestic Dogs And Humans — Found In Washington State Coyotes

A new University of Washington study detected a parasitic tapeworm that can infect domestic dogs and humans in the intestines of one-third of coyotes surveyed in Washington. This coyote (not part of the study) was spotted in Seattle’s Discovery Park last fall. CREDIT: Samantha Kreling/University of Washington

April 7, 2026

By Eurasia Review

New evidence suggests that a disease-causing tapeworm that has been spreading across the United States and Canada has arrived in the Pacific Northwest. The tapeworm, called Echinococcus multilocularis, lives as a parasite in coyotes, foxes and other canid species and can cause severe disease if passed to domestic dogs or humans

E. multilocularis has long been recognized as a public health threat in parts of the Northern hemisphere, including Europe and Asia, but was considered extremely rare in North America until approximately 15 years ago, when cases in humans and dogs began cropping up in Canada and the midwestern U.S., indicating that the parasite was spreading.

This study, led by University of Washington researchers, is the first to detect E. multilocularis in a wild host on the west coast of the contiguous U.S. Researchers surveyed 100 coyotes in the Puget Sound region, and found E. multilocularis in 37 of them. The results were published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

“This parasite is concerning because it has been spreading across North America. There have been numerous cases of dogs getting sick, and a handful of people have also picked up the tapeworm,” said lead author Yasmine Hentati, who recently graduated from the UW with a doctorate in environmental and forest science. “The fact that we found it here in one-third of our coyotes was surprising, because it wasn’t found anywhere in the Pacific Northwest until earlier this year.”

When E. multilocularis infects an animal or person, it causes cancer-like cysts to form in the liver and sometimes other organs. If untreated, infection can be fatal.

However, not all carriers become sick. E. multilocularis has a complex life cycle that involves multiple hosts. Canids, which host adult parasites, can support thousands of worms in their intestines without becoming sick. The worms shed eggs that are then passed in their feces.

Rodents — another host — become infected by eating food contaminated with coyote feces. Once consumed, the parasite eggs migrate to the liver and form cysts, ultimately weakening or killing the rodents. The parasite’s life cycle begins again when coyotes prey upon infected rodents.

Humans and domestic dogs are categorized as accidental hosts. Humans may pick up the parasite by consuming tapeworm eggs — in food that is contaminated with coyote or dog feces, for example — and can develop a disease called alveolar echinococcosis, characterized by slow-growing metastatic cysts. Symptoms may not appear for five to 15 years after exposure, which complicates diagnosis and treatment.

Alveolar echinococcosis is considered the third most important food-borne illness globally, and one of the top 20 neglected tropical diseases by the World Health Organization. Many countries have developed robust protocols for tracking it.

Domestic dogs that are exposed to E. multilocularis may or may not become sick, depending on where the parasite is in its life cycle at exposure. It is more common for dogs to carry the parasite and shed eggs without developing disease, but dogs that are exposed to parasite eggs may develop the same cancer-like cysts as other infected animals.

“To minimize the risk of dogs getting infected with E. multilocularis, owners should not let them prey on rodents or scavenge their carcasses,” said co-author Guilherme Verocai, an associate professor and director of the Parasitology Diagnostic Laboratory at the Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

Owners can also give dogs preventative medication for worms and ticks and ensure routine veterinary care, which should include diagnostic tests for parasites, Verocai said.

Although the researchers found E. multilocularis in more than one-third of local coyotes tested, there is little evidence of the infection spreading to other hosts. One study reported seven cases of the parasite in dogs in Washington, Oregon and Idaho since 2023, five of which were in Washington. Few human cases have been reported in the U.S., and none on the West Coast.

“The reason that it’s so high in coyotes is because they are regularly eating raw rodents, and that is the primary way for them to get infected. Most domestic dogs are not eating the raw livers of wild rodents,” Hentati said.

Before the uptick in the 2010s, there were several reports of E. multilocularis on remote islands in northwestern Alaska. Those cases were caused by a parasite with different origins than the current outbreak. Genetic analysis pins the earlier cases to a tundra variant while these recent cases are driven by a more infectious variant with European origins. The coyotes in this study carried the newer variant, now thought to be the predominant variant in the U.S. and Canada.

Neither Canada nor the U.S. require dogs to undergo deworming upon arrival, which may explain the spread. Previous studies also proposed that E. multilocularis could have come over in red foxes imported for hunting 100 years ago, but no one knows for sure.

“The main takeaway is that Echinococcus multilocularis is here, it’s pretty prevalent in the local coyote population and people should be aware of potential risks,” Hentati said.

2026-04-06T18:32:00.004-07:00

Alaska’s Metals Mining Remains A Major Economic Driver, Delivering Jobs, High Wages, And Billions In Exports – Report

But none of those proposed mines can be expected to be developed quickly, and development itself is uncertain

Kinross's Fort Knox mine outside of Fairbanks in seen in this undated photo. Fort Knox produced 239,508 ounces of gold in 2024, according to the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development, and it is one of the state's six major mines. (Photo provided by Kinross Gold Corporation)

April 7, 2026
Alaska Beacon
By Yereth Rosen

(Alaska Beacon) — Metals mining has a prominent place in Alaska history. Today, it remains a prominent economic driver in the state.

Over the past decade, the metals mining sector has made up 3% to 4% of Alaska’s gross domestic product, and those mined metals rival Alaska seafood as top exports from the state, according to a state Department of Labor and Workforce Development analysis.

Metals such as zinc produced at the Red Dog mine in Northwest Alaska, silver produced by the Greens Creek Mine in Southeast Alaska and gold, lead and copper produced by various mines, now support an industry worth close to $3 billion a year, according to the analysis, published in the current issue of Alaska Economic Trends, the department’s monthly research magazine.

Alaska has six major metals mines, three of which produce more than one type of metal, and hundreds of small placer operations.

Among the mined products coming from Alaska is germanium, a byproduct of zinc that is classified as a critical mineral and used in electronics. In 2024, the Red Dog mine produced about 10 tons of germanium, according to the analysis, making it a critical source to the nation because China cut off deliveries of its germanium. That year, the Red Dog mine was the only U.S. mine producing germanium, though prior to 2023, a Tennessee mine was also producing the mineral, said Karinne Wiebold, the state economist who wrote the Alaska Economic Trends report.

The value of Alaska’s mining sector, including coal, gravel and sand as well as metals, actually peaked in 2011 at nearly $3.5 million and close to 5% of the state’s gross domestic product. That peak reflected extremely high metals prices and the startup of the Kensington gold mine in Southeast Alaska.

Still, mining has been a strong economic factor in Alaska for the last two decades, after jumping in value in 2006. Every year since then, its total value to the state has generally been above $2 billion and usually accounted for 3% to 4% of Alaska’s gross domestic product.

Metals mining has also become a big employment driver as well, according to the analysis.

There were 3,533 metal mining and support jobs in Alaska in 2024, the most recent data available, and jobs in the sector grew by 37% over the past decade, compared to an overall state job growth rate of 0.3%, Wiebold’s analysis said.

The average metal mining job paid $135,000 in 2024, well above the state average of $71,000 that year and second only to the average pay for workers in the oil and gas sector, the analysis said.

But a large percentage of mine workers are not Alaska residents. Wiebold’s analysis puts resident hire at 56%. That puts the non-resident hire percentage in the metals mining sector well above the state average.

In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, 22.9% of workers in the state were not Alaska residents, according to an annual report published by the Department of Labor and Workforce Development. That is the highest percentage since such records began in state average, which is the highest percentage since records started in the 1990s.

Wiebold noted that the nonresident hire in the mining sector is about the same as that in the oil and gas sector, which in 2024 was 40.5%, according to the state’s report.

Mining and oil and gas work in Alaska is conducive to nonresident employees because it is generally conducted at remote locations, typically with rotating schedules of two weeks on and two weeks off, she said.

“This combo means most folks don’t live near the mine and have to commute and stay at the worksite, and that there is not a significant time/cost/commute savings for living in the state,” she said by email. “As a result, miners from out of state can work in Alaska and live somewhere less expensive or more appealing to them.”

Another reason for the high percentage of nonresidents lies in Alaska’s demographics, she said. “In the last several years, with Alaska’s working age population fairly stagnant after a decade of significant declines, more jobs are being held by out of state workers,” she said.

The sector is poised for future growth, with projects like the Donlin gold mine in Southwestern Alaska, the Graphite One graphite mine in Northwestern Alaska and, potentially, the commercialization of the copper-rich but isolated Ambler Mining District in Northwestern Alaska.

But none of those proposed mines can be expected to be developed quickly, and development itself is uncertain, Wiebold’s article said.

“Mines take years to come to fruition — exploration, feasibility studies, environmental reviews, and permitting are expensive, and all have the potential to derail a project. Public concerns and controversy can also slow or stop development,” the article said.

Alaska Beacon

Alaska Beacon is an independent, nonpartisan news organization focused on connecting Alaskans to their state government. Alaska, like many states, has seen a decline in the coverage of state news. We aim to reverse that.

2026-04-06T18:27:00.005-07:00

Middle East Gulf Was Source For 8% Of 2025 U.S. Crude Oil Imports – Analysis

April 7, 2026
By EIA

By Kevin Hack

In 2025, the United States imported an average of 490,000 barrels per day (b/d) of crude oil from the Middle East Gulf region—Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Crude oil imports from the region are primarily medium sour grades of crude oil and flow mainly into the West Coast and Gulf Coast of the United States.

Imports from the Middle East Gulf region made up 8% of the 6.2 million b/d of U.S. crude oil imports in 2025. These imports make up far less than those from Canada but slightly more than those from Mexico. Imports from Canada, Mexico, and elsewhere in the Americas benefit from geographic proximity, historical trade relationships, and shorter shipping times.

The U.S. West Coast (PADD 5) accounted for 47% of all U.S. imports from the Middle East Gulf in 2025. More than half of these volumes came from Iraq (139,000 b/d), with the rest coming from Saudi Arabia (62,000 b/d) and the UAE (28,000 b/d). The West Coast produces relatively less domestic crude oil than the U.S. Gulf Coast (PADD 3), and a lack of pipeline access means imports of crude oil from Canada are more limited. As a result, the region is more reliant on seaborne imports to meet refinery demand for crude oil. Both the West Coast and Gulf Coast in the United States also import crude oil from the Middle East Gulf to meet specific demand from refiners.

Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Company Level Imports Note: Medium crude oil grades refer to crude oils with an API gravity between 22 degrees and 38 degrees, and sour refers to any crude oil with a sulfur content of 0.5% or greater; Middle East Gulf refers to imports from Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Crude oil grades produced in different regions and by different production methods can vary significantly in qualities and characteristics across the global crude oil market. Two of the most widely used measures of crude oil quality are API gravity (lightness) and sulfur content (sourness). Most refineries have a preferred slate of crude oil grades and qualities that they process to effectively utilize their equipment and produce the highest value products in their market.

Light sweet grades account for most domestic production, but the United States relies on imports for heavier, more sour grades. In 2025, 88% of crude oil imports from the Middle East Gulf were medium sour grades of crude oil (with API gravities between 22 degrees and 38 degrees and with sulfur contents of 0.5% or more). This volume amounts to about 432,000 b/d but only makes up about 17% of all U.S. imports of these grades.

The spot markets for Mars crude oil (a medium sour) and Light Louisiana Sweet (LLS) crude oil (a light sweet) indicate the difference in value between medium sour and light sweet crude oil grades for the U.S. refining industry. Typically, medium sour grades are relatively harder to refine so they sell at a discount to light sweet grades. In 2025, the Mars discount to LLS averaged $2 per barrel (b). Since March, however, Mars has traded at a premium of $1/b relative to LLS because of supply disruptions in the Middle East.

Data source: Bloomberg LP. Note: The Mars-LLS spread is calculated by subtracting the spot market price of Mars crude oil from the spot market price of Light Louisiana Sweet crude oil.

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) stores crude oil for distribution to U.S. refineries in response to market disruptions. Since 2024, the SPR has acquired crude oil of two specifications: one sweet (low sulfur) and one sour (high sulfur), both of which are of medium API gravity. The release of crude oil from the SPR announced on March 11 will supply some volume of displaced medium sour crude oil that would have otherwise been supplied from the Middle East Gulf. SPR volumes are primarily distributed to refiners along the U.S. Gulf Coast, and the use of Jones Act compliance waivers may make it easier to move crude oil from the Gulf Coast to refiners on the West Coast.

Principal contributor: Kevin Hack
Source: This article was published by EIA
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) collects, analyzes, and disseminates independent and impartial energy information to promote sound policymaking, efficient markets, and public understanding of energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment.

2026-04-06T18:23:00.002-07:00

Global Imbalances: Old Questions, New Answers? – Analysis

April 7, 2026

the IMF Blog

By Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Christian Mumssen

Global current account imbalances are widening again, reversing a decade of steady decline following the global financial crisis. History suggests a clear risk: widening imbalances have often been accompanied by concentrated and lower-quality growth, triggered sectoral dislocations across trading partners, and preceded financial crises or abrupt reversals of capital flows. With the global economy already absorbing multiple shocks, such a disorderly adjustment could be exceptionally costly.

This renewed widening has revived questions about which policy tools can meaningfully impact external positions. In particular, the recent expansion of industrial policies and the proliferation of trade restrictions have diverse economic and non-economic motives, but are often justified by the objective of reducing current account imbalances. Yet there is limited analytical and empirical clarity on how these policies affect external balances.

Our new policy paper aims to fill this gap by linking domestic drivers to external outcomes. We conclude that traditional macroeconomic policies remain the dominant drivers of external balances and are the best lever for addressing current account imbalances. Our analysis suggests that tariffs only improve the current account in a limited set of circumstances, and generally have modest and uncertain effects on the current account. Industrial policies, when applied with economy-wide tools, can have larger impacts by raising national saving and compressing domestic demand.

Saving and investment

For any economy, the current account reflects the difference between what its people, businesses, and government save and invest. This concept anchors the IMF’s long-standing analytical framework for external sector assessments.

Policies affect the current account to the extent that they alter saving or investment. This depends not just how policies affect activity today, but also how they shift expectations. Personal saving rises when people expect income to decline, and it falls when they expect increased income. Companies invest based on their outlook for returns, not just today’s profitability. This insight is central to understanding why many trade and industrial policies often have limited or counterintuitive impacts on the current account.

We can see how standard macroeconomic policies have driven some of the recent increase in global imbalances: bigger budget deficits and robust consumer spending have lowered saving in the United States, while weaker demand and higher saving in China have followed its real estate slowdown.

Of course, positive or negative current account balances are not inherently undesirable, as they can reflect structural factors such as countries saving more as their population ages. It is also important to bear in mind that the relevant metric for assessing imbalances is the overall current account position of a country against the rest of the world, not bilateral or sectoral balances. Nor are imbalances simply about misaligned exchange rates and price competitiveness. A meaningful diagnosis requires a full macroeconomic assessment of influences on saving and investment, including policy drivers and structural forces.

Policy details matter

Tariffs have been justified as a way to narrow trade deficits. However, our analysis finds that they have only small and unreliable effects on the current account because they are often perceived as permanent or are frequently retaliated against. In such cases, people do not adjust saving in anticipation of future price changes. The result is a nearly unchanged current account.

There is one important exception: temporary tariffs can raise saving by encouraging people to postpone consumption. In theory, this can increase the current account balance, though such episodes are rare, and empirical evidence suggests the effects are modest and short-lived.

Industrial policies are more diverse—and so are their effects. We distinguish two types of industrial policies: micro, which target specific companies or sectors, and macro, which are economy-wide policies that are often combined with financial or capital account restrictions.

Micro industrial policies—such as subsidies for a specific industry or targeted tax incentives—generally have ambiguous and limited effects on the current account. When they succeed in raising aggregate productivity, they tend to boost investment and consumption, often lowering the current account balance. When they fail, for example by misallocating resources and depressing productivity, they can increase the current account balance, but at the cost of lost output. Either way, large and systematic effects on external balances are uncommon.

Macro industrial policies, by contrast, can have larger effects. These strategies, often associated with export-led growth models, combine foreign asset accumulation, capital flow restrictions, financial repression, or other mechanisms that boost national saving. These policies work not by improving efficiency but by forcing saving, often at the expense of economic welfare. The current account balance increases, but mainly because domestic demand is restrained and resources are redirected toward external surpluses.

The conclusion is clear: industrial policies and tariffs are not shortcuts to external rebalancing. When they affect the current account, they often do so by suppressing consumption or investment—hardly a recipe for sustainable growth. Durable rebalancing still depends on sound domestic policies, not trade barriers.

Future imbalances and output

Applying our findings to the current economic picture, scenario analysis shows that global imbalances could widen further if trends persist. This would reflect continued large fiscal deficits and strong domestic demand in the United States, additional government support to exporters in China alongside weaker safety net provision and consumption, and subdued investment and weak productivity growth in Europe. In this setting, an escalation of tariffs does little to change current account positions, largely because these measures are reciprocated or perceived as permanent, but it does lower output across regions.

By contrast, an alternative scenario anchored in domestic rebalancing—fiscal consolidation in deficit countries, more consumption‑led growth in surplus economies, and productivity‑enhancing investment elsewhere—would narrow global imbalances and raise global output.

This synchronized adjustment would lead to the best outcome for the global economy. The economic drag from US fiscal tightening would be offset by stronger demand from China and Europe. But even if such coordination proves difficult, the best course of action for each country is clear: start addressing domestic imbalances now, regardless of what others do. Delaying adjustment poses a threat to domestic and global economic stability. Unilateral adjustment will also add pressure for other economies to adjust. Stronger domestic demand in China, by lifting global demand, would increase global interest rates and make fiscal adjustment more likely in other regions such as the United States.Fiscal consolidation in the United States could further stoke deflationary forces in China and incentivize efforts to boost consumption.

What is clear is that global imbalances will be shaped by domestic macroeconomic trajectories and policies rather than by tariffs or narrowly targeted industrial policies. It’s also evident that reducing global imbalances works best when countries move together. The IMF, though its analysis, policy advice, and convening power, can help its members move toward this better outcome.

About the authors:

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is the Economic Counsellor and the Director of Research of the IMF. He is on leave from the University of California at Berkeley where he is the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Department of Economics and at the Haas School of Business. Professor Gourinchas was the editor-in-chief of the IMF Economic Review from its creation in 2009 to 2016, the managing editor of the Journal of International Economics between 2017 and 2019, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review between 2019 and 2022.

Christian Mumssen is Director of the Strategy, Policy, and Review Department of the International Monetary Fund. In this capacity, he leads the IMF’s work on institutional strategy, policy design, and review of operations. Mr. Mumssen has previously served as Chief of Staff in the Office of the Managing Director, Deputy Director of the Finance Department, and Director of the IMF’s Europe Office in Brussels and Paris.

Source: This article was published by the IMF Blog

2026-04-06T18:19:00.006-07:00

Burkina Faso: Crimes Against Humanity By All Sides, HRW Says

April 7, 2026

By Eurasia Review

The Burkina Faso military with its allied militias and an Al Qaeda-linked armed group have killed more than 1,800 civilians and forcibly displaced tens of thousands since 2023, Human Rights Watch said in a recent report. These atrocities, including the government’s ethnic cleansing of Fulani civilians, amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity for which senior leaders on all sides may be liable.

The 316-page report, “‘None Can Run Away’: War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in Burkina Faso by All Sides,” documents the devastating impact on civilians of an armed conflict that has received scant global attention. Researchers documented 57 incidents involving Burkinabè military forces and allied militias known as the Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (VDPs), and the Islamist armed group Jama’at Nusrat al‑Islam wa al‑Muslimin (JNIM) since the current military junta seized power in September 2022. Human Rights Watch issued a question and answer document to explain the legal issues involved.

“The scale of atrocities taking place in Burkina Faso is mind-boggling, as is the lack of global attention to this crisis,” said Philippe Bolopion, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The junta is committing horrific abuses itself, failing to hold those responsible on all sides to account, and curtailing reporting to obscure the suffering of civilians caught in the violence.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 450 people in Burkina Faso, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Mali, and by phone about grave abuses between January 2023 and August 2025. Researchers also carried out extensive open-source analysis, examining satellite imagery, thousands of hours of audiovisual footage, and official documents to verify incidents and identify commanders on all sides.

Under President Ibrahim Traoré, the junta has carried out a broad crackdown on the political opposition, peaceful dissent, and independent media, fostering an atmosphere of terror and severely restricting the flow of information about the conflict and its toll.

Since 2016, JNIM and other Islamist armed groups have waged an insurgency against successive governments in Burkina Faso as part of a broader offensive across Africa’s Sahel region. JNIM has killed civilians and looted property leading the junta to conduct brutal counterinsurgency campaigns.Murder and other grave abuses against civilians, often from communities accused of supporting the opposing side, have become a key tactic of the junta as well as of JNIM.

