News

For the first time since the 2024 uprising, Bangladesh is heading to the polls. Voters will pick a new parliament and weigh in on a controversial “July Charter.” With Gen Z now the largest voting bloc, will this election deliver real change?

In this episode: 

Episode credits:

This episode was produced by Tamara Khandaker, Noor Wazwaz and Chloe K. Li with Marcos Bartolomé, Tuleen Barakat, Maya Hamadeh, Sonia Bhagat, and our guest host, Kevin Hirten. It was edited by Tamara Khandaker.  

Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohannad al-Melhemm. Alexandra Locke is The Take’s executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera’s head of audio. 

For more: Al Jazeera Investigates – 36 July: Uprising in Bangladesh

Connect with us:

United States aviation authorities have announced that the airspace over El Paso, Texas, has been reopened after initially closing the airspace due to an alleged drone incursion from a Mexican cartel.

Wednesday’s announcement walked back an earlier statement from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), abruptly pausing air traffic over the southern border city for 10 days.

Such a closure would have been unprecedented. By late morning, though, the FAA announced that flights would resume in and out of the area as normal, prompting questions about the legitimacy of the drone claims.

“The temporary closure of airspace over El Paso has been lifted. There is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal,” the agency said in a social media post.

El Paso is one of the largest cities in Texas, and it is located on the banks of the Rio Grande River, directly across from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico.

Securing border areas, however, has been a focus of President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

The Trump administration has asserted that Wednesday’s brief airspace closure was a result of a drone operated by a Mexican drug cartel infiltrating US airspace. It has since suggested the drone was destroyed.

“The FAA and [the Department of Defense] acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote on social media at 9:37 US Eastern time (14:37 GMT).

“The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region.”

But the Mexican government has not confirmed the drone incursion.

At her morning news conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum told reporters, “There is no information about drone use on the border,” but she added that the security cabinet would investigate the incident.

Anonymous US officials have told media outlets like CNN and CBS News that the sudden airspace closure may have been a false alarm, caused by the US military’s tests of its laser-based counter-drone system near El Paso.

CBS and Fox News also reported that, earlier this week, a party balloon was misidentified as a drone, prompting it to be shot down, according to official sources.

The El Paso airspace closure began abruptly late on Tuesday night and lasted until early Wednesday morning.

Still, the Trump administration framed the airspace closure as evidence of the threat from Mexican cartels.

Speaking to lawmakers in the House of Representatives on Wednesday, Attorney General Pam Bondi cited the alleged drone incident as she spoke of “striking crucial blows against terrorist organisations”.

“I think you’ve seen the news this morning,” Bondi told Congress members. “The news is reporting that cartel drones are being shot down by our military. That’s what we all should care about right now: protecting America.”

The Trump administration has frequently referred to criminal groups operating in Mexico as a threat to US national security.

Since taking office on January 20, 2025, Trump has started designating cartels across Latin America as “foreign terrorist organisations”, spurring fears that the US could launch aggressive, cross-border military actions.

Trump himself has threatened to strike drug trafficking groups in Mexican territory, despite criticism that such an attack would constitute a violation of Mexican sovereignty.

Already, Trump has authorised military strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, on the pretext of disrupting international drug trafficking. He has alluded to land-based targets as an extension of that military campaign.

“We are going to start now hitting land. With regard to the cartels, the cartels are running Mexico. It’s very sad to watch,” Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity in an interview published on January 9.

“You see what’s happened to that country. But the cartels are running it.”

Some elected officials, however, have expressed scepticism about the Trump administration’s claims about a drone incursion on Wednesday. Democratic Congress member Veronica Escobar, who represents El Paso, was among those asking for more information.

“I believe the FAA owes the community and the country an explanation as to why this happened so suddenly and abruptly and was lifted so suddenly and abruptly,” Escobar said during a news conference.

A Kenyan self-proclaimed preacher and seven others linked to an infamous doomsday cult have been charged over the deaths of dozens of people whose bodies were discovered in shallow graves in southeast Kenya last year.

Kenya’s public prosecutions office said in a statement on X on Wednesday that it had charged Paul Mackenzie and other defendants with “organized criminal activity, two counts of radicalization (and) two counts of facilitating commission of a terrorist act” in relation to the “deaths of at least 52 people at Kwa Binzaro area in Chakama, Kilifi County.”

The defendants pleaded not guilty, with the next hearing in the case due on March 4.

“They are alleged to have promoted an extreme belief system by preaching against the authority of the government, adopted an extreme belief system against authority, and facilitated the commission of a terrorist act,” the prosecutor’s office said.

Mackenzie and others were already facing charges including murder and “terrorism” in connection with the deaths ⁠of people whose bodies were exhumed earlier from Shakahola Forest, in one of the world’s biggest cult-related disasters in recent history.

Prosecutors say Mackenzie and his Good News International Church organised a cult in which they ordered followers to starve themselves and their ‌children to death to go to heaven before the world ended. Mackenzie has denied the accusations.

By 2025, two years after investigations began, prosecutors said more than 400 bodies had been recovered from Shakahola Forest, which is located in Kilifi County on Kenya’s east coast.

Autopsies revealed that the majority had died of hunger. But others, including children, appeared to have been strangled, beaten or suffocated.

Mackenzie pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of manslaughter at a first trial in Mombasa and has remained in custody ever since.

But last year, more bodies were discovered in the remote village of Kwa Binzaro, around 30km (20 miles) from Shakahola along the Indian Ocean coast.

Prosecutors say Mackenzie masterminded and oversaw the offences at Kwa Binzaro, continuing to direct them after his detention in 2023 and using methods that included radical teachings to draw victims to the remote site.