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Factories across Bangladesh, the world's second-largest clothes supplier, have turned off fans and coolers due to energy cuts caused by the Iran conflict, with workers sweltering and a drop in productivity likely costing billions of
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Isabel DeBre, Associated PressBolivia's President Rodrigo Paz faces a deepening crisis as widespread protests and blockades leave the political capital under siege less than six months after he took office. Two weeks of road closures
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When Viktor Sevidov looked up to the sky above Ukraine's war-scarred landscape, he was not watching out for incoming missiles or drones. Instead, he was looking for birds. "There's a jay ... That's a bluethroat
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Chennai Super Kings (CSK), lost an important match against Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH), on Monday, in a nail biting finish. Cricket fans desperately wanted CSK to win the match to stay in the competition, but SRH
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The son of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said Fatah would prioritise Gaza and return it "to the fold of Palestinian legitimacy", the day after being elected to the movement's top decision-making body. Fatah's first congress in a decade came as the Palestinian movement faces existential challenges in the wake of the devastating Gaza war.Veteran Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, 90, was re-elected as head of the movement, with his 64-year-old son Yasser Abbas securing a place on its central committee. In his first remarks since his election, Yasser Abbas said he would focus on "Gaza first, prisoners and the families of martyrs, and the refugee camps.""We will work to return Gaza to the fold of Palestinian legitimacy," he told journalists in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. Fatah has historically been the dominant force within the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the sole representative of the Palestinian people in international forums. It groups most Palestinian factions but excludes movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad."Achieving full national unity requires agreement to all the conditions for joining the Palestine Liberation Organisation in all its provisions: one law, one state, one legitimate weapon, and recognition that the organisation is the sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people, Yasser Abbas said. "Whoever accepts that is welcome."In recent decades, Fatah's popularity and influence have dwindled amid internal divisions and growing public frustration over the stagnation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The sense of disappointment led to a surge in support for rival Hamas, which won the last legislative elections held in 2006, before going on to expel Fatah from the Gaza Strip after a bout of factional fighting.Under US President Donald Trump's Gaza peace plan, Hamas is to play no role in the future governance of the territory. It also demands sweeping reforms of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority as a condition for it to play any meaningful role in post-war Gaza. On Monday, the Fatah congress announced the official preliminary results of the elections for its central committee and the revolutionary council, the party's parliament. A closing statement read out on Monday said that: "there is no state without Gaza, and no state in Gaza"."Any international administrative arrangement must preserve the ceasefire, end the occupation, ensure the flow of aid, and begin recovery and reconstruction, all clearly linked to the Palestinian government, which must be enabled to exercise all its responsibilities in Gaza," it added.
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Lebanon has a talent for debating the architecture of its future while the foundations crumble beneath it. For two years, the most urgent conversation in Lebanese political circles — in Beirut salons, diaspora forums, and the offices of international mediators — has centred on a question of constitutional design: Should Leba non restructure itself as a federal state, granting its communities formal governing sovereignty? Or should it rebuild as a reformed unitary republic, concentrating authority at the centre and delivering it, this time, with competence and accountability? It is a genuine question. But the way it is being asked is wrong, and the frame in which it is being conducted is worse. The federal-versus-unitary debate is almost invariably a sectarian debate wearing constitutional clothes. Federalism’s advocates are communities that want to govern themselves because they no longer trust the state to govern them fairly. The unitary state’s defenders fear federalism as a prelude to partition, or a mechanism for rivals to entrench territorial control behind a constitutional warrant. Both sides are having a real argument. But it is the wrong argument. The wrong argument produces the wrong diagnosis. Lebanon’s crisis is not, at its root, a crisis of sectarian incompatibility. It is a crisis of institutional collapse — what Émile Durkheim called “anomie”: the condition that arises when the normative frameworks holding a society together break down faster than new ones can be built. Lebanon is not a country whose communities cannot coexist. It is one whose institutions have so thoroughly failed that citizens have retreated to communal solidarity as the only available social insurance. The sect did not destroy the state. The state’s failure made the sect indispensable. This distinction matters enormously. If Lebanon’s problem is sectarian incompatibility, the solutions are communal: redraw the boundaries, renegotiate power-sharing, allocate sovereignty by identity group. These are the solutions currently on offer, and they have a long record of failure. If the problem is institutional collapse, the solutions are civic and administrative: rebuild the courts, the civil service, the fiscal architecture, the rule of law. That is a harder project. It is also the right one. Lebanon’s confessional system was not an indigenous tradition; it was a French Mandate administrative tool, designed to make a diverse population legible to a colonial authority. What its founders did at independence was nationalise that tool — converting a mechanism of foreign control into the operating system of self-governance. The National Pact allocated the highest offices of the republic on a confessional basis calibrated to a 1932 census that has never been updated. The country’s population has quadrupled since. Its citizens are more educated, more urbanised, and more furious at an arrangement that has delivered only economic ruin. The scaffold meant to be temporary became the building. Into this structure came external shocks a functional state might have managed and Lebanon’s dysfunctional one could not: the Palestinian presence and the wars it brought; Syrian tutelage that systematically prevented Lebanese institutions from developing autonomous capacity; Hezbollah, which arose precisely in the space the state had vacated in the south, and which understood that schools, hospitals, and roads were the most effective instruments of political loyalty. Each exploited vacuums they did not create. The Lebanese state did — through neglect, corruption, and the chronic inability to reform an arrangement from which its political class profited. Against this background, the case for federalism deserves a sober rather than ideological assessment. Decisions made closer to communities are more responsive to local needs; local governments are, in principle, more accountable. But federalism’s benefits are conditional — they materialise only when functioning sub-national institutions exist to exercise devolved authority. In Lebanon today, constitutional federalisation would more likely entrench existing sectarian power structures behind federal sovereignty than dismantle them. The regional strongmen become governors. The patronage networks become administrative systems. The dysfunction acquires a constitution. There is a better path that does not require resolving the federal question first. The substantive goals behind the federalism argument — local accountability, community control over services, protection from arbitrary central interference — are achievable through administrative and fiscal decentralisation within a reformed unitary framework: elected regional councils with guaranteed funding and genuine authority over service delivery; municipal governments with real budgets and direct democratic accountability; a constitutional court with the independence to protect local governance from central override. These describe the normal operation of functional states — achievable without a constitutional convention and without crystallising Lebanon’s confessional map into permanent federal units. What makes this urgent is Lebanon’s human capital catastrophe. The diaspora — 15mn people, three times the resident population — is one of the developing world’s most extraordinary concentrations of global talent. Diaspora Lebanese who consider returning or investing ask a single question: is there a functioning legal system? The answer depends on governance quality — not constitutional architecture — and reads the same whether the state is federal or unitary. The October 2019 uprising offered a lesson the political class has not absorbed. For weeks, Lebanese citizens from every confessional community stood in the same squares, chanting the same slogans, demanding the same thing: a state that works. That solidarity was not an aberration. It showed what Lebanese civic identity looks like when people have an institutional space in which to express it. The uprising failed not because Lebanese citizens are incapable of transcending sectarian politics, but because no institutional mechanisms existed to convert civic energy into governing authority. Lebanon’s choice is not between a federal and a unitary state. Those are second-order questions about how authority is distributed within a functioning republic. The first-order question — the one that must be answered before any constitutional architecture makes sense — is whether Lebanon will build a real state at all: courts that enforce the law against the powerful and powerless alike; a civil service recruited on merit; a fiscal framework transparent and not subordinated to the financing needs of political patrons. A real state or a simulation of one: that is Lebanon’s actual choice, and no constitutional formula can make it on Lebanon’s behalf. Jamil K Mroue is a Lebanese writer and former editor of Al-Hayat in London and The Daily Star in Beirut.
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In recent years, Gulf states have worked hard to turn their home region into a hub for digital innovation and investment in AI, cloud computing and clean-tech. The region has also established itself as one of the world’s fastest-growing destinations for the data centres and other types of digital infrastructure. This makes it a useful and timely exercise to consider how smaller state actors in other parts of the world have undertaken similar projects to become important tech players on the international stage. Two excellent examples are Ireland and Singapore. Neither has access to the energy resources of the Gulf states. But like smaller states in the Gulf they are acutely aware of both the limitations and opportunities of their smallness. Since the early 2000s, decision-makers in Ireland and Singapore have prioritised their tech sectors as a way to overcome the limits of their small domestic economies and populations to build capacity and diversify their economies. In doing so, both states have leveraged geographic location — Ireland between the US, UK and Europe; Singapore between the Straits of Malacca and South China Sea. They have also championed economic openeness, and built tech-savvy educated workforces that attract talent from all over the world. These moves have been supported by new regulatory frameworks, special economic zones, and cross-border agreements to maintain competitive advantage. In economic terms, the results have been impressive. Ireland serves as the European base for 16 of the top 20 global tech companies. The tech sector accounts for around $50bn annually, over 13% of the country’s GDP, and employs roughly 120,000 workers. For Singapore the numbers are even bigger. With a total of S$128.1bn value-added, tech accounts for 18.6% of GDP and employs 214,000 workers. This tech success has not only increased economic competitiveness, efficiency, and resilience. It has also resulted in the routing of global flows of information as well as capital through both countries. Singapore has more data cables landing on its territory than any other country in Southeast Asia. Three-quarters of all cables in the northern hemisphere pass through or near Irish waters, and four transatlantic cables directly connect with Ireland. This has significant geopolitical as well as economic implications. Not least, it makes the subsea infrastructures of Ireland and Singapore strategically important components of the international security system. This has enabled both countries to extend their political, as well as economic, reach beyond existing territorial and physical limitations. In turn, this has helped them offset some of the political vulnerabilities of smallness. But tech success also raises important challenges related to energy security, environmental management and tech geopolitics. The energy demands of building a state-of-the-art digital infrastrucure are massive. A single hyperscale facility can require the same amount of energy as a small town. Tech infrastructure also takes up large amounts of other vital resources including water. It also monopolises the use of precious space, a real concern in small states. The energy resources and financial power of the Gulf states position them well to address the energy security and environmental challenges associated with tech-leadership. But even in the Gulf, the building of a cutting edge digital infrastructure requires hard financial choices and the commitment of large amounts of energy. It also requires next-generation cooling systems that operate efficiently in hot weather. On the geopolitical level, the roles of Ireland and Singapore as regional gateways for the flow of data has located both countries at the centre of US-Chinese technology rivalry. It has also entangled them in tech geopolitics and governance issues relating to the control and use of data. The experiences of both Ireland and Singapore in becoming tech strongholds offers some guidance for other state actors, including Gulf states, on all of these issues. First, their tech journeys demonstrate the importance of social and human capital, innovation, learning and adaptation for attracting high levels of inward investment and diversification into tech. The messae is clear. Even in a world of de-globalisation and resource nationalism, smaller actors that effectively use their national development plans to establish themsevles as innovative ‘hubs’ and ‘gateways’ will attract significant tech opprotunties. Both cases also highlight the close connection between trans-formative tech and US-China great power competition. Ireland and Singapore have had some success in navigating this challenge. In particular, they have presented themselves as neutral third parties that are ‘neither pro-China nor pro-America,’ as the Singaporean government put it in 2024. For example, Ireland has repeatedly used the courts to block US access to Irish data centres and has fined Meta over data transfers to the US. Attracted by Ireland’s reputation for strict data protection laws and keen to counter claims of Chinese state surveillance, TikTok’s ‘Project Clover’ relocated its European user data to an Irish centre. Singapore has not only eagerly signed agreements with both the US and China on cooperation in the fields of data analytics and AI. It has also developed a legal regime for tech that takes into account Chinese protectionism and US surveillance, as a way to attract major tech firms from both countries. Such strategies have enabled Ireland and Singapore to present themselves as tech gatekeepers as well as gateways. This adds to their influence in regional affairs and their reputation and standing on the international stage. This could not be more relevant for smaller states in the highly contested Gulf region. China and the US already use technology in the Gulf as a form of statecraft. It is inevitable that going forward both great powers and ambitious regional players will look to use the emerging tech eco-system to shape regional geopolitics and security in their favour. For all these reasons, the cases of Ireland and Singapore provide valuable lessons for the Gulf states in their transition from buyers to suppliers of technology and key players in the global tech revolution. The writer is Professor of International Politics and Director of the Small States and Energy Studies Programs at Georgetown University. @RoryDavidMiller
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Whatever comradeship and fraternal fealty remain within Labour, the debate that has suddenly ignited in the party about Britain rejoining the European Union is hardly helping it.Two men who actually agree on that eventual goal,
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Dr. Jaya Jacob M. & Ms. Haritha GirishThe forty-day Mideast conflict that erupted in early 2026 subjected the United Arab Emirates to an unprecedented combination of direct military threat, regional economic disruption, and intense international
