Democrats Secure First Major Election Victories in Trump’s Second Term

November 5, 2025

Democrats win first major elections of second Trump term — Supporters celebrate after Zohran Mamdani is announced the winner

The Night New York Chose a New Chapter

There are nights in New York when the city seems to breathe as one organism — sirens fade. Neon blinks against winter fog. And in those hushes the future sometimes announces itself with a roar. On election night, a crowd packed into a small park by the subway, chanting and crying as if the city itself had learned to laugh for the first time in years.

Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old state legislator who until recently was a name only political junkies and neighborhood activists could place, emerged from that crowd as the victor in the New York mayoral race. The win — historic in more ways than one — makes him the first Muslim to lead the nation’s largest city and signals a generational handoff in urban politics.

The taste of victory

“This is our moment,” Mamdani told supporters under strings of lights, his voice hoarse from hours of applause. “New Yorkers taught me how to fight, and now we will teach the rest of the country how to rebuild.” That line, half vow and half promise, landed like a charge through a room that felt suspended between celebration and the seriousness of the task ahead.

Opponents called—and some still call—his platform radical. He campaigned on dramatic measures to ease an affordability crisis whose statistics are grim: roughly a million city households live in rent-regulated apartments that are nonetheless stretched thin by inflation and wage stagnation, and transit ridership is only slowly returning to pre-pandemic levels after years of service disruptions. His proposals — including a temporary freeze on rents for large swaths of the city and free buses for all riders — read to supporters like bold, necessary medicine; to critics, like political overreach.

Politics at the scale of a metropolis

In a race that at times looked like a pageant of national tensions, Mamdani faced a formidable and familiar opponent: Andrew Cuomo, the former state governor who ran as an independent after losing the Democratic primary. Cuomo’s name still carries weight in the city, and his campaign drew older voters who remember more stable fiscal eras. But the electorate that turned out in numbers — more than two million ballots in New York City, the most in a mayoral race since 1969 — was younger and more restless than many pundits expected.

“We voted for someone who looks like the city I ride the subway in,” said Maria Lopez, a 29-year-old teacher from Queens, wiping away tears as she spoke. “Who eats at the same bodegas as us. Who knows what it’s like to be priced out.” Her voice was the color of a generation deciding that lived experience mattered as much as letters after a name.

Immediate friction with the national stage

The victory will not be local in impact alone. Mamdani wasted little time signaling he intends to fight the federal government when necessary. “If the city that raised him can show how to beat the systems that let men like him rise, we will do it,” he said, framing New York not only as a municipal engine but as a national counterpoint to the sharp politics of the moment.

That exchange quickly escalated into the kind of showdown that makes Washington strategists salivate and local residents wary. The president’s allies hinted at withholding federal funds — a pressure tactic with real implications for a city that depends on Washington for disaster relief, transportation projects and social services. “If you elect someone who embraces extreme ideas, we will reconsider how your federal dollars are spent,” an administration official told reporters shortly after the results, underlining the fraught relationship between cities and a polarized federal government.

What the win means on the street

Walk through Jackson Heights and you hear Bengali and Spanish and the clatter of cups from late-night tea stalls. You smell cardamom and frying onions. The diversity of the city shows up in small, everyday ways — and also in the stakes of municipal policy. When Mamdani talks about universal childcare or tenant protections, he speaks to parents juggling multiple jobs and to seniors watching rents climb as fixed incomes lag.

“A young mayor means fresh energy, but it also means inexperience at the negotiation table,” said Dr. Evelyn Park, a professor of urban policy at a New York university. “The question is not whether the ideas are bold; it’s whether the city can translate them into durable, administratively feasible programs while defending itself from partisan attacks at the federal level.”

Policy pitch — and practical hurdles

Rent freeze proposal: aimed at nearly one million apartments; scope and legal durability remain debated among lawyers and housing activists.
Free city buses: a move to reduce commuter costs and traffic; budgetary offsets would need clarity, especially with potential federal funding cuts looming.
Universal childcare: a transformational goal that would require coordination with state and non-profit providers to scale quickly.

“We will pursue the most ambitious agenda to address the cost-of-living squeeze this city has seen since the mid-20th century,” Mamdani promised. The phrasing may read like campaign rhetoric, but the city’s affordability crisis is real: rental growth in some neighborhoods has outpaced wages for years, and transit costs bite into the budgets of working families.

Echoes across the states

New York’s election night was part of a broader tapestry. In neighboring states, Democrats also scored significant wins: in Virginia and New Jersey, congressional veterans turned governors-elect — figures who ran to the center and promised stability. Their victories offer a reminder that the Democratic coalition remains a patchwork: progressives winning in urban strongholds, moderates holding ground in suburbs and swing regions.

“Voters sent a message that local competence matters,” said a campaign veteran in Richmond who requested anonymity. “But they also showed patience for policy experimentation in places where cost-of-living pressures are most acute.”

California, turnout and the national mood

Meanwhile, in California, a sweeping move to redraw state electoral maps passed by a wide margin, a vote many Democrats framed as a defensive step against national gerrymandering trends. And across races, turnout surprised observers — with early returns in Virginia and New Jersey outpacing previous cycles, and a national approval metric showing 57% of Americans disapproving of the president’s performance, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. That unease with national leadership may be one of the engines driving increased local engagement.

Looking forward: questions the city must answer

How will a young, ideologically bold mayor manage the messy practicalities of running a metropolis? Can he protect an agenda that touches landlords, unions, commuters and federal agencies? Will the city survive, fiscally and politically, if federal assistance tightens?

