Category World News

Tehran, Iran – The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has confirmed Western intelligence reports that it intercepted a Cyprus-registered tanker that transited through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Marhsall Islands-flagged Talara was confiscated on Friday morning while carrying 30,000 tonnes of petrochemicals, Iran’s powerful military and political organisation said in a statement carried by state media.

“This operation was carried out successfully in accordance with legal duties and for the purpose of safeguarding the national interests and resources of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and under the orders of judicial authorities,” the IRGC said, alleging that the vessel committed a “violation for transporting unauthorised cargo”.

Unnamed officials with the administration of United States President Donald Trump told media outlets that the IRGC took over the vessel as several Western intelligence agencies confirmed the report.

Talara, operated by Cyprus-based Columbia Shipmanagement, had departed a port in the United Arab Emirates for Singapore.

The company said it lost contact with the vessel, adding it is working with maritime security agencies and the vessel owner as it prioritises crew safety. It said the cargo was high-sulfur gas oil, which is, among other things, used as fuel for marine vessels.

British security agencies also said they were tracking the incident.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) identified the location of the incident at 20 nautical miles (equivalent to 37km) east of the Emirati city of Khor Fakkan, and said “state activity” was behind it.

Security agency Ambrey said three small boats approached Talara as it was heading south through the Strait of Hormuz, with the ship later deviating from its route in the Gulf of Oman to steer towards Iran.

Flight-tracking data analysed by The Associated Press on Friday showed a US Navy MQ-4C Triton drone loitering for hours over the area during the seizure.

US Central Command, which oversees Washington’s military deployment in the Middle East, Central Asia and parts of South Asia, said in a statement on Friday that it was “aware of the incident” involving Talara and was “actively monitoring the situation”.

“Commercial vessels are entitled to largely unimpeded rights of navigation and commerce on the high seas,” it said, without assigning blame.

This is the first such interdiction by Iranian forces in the Strait of Hormuz in more than a year.

In July 2024, the IRGC seized a Togo-flagged, UAE-managed products tanker some 61 nautical miles (113km) southwest of Iran’s port of Bushehr in an operation it said was carried out based on a judicial order to intercept the vessel “systematically engaged in fuel smuggling”.

IRGC commandos in April 2024 rappelled down from a helicopter onto the deck of a Portuguese-flagged containership linked with an Israeli billionaire. That incident came shortly after Israel bombed Iran’s consulate in Syria, killing seven IRGC members, including two top generals.

Another Israeli-linked container ship was attacked and damaged by a drone in the Indian Ocean in November 2023, an attack the US blamed on Iran. The US, UK and Israel said Iran was responsible for a drone attack off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea that killed two European crew members in 2021.

In May 2022, Iran took two Greek tankers and held them until November that year to secure the release of an Iranian-flagged tanker seized in Greece as a result of US sanctions.

Washington also accused Iran of orchestrating a string of attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz in 2019, including using limpet mines, which led to increased maritime insurance costs and forced reroutes for some vessels.

The strategic waterway is where about 20 percent of the global oil trade and roughly one-third of global liquefied natural gas is exported through. Tehran has long threatened to shut it off in reaction to rising external pressure.

All the maritime incidents occurred after Trump in 2018 unilaterally withdrew from Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and imposed stringent sanctions that have only expanded since.

The US also assassinated Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani during the tenure of the first Trump administration in 2020, and, together with Israel, bombed Iran’s top nuclear facilities during a 12-day war in June.

The seizure of Talara on Friday came as Iran’s authorities opened an exhibition in Tehran to display a variety of missiles, drones and other military capabilities.

When Gabriel Boric was sworn in as president of Chile in 2022, his victory was heralded by supporters as the beginning of a new era in the country’s political history.

The leftist leader, only 36 at the time, was swept into power by a wave of protests focused on cost-of-living issues.

He also promised to oversee the rewriting of the Chilean Constitution, created during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and famous for locking the country into a pro-market model.

But several years later, after a series of failed efforts to replace the old constitution, Chile is on the verge of a sharp about-face. Boric is limited to one term at a time in office, and the country’s political right sees an opening to return to power, particularly as concerns rise over crime and immigration.

Sunday marks the first round of voting in Chile’s 2025 presidential race. But the race is likely to progress to a run-off, with Jeannette Jara, the nominee for Boric’s coalition, leading a packed field of conservative rivals.

That fractured right-wing base, however, is likely to consolidate into a formidable force by the second round of voting.

Who are the main candidates on Sunday’s ballot? Which issues are front and centre? And what do polls tell us about the first round of voting? We answer those questions and more in this brief explainer.

When is the election?

The first round of voting takes place on November 16, with 50 percent of the vote needed for a candidate to win outright.

If no candidate reaches that threshold, a second round of voting will take place on December 14.

The November 16 vote will, however, be crucial for deciding the composition of the country’s legislature, with all 155 seats in the Chamber of Deputies up for grabs, as well as 23 out of 50 seats in the Senate.

Will voting be mandatory?

Mandatory voting is returning to Chile’s presidential elections for the first time since 2012.

That means participation rates are likely to increase. During the first round of the 2021 election, for instance, only about 47 percent of eligible voters participated.

During obligatory voting in constitutional referendums, that figure has risen higher than 80 percent.

There were 15,450,377 registered voters in Chile as of 2024, according to the government’s electoral agency.

Who are the candidates?

Boric cannot seek re-election, but his governing coalition, Unity for Chile, has placed its hopes on Jeannette Jara, 51.

Unity for Chile, which comprises eight parties, held a primary in June that Jara handily won, with 60 percent of the vote.

As a labour minister under Boric, Jara led an effort to reduce the work week from 45 hours to 40. She has campaigned on affordability, pledging to increase Chile’s minimum wage and make housing more affordable.

Her candidacy is considered historic in contemporary Chilean politics, in part because of her working-class background and in part because she represents the Communist Party, which has not seen such broad support since Chile’s return to democracy.

Jara has sought to project stable and experienced leadership on the campaign trail. She has also put forward a public safety plan that would train more police and expand the country’s prison system.

While the governing leftist coalition held a primary in June, parties on the centre-right and far-right declined to do so, leading to multiple candidates on November’s presidential ballot.

The frontrunner on the right is Jose Antonio Kast, a 59-year-old former congressman running for the Republican Party.

The far-right Kast previously lost to Boric in the 2021 presidential election, but this time around, he is projected to do well, particularly if he reaches the second round of voting.

There, he is likely to consolidate the support of other right-wing candidates who fail to advance to the final ballot.

During his campaign, Kast has laid out a hardline vision on issues such as crime and immigration, pointing to the strongman leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, as an inspiration.

He has pledged to carry out a campaign of mass deportation, slash government spending and seek greater incentives for companies to invest in Chile.

Kast has also expressed support for the dictatorship of the late military leader Augusto Pinochet, who oversaw the torture, disappearance and killing of dissidents while in power from 1973 to 1990.

Another candidate running on a hard-right platform is Johannes Kaiser, a 49-year-old former YouTuber and a member of the Chamber of Deputies who is running with the National Libertarian Party.

Kaiser has promised deeper pro-market reforms than Kast, as well as an end to Chile’s involvement in international agreements on climate change and human rights. He has also staked out right-wing positions on public safety, calling for the use of the death penalty and greater access to firearms.

Other candidates include Franco Parisi, a former radio host and economist running as an independent, and Evelyn Matthei, a pro-business, centre-right politician.

How do polls rank the presidential candidates?

According to polling averages from the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA), the left-wing nominee Jeannette Jara is currently leading the race. She earns about 25 percent of voter support in most prominent polls.

Her closest rival is Jose Antonio Kast, the far-right candidate, with about 20-percent support.

