Maryland Democrat challenges party leader after midterms sweep, saying: ‘The American people called for change’ Chris Van Hollen, the Democratic senator of Maryland, announced on Thursday that he is challenging Chuck Schumer for the role of Senate majority leader when Democrats regain the chamber’s majority in January. “In this election, the American people called for change. They called for a change from Donald Trump’s disastrous policies – but even bigger than that, a change from the status quo that isn’t working for working people,” Van Hollen said in a statement posted on social media. Continue reading...
Decision disappoints experts hoping for world’s biggest emitter to take global lead on climate crisis China has ruled out hosting the Cop33 UN climate summit in 2028 after months of deliberations, leaving the field open for other Asian countries to hold it, the Guardian understands. The decision will disappoint many countries and climate experts, who had hoped the world’s biggest emitter would take the lead on the global stage, as the US under Donald Trump has vacated all forms of international cooperation on the climate. Continue reading...
Democratic state Sen. Cindy Holscher has narrowly won Kansas’ race for governor, NBC News projected Thursday, extending the party’s hold on the office in the red state.
Parties including the MK party, EFF and SACP have united as the Council of the Left, representing 20% of the municipal vote. While members continue individual coalition talks, the bloc says it will back the ANC only if it cuts ties with the DA and Freedom Front Plus in national government.
Figures highlight spread of virus, officially declared eliminated in US in 2000, but CDC does not identify which states accounted for deaths The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported six measles-related deaths in the US this year, according to figures published on its website on Thursday, as the country faces its most severe resurgence of the disease in decades. The newly reported total is twice the number of deaths recorded in 2025, highlighting the spread of the highly infectious virus, which was officially declared eliminated in the US in 2000. Continue reading...
An alert on Microsoft’s site said it was ‘aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact’ and blamed a server issue Microsoft says its servers are beginning to return to service after a global outage resulted in nearly 130,000 users globally reporting issues accessing its 365 suite of software, including Outlook and Teams. Outage website Down Detector showed a spike in Microsoft 365 problems, with nearly 130,000 reports of issues affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. AI assistant Copilot was also affected. Continue reading...
A possible China-US-Russia summit has prompted alarm of a modern-day Yalta Conference, with three powerful men carving up the world — with little regard for Ukraine, Europe and Taiwan or anyone else. But apart from an historic photo opportunity, the meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the November 18-19 APEC summit in Shenzhen will likely achieve little, analysts say. Spheres of influence When then US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945, they laid out the post-WWII settlement and new territorial boundaries in Europe. That meeting in Yalta, then in the Soviet Union and now in a part of Ukraine annexed by Russia in 2014, laid out the foundations for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the Cold War. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has raised alarm that Shenzhen could be a Yalta-like “redistribution of spheres of influence” for the 21st century. At talks in Abu Dhabi this week — the first since February — Russian negotiators rattled Ukraine and its European supporters by pushing a review of the continent’s security architecture as part of any peace deal, with the US also floating a new framework. Russia’s delegation chief in Abu Dhabi, Vladimir Medinsky, fanned such fears by questioning the inclusion of Europe in further talks. The trilateral rankles because it signals “the idea that a few great powers can decide the security and future of other countries over their heads”, according to Tsiporah Fried at the Hudson Institute. The format alone “would already send a message about who counts, and whose interests can be negotiated by others”, she told AFP. Divergent interests Beyond the symbolism, however, divergent interests make the creation of a new world order in Shenzhen unlikely. Even the agenda reportedly remains contentious: Russia has suggested the meeting focus on Ukraine, Trump has pushed for talks on nuclear weapons and the Iran war, and China has remained tight-lipped on both. “The three parties have vastly different demands, making the management of expectations difficult. There is a high probability that talks could end without a breakthrough,” according to Wang Wen, dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University in Beijing. There are also few issues where input from all three leaders could bring progress. The main points of contention between Beijing and Washington are trade and the AI technology race, for instance. Beijing — which presents itself as a champion of multilateralism — has repeatedly said that Europe should be part of peace negotiations over Ukraine. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that in a recent meeting, Xi showed “irritation” when the idea of the trilateral talks covering Ukraine came up. “He explicitly pointed out that this is a European conflict, in which the Europeans must also be at the table,” Steinmeier told ARD. On nuclear disarmament, China has long insisted that the US and Russia reduce their own giant nuclear arsenals before it agrees to talks on its own stockpile. The summit therefore is more likely to produce minor outcomes such as crisis hotlines or some cooperation on counter-terrorism, public health, or climate change, Wang told AFP. “There is no single enemy to unite all three great powers the way that the fight against Nazi Germany united Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin,” said Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist at Australian National University. “It follows that piecemeal horse-trading is in; a grand bargain is out.” However, Taiwan — which China claims — will still be watching the meeting closely, Sung said. “If the Trump administration is open to abandoning one partner (Ukraine) out of convenience, then it can abandon another,” he said. A post-Shenzhen world The Trump administration has sought to reassert US dominance over the “Western hemisphere” — including by capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in January — but splitting the world among great powers like it’s 1945 may not guarantee security. China has opposed the logic of Yalta — the clandestine division of spheres of influence and major powers determining the fate of other nations — “from the very beginning”, according to Renmin University’s Wang. China could allay fears of a second Yalta by using the summit to “emphasise the defence of sovereignty and support for multilateral organisations”, Wang said. If Beijing uses the meeting to insist on European inclusion in talks regarding the continent’s security, it “could, in fact, open a new window for communication between China and Europe”, he said. “The original Yalta opened the path to the Korean War and Indochina Wars in addition to various conflicts and insurgencies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America,” said Chong Ja Ian at the National University of Singapore. Any Yalta 2.0 agreement “will almost certainly run into the same kinds of issues”, Chong said.
WASHINGTON, Nov 12 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump said on Thursday he wanted Vice President JD Vance to focus "his complete and total attention" on any crime and corruption in Democratic-run US cities, saying that effort could save more money than a deal with Iran.
Mostafa Sepahvand and Farhad Javadi Manesh carried out surveillance in an effort to inflict violence on three people Two men of Iranian origin who were hired through social media as part of a plan to “eliminate” journalists in the UK have been found guilty of engaging in conduct likely to assist Tehran’s intelligence services. Mostafa Sepahvand, 41, and Farhad Javadi Manesh, 46, carried out surveillance and reconnaissance between August 2024 and March last year in an attempt to inflict violence on “subjects” in the UK. Continue reading...
Voters remembered Trump’s many promises to avoid the same kind of regime-change wars started by his predecessors For much of his political career, Donald Trump ranted at past US presidents who got the US entangled in endless foreign conflicts. He used it as a cudgel to belittle his predecessors, calling George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 “the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country”. Trump also regularly derided the occupation of Afghanistan as “a total disaster”. Then Trump decided to launch his own disastrous war against Iran eight months ago. And that conflict may well have cost Republicans control of Congress in last week’s midterm elections. Continue reading...
Displaying Ten Commandments in class, whitewashing history and study of Bible verses drove many to vote blue Michelle Palmer has run for the Texas state board of education twice before, but this time felt different. “I was hearing from day one from people who had not really been politically active before that they were worried about education,” Palmer said. Continue reading...
