Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez has signed into law a reform bill that will pave the way for increased privatisation in the country’s nationalised oil sector, fulfilling a key demand from US President Donald Trump.
Kurmin Wali, Nigeria – Like most Sundays in Kurmin Wali, the morning of January 18 began with early preparations for church and, later on, shopping at the weekly market.
But by 9:30am, it became clear to residents of the village in the Kajuru local government area of Nigeria’s Kaduna State that this Sunday would not be a normal one.
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Gunmen known locally as bandits arrived in the village in numbers, armed with AK47 rifles.
They broke down doors and ordered people out of their homes and the village’s three churches.
They blocked the village exits before taking people and marching dozens into the forest at gunpoint.
Some captives were taken from church, while others were forcibly kidnapped as gunmen moved from house to house.
In one house, more than 30 members of an extended family were abducted.
Jummai Idris, a relative of the family that was taken, remains inconsolable.
She was home the day of the attack and did not go out.
“When I heard shouting, I took two children and we hid behind a house. That was how they [the bandits] missed us,” she told Al Jazeera.
“But I heard every shout, every cry and footstep as they picked up people from our house and surrounding houses,” she added, between sobs.
With tears streaming down her face, Idris recounts how she kept calling out the names of her missing family members – men, women and children.
Her house sits on the edge of the village, close to a bandits’ crossing point.
“I don’t know what they are doing to them now. I don’t know if they’ve eaten or not,” she said.
A total of 177 people were abducted that day. Eleven escaped their captors, but about a quarter of Kurmin Wali’s population remains captive.
Initially, state officials denied the attack had taken place.
In the immediate aftermath, Kaduna’s police commissioner called reports a “falsehood peddled by conflict entrepreneurs”.
Finally, two days later, Nigeria’s national police spokesman, Benjamin Hundeyin, admitted an “abduction” had indeed occurred on Sunday. He said police had launched security operations with the aim of “locating and safely rescuing the victims and restoring calm to the area”.
Uba Sani, Kaduna state’s governor, added that more than just rescuing the abductees, the government was committed to ensuring “that we establish permanent protection for them”.
There has been a police presence in Kurmin Wali since then. But it is not enough to reassure villagers.
Locals say the police are not there to protect the village, but merely to compile the names of victims they for days denied existed.
At the premises of Haske Cherubim and Seraphim Movement Church, the largest church in the village, days after the attack, a rust-coloured door lay on the floor, pulled off its hinges. Inside the mud-brick building, the site was chaotic.
Plastic chairs overturned in panic were strewn around the room – just as the kidnappers had left them.
The church building was where the captors brought everyone before marching them into the forest surrounding the village.
Residents said the gunmen divided themselves into different groups, targeting homes and churches in the village.
Maigirma Shekarau was among those taken before he managed to escape.
“They tied us, beat us up, before arriving us into the bush. We trekked a long distance before taking a break,” he said of his journey with his captors.
Shekarau, a father of five, was holding his three-year-old daughter when he and others were taken.
“When we reached an abandoned village, I ducked inside a room with my little daughter when the attackers weren’t looking. I closed the door and waited. After what seemed like eternity, and sure they were gone, I opened the door and walked back home, avoiding the bush path,” he said, now back in the village.
But on returning home, his heart sank. He and his three-year-old were the only ones who made it home. The rest of the family is still held by the kidnappers.
Standing in a parched field of long dried grass, Shekarau says the village no longer feels like home.
The village chief was also taken, but managed to escape. He now presides over a community hopeful for the return of the missing – but too scared to stay.
“Everyone is on edge. People are confused and don’t know what to do. Some haven’t eaten. There are entire families that are missing,” said Ishaku Danazumi, the village chief.
Danazumi says the kidnappers regularly visit and loot the village grain stores and the villagers’ possessions, including mobile phones.
Two days after the attack, residents said the bandits rode through their village again.
On that day, the community also received a ransom demand.
“They accused us of taking 10 motorcycles they hid in the bush to evade soldiers who operated here the week before,” Danazumi said. “But we didn’t see those bikes.”
The chief said the captors told him the return of the 10 bikes was a precondition for the return of his people.
But deep inside, he knows, more demands will follow.
In the village, residents wait in their thatch and mud-brick houses, hoping for their loved ones to return.
But because of fear and the tense situation, many are leaving the farming community.
“Anyone thinking about remaining in this village needs to reconsider,” said Panchan Madami, a resident who also survived the attack.
“Only the recklessly bold can stay with the current state of security here.”
Villagers said that before the January 18 attack, 21 people kidnapped by the bandits were returned to them after a ransom was paid. But just two days later, a quarter of the village was taken.
“It will be stupid to stay here, hoping things will be OK,” added Madami.
The government says it will establish a military post to protect the community from further attacks. But that is not comforting enough for Idris, who has also made up her mind to leave.
“I’m not coming back here,” she said, gathering her belongings to leave the village where she grew up and married. “I just hope the rest of my family gets back.”
Diplomatic efforts are intensifying to avoid a military confrontation between the US and Iran, as Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi travels to Turkiye for high-level talks. Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem explains how regional leaders are pushing to avert conflict.
Syria’s Kurdish forces have reached a comprehensive agreement with the government to integrate with the Syrian army.
The interim government in Damascus has been fighting an offensive in the north of the country against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) over recent weeks as it seeks to consolidate control of the country following the overthrow of longtime leader Bashir al-Assad in December 2024.
However, a ceasefire over the past week or so has now resulted in an agreement for a phased integration of the Kurdish military forces into the army, according to an SDF statement issued on Friday.
Shortly afterwards, Syrian state TV confirmed the agreement, reporting that government officials said it would be implemented immediately.
The army has seized swaths of northern and northeastern territory in the last three weeks from the SDF in a rapid turn of events that has consolidated the leadership of President Ahmed al-Sharaa, after months-long talks between the sides failed to merge the fighters and Kurdish political entities into central institutions.
Under the new agreement, forces will withdraw from the front lines, government units will deploy to the centres of the cities of Hasakah and Qamishli, and local security forces will be merged.
The ceasefire between the sides was largely holding, even as they accused each other of violating its terms, as the government pressed its demand for the integration of the remaining Kurdish-run enclaves with the state, while the SDF sought to cling on in the northeastern enclave it held.
When Sajid Javid remarked that he would not allow people like his own parents to enter the United Kingdom today, he was not making an offhand comment. He was articulating a view that has become increasingly central to British immigration politics. The UK’s first ethnic minority home secretary said he opposed admitting unskilled workers and those who do not speak English. By his own criteria, neither his father, who arrived as an unskilled worker, nor his mother, who did not speak English, would have been permitted to settle in the country. Promoting his memoir, The Colour of Time, Javid was unambiguous: immigration must fall, English-language requirements should be tougher, and entry should be limited to skilled workers.
Far from being exceptional, Javid’s position points to a broader and increasingly visible pattern in British politics. Some of the most prominent anti-immigration positions of recent years have been articulated by ethnic minority politicians.
This pattern is most visible at the Home Office, the government department responsible for borders, asylum, detention and deportation. Since 2018, the role of home secretary has repeatedly been held by ethnic minority politicians, including Javid himself, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and James Cleverly under Conservative governments, followed by Shabana Mahmood under Labour. Each, in turn, has advanced a tougher approach to immigration control.
Under Priti Patel, a points-based immigration system was introduced and the controversial plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was developed. Braverman went further still, declaring that seeing deportation flights take off would be her “dream” and her “obsession”. Yet despite the increasingly punitive tone, overall immigration numbers rose during this period. Rhetoric and outcomes diverged. Even so, the political signal from the Home Office was unmistakable: firmness on borders above all else.
The explanation for this phenomenon lies not simply in personal biography or individual conviction. Drawing on my research on ethnic minority representation in Britain, I argue that these appointments reflect a clear political logic. When political parties harden their stance on immigration, they often rely on minority politicians to act as reputational shields, figures who can front restrictive policies while insulating parties from accusations of racism.
Reputational shields matter because immigration control in the UK has long been racialised. From post-war restrictions on Commonwealth migration to the “hostile environment” policies associated with former Prime Minister Theresa May, border control has frequently intersected with race and belonging. When such policies are championed by ethnic minority politicians, criticism can more readily be reframed as ideological disagreement rather than racial exclusion.
Nowhere is this dynamic clearer than at the Home Office. The department effectively demands a hard line on immigration from its secretary, and appointing minority politicians to the role has repeatedly proven politically expedient. This does not mean white politicians are more liberal, as Theresa May’s record makes clear, but it does help explain why parties have been willing to place minority figures at the forefront of border enforcement. Four consecutive Conservative home secretaries were non-white.