Libertarian Johannes Kaiser and independent Franco Parisi have seen slight upswings in support for their campaigns. Each has between 10 and 14 percent support.

Centre-right candidate Evelyn Matthei has seen a small decline but is polling in the same range, between 11 and 14 percent.

What issues are front and centre?

As voters head to the polls, a handful of issues are top of mind. An October poll from the research firm Activa shows that crime and immigration dominate as areas of concern, with unemployment and health tied for third.

Chile remains a relatively safe country compared to others in Latin America, with some of the lowest rates of violent crime in the region.

But it is partly due to the expectation of lower crime that a recent surge in organised criminal activity, corruption and theft has been so disorienting for voters.

“I had to install remote surveillance cameras [and] chain the tables, and on weekends I hired a security guard to help keep watch,” Leidy Paredes, the owner of a nightclub in the capital of Santiago, told The Associated Press news service.

Chile is not the only country in South America to see an uptick in crime. Over the last several years, a surge of violence in Ecuador has likewise helped propel candidates promising “mano dura” or “strong hand” policies, although experts note that tackling crime is a multifaceted endeavour and force alone is rarely the answer.

In Chile’s presidential race, right-wing candidates like Kast have promised an “iron-fisted approach to crime”.

While left-wing contenders like Jara have accused their rivals of scaremongering, they too have been pushed to take a harder line on crime and public safety. Jara, for instance, has promised to build more prisons.

There has also been a public backlash to immigration in the country, following a substantial increase in migrants and asylum seekers, many of them fleeing economic and political turmoil in Venezuela.

A report from two of the country’s immigration agencies found that migration to Chile increased by 46.8 percent between 2018 and 2024. From 2022 to 2024, the increase was a much lower 4.5 percent.

Around the world, immigrants are frequently targets for concerns about crime and economic stagnation, forming a convenient scapegoat for politicians. Candidates like Kast have promised a campaign of mass deportation, while Jara has proposed creating a temporary registration system to keep track of undocumented arrivals.

Palestinians, especially those in the Gaza Strip, must be wary of networks that seek to remove them from their homes in line with Israeli interests, the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has warned.

The warning came a day after 153 Palestinians, who left Gaza without knowing their final destination and without proper paperwork, arrived in South Africa on board a flight from Kenya on Friday and were held up for 12 hours as authorities investigated the issue.

South Africa, which is advancing a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), gave the war-ravaged Palestinians 90-day visas.

The Palestinian ministry on Saturday expressed “deep appreciation” for the support from the South African authorities and people, as well as the decision to grant temporary visas for the people who it said departed from Ramon airport in southern Israel.

The Palestinian embassy in Pretoria said it is working to assist the travellers who have “endured over two years of Israeli genocidal war, killing, displacement, and destruction”.

But it warned that companies, unofficial entities and unregistered intermediaries inside Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory are trying to mislead Palestinians and incite them towards leaving.

“The ministry calls upon our people, especially our people in the Gaza Strip, to exercise caution and not fall prey to human trafficking, to merchants and companies of blood, and to agents of displacement,” it said.

According to South Africa’s Border Management Authority, 130 Palestinians ended up entering the country, while 23 were transferred from South Africa to other destinations from the airport itself. Most are expected to apply for asylum.

A South African humanitarian aid organisation, Gift of the Givers, said it was committed to accommodating the visitors during their stay.

Charity founder Imtiaz Sooliman told public broadcaster SABC that he did not know who had chartered the aircraft, and that the first plane carrying 176 Palestinians had landed in Johannesburg on October 28, with some of the passengers departing for other countries.

He said accounts from the Palestinian arrivals indicate that Israel appears to be removing people from Gaza and putting them on a plane without stamping their passports, in order to leave them stranded in third countries.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office have not reacted to the incident, but Israel and the United States have repeatedly pushed to move as many Palestinians out of Gaza as possible, holding negotiations with many countries over this.

