Category World News

DNA evidence links the suspect in the assassination of conservative American activist Charlie Kirk last week to the scene of the crime, the director of the FBI has said.

DNA from a towel and a screwdriver recovered from the crime scene both match Tyler Robinson, FBI Director Kash Patel said on Monday.

Robinson, 22, was arrested by police on Thursday after a 33-hour manhunt for the killer.

“I can report today that the DNA hits from the towel that was wrapped around the firearm and the DNA on the screwdriver are positively processed for the suspect in custody,” Patel said in an interview on Fox News’s Fox & Friends.

Patel said Robinson had also expressed his desire to “take out” Kirk in a text exchange with another person, and had written a note detailing his plans to commit the crime.

Patel said the note had been destroyed, but investigators recovered forensic evidence of its existence at the home of Robinson and his romantic partner, who prosecutors have said has been cooperating in the investigation.

“We have evidence to show what was in that note, which is… basically saying… ‘I have the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I’m going to take it’,” he said.

Kirk, the CEO and cofounder of conservative youth activist organisation Turning Point USA and a close ally of US President Donald Trump, was shot dead last Wednesday during a speaking event at a university in Utah.

The killing of Kirk, a polarising figure who was lionised by conservatives and reviled by liberals, has provoked condemnation across the political spectrum, while drawing attention to deep political divisions in the United States and raising fears of further political violence.

The murder has also prompted calls for retribution among the political right, including from Trump, who has promised to use the power of the federal government to crack down on left-wing networks that he claims are driving violence.

On Monday, Trump said his administration was looking into bringing racketeering charges against left-wing groups believed to be funding agitators, and favoured designating the loose-knit antifascist group Antifa as domestic terrorists.

In an appearance as guest host of Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance threw his support behind a grassroots online campaign to get people who celebrated Kirk’s death fired, urging listeners to “call them out” and “call their employer”.

Numerous employees across the US have been fired or put on leave over their social media commentary about Kirk’s death, not all of whom celebrated or justified the assassination.

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said on Monday that she had been fired over her social media posts about Kirk.

In a column on Substack, Attiah said she had been terminated for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns”.

Attiah included a number of past posts about political violence in her column, only one of which mentioned Kirk specifically.

That post misquoted Kirk as saying that Black women “do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.”

Kirk’s actual comments specifically referred to the intelligence of four Black women, including former first lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Trump’s pledge to crack down on what he says is left-wing extremism has raised fears that his administration may seek to use Kirk’s murder as a pretext to stifle legitimate dissent.

Responding to a claim by Vance that “most of the lunatics” in US politics reside on the far-left, Democratic lawmaker Greg Casar accused the Trump administration of weaponising concerns about political violence against its opponents.

“He cannot be allowed to use the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to go after peaceful political opposition,” Casar, who represents a Texas district in the US House of Representatives, said in a statement.

High-profile acts of political violence have targeted figures on both the left and right of US politics in recent years.

They include the killing of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota in June, two assassination attempts on Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign, and a 2022 hammer attack on the husband of Democratic former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Experts say that politically motivated attacks and threats are on the rise in the US.

More than 250 incidents of threats and harassment against local officials were reported in the first half of 2025, a 9 percent increase from the previous year, according to the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University.

While little information has been released about Robinson’s suspected motive so far, Patel on Monday affirmed an earlier assertion by Utah Governor Spencer Cox that the suspect espoused left-wing views.

New Delhi, India — The rattle of iron gates sounded like drumbeats as the crowd surged forward. A sea of bodies stormed through the barricades, which had stood as sentinels of power barely hours ago.

The hallways of the house of the country’s leader echoed with the thunder of muddy footsteps. Some smashed windows and artefacts, others picked up luxury bedsheets or shoes.

The building and its plush interiors had been symbols of crushing authority, impenetrable and out of reach for the country’s teeming millions. Now, however, they briefly belonged to the people.

This was Nepal last week. It was also Sri Lanka in 2022, and Bangladesh in 2024.

As Nepal, a country of 30 million people sandwiched between India and China, now plots its future in ways alien to traditional electoral democracies, the spate of youth-led protest movements that have toppled governments one after the other in South Asia has also sparked a broader question: Is the world’s most densely populated region Ground Zero for Gen Z revolutions?

“It’s certainly very striking. There’s this kind of new politics of instability,” said Paul Staniland, an associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago, whose research focuses on political violence and international security in South Asia.

On Thursday, some 10,000 Nepali youth, including many in the diaspora, voted for an interim prime minister not through physical or electoral ballots, but through an online poll on Discord, a platform primarily used by gamers. Nepal, where three days of protests against corruption and nepotism turned violent, with a crackdown by security forces leading to the death of more than 70 people, has announced new elections in March.

But the protests, which forced Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli to resign days after he had mocked the Gen Z origins of the agitators, have already shown that in nation after nation in South Asia, increasingly frustrated young people are grabbing power and declaring themselves boss when they feel betrayed by political systems out of tune with their demands.

This is a dramatic shift for South Asia, a region that has long been home to major political protests, but rarely ones where regimes are overthrown, Staniland told Al Jazeera. “This is a very different kind of orientation from a world that has military coups, or the main form of political conflict is something else,” he added, referring to the ways political crises in the region have previously often played out.

Each of the protest movements – in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal – was rooted in specific histories and was triggered by events unique to that country. Yet, analysts say, there is a common thread that runs through the rage that exploded in these countries: a generation that is refusing to live with broken promises, and the factors driving them.

These movements, experts say, also appear to be learning from each other.

From Colombo to Dhaka to Kathmandu: The backdrop

The Gen-Z protests in Kathmandu kicked off after the government banned social media platforms, citing misuse and the failure of the platforms to register with regulators. But the grievances ran much deeper: inequality, corruption and nepotism were the major triggers for young people in a country where remittances sent home by Nepalis abroad represent a third of the nation’s economy.

Thousands of teenagers hit the streets, many still in school uniforms. More than 70 people were shot dead, and hundreds more were injured.

But the violence unleashed on protesters by security forces only aggravated the crisis. Some demonstrators torched the parliament, while others set the houses of other political parties, some leaders, and even Nepal’s largest media house on fire. Protesters also broke into Oli’s house, ransacking it.

Oli resigned a day later.

It was very different in Bangladesh in 2024. There, it began with a student-led campaign against discriminatory job quotas. But by the summer, after a series of police crackdowns on mostly peaceful protesters killed hundreds of civilians, the movement’s character shifted to a broad coalition demanding an end to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s long hardline government.

Protests had a loose leadership structure: student leaders issued ultimatums and lists of demands to the government, and opposition figures provided support. Everything Hanisa’s government did – from brutal assaults on student agitators to telecommunications blackouts – only aggravated the crisis. Ultimately, on August 5, 2024, the prime minister quit, escaping to close ally India by helicopter.

Two years before the upheaval in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka had its own moment. There, the protests were a response to an economic collapse as Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt. By March 2022, daily life had become dire: 12-hour power blackouts, miles-long queues for fuel and cooking gas, and inflation above 50 percent.

Sri Lanka’s “Aragalaya” movement, which stands for “The Struggle” in Sinhala, was born. Youth activists set up a protest camp they called “GotaGoGama” (“Gotta Go Village”), in front of Colombo’s Presidential Secretariat. It was a reference to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, whose family had governed the country for 15 of the previous 18 years. The site became a hub of rallies, art performances and speeches.

In mid-July, Rajapaksa fled the country after his residence was overrun by demonstrators.

‘Dissonance was too high’

To Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, the overthrow of powerful governments by youth-led movements in the three countries has common foundations: unaddressed socioeconomic disparities and corruption by an entrenched political elite that left them disconnected from the challenges of younger generations.

Many in Gen Z have experienced two economic recessions in their lifetimes: in 2008-09 and then in the wake of COVID-19. Ganguly said that the generation had also two formative years in isolation, cut off from their peers physically, though those pandemic years also amplified their use of digital platforms to unprecedented levels.

All of this happened while they were increasingly being governed by leaders of their grandparents’ age. When these governments were toppled, Nepal’s Oli was 73, Bangladesh’s Hasina was 76, and Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa was 74.

“The youth in South Asia is not able to find anything to connect them to their political leaders,” said Ganguly. “The dissonance was too high.” And that sort of gap in discrepancies between their lives, and that of the politicians and their children, has driven the anger, she added.

This is the reason why protests against nepotism – which took the form of the #NepoKid social media trend in Indonesia, which has also witnessed mass agitations in recent weeks – also resonated in Nepal, say experts.

The most common theme between the youth-led movements in South Asia, said Staniland, was the ability to imagine a better political and economic future, and see the gap between what they aspire to, and the reality.

“Their strengths are these forward-looking set of desires and grievances, and a sense of connection,” Staniland told Al Jazeera.

These countries also have overlapping demographic factors: Nearly 50 percent of the population in all three countries is below 28. Their per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is much lower than the global average, but the literacy rate is more than 70 percent.

Experts say that the socioeconomic emphasis of the movements, rather than one based on secessionist demands or grievances of any one minority, helped them appeal to wider audiences across their countries.

“When these governments are faced with protest, they don’t have that many levers to fall back on, especially amid an unequal [society] or slowing down of economic growth,” said Staniland.

Gen Z edge

Rumela Sen, faculty director of the master’s in international affairs programme at Columbia University, told Al Jazeera that if one looks beyond the visuals of rage emerging from these countries’ protests, “there is a very democratic, sincere aspiration for political inclusion, economic justice, and holding their elected representatives accountable”.

With a young demography, and both access and savvy when it comes to the internet, Sen said, South Asia’s Gen Z has managed to leverage digital platforms “effortlessly for community, organisation and self-expression”.

Blocking internet access, or specific platforms, has only backfired on governments.

In Nepal, the Gen Z protesters just “did not want to un-see [the #NepoKids’] lavish lifestyles [and] foreign education that was built on the dead bodies of their future,” said Sen.

“There is something authentic about this generational framing – the moral outrage of the youth against a generation that is stealing their future,” she added .

“The slogans about fairness, future, jobs, combined with the tech savviness, are giving these movements an edge over the traditional elites.”

Are they learning from each other?

Jeevan Sharma, a political anthropologist on South Asia, who is currently in Kathmandu for research, said that these protest movements have learned from each other, as well as from other youth-led global protests, like in Indonesia and the Philippines.

“Nepali youth have been closely witnessing and following the movements in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh,” he said, adding that the Gen Z-led political movement has not appeared in isolation, but out of deep-seated disillusionment in the country’s political leadership.

Staniland agreed. “Certainly, these movements are watching and learning and being inspired by one another.”

Sen of Columbia University, whose research focuses on civil conflict and rebel governance in South Asia, said that the protest tactics used in Nepal and other regional countries – including hashtag campaigns on social media and decentralised organising – represent an emerging playbook of digital protest.

Israel has bombed and destroyed the tallest residential building in Gaza, the Al-Ghafri high-rise, as it launched a massive wave of strikes on Gaza City on Monday evening, forcing hundreds of thousands of residents to continue to flee the city.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, says Israel is using unconventional weapons to forcibly evict Palestinians from Gaza City, the largest urban centre in the enclave.

Israeli media source Channel 12 reported that “exceptionally intense air strikes” were concentrated in the city’s north and west, while the Palestinian Civil Defence said at least 50 multistorey buildings had been levelled in recent weeks as Israeli forces intensified attacks to seize the city.

Other neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. In Zeitoun, more than 1,500 homes and buildings have been destroyed since early August, leaving entire blocks with nothing left standing.

For the third day in a row, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz has posted videos of the attacks. “The terror tower… crashes into the sea off Gaza. Sinking the centres of terror and incitement,” he wrote on X. Katz offered no evidence for his claim that the residential tower was being used by Hamas.

Israel has repeatedly attacked residential areas, schools and hospitals during its 23 months of genocidal war.

Gaza’s Ministry of Health said that 51 Palestinians, including six-year-old twins, were killed in Gaza City in the past 24 hours.

Three journalists were also killed in separate Israeli strikes: reporter Mohammed al-Kouifi in the Nassr neighbourhood, photographer and broadcast engineer Ayman Haniyeh, and journalist Iman al-Zamili. These killings take the number of journalists and media workers killed in Israel’s war on Gaza to nearly 280. Media watchdogs say this war is the deadliest conflict for journalists.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed at least 64,905 Palestinians and wounded 164,926, with thousands more still buried under rubble.

‘Striking every area’

Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan in August to seize Gaza City, which has led to relentless bombardment, forcing residents south towards al-Mawasi.

Many Palestinians say they do not believe they will ever be allowed to return, and fear the journey itself.

“For more than three days, they have been hitting every school and emptying Shati camp [near north Gaza’s coast], striking every area. You cannot even move,” one resident told Al Jazeera.

“That is why I decided to leave with my family – my daughters and my wife – and head to Khan Younis. I don’t even have a tent. I only took a few things; I couldn’t take anything from my home.”

Being pushed into al-Mawasi, the area Israel has designated a “safe zone”, offers no safety as Israel continues to attack the site. The Health Ministry has also said the area lacks the “basic necessities of life, including water, food [and] health services”, and warned of “dangerous” disease outbreaks.

It added that displaced people are subjected to “direct targeting and killing both inside the camps and when attempting to leave them”, in violation of international law.

Israel continues to block aid

Israeli forces shot dead at least five Palestinians waiting for food assistance near al-Mawasi, according to the Nasser Medical Complex.

Meanwhile, the famine is deepening in the Strip. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared a famine in northern Gaza on August 22.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that out of the 17 humanitarian missions coordinated with Israel on Sunday, only four were permitted. A mission to deliver water tanks to the north was also denied entry.

Albanese, the UN special rapporteur, told Al Jazeera on Thursday that Israel must be held accountable.

“This is a genocide that could have never happened without the support and involvement of a number of actors,” she said, pointing to Israel’s allies and private sector partners.