Category World News

The bodies of 32 Cuban soldiers killed during the US bombing of Venezuela have been returned to Cuba. Former Cuban President Raul Castro stood in a guard of honour.

Four weeks after shopkeepers in Tehran’s grand bazaar shut their stores in protest over the tanking economy, much of Iran is under an internet blackout as protests, which swelled to mass demonstrations against Iran’s clerical rule, have quietened.

The hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets in the wake of the shopkeepers’ protest are now reported to be staying at home following the deaths and detention of many protesters.

Iran’s government has not released an official death toll, and estimates about how many people have died in the protests vary. But the widely-cited United States-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) put the death toll at 2,615 on Wednesday this week. Iran’s government claims numbers have been vastly exaggerated.

Tensions with the US escalated this week when President Donald Trump threatened to take action if killings continued, but then appeared to back down on Wednesday night when he said he had received assurances from Tehran that the killings would stop and executions of detained protesters would not take place.

But while protesters may have been silenced for now, their concerns remain far from resolved. The threat of intervention by the US remains very real, and, critically, the dire economic conditions that first prompted protest in the closing days of 2025 have only worsened.

Why have protests erupted over the economy?

“The recent unrest was undoubtedly rooted in economic distress,” Hassan Hakimian, emeritus professor of economics at SOAS, told Al Jazeera. “Decades of chronic corruption and extensive economic mismanagement were accentuated by international economic sanctions, adding to the misery of large swaths of ordinary people.”

On top of this, Hakimian said, Iran has suffered severe environmental-related problems in recent months – “critical water shortages, power outages and crippling air pollution – generating a perfect economic storm”.

The value of the Iranian rial, whose near collapse on December 28, when it fell to a record low against the dollar, first prompted the protest, remains at a low.

Banking ATMs are offline, flights and currency transactions remain limited, casualties of the shutdown of the National Information Network, Iran’s state-controlled domestic intranet, which is essentially the country’s internet.

“If you think of the shutdown as having run for around a month, then we can fairly say that Iran’s economy has run at around 50 percent capacity over that period,” Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an economics professor at Virginia Tech, said. “Assuming that’s correct, you’re looking at a loss of around a tenth of the country’s GDP if that extends to a month. How much that is in dollars depends on what currency conversion you use. They change all the time, but, over a year, it’s likely somewhere between $20bn and $90bn.”

How have sanctions affected the Iranian economy?

Iran’s economy today is unrecognisable from that at the time of the 1979 Islamic revolution, as war, sanctions and shifting economic priorities have slowed it to a crawl, experts say.

One of the main reasons is that Iran is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world.

Economic sanctions on Iran, beginning with those imposed by the US in the immediate wake of the revolution, followed by further tranches imposed by the United Nations over its nuclear programme in 2006, have played a central role in tilting Iran’s economy to the point of collapse. Israel’s attack in June last year, which resulted in a 12-day war between the two countries, further undermined confidence.

The US first imposed sanctions on Iran in 1979, when the Islamic revolution overthrew the shah, or monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose forces notoriously used repression and torture to keep him in power, without a democratic mandate.

In 1979, Washington also halted oil imports from Iran and froze $12bn in Iranian assets.

In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton issued executive orders preventing US companies from investing in Iranian oil and gas and trading with Iran. A year later, the US Congress passed a law requiring that the US government impose sanctions on foreign firms investing more than $20m a year in Iran’s energy sector.

In December 2006, the United Nations Security Council imposed its own sanctions on Iran’s trade in nuclear-energy-related materials and technology and froze the assets of individuals and companies involved in activities pertaining to it.

In subsequent years, the UN toughened sanctions and the European Union also followed suit.

In 2015, Iran signed a nuclear deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – with the US, United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Russia and the EU. Under that pact, Iran agreed to refrain from any uranium enrichment and research into it for 15 years.

But in 2018, during his first term as president, Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the nuclear treaty and reimposed all sanctions on Iran.

In 2019, the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a “foreign terrorist organization”. Additionally, Trump imposed sanctions targeting petrochemicals, metals (steel, aluminium, copper), as well as senior Iranian officials.

On January 3, 2020, after the US assassinated Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force, in a drone strike in Baghdad, Iraq, it also imposed more sanctions on Iran.

In September 2025, the UN’s sanctions were reimposed on Iran over its nuclear programme when the UNSC voted against permanently lifting economic sanctions on Iran.

Currently, under US and other international sanctions, nearly all of Iran’s oil revenues remain frozen. Additionally, assets held overseas are frozen, trade is restricted, and banks have been targeted.

Financial networks and companies linked to the development of Iran’s nuclear, ballistic-missile network and entities, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which many in the international community hold responsible for domestic repression, are also sanctioned and are not permitted to do business with the US or other nations levying sanctions.

Now, China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s shipped oil, data for 2025 from analytics firm Kpler shows. Much of it is transported by a “shadow fleet” of oil tankers which fly false flags or switch off tracking devices to avoid sanctions.

How has this affected people in Iran?

Even before the conflict with Israel last year, many economists regarded Iran’s economy as locked in a period of “stagflation”, as sluggish growth – estimated by the International Monetary Fund at just 0.6 percent per year – combined with soaring prices, robbed many in Iran of their last hopes for a stable future for themselves and their families.

Economists generally consider an annual economic growth rate of 2 to 3 percent to be ideal.

Over the past eight years, Iranians’ purchasing power – the value of the money they have to spend, compared with prices – has fallen by more than 90 percent. Food prices have soared by an average of 72 percent compared with last year, as the rial has collapsed against the US dollar, official statistics show.

In December 2025, one US dollar was priced at about 1.36 million rial in the open market, the rial’s worst rate ever.

Then, in early January, as protests were in full swing, the Iranian rial dropped even further to 1.42 million against the US dollar – a 56 percent drop in value in just six months and a sharp decline from about 700,000 in January 2025.

Meanwhile, nearly one in five young people is out of work.

Why is the rial exchange rate important?

“One of the key economic indicators that really matters to people is the exchange rate,” Iranian American economist Nader Habibi explained. “People pay real attention to where the dollar is against the rial and, as their uncertainty grows, so does the amount of hard currency they store, such as dollars or gold.”

According to Habibi, shortages in the supply of hard currency following Israel’s attack in June last year, as well as competition for funds from a government scrambling to rebuild and maintain its defences after 12 days of war, sent confidence in the Iranian economy reeling and accelerated the collapse of the rial.

“The rapid devaluation of the rial was more than even conservative elements of society, such as the Bazaaris, could cope with,” Habibi said, referring to the common name for the shopkeepers who work in the grand bazaar.

“Imagine you want to sell a TV. Say you sell it and the next day you need to buy another to replenish your inventory,” he explained. “Everything depends on the ability to buy a new TV at a price lower than that which you sold the last one for. However, after the rial collapsed, that was something the Bazaaris no longer felt they could do, so they shut their shops and took to the streets.”

What will happen now?

“The protests have calmed in the last two or three days because of the sheer number of people killed. That’s why people did not go out,” one Tehran resident, who did not wish to be named, told Al Jazeera.

However, people remain angry about the state of the economy, experts say. “The reality is that the regime has no quick fix to alleviate the dire situation it confronts this time. Even if it were to succeed in suppressing the protests by brute force, the underlying issues will not be going away,” Hakimian, the economics professor, said.

Outside intervention by the likes of the US is unlikely to help, he added.

Israel’s announcement late last year that it would recognise Somaliland as an independent state was followed almost immediately by anger from Somalia and condemnation across Africa and the Middle East.

Among criticisms of the move came a warning from Yemen’s Houthis, with the group’s leader, Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, describing it as a “hostile stance” and saying any Israeli presence in Somaliland would be treated as a military target.

Those concerns were reinforced this month when Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, visited Somaliland and included the strategic port city of Berbera in his itinerary.

In a readout after the trip, he said security cooperation was on the agenda.

Somaliland officials have since indicated they are open to the possibility of Israeli military presence in the territory – a prospect that would place Israel directly across the Gulf of Aden from the Houthis, thus validating the group’s concerns.

This week, al-Houthi said he was “serious” about his earlier threat, adding he would not “hesitate to target any fixed Zionist presence accessible to us”.

Israel’s conflict with the Houthis

Israel’s recognition of Somaliland is part of a broader shift in its policy from covert state-to-state engagement towards cultivating ties with alternative actors, following prolonged conflicts with Iran and its regional allies, experts say.

When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the move on December 26, he publicly thanked Mossad director David Barnea, pointing to the intelligence dimension of the engagement.

Experts say the timing reflects Israel’s growing concern about the threat posed by the Houthis in the southern Red Sea region.

During the genocidal war on Gaza, Israel has traded fire with the Houthis, who have fired missiles and drones from northern Yemen and also targeted Israeli-linked shipping in the Red Sea, in what they said were moves in solidarity with the Palestinians.

“Everyone just looks at the map and understands what Israel is looking for here,” Shiri Fein-Grossman, the CEO of the Israel-Africa Relations Institute and a former member of the Israeli National Security Council, recently told Israeli outlet i24 News.

“The recognition of Somaliland gives Israel a strategic location near the Houthis in Yemen and comes at a time that Israel needs as many friends as possible.”

Much attention focuses on Berbera, a city on Somaliland’s Gulf of Aden coast at the Red Sea’s entrance, historically hosting the Ottomans, the Soviets during Somalia’s pro-Moscow Cold War alignment, the United States, and, since 2017, the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The port sits along one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, just across the Gulf of Aden on the Red Sea, and about 500km (300 miles) from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen.

An assessment published in November by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies noted that Somaliland’s territory could “forward base for multiple missions: intelligence monitoring of the Houthis and their armament efforts; logistical support for Yemen’s legitimate government in its war against them; and a platform for direct operations against the Houthis”.

Over the past two years, Israeli strikes in Yemen have hit key economic and civilian infrastructure and killed Houthi leaders, yet unnamed Israeli officials told The Jerusalem Post that the group remains nearly undeterrable.

This has prompted calls for a total overhaul of Israel’s military and security doctrines, including by the Israeli army’s Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies, due to what it said were significant changes in the “characteristics of Israel’s security environment”.

“This context has totally brought Somaliland into effect,” Max Webb, an independent analyst on the Horn of Africa, told Al Jazeera. “The Houthis are now the largest Iranian proxy posing a direct threat to Israel,” he said, citing the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the collapse of the Bashar al-Assad government in Syria.

“Israel has never previously been attacked by the Houthis; this is a new development. And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they’re prepared to work with new actors in order to counter that Houthi threat,” Webb said.

Asher Lubotzky, a senior fellow at the Israeli think tank, the Israel-Africa Relations Institute, told Al Jazeera that while Israel’s military demonstrated it could strike distant targets, its overall performance against the Houthis was “below the passing mark”, despite it launching the longest-range strike Israel had ever carried out.

The Houthis, in turn, have threatened to strike any Israeli presence in Somaliland, a move that Mostafa Hasan, Somaliland’s former intelligence director, said amounts to a declaration of war.

Lubotzky said Somaliland had taken a major risk and, in a November report for an Israeli think tank, suggested that other countries take the lead in recognising Somaliland to reduce potential fallout for both Hargeisa and Israel. “But they wanted recognition and they think it is worth it,” he said.

“Most of the countries which were extremely mad at Israel for this, were mad at Israel before,” he added.

According to Webb, “both sides have very little to lose diplomatically.

“Israel is more isolated than it has ever been, and Somaliland isn’t recognised by anyone. Israel can take the heat, and Somaliland gets a breakthrough.”

A ‘state of necessity’

For Somaliland, Israel’s diplomatic lifeline arrives at a moment of comparable vulnerability.

In 2023, the region suffered a major military setback, losing the eastern city of Las Anod and its surroundings to anti-separatist forces, with Somali Prime Minister Hamza Barre even visiting the city last April. A new administration under Somalia’s federal system has been established.

Several senior Somali cabinet ministers have arrived in the city this week, and the president is expected to visit over the weekend.

Somalia’s federal government has also increased pressure over the last year through airspace controls, visa restrictions and port regulations.

A source close to Somaliland’s government, speaking anonymously to Al Jazeera, said the measures had created a sense of unease in Hargeisa, making the need for action more urgent.

Hersi Ali Haji Hassan, chair of the governing Waddani party, told Al Jazeera Mubasher that “we are in a state of necessity for official international recognition,” adding there “is no choice before us but to welcome any country that recognises our existential right”.

In mid-2025, the administration of Somaliland’s Abdirahman Mohamed Abdillahi sent letters to 193 heads of state offering strategic access and cooperation in exchange for diplomatic recognition. Last week, the president, known locally as Cirro, said only Israel had responded.

Though the effort produced no immediate public breakthroughs, in recent years, Somaliland has won the support of prominent US Republicans such as Ted Cruz and Scott Perry, and even appeared in Project 2025, a document closely aligned with President Donald Trump’s base that is believed to be guiding policy.

Trump has distanced himself from Somaliland recognition, telling the New York Post he was unlikely to follow Israel’s lead. However, he did say the matter was being “studied”.

