Soldiers were seen shooting down small Russian drones with their rifles in a video that the Ukrainian military had made available near Kostiantynivka, a small village in Donetsk. Russian forces claim on Monday that they have captured nearby Dibrova, making steady but priceless gains in the area.
Published On 29 Dec 2025
Published On 29 Dec 2025
Haybat al-Halbousi has been elected as the new government’s speaker in Iraq, a significant step after months of political unrest.
According to the Taqaddum (Progress) Party, al-Halbousi received 208 votes, a clear victory over two rival candidates who received 66 and nine votes, respectively, according to the media in Iraq on Monday, citing parliament’s media office.
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Sunni heartlands in the west and north of the country are a major source of support for Al-Halbousi’s party.
Iraqis have been eagerly awaited the first session of the country’s parliament, known as the Council of Representatives of Iraq, as they seek certainty over its leadership after the November 11 vote, which created a tense environment for the formation of the new government.
In its first session, parliament elects a consensus Sunni candidate along with two deputies under Iraq’s customary muhasasa system, which has been in place since the first government under the post-2003 constitution.
A Kurdish candidate will be chosen as the winner, according to Muhasasa. The president then chooses the Shia Coordination Framework (SCF) candidate for prime minister.
The Federal Supreme Court (FSC) ratified the results more quickly than usual before the election, prompting Supreme Judicial Council President Faiq Zaidan to urge lawmakers to adhere to the maximum 90-day constitutional deadline for government formation.
Few people, however, anticipate a quick conclusion. There are questions about who the SCF will choose as the ideal candidate for prime minister, which process typically lasts months (more than 300 days in 2021).
Former prime minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani ran an independent electoral list that won about 46 out of 329 seats for his Reconstruction and Development Coalition (RDC), despite having been nominated by the SCF four years prior.
However, he was turned back to the SCF and its leadership, many of whom are external power brokers and do not hold any parliamentary seats.
As the SCF considers how to respond to the growing parliamentary presence of lawmakers affiliated with Shia parties with pro-Iran and pro-West armed wings, it is now up to question whether it supports al-Sudani or an alternative candidate for prime minister.
80 to 90 of the 180 SCF members are members of armed organizations close to Iran, the majority of whom are subject to US sanctions. These organizations only had 17 seats in the Senate in 2021.
Published On 29 Dec 2025
As a result of criticism from Myanmar’s main pro-military party, critics claim that the tightly controlled vote is intended to strengthen the ruling party’s position. The country’s military rulers have already seized the lead in the first phase of elections.
On January 11 and January 25, the first round of voting will take place on Sunday. In 65 townships, voting has been canceled.
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In townships where counting had been completed, a senior official from the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) claimed victory over 82 of the 102 seats in the lower house of the legislature, suggesting it had secured more than 80% of the seats contested on Sunday.
The party also won all eight townships in Naypyidaw, the party’s main town, the official added. The Union Election Commission of Myanmar has not yet released official statistics.
Campaign groups have criticised candidate lists that are dominated by figures affiliated with the military, while the UN’s human rights chief has criticized the elections.
Only about a third of Myanmar’s 330 townships were able to vote in the elections, which is because of fighting between the military and opposition forces following the military coup that overthrew the Aung San Suu Kyi-led government in 2021.
The USDP is anticipated to be the party with the most support. It has long been viewed as a civilian replacement for the military by analysts.
The USDP lost significantly to Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) in the previous elections held in 2020. Campaigners in the United Kingdom claim that the NLD is one of the 40 political parties that the military has outlawed. Since the military seized power, Suu Kyi has been in custody.
The military government’s leader, Min Aung Hlaing, said it was possible to trust the military to appoint a civilian-led government after the election ended on Sunday. Since the coup, he has been in power by decree.
As pro-democracy activists formed armed resistance groups alongside ethnic minority forces that have long fought the central government, the military takeover sparked a nationwide civil war.
Shopkeepers in the Jomhouri neighborhood of the capital’s Jomhouri neighborhood canceled their businesses on Sunday and chanted slogans before recording more incidents on Monday afternoon, this time with other people posing as participants.
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More gatherings were reported in the same area, as well as other nearby Tehran-arean neighbourhoods, according to videos that were circulating on social media. Demonstrators chanted, “Don’t be afraid, we are together.”
On the streets, there was a significant amount of anti-riot police deployed in full gear, with numerous videos demonstrating how tear gas was used and people were forced to disperse.
In and around Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, many businesses were shut down by owners, with some videos revealing business owners asking others to do the same.
State media outlets acknowledged the protests, but quickly responded by stating that the shopkeepers are only concerned with the state’s economic situation and have no reservations about the theocratic establishment, which has been in power since a 1979 revolution that ended Iran’s US-backed shah.
The government’s IRNA news agency claimed that mobile phone vendors were angry after their businesses were threatened by the unchecked rial depreciation.
On Monday, the rial regained some ground after posting yet another record-breaking US dollar high of over $1.42 million before regaining some ground.
The issue is not just with the money, though. Iran has long been dealing with an even worse energy crisis that has frequently resulted in deadly air pollution that kills thousands of people annually.
In the face of a water crisis, the majority of the dams that feed Tehran and many of Iran’s major cities are still almost empty. One of the world’s most censored internet landscapes is located in Iran.
Iran’s purchasing power is continuing to decline as a result of growing pressure from the US, Israel, and their allies in Europe over Iran’s nuclear program.
In a 12-day conflict that included civilians, dozens of top military and intelligence commanders, and nuclear scientists, Israel and the US attacked Iran in June.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was in charge of the majority of Iran’s nuclear facilities, which were severely damaged or destroyed by the attacks. Since the West has put more pressure on the watchdog, it has been denied entry to the bombed sites. There is currently no diplomatic solution.
In 2022 and 2023, there were last nationwide demonstrations in Iran, with many thousands of people lining the streets of the country following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was taken into police custody for allegedly breaking strict Islamic laws governing headcarves.
In connection with the protests before they subsided, hundreds of people were killed, over 20 000 people were detained, and several were executed. Authorities blame “rioters” trying to destabilize the nation, as they did with previous demonstrations.
President Masoud Pezeshkian portrayed the situation as bleak in parliament on Sunday to defend the contentious budget bill that his administration has proposed.
His highly inconvenient budget proposal proposes a 20% increase in wages while inflation, which has consistently been among the highest in the world over the past few years, is currently at around 50%. The price increase is anticipated to be 62% higher.
Washington, D.C. – 2025 was a crisis year for Donald Trump, the president of the United States.
Roaring into office on January 20 on the heels of a raucous political comeback, the president’s own telling describes a series of actions that have been swift and stark.
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To name a few, he has envisioned rooting out a migrant “invasion” that includes staunching legal immigrants, and, potentially, targeting US citizens, he has touted a hard reset of uneven trade deals that pose “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security”, and, in the final months of the year, he has gone on the military offensive against “narcoterrorists” that he claims seek to topple the US through illicit drugs, possibly used as “weapons of mass destruction”.
Trump’s strategy has been a yet-undetermined stress test on presidential power, aided by the gears of broadly interpreted emergency statutes and untrammelled executive authority, according to legal observers.
In the midterm elections of 2026, the court, lawmakers, and voters could decide how that strategy is perceived or withdrawn.
“The use or abuse of emergency powers is only one corner of a larger picture”, Frank Bowman, professor emeritus of law at the University of Missouri, told Al Jazeera.
The administration is simply doing things, he said, in many cases, that no prior executive orders would have permitted.
The US Constitution, unlike many countries, has no catch-all emergency power authorisation for presidents.
According to David Driesen, professor emeritus at Syracuse University College of Law, the US Supreme Court ruled in 1952 that presidents had no such implied authorities. Despite this, “numerous statutes grant the president limited emergency powers under limited circumstances.”
Nearly every modern president has used emergency powers with varying degrees of gusto, with Congress and the Supreme Court historically wary of reining in those actions.
Trump has also defended expanding his reach by making broad, ambiguous national security claims, as do many other US presidents.
However, Driesen said that Trump’s second term has been shaped by a number of factors, most notably the lack of distinct inciting events for many of the powers.
“I’ve never seen a president invoke emergency powers to justify practically all of this policy agenda”, he told Al Jazeera, “and I’ve also never seen a president use them to seize powers that really are not in the statutes at all”.
He continued, “To Trump, everything is an emergency.”
Trump’s broad executive order, which stated that irregular crossings at the southern border meant nothing less than “America’s sovereignty is under attack,” set the tone for the day. The order has been used to indefinitely suspend US asylum obligations, surge forces to the border, and seize federal land.
Tren de Aragua (TdA) and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) were designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” by Trump on the same day as they were threatened by US “national security, foreign policy, and economy” by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
In part, the administration has relied on and expanded that order in its efforts to defy the law and rhetorically defend a militaristic policy toward Latin America.
Simultaneously, Trump also declared a wide-ranging energy emergency on his first day in office, laying the groundwork to bypass environmental regulations.
As Bowman put it, Trump’s use of official emergency statutes was only one component of the puzzle, combined with his broad understanding of the constitutional authority to change the government, both big and small.
That includes trying to fire heads of independent agencies, renaming institutions in his likeness, and allegedly bypassing necessary approvals to physically transform the White House, as well as cleaving civil servants from congressionally created government departments via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
But the invocation of emergency statutes has remained a backbone of his second term. Trump invoked an emergency to demand that the International Criminal Court (ICC) be prosecuted for its inquiries into Gaza’s Israeli war crimes.
He later unilaterally labeled the drug “weapons of mass destruction” using the “emergency” of fentanyl smuggling to support tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China.
In April, in one of his most challenged uses of an emergency authority, Trump cited an emergency statute to impose sweeping reciprocal tariffs against nearly all US trading partners.
In summary, 2025 has demonstrated that Congress, where Trump’s Republican Party maintains a tightholdhold in both chambers, is hardly willing to put up a challenge on the president.
Rulings from lower federal courts, meanwhile, have offered a “mixed picture”, according to the University of Missouri’s Bowman, while the country’s top court has left wider questions unanswered.
Bowman noted that the nine conservative members of the panel, who contend that the “unitary executive theory” was a theory that the constitution’s drafters had in mind when creating a strong consolidation of presidential power, contributed to varying degrees.
Trump, according to Bowman, is undoubtedly willing to declare emergencies when no-one would actually believe they exist.
“On the other hand, at least the lower courts have pushed back, but it remains to be seen whether the Supreme Court will back them up”.
For instance, Trump has been given a temporary right to continue sending National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., a federal district where he declared a “crime emergency” in August. According to city officials, the characterization defies local laws.
Despite claiming similar overlapping crime and immigration crises in liberal-led cities in states across the country, Trump has had far less success. California, Illinois, and Oregon’s deployments of the National Guard are constrained by lower courts.
The Insurrection Act, a second law in the crisis portfolio that allows the president to “suppress insurrections and repel invasions,” has also been suggested by Trump, but it has not yet been invoked. It is a law that allows the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
A judicial response to the tactics behind Trump’s deportation drive has also been mixed.
Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law intended to quickly expel foreign nationals from war, to quickly deport undocumented individuals has been constrained, but the Supreme Court has allowed it to proceed with limited due process protections.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the legal justification of Trump’s reciprocal tariffs when it resumes its session in January in one of the most closely watched cases on the docket.
A lower court has previously ruled that Trump deployed the emergency statute illegally. The president’s assertion has also drawn the attention of some conservative justices in the top court.
In a landmark case involving whether Trump can fire the heads of independent agencies, which will also be decided in the new year, the panel has come across more sympathetic.
According to Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Washington, DC-based Center for International Policy, Trump has been treading a well-trodden path of misguided presidential power when it comes to making war unilaterally.
Rights groups have called for the US military to launch strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats from Venezuela as extrajudicial killings.
The administration has claimed, without evidence, that over 100 people killed had sought to destabilise the US by flooding it with drugs. Trump has repeatedly roil the sabre and sputter of land strikes, making a similar claim about the Nicolas Maduro-led Venezuelan government.
The actions come in the form of a pugnacious rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a resemblance to the so-called “narcoterrorists” for criminal Latin American cartels, and a new effort to firmly place the Western Hemisphere under US control.
“We have to understand this in the context of multiple administrations of both parties abusing executive authority to essentially go to war”, said Duss, who explained that the practice accelerated in the so-called “global war on terror” post-September 11, 2001 attacks.
Republicans and a few Democrats in the House of Representatives recently rejected two separate war powers resolutions that would require congressional approval for upcoming strikes on alleged drugboats or on Venezuelan territory.
Duss claimed that the vote demonstrated Trump’s “almost total control of the Republican Party” despite the fact that he was blatantly violating his own campaign pledges to end wars rather than to start them.
In the midterm elections of next year, Trump’s ability to control both his party and his overall political influence will be largely under scrutiny. The House and Senate will be in control after the vote.
A slate of polls has indicated at least some degree of wariness in Trump’s use of presidential power.
In particular, a Quinnipiac poll found that 37% of voters believe Trump is handling his authority claims correctly, while 54% believe he is overstepping it. Another 7 percent think Trump needs to expand his presidential influence.
Another Politico poll in November found that 53 percent of US residents think Trump has too much power, while the president has seen an overall slump in his approval ratings since taking office.
It’s true that the US elections are determined by a number of factors, but it’s still unclear whether voters were more likely to approve of Trump’s presidential candidate’s choices or the ones that were made.
Does the typical person really consider any theoretical foundations for Trump’s actions? And frankly, would the average person care very much if the results were, in the short term, results of which they approved”? Bowman made up a rumor at the University of Missouri.
At the conclusion of two days of talks in southwest China, Thailand and Cambodia announce a plan to rekindle mutual trust and strengthen a ceasefire, according to Beijing, despite fresh allegations from the Thai military that their Cambodian counterparts are violating the truce with drone flights.
For the two days of talks scheduled for Monday between the Thai and Cambodian foreign ministers and the Chinese foreign minister in Yunnan province, which aim to end weeks of bloody fighting along their border, which have resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people and displaced more than half a million civilians.
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After both sides agreed to a ceasefire on Saturday, freezing troop positions at their current locations, the talks, which are billed as a “mutual confidence” building initiative aimed at restoring “peace, security, and stability” along the border.
If the ceasefire, which ended at noon (05:00 GMT) on Saturday, is fully observed, Thailand has agreed to return 18 Cambodian soldiers who were captured as part of the deal.
Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow expressed his confidence in the parties’ “movement in a positive direction” in a statement released following the meeting.
He said, “We haven’t resolved everything, but I believe we are moving in the right direction and must continue to build momentum.”
Prak Sokhonn, the country’s foreign minister, claimed in a statement to Cambodian state TVK that he hoped the most recent ceasefire would last and create a forum for the neighbors to unify.
No one wants to see this conflict occurring again because we don’t want to go back to the past. Therefore, it is crucial that this ceasefire be put into effect and be firmly enforced.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi claimed that the discussions had been “beneficial and constructive and an important consensus was reached” in a statement released by his ministry.
Bangkok and Phnom Penh would “rebuild political mutual trust, achieve a turnaround in relations, and maintain regional peace,” according to a joint statement from China’s official Xinhua news agency.
Thailand’s military accused Cambodia of violating the ceasefire by flying hundreds of drones over its territory on Monday, warning that it may reconsider the 18 Cambodian soldiers’ scheduled release.
More than 250 drones were “intruding into Thailand’s sovereign territory” on Sunday night, according to a statement from the Thai army, calling the incident a “provocation” and a “violation of measures aimed at reducing tensions” and incompatible with Saturday’s agreement.
According to the circumstances and the behavior that were observed, Thailand’s army may need to reconsider its decision to release 18 Cambodian soldiers, according to the statement.
Sokhonn described the incident as “a small issue related to flying drones seen by both sides along the border line,” adding that the two nations had discussed it and agreed to investigate and “resolve it immediately.”
In addition to agreeing to return Cambodian soldiers, the two sides also agreed to work together to combat cybercrime, defuse illegal immigration, and allow civilians who live in border regions to flee as soon as possible.
In the border province of Banteay Meanchey, where Thai forces had advanced into Cambodian territory, an Al Jazeera team was able to gain exclusive access to one of these border areas.
According to Assed Baig, who spoke from the border, the area is still rife with shrapnel and unexploded weapons despite the agreement’s passage on Saturday.
He claimed that some residents appeared to have tried digging their own bunkers before the hostilities drew too close and forced them to flee because some villages had been deserted by civilians.
He claimed that “people are afraid to cross the border again or to approach it.”
Although the ceasefire was in effect, according to Baig, there hasn’t yet been a resolution to the conflict’s deeper root causes, which are rooted in territorial disputes along the 800-kilometer (500-mile) border.