Donald Trump says he thinks the US is close to doing a nuclear deal with Iran. The US president made the comments in Qatar, where he praised the Emir for helping to push for a diplomatic solution, rather than war.
A New Zealand government committee has recommended that three Indigenous legislators be temporarily suspended from parliament for performing a protest haka last year.
The Privileges Committee recommended on Wednesday evening that Te Pati Maori party co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi be suspended for 21 days.
It was also recommended that representative Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, 22, New Zealand’s youngest legislator, be suspended for seven days for acting “in a manner that could have the effect of intimidating a member of the House”.
But, according to the committee report, Maipi-Clarke was given a shorter sanction because she had written a letter of “contrition” to the parliament.
While both haka and Maori ceremonial dance and song are not uncommon in parliament, members were aware that permission was needed from the speaker beforehand, the report said.
In November, Maipi-Clarke derailed parliament when she ripped a copy of a contentious race relations bill with a protest haka. Party co-leaders Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer joined her and strode to the chamber floor.
The Maori party were protesting against the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, which sought to redefine New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 pact between the British Crown and Indigenous Maori leaders signed during New Zealand’s colonisation.
Critics of the bill saw it as an attempt to reverse the special rights given to the country’s Maori population.
Last month, the bill was resoundingly voted down.
But the Maori party has called the recommendation the harshest penalty handed out in the country’s parliament, with three days being the longest that a legislator has been banned from the House.
“When tangata whenua [Indigenous people] resist, colonial powers reach for the maximum penalty,” the party said, adding, “This is a warning shot to all of us to fall in line.”
However, Judith Collins, a ruling legislator who heads the Privileges Committee and serves as attorney general, said it was highly disorderly for members to interrupt a vote while it was being conducted.
“The right to cast one’s vote without impediment goes to the heart of being a member of parliament. It is not acceptable to physically approach another member on the floor of the debating chamber,” Collins told a news conference on Wednesday.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will meet United States President Donald Trump at the White House next week in an attempt to “reset” ties between the two countries, Pretoria has said.
The reported visit comes after the US welcomed dozens of white Afrikaners as refugees this week, following widely discredited allegations made by Trump that “genocide” is being committed against white farmers in the majority-Black country.
“President Ramaphosa will meet with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, DC to discuss bilateral, regional and global issues of interest,” South Africa’s presidency said in a statement on Wednesday.
“The president’s visit to the US provides a platform to reset the strategic relationship between the two countries,” it added, saying the trip will take place from Monday to Thursday and the two leaders will meet on Wednesday.
The White House had no immediate comment on the meeting, which would be Trump’s first with the leader of an African nation since he returned to office in January.
Relations between Pretoria and Washington have soured significantly since Trump returned to the White House.
Trump has criticised Ramaphosa’s government on multiple fronts. In February, he issued an executive order cutting all US funding to South Africa, citing disapproval of its land reform policy and its genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against US ally Israel.
Trump’s order also offered to take in and resettle people from the minority Afrikaner community, whom he alleges are being persecuted and killed because of their race – claims that have been disproven by experts and South Africa’s government.
Afrikaners are descendants of mainly Dutch colonisers who led the apartheid regime for nearly five decades.
Pretoria maintains there is no evidence of persecution of white people in the country and Ramaphosa has said the US government “has got the wrong end of the stick”, as South Africa suffers overall with the problem of violent crime, regardless of race.
The US’s criticism also appears to focus on South Africa’s affirmative action laws that advance opportunities for the majority-Black population, who were oppressed and disenfranchised under apartheid.
A new land expropriation law gives the government power to take land in the public interest without compensation in exceptional circumstances. Although Pretoria says the law is not a confiscation tool and refers to unused land that can be redistributed for the public good, some Afrikaner groups say it could allow their land to be redistributed to some of the country’s Black majority.
According to data, white people, who make up about 7 percent of South Africa’s population, own more than 70 percent of the land and occupy most top management positions in the country.
Ramaphosa has spoken repeatedly of his desire to engage with Trump diplomatically and improve the relationship between the two countries.
On May 15, 1948, my grandfather Saeed was just six years old when Zionist militias attacked his village in Beersheba, forcing his family to flee. His mother carried him as they escaped the horror of explosions and shelling. The nearest refuge was Gaza City. They arrived expecting to stay in makeshift tents for a few days, certain they would soon return to their homes and fertile lands.
They did not know then that their temporary stay would stretch into decades – that the tents would become permanent concrete shelters. The house keys they clung to would rust, transforming into symbols of a right of return passed down through generations – 77 years and counting.
For most of my life, the Nakba lived in the past, a tragedy I inherited through my grandfather’s stories. But since 2023, I have lived my own Nakba in Gaza – this time in real time, under the lens of smartphone cameras and television screens. The militias that once expelled my grandfather have become a state with one of the world’s most advanced armies, wielding deadly weapons against a besieged civilian population demanding only freedom and dignity.
In October 2023, Israel launched a campaign of forced displacement that eerily echoed what my grandfather had endured. Residents of northern Gaza were ordered to evacuate to the south – only for those areas to be bombed as well. Entire families walked for hours, barefoot, carrying only what they could. Once again, people found themselves in tents – this time made not of plastic but of scraps, cloth and whatever could shield them from the harsh sun or bitter cold. We faced death without bullets. Newborns died of cold and dehydration. Diseases the world had nearly eradicated like polio and malaria returned due to unsanitary conditions. Israel tightened its blockade, preventing food, medicine and basic essentials from entering. According to the World Food Programme, 96 percent of Gaza’s population now suffers from food shortages, ranging from moderate to catastrophic. The World Health Organization has confirmed at least 32 deaths from malnutrition among children under five and warns that the toll will rise.
We now live as our grandparents once did: no electricity, no running water, cooking over firewood or in clay ovens. Smoke fills the air and clogs the lungs of mothers while children sleep with empty stomachs. Donkey carts have replaced cars – destroyed or rendered useless by fuel shortages. The occupation has stripped us not only of our land but also of the very basics of life.
My grandfather who witnessed the first Nakba did not survive a second one. After a year of suffering, hunger and the absence of medical care, he passed away in October. He had lost half his body weight in a matter of months. His once-strong frame – he had been a proud athlete – was reduced to skin and bone. In his final days, he lay bedridden, silently enduring strokes and pain with no medicine, no proper food and no relief. I still remember our final embrace on October 11. It was a silent farewell. A tear slipped down the wrinkled cheek of a man who had witnessed too many wars and buried too many dreams. That tear said what words never could: it was time to go. And I ask myself: Would he have survived had there been no war? Could his last months have been filled with care instead of hunger?
As if all this were not enough, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly called for the displacement of two million Palestinians from Gaza. His rhetoric only confirms decades-old Israeli plans, now receiving full backing from the United States. One such plan is cloaked in the language of “voluntary migration”, but the reality is far from voluntary. Life in Gaza has been made unliveable.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as of July 1, 85 percent of Gaza’s health facilities had been destroyed or damaged, including 32 of 36 hospitals. The education sector is equally devastated: UNICEF reports that 80 percent of Gaza’s schools and universities are no longer functional and at least 94 academics have been killed.
The assault extends even to UNRWA, the UN agency that has supported Palestinian refugees since the original Nakba. Israel’s parliament has banned its operations in Palestinian territory while also bombing food warehouses and pressuring donor countries to cut funding. Why? Because UNRWA’s existence reminds the world of the refugees’ legal right of return. Israel wants that memory – and all physical traces of it – erased.
Entire refugee camps, symbols of that right, have been flattened by bombs. Camps like Jabalia and Shati in the north and Khan Younis and Rafah in the south have been turned into mass graves. Once home to generations of dreams and defiance, these camps now cradle only the bones of those who refused to leave.
So I ask again: Will my grandfather’s dream of returning to his land ever be realised? Or will history continue to turn its cruel wheel, spinning new chapters of exile and suffering? And will I one day tell my own children about our Nakba and our dreams of return – just as my grandfather once told me his?
Tadeo Allende scored twice and Inter Miami tied the San Jose Earthquakes 3-3 in Lionel Messi’s first game in the Bay Area since joining MLS.
Allende scored once in the first half and then tied the game in the 52nd minute on Wednesday night when he tapped in a pass from Baltasar Rodríguez on a play that Messi helped set up.
Maximiliano Falcon also scored for Miami, which has allowed at least three goals in three of the last four games.
Cristian Arango, Beau Leroux and Ian Harkes scored for the Earthquakes, who are unbeaten in their last three games.
Messi had a chance late for the game-winner but was stopped from in close in stoppage time in the second half by Daniel De Sousa Britto.
Messi’s debut here was played in front of a sellout crowd of 18,000 with fans lined up hours before the game for the opportunity to see the Miami star in person. His entire Bay Area stay was turned into a multiday event with a block party held on Tuesday night, and fans gathered outside of Miami’s team hotel, excited just to get a wave from the balcony from Messi.
Messi had a few good opportunities in the first half, barely missing wide left after getting a pass in the box in transition and then missing wide again on a free kick from just outside the box in the closing seconds of the half.
The game got off to an exciting start with Miami scoring about 35 seconds into the game, following a corner kick when Falcon headed in a crosser from Jordi Alba.
The Earthquakes quickly responded in the third minute with Arango converting on a pass from Cristian Espinoza about 2:05 into the game, marking just the fifth time in MLS history that both teams scored in the first three minutes of a game, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
The teams traded goals later in the half with Leroux giving San Jose the lead in the 37th minute and Allende answering about seven minutes later. The Earthquakes took a 3-2 lead at the half when Harkes scored with a left-footed shot from outside the box on an assist from Leroux in injury time.
The US and China have agreed to slash tariffs temporarily in a surprise breakthrough.
The United States and China have surprisingly agreed to a dramatic de-escalation in their trade war.
Under the agreement, the world’s two largest economies have paused their respective tariffs for 90 days.
That breaks an impasse which has brought much of the commerce between the two nations to a halt.
Critics say the talks in Geneva did not appear to yield any meaningful concessions. The two sides aim to reach a broader deal, but this takes too long to negotiate.
Also in this episode, we examine whether the US-UK trade pact will deliver real benefits, or is it symbolism over substance?