Mourners at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital received the bodies of two Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike while they were trying to reach their home east of Khan Younis. The Israeli army says the two “posed an immediate threat.” One of the dead reportedly is a child.
Indonesia’s former President Muhammad Soeharto, whose three-decade rule was marred by accusations of mass human rights violations, was posthumously named a “national hero” on Monday, causing backlash.
The title was conferred in a ceremony presided over by President Prabowo Subianto, a former military general and Soeharto’s former son-in-law, despite protests by pro-democracy activists and the families of those affected by the former leader’s iron-fisted rule.
Backed by the United States during the Cold War, Soeharto used the military to dominate civilian affairs and crush dissent.
He was also accused of massive corruption and nepotism benefiting his family and cronies, although no charge was proven and he never went on trial due to his failing health.
So who was Soeharto, who ruled Indonesia for 32 years? And what’s behind President Prabowo’s decision to honour the late general?
Soeharto, whose name is also spelled Suharto, was Indonesia’s second president. He was a military officer who became president in 1967 after seizing power from the country’s first president and independence leader, Sukarno.
He launched a brutal crackdown to purge alleged communists, killing more than half a million Indonesians. The crackdown came after Soeharto accused the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) of a coup attempt following the kidnapping and killing of six military officers in 1965.
It has never been officially investigated. Soeharto was the key military officer during that time, although his involvement was never proven.
Under his leadership, Indonesia invaded and occupied East Timor in 1975, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Soeharto had the support of the West, particularly Washington, for his brutal actions in Indonesia and East Timor.
The former leader and his family were also suspected of corrupt practices during his rule. The charges remain unproven. Attempts to try Soeharto for graft were first made in 2000, but he failed to appear in court and was later declared too ill to stand trial.
Soeharto’s three-decade rule was marked by rapid economic growth and political stability, but also involved severe restrictions on human rights and free speech, and the military’s violent crackdowns on the opposition.
He was forced out of office in 1998 following deadly student protests in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. He issued an apology to the nation after his ouster, but did not specifically mention the human rights abuses and corruption that characterised his rule.
Soeharto came from a humble background. He joined the Dutch colonial army at 19 as a corporal and afterwards fought with Indonesian guerrillas against the Dutch colonial forces. Indonesia gained independence from the Netherlands in 1945.
Soeharto was one of the 10 people recognised by Prabowo during a televised ceremony that took place at the presidential palace in Jakarta to commemorate the annual National Hero Day.
Every year, the title of national hero is awarded to Indonesians who have contributed significantly to the Southeast Asian archipelago’s development.
“A prominent figure from Central Java province, a hero of the struggle for independence, General Soeharto stood out since the independence era,” an announcer said as Prabowo handed the award to Soeharto’s daughter and son.
Soeharto joins a list of more than 200 people that includes the first democratically elected president, Sukarno, as well as prominent women’s rights advocates, Islamic scholars and independence activists.
Former President Abdurrahman Wahid and labour activist Marsinah, who was kidnapped and murdered under Soeharto, are also among this year’s candidates to become national heroes.
Soeharto’s daughter, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, and son, Bambang Trihatmodjo, were among the attendees at Monday’s ceremony.
“Please remember what my father had done, from when he was young, until he was old, all his fights for this country and the Indonesian people,” Siti told reporters after the ceremony.
Yes.
Ahead of the National Hero Day ceremony, activists and civil society members rallied outside the presidential palace to protest proposals to grant Soeharto the national hero title. They raised an alarm about historical revisionism in Indonesia.
Some carried posters saying: “Stop the Whitewashing of the General of Butchery” and “Thousands Died But The Country Chose to Forget”.
The Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (KontraS), a local rights group, said designating Soeharto a national hero was immoral and helped to normalise impunity.
“[Soeharto], as someone suspected of being involved in human rights violations, state violence and various offences related to human rights abuses, does not deserve to be awarded the title of national hero,” KontraS coordinator Dimas Bagus Arya told AFP.
Last week, around 500 civil society members, activists and academics published a letter sent to Prabowo requesting he not proceed with the hero designation.
The letter said awarding Soeharto the title was a betrayal of his victims and of democratic values, and constituted a dangerous distortion of history.
Several rights groups also sent a letter to Culture Minister Fadli Zon and Prabowo to oppose the plan to honour the former leader. Fadli said proposing national hero candidates included public input.
“We have conducted research,” he told reporters. “All of them have met the requirements.”
State Secretary Prasetyo Hadi also defended the government’s decision.