Those are not rhetorical questions — they are the scaffolding of a four-year experiment being inaugurated tonight. New Yorkers are used to experiments. They are also used to failure, to resilience, to reinvention.

“Change is messy,” said Jamal Rivers, a 52-year-old MTA conductor. “But if this city believes in something, then it fights to make it work. That’s the New York I know.”

So, what do you believe the role of a city should be in a nation grappling with polarization, cost pressures, and demographic shifts? As New York writes its next chapter, the answers will not be tucked inside headlines. They will be argued in town halls, apartment lobbies, union halls, and on buses that — for the first time in memory — might be free to ride.

UPS Freight Plane Crash Leaves at Least Seven Dead, Eleven Injured

hanad

November 5, 2025

At least 7 dead, 11 injured in UPS cargo plane crash — Fire and smoke is pictured at the crash site near Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport in Kentucky

Night of Smoke and Silence: When a Cargo Flight Fell Back to Earth in Louisville

On a humid evening in Louisville, the skyline was cut by a column of black smoke that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

The blaze began just after 5:15pm local time when a UPS MD-11 freighter — a long-serving three‑engine workhorse, fueled for an eight‑and‑a‑half hour run to Honolulu — departed Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport and never climbed into the night. Video captured by residents and local media shows fire licking at one wing shortly after takeoff; moments later the aircraft descended sharply and erupted into flame as it hit an industrial strip adjacent to the airport.

By midnight the tally was grim: at least seven lives lost and 11 people hospitalized with injuries. Four of those killed were on the ground, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg confirmed at a late-night briefing, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear said officials expected the death toll to climb and that some survivors had suffered “very significant” injuries.

The scene on the ground

UPS Worldport, the sprawling air hub that anchors the city, was plunged into an uneasy, shocked silence. The facility is not only a piece of global logistics infrastructure; it is embedded in the fabric of Louisville. The company employs roughly 26,000 people in the region, and for many families in the city, UPS is not an abstract corporation but a neighbor, a first job, a source of steady overtime cash that pays for college tuition.

“This is a UPS town,” said Council member Betsy Ruhe, voice cracking with a blend of civic pride and dread. “My cousin’s a UPS pilot. My intern works the night shift to help pay for school. People are texting, calling — and not getting responses.”

Up and down the industrial corridor, firefighters battled spot fires, and the airport was shuttered through the night. Debris was strewn across two runways, and authorities issued a shelter‑in‑place order for locations within an 8km radius of the airport as a precaution.

What we know — and what investigators will look for

Federal investigators are on their way. The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched a team; the NTSB typically takes 12 to 24 months to complete a formal investigation and issue recommendations. The Federal Aviation Administration also confirmed the crash of “UPS Flight 2976” shortly after its departure.

One striking image from amateur footage and overhead sensors: a piece of the aircraft appearing to separate before the airplane struck the ground. Flightradar24 telemetry shows the MD‑11 climbed to about 175 feet and reached a speed of roughly 184 knots before making a sudden, sharp descent.

“It’s too big a fire for a normal, typical-engine fire,” said John Cox, a U.S. air safety expert and former pilot. “That airplane should have flown on two engines. So now we’ve got to look at what caused it not to fly.”

Investigators will be piecing together many threads: engine performance, fuel load, maintenance records for a 34‑year‑old airframe that began service with UPS in 2006, ground witness accounts, and video. Boeing — which inherited the MD‑11 when it merged with McDonnell Douglas and later discontinued the type — said it would provide technical support to the probe and expressed concern for all affected.

People, community, and grief

On the streets near the airport, people stood in the glow of emergency lights, wrapped in blankets, watching the sky. A maintenance worker who asked not to be named said he had spent decades in the shadow of the Worldport dome. “You know the planes. You see them every night. You never think about one of them not coming back,” he said. “This is personal. We’re a family that works here.”

Another neighbor, Maria Lopez, who runs a small bakery a few blocks from the industrial park, described a surreal, apocalyptic night. “The first sirens were like a bad dream,” she said. “We closed early and saw the smoke. It smelled like rubber and oil. My son is a UPS driver. I called him a hundred times.”

Local hospitals treated the wounded through the night; city officials worked to coordinate shelter and family reunification. “There are people who will not get answered texts,” Council member Ruhe warned — a blunt admission of the human toll locked into compressed hours of commuting and overnight shifts.

Why this matters beyond Louisville

When a cargo jet crashes near a major logistics hub the ripple effects are not merely local. UPS Worldport is a linchpin of global supply chains. Delays at a single hub can cascade into missed connections, delayed parcels, and higher costs for companies and consumers around the world. UPS itself issued a service alert warning that scheduled delivery times for airborne and international packages “may be affected” and said contingency plans were being enacted to route freight as conditions permit.

On a broader level, the crash raises questions about aging aircraft in freighter fleets, the maintenance protocols for converted passenger-to-freighter planes, and the readiness of cities that host large industrial aviation operations. The MD‑11 is no stranger to scrutiny; its design and operational history have been discussed in aviation circles for decades. The fact that an MD‑11 in service for nearly two generations of workers could be lost so catastrophically will trigger hard questions about risk tolerance and oversight.