The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military organisation in charge of the Gaza border crossings, was quoted as saying by Israeli media that it received approval from a third country to receive the Palestinians as part of an Israeli government policy allowing Gaza residents to leave. The third country was not named.

After facing nonstop bombing and famine in Gaza, the Palestinians were told to leave behind all their belongings and hop on a flight to an unknown destination.

Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, a book about Israel’s arms and surveillance industry, said the transit scheme could have been operating weeks or months before being noticed.

He told Al Jazeera from Indonesia’s capital Jakarta that there have been rumours about companies making such flights, which apparently “requires Israeli permission as well as other countries’ permissions”.

“This is the concept of people making money out of other people’s misery,” he said, also pointing to the murky operations and website of the company that ran the scheme.

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In July, Uzbekistan-born, Russian-speaking Israeli writer Dina Rubina gave an interview to the Russian opposition channel Rain TV, which caused a stir in the Russophone world. During the hour-and-a-half programme, she declared that there are no “peaceful residents” in Gaza, Israel has the right to “cleanse Gaza and turn it into a parking lot”, and that Palestinians need to be “dissolved in hydrochloric acid”.

Self-exiled journalist and producer Mikhail Kozyrev, who interviewed Rubina, decided to take out these bits, calling them “the most complex part” of the interview. Although he appeared to question Rubina on the claim that there are no “peaceful residents in Gaza” by comparing it to the collective blame Russians face over the war in Ukraine, he did not reject her claims and himself took a clear pro-Israel stance throughout his conversation with her.

And while many Russian speakers condemned Rubina – especially in Central Asia where her book talks were cancelled – there were many among Russia’s political emigres who supported her, did not condemn her openly, or maintained her words were taken out of context.

This incident is not an aberration. Many in the Russian liberal opposition, which now operates mostly in exile, unquestioningly support Israel. This is not only due to their tendency to disregard institutionalised racism in Russia but also due to their embrace of a civilisational hierarchy narrative that places the white West at the top. Anti-Palestinian bias is a natural outcome of this worldview.

Examples of the Russian opposition’s virulent anti-Palestinianism abound. Yuliya Latynina, a star columnist living in exile, has made parallels between “barbarians” destroying “blossoming civilisations” and the Palestinians and called students protesting against the genocide in Gaza “lazy and stupid”.

Another self-exiled liberal commentator, Leonid Gozman, has claimed that European countries that voted at the United Nations in favour of a “pro-Hamas” resolution calling for a truce in Gaza did so because they were “afraid of their immigrant communities”.

Andrei Pivovarov, former director of Open Russia, a now-defunct pro-democracy organisation, has said he finds Israel’s actions in Gaza “justified”. He was imprisoned in Russia until he was released last year in a prisoner exchange with the West.

Russian opposition politician, Dmitri Gudkov, currently residing in Bulgaria, has declared: “For me, Israel is the embodiment of civilisation. Anything against it is barbarism.”

Kseniya Larina, a renowned Russian journalist and radio host, also currently in exile, has hosted on her show Israeli Russian-speaking intellectuals multiple times. In one instance, a talk with an Israeli educator was titled, “Recognition of Palestine is not antisemitism, it’s idiocy”.

These are just a few examples of the many Russian liberal emigres who openly supported Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. In addition, Russian pop icons, comedians, musicians, and TV personalities who are based in Israel or visit also constantly broadcast the Israeli narrative.

Popular Russian oppositional media outlets – the Nobel Prize recipient newsletter Novaya Gazeta, Meduza publication outlet, and TV Rain – disproportionately feature pro-Israeli news with little counter-narrative offered. As a result, racist, anti-Palestinian rhetoric thrives in Russian-language social and traditional media.

The roots of this pro-Israeli stance among Russia’s liberals – who make up the majority of the Russian opposition – go back to the 20th century.