“It is part of how we honour our predecessors, especially our leaders, who undoubtedly have made extraordinary contributions to the nation and the country,” he told reporters.
Prabowo is closely associated with Soeharto and was an ally of the former president. Prabowo is a former army general who served as the special forces commander during Soeharto’s rule.
The current Indonesian president was married to Soeharto’s daughter Siti Hediati Hariyadi. The couple divorced after 15 years of marriage, and she is now a parliamentarian.
Prabowo has been accused of being involved in military crimes in East Timor under Soeharto in 1983. East Timor only became independent after Soeharto stepped down.
Soeharto’s party, Golkar, remains a major player in Indonesian politics and backs Prabowo. Golkar holds key ministries in the Indonesian cabinet.
Prabowo rose to power following an election last year, and has been accused by his critics of expanding the role of the military in civilian domains.
In response to outcry over the plan to include Soeharto, Prabowo’s office had insisted he has the right to bestow the title upon whomever he chooses.
Yes.
Soeharto was a staunch anti-communist, and the US played a role in shoring him up.
Even before Soeharto rose to power, the US sought to weaken and depose Sukarno, who was accused of being sympathetic to communists.
In 2017, diplomatic cables declassified by the US National Security Archive and the National Declassification Center showed that Washington had intimate knowledge about the 1965 purge of alleged communists in Indonesia.
The United States has carried out another set of military strikes against what it says are drug boats in international waters headed to the country.
Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said on Monday that the US military targeted two vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Sunday, killing six people.
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“These vessels were known by our intelligence to be associated with illicit narcotics smuggling, were carrying narcotics, and were transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route in the Eastern Pacific,” he wrote in a social media post.
“Both strikes were conducted in international waters, and three male narco-terrorists were aboard each vessel. All six were killed. No US forces were harmed.”
The administration of President Donald Trump has faced mounting criticism over such attacks, including accusations of violating domestic and international law.
But Washington appears to be stepping up the campaign. Sunday’s deadly double attack was the fourth this month. Previous strikes in the Pacific and Caribbean Sea killed at least eight people, according to US authorities.
The Trump administration started targeting boats in the Caribbean in September and later expanded its military push to the Pacific Ocean.
The US has carried out 18 strikes on vessels so far, killing dozens of people.
Last month, United Nations rights chief Volker Turk said the US attacks have no justification under international law.
“These attacks – and their mounting human cost – are unacceptable,” Turk said. “The US must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats, whatever the criminal conduct alleged against them.”
The US has described the attacks as “counterterrorism” operations after having designated drug cartels as “terrorists”.
“Under President Trump, we are protecting the homeland and killing these cartel terrorists who wish to harm our country and its people,” Hegseth said on Monday.
Other than grainy footage showing the strikes, the Trump administration has not provided concrete proof that the vessels targeted were carrying drugs.
Trump himself has previously joked that fishermen are now afraid to operate in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela.
Critics have questioned why US authorities would not monitor the boats and intercept them when they enter the country’s territorial waters instead of extrajudicially executing the suspects.
The strikes have sparked regional tensions, particularly with Venezuela, with Trump accusing its president, Nicolas Maduro, of links to “narcoterrorists”.
The ramped-up US military campaign near Venezuela has raised speculation that Washington may be preparing for conflict in the oil-rich South American country.
Most regions of Ukraine are undergoing scheduled power outages amid a new wave of attacks on energy sites by Russian drones and missiles.
Ukrenergo, the state-run electricity transmission systems operator in Ukraine, said the blackouts will last at least until the end of Monday as repairs are conducted on infrastructure damaged over the weekend and demand remains high as the onset of winter approaches.
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The Poltava and Kharkiv regions are suffering from a deficit of high-voltage capacity after damage to their power transmission lines while the areas of Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kyiv and other central and northern regions have been affected as well.
According to Ukraine’s military, Russian forces used two air-launched ballistic missiles, five surface-to-air guided missiles and 67 drones, including those of Iranian design, during their attacks overnight into Monday.
The Ukrainian army did not report shooting down any of the missiles, but it said 52 of the drones were intercepted and the remaining 15 conducted strikes on nine locations.
Russia has maintained its attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure as United States-led diplomatic efforts to end the war make little progress. Ukraine has also been hitting Russian oil and fuel infrastructure in a stated effort to disrupt resources going to the front lines.
An explosion rocked Russia’s port town of Tuapse on the Black Sea overnight after Ukrainian forces launched sea drones towards the major oil terminal and refinery in the town. No casualties were reported.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence announced on Monday that four naval drones were destroyed near the port in the northeastern Black Sea.
It added that its air defences shot down six US-made HIMARS rockets and 124 fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles.
While calling for tougher sanctions and asset freezes to punish Russia, Ukraine is also looking to buy more arms.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that Ukraine would like to order 25 Patriot air defence systems from US weapons makers as it tries to fend off Russian attacks at the brink of winter.
Zelenskyy acknowledged that the missile systems are expensive and such a large order could take years to manufacture. But he suggested that European countries could give their Patriots to Ukraine and await replacements, stressing that “we would not like to wait.”
Ukraine is also advancing with an internal drive with a stated aim of weeding out corruption in the energy sector.
The National Anti-Corruption Bureau announced on Monday that it was conducting searches in cooperation with a specialised anticorruption judicial office in premises connected to Tymur Mindich, a former business partner of the president.
The head of the UK’s British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and a top news executive resigned from the organisation on Sunday after a memo criticising the editing of a 2021 speech by US President Donald Trump shortly before protesters stormed the US Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021, was leaked.
The BBC said Director-General Tim Davie and news CEO Deborah Turness had chosen to step down after the memo became public.
The memo was from ex-adviser Michael Prescott, a former journalist who was an independent consultant to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board for three years before leaving in June. He claimed that editors of a 2024 BBC Panorama documentary had spliced two parts of Trump’s speech together so it appeared that he had actively encouraged the Capitol Hill riots of January 6, 2021, which followed his 2020 election defeat.
Trump responded to the pair’s resignation on Sunday night, calling Davie and Turness “very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a presidential election”, in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Davie said he took “ultimate responsibility” for mistakes made, and had decided to resign after “reflecting on the very intense personal and professional demands of managing this role over many years in these febrile times”.
The resignations of Davie and Turness followed controversy over a BBC Panorama documentary called “Trump: A Second Chance?”, which was broadcast one week before the 2024 US presidential election.
A clip from the programme appears to show two different parts of Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech joined together into one sequence. In the episode, Trump is shown as saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
But according to a transcript from Trump’s comments that day, he said: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.”
Nearly an hour later, Trump then used the phrase “we fight like hell”, but not in reference to the protesters at the Capitol. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said.
Tim Davie became director-general of the BBC in September 2020. He was responsible for overseeing the organisation’s editorial, operational and creative work. He previously led BBC Studios for seven years and worked at companies including Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo.
In an email to staff on Sunday, Davie said quitting the job after five years “is entirely my decision”. He said he was “working through exact timings with the Board to allow for an orderly transition to a successor over the coming months”.
Meanwhile, Deborah Turness had been the CEO of BBC News since 2022, leading a team of around 6,000 employees broadcasting to almost half a billion people around the world. She was previously CEO of ITN and president of NBC News.
Over the weekend, Turness said that the controversy over the Trump documentary “has reached a stage where it is causing damage to the BBC – an institution that I love. As the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, the buck stops with me”.
“In public life, leaders need to be fully accountable, and that is why I am stepping down,” she said in a note to staff. “While mistakes have been made, I want to be absolutely clear recent allegations that BBC News is institutionally biased are wrong.”
David Yelland, former editor of the Sun newspaper, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Monday that Davie and Turness were the victims of a “coup”. However, both they and the BBC deny this.
The incident prompted criticism of the BBC by Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, who described the corporation over the weekend as “100 percent fake news” and a “propaganda machine”.
For his part, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “The TOP people in the BBC, including TIM DAVIE, the BOSS, are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught “doctoring” my very good (PERFECT!) speech of January 6th”.
He added that “very dishonest people” had “tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election… On top of everything else, they are from a Foreign Country, one that many consider our Number One Ally. What a terrible thing for democracy!”
Prescott’s leaked memo did not only refer to the Panorama editing of Trump’s speech. It also focused criticism on a number of other areas of the BBC’s work, such as its coverage of transgender issues and racism – which he said were “one-sided” and “ill-researched” – but most notably its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Prescott accused the BBC of anti-Israel bias within the BBC Arabic service, claiming that contributors over-emphasised stories that were critical of Israel. He also accused the wider corporation of “misrepresenting” the number of women and children killed in Gaza and the issue of Palestinian starvation in the besieged enclave.
The former BBC adviser said he had sent the memo in “despair at inaction by the BBC Executive” over these and other issues.
Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing broadsheet newspaper in the UK, accused the BBC of “the most extraordinary degree of systemic bias, particularly in BBC Arabic” in its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.
On general news, he told the Today programme, “it’s always [reporting] from a sort of metropolitan left position. Absolutely consistently, that’s how the bias is.”
The BBC denies that it is institutionally biased, however.
In February, the United Kingdom’s media regulator Ofcom said a BBC documentary about Palestinian children living through Israel’s war on Gaza broke rules on impartiality, as it was narrated by the 13-year-old son of a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas-run government.
Five days after it was broadcast, the BBC removed the documentary Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone from its online streaming platform. In July, the BBC’s own investigation found that the programme had breached its editorial guidelines on accuracy.
But the BBC has also been accused of being biased in favour of Israel.
In November, the organisation was accused by more than 100 of its own staff of giving Israel favourable coverage in its reporting of the war on Gaza, and criticised its lack of “accurate evidence-based journalism”.
An internal letter, signed by more than 100 anonymous staff at the BBC, was sent to Tim Davie and Deborah Turness, stating: “Basic journalistic tenets have been lacking when it comes to holding Israel to account for its actions.”
Karishma Patel, one journalist who quit the BBC over its Gaza coverage, told Al Jazeera: “It is absurd that Panorama’s editorial blunder over Trump’s speech was the final straw for the Director-General and CEO – rather than the worst moments in the BBC’s Gaza coverage across two years: its refusal to air the Gaza medics documentary by Basement Films, significant broadcast of Israel’s defence and not South Africa’s genocide case at the ICJ, public letters signed by BBC journalists concerned about the organisation’s Gaza coverage, some of which I personally organised.
“There have been many crucial moments where we have seen no real accountability and no real change, eroding public and staff trust.
“It is very clear that criticisms are only taken seriously if they come via the right wing press, and this influence has shaped the BBC.”
The BBC, which is funded by a mandatory licence fee payable by all households in the UK that own a television, has long been accused by rival media organisations and politicians of failing to maintain a commitment to impartiality in its coverage of global news and events and of having a “liberal” bias.
In March 2023, the BBC struggled to contain a scandal over the opinions of Gary Lineker – a former professional footballer and its highest-paid sports presenter – on immigration. He was ultimately removed as a presenter of BBC’s Match of the Day show after he criticised the UK government’s asylum-seeker policy, briefly leading to a walkout by some of his colleagues in a show of solidarity.
In May 2025, controversy over Lineker was reignited after he shared an Instagram post about Zionism that included a drawing of a rat, which critics claimed was an anti-Semitic insult.
In response, Lineker said: “I recognise the error and upset that I caused, and reiterate how sorry I am.” The BBC said he would leave the organisation altogether.
Elsewhere, the BBC has faced lasting reputational damage following revelations that its former TV presenter Jimmy Savile perpetuated decades of sexual abuse, which came to light after his death in 2011.
Posthumous investigations revealed that Savile had exploited his celebrity status and access to BBC facilities to abuse hundreds of victims, many of them children, while complaints to the corporation about his behaviour were ignored and even covered up.
More recently, the broadcaster was again rocked by allegations involving one of its main news anchors, Huw Edwards. In 2023, Edwards was accused of paying for up to 41 sexually explicit images he had received on WhatsApp, some of victims aged between seven and nine years.
The case reignited scrutiny over how the BBC handles staff misconduct, reviving painful questions about trust and oversight within the institution, which eventually admitted that it should have responded to complaints much faster.
Sunday’s resignations come at a sensitive time for the BBC, as the government is set to review the corporation’s Royal Charter before the current term expires in 2027.
The Royal Charter sets out the terms and purpose of the BBC’s operations, and normally lasts for about a decade each time it is renewed.
UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, who has previously called allegations of bias “incredibly serious”, said a review of the Charter by the government would help the BBC “adapt to this new era”.
Jonah Hull, reporting for Al Jazeera in London, said “this is a hugely significant moment for the BBC … arguably the most famous news media brand, built on a reputation of journalistic integrity and impartiality”.
In addition to the recent scandal over the misleading editing of a Trump speech, Hull said the BBC had also suffered criticism for its coverage of “trans-rights issues, Israel bias … all of which has led to a furore of criticism aimed at the BBC”.
BBC Chair Samir Shah, who apologised for an “error of judgement” over the editing of Trump’s speech in the Panorama programme on Monday, but denied that the BBC is guilty of systemic bias, is due to lay out a vision for the BBC’s future on Monday to Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee.