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Conservatism is in decline. True, it’s not dead — in 2025, a larger share of Americans described themselves as conservative (35%) than liberal (28%) — but this seven-point difference is the smallest Gallup has measured
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In a parking lot strewn with rubbish near Beirut’s Mediterranean coast, Hassan Yahya has taped a cardboard sign to a traffic signal pole beside the tarp tent that now serves as his home. “Kfar Kila welcomes you,” read the lines scrawled in thin pen. The flimsy board recalls a signpost that once stood dozens of miles away at the entrance of the centuries-old village of that name. Kfar Kila is one of about a dozen villages along Lebanon’s southern border that have been progressively flattened by waves of Israeli bombardment over the past two and a half years. Now, as Israeli forces move in with controlled detonations and bulldozers, the villages are being effectively erased, vibrant communities reduced to lifeless moonscapes. Like tens of thousands of other southerners, Yahya has watched his ancestral lands transformed into a “buffer zone” that Israel is clearing to secure its border. CULTURAL SPACEIn Lebanon, villages occupy a profound psychological and cultural space: centres of gravity where families converge from across the country and world, maintaining roots by investing in homes and forging communal ties to the rhythm of weddings, holidays and olive harvests. Practically everyone knows their family’s village - “day’a” in the local dialect - even if they left generations ago. The sudden disappearance of these settlements has cut hundreds of thousands adrift. “It’s like fish, if they leave the water, they die,” said 58-year-old Yahya, squatting on a plastic chair in his tent as a generator thrummed behind him. “We can’t leave. We die.” Israeli forces say Kfar Kila and other levelled villages are havens for Hezbollah, the political and military movement they have fought since October 7. The latest round of fighting, which broke out early last month when Hezbollah fired rockets at Israel in solidarity with its attacked ally Iran, has forced 1.2mn Lebanese people from their homes, about a fifth of the population. To reconstruct life in one of Lebanon’s vanished villages, Reuters spoke to five former residents of Kfar Kila now scattered across the country and used satellite images, social media posts, and photos and videos shared by them and others to see what has become of their communities. Some of the earliest mentions of Kfar Kila appear in the 10th-century travelogues of the Arab geographer Al-Maqdisi and later in the records of Ottoman tax collectors and colonial-era British surveyors. Before war erupted in 2023, about 5,500 people lived there, according to Kfar Kila mayor Hassan Sheet. Farming dominated life, the climate supporting crops from wheat and grapes to watermelons, tobacco, tomatoes, parsley, fava beans and olives. The village prized its olive oil, sold nationwide and drawing buyers from as far as Beirut, he added. Daily life revolved around bakeries, restaurants and cafes where residents gathered to play cards and trade gossip and jokes. During weddings, the community would come together for a week of feasting funded by gifts to the groom. On the day of Ashura, crowds thronged in the village centre, climbing onto rooftops to watch men in medieval dress reenact the Battle of Karbala. ‘IT ALL WENT UP IN SMOKE’Much of the two decades preceding the October 7, 2023, saw relative prosperity for Kfar Kila, Sheet said. Schools and clinics opened, literacy rose, roads to the city of Nabatieh and other nearby hubs expanded horizons. Expats sent money home from Europe, the Gulf and Africa. Yahya’s brother’s children, who lived in Sweden, built a house beside the Fatima Gate, a historic border crossing which became a local attraction as restaurants sprang up near a replica of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock and a graffiti-covered wall built by Israel along the frontier. Yahya himself built a three-storey house of cement and stone in the village, and installed an oven in the basement to serve pastries to friends. Within days of the attacks, though, Hezbollah launched a “war of support” firing missiles into Israel. The Israeli border town of Metula was particularly heavily hit, with hundreds of homes damaged or destroyed, according to Israeli media outlets. Israel responded with a ferocious air and ground campaign, concentrated heavily in the south. By January 2024, Kfar Kila was nearly empty, Sheet said. Hezbollah officials have repeatedly condemned the village demolitions and denied the group places military infrastructure in areas where civilians live. Its media office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the demolitions. Before the war, Hezbollah made no secret of its plans to invade northern Israel, even inviting reporters to observe its fighters simulate such an attack, and described its tunnel network as extensive. Soon after the conflict broke out, Yahya went north from Kfar Kila before ending up in Beirut. His neighbour and childhood friend, Kheder Hammoud, settled near the Syrian border. Grocery store owner Jameel Fawwaz, whose shop and home were destroyed, fled first to the southern town of Habbouch and later to a school in the coastal city of Sidon that sheltered hundreds of people who had lost their homes. “It all went up in smoke,” Fawwaz said, sitting by a wall at the school bearing dozens of paper signs put on display by displaced residents to remember the names of villages hit by the war, including Kfar Kila. IRAN WAR BRINGS FRESH PAINA ceasefire in November 2024 prompted some residents to return. But by then nearly 85% of buildings in Kfar Kila had been destroyed, Sheet said. Among them was the newly built home of Yahya’s extended family, completed just before the war. A few residents, including Hammoud, set up prefabricated homes near the ruins, hoping to rebuild. In February this year, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam visited Kfar Kila and promised impatient residents that reconstruction would start soon. Instead, war returned within a month. This time, Israeli forces used controlled demolitions and bulldozers. In one video, verified by Reuters and first posted on social media in late March, an earthmover can be seen moving on the western outskirts of the village. Reuters could not confirm who was operating the machine. By late April, Israeli forces had destroyed over 90% of homes in Kfar Kila, an Israeli military official told Reuters, requesting anonymity to discuss security matters. With little hope of returning soon, many former Kfar Kila residents now rely on sporadic calls to maintain ties. When someone dies, Yahya said, “We just pick up the phone. That’s it.” Marriages, if they happen at all, often take place without fanfare, Sheet said. Though Israel says the buffer zone is temporary, many Lebanese fear it will become permanent. The Golan Heights, captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, was annexed in 1981. The West Bank, captured from Jordan in the same war, is now home to hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers. One day this month, Hammoud drove his battered sedan from the northern mountains to the Beirut parking lot to visit Yahya. They paced together, Hammoud leaning on his late mother’s walking stick, one of the few items salvaged from his home, and recalling the days of their youth. “Everything in the old village has meaning and significance for us - the historic houses, our family’s homes, the homes of our ancestors,” he said. “These things are impossible to bring back.” Sheet, the mayor, echoed this as he sat in his uncle’s home in a village in the country’s central mountains, where he’d taken refuge. “There’s a spiritual connection, psychological connection, a connection with your roots - a very strong one. This is fundamental for Kfar Kila,” he said. “It’ll take time, for sure, but when we get back, we’ll rebuild.” He paused. “This isn’t just talk,” he said. “We’re going back.”