What happens next — a short checklist

The NTSB will secure the wreckage, gather flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders, and interview witnesses and first responders.
UPS will coordinate with investigators, support the families of the crew and victims, and adjust routing for packages.
Local authorities will continue to assess damage to structures, airfield infrastructure, and environmental hazards from jet fuel and fires.
Community organizations will mobilize resources for displaced workers and trauma counseling; grief and recovery will be a months‑long process.

Questions to sit with

What does it mean for a city when the factories and hubs that provide livelihoods also carry risk? How do we balance the need for global connectivity with the safety of neighborhoods that live in the shadow of runways? And for families waiting for a text or a call — how do we rebuild confidence and provide comfort when information is slow and the truth is still being uncovered?

As investigators work to answer those questions, Louisville — a city that has long merged the grit of the blue‑collar Midwest with the warmth of Southern hospitality — is now gathering itself to mourn and to demand accountability. The MD‑11’s final descent has left charred earth and ruptured lives, but it has also revealed the delicate web of people behind every parcel, every overnight shipment, every midnight shift.

In the coming days, expect more details to emerge: official reports, crew manifests, maintenance logs. Expect an outpouring from a community that knows UPS not as a logo, but as a cluster of faces, families and routines. For now, neighbors share food, churches open rooms, and strangers stand under the same smoky sky, asking the same quiet question: how do we make sure this never happens again?

Wherever you are reading this — watching a package tracker update, or a newsfeed scroll past — pause for a moment. Think of the unseen linkages that bring goods across oceans and time zones, and of the people whose labor keeps the world running, sometimes through the darkest of nights.

EU nations clinch agreement on 2040 climate target

hanad

November 5, 2025

EU countries agree deal on 2040 climate target — EU officials have stressed the importance of the talks, which come ahead of the COP30 summit next week

Into the Small Hours: Europe’s 2040 Climate Gamble and What It Means for the World

Brussels at 3 a.m. has a peculiar hush. Streetlights hum, trams sigh, and negotiators — bleary-eyed, coffee in hand — shuffle from one closed-door room to another. That is where the European Union’s environment ministers have just stitched together a new climate pledge: a continent-wide commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040 compared with 1990 levels.

It reads on paper like a bold, almost cinematic turn: a region that once powered itself on coal and steel vowing to almost entirely decarbonize within two decades. But between the headline and the horizon lies a tangle of politics, markets, and livelihoods. The compromise struck in Brussels after an all-night session blends ambition with levers for flexibility — and sparks an urgent conversation about fairness, finance, and trust.

The deal, in plain language

The ministers approved the target by a weighted majority early this morning. Along the path to 2040 lies an intermediate aim: a collective emissions cut of between 66.25% and 72.5% by 2035. Those figures will be folded into each country’s Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement — the formal promises that nations take to the global climate negotiating table.

But there’s a twist. To account for differing national capacities and political realities, the agreement allows member states to outsource up to 5% of their reduction obligations to non-EU countries via international carbon credits. That mechanism will kick in from 2036, with a pilot program to test the waters between 2031 and 2035. Meanwhile, the European Commission secured a revision clause: it will periodically assess whether member states need additional flexibility, including the potential to expand the role of international credits.

A pause for ETS2

Another significant line in the agreement concerns the Emissions Trading System expansion — ETS2 — which was intended to cover buildings and road transport. Ministers agreed to delay the start of that scheme by one year; it was due in 2027 and will now begin in 2028. That extra time is meant to allow smoother implementation, but for climate campaigners it is a sting of frustration.

Voices from the corridor and the street

“We are trying to reconcile urgency with realism,” said one senior environment official as the first light touched the rooftops of Brussels. “A 90% target sends a signal that Europe is prepared to lead. But leadership also requires keeping the bloc together.”

Across the Place du Luxembourg, a café owner who has served late-night negotiators for years wiped a mug and offered a more human metric. “They came in two hours ago, tired and talking about numbers,” he said. “You can feel the weight of decisions — but people here want two things: a healthy planet and a paycheck.”

Farmers in eastern Europe — where coal and heavy industry have been lifelines — are watching closely. “We are not against cleaner air,” said Jacek, who farms near Katowice in Poland. “But if factories close and there is no plan for the workers, you create a social crisis. Ambition must be matched by a roadmap for jobs.”

From the climate science side, voices were cautiously supportive. “Raising the bar to 90% is meaningful if implemented properly,” said Dr. Maria Silva, a climate policy researcher. “But the devil is in the details: how are emissions counted, how credible are the credits, who verifies the offsets?”

Why the 90% matters — and why it might not be enough

When you zoom out, the EU’s new target is both a leap and an argument. Since the European Green Deal, the bloc has pursued increasingly ambitious goals — including a headline commitment to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 compared with 1990. Pledging 90% by 2040 accelerates that trajectory significantly.

Yet climate scientists caution that even large regional cuts must be evaluated in global context. Atmospheric CO2 does not respect borders. To avoid the worst-looking climate scenarios — those that bring rapid sea-level rise, intensified heatwaves, and ecosystem tipping points — worldwide emissions must fall dramatically this decade. Every region’s pledge helps, but the collective ambition and real-world implementation determine the outcome.

Offsets: a safety valve or a loophole?

The allowance for up to 5% outsourcing via international credits is the most controversial ingredient. Designed to provide breathing room to countries facing disproportionate transition costs, the crediting mechanism is also viewed with suspicion by many activists.