Meanwhile, US Ambassador Tammy Bruce declined to condemn Israel’s recognition of Somaliland at the United Nations Security Council last year, even as she insisted US policy hadn’t changed. The State Department told Al Jazeera it had no role in Israel’s decision to recognise Somaliland.

Somaliland: ‘where interests intersect’

In Somaliland, most people appear to have backed the deal with Israel.

Meanwhile, many of its supporters have welcomed its positioning as a potential Western ally – cultivating ties with Taiwan, deciding to build a relationship with Israel – while moving against regional and global rivals, including China, Iran, and its networks of regional allies.

“Somaliland has tried to present itself as a place where those interests intersect,” said Jethro Norman, a Somalia expert at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “In a more transactional global environment, geography matters more.”

Mostafa Hasan, former intelligence director in Somaliland, told the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs that Somaliland would safeguard Israel’s and Western interests following recognition.

Alon Liel, a former Israeli diplomat, told Al Jazeera that Israel’s goals were much larger than simply having a position from which it could strike Yemen.

“This relationship with Somaliland indicates that Israel is preparing for more international troubles and is looking for friends it can build leverage on with some strategic added value, like Somaliland,” Liel said.

He added that Israel also wants to show it can still gain new allies despite the fallout from its two-year war on Gaza.

Somaliland’s president recently officially accepted an invitation by Netanyahu to visit Israel, during which an embassy is likely to be opened.

Analysts say the relationship is still new, with its trajectory uncertain, and that both Somaliland and Israel will be assessing the announcements’ consequences and potential opportunities.

After Saar’s visit to Hargeisa this month, Somaliland’s Foreign Minister Abdirahman Dahir Adam expressed on X hope that the trip marked “the beginning of a promising partnership”, with Saar saying Israel was determined to “vigorously advance relations”.

Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, meanwhile, appealed to Somaliland’s leaders, urging them to reconsider talks and stressing that wider recognition of independence could only come through negotiations with Mogadishu – a signal he was willing to engage on Somaliland’s core demands.

“The federal government will find it easy to do anything it can in order to find unity,” he said in a national address.

Farhan Isak Yusuf, the deputy director at Somali Public Agenda, a Mogadishu-based think tank, said talks between both sides were now unlikely, as the diplomatic breakthrough has left Somaliland’s leaders feeling emboldened and vindicated.

Elon Musk recently declared on X that “an immediate increase in the birth rate is needed”. It’s the kind of statement that sounds dramatic, urgent and vaguely civilisational, but it is also profoundly disconnected from reality. However, Musk is far from an isolated voice within the far right and among the world’s billionaires.

Low birthrates are not a mystery. They are not the result of moral decay, declining ambition or an excess of “woke politics”, but rather the predictable outcome of an economic system in which people are paid too little, work too much and are told to feel personally responsible for structural failures engineered far above their heads.

This disconnect is not limited to fertility. The same billionaires and CEOs who lament demographic decline also complain that people do not buy locally, that European industries are losing ground, and that “the West” is becoming economically fragile, with some even calling for bans on Chinese online platforms such as Temu or Shein. And yet, when it comes to solutions, they reliably converge on the same prescriptions: longer working hours, wage restraint, mass layoffs and deregulation.

In other words, even when their diagnosis occasionally overlaps with reality, their remedies systematically make the problem worse.

Start with wages. Across much of Europe, real wages have stagnated or fallen in recent years. Inflation has eaten into purchasing power, while salary increases have lagged behind the cost of housing, energy, food and childcare. The results are visible in the numbers: the EU’s average fertility rate has fallen to around 1.4 children per woman, well below replacement level. For millions of households, income is no longer a foundation for planning a future, but a constant exercise in damage control.

But better wages alone will not make a difference if the cost of living continues to rise. Young people simply cannot buy a home in most European countries and basic living costs have risen several times faster than wages.

All of this has direct consequences for fertility. Having children requires not just love or desire, but time, money and a sense of stability. When rent absorbs half your income, when childcare costs rival a second mortgage, and when job security is eroded by endless “restructurings”, choosing not to have children is not a cultural failure, but an economically rational decision.

Yet this reality is routinely ignored by those at the top. Musk, for instance, is famous not only for his concern about population decline, but also for championing extreme work cultures. Employees at companies he controls have been told to work “hardcore” hours or leave, and similar messages echo across corporate America and increasingly in Europe: work more, rest less, be grateful, and somehow also find time to have children and buy local products, which are often more expensive than those sold by Chinese online retailers.

The contradiction is obvious. You cannot demand longer working days, weekend availability and permanent precarity, and then act surprised when people do not have the time, energy or confidence to raise children. Biology may set limits but economics determines whether people feel safe enough to build families within them.

It is also true that falling birthrates in wealthy societies are a long-observed pattern shaped by structural conditions, not simply by “cultural decline” or a lack of desire for children.

This leads to a paradox. Wealthy societies tend to have fewer children, so it is often assumed that the problem cannot be economic. But this confuses national wealth with individual security. Rich countries can still be hostile places in which to raise families. What suppresses fertility is not prosperity, but precarity.

Where income is concentrated, time is scarce and risk is individualised, having children becomes a gamble rather than a choice. The question, then, is not why people in rich countries have fewer children, but why so many rich countries make family life economically irrational.

The same logic applies to consumption. European business leaders often complain that consumers are turning away from local products and towards cheap imports from China. This is framed as a failure of loyalty or taste, and as an imminent danger to Western economies, but the truth is far simpler.

People buy cheaply because they are paid poorly. When wages stagnate, price becomes the dominant factor in purchasing decisions, and supporting local producers becomes a luxury, accessible primarily to those insulated from the economic pressures shaping the debate, often the same actors who helped create them.

This is where the hypocrisy becomes clear. The same corporate actors who suppress wages through outsourcing, automation and relentless cost-cutting then complain that domestic demand is weak. They hollow out the middle class and then lament its disappearance.

None of this is accidental. Extreme inequality is not a side effect of modern economies, but a political choice, actively defended by those who benefit most from it. Millionaires, and especially billionaires, exercise outsized influence over public policy, labour markets and regulatory frameworks. Through lobbying, tax avoidance, media ownership and direct access to decision-makers, they shape economies in ways that concentrate wealth while externalising risk onto workers and families.

The result is a system in which insecurity is normalised for the many and optional for the few. When economic power translates so seamlessly into political power, policies that could restore balance, such as higher wages, shorter working hours, progressive taxation, robust public services and wealth taxation, are dismissed as unrealistic, even as the social consequences of inequality become impossible to ignore.

It is not uncommon for politicians aligned with economic elites to propose tax cuts for corporations, often through reductions in social contributions and labour protections, while shifting the burden onto the rest of the population under the claim that it will “create jobs”. In this sense, today’s fertility crisis is not a demographic mystery, but a governance failure rooted in the unchecked power of those who profit from scarcity while lamenting its effects.

History offers a simple lesson. Henry Ford famously understood that paying workers enough to buy the products they made was not charity, but sound economics. Today’s corporate elite appears to have forgotten that insight, even as it enjoys productivity gains and record profits unimaginable a century ago.

Instead, mass layoffs are presented as efficiency. Thousands of highly skilled workers are dismissed, even as executive compensation and shareholder payouts remain intact. Jobs are treated as expendable, families as optional and stability as a privilege rather than a baseline.

And when the social consequences become impossible to ignore, billionaires suddenly rediscover “society” and issue pronouncements about what ordinary people should do differently.

Despite the complexity of the situation, the core logic is simple. If people do not earn enough to live decently, they will not buy expensive goods, have children or plan long-term futures. If they are expected to be permanently available for work, they will not have the time or emotional capacity to care for families or communities.

If billionaires are genuinely concerned about demographic decline, the prescription is not cultural panic or reproductive moralising, or showcasing their own large families, but higher wages, stronger labour protections, affordable housing, accessible childcare and shorter working hours. Above all, reducing the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few would be fundamental.

If they are concerned about the decline of local industries, the answer is not scolding consumers, but rebuilding purchasing power and economic security.

The uncomfortable truth is that many of today’s elites benefit from the very fragility they decry. Stability, by contrast, requires redistribution, limits and shared responsibility. If billionaires are truly concerned, they should accept heavy taxation on their wealth. Philanthropy and charitable giving, often used as tools for tax avoidance and reputational laundering, are no substitute for democratic accountability.

When billionaires demand more babies, more loyalty, more work and more sacrifice, the real question is not why ordinary people are failing to deliver, but why those with the most power refuse to acknowledge their own role in creating the conditions they now condemn. Addressing this crisis ultimately requires political choices that rebalance power towards workers, families and democratic institutions, rather than further entrenching the authority of those who profit from insecurity.