This logic now extends beyond the Conservative Party. Labour’s appointment of Shabana Mahmood as home secretary marks a notable shift for a party that has historically sought to signal greater nuance on immigration. Since taking office, Mahmood has announced and is implementing sweeping asylum reforms, which she has described as “the most substantial reform to the UK’s asylum system in a generation”.
That Keir Starmer has placed a minority politician at the forefront of Labour’s tougher turn on immigration suggests an implicit recognition of this reputational logic. Mahmood’s identity does not determine her policy positions, but it does shape how those positions are received, particularly in a media and political environment where immigration debates are routinely filtered through accusations of racism. In this sense, Labour appears to have absorbed a lesson from Conservative governments about how ethnic minority representation can function as political cover when tightening border policy.
Immigration is now cited by about four in 10 Britons as the most important issue facing the country. For Labour, long uneasy talking about borders and enforcement, Mahmood’s stance represents a recalibration. Her measures include tightening the route from asylum to permanent settlement, reforming human rights legislation to facilitate removals, and suspending visas for countries that refuse to accept returned nationals. She has been unapologetic, arguing that the pace and scale of immigration has destabilised communities and fuelled perceptions of unfairness. While Labour backbenchers and the Green Party have accused her of scapegoating migrants, figures on the political right have welcomed her approach.
It would, however, be a mistake to portray minority politicians as mere symbols or cynical mouthpieces. Many articulate their positions through narratives of fairness, legality and contribution. Javid has spoken of his family’s experiences of racism while emphasising that they entered the UK legally and worked hard. Mahmood has similarly argued that constituents who “did things the right way” feel aggrieved by irregular arrivals crossing the Channel in small boats.
These arguments reflect a broader shift in how immigration is discussed: less overtly in racial terms and more through the language of fairness, order and control. Yet this reframing does not escape the UK’s longer history of racialised immigration policy. Instead, ethnic minority politicians increasingly play a visible legitimising role within it.
The prominence of politicians of colour at the forefront of the UK’s immigration crackdown is therefore not a paradox. It is a window into how representation is operationalised in practice. When Sajid Javid says his parents would not be admitted today, he is not disavowing his background but signalling his political credibility. The deeper question is what happens when such credibility is no longer enough to contain the moral and social consequences of a system built on exclusion. Race, borders and political legitimacy, and enduring questions about belonging and citizenship, remain tightly bound together in contemporary British politics.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he plans to increase his armed forces’ lethality as part of a strategy to disarm Moscow and turn a deadlocked negotiating table.
“The task of Ukrainian units is to ensure a level of destruction of the occupier at which Russian losses exceed the number of reinforcements they can send to their forces each month,” he told military personnel on Monday.
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“We are talking about 50,000 Russian losses per month, this is the optimal level,” he said.
Video analysis, Zelenskyy recently said, showed 35,000 confirmed kills in December 2025, up from 30,000 in November and 26,000 in October. But on Monday, he clarified that the 35,000 were “killed and badly wounded occupiers”, who would not be returning to the battlefield.
His commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrskii, conservatively estimated “more than 33,000” confirmed kills in December.
Ukraine believes it has killed or maimed 1.2 million Russians since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies recently estimated that Russia had suffered 1.2mn casualties, including at least 325,000 deaths, and Ukraine up to 600,000 casualties, with as many as 140,000 deaths.
Al Jazeera cannot confirm casualty estimates from either side.
The war is currently stalemated, with Russia struggling to make meaningful territorial gains.
Russia held just more than a quarter of Ukraine a month into its full-scale war, in March 2022, according to geolocated footage.
The following month, Ukraine pushed Russian forces back from a string of northern cities – Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv – leaving Russia in possession of one-fifth of the country.
In August and September 2022, then-ground forces commander Syrskii masterminded a campaign to push Russian forces east of the Oskil River in the northern Kharkiv region, and Russia itself withdrew east of the Dnipro River in the southern region of Kherson, leaving it with 17.8 percent of the country.
In the last three years, Russia increased that number to 19.3 percent.
For almost six months, Russia has struggled to seize two towns it has almost surrounded with 150,000 troops in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
“In Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, the Ukrainian Defence Forces continue to contain the enemy, which is trying to infiltrate the northern districts of both cities in small groups,” Syrskii said last week.