Supporters argue it could mobilize investment in green projects outside Europe and build global partnerships — for example, financing renewable energy or reforestation projects in countries that need finance and capacity.
Critics worry about double-counting, weak monitoring, and projects that don’t actually reduce emissions. “A credit must be a real reduction, additional and permanent,” said Dr. Silva. “Otherwise you’re just shifting responsibility.”

From Brussels to Brazil: a global theater

The EU plans to bring the 2040 target to the UN climate conference, COP30, in Brazil this week. How it lands there matters. Climate diplomacy is a theater of norms and trust: large emitters setting credible, verifiable targets can catalyze action elsewhere; but ambiguous or contingent pledges can fuel skepticism.

For nations in the Global South, the question will be whether Europe’s new target translates into enhanced financial and technological support. “If Europe asks developing countries to do more, it should also open its purse and its markets,” said Amina Ndlovu, an environmental campaigner from South Africa. “Ambition without support is a recipe for division.”

The human ledger: jobs, justice, and politics

Consider a worker in a German auto plant, a miner in Silesia, a bus driver in Lisbon. Each represents a line on the policy ledger that can be transformed into opportunity — or left as a casualty. The EU’s deal includes the beginnings of transitional thinking, but it must be followed by spending plans, retraining programs, and industrial strategies that create resilient communities.

“We cannot simply tell people to change overnight,” said an EU commissioner during the negotiations. “We must chart a path that is equitable and economically sensible.”

What should you be watching? Questions to keep in mind

As readers trying to make sense of this moment, here are a few areas to watch:

How national governments translate the EU-level targets into concrete policies and budgets — especially for coal-dependent regions.
The design and safeguards of the international crediting system — including transparency, verification, and avoidance of double-counting.
Whether the postponed ETS2 arrives with enough protections for low-income households and clear incentives for low-carbon urban transport and building retrofits.
How Europe’s pledge influences other major economies at COP30 — will it raise the bar or expose gaps?

A story of choices

The Brussels agreement is not an end — it’s a crossroads. It reflects a political calculus: push hard enough to lead on the global stage, but hold enough levers to keep a diverse union intact. For citizens, it’s an invitation to ask hard questions of their leaders and themselves. How much are we willing to invest now for a safer climate later? Who pays, and who benefits?

Standing outside the negotiating zone as dawn broke, an activist handed out flyers and brewed tea for weary reporters. “We’re out here for our children,” she said, looking at the long line of cyclists and trams humming into the city. “Targets are words until you turn them into homes that don’t flood, jobs that don’t vanish, and air our kids can breathe.”

That is the measure by which this deal — and any deal that follows — will be judged. Ambition can be a rallying cry, but it becomes justice only when it is matched by action, accountability, and solidarity that crosses borders.

Philippines Typhoon Death Toll Climbs Past 90 as Rescue Efforts Continue

hanad

November 5, 2025

Death toll from Philippines typhoon rises above 90 — A person walks beside damaged houses in the aftermath of Typhoon Kalmaegi

When Streets Became Rivers: Cebu After Typhoon Kalmaegi

There is a strange, persistent sound in the hours after a flood: the low, haunted scrape of debris rubbing against concrete, the high thin chatter of people counting what’s left, and the long, wet sigh of communities trying to figure out how to begin again.

In Cebu — an island province typically known for its bustling markets, bright festivals and the scent of roasted lechon on the evening air — those everyday noises were drowned out by a different kind of ruin. Overnight, arterial roads became waterways, entire shanties clung to their foundations like seaweed, and hulking shipping containers rode the current like driftwood. By morning, the death toll from Typhoon Kalmaegi had climbed above 90 nationwide, with the hardest blow landing on Cebu: at least 76 lives lost there, the provincial toll reported by local officials.

On the Ground in Liloan and Beyond

In Liloan, a coastal town within the greater Cebu City metro area, rescue teams scraped mud from doorways and lifted sodden mattresses from alleys that, just a day earlier, had been rivers. Rhon Ramos, a provincial spokesperson, confirmed that 35 bodies had been recovered in flooded parts of Liloan — a grim number that became a stubborn fact for families waiting at evacuation centers.

“I thought our barangay had seen everything,” said a woman who runs a tiny sari-sari store tucked under a corrugated roof. “At four in the morning the water came like a wall. I could hear the metal gates bending, and then everything went.” She held a waterlogged ledger. “Everything is gone.” Her voice curled between disbelief and a tired, practical fury.

Outside the evacuation center, a man in mud-splattered jeans loaded a small generator into the back of a pickup while his neighbor handed him a battered wooden box. “The river overflowed,” he said. “We live by the bank because it was cheap. Now where do we go?”

Provincial Governor Pamela Baricuatro, describing the scene as “unprecedented,” told reporters the storm’s water — more than the winds — was the killer this time. The admission captured a new fear among local leaders: urbanization and fragile riverbank settlements can turn routine storms into calamities.

Numbers That Tell a Story

Some figures help frame the scale of the emergency. In the 24 hours before Kalmaegi’s landfall, weather monitors recorded 183 millimeters of rain around Cebu City — well above the area’s monthly average of 131 millimeters, according to weather specialist Charmagne Varilla. Nearly 400,000 people were moved out of harm’s way in advance of the storm, a major logistical effort that likely saved many lives even as it underscored the vulnerability of dense coastal and riverside neighborhoods.

The Philippine military, mobilised to assist relief efforts, also suffered a tragic loss: a Super Huey helicopter on a relief sortie crashed on northern Mindanao, near the city of Butuan. Authorities later recovered the remains of six servicemembers. The Eastern Mindanao Command confirmed the helicopter was en route to support operations when it went down.