In one of the deadliest incidents, the Burkinabè military and allied militias killed more than 400 civilians in December 2023 in about 16 villages near the northern town of Djibo during an operation known as “Operation Tchéfari 2 (Warriors’ Honey in Fulfulde).” “[The militia] opened fire,” said a 35-year-old woman. “My two daughters died on the spot.” Bullets seriously injured her and her 9-month-old son. She heard a militia member say: “Make sure no one is breathing before heading out.”

The military and militia have targeted Fulani communities because of their alleged support for Islamist armed groups, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of entire communities.

In November 2023, government-allied militias killed 13 Fulani civilians, including 6 women and 4 children, in the western village of Bassé. “All the bodies, except for that of my son, were grouped together in the courtyard, blindfolded with their torn clothes and their hands tied behind their backs… riddled with bullets,” said a 41-year-old man. “My son …was lying on his stomach. He had been shot in the back of the neck.”

JNIM has used widespread threats and violence to dominate and punish communities as part of efforts to expand territorial control in rural areas. On August 24, 2024, JNIM killed at least 133 civilians, including dozens of children, in the central town of Barsalogho, accusing the whole community of supporting the VDPs.

“[JNIM fighters] shot continuously, as if they had plenty of ammunition,” said a 39-year-old man. “People were falling like flies. They came to exterminate us. They did not spare anyone.” Five of his family members were killed in the attack.

JNIM has besieged dozens of towns and villages across Burkina Faso, blocking the movement of goods and people, resulting in hunger and illness. The armed group has planted improvised explosive devices on roads, and destroyed bridges, water sources, and communications infrastructure.

All sides are responsible for the war crimes of willful killing, attacks on civilians and civilian objects, pillage and looting, and forced displacement, Human Rights Watch found. They have also committed murder and forced displacement as part of attacks on a civilian population, amounting to crimes against humanity, Human Rights Watch said.

Human Rights Watch found that President Traoré, supreme commander of the armed forces, and six senior Burkinabè military commanders may be liable as a matter of command responsibility for grave abuses and should be investigated. Iyad Ag Ghaly, the JNIM supreme leader who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes in Mali in 2012-2013, and four JNIM commanders may be liable as a matter of command responsibility for abuses by JNIM in Burkina Faso and should also be investigated.

Members of all warring parties in the country have near-total impunity. Victims and their families said they do not trust national justice institutions or cannot access them. Government officials have either denied or downplayed allegations of abuse, especially by military forces and militias, and failed to conduct credible investigations.

Governments have taken little action in the face of these atrocity crimes, Human Rights Watch said. Burkina Faso’s international partners—including the United Nations, African Union, European Union and its member states, and the United States—should address Burkina Faso’s longstanding cycles of abuse and impunity. They should promote accountability, including by imposing targeted sanctions against abusive commanders that Human Rights Watch identified. The Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC should open a preliminary examination into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all parties in Burkina Faso since September 2022.

“The world needs to recognize the magnitude of the atrocities unfolding in Burkina Faso to bring them to an end,” Bolopion said. “Regional bodies and partner governments should work with, and press, Burkina Faso’s authorities to tackle grave abuses by all sides and provide genuine accountability.”

2026-04-06T18:09:00.003-07:00

The Lost Art Of Medicine: What Maimonides Knew That We Forgot – OpEd

Posthumous engraving in Thesaurus Antiquitatum Sacrarum, from which all modern portraits of Maimonides are derived, c. 1744. Credit: Wikipedia Commons

April 7, 2026
By Joseph Varon

Contemporary medicine is not failing for lack of knowledge. It is failing under the weight of its own complexity. The present era is defined by unprecedented access to data, advanced technologies, an ever-expanding network of subspecialties, and a dense architecture of protocols and performance metrics. Nearly every aspect of patient care can now be measured, quantified, and standardized. Interventions that were unimaginable only decades ago are now routine. Yet despite these advances, a fundamental element has been eroded. This erosion is philosophical.

Medicine has accumulated extraordinary capability, but it has lost clarity of purpose. Increasingly, it functions as a system optimized for processes rather than a profession oriented toward patients. The distinction is subtle but consequential. Without a clear understanding of its purpose, medicine risks becoming an efficient mechanism that delivers care without understanding the individual it serves.

In the 12th century, Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon [1135–1204], known as the Rambam), one of history’s most influential physician-philosophers and a court physician in Egypt, practiced medicine in an era devoid of modern diagnostics, randomized trials, or institutional oversight. Trained within the intellectual traditions of Andalusian and Islamic medicine, and deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, he integrated empirical observation with rigorous reasoning and ethical responsibility. Although he lacked contemporary tools, he possessed something far more important: clarity. In Regimen of Health, he asserted that the physician’s foremost responsibility is to preserve health rather than simply treat disease¹. This principle stands in sharp contrast to the modern system, which frequently prioritizes intervention over prevention.

The Physician As Intellectual Practitioner Rather Than Technician

Maimonides regarded medicine as an intellectual discipline rooted in observation, reasoning, and adaptation. His clinical writings consistently emphasize individualized care guided by physician judgment, rather than strict adherence to generalized rules². In his model, the physician was not merely a technician following predefined steps, but a thinker adept at navigating uncertainty.

Modern medicine increasingly emphasizes compliance. Clinical guidelines and protocols, though valuable, have expanded to the extent that they often define practice rather than merely inform it. Evidence-based medicine, initially conceived as the integration of clinical expertise with the best available evidence, is now frequently implemented as strict guideline adherence³.

When adherence is used as the primary metric of quality, deviation is perceived as risk. However, no patient precisely matches the populations studied in clinical trials. Maimonides recognized this implicitly, treating individuals rather than statistical abstractions. This distinction is not merely philosophical; it has practical consequences at the bedside. A physician trained to follow protocols may deliver technically correct care, yet fail to recognize when a patient falls outside expected patterns.

In contrast, a physician trained to think can identify nuance, adapt in real time, and challenge assumptions when necessary. Maimonides’ model required intellectual engagement with every patient encounter. Modern systems, in their effort to standardize care, risk reducing that engagement. The result is not necessarily incorrect medicine, but it is often incomplete medicine.

Prevention As the Core Principle of Medical Care

Maimonides positioned prevention as the central tenet of medicine. His recommendations regarding diet, exercise, sleep, and emotional balance reflect a systematic understanding of health maintenance as the physician’s principal responsibility¹. In his framework, disease frequently resulted from an imbalance.

Modern medicine recognizes the significance of prevention but, structurally, incentivizes intervention. Chronic disease management is predominantly pharmacological, while upstream determinants receive comparatively less systematic attention. This dynamic reflects systemic incentives rather than a lack of scientific understanding. Frieden has argued that effective clinical decision-making must extend beyond randomized trials to incorporate broader determinants of health⁶. Maimonides’ framework anticipated this perspective centuries earlier.

This imbalance becomes particularly evident in the management of chronic disease, where treatment pathways are well defined, but prevention strategies remain inconsistently applied. The modern patient often enters the healthcare system after the disease has already progressed, at which point interventions are more complex, more costly, and less effective. Maimonides’ emphasis on daily habits (i.e, nutrition, movement, and moderation), reflects an understanding that health is constructed over time rather than restored episodically. This temporal dimension of medicine is frequently underappreciated in contemporary care models.

The Integration of Psychological and Physical Health

Maimonides recognized that emotional and physical health are inseparable. He described the influence of psychological states on bodily function and emphasized that effective treatment must address both².

Unfortunately, modern healthcare often fragments this unity. Psychiatry, internal medicine, and behavioral health typically function in parallel rather than in an integrated fashion. Consequently, the patient is divided across multiple systems. Epstein and Street have shown that patient-centered care requires understanding the full context of the patient’s experience¹². Maimonides’ approach inherently embodied this principle.

The fragmentation of care also alters the physician’s perception of responsibility. When different aspects of the patient are managed by separate systems, accountability becomes diffuse. No single clinician is responsible for integrating the whole. Maimonides’ approach avoided this fragmentation by necessity. His model implicitly required the physician to synthesize physical, emotional, and environmental factors into a unified understanding of the patient. This integrative responsibility is increasingly difficult to sustain in modern practice.

Ethical Practice Amidst Systemic Pressures

For Maimonides, medicine was inherently ethical. The physician’s duty was unequivocal: to act in the patient’s best interest. Modern physicians operate within a framework shaped by administrative, financial, and legal pressures. Relman described the emergence of the “medical-industrial complex,” in which economic forces influence care delivery¹⁰.

The consequences of these systemic pressures are evident in the prevalence of physician burnout. Shanafelt and Noseworthy have associated this phenomenon with systemic pressures that undermine professional fulfillment⁹. This is more accurately described as moral injury: the inability to consistently act in accordance with ethical obligations.

This shift has implications beyond physician well-being. It affects trust. Patients may not fully perceive the structural constraints under which physicians operate, but they often sense when care is mediated by systems rather than guided by judgment. The erosion of trust in medical institutions may, in part, reflect this disconnect. Maimonides’ framework, centered on a direct ethical obligation between physician and patient, preserved that trust by design.

The Interplay of Knowledge, Authority, and Uncertainty

Maimonides engaged rigorously with intellectual authority but did not defer to it. He critically evaluated prevailing knowledge and underscored the provisional nature of understanding.

Despite its scientific foundation, modern medicine can gravitate toward authority-driven practice. Guidelines and consensus statements may become rigid beyond their evidentiary basis. Djulbegovic and Guyatt highlight the persistent tension between standardized evidence and individualized care³. Excessive certainty can constrain inquiry.

Individualized Care Versus Population-Based Approaches

Population-based data are essential, yet inherently limited. The concept of the “average patient” remains an abstraction. Maimonides treated individuals. His clinical reasoning was adapted to the specific patient rather than conforming the patient to a model.

Montori and colleagues have emphasized that optimal care requires integrating evidence with individual context and values¹⁵. This principle aligns directly with Maimonides’ approach. Yet, few modern healthcare providers apply it.

Technological Advancement in the Absence of Guiding Principles

Modern medicine’s technological capacity is without precedent. However, technology is not inherently beneficial; its value reflects the priorities of the system in which it is employed.

Topol has argued that technological innovation may restore the human dimension of medicine⁸. Nevertheless, electronic medical records frequently divert attention from the patient to documentation. Verghese describes a system in which the patient becomes secondary to their digital representation¹⁴. As a result, the clinical encounter risks subordination to its documentation. Maimonides practiced medicine without technological aids, yet maintained a profound presence.

Technology, when aligned with clinical reasoning, enhances care. When it replaces reasoning, it constrains it. The distinction lies not in the tool itself but in its role within the clinical encounter. Maimonides’ practice demonstrates that the absence of technology does not preclude effective medicine, while modern experience suggests that the presence of technology does not guarantee it. The challenge is not to limit technological advancement, but to ensure that it remains subordinate to clinical judgment.
Essential Elements Lost and the Need for Recovery

Cassell emphasized that medicine must address suffering, not merely disease¹¹. This aligns closely with Maimonides’ framework. Starfield distinguishes between patient-centered and person-focused care, noting that true care must address the individual beyond disease labels¹³. Maimonides practiced this inherently.

What has been lost is not knowledge itself. Rather, it is coherence.

Conclusions

Maimonides represents not a historical curiosity but a standard we have yet to reclaim. His medicine was grounded in principle: prevention over intervention, judgment over compliance, the individual over the average, ethics over expediency.

Modern medicine possesses extraordinary tools. But without a guiding philosophy, those tools risk being applied without direction.

The future of medicine will not be determined by how much more we can do.

It will be determined by whether we remember why we do it. Because a system that measures everything, standardizes everything, and controls everything, yet fails to understand the patient in front of it, is not advanced. It is incomplete. And if left uncorrected, it risks becoming something far more dangerous than outdated medicine:

It becomes medicine that no longer knows what it is.

References

Maimonides M. Regimen of Health. Translated by Bar-Sela A, Hoff HE, Faris E. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society; 1964.

Maimonides M. Treatise on Asthma. In: Rosner F, editor. The Medical Writings of Moses Maimonides. New York: Ktav Publishing; 1971.

Djulbegovic B, Guyatt GH. Progress in evidence-based medicine: a quarter century on. Lancet. 2017;390:415–423.

Rosner F. The Medical Legacy of Moses Maimonides. Hoboken: KTAV Publishing; 1998.
Rosner F. Maimonides as a physician. JAMA. 1965;194(9):1011–1014.

Frieden TR. Evidence for health decision making—beyond randomized, controlled trials. N Engl J Med. 2017;377:465–475.

Sackett DL, Rosenberg WM, Gray JA, Haynes RB, Richardson WS. Evidence-based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t. BMJ. 1996;312:71–72.

Topol EJ. Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. New York: Basic Books; 2019.

Shanafelt TD, Noseworthy JH. Executive leadership and physician well-being. Mayo Clin Proc. 2017;92(1):129–146.

Relman AS. The new medical-industrial complex. N Engl J Med. 1980;303:963–970.

Cassell EJ. The nature of suffering and the goals of medicine. N Engl J Med. 1982;306:639–645.

Epstein RM, Street RL. The values and value of patient-centered care. Ann Fam Med. 2011;9(2):100–103.

Starfield B. Is patient-centered care the same as person-focused care? Perm J. 2011;15(2):63–69.

Verghese A. Culture shock—patient as icon, icon as patient. N Engl J Med. 2008;359:2748–2751.

Montori VM, Brito JP, Murad MH. The optimal practice of evidence-based medicine. JAMA. 2013;310(23):2503–2504.

Joseph Varon

Joseph Varon, MD, is a critical care physician, professor, and President of the Independent Medical Alliance. He has authored over 980 peer-reviewed publications and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Independent Medicine.

Standing With Science In A Post-Truth World – Analysis

Photo Credit: Ajay Kumar Singh from Pixabay.

April 7, 2026
Observer Research Foundation
By Lakshmy Ramakrishnan

Since 2018, India has faced periodic outbreaks of the deadly Nipah virus (NiV), most recently in West Bengal in February this year. Marked as a priority pathogen by the World Health Organization (WHO), NiV serves as a critical example of the One Health approach, which emphasises interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health in addressing global health and disease. With no licensed vaccines or therapeutics available, advances in mRNA vaccine research offer an encouraging pathway for response, including efforts led by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) and India’s Gennova Biopharmaceuticals Limited to develop an mRNA vaccine candidate. However, scientific progress alone is insufficient. As the WHO marks this year’s World Health Day under the theme, “Together for Health. Stand with Science”, it serves as an opportunity to recognise that the challenge involves not only developing medical countermeasures, but also ensuring that societies are willing to trust science and accept its applications.

Misinformation Economy

Vaccine hesitancy, a major threat to global health, has been exacerbated by a rapidly evolving information economy. Misinformation casts doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines and thrives in an ecosystem where social media amplifies both factual and false information. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO labelled the information overload as an infodemic. Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that false information travels faster than factual content on social media, particularly when it evokes strong emotional responses such as fear. Repeated exposure to misinformation from a credible authority can reinforce belief in it and facilitate its spread.

Post-truth Dynamics

Anti-vaccine narratives utilise this ecosystem by applying conspiracy theories, misrepresenting studies through cherry-picking, and amplifying voices that discredit evidence-based science. False information influences public opinion, creating fear over vaccine safety. For instance, claims that Covid-19 mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancers’—aggressive forms of cancer—gained significant traction online, despite having no scientific basis. In a post-truth world, where objective facts are increasingly found to be less influential in shaping public opinion than methods that appeal to emotion and personal belief, doubt and confusion are created. This leads to erosion of collective decision-making abilities, a decline in trust in science, and the widespread social acceptance of misinformation.

Its impact is evident in the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases across the world. Ongoing measles outbreaks in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and European countries demonstrate how declining vaccine uptake can rapidly cause outbreaks and contribute to shrinking herd immunity. This is concerning as it raises the possibility of a surge in severe measles infections, which has alarmed the medical community. A complication from measles—subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE)—which typically appears a year after infection, can lead to disability, paralysis and often fatality. This trend highlights how misinformation can directly transform into debilitating public health threats.

Politics of Health

Vaccine hesitancy is further complicated by the politicisation of science. It involves overemphasis on the inherent uncertainty of science to undermine existing scientific consensus. In the US, during the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines were associated with political identity. Attitudes towards vaccine acceptance ranged from outright refusal to hesitation, to immediate vaccine uptake, with partisanship acting as a critical determinant. Studies suggest that political affiliation influenced susceptibility to misinformation and responsiveness to pro-vaccination campaigns. In this manner, politicisation can reinforce the acceptance and spread of misinformation.

This dynamic is now evident in the US childhood immunisation schedule. Recent attempts to alter the schedule—including shifting vaccines for rotavirus, meningitis, and hepatitis A and B from ‘routine administration’ to ‘shared clinical decision-making’, in which a patient or parent and clinician discuss the risks and benefits of vaccination—represent a significant policy change. Without a robust scientific rationale or review, it risks increasing childhood infections and hospitalisations. Although these attempts have been blocked by a federal judge, these shifts indicate how such policies can destabilise trust in science. Further, this discourse may potentially impact the course of scientific innovation.

Future of Innovation

The course of mRNA vaccine technology provides a notable illustration of the tension between scientific progress and public trust. In August 2025, the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) abruptly terminated funds dedicated to mRNA vaccine research, including the cancellation of 22 contracts granted by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) valued at US$ 500 million. These cuts are likely to result in severe health and economic consequences, given that mRNA vaccines are estimated to prevent US$ 75 billion in economic costs each year. In addition to pandemic preparedness, mRNA platforms hold transformative potential for treating diseases such as cancer, making investment crucial.

This decision has been justified by concerns about vaccine effectiveness and safety, although the studiesused to support these claims focus heavily on in vitro studies, which do not adequately reflect clinical outcomes. Concomitantly, claims linking the sudden death of young healthy adults and mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines have circulated widely, prompting further scientific scrutiny. Existing studies do not establish COVID vaccines as a causative factor. Studies have identified rare occurrences of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) following vaccination; however, evidence suggests that these risks are higher following COVID-19 infection. Further, vaccine-induced inflammation is not unique to mRNA vaccine platforms but may occur with less public attention and scrutiny.

These concerns now extend to regulatory agencies. Moderna’s mRNA-based flu vaccine (m1010) recently came under the limelight when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initially declined to review its application. Though the FDA has since agreed to proceed, with a decision expected in August this year, Moderna indicated that it will wait for this outcome before proceeding with its combined flu-COVID-19 vaccine (m1083), which has already been approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). These developments, along with speculation around future funding for mRNA vaccine research, have created uncertainty around the vaccine innovation ecosystem and its impact on health.

Rebuilding Trust in Science

The WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) is tasked with ensuring that vaccination policies are grounded in evidence-based decision-making. However, translating these measures into effective public health outcomes requires a pragmatic approach that enables meaningful public engagement with science. Addressing vaccine misinformation requires a shift towards scientific empowerment rooted in sustained trust-building. This includes clear science communication that counters false claims with accurate, evidence-based information. Pre-bunking—warnings issued before exposure to misinformation—can help reduce its impact. Misinformation can be debunked through multiple strategies, including myth–fact corrections, fact-only messaging, or ‘sandwiching’ myths between facts. While some studies suggest that corrective messaging may occasionally backfire, the notion that truth cannot catch up with ‘flying falsehoods’ reflects a resigned stance that is ultimately counterproductive to public health communication.

Strengthening science literacy through formal and informal education can help individuals better understand the benefits of science and enhance their decision-making. Integrating scientific expertise into policymaking must be reinforced through evidence-based measures. Engagement should include both scientific experts and non-scientific voices to bridge gaps in understanding and to reduce feelings of alienation. Community outreach activities should include trustworthy communicators to ensure credibility and relevance. Collectively, these approaches tackle the misinformation ecosystem head-on to cultivate a more informed public and strengthen trust in science.

Conclusion

Addressing vaccine hesitancy is not only a scientific endeavour but also a political and social one. Emerging global threats such as the Nipah virus (NiV) underscore that medical countermeasures alone are insufficient; success depends equally on public trust. In a post-truth world, where social media amplifies both factual and false information, building confidence in science requires sustained commitments to communication, education, and inclusive engagement. The year’s World Health Day theme, “Together for Health. Stand with Science”, emphasises the need to build collective trust and acceptance of medical technologies to ensure societies are not vulnerable to both existing and emerging health threats.

About the author: Lakshmy Ramakrishnan is an Associate Fellow with the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy at the Observer Research Foundation.

Source: This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation.

ORF was established on 5 September 1990 as a private, not for profit, ’think tank’ to influence public policy formulation. The Foundation brought together, for the first time, leading Indian economists and policymakers to present An Agenda for Economic Reforms in India. The idea was to help develop a consensus in favour of economic reforms.

2026-04-06T18:09:00.001-07:00

Israel shifts from conventional confrontation to "total war of attrition" in Lebanon

Israel's IDF has expanded its tactics in Lebanon to a war of attrition, striking infrastrucutre and bridges. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

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By IntelliNews Gulf bureau April 6, 2026

In just two days, something changed in Israel’s war against Lebanon. The military clash is no longer a mere exchange of fire along the border, but a fill war of attrition, targeting vital arteries and infrastructure, reshaping the rules of engagement on land and possibly at sea.

The period between April 4-5 marked a significant escalation in the war after Israel’s full scale invasion almost a month ago. Operations shifted to a new level based on sustained, long-term pressure, while Israel has adopted what can be described as a strategy of "logistical strangulation." Hezbollah has sought to introduce more advanced weapons, notably naval cruise missiles, in an effort to increase the pressure on the invading forces that hold almost all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River.

The Masnaa border crossing emerged as one of the most critical strategic targets. On the night of April 4, the Israeli army issued evacuation warnings for the area, threatening to strike it on the grounds that it is being used to smuggle weapons from Syria. The crossing’s importance lies in the fact that it represents the last vital land supply route linking Lebanon to Syria, making it a central objective in Israel’s effort to cut off logistical support.

At the same time, Israel continued targeting key infrastructure. Israeli airstrikes completely destroyed the West Bekaa bridge on April 5 following a preliminary strike the day before in a move aimed at isolating southern Lebanon from the country’s interior and preventing reinforcements from reaching the front.

On the other side, Hezbollah announced a high-profile operation targeting an Israeli naval vessel with a maritime cruise missile fired from a long distance off the Lebanese coast, claimed a direct hit. However, Israeli Army Radio, citing a security source, denied the claim, highlighting the parallel escalation in the information war.

On the ground, Hezbollah intensified its operations, announcing 32 attacks within 24 hours, targeting sensitive sites including the Mishar intelligence base and the Dado base, the headquarters of Israel’s Northern Command. The group also claimed to have targeted an Israeli RC-12 reconnaissance aircraft over West Bekaa, in addition to striking Merkava tanks along several southern frontlines.

In response, Israel expanded its air campaign, striking multiple areas across southern Lebanon, Bekaa, and Beirut’s southern suburbs. The Housh area in Tyre was hit by heavy airstrikes, causing significant damage, while attacks also targeted the towns of Ma‘rakeh, Ain Baal, Naqoura, and Housh

Israeli warplanes also carried out intensive strikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs at dawn on April 4, targeting what Israel described as command centers linked to the "Lebanon Corps" of Iran’s Quds Force considered a key coordination link between Hezbollah and the Iranian regime, as well as facilities associated with Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

In a notable development, the United Nations announced that Israeli forces had destroyed 17 surveillance cameras belonging to UNIFIL headquarters in Naqoura, raising questions about the rules of engagement with international forces. Meanwhile, an Israeli special forces unit conducted a raid in the town of Shebaa, abducting a Lebanese civilian.

Airstrikes on April 4 resulted in 14 fatalities and more than 25 injuries in Lebanon, bringing the total death toll since March 2 to 1,422, underscoring the rising human cost of the conflict.

On the Israeli side, the army announced the death of Staff Sergeant Guy Ludar, a member of the Maglan commando unit, during fighting in southern Lebanon, in addition to nine soldiers wounded in rocket attacks.

These developments reflect clearly defined objectives for both sides:

- Israel is pursuing the destruction of Hezbollah’s military infrastructure, the establishment of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, and the severing of supply lines.

- Hezbollah is focused on exhausting Israeli forces, hindering any ground advance, and demonstrating its ability to deploy advanced weapons capable of challenging conventional defense systems.

Alongside the military escalation, the humanitarian situation is deteriorating rapidly. Evacuation warnings in Tyre and surrounding areas have triggered mass displacement and severe traffic congestion, with the number of displaced persons in Lebanon exceeding one million, around 20% of the population.

Syrian authorities also announced the temporary closure of the Jdeidet Yabous crossing, opposite Masnaa, further increasing Lebanon’s isolation and compounding the humanitarian and logistical crisis.

In sum, the developments of April 4 and the morning of April 5 indicate that the war has entered a new phase defined by comprehensive attrition and the breaking of will. The battlefield is no longer confined to the south it now extends deep into infrastructure, the economy, and society in a trajectory that remains open to further escalation.

2026-04-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

Syria, US Intervened To Halt Israeli Strike On Lebanon-Syria Border Crossing, Sources Say

Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon. Photo Credit: IDF

April 7, 2026
Arab News
By Najia Houssari

Syrian intervention helped halt a planned Israeli strike on the Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, a vital commercial and civilian lifeline, Lebanese officials told Arab News on Monday.

Israel had issued warnings that it would target the crossing and the international road linking Lebanon to Syria, prompting urgent diplomatic contacts involving Beirut, Damascus and Washington to prevent the strike.

A Lebanese official source said Lebanese and Syrian authorities communicated with relevant parties after the Israeli threat, stressing that the crossing is used by thousands of civilians and is Lebanon’s main overland trade route to Arab countries.

Public Works and Transport Minister Fayez Rasamny told Arab News that the Masnaa crossing is subject to strict security oversight and coordination between Lebanese and Syrian authorities.

“The Masnaa crossing is under full supervision and monitoring by Lebanese security forces, where inspections, checks and scans are carried out with the utmost seriousness and discipline,” he said.

Rasamny denied claims about possible smuggling operations, particularly of weapons, as “not based on any factual evidence, given the strict security measures and coordination between the Lebanese and Syrian authorities.”

The Israeli army had warned travelers and residents to evacuate the crossing area and the M30 international road, claiming Hezbollah was using the crossing for military purposes and weapons smuggling.

However, security sources at the crossing said Hezbollah no longer uses the Masnaa route, particularly after political and security changes in Syria altered control and oversight along the border.

“Since the fall of the previous regime in Syria, Lebanon’s official land crossings have lost their security function for Hezbollah. The group has retreated from using the Masnaa crossing, which it had previously considered a main route,” a security source told Arab News.

Authorities on both sides of the border took precautionary measures within hours of the Israeli warning, moving trucks, transferring detainees and clearing administrative offices and equipment from the crossing area to minimize risks in event of an attack.

Syrian authorities also cooperated by allowing stranded trucks to return to Syrian customs yards, while traffic through the crossing was suspended until the threat subsided.

The Masnaa–Jdeidet Yabous crossing is currently the only operational land crossing between Lebanon and Syria and is Lebanon’s main land route for trade, agriculture, tourism and transit to other Arab countries.

Economic groups warned that any closure or destruction of the crossing would have severe consequences for Lebanon’s already collapsing economy.

Ibrahim Tarchichi, head of the Bekaa Farmers’ Association, said all trucks passing through Masnaa are subject to thorough inspections by several Lebanese security agencies.

“Closing Masnaa would harm all of Lebanon — commercially, touristically, industrially and agriculturally — as it is the only land route connecting Lebanon to Arab countries,” he said.

“More than 300 trucks pass through Masnaa daily, carrying over 5,000 tonnes of goods in imports and exports. The threat to close the crossing marks a turning point in this devastating war we are living through,” he added.

Israel previously targeted the crossing during the 2024 war, rendering it unusable for vehicles and trucks until it was repaired after the conflict.

The latest threat comes as Israel continues its military campaign in Lebanon after Hezbollah’s entry into the regional conflict,, raising fears that key infrastructure linking Lebanon to the outside world could increasingly be targeted.

2026-04-06T18:00:00.006-07:00

Trump And The Unplanned Trap Of War With Iran – Analysis

April 7, 2026
IFIMES

Genesis of the conflict and escalation of tensions

Tensions between Iran and Israel date back to 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, when the new theocratic authorities severed all diplomatic relations with Israel, branded it the “little Satan” and laid the ideological foundations for the export of the Islamic revolution. This doctrine was particularly geared towards supporting Shiite communities and movements across the Arab world – in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – as Tehran sought to expand its geopolitical influence and undermine the stability of predominantly Sunni regimes in the region.[2]

In the decades that followed, hostility between the two states evolved through complex forms of indirect confrontation, including proxy wars, support for militant actors, the accelerated development of Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, as well as a series of covert operations, cyberattacks and targeted assassinations by both sides. This long-standing rivalry culminated in the June war of 2025 – a brief but highly intense direct conflict – in which Israel launched extensive air strikes on key Iranian nuclear and military facilities, prompting Iran to respond with large-scale missile attacks and the mobilisation of its allied paramilitary networks throughout the region.

This conflict marked a turning point, as prolonged indirect hostility gave way to open military conflict, setting the stage for a deeper and more protracted regional crisis.
Failure of diplomatic efforts

From the outset, the American administration demonstrated a clear commitment to resolving the crisis through diplomatic means. To this end, the United States initiated indirect negotiations with Tehran, mediated by Oman. The first round of talks, held in Muscat on 12 April 2025, concluded without tangible progress, though the door remained open for further dialogue. A new attempt followed on 6 February 2026, again in Muscat, while the final round of negotiations was held on 17 February in Geneva, aiming to establish a framework agreement on freezing Iran’s nuclear programme and reducing regional tensions. However, the talks collapsed on the same day, primarily due to irreconcilable differences on key issues – specifically uranium enrichment thresholds, ballistic missile constraints, and Iran’s regional footprint – triggering a dramatic escalation of the conflict.

The United States soon found itself deeply embroiled in the conflict. President Donald Trump’s administration is now more than a month into a military campaign aimed at degrading Iran’s military capabilities over the long term. However, this operation carries growing risks of a broader regional war that could draw in further actors and severely disrupt global energy security. At first glance, this may appear to be yet another Middle Eastern conflict in which Washington acts to defend its allies. Yet closer analysis reveals a more complex reality: both Iran and Israel, driven by their respective strategic interests, have played a role in pulling the United States and President Trump into this war.

Despite the administration’s initial reluctance to enter another major conflict, and although Donald Trump entered his second term with the ambition of being seen as a “president of peace”, even as a prospective Nobel Peace Prize laureate, developments on the ground have outpaced political intentions. Within a single year, he helped broker the end of several regional conflicts, including the complex war in Gaza in 2025. Nevertheless, the escalating spiral between Tehran and Tel Aviv, compounded by the failure of negotiations in Geneva, significantly narrowed the space for diplomatic manoeuvring.

This dynamic is also captured in a well-known remark by Mao Zedong: “Victory, victory, victory… until defeat is reached.”[3] Its essence lies in the warning that even a succession of triumphs can culminate in strategic failure if not tempered by prudence and a long-term assessment of consequences. History abounds with such examples: Napoleon Bonaparte, following a string of spectacular military feats, met disaster in Russia and ultimate defeat at Waterloo in 1815; Adolf Hitler, after initial successes between 1939 and 1942, reached a critical turning point at Stalingrad, which marked the beginning of his downfall. The United States itself is not immune to this pattern: from Vietnam in 1975, through Iraq in 2010, to the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, a series of initial military successes ended in strategic overstretch and political retreat.

Against this backdrop, the breakdown of talks and mounting tensions between Iran and Israel effectively pulled the United States into a direct confrontation. Donald Trump was compelled to act to preserve the credibility of American power and protect national interests in the Persian Gulf – one of the key geostrategic zones of US global engagement.
A jointly laid trap: how Iran and Israel drew the United States into war

Although open hostilities erupted on 28 February 2026, their origins can be traced back to June 2025, when a pattern of reciprocal strikes had already taken shape. The escalation was temporarily halted on 24 June, when Donald Trump intervened and ordered a suspension of further attacks – Israeli aircraft, already operating over Iranian territory, were recalled to base. Following this brief lull, tensions intensified again through a series of indirect confrontations and strategic posturing. Efforts to de-escalate through indirect talks in Geneva in early 2026 ultimately failed, paving the way for renewed escalation at the end of February.

By late February, after negotiations collapsed in a deadlock, Israel concluded that diplomacy had run its course and launched a new wave of strikes against Iranian targets, causing the situation to deteriorate rapidly. Iran responded by directly striking US bases in Iraq and Syria, and Washington, faced with threats to its own forces and pressure from its Gulf allies, opted for direct intervention. A coordinated campaign with Israel was launched in March, targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, missile launch sites, naval assets in the Strait of Hormuz and command structures of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

This spiralling dynamic serves as a textbook example of the “action–reaction” pattern, in which both regional powers leverage American might to further their own objectives. Iran seeks to demonstrate its ability to inflict unsustainable damage on US interests, while Israel pursues the lasting destruction of Iran’s nuclear programme, viewing it as a matter of its own survival. Amidst this rivalry, the United States is steadily losing the ability to remain a neutral observer. The endgame remains precarious for Washington: a withdrawal would risk a significant loss of credibility, potentially ceding geopolitical ground to Russia and China in the Persian Gulf; alternatively, escalating to salvage its reputation would entail profound political and strategic risks.

Despite the destruction of hundreds of Iranian targets and the elimination of high-ranking commanders, risks to US troops have increased, oil prices have surged, and global trade through the Strait of Hormuz has come under serious threat. Tehran has rejected ceasefire proposals, insisting on reparations and threatening to blockade the Strait. While neither regional actor explicitly forced America’s hand, both have created conditions in which the administration can no longer afford to remain on the sidelines.
War on the nuclear brink: what are the consequences?

Israel’s longstanding objective has been the dismantling of the Iranian regime – initially through internal revolution, and then through military capitulation. As both strategies have fallen short of their goals, the conflict has entered an existential “survive or perish” phase, in which the nuclear threshold represents a tangible threat.

Should Israel continue strikes on critical facilities such as Bushehr or Fordow, the consequences would extend far beyond the region. Even a relatively contained incident, such as a radiation leak, could endanger the entire Gulf area. Further attacks on nuclear infrastructure could remove Tehran’s self-imposed restraint on developing nuclear weapons, potentially turning Iran into another North Korea – a state with nuclear deterrence. At that point, Israel’s strategy would return to square one or, more dangerously, precipitate a catastrophe.[4]

President Donald Trump is attempting a different approach. His 15-point plan, conveyed on 25 March via Pakistan, calls for Iran’s complete abandonment of nuclear weapons and an immediate end to the war. Grounded in the “peace through strength” doctrine, the plan acknowledges the reality that the Iranian nuclear programme cannot be permanently eliminated – only delayed. Rather than pursuing further escalation, the proposal outlines a framework for negotiations with strictly defined conditions and clear pathways for de-escalation.

Panic in the Gulf states is understandable in light of disruptions to oil exports, which account for roughly 95% of their economies, as well as tangible damage to tourism and air transport, which in some countries contribute more than 10% of GDP. The energy insecurity brought by the war is placing additional strain on state budgets. A critical strategic vulnerability lies in desalination infrastructure across the Gulf, which provides roughly 80% of potable water in the region. It must be clear to Israel that a protracted war will neither dismantle the Iranian state nor extinguish its nuclear ambitions.

The current conflict evokes the imagery of the Roman Colosseum, where gladiators determined their opponents’ fate through death – except that in the case of Israel and Iran, the complete defeat of the adversary is unattainable. A potential transition into a nuclear phase would transform the regional conflict into a grave global threat.

What is required now is wisdom: a swift end to military operations, credible negotiations and a focus on long-term security without a nuclear Iran. Rather than pursuing a dangerous escalation, a pragmatic settlement could avert catastrophe and open the path to stability.
Regional dynamics, allies and strategic costs

The role of the United States’ regional allies in this conflict is multifaceted and strategically complex. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states find themselves in a unique position: they share concerns over Iran’s nuclear programme, yet directly bear the repercussions of escalation. Their geographical proximity to Iran leaves them exposed to missile strikes and the potential closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key maritime route for global oil trade.

These states are pressing Washington to sustain the military campaign and bring about the definitive collapse of the Iranian regime. They have also signalled readiness to shoulder part of the financial burden of military operations in pursuit of Tehran’s lasting defeat. These dynamics place additional pressure on the US administration, while simultaneously offering President Donald Trump room to calibrate his approach between safeguarding American interests and limiting the risk of a wider regional war.

As a pivotal US ally, Israel has specific security interests at the very heart of the conflict. Tel Aviv regards Iran’s nuclear programme as an existential threat and maintains that it cannot be neutralised through diplomacy alone. This perception has driven pre-emptive military action, prompting Iranian retaliation, including threats to US forces, and creating a chain of events that has drawn the United States into direct confrontation.

The military campaign against Iran entails substantial economic costs. Oil prices have surged as a direct result of volatility in the Persian Gulf, generating inflationary pressures on both the US and global economies. The financial burden of military operations, including the use of precision-guided munitions and logistical support, amounts to billions of dollars per month.

Nevertheless, diplomacy remains a key instrument for achieving a long-term solution. Experience from the Geneva talks suggests that, while differences between the parties are considerable, they are not insurmountable. The key components of any renewed negotiation process include credible security guarantees, the gradual lifting of sanctions in exchange for verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear programme, and the establishment of robust monitoring mechanisms. The Trump administration could draw on its diplomatic capital and previous peace efforts to secure a historic agreement with Iran – one that would not only address the nuclear issue but also pave the way for broader regional dialogue.

The probability of a US ground offensive against Iran

At present, a large-scale US ground invasion remains unlikely. While Washington is reinforcing its military presence and carrying out sustained air strikes on Iranian infrastructure and military targets, the lack of sufficient forces and the scale of associated risks represent major constraints. For comparison, during the 1990–1991 Gulf War, the United States deployed approximately 540,000 troops within a coalition numbering close to one million, whereas the 2003 invasion of Iraq involved around 150,000 to 170,000 personnel. In Iraq, Shia and Kurdish communities, accounting for around 80% of the population, initially received US forces in a relatively positive manner. In contrast, in Iran the population currently stands firmly behind the authorities, which limits the potential effectiveness of ground operations.[5]

A more plausible scenario would involve limited operations, such as short-duration airborne assaults on strategic locations – including Kharg Island or the Iranian coastline along the Strait of Hormuz. Stretching approximately 167 kilometres and narrowing to just 33 kilometres at its narrowest point, the strait represents a highly sensitive chokepoint through which a substantial share of global oil trade flows. Limited ground operations would likely focus on securing maritime corridors rather than engaging in a prolonged territorial occupation.

In this context, the United Arab Emirates could play a significant role, with their geographical position enabling logistical and operational support for US forces. At the same time, Iran is pursuing a strategy that combines military, economic and political dimensions to frustrate rapid American gains and draw the United States into a protracted asymmetric conflict.

The most probable course of events remains the continuation of intensive air strikes, potentially accompanied by limited ground operations at strategic locations. A prolonged ground invasion remains unlikely, with the conflict continuing within an asymmetric warfare framework, in which neither side can rapidly assert dominance, instead relying on a combination of military and political instruments to pursue its objectives.
The war must be brought to an end without delay

History teaches us that an unbroken chain of military “victories” inevitably reaches a tipping point at which strategic advantage is eroded, resources are depleted and legitimacy is compromised. Napoleon Bonaparte fell after conquering half of Europe, Alexander the Great confronted the limits of his armies despite remarkable conquests, and the United States suffered defeat in Vietnam, even though it now maintains strong economic relations with the country. The historical lesson remains clear: what appears today as a series of American successes against Iran could, in time, evolve into a protracted conflict that ultimately leads to defeat.

The United States and President Trump now face a historic opportunity to demonstrate genuine leadership: to bring the conflict to an immediate end, return to the negotiating table and provide security guarantees for all parties. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel must not, through pressure or incitement, push the administration into further escalation. While their security concerns may be legitimate, they cannot be pursued at the cost of American lives or global stability.

Peace is not a sign of weakness – it is the highest form of strategic victory. The time has come for all parties to return to that objective before “victories” become irreversible. Having already demonstrated that he can bring wars to an end faster than his predecessors, Donald Trump must once again embrace the role of peacemaker. His aspirations for the Nobel Peace Prize will not be realised through further military strikes, but through the ability to bring an end to a conflict set in motion by others. The region and the wider world expect no less – and they expect it without delay.

IFIMES – International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has a special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN in New York since 2018, and it is the publisher of the international scientific journal “European Perspectives.” Available at: https://www.europeanperspectives.org/en

Iran–Israel conflict since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Available at: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/irans-revolutionary-guards

Chinese proverb: “Victory, victory, victory… until defeat is reached”. Available at: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12087476-victory-victory-victory-until-defeat-is-reached

Chatham House warns that Israeli strikes could accelerate Iran’s nuclear program by strengthening hardliner arguments for a bomb. Available at: www.chathamhouse.org/2025/06/israels-strikes-might-accelerate-irans-race-towards-nuclear-weapons?utm_source

Pentagon preparing for weeks of ground operations in Iran, The Washington Post, 29 March 2026. Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/28/trump-iran-ground-troops-marines/?utm_source

IFIMES

IFIMES – International Institute for Middle-East and Balkan studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN since 2018. IFIMES is also the publisher of the biannual international scientific journal European Perspectives. IFIMES gathers and selects various information and sources on key conflict areas in the world. The Institute analyses mutual relations among parties with an aim to promote the importance of reconciliation, early prevention/preventive diplomacy and disarmament/ confidence building measures in the regional or global conflict resolution of the existing conflicts and the role of preventive actions against new global disputes.

2026-04-06T17:43:00.011-07:00

La France Insoumise After the Local Elections

By Frederico Lyra

April 6, 2026

Source: Jacobin

Danièle Obono of La France Insoumise, October 26, 2017 | Image credit: La France Insoumise/Flickr | CC BY-ND 2.0

The recent local elections across France offer a revealing snapshot of the balance of forces on the Left — and above all, of the position of La France Insoumise (LFI) as it looks toward the presidential elections in 2027. Rather than confirming a crisis or the hegemony of a particular tendency, the results point to a more complex reality. This is a socially dynamic party territorially advancing in some parts of France, yet unable to impose itself as a dominant force across the entire left.

Just a year ahead of the presidential race, these elections were not merely local contests but functioned as a strategic rehearsal for national power. For the first time, LFI invested heavily in municipal campaigns, seeking to consolidate a durable base capable of supporting a future presidential victory. Control over city halls matters symbolically, and even more so institutionally, shaping political networks, public visibility, and even influence over the composition of the Senate.

From this perspective, LFI’s results were mixed. Notably, it failed to make a decisive breakthrough that would have consolidated its left leadership status. The party made some progress, particularly in suburban areas of large cities, confirming its capacity to mobilize and win in specific contexts. On the other hand, LFI continues to have a weak presence in many parts of rural France — in the kind of regions where the gilets jaunes movement emerged, with their predominantly white, precarious populations. Some are concluding that such demographics tend to gravitate toward the hard-right Rassemblement National — an assessment that seems premature, as their radicalism and rejection of the establishment might still swing either way.

Another of the central dynamics of the election was the strategy of the Parti Socialiste (PS). It is openly seeking to hegemonize the left-wing camp ahead of the presidential race, and it now faces a strategic dilemma over whether to organize primaries to designate a candidate. What the Parti Socialiste lacks is a natural runner. In day-to-day coverage, Raphaël Glucksmann appears as the strongest contender, but has not been confirmed. On the one hand, the impression is that outside the TV spotlight he carries little real weight; but the precedent of Emmanuel Macron’s unexpected rise to power in the 2010s shows that, in France, the media-driven construction of a candidacy can be highly effective. As for LFI, there is no doubt that Jean-Luc Mélenchon will run for the fourth time, the third as its candidate. (What is rarely discussed openly is his succession; at seventy-five years old, it is likely to be his last presidential bid.)

In terms of a broader leadership strategy, the PS approach during the municipal elections was hard-edged, affirming its intention to spearhead the Left. It refused alliances with LFI in key cities while building coalitions with the Greens and the Communists. In general, this tactic proved electorally effective. Indeed, the traditional left retained control of many of France’s most important cities, including the three largest ones: Lyon, Marseille, and, crucially, Paris, underlining a strong performance overall.

Rupture

LFI tended to identify itself with a program of rupture — and perhaps as a result, secured triumphs in poorer, more multiethnic municipalities such as La Courneuve, Roubaix, and Creil. These victories showcased an insurgent social and political profile: elected officials from immigrant backgrounds, typically of African and Arab origin, emerging directly from the popular classes. This narrative was particularly striking in Saint-Denis, the largest district in the Parisian suburbs, where the mayor elected was Bally Bagayoko — the son of Malian parents, and a Muslim — a figure who embodies both LFI’s anti-racist struggle and the promise of republican equality. (The biggest development in the days following the election is the overt racism from the Right against the new mayor of Saint-Denis — which has seen many ghosts from the past come to light.)

LFI is advancing a form of political representation rooted in the peripheries, one that challenges the traditional sociological composition of political elites in France. At a deeper level, this political shift raises fundamental questions about the French republican model. Officially, France recognizes no minorities, only equal citizens. In practice, however, working-class suburbs like Saint-Denis — home to ethnic minority populations, migrants, and the traditional working class — are treated as internal fractures of the Republic, and commonly subjected to aggressive policing, stigmatization, and political marginalization. The rise of what LFI calls a process of “creolization” directly challenges this illusion, seeking to create a new imaginary that aligns with the wider evolution of French society. This perspective does not reject universalism outright but aims to reconstruct it on more inclusive foundations, indeed as an affirmation of essential French republican ideals.

In this sense, LFI’s strategy attempts to articulate social equality within a broader conception of “the people.” Their local governments are also programmatically ambitious. They hope to renew a welfare-state agenda centered on democratic redistribution of resources: social housing, price controls, free public transport, and free school meals. In this sense, LFI is attempting to anchor its project in concrete improvements to everyday life, particularly for working-class populations. The difficulty lies in how to fulfill such promises against a backdrop of French economic stagnation and now-chronic crisis, today likely heightened by the escalating wars across the globe.

Coalitions, or Not?

Despite its advances, LFI faces clear limits, as the election results underline. Its inability to secure major metropolitan centers, most notably Toulouse (which the party could and perhaps should have won), underscores what an uphill task it is to translate its local breakthroughs into national dominance. Le Monde and others have argued that some of the towns where the PS formed an alliance with the LFI were lost and that, conversely, where PS kept its distance from the LFI a series of victories were secured.

The quandary of whether to coalition-build (or not) must also be understood in light of recent political developments. In the 2024 parliamentary elections, LFI achieved a major and unexpected victory within the framework of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), finishing ahead of the far right that had been widely predicted to win. However, due to disagreements and intransigence on all sides, the alliance ultimately collapsed, leaving room for a counterattack. Such developments significantly altered LFI’s position in the wider system, as the political and media establishment cast it not merely as a rival contender, but as the principal threat to the Republic, even more than Marine Le Pen’s party.

The municipal elections were widely seen as an opportunity for such tendencies to halt LFI’s momentum and render it politically unviable. While this objective was not achieved — LFI was neither defeated nor marginalized — the level of growth the party might have hoped for failed to materialize. The outcome is, then, ambiguous: LFI has not been neutralized, but it now faces real difficulties in establishing itself as the leading force of the Left. It appears to have a solid strategy of local implantation, with figures other than leader Mélenchon, such as Clémence Guetté, Manuel Bompard, and Danièle Obono playing strong roles in public debate, demonstrating the party’s organizational ability. However, it is not so strong as to bring together other left-wing groups around a common project under its leadership. The kind of coordination attempted in the parliamentary elections of June–July 2024 under the NFP banner now seems much more difficult.

What seems to have been confirmed above all is something that has been growing evident in recent years (at least since Macron dissolved parliament in June 2024), and which was reinforced by the tone of the municipal campaign: namely, the widespread and effective demonization of LFI. The “cordon sanitaire” that until recently was placed around the far right so that a republican front could form against it now seems to have been shifted to the other end of the political spectrum. The dominant discourse in major media and rival parties (also from many figures within the PS, Greens, and Communists) is that the enemy to be fought — the one that truly threatens France’s cohesion — is now LFI. A tone reminiscent of the anti-communism of the Cold War and the interwar years has again gained traction. No cost seems too high to ward off the perceived threat posed by LFI.

The accusation of antisemitism attached to LFI seems to be the most difficult one to counter. Perhaps this insistence conceals something else: it is possible that what is most unacceptable about LFI for French society is its attempt to effectively integrate descendants of immigrants into the party and into positions of power. In a society that has long been marked by a complex social fracture, the abolition of long-standing racial hierarchies is often seen as unacceptable. The attempt to challenge them through new means may be what most scandalizes a segment of French society that seems unwilling to let these hierarchies fall away. A fundamental episode of the campaign illustrates this drift. The murky killing of Quentin Deranque (a confirmed neofascist activist), in Lyon on February 12 was immediately linked to LFI and resulted in a minute of silence in the National Assembly, something that has never before happened in the wake of a political killing (especially not those carried out by police, which occur regularly in France).

It is possible that a significant portion of the establishment would consider a Rassemblement National victory acceptable if its opponent were LFI. Among the so-called extremes, the elites may already have made their choice. This tendency was embodied in this campaign by examples like Rachida Dati, the conservative Républicains contender in the runoff for the Paris mayoralty. She attempted to label the — ultimately victorious — PS candidate as far left, trying at all costs to associate him with LFI’s radicalism.

The PS might yet be able to compete in the presidential race next year. But one of its major difficulties is that, unlike other parties — notably France Insoumise — it does not yet have a strong, obvious candidate to put forward. More broadly, it may be being sidelined in favor of a centrist alliance that will ultimately bear a strong resemblance to that which propelled Macron to the presidency. There is still a possibility for the Left to win in France. But in order for this to happen, some sort of pre-election agreement is needed, indeed one that doesn’t look close at hand. Otherwise, the resulting fratricide will have immense consequences for French society and beyond.Email

Frederico Lyra

Frederico Lyra is a musicologist and philosopher. He is an associate of the Alameda Institute.

2026-04-06T17:40:00.010-07:00

A History of US-Iran Relations

Review of Axis of Empire: A History of Iran-US Relations by Afshin Matin-Asgari (Verso, 2026)

By Chris Green

April 6, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953. The photograph captures Mosaddegh being carried on the shoulders of a cheering crowd in Tehran. This moment reflects his immense popularity following the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had previously been controlled by the British. His premiership ended in August 1953 after a coup d'état orchestrated by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States. | Image credit: The Granger Collection, public domain

When the US backed dictator of Iran, Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in 1979 and the Islamic Republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini was established in its place–and in November 1979, the Khomeini regime oversaw the taking of American hostages–US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote to President Jimmy Carter:

“We are never going to be able to work with the Khomeini regime…[Khomeini’s Islamic revolution] was a true expression of deep-seated national will, and the anti-Americanism we are seeing is a true expression of national outrage at US actions over the past 26 years…We are not in control of events and we must prepare for the worst. The oil fields are what count in the final analysis.”

Brezinski’s memo to Carter neatly encapsulates, 47 years after it was written, why the US has joined Israel in military aggression against Iran. A popular revolution overthrew a US backed dictator in one of the most strategically important and oil rich countries in the Middle East and established Iran as hostile to US and Israeli hegemony in the region. The current war is US revenge on the Iranian people for the 1979 revolution.

