WORLD - The African Mirror

Nov

12

2025

Global refugee winter crisis deepens as humanitarian funding collapses

WORLD

THE United Nations refugee agency has issued a stark warning: millions of displaced people across conflict zones will face winter with dangerously inadequate protection as international humanitarian funding craters to unprecedented lows. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) confirmed that plummeting government contributions have forced the agency to slash winter assistance programs precisely when need has intensified. The agency's emergency winter campaign seeks to raise $35 million - a sum that underscores both the scale of the crisis and the agency's constrained resources. "Humanitarian budgets are stretched to breaking point and the winter support that we offer will be…

Nov

11

2025

By SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

Bloodshed in the West Bank: UN demands justice as settler violence spirals out of control

WORLD

THE violence gripping the occupied West Bank has reached a devastating crescendo, with Israeli settlers and security forces killing more than 1,000 Palestinians since the Gaza war ignited two years ago - a death toll that includes 215 children cut down in what UN officials are calling an unchecked reign of terror. The stark numbers paint a grim portrait of life under occupation: 1,010 Palestinians dead in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, their lives snuffed out as illegal settlement expansion accelerates and attacks on Palestinian communities intensify with what UN human rights officials describe as absolute impunity. "The attacks…

Nov

11

2025

By OWN CORRESPONDENT

117 million displaced people face rising climate threats, UN warns

WORLD

THREE-quarters of the world's 117 million refugees and displaced people are living in countries with extreme climate risks, trapped in a dangerous cycle where weather disasters compound the violence that forced them to flee, according to a UN report. The report from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, reveals that weather-related disasters have triggered 250 million internal displacements over the past decade — the equivalent of 70,000 people forced from their homes every day. "Around the world, extreme weather is putting people's safety at greater risk," said Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees. "These are people who have already endured…

Nov

11

2025

By JACKIE HARRIS, NHPR

‘Love brings you home’: A 100-year-old family secret and the librarian refusing to bury it

WORLD

ERIN Moulton’s interest in genealogy was casual at first. It started when people began stopping by her desk at the Derry Public Library with questions about the 198-year-old New Hampshire town’s history or for help looking up their ancestors. This reporting was published in partnership with NHPR, a nonprofit public media newsroom based in New Hampshire. Listen to the story: Moulton, 43, soon developed an obsession with solving these history puzzles, chasing a “geeky” kind of rush. “I'll go flying through the archives. I'll be diving through the newspapers. I think it's exhilarating,” Moulton said. "It's like overturning treasure — another…

Nov

10

2025

By AIDEN HOYLE

How authoritarian states sculpt a warped alternative reality in our news feeds

WORLD

WHEN we talk about disinformation – the intentional spreading of misleading information – we usually picture blatant lies and “fake news” pushed by foreign governments. Sometimes the intention is to sway voters in elections, and sometimes it’s to sow confusion in a crisis. But this is a somewhat simplified version of events. In fact, authoritarian countries, such as Russia and, increasingly, China, are engaged in continuous and more expansive projects aimed at creating a tilted political reality. They seek to subtly undermine the image of Western democracies, presenting themselves and their growing bloc of authoritarian partners as the future. Crafting…

Nov

10

2025

By GRACE PANETTA

After nearly 40 years, Nancy Pelosi is retiring from Congress

WORLD

NANCY Pelosi, the first and only woman to serve as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, announced Thursday that this term in Congress will be her last. Pelosi, 85, has been in the House for 38 years and served two stints as House speaker, from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023. This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta of The 19th. Meet Grace and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy. “It seems prophetic now that the slogan of my very first campaign in 1987 was ‘a voice that will be heard,’”…

Nov

10

2025

By MARIA SMÅBERG and JOHAN SCHAAR

The cooking pot that became a symbol of Sweden’s commitment to helping Palestine

WORLD

IN the hills of the southern West Bank, a Swedish cooking pot has become a symbol of trust, resilience and forgotten solidarity. Half a century after it was first distributed as emergency aid, the cooking pots still gleam in the kitchens of Beit Awwa – reminding villagers of a time when Sweden stood by them in the aftermath of war. Today, that legacy stands in stark contrast to Sweden’s current policy: a sharp reduction in aid to Palestine, which has been folded into a regional government strategy for all of the Middle East and North Africa region. The origins of…

Nov

08

2025

By ADRIAN BEAUMONT

Trump’s ratings slump as shutdown grinds on; Democrats have big wins in state elections

WORLD

DONALD Trump’s net approval has slumped to its lowest this term as the United States government shutdown breaks the record for the longest shutdown. Democrats had big wins in state elections on Tuesday. I previously covered the ongoing US government shutdown on October 9, eight days into a shutdown that began on October 1. This shutdown has now lasted 38 days, beating the previous record 35-day shutdown that was set during Trump’s first term. Although Republicans hold the presidency and majorities in both chambers of Congress, they cannot pass a budget without Democratic support in the Senate owing to the…

Nov

08

2025

By PETER RUTLAND and ELIZAVETA GAUFMAN

Beware the Anglo-Saxons! Why Russia likes to invoke a medieval tribe when talking about the West

WORLD

A new, old specter is haunting the world: the bloodthirsty Anglo-Saxons. Well, that is what the Kremlin wants the world to believe. Take the new Russian state-backed film “Tolerance.” Released in September 2025 to a less than enthusiastic public response, the dystopian tale of moral decay in the West opens with a warning of an “omnipresent Anglo-Saxon liberalism” that will “cause the ultimate degradation and extinction of once-prosperous countries and peoples.” Scary stuff. But the film isn’t the first time that Anglo-Saxons have been cited as a threat to the Russian way of life. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine…

Nov

08

2025

By MARK LACY

Netflix’s A House of Dynamite sounds the nuclear alarm, but how worried should we be?

WORLD

AS a teenager in the 1980s, I was shown a BBC drama in school called Threads that depicted the impact of a nuclear strike on a city in northern England. Threads is a brutal vision of a terrifying reality that I imagine haunted many people in the years before the end of the Cold War. For younger generations who have so far experienced a world with pandemic lockdowns, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and international tensions that make a third world war no longer feel like a fictional scenario, geopolitical fear and anxiety are again hard to escape. And now…