Voices from the Flood

“I’ve fished these waters my whole life,” said an elderly fisherman, pulling a bent net from a mucky pile. “This is the worst I’ve seen. The sea was angry, and it wasn’t just the sea — the rivers came out of their beds.” His hands trembled as he described the night, and he shook his head at the sight of a metal shipping container jammed awkwardly against a row of coconut trees.

A young volunteer from a local church, boots caked with mud, described the scale of humanitarian need: “People need dry clothes, baby formula, medicines for the old people. It is more than shelter — it’s the dignity that the flood washed away.”

Experts watching from Manila and abroad are reluctant to dismiss the fury of Kalmaegi as a standalone event. “We are seeing a pattern where storms intensify faster and dump more rain because ocean temperatures are higher,” said a climate scientist I spoke with, asking for anonymity to speak candidly about attribution. “A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. That increases the risk of these sudden, catastrophic floods in coastal, urban—and poorer—neighbourhoods.”

Not Just a Local Tragedy: A Global Pattern

Kalmaegi is part of a troubling trend. The Philippines averages about 20 tropical cyclones a year; this storm brought that yearly tally to the expected average, and meteorologists said another three to five systems could still form before the end of the season. In recent months the country has already grappled with other major storms, including Super Typhoon Ragasa in September.

Globally, scientists point to warmer seas and atmosphere as contributors to storms that are more intense and more moisture-rich. The result is straightforward but devastating: heavier downpours in a shorter time, compounded when communities live in flood-prone corridors that have been squeezed by rapid urban growth.

Immediate Needs and the Road to Recovery

On the ground, the priorities are painfully clear:

Search and rescue for the missing;
Medical care for injuries and prevention of waterborne disease;
Emergency shelter, dry clothing and food for displaced families;
Restoration of power, water and communication links.

Relief organizations are setting up temporary kitchens and medical tents. Local government units are creating lists of families who have lost their homes. Volunteers are coordinating with the military for debris clearance and distribution of aid supplies. Yet logistical bottlenecks and damaged roads make each step uphill.

What Does “Resilience” Really Mean Here?

When will rebuilding stop being a patchwork response and become a chance to design for a different future? That question hangs over Cebu as clearly as the soggy laundry lines strung between battered posts.

“Resilience cannot be just a word we use when the water recedes,” said an urban planner with experience in post-disaster reconstruction. “We need to look at zoning, at river management, at affordable housing away from floodways. We need community-centered planning that understands how people actually live.” She paused. “Otherwise, every storm will just reveal the same gaps.”

It’s a difficult conversation: relocate people who have lived by the river for generations? How to balance livelihoods tied to place against the safety of families? How to fund large-scale infrastructural change in a country where millions still live in poverty?

After the Waters, a Call to Reflection

As Cebu cleans its streets and tallies its losses, the human texture of the disaster refuses to be reduced to statistics. There are names behind each number: grandparents who kept their grandchildren safe at the cost of their own lives, shopkeepers whose tiny savings have been swept away, volunteers who will not sleep until the last displaced neighbor has a blanket.

What do we want our communities to look like after the next storm arrives? Who bears the cost when climate risk meets poverty? These are not questions for distant committees alone; they are urgent, local, and moral. They demand investment, political will and — perhaps most importantly — the involvement of the people who know their neighborhoods best.

For now, residents of Cebu and surrounding provinces are in the slow work of recovery: sorting, salvaging, consoling, and remembering. If there’s any comfort, it is in the long Filipino tradition of bayanihan — the spirit of communal help — which is visible now in the volunteers handing out warm bowls of soup, in neighbors ferrying elderly people to safety, and in strangers who have become temporary kin.

As you read this, consider how far-reaching the consequences of a single storm can be. If climate change is reshaping the way disasters unfold, then our responses must change too — fast, fairly, and with deep respect for the people who live with the consequences.

Police: Ten die in nursing home fire in Bosnia

hanad

November 5, 2025

Ten killed in Bosnia nursing home fire - police — Firefighters were deployed to the scene after a fire broke out in a nursing home in Tuzla, Bosnia

Flames in the Night: A Bosnian Nursing Home That Never Slept

On a cool evening in northeastern Bosnia, the ordinary rhythm of a care home was shattered by a sound no one wants to hear: a crack, a rush of smoke, then panicked voices. By the time dawn timidly eased over Tuzla the next morning, 10 residents lay dead and nearly 20 people — residents, staff, firefighters and police — were receiving treatment at the Tuzla University Clinical Centre. What began as a place of shelter and quiet routines turned into a scene of chaos and grief.

Witnesses in Pajamas

“I thought someone was dropping heavy dishes,” said one resident who escaped down the stairwell and asked to be named only as Jasna. “Then the whole corridor filled with smoke. We grabbed what we could — slippers, a blanket — and ran. On the upper floors there were people who couldn’t move. I could hear them coughing.” Her voice, hoarse from the night, trembled as she spoke about the helplessness of watching neighbours — some bed-bound — as flames licked through the building.

Local television footage showed a portion of the care home’s upper floor engulfed in orange light, embers drifting like strange, burning snow. Fire crews worked into the night, their helmets gleaming under searchlights, hoses snaking across the asphalt. Officials later said the blaze began on the seventh floor at about 8:45pm local time and was brought under control, but not before lives were lost.