The Jewish people were persecuted by the Tsarist regime during the Russian Empire, which the Bolsheviks initially denounced. But the communist regime itself eventually embraced anti-Semitic views under Joseph Stalin. Discrimination against Jews continued, and it peaked during 1951-53, when Stalin accused a group of Jewish doctors of conspiracy against the state and launched a campaign of persecution. Even after the Communist Party dropped the accusations, Jews continued to be subject to forced assimilation and structural discrimination.

Within this context, the emerging liberal opposition of the 1980s came to perceive Israel as a protector of the victimised Jewish community and a democratic, liberal state, part of the West.

In parallel, there was an immigration wave towards Israel, which was seen as a place of safety for Soviet opposition figures. This also fed into an unconditional allegiance to Israel and Zionism among dissidents, which was inherited by subsequent generations of the liberal opposition.

The pro-Israel bias of the Russian opposition intensified even more after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sent hundreds of thousands of opposition-minded Russians fleeing abroad. Israel has been one of the main destinations; by some estimates, in 2022 alone, some 70,000 Russians moved there, compared with 27,000 in 2021, contributing to a total of about 1.3 million Russian-speakers in Israel.

The paradox here is that the Russian liberal opposition maintains that it is the democratic, moral alternative to President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism while openly expressing racist views against the Palestinians. It largely condemns Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Russian war crimes, but denies the Israeli ones.

In the West, the self-declared democratic values of the Russian opposition are rarely scrutinised. But they should be, because it is not just in relation to Palestine that its racist views are apparent.

In the past, liberal opposition figures have frequently reproduced Kremlin-style narratives about migrants, Muslims, and other racialised people. For example, the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny, once hailed as Russia’s democratic hope, referred to migrants from the Caucasus as “cockroaches” and “flies” in a 2007 video on “How to fight insects”. In 2021, these and other statements led Amnesty International to revoke his prisoner of conscience status; the organisation later apologised and continued to advocate for him until his death in custody.

In April this year, Vladimir Kara-Murza, the vice president of the Free Russia Foundation, claimed that soldiers from Russia’s minorities have an easier time killing Ukrainians than ethnic Russian soldiers do. The statement was seen as an attempt to blame war crimes on racialised minorities and prompted an open letter from the Indigenous of Russia Foundation denouncing it.

These attitudes expressed by Navalny and Kara-Murza are not exceptional. The Russian liberal opposition rarely, if ever, condemns discrimination or racist violence against minorities in Russia. Last year, when activist Rifat Dautov died in custody from apparent torture in the Bashkortostan region, there was almost no reaction from the exiled opposition communities. By contrast, when several weeks later, Navalny died of suspected poisoning in prison, the eulogies and mourning lasted for months.

This reflects a longstanding pattern within Russian liberalism: claiming moral superiority over the Kremlin while sharing the same problematic and prejudiced thinking. The truth is, even if Putin’s regime were to fall tomorrow and this opposition come to power, it is unlikely that it would carry out any major reforms to remove structural racism. The concerns of peripheralised regions that seek greater autonomy within Russia, non-Russian ethnic people, and Indigenous and migrant populations in Russia, do not seem to trouble Russia’s liberal opposition.

It is no wonder the Russian liberal opposition tries to blame Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Putin. It does not want the war to be seen as a direct continuation of Russia’s and the erstwhile USSR’s longstanding expansionist politics and drive to subjugate peoples perceived as lesser.

While in the case of Ukraine, Russian liberals are able to hide behind their opposition to the war, in the case of Palestine, they are exposed.

What Palestinians face today – dehumanisation, dispossession, and denial of existence – mirrors what many racialised and Indigenous people within Russia have long endured. Yet the Russian opposition remains blind to these experiences and continues to see itself as the sole victim of Russian authoritarianism.

An explosion at a police station in Indian-administered Kashmir has killed at least nine people and injured 32 others, mainly police personnel. Officials said the blast was an accident. It happened as officers were inspecting confiscated explosives.