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This refers to the third hike in the price of commercial gas cylinders in our country. No doubt, every nation is forced to make hard choices to increase the fuel and gas cylinder tariff.After the
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The UAE national athletics team concluded their participation in the 21st Arab Youth Championships (Under-20) in Tunisia, with a total of 10 medals including five gold, one silver, and four bronze, in addition to several
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The US Supreme Court’s decision last week weakening a landmark voting rights law opens the door for Republican lawmakers to dismantle Democratic-held US House districts with majority Black or Latino populations across the South, potentially giving Republicans an electoral advantage for years to come. The ruling escalates a national battle over congressional maps that has raged since last year, when President Donald Trump launched an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting campaign to protect his Republicans’ narrow House majority in this November’s midterm elections. Typically, states only draw maps at the start of each decade to account for the US Census count. The decision severely weakens legal constraints that have historically forced state legislators to ensure voters of colour are not marginalised when drawing maps. It is likely to result in a fresh round of tit-for-tat redistricting that extends into the 2028 election. It remains to be seen whether statehouses will use the court’s ruling to try to install new electoral maps before November. Lawmakers have little time to do so. Most states are well into their 2026 election calendar, with filing deadlines for candidates already past and primary votes looming. In Georgia and Alabama, for instance, two states where Republican legislators might be expected to take advantage of the ruling by eliminating majority-Black districts, voters have begun casting early ballots ahead of their May 19 primary elections. Even in Louisiana, whose congressional map was struck down in the Supreme Court case, lawmakers face hurdles in passing new district lines. Candidates have been raising money and campaigning for months. The state has mailed absentee ballots and early voting begins on Saturday for the May 16 primary. In court filings, Louisiana’s top election official had asked the court to rule no later than early January to ensure enough time to administer the election. “It is very late in the cycle to make changes to maps,” said Danielle Lang, vice president for voting rights at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “It would be enormously disruptive and chaotic.” House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, told reporters it wasn’t clear whether lawmakers would try to draw a new map immediately. “We have, as you know, a primary coming up in about two weeks,” he said. “So we’ll see if the state legislature deems it appropriate to go in and draw new maps.” Even if states hold their fire until after the November election, Republicans appear poised to target as many as a dozen Democratic-held districts with a majority of Black or Latino voters ahead of the 2028 presidential election. Democrats could even respond by taking apart majority-minority districts in states they control, with the aim of spreading Black and Latino voters, who traditionally vote Democratic, across more districts. The result would be to dilute the voting power of racial minorities across the country by denying them the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice, advocates said. Janai Nelson, president of the Legal Defense Fund, who argued the case before the Supreme Court on behalf of Black voters in Louisiana, said it was too soon to tell whether states would try to redistrict immediately, but she noted that state lawmakers have “wide latitude” to change elections even in unprecedented ways. Either way, she said, the decision would upend decades of protections for voters of colour. “This is a day of infamy for the court,” she told reporters. “It is a day of devastation for our democracy.” The ruling adds fuel to a national redistricting war, which started last summer when Trump convinced Texas Republicans to draw a new map taking aim at five Democratic incumbents. Other states, both Republican- and Democratic-led, have followed suit. As it happens, Wednesday’s ruling arrived as Florida Republicans were debating a new partisan map, drawn by Governor Ron DeSantis, intended to flip four Democratic seats in November. The legislature approved the plan shortly thereafter. States are already permitted to draw maps for partisan advantage, a practice known as gerrymandering, thanks to a 2019 Supreme Court decision. “The court has just added more chaos to a system that’s already chaotic,” said Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. With Trump’s mid-cycle push and the Supreme Court’s latest ruling, the legal and institutional guardrails that once constrained redistricting may be giving way to a free-for-all, turning voters into “pawns in a set of political games instead of being the decision-makers themselves,” Lang said.
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The ousting this month of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in a landslide electoral defeat has generated a flood of commentary. Much of it has been about the implications for far-right populism in Europe. Others
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Stephanie Toliver, Tribune News ServiceWhen an active shooter threat disrupted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president and members of his Cabinet were evacuated swiftly and efficiently. The threat ended with a shooter apprehended and
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Rory Bremner, The IndependentI have ADHD. I know both the positives (energy, creativity) and the negatives (disorganisation, sensitivity) of what it is to be wired differently.That is why I’m standing with thousands of parents fighting
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Despite environmental concerns, some manufacturers are making bigger and bigger vehicles, especially work related ones, but is there a limit?A work vehicle I saw recently wouldn't fit in a standard car park, too wide and