First responders and survivors

“We did everything we could for those inside,” a firefighter on the scene told me, his soot-streaked face under a beanie, hands still shaking. “You always dread the worst in places like this: limited exits, mobility-impaired residents. It tests you.” The fire department has been credited with containing the blaze, yet containment came after a toll that will be felt for many months — and likely years — by a small community that knows one another’s birthdays and coffee habits.

The Human Geography of Loss

Tuzla, a city of salt pans and chimneys, is a place shaped by industrial labour and communal ties. In neighborhoods where people exchange home-brewed plum rakija and morning cups of thick Bosnian coffee across shared balconies, news like this lands hard. The nursing home was not a faceless institution; it was a mosaic of lives—former teachers, miners, mothers, fathers—each with stories that will now be recounted at funeral tables and memory gatherings.

“We are devastated,” said a small business owner who used to visit his father weekly at the home. “These were our elders. They taught us songs and recipes. What do you say at a wake when everything comes too soon?” His hands rested on a rusting storefront counter as he tried to collect himself. Around him, neighbours moved quietly, eyes rimmed in red.

Official Response and an Unfinished Investigation

Bosnia’s tripartite presidency acknowledged the tragedy, offering condolences to grieving families while government officials vowed a thorough probe. The prime minister called the event a “disaster of enormous proportions,” words that conveyed both grief and the weight of responsibility.

Police have said a full forensic investigation will proceed when conditions allow. That will focus on cause and, likely, the procedures in place for a residence with vulnerable people. Was there a working alarm system? Were evacuation routes adequate? Were staffing levels sufficient that night? These are not just bureaucratic questions — they are the ones families will want answered before they can find closure.

Questions that linger

How well-equipped are care homes in Bosnia and Herzegovina to prevent and respond to fires?
Are regulations for elder-care facilities enforced uniformly across regions?
What resources do emergency services have in smaller cities like Tuzla, and has regional funding kept pace with needs?

Behind the Headlines: Broader Fault Lines

Tragedies like this are not isolated. Globally, fires in residential care settings are particularly deadly because residents often have limited mobility and chronic health conditions that make rapid evacuation difficult. In countries with aging populations, the question is as much about infrastructure and investment as it is about compassion. Bosnia faces additional challenges: post-war infrastructure gaps, strained social services, and a healthcare system that often juggles emergencies with limited budgets.

“This is a wake-up call,” said an independent fire-safety consultant who reviewed the available information and spoke on condition of anonymity. “You need clear evacuation protocols, regular drills, up-to-date alarm systems, and training tailored to residents who cannot ambulate independently. Otherwise, the odds stack against them in a fire.” His voice was measured, but the urgency came through. “Prevention is cheaper and less painful than response.”

Small Rituals That Bind a City

Walk through Tuzla and you’ll see the everyday rituals that make loss communal. Shopkeepers sweep the same front steps they did last year; pensioners gather under plane trees to swap gossip and morning coffee; the old sevdalinka singers can still be heard at neighborhood cafés, a melodic reminder of resilience. These small acts — the shared cigarette behind a bakery, the habit of borrowing sugar — are now the social scaffolding that will support grieving families.

“We will remember them when we sit down to coffee,” said an elderly neighbour, smiling through tears. “When the next winter comes and we bring flatbread to each other, their names will be there. That’s how we keep them near.” There is a simple dignity in that: remembrance through routine.

What Comes Next?

The immediate priorities are clear — care for the injured, counselling for survivors and families, and a transparent investigation. But there is a longer arc to consider. Will this tragedy spur policy changes? Will funding shift to fortify vulnerable care facilities across Bosnia and Herzegovina? Will families be reassured that loved ones in institutional care are safe?

Readers far away might ask: why should the fire in a Tuzla nursing home matter to me? Perhaps because the questions it raises — about aging, dignity, and public responsibility — are global. Across continents, societies are grappling with how to honour older adults without placing them in peril. How we respond, here and now, says a lot about what we value.

Closing: A City Mourns, A Country Watches

In the days ahead, Tuzla will set out tables for condolences, the clergy will visit rooms where flowers gather, and neighbours will string lights as a small, human defiance against the dark. Investigators will take their time. Families will demand answers. And in the quiet hours, someone will make coffee for two, one cup for a person now gone, and one for memory.

What do we owe our elders? Is it enough to offer shelter if we cannot ensure safety? These are the questions this tragedy leaves us with — questions that linger long after the smoke clears.

Prime Minister’s Office Confirms Israel Received Remains of Gaza Hostage

hanad

November 5, 2025

Israel receives remains of Gaza hostage - PM office — A vehicle of the International Committee of the Red Cross is seen in Gaza City

A coffin, a convoy and a city that refuses to sleep: life at the margins of a fragile truce

When the Red Cross truck rolled up to the perimeter last week, there was a hush that felt more like waiting than relief. Men in army fatigues checked manifests. A small team from the Shin Bet clipped ribbon; a medic adjusted gloves. For families watching from across the barrier, the moment carried the complicated taste of closure and the unbearable salt of confirmation.

“You don’t get to think ‘closure’ in one breath,” said Miriam Adler, whose nephew remains listed as missing. “There is a story inside that casket, and for us the story keeps changing its ending.” Her voice trembled and steadied in the same sentence — a cadence familiar to anyone who has learned to live with grief that can be interrupted by bureaucracy, by politics, by the cadence of a ceasefire.

