IAuthorities in Libya, a country still divided after years of civil war, have denied reports that they will receive undocumented migrants deported by the United States.
The Reuters news agency reported on Wednesday that deportation flights from the US to the North African country could begin this week, despite previous government reports raising alarm over unsafe conditions there.
The National Unity government, which controls western Libya, said in a statement that it rejected the use of its territory as a destination for deporting migrants without its knowledge or consent.
“The Government of National Unity categorically denies any agreement or coordination with US authorities regarding the deportation of migrants to Libya,” it said in a statement.
Haftar’s Libyan National Army, which controls eastern Libya, also rejected the report, saying that migrants “will not be received through airports and ports secured by the Armed Forces, and that this is completely false and we cannot accept it at all.”
The report by Reuters, which cites three anonymous US officials, says that the US military could fly migrants to Libya for detention as soon as Wednesday, but notes that those plans are subject to change. The number and nationality of the migrants who could be deported are unknown.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has sought out third countries where it can deport and detain undocumented immigrants, part of a larger push to enact the administration’s hard-right vision of immigration enforcement.
And on April 30, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced at a cabinet meeting at the White House that the US was requesting that countries take its undocumented migrants.
“We are working with other countries to say: We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings, will you do this as a favour to us?” Rubio said. “And the further away from America, the better.”
‘Extortion, forced labour and unlawful killings’
Authorities in Libya have long been willing and controversial partners in immigration enforcement, collaborating with the European Union to intercept and detain migrants and refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe.
A 2022 statement from the human rights watchdog Amnesty International says that “men, women and children returned to Libya face arbitrary detention, torture, cruel and inhuman detention conditions, rape and sexual violence, extortion, forced labour and unlawful killings”.
The US government itself has also documented unsafe conditions in Libya, with a report released last year by the Department of State noting “harsh and life-threatening prison conditions” and “arbitrary arrest and detention”.
Such conditions have not deterred the Trump administration from sending undocumented immigrants to prisons known for abusive conditions in countries like El Salvador, sometimes based on unsubstantiated allegations of gang affiliation and without due process.
The practice of third countries entering into agreements with Western nations to warehouse undocumented migrants and asylum seekers is also not entirely new.
Wales fly-half Gareth Anscombe has joined French Top 14 club Bayonne from Gloucester.
The 33-year-old has signed a one-year deal with the club that are currently fourth in France’s top flight.
Anscombe played a season in the English Premiership after his deal with Japanese club Tokyo Suntory Sungoliath fell through because of a groin injury.
He started his career in his native New Zealand before moving to Cardiff in 2014, making his Wales debut, qualifying through his Welsh mother, a year later.
He also spent four seasons at Ospreys from 2019.
Anscombe was left out of Warren Gatland’s 2025 Six Nations squad before being re-called for the final three matches by interim head coach Matt Sherratt.
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The World Snooker Championship was streamed a record-breaking 29 million times across BBC iPlayer, the BBC Sport website and the BBC Sport app, a 25% increase from the previous year.
The action from the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield was watched by a further 12.6 million people on TV across BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four. There was a peak of three million on BBC Two during the final.
Zhao Xintong completed a 18-12 win over Mark Williams on Monday to become the first player from China to lift the trophy.
“This year’s World Championship has been gripping, with a phenomenal response from fans,” said director of BBC Sport, Alex Kay-Jelski.
World Snooker Tour (WST) chairman Steve Dawson said: “This has been one of the best World Championships in memory, packed with thrilling moments, fabulous matches and a remarkable standard of play.
“So we’re delighted to see that reflected in the BBC viewing figures. To set a new record for iPlayer streams shows that we have a growing audience of new fans who are tuning in to snooker’s unique capacity for drama.”
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Mali’s military government has suspended the activities of political parties “until further notice”, days after a rare pro-democracy rally.
The decree signed on Wednesday by the transitional president, General Assimi Goita, cited “reasons of public order” and covered all “associations of a political character”, according to state media.
It was issued a week after authorities announced the repeal of a law governing the operation of political parties – a decision interpreted by legal experts as a step towards their dissolution.
In response, a coalition of dozens of parties formed to “demand the effective end of the political-military transition no later than December 31” as well as a return to constitutional order.