Russia claimed it had captured the northern city of Kupiansk last month, but Russian military reporters say Ukrainian forces have retaken control of the town and surrounded the Russian assault force within it.
Zelenskyy’s strategy involves increasing domestic drone production and honing the skills of drone operators, because drones now hit 80 percent of targets on the battlefield.
“In just the past year alone, 819,737 targets were hit – hit by drones. And we clearly record every single hit,” he said on Monday.
The military has instituted a point system, rewarding drone operators for the number and precision of their hits.
That reflects a system put in place in April 2024, offering financial rewards to ground troops for destroying Russian battlefield equipment, culminating in $23,000 for capturing a battle tank.
Zelenskyy appointed Mykhailo Fedorov as defence minister this month, who previously served as digital transformation minister and deputy prime minister for innovation, education, science and technology.
Last week, Fedorov began to appoint his advisers. They include Serhiy Sternenko, who last year created Ukraine’s largest non-state supplier of military drones, to step up drone production. Fedorov’s former deputy at the digital transformation ministry, Valeriya Ionan, was put in charge of international collaborations, thanks to her experience with Silicon Valley giants like Google and Cisco. Fedorov also appointed Serhiy Beskrestnov as technological adviser. Beskrestnov is an expert on Russian drone and electronic warfare innovation.
Zelenskyy’s war aims stem in part from the fact that Russia refuses to give up its campaign to seize more of Ukraine.
Despite US President Donald Trump’s efforts to bring about a ceasefire, talks remain deadlocked over the future of Donetsk.
Russia’s worst attack against Ukrainian cities and energy facilities last week came on Saturday, involving 375 drones and 21 missiles, as Russian, US and Ukrainian delegations were negotiating a ceasefire in Abu Dhabi.
The strike left 1.2 million homes without power nationwide, including 6,000 in Kyiv.
Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said 800,000 homes in Kyiv were still without power following three previous strikes this month. “Constant enemy attacks unfortunately keep the situation from being stabilised,” he wrote on social media.
Zelenskyy told Ukrainians in an evening video address that electricity supply problems were still widespread in Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih, Dnipro and in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions.
“We are scaling up assistance points and warming centers,” he said, adding that 174 [crews] were working to fix the damage in Kyiv alone. Shmyal said 710,000 people were still without power in Kyiv.
A Czech grassroots initiative fundraised $6m to buy hundreds of electric generators for Ukrainian households. On Friday, the European Commission said it was sending 447 generators to Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Russian drones killed three people. Two of them were a young couple in Kyiv killed when a drone struck their apartment building. Rescuers found only their four-year-old daughter alive.
“When I carried her out, the girl started crying very hard, and then she began to shake violently,” said Marian Kushnir, a journalist who was a neighbour of the couple.
At least five more people died when a drone struck a passenger train in the northern Kharkiv region, and two children and a pregnant woman were wounded when 50 drones rained down on the southern port of Odesa.
Talks in Abu Dhabi ended without a ceasefire. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had said before they began that Russia was not willing to compromise on any of its territorial demands.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said talks were focusing on the nub of disagreement between the two sides, which is Ukraine’s refusal to hand over the remaining one-fifth of Donetsk that Moscow does not control.
Talks are scheduled to continue in Abu Dhabi on Sunday, officials said.
In a scathing speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Zelenskyy accused his European allies of “wait-hoping” the Russian threat would disappear after almost four years of war in Ukraine.
“Europe relies only on the belief that if danger comes, NATO will act. But no one has really seen the Alliance in action. If Putin decides to take Lithuania or strike Poland, who will respond?” Zelenskyy asked.
US President Donald Trump’s threat to take Greenland by force on January 17, he said, revealed Europe’s lack of readiness when seven Nordic countries sent 40 soldiers to the island.
“If you send 30 or 40 soldiers to Greenland – what is that for? What message does it send? What’s the message to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin? To China? And even more importantly, what message does it send to Denmark – the most important – your close ally?”
In contrast, said Zelenskyy, Trump was willing to seize Russian tankers selling sanctioned oil, and put Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on drug charges, while Putin, an indicted war criminal, remained free. “No security guarantees work without the US,” he said.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte echoed those sentiments in a speech to the European Parliament on Monday [January 26].