What happened — and what it reveals

Under the US-mediated ceasefire that began on 10 October, one of the most wrenching clauses was the return of all hostages, dead or alive. In recent days, Israeli authorities announced they had received the remains of a hostage via the Red Cross; Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine Al-Qassam Brigades, confirmed it had recovered a body in Shujaiya while excavating under the so-called “yellow line” that marks Israeli positions inside Gaza.

If confirmed, this would be the 21st deceased hostage handed over since the truce took effect. At the start of the agreement, Israeli tallies indicated Hamas held 48 hostages — 20 alive and 28 presumed dead. The living have since been released; the dead continue to be brought back piecemeal, a painful accounting that refuses neatness.

Voices from both sides

“We are working to complete the entire exchange process as soon as possible,” Hazem Qassem, a Hamas spokesman, told local media, acknowledging the practical difficulties: many bodies are entombed beneath collapsed buildings, sometimes weeks or months after strikes.

An official from Israel’s Prime Minister’s office was blunt: “Every returned life—or body—is a matter of national and moral urgency.” In a later statement the military said the remains had been transported to a forensic medical centre for identification, the next step in a procedure that blends science, dignity, and ritual.

Shujaiya: where excavations find more than concrete

The neighborhoods of Gaza carry stories the way old books wear fingerprints. In Shujaiya, piles of rubble are layered like sedimentary memory: apartment blocks, makeshift shops, a school with a partially intact mural. “We are digging for everyone,” said Ahmad al-Saleh, a local volunteer. “We find shoes, toys, a piece of a wedding dress — and sometimes, a person.” His hands are calloused from sifting through dust and metal; his voice has the calm of someone who has learned to compartmentalise trauma so that work can continue.

Search operations are slow, dangerous and painfully human. The militants say they need heavy machinery and more personnel to reach bodies under collapsed structures. Their critics accuse them of delaying returns for political leverage. The truth likely lies in both: a battlefield’s devastation complicates every administrative and humanitarian act.

Numbers that won’t let us look away

Statistical tallies are blunt instruments in a messy human story, yet they matter. Israeli officials attribute 1,200 deaths to the 7 October cross-border attack, and 251 people were taken hostage, according to Israeli figures. Palestinian health authorities in Gaza report the Israeli retaliatory campaign has killed more than 68,000 Palestinians; the figures diverge in methodology and meaning, but the arithmetic of loss is undeniable.

Since the truce, the United Nations’ World Food Programme says it has delivered food parcels to roughly one million people in Gaza, and aims to reach 1.6 million. Some 700,000 people now receive fresh bread daily thanks to WFP-supported bakeries. Yet, as Abeer Etefa, the WFP’s Middle East spokeswoman, warned in Geneva, “We are in a race to save lives.” The logistical obstacles — closed crossings, damaged roads, limited distribution points — mean that agency capacity is still only half of what’s needed.

The texture of scarcity

Walk through Khan Younis and you’ll see that aid is changing daily rhythms. Bakeries that once produced loaves in sleepy shifts now crank out round-the-clock bread for hundreds of thousands. “An apple costs what a kilo cost before the war,” said Nour Hammad, WFP’s spokeswoman in Gaza — a small sentence that collapses a lifetime of markets, kitchens, children’s lunches into a single, devastating price point.

Households are coping by reverting to staples: cereals, pulses, bread. Meat, eggs, fresh fruit — luxuries in a landscape where aid trucks are a lifeline and commercial supplies are often priced beyond reach. The limited crossings open — Kerem Shalom and Kissufim — mean that the north of Gaza remains especially vulnerable.

Small moments, large questions

In a makeshift clinic, a nurse named Fatima tied a scrap of cloth around a child’s arm like a tiny flag. “We do what we can,” she said. “We stitch, we feed, we listen. But sometimes the small things are not enough.” Her clinic is crowded, warm with the smell of antiseptic and the soft insistence of children’s breathing. Outside, a queue of people waits for parcels — a line that hints at dignity and dependence at once.

What does it mean when recovery requires not only ceasefires but cooperation from those who fought? What happens when humanitarian agencies plead for access and are met with silence about why northern crossings remain closed? These are not rhetorical questions for those living in Gaza and southern Israel; they are determiners of life and death.

Where to from here?

The exchange of bodies is painful work — forensic, diplomatic, ritual. Each returned person compels a country to mourn, and a community to reckon. Each day that aid does not reach vulnerable populations lengthens the shadow of the emergency.

For readers far from the border, this conflict asks us to hold two things at once: the urgency of immediate humanitarian needs, and the long shadow of geopolitical patterns that make ceasefires and aid corridors repeatedly necessary. What responsibilities do we carry as global citizens when aid deliveries are stalled, when families await the identification of loved ones, when bakeries become lifelines?

We can start by listening — not to headlines alone, but to the small, fierce voices on the ground: the medic, the volunteer, the mother who insists on naming a child even as a city is un-named by destruction. “We are not numbers,” Ahmad said as he sifted through rubble. “We are stories.” These stories are what remain when bullets and politics recede: messy, surviving, insistent. They are what must shape our response.

UN warns global temperatures set to exceed 1.5°C Paris target

hanad

November 5, 2025

World will overshoot 1.5C temperature rise goal, UN says — The UN says the world is facing warming of around 2.5C

A planet nudging past a line we promised to keep

On a muggy morning in Belém, the river smells like wet wood and citrus. Vendors at the market haggle over tucupi and tapioca while teenagers paint cardboard placards for the climate march. For all the rhythm and color of daily life, there is an undercurrent of unease: scientists say the global thermostat is about to tick over a limit that once felt, politically and morally, untouchable.

Last week’s United Nations Environment Programme Emissions Gap report reads like a ledger of promises postponed. The stark conclusion — the world has effectively missed its primary 1.5°C target under the 2015 Paris Agreement and will likely exceed it within the next decade — landed on laptops and newsfeeds with the thud of a wake-up call.

“This will be difficult to reverse,” the UN said. “It would require faster and bigger additional reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to minimize overshoot.” Anne Olhoff, the report’s lead author, put it in plain language: deep cuts now could delay the overshoot, “but we can no longer totally avoid it.”

Numbers that don’t lie (and won’t be ignored)

Concrete figures sharpen the picture. Governments’ current pledges — if fully implemented — still steer the globe toward roughly 2.3–2.5°C of warming by century’s end. Under policies already on the books, the projection is worse: about 2.8°C. Carbon pollution rose again in 2024, increasing by 2.3% to an estimated 57.7 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent. Ten years after Paris, the world has made progress — a once-feared pathway toward 4°C warming has been narrowed — yet the remaining gap is still vast.

We should not treat these decimals as abstract. Each fraction of a degree translates into livelihoods, landscapes, and lives: at 1.5°C, at least 70% of coral reefs would be destroyed; at 2°C, that figure climbs toward 99%. Heat stress, drought intensity, and wildfire potential all climb nonlinearly. As the UN succinctly reminds us: every fraction matters.

From pledges to practice: promises on paper, emissions in the sky

It is tempting — and comforting — to pin hope on the announcements that made headlines this year. China, the world’s largest CO2 emitter, pledged in September to reduce emissions by 7–10% from their peak by 2035. Analysts note a pattern: Beijing often sets modest official targets and then exceeds them. Still, when you add up competing national ambitions, the sum still falls short.

“We are seeing some policy traction,” said Dr. Maya Alvarez, a climate policy analyst who has worked with governments in Latin America. “But traction is uneven. Energy transitions are racing ahead in parts of Europe and certain Asian economies, while coal plants are still being built and fossil fuel subsidies remain entrenched elsewhere. That disconnect is why the gap persists.”

Local voices in Belém echoed that mix of resolve and frustration. “We can see the river level changing in ways our grandparents never described,” said José Carvalho, a fisherman who depends on seasonal tides and predictable rains. “We hear promises on the news, but when the rain arrives too early or too late, the fish are gone. My son asks me if there will still be mangroves to play in. I don’t have a good answer.”

What COP30 has to wrestle with

All of this adds pressure to the upcoming COP30 summit, where diplomats, ministers, activists and business leaders will try to translate the gap into urgent action. Conversations will not be limited to emissions curves: they will include financing for adaptation and loss and damage; mechanisms for technology transfer; and the geopolitics of energy — who phases out fossil fuels, who accelerates renewables, and who pays for the transition.

“COP is the place where the political will should be forged into operational plans,” said Sindre Halvorsen, an energy transition advisor. “But willingness without finance is a species of rhetoric. Developing nations need predictable financing to protect their people now and to leapfrog dirty infrastructure.”

Human stories in a global ledger

Statistics are necessary; stories change minds. Consider the coral reefs of the Caribbean and the fishers who rely on them. An underwater scientist I spoke with on a recent field trip described reefs as cities of the ocean—bustling, fragile, irreplaceable. “At 1.5°C, we’ll still lose most of this neighborhood,” she said. “At 2°C, it’s essentially bulldozed. That’s not a slogan. It’s a way of life disappearing.”

Across the Sahel, pastoralists trace shifting grazing patterns; in Pacific atolls young families measure their days against saltwater intrusion. In cities, hospital emergency departments brace for more heat-related admissions each summer. The damage is not evenly distributed. Those least responsible for emissions often bear the worst of the consequences.

Choices ahead — and what they cost

Overshoot is not a sentence so much as a challenge. It opens a brutal math problem: either we accelerate emissions cuts harder and faster than history has shown we can, or we accept a period where temperatures exceed desired thresholds and invest heavily in adaptation and carbon removal technologies to pull them back down later.

Both paths have costs. Faster decarbonization requires political courage: eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels, upgrading grids, retrofitting buildings, and rapidly scaling renewables and storage. Overshoot-plus-removal bets on nascent technologies like large-scale carbon capture, bioenergy with carbon capture (BECCS), and enhanced weathering — all costly and unproven at the scale required.

Short-term acceleration: immediate cuts, faster renewables, demand reduction.
Managed overshoot: temporary overshoot followed by engineered removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.
Adaptation-heavy: accept higher temperatures and invest massively in resilience.

What can a single reader do?

It’s easy to feel small. But history shows that small actions, multiplied, can shift policy and markets. Pressure matters: voters, consumers, investors and activists together alter the economics of energy and the calculus of governments. Here are practical levers:

Demand accountability: ask candidates how they will fund rapid decarbonization and protect vulnerable communities.
Shift investments: support banks and funds that prioritize clean energy and divest from high-emission projects.
Adapt behavior where feasible: reduce waste, fly less, use public transit or electric mobility.
Support local adaptation: back community-led initiatives that protect coasts, rebuild wetlands and strengthen food systems.

How will we be remembered?

We stand at a pivot. The next decade will define how much of the planet’s richness is preserved for our children. Will we be the generation that turned grudging agreements into a global sprint? Or the one that told ourselves we tried and then watched the ledger tