Category World News

America’s renewed scepticism, and even hostility under Donald Trump’s second administration, does not for one moment alter the fact that climate change is real.

Neither does it negate the reality that the Global South — including the almost 700 million-strong Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), virtually all of which are tropical countries — is on the front line of the climate crisis.

Typhoons Tino and Uwan, which recently struck our region, especially the Philippines, are the latest proof of this and a reminder of the urgent need for climate justice.

What the Global South needs from summits like COP30 has been stated time and time again. It really boils down to four things.

The developed world needs to listen

On the one hand, developed countries need to listen to developing and less developed countries on how climate change should be addressed.

A rigid approach to the various facets of climate action, including technology, energy transition and biodiversity conservation, will ultimately frustrate the sincere, proactive measures that many Global South countries, including Malaysia and several of its ASEAN partners, are taking towards these goals.

More flexibility on the part of the Global North would go a long way towards ensuring that the war against climate change is won.

This is not an attempt to water down or deflect anything. The right to live in a sustainable environment is arguably a fundamental human right.

Israel’s devastating war in Gaza has also resulted in widespread ecocide that Western nations have remained strangely silent on, but whose ramifications — not only for the Middle East but for the wider world — will last for decades.

There should therefore be no doubt that sustainability and human rights go together. Supporting the former, especially in ASEAN and the Global South, is a means of upholding the latter.

Developed countries should bring their chequebooks

At the risk of putting things crudely, money talks. The various climate finance commitments — especially those for vulnerable nations — must not only be fulfilled, but also increased.

Projections from the United Nations Global Policy Model estimate that developing countries will need around $1.1 trillion in climate finance by 2025 and some $1.8 trillion by 2030.

The chair of the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference, Brazil, has rightly said that it hopes the meeting in Belem will be remembered as “the COP of Adaptation Implementation”. This is astute because, while I do not share the view that it is too late to act, it should be painfully clear that climate action can no longer be about setting lofty goals. Rather, the time has come to deliver.

The Global South can lead on climate change

Admittedly, the absence of the United States — as the world’s superpower and largest economy — looms over the COP and any international efforts to protect the environment. But the absence of the US is not a reason to retreat from climate action, or any other international cause; rather, it is an opportunity to reaffirm and strengthen multilateral cooperation.

Although it would be nice to have the US involved, the world can act without America. As has been widely reported, China’s carbon dioxide emissions have either flatlined or fallen over the past 18 months.

Moreover, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), proposed by Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is an important part of the solution.

With the World Bank as its trustee and interim host, the TFFF seeks to support lasting conservation strategies and protect crucial tropical ecosystems through global, public and private partnerships.

With a medium-term goal of achieving a $125bn fund, the TFFF Launch Declaration has been endorsed by 53 countries and 19 sovereign wealth funds. Among them are 34 tropical forest countries, covering 90 percent of the tropical forests in developing nations.

It has been reported that Norway, Brazil, Indonesia, Portugal, France and the Netherlands have already made financial commitments. So far, $5.5bn has been announced — an encouraging, albeit modest, start to what will be a long journey.

Nevertheless, the TFFF shows that the Global South has the potential to build initiatives of its own, including on existential global challenges such as climate change.

Again, this is something the Global North must support. It arguably owes a “debt” to tropical countries for the huge carbon sinks they provide.

This must be achieved not through prescriptive policies, but through equitable, transparent climate reparations to ensure that the burden of conserving irreplaceable biodiversity does not come at the cost of education, jobs or dignity for the people of these countries.

ASEAN must do its part

The tropical countries — including those in ASEAN — cannot shirk their responsibilities, either.

It was disappointing that climate change did not feature more prominently during the recent 47th ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, which was chaired by Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, despite the 2025 chairmanship’s theme of “Inclusivity and Sustainability.”

To be fair, the Chair’s Statement commendably noted that the regional bloc had “adopted the ASEAN Joint Statement on Climate Change” at COP30 and “welcomed the ASEAN Pavilion”, as well as “looked forward to the development of the ASEAN Climate Change Strategic Action Plan (ACCSAP) to further advance climate action in the region”.

The ASEAN Declaration on the Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment was also adopted during the summit in Kuala Lumpur, following several years of diplomacy among member states.

We must also not forget that the ASEAN Summit saw the historic accession of Timor-Leste to our ranks and progress on the ASEAN Power Grid.

These are all commendable achievements, but they still fall short of the proactive posture the developing world often urges the developed world to take. We must do as much — if not more — than we expect of others.

Some may argue that ASEAN lacks the financial capacity to act alone. But 2025 summits have shown that it has the credibility and influence to connect disparate blocs — including China, the BRICS coalition of economies, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the European Union, Africa and Latin America.

How far does the ASEAN Joint Statement on Climate Change go in recognising that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lists Southeast Asian countries among those that will be hardest hit by climate change?

Without action, words remain just words. This leaves ASEAN — which has a proud record of neutrality — vulnerable to accusations of pandering to Trump (who, as we know, was briefly present at the summit) even in the face of climate-related disasters affecting our people.

What ASEAN — and indeed the rest of the Global South — needs is bold, decisive multilateral action in partnership with like-minded regions.

The urgency that ASEAN demonstrates in defending its geopolitical agency and advancing economic integration must now manifest in stronger, more vocal climate leadership.

More can and should be done. It is still not too late for both the developed and developing worlds to win the fight against climate change.

‘Do you believe Israel should repay for the reconstruction of Gaza?’

This is the question that cost Italian journalist Gabriele Nunziati his job after he asked it during an EU press conference in October. He told Al Jazeera he stands by it.

US President Donald Trump’s relationship with the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has once again come under scrutiny, after United States lawmakers released more than 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate on Wednesday, including some that mention Trump’s name.

US Democrats in the House Oversight Committee – a federal body that oversees government functions – released email exchanges between Epstein and some of his associates in which the former financier appeared to suggest that Trump knew about his conduct towards young girls.

Hours later, US Republicans released 20,000 documents from Epstein’s estate in a bid to counter the Democrats’ email releases, claiming the Democrats had “cherry-picked” documents to paint a false narrative against Trump. The Republicans’ documents also mention Trump’s name, but these references are mainly in regards to the US president’s political career.

Trump, who had a 15-year-long friendship with Epstein, denies all wrongdoing and has repeatedly stated that he was never involved in – or even knew about – Epstein’s sexual crimes.

Epstein died by suicide in prison in 2019 after being arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors. He had previously been imprisoned in 2008 after pleading guilty at a court in Florida to engaging in prostitution of minors, but was released from prison in 2009 after completing his sentence.

While some documents relating to the prosecution of Epstein have been made public, the US Justice Department has repeatedly refused to release others, raising eyebrows – not least among Trump’s own “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) base.

In June 2025, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk claimed on his social media platform X that “Trump is in the Epstein files” and said that was “the real reason they [the files] have not been made public”. But the Justice Department has said the real reason for not releasing the files is to protect the privacy of the victims.

Next week, the US House of Representatives will vote on releasing all remaining sealed court files pertaining to Epstein.

Here’s what we know:

What do the emails released by Democrats reveal?

At least three emails were made public by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.

Epstein and Maxwell: One email is an April 2011 exchange between Epstein and his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking in December 2021 and is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. In the email, Epstein told her that Trump had “spent hours” at his house with one victim.

Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [redacted name of victim] spent hours at my house with him .. he has never once been mentioned.”

Maxwell responded, “I have been thinking about that…”

The name of the victim was not released by the Democrats, but in the cache of documents released on Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee, the name is shown as Virginia Giuffre, who sued disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom, before he was stripped of his royal titles last month) for rape and sexual assault before she died by suicide in April this year.

In a statement sent to US media on Wednesday, the White House also confirmed that the victim was Giuffre.

“The ‘unnamed victim’ referenced in these emails is the late Virginia Giuffre, who repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday.

“The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including Giuffre,” she added.

Epstein and Wolff: Epstein and US journalist Michael Wolff, who has written four books about Trump, also exchanged emails that included details of their strategising against Trump, according to the documents released by the Democrats.

In December 2015, seven years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to his crimes – which included engaging in prostitution with a minor under the age of 18 – Wolff wrote to Epstein: “I hear CNN is planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you – either on air or in scrum afterwards.”

Epstein replied: “If we were to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”

Wolff responded: “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”

In a separate email in October 2016, Wolff tried to persuade Epstein to give an interview, writing: “There’s an opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him. Interested?” The email was written just before Trump’s presidential election win in November 2016. It is not clear if Epstein responded.

In another email in 2019, Epstein wrote to Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”, referring to Maxwell.

Responding to the emails released by the Democrats on Wednesday, Wolff told the Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head late on Wednesday that he was “nice” to Epstein to try to understand him better and get “an entirely different view” of Trump.

Wolff’s books about Trump include the 2018 bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which revealed backstories of discord within his administration during his first term as president.

“I’m the person who sees this, this elemental story, Donald Trump,” Wolff told The Daily Beast. “I’ve gone through this with Epstein deep into the background. Donald Trump is the best friend of, you know, evil. He is the best friend of a deeply, deeply diabolical person.”

Wolff said that he also hoped to persuade Epstein to come forward and speak up about what he knew about Trump. “‘Why don’t you go public with these pictures? Why don’t you go public? Let me help you go public in telling your story about Donald Trump’,” Wolff claimed he told Epstein.

But he said he believed Epstein was afraid of Trump. “Epstein was fearful about what would happen to him if Donald Trump became the president of the United States,” Wolff told the Daily Beast.

The author added that the reason he was trying to convince Epstein to come forward was because he “saw then” and continues to “see and see every day now, that Donald Trump was unfit to be the president of the United States”.

Separately, on October 23 this year, the author claimed in a lawsuit he filed at the New York Supreme Court in Manhattan against First Lady Melania Trump that she had threatened to sue him for more than $1bn if he didn’t retract his statements linking Epstein to her.

Wolff had claimed that Melania Trump was “very involved” in Epstein’s social circle, through which she met her future husband, Donald Trump.

Wolff added that the president and his wife “have made a practice of threatening those who speak against them”.

What have the responses to the emails been?

Trump immediately dismissed the emails as a “hoax” in a social media post.

“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday afternoon.

Trump’s press secretary Leavitt also told journalists at the White House on Wednesday that “these emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong”.

US Democrat Ro Khanna, however, told the Breaking Points podcast that “this whole Epstein class needs to go”.

“The issue in American politics from left or right is: Are you for working, ordinary Americans? Or are you for this Epstein class? And this is what’s so important about those emails. It’s not just rich and powerful men who may have abused and raped young girls; it’s a lot of rich and powerful people who knew that the abuse was going on and did nothing about it.”

The email release also took place on the day that Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva was sworn in by House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson.

“It’s past time for Congress to restore its role as a check and balance on this administration,” Grijalva told local media.

What are Republicans saying?

Trump has warned members of the Republican Party against focusing attention on the Democrats’ emails.

“There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!” Trump said on Truth Social on Wednesday.

US Republican members of the House Oversight Committee, however, responded to the release of the emails with the release of around 20,000 Epstein-related documents obtained from his estate, just hours later.

These documents reveal email exchanges between Epstein and his associates in which they discuss Trump’s presidential career and his whereabouts.

In one email from December 2018 to former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H Summers, Epstein called Trump “borderline insane” and then spoke about lawyer Alan Dershowitz, his defence attorney at the time. “dersh, a few feet further from the border but not by much”. It is unclear what these comments are related to.

Summers replied: “Will trump crack into insanity?”

Epstein responded: “This is not a new phenomenon for him. in the past he was told not to come out of his apt. thats how he got through near personal bankruptcy. is strength is remarkable. he is pounded 24/7.”

“I hope someone close to him gets indicted, but not sure, otherwise the pressure of the unknown will force him to do crazy things,” he added.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told reporters in Washington, DC on Wednesday: “These emails prove literally nothing.”

But some Republicans want the US government to release all existing Epstein files, once and for all.

Representative Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska, told US broadcaster MSNBC on Wednesday that he’d vote in favour of a bill demanding Trump’s Justice Department release all the files.

Referring to the release of the documents by the House Oversight Committee, he said: “It’s still got to work its way through the Senate and the president. But we’re already getting a lot of results.”

According to reports from Axios and other US media, Trump and other administration officials have reached out to some Republican representatives such as Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace to try to persuade them to remove their names from a petition that would force a vote in the House on releasing all of the Epstein files.

But Boebert told reporters on Wednesday in DC that there was “no pressure” and said she remained a supporter of the petition.

In a post on X, she wrote that “the Epstein petition is deeply personal”, as she is also a “survivor of sexual and domestic violence”.

“I signed the discharge petition. I was one of four Republicans to do so. I stand with all survivors,” she wrote.

“When it seems like the world is against you. When the press hates your guts. When your friends desert you. Your pain is my pain. Your fight is my fight. Your justice is our justice.”

The Epstein petition is deeply personal. When I was 14 I was molested by a friend of one of my coaches and sexually assaulted at 16. I was violently mugged months later. I dropped out of high school at 17 because I had nothing left to give. But God helped me turn things around.…

Meanwhile, Tennessee Republican Tim Burchett told reporters on Wednesday that he was “tired of messing around” with the issue.

“The Democrats have had the Epstein files for four years, and now we’ve got it for nine months, and it’s going to be dragged into a bunch of nonsense. Let’s just take it to the floor. Let’s vote on it. Let’s get on with it,” he said.

When will the US House vote on a bill to release files?

The release of the House Oversight Committee’s documents on Wednesday came as the House voted to end its 43-day-long shutdown of the federal government, which began on October 1 this year.

House Speaker Johnson told reporters on Wednesday that he will hold a vote next week to decide if all Epstein files should be released.

Johnson added that he wanted to “remind everybody” that the GOP-led House Oversight Committee had been “working around the clock” on its own investigation into the case.

Even if the House votes in favour of the bill, the Senate will have to agree, and Trump will have to sign the bill ordering the files to be released. US presidents do have the power of veto, and can reject bills. However, they are required to give a reason for the rejection. The bill would then be sent back to the House to vote on again.

Betting is now embedded in modern sport. In Türkiye, referees are under investigation for placing thousands of bets. NBA players and coaches are facing major sanctions over gambling violations. But on the flip side, those same players, teams and leagues wear and promote gambling brands. Samantha Johnson explores the contradictions shaping today’s sports betting economy

Panama’s indigenous Guna people may be the example to follow for others affected by climate change, having moved most of their community, traditions and all.