Indeed that is the real reason for the war–not the Iranian regime’s massacre of thousands of protestors in the months before the war–or most particularly, the supposed threat of–in reality non-existent–Iranian nuclear weapons program. After all, Iran scrupulously adhered to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)–the nuclear agreement it signed with the Obama administration in 2015 until Trump abrogated it in 2018, claiming he could get a better deal out of Iran. Going back to 2007, and including the current Trump administration, US intelligence agencies have consistently determined that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program. According to Oman’s foreign minister–who mediated talks between Iran and the US–Iran had agreed to completely give up its stock of enriched uranium just before Israel and the US launched their aggression on February 28th.

The current aggression is but the latest crime against the Iranian people by American imperialism going back many decades. Brezinski’s Iranian “national outrage at US actions over the past 26 years” referred to the US being the primary foreign sponsor of the Shah’s dictatorship. It was the US and Britain who engineered the August 1953 coup which overthrew the Shah’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh after the latter nationalized the holdings of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC–later British Petroleum). The coup allowed the Shah to eliminate the last vestiges of Iran’s parliamentary system and establish a near totalitarian dictatorship.

While criticism of his human rights record started seeping into American mainstream media in the 1970s, the Shah was frequently portrayed by politicians and media hacks alike as a glamorous and enlightened monarch, bringing his backward people into the modern age. In contrast, Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International, described the Shah’s dictatorship in 1976 thusly: “the Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country has a worse human rights record than Iran.”

The US entanglement with the Shah’s regime went well beyond selling it billions of dollars in weapons annually, allowing the dictator to build up a bloated military with his oil riches while most of his people lived in misery. The US and Israel trained SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious secret police. The US endorsed the Shah’s so-called White Revolution launched in 1963, supposedly a multifaceted effort to modernize Iran. However much of the White Revolution was hollow PR: for example, US Peace Corp volunteers on the ground in Iran discovered that health and education programs for Iran’s rural communities publicly touted by the Shah simply didn’t exist in any form; the villagers lived in as much misery as before.

After the Shah’s 1979 overthrow, the US inflicted additional punishment on the Iranian people: for example, the US deliverance of components to make chemical and biological weapons to Saddam Hussein for use against Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq War; the shootdown of Iran Air flight 655 in 1988 by the USS Vincennes, killing 290 civilians; and most significantly decades long economic sanctions which have immiserated much of the Iranian population while strengthening the government.

The Iranian Working Class

In January a compelling and timely book on Iran-US relations–which provides almost all the quotations and points I make above–was published by Afshin Matin-Asgari, professor of history at California State University, Los Angeles. What makes the book particularly unique is the author’s attempt to weave a key player into his narrative that is often missing from accounts of US-Iran relations: the Iranian working class.

The Iranian working class has been a key force over the last century in struggling against foreign domination of Iran–as well showing great courage in struggling for better working and living conditions against the wishes of economic oligarchs, domestic and foreign. One of the most legendary movements of the Iranian working class during the early and mid-20th century was the oil workers movement centered in Abadan, the port city and capital of Khuzestan province,

Another notable Iranian working class achievement was the establishment of social democratic governments in Iran’s northern Azerbaijani and Kurdish provinces under Soviet military occupation during and just after World War II. Although operating under Soviet military occupation, Matin-Asgari notes that western diplomats believed that these regimes had massive support amongst the poor and working class in the region. When, under American pressure, the Soviets withdrew their military from northern Iran in 1946, and the Shah’s British and American backed military re-occupied the region, Matin-Asgari relates what happened next from a quotation by US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was travelling in the Middle East at the time:

“When the Persian Army returned to Azerbaijan it came with a roar. Soldiers ran riot, looting and plundering, taking what they wanted. The Russian army had been on its best behavior. The Persian Army–the army of emancipation–was a savage army of occupation. It left a brutal mark on the people. The beards of peasants were burned, their wives and daughters were raped. Houses were plundered; livestock were stolen. The Army was out of control. Its mission was liberation; but it preyed on civilians, leaving death and destruction behind.”

According to Matin-Asgari, as many as 20,000 people may have been executed by the Iranian army and its allied right wing militias during the reoccupation campaign.

Mullahs vs. Leftists

Matin-Asgari writes that the rulers of the Islamic Republic in Iran have, over the years, specifically invoked the Azerbaijani and Kurdish republics in an attempt to bolster their own anti-imperialist and pro-worker cachet. Indeed, they have periodically indulged in socialist sounding, pro-worker rhetoric.

During the Shah’s regime, Ayatollah Khomeini–then in exile in Qom, Iraq–endorsed opposition to a 1970 conference in Tehran attended by representatives of American corporations to discuss investment in Iran. Khomeini declared that “any agreement that is concluded with these American capitalists and other imperialists is contrary to the will of the people and the ordinances of Islam.” Matin-Asgari notes that one of Khomeini’s proteges, a young Shiite cleric, was tortured to death in SAVAK custody for publicly opposing this conference..

The Iranian working class and secular progressives led the 1978-79 revolution which overthrew the Shah–before it was co-opted by the Islamists led by Khomeini. It has been long forgotten, but Matin-Asgari notes that hundreds of thousands of workers across Iran seized control of their workplaces during the revolution, establishing shuras (workers councils)–these were eventually crushed by the Khomeini regime and the Iranian left as a whole was violently repressed.

Matin-Asgari writes that in 1979, the Khomeini regime and the United States seemingly had little ground for hostility. In spite of its mimicking of left wing rhetoric, the Khomeini regime was, in reality, ferociously anti-communist. The US made no initial attempt to overthrow Khomeini. Matin-Asgari suggests that the regime’s endorsement of the seizure of American diplomat hostages on November 4th 1979 by Islamic student radicals was motivated by the regime’s domestic political battles rather than any real antagonism to the United States. Khomeini feared his government was losing popular support to radical leftists within Iran and so decided to support the seizure of hostages so as to bolster his own anti-imperialist credibility among his people.

The Role of AIPAC

Matin-Asgari describes a picture where it seems rather curious that the US and Iran should be enemies rather than friends: in different ways both regimes are devoted to repressing workers in the interests of capital accumulation. Moreover after it was established in 1979, the Islamic Republic displayed a ferocious anti-communism: Matin-Asgari writes that the CIA and MI6 may have even fed the Khomeini regime intelligence which lead it in 1983 to launch show trials against leaders of Tudeh, Iran’s once proud Communist Party.

Since the 1990s, Matin-Asgari notes, Iran’s leaders have adopted neoliberal policies within the country. They have sought to make Iranian workers more insecure: 6 percent of Iranian workers were classified as temporary employees in 1990 but that rose to 90 percent by 2014. The regime has also sought to create favorable conditions for foreign investment in the country–and of course, the Iranian working class has paid the price for this. In contrast to the views of pro-Iranian campists like Max Blumenthal–who imply that any mass protest against the Iranian government is entirely rooted in the machinations of the CIA and Mossad–Matin-Asgari writes that economic grievances among ordinary Iranians have driven the periodic wave of mass protests which the regime has violently suppressed. Key economic sectors in Iran are controlled by the Iranian Revolution Guard Corps in a highly secretive fashion–corruption has flourished under such conditions.

Thinking that the US and Iranian ruling classes share the same broad interest in facilitating capital accumulation at the expense of ordinary workers and thus have no real reason to be enemies, Matin–Asgari points to AIPAC’s influence on the US congress as being the primary source for driving hostility between the US and Iran. In the 1990s there arose a strong corporate lobby in the US–centered in the oil and agricultural industries–advocating for normalizing US relations with Iran so they could take advantage of business opportunities in the country. The late Dick Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton in the 90s, even advocated for easing US-Iran tensions. Yet this lobby was unsuccessful, defeated by the anti-Iran pro-Israel lobby which induced President Clinton to issue an executive order voiding a contract to develop oil fields that the American company Conoco (now Conoco-Phillips) signed with Iran in 1995.

In placing such stress on AIPAC influence, I think that Matin-Asgari misses the point that I argue above: that, regardless of what AIPAC or corporate lobbies do, US policy makers have long sought to punish Iran for taking itself outside the US sphere of influence in 1979. The Iranian regime–however hollow its posturing may be–brands itself as the leader of “anti-establishment” forces in the Middle East: as the champion of Palestinians facing US-Israeli genocide, of Lebanese resistance to Israeli aggression, of the Shia living as second class citizens in US backed dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. This makes the regime a mortal enemy from the perspective of US policy makers, whether Democrat or Republican.

In spite of such a disagreement, I can well recommend Matin-Asgari’s book. It is very readable and has admirably judicious analysis of primary sources.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Pro-Orbán actors accuse Meta of interference in Hungarian elections, despite lack of evidence

By Estelle Nilsson-JulienPublished on 06/04/2026 - EURONEWS

Meta has found itself embroiled in Hungary's tense election campaign, after supporters of the ruling Fidesz party claimed their posts are being restricted to favour opposition parties. In reality, there is no weight to the allegations.

Claims of interference

A video taken out of context

Members of Meta’s team targeted by interference rumours

JD Vance heads to Budapest to give final campaign push for Orban

US President Donald Trump threatened to unleash "hell" on Iran if it failed to meet his Tuesday deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to all shipping. Can Ukraine help unblock it?

Food security corridor in the Black Sea

What tools does Ukraine have?

Why is Kyiv offering help?

Ukraine's Zelenskyy arrived in Damascus in a surprise visit on Sunday, for his first official visit to Syria after the fall of the pro-Russian al-Assad regime.

Syria’s new partnerships

Russian military bases in Syria remain

Ukraine's Zelenskyy arrived in Damascus in a surprise visit on Sunday, for his first official visit to Syria after the fall of the pro-Russian al-Assad regime.

Syria’s new partnerships

Russian military bases in Syria remain

Combines 13 climate models

Global trends of increasing risk

Climate action can reduce risk

Figure: Projected changes in wildfire burned area. Percentage increase in annual burned area relative to the reference period (1999–2014), projected for 2081–2100 under SSP2-4.5.

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Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis has asked EU prosecutors to swiftly charge MPs over alleged €23m farm subsidy fraud, as resignations and pressure mount.

Bananas on Mount Olympus

NASA’s Artemis II crew are expected to reach their destination on Monday where the four astronauts aboard the Orion will – for the first time – look at the lunar far side with the naked eye. The fly-by will last approximately six hours before the astronauts head back home.

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Main image: students Ha Do (left) and Natalie Orrantia (right) observe the Ancient Immigrant star

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How Unsupervised Screen Time Harms Vulnerable Preschoolers

Rupture

Coalitions, or Not?

By Estelle Nilsson-Julien
Published on 06/04/2026 - EURONEWS