WORLD - The African Mirror

Apr

02

2026

Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah is raising sectarian tensions in Lebanon

WORLD

ISRAEL’S prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, instructed the military on March 29 to expand its operations in southern Lebanon. It is the latest conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, in which Netanyahu has again promised to dismantle the Lebanese Shia group, and it does not seem close to a conclusion. This is not the first time Israel has invaded southern Lebanon. And people across the country are bracing themselves, knowing that previous Israeli invasions have almost always resulted in longer-term occupation. Lebanese fears are worsened by the opaque situation on the ground. Contradictory reports regularly break about the success or failure of…

Apr

02

2026

By The African Mirror

Tiger’s reckoning with a body consumed by greatness, a life lived at the edge of human endurance

WORLD

ON the eve of the Masters - the cathedral he built with his bare hands and consecrated with five green jackets - Tiger Woods sat down, put his hand up, and said: enough. Not as a defeat. As survival. Four days after his Land Rover rolled onto its side on a two-lane road near his Jupiter Island home - the vehicle pinned to the road, opioid pills in his pocket, his pupils dilated, his gait a stumble - the 15-time major champion posted a brief, dignified statement on social media on Tuesday, March 31. "I know and understand the seriousness…

Apr

01

2026

By NOUR ELASSY

Land Day and the Palestinian struggle after 30 months of genocide

WORLD

EVERY year on 30 March, Palestinians mark Yom al-Ard, Land Day. The phrase sounds almost harmless to those who have never lived inside its meaning, like a date for folklore, celebrating our roots, or perhaps honouring our sentimental attachment to olive trees and generationally inherited fields. But Land Day is not a charming ritual of heritage. It is a political wound. An annual acknowledgement of a truth that much of the world still tries to ignore, soften, or bury: In Palestine, our struggle has always been about the land. Simply, it is about our right to exist on our own…

Apr

01

2026

By The African Mirror

Dolores Huerta feared speaking about her abuse for years. The farmworkers she advocates for understand

WORLD

EVERY survivor of sexual assault is forced to make a calculation: What are the repercussions if they speak out? Dolores Huerta felt the weight of the entire labour rights movement, which she feared would crumble if she accused civil rights leader Cesar Chavez of sexual abuse. “The weight of that calculation is the same weight for every single survivor in the farm worker industry,” attorney Karla Altmayer told The 19th. “They're not thinking about the movement, but they're thinking about: ‘Will my family be able to work next year?’ ‘Will I be abandoned in the field?’ ‘Will I be killed?’”…

Mar

31

2026

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS

Cities emptied, hospitals bombed: how the US-Israel war is destroying ordinary lives in Iran and Lebanon

WORLD

ALMOST a month since American and Israeli warplanes began striking Iran on 28 February, the toll on ordinary people has reached a magnitude that statistics alone cannot capture. A nine-million-strong capital reduced to a ghost town. Ambulances reduced to smouldering wreckage. Mothers fleeing southern Beirut in darkness, with no destination, no guarantee of safety — and no designated safe zones anywhere in the country. This is not collateral damage. This is the lived reality of two populations caught between competing military imperatives and geopolitical calculations made in Washington and Tel Aviv — calculations that have never once factored in what…

Mar

31

2026

By JONATHAN ESTE

Iran was always going to close the Strait of Hormuz

WORLD

THE five-day deadline to open the Strait of Hormuz handed to Iran by Donald Trump on Monday expires sometime tomorrow, and the Islamic Republic needs to “get serious before it is too late” – or so the US president has announced on his TruthSocial platform. You’ll recall that this deadline replaced another deadline, which was due to expire on Monday night, after which the US and Israel would obliterate Iran’s power plants and plunge the country into darkness. Happily, Trump pulled back from this plan, reporting that talks were progressing very well, so he would extend the deadline until March…

Mar

30

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

Millions march across America in the ‘No Kings’ uprising – and the world is watching

WORLD

THE snow had barely melted from the Minnesota State Capitol steps, but on Saturday, 28 March 2026, the heat of a democracy asserting itself was unmistakable. More than 200,000 people flooded the lawns, streets, and overpasses of St. Paul in a demonstration that surpassed even the iconic Women's March of 2017. Across the United States, in cities and hamlets from New York's Times Square to a windswept square in Driggs, Idaho — population fewer than 2,000, where Trump took 66% of the vote in 2024 — millions took to the streets in what could be the largest single day of…

Mar

30

2026

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

War without exit: how Trump’s Iran gamble is burning the global south

WORLD

ONE month into what the United States military calls Operation Epic Fury, the Trump administration finds itself ensnared in exactly the kind of open-ended Middle East conflict it promised to avoid. The war against Iran — launched jointly with Israel on 28 February — has not produced the swift, definitive outcome the White House projected. Instead, it has unleashed what the International Energy Agency (IEA) has described as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. For African governments, that designation is not an abstraction. It is the reason fuel queues are growing in Nairobi, the…

Mar

28

2026

By The African Mirror

THE TIGER WHO FORGOT HE WAS RICH: Woods rolls the dice – and his car – for the second time

WORLD

HERE is a number worth considering before we go any further: one billion dollars. That is, give or take a yacht, the estimated net worth of Eldrick Tont "Tiger" Woods - fifteen-time major champion, cultural colossus, and, as of Friday afternoon, a man who had just crawled out of the passenger window of an overturned Land Rover four miles from his own front door. For the second time in nine years, one of sport's most storied figures sat in the back of a police cruiser rather than the back of a limousine. One must ask - with a sincerity that…

Mar

28

2026

By The African Mirror

UN Rights Chief slams Minab school strike amid Middle East escalation

WORLD

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk delivered a scathing statement to the UN Human Rights Council's urgent debate on the Minab school strike, demanding accountability for the deaths of schoolchildren while decrying broader US-Israel-Iran hostilities and Iran's internal crackdown. His remarks frame the March incident as a humanitarian flashpoint in a spiralling regional conflict now risking global economic fallout. Türk's direct quotes underscore violations of international law and the urgent need for de-escalation. Türk evoked the bombing's raw impact: “The bombing of Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab evoked a visceral horror. The images of bombed-out classrooms and…