On Saturday, the new coalition mobilised several hundred people to protest in the capital, Bamako, against the military government’s move. Another protest had been expected later this week.
Cheick Oumar Doumbia, one of the leaders of the weekend demonstration, said he was “not surprised” by the decree.
“I expected this because this is their way of preventing us from carrying out our activities, but we will continue to defend democracy in Mali”, he told The Associated Press news agency. “We are a people committed to democracy”.
Goita seized power after coups in 2020 and 2021. Last week, a national political conference said he should be installed as president for a renewable five-year term.
Mali’s military government has suspended the activities of political parties “until further notice”, days after a rare pro-democracy rally.
The decree signed on Wednesday by the transitional president, General Assimi Goita, cited “reasons of public order” and covered all “associations of a political character”, according to state media.
It was issued a week after authorities announced the repeal of a law governing the operation of political parties – a decision interpreted by legal experts as a step towards their dissolution.
In response, a coalition of dozens of parties formed to “demand the effective end of the political-military transition no later than December 31” as well as a return to constitutional order.
On Saturday, the new coalition mobilised several hundred people to protest in the capital, Bamako, against the military government’s move. Another protest had been expected later this week.
Cheick Oumar Doumbia, one of the leaders of the weekend demonstration, said he was “not surprised” by the decree.
“I expected this because this is their way of preventing us from carrying out our activities, but we will continue to defend democracy in Mali,” he told The Associated Press news agency. “We are a people committed to democracy.”
Goita seized power after coups in 2020 and 2021. Last week, a national political conference said he should be installed as president for a renewable five-year term.
My beloved mother, I began writing this piece in the first month after your passing.
I gathered my words and my pain to pour into this text, but my tears would choke me, and I’d close the file.
I came back to it two months later, then six, then again at the end of the year, but I still couldn’t finish it.
Each time I returned to it, I carried new burdens, new grief, and new tears as the war wove itself into our lives, adding sorrows.
One time, I opened the file crying, between joy and heartbreak, with news you had waited so long to hear: A ceasefire had been announced. But you were no longer there, and I closed the file that day, too.
Now, I gather my strength to write this on the first anniversary of your death.
Eulogising our loved ones is not a choice, it’s a form of preservation.
A war without your prayers
Can you imagine, Mama – the war stopped, only to return with even more force?
Today marks 570 days of it.
The killing, bombing, and displacement weren’t enough for them. Now, people are dying from hunger.
How can I explain that, as much as I miss you, I’m relieved you don’t have to see these unimaginable days?
In our family home in the north, there’s only half a bag of flour left. They guard it fearfully and try to make it last. The canned food is running out, and the struggle to find food is daily.
I can imagine your agony if you were calling us now, worrying that we are starving.
Many have starved to death, and thousands are lining up at charity kitchens and communal food stations. The crossings have been closed for over two months, with food, medicine, aid – all banned by Israel.
Mama, my tears defeat me often, my fear that this war will go on even longer without your prayers, your constant prayers for our safety and protection, which I say every day now.
Life is hard, and while some things can be endured, war without a mother’s prayers seems especially unbearable.
Mama, I went to our family home in the north. The whole house was burned, shattered – except your room, your clothes, your things.
We gathered them and keep them like treasures that still carry your scent. We prioritise them in case, God forbid, we have to flee again.
Maram and her mother in the background with her sister Mayar and Maram’s daughter, Banias, in the foreground, in September 2021, two years after her mother’s diagnosis with pulmonary fibrosis]Maram Humaid/Al Jazeera]
Recently, I’ve been thinking about your last days in the ICU, how I struggled to stay on my feet, distracting myself with work.
But that was a false escape. This is the conclusion of a year of grief.
Illness, displacement, and loss in war
My mother passed away on May 7, 2024.
That morning, we woke up to images of tanks storming the Rafah border crossing as the Israeli assault on Rafah started. The one way out of Gaza was blocked, we were trapped.
Then, like a thunderbolt amid the darkness of that day, came the news of my mother’s death in Egypt, five months after her medical evacuation there.
We wept, for her and because we, like thousands of others, were paying the price for simply existing in this besieged land.
We were denied a final farewell to the one we loved. Denied a funeral, denied burial, denied condolences. All we could do was weep and pray.
My mother suffered from pulmonary fibrosis, a severe respiratory illness. She needed an oxygen pump, an electric one, which meant any power outage was life-threatening.
Since October 7, it felt like we were living through multiple wars. Electricity was cut off at the start of the war, generators gradually stopped working, and the healthcare system was collapsing.
We moved her around in Gaza City, from our family home to my brother’s house, then to my aunt’s.
Regardless of relentless Israeli strikes, she needed the same thing: a place on the ground floor and a reliable power source, like solar panels. But just as she settled, Israeli orders would come, expelling people to the south.
So we went to my grandfather’s house in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza. We teased my father that he had made a “strategic” decision marrying someone from the south – otherwise, our displacement would’ve been even harder.
But the bombs followed us. An expulsion order was issued for a house next to my uncle’s and we ran, carrying the oxygen tank and propping my mother up.
The crises came one after another: contaminated water that hurt her kidneys, a shortage of gas to cook for her, medicines running out, then we ran out of electricity for her oxygen pump.
She would struggle through nights when the electricity was out, trying to breathe until the sun rose and the solar panels could work.
The oxygen tank became my brother’s and my daily companion – we took it to Al-Aqsa Hospital to refill until the hospital announced it had no fuel and could no longer operate its oxygen stations.
The only solution was for Mama to leave Gaza through the patient travel lists – any way possible.
Mayar in the ambulance with her mother]Maram Humaid/Al Jazeera]
We did everything to get her name on the list, with my sister Mayar as her companion, and miraculously, it worked and she left on December 6, 2023 – in an ambulance with a permit to cross the border.
I said goodbye to my mother, and that was the last time I saw her. I cried that day, as the ambulance drove away, worrying it might be the last time.
We didn’t realise that illness wasn’t her greatest enemy – it was the fear and psychological torment caused by the war.
In every call after she reached Egypt, her face and voice were pale and shaky, the result of countless failed attempts to reach us due to network outages that lasted days.
We tried to tell her not to worry, that we were alive.
But asking a mother to ignore her overwhelming fear for her children and grandchildren living through genocide is impossible. She spent her days glued to the news, grilling my sister for news, especially about Deir el-Balah.
For her, I would sneak up to the hospital’s roof to get some network on my eSIM, hide behind water barrels near the dangerous eastern border, and message my sister: “We’re OK. Tell Mama we’re OK”.
And her voice would come back like a lifeline to a drowning soul, thanking God and begging us to be careful.
She would tell me not to go to the hospital, not to put myself in danger.
We walked long distances to connect to the internet near a hill by the sea, moving left and right to catch a signal just to send the same message: “We’re OK, Mama. Don’t worry”.
We’d send her pictures, and when the signal was strong enough, we did voice calls.
But the world around my mother in Egypt moved in one direction, while she moved in another – her heart, mind, and soul still here with us.
Survival drenched in fear
It wasn’t the illness that killed my mother, it was heartbreak, distance, and worry that exhausted her and stole her will to live.
My mother died with only one wish in her heart: That the war would end, and she would see us again, alive and safe. But death was nearer than that impossible wish.
Mama, in a few months, the war will enter its second year, and it only grows more brutal.
The days have become heavier in your absence.
Every day I stood before the bodies of victims at the hospital, watching people break down at the news of their loved ones ‘ deaths. I watched their tears, their screams, their final goodbyes.
Relatives of Palestinian child Hasan Munir Hamad, who was killed by the Israeli army when it attacked Beit Hanoon, carry his shrouded body for burial in Jabalia on May 6, 2025]Ramez Habboub/Anadolu Agency]
Sometimes, I envied them, they at least got to say goodbye, as my heart wept for them and with them.
Mama, we, the tormented in this land, are in a free-for-all festival of death.
Yesterday, Mama, they bombed a school full of displaced people. In a moment, they killed more than 30 people.
The world has grown used to our mass deaths on live broadcast. But who said we’ve gotten used to it?
Mama, there is no rest, not these days, and not in those to come.
How can we continue living when we are dying slowly? The only thing that comforts us is that those who have gone are finally at peace.
