Category World News

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is asking for a pardon over a range of corruption charges laid against him after repeatedly telling Israeli journalists that he would clear his name in court.

The prime minister has long described the case against him as a witch-hunt led by the media and the judiciary. If he succeeds in sidestepping the courts, Israeli journalists and judges will wonder what he might have in store for them.

Contributors:
Daniel Levy – President, US/Middle East Project
Dana Mills – Writer, Local Call & +972 Magazine
Jonathan Ofir – Writer, Mondoweiss
Dan Perry – Author, “Ask Questions Later” Substack

On our radar

This week, former United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted Israel’s PR problems have more to do with TikTok than with the genocide Israeli forces have inflicted on Gaza. Ryan Kohls looks at a persistent myth still making the rounds in American political circles.

The phenomenon of Kim Ou-Joon

Kim Ou-Joon is part journalist, part activist, part political performer. An outspoken and sometimes controversial voice who leans to the left ideologically, Kim leads South Korea’s biggest YouTube-based news network, primarily through a political podcast. The Listening Post’s Meenakshi Ravi reports on what Kim Ou-Joon – and others like him – reveal about the world of politics and media in South Korea.

United States President Donald Trump has announced a $12bn aid package to help farmers harmed by his hardline tariff policies.

Trump announced the package at a White House event on Monday, saying the money would come from funds raised by tariffs.

“What we’re doing is we’re is taking a relatively small portion of that, and we’re going to be giving and providing it to the farmers in economic assistance,” Trump said.

Since taking office, Trump has used emergency powers to pursue a sweeping tariff agenda, including imposing reciprocal tariffs on nearly all US trade and escalating a trade war with China.

While Washington and Beijing have since begun to de-escalate some of their tensions, the tit-for-tat has spelt a challenging year for farmers.

Despite record harvests in the US, China has increasingly turned to South America for agricultural products, notably soya beans and sorghum. They have also faced higher seed and fertiliser prices as a knock-on effect of the tariffs.

The Trump administration has been acutely aware of the impact, given Trump’s staunch support among many farmers during the 2024 election.

Trump referenced that support on Monday, saying, “We love our farmers.”

“And as you know, the farmers like me … because based on, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else,” he said.

Before the White House event, a Trump administration official said up to $11bn in the new aid would go to the newly created Farmer Bridge Assistance, a programme for row crop farmers hurt by trade disputes and higher costs.

It was still being determined where the other $1bn would be allocated, the official said.

The Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri has estimated that net farm income could fall by more than $30bn in 2026 due to a decline in government payments and low crop prices.

Soya bean farmers, meanwhile, are expected to see their third consecutive year of losses in 2025, according to the American Soybean Association, a decline that preceded Trump’s tariffs.

The Trump administration has sought to paint a rosier picture, pointing to an agreement between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping for Beijing to buy 12 million metric tonnes of US soya beans by the end of the calendar year. Beijing also agreed to buy 25 million metric tonnes per year for the next three years.

While China has since purchased only a fraction of its promised total in 2025, White House officials have said it is on track to meet the target.

US farmers typically receive billions of dollars in federal subsidies each year.

Twelve former agents with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have filed a lawsuit alleging wrongful termination by the administration of US President Donald Trump for the act of taking a knee during racial justice protests in Washington DC, in 2020.

The lawsuit, filed in a US District Court on Monday, states that the agents were fired as part of a politicised “campaign of retribution” by the Trump administration over perceived sympathy for the protests, prompted by the police killing of George Floyd.

The agents have said that they kneeled during the protests in order to de-escalate a tense situation and that it was not meant as an act of political support. The controversy over their termination has brought further attention to the Trump administration’s efforts to enact retribution against perceived political enemies.

In recent months, federal prosecutors who worked on investigations into Trump have been fired, along with a federal worker who had an LGBTQ flag in his workplace.

The lawsuit states that Trump had attacked the agents, nine of whom are women, on social media before returning to the White House in 2024 and that FBI Director Kash Patel was intent on firing them, despite a previous review by FBI officials who concluded that the agents had kneeled to help ease tensions rather than as an act of support.

“Defendants targeted plaintiffs in particular because of plaintiffs’ use of deescalation with civilians that defendants perceived as opposed to, or otherwise not affiliated with, President Trump,” the lawsuit states.

It states that the agents had encountered a hostile crowd and that by kneeling, they may have avoided a “deadly confrontation” that “could have rivalled the Boston Massacre in 1770”, a reference to the shooting of protesters by British forces in Boston before the American Revolution. In a photo of the incident, however, agents appear relaxed, with little indication of serious risk.

Southeast Asia is facing one of its worst storm seasons on record, as thousands of people have died or are missing across Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka.

Another storm is currently forming in the Philippine Sea.

But while governments are promising to rebuild, it is not clear how they can afford to do so every year as the storm seasons get worse.

At the same time, the United Nations announced that it has slashed its 2026 budget for response to war and natural disasters by half.

These countries are increasingly on their own – left to try and put cities and lives back together, storm after storm.

So, how is this changing lives and livelihoods?

And what does the future of flood recovery look like across Southeast Asia?

Presenter: Dareen Abughaida

Guests:

Alexandre Borde – Environmental economist and CEO of Cibola Partners

Sehr Raheja – Programme officer for the Climate Change Programme at the Centre for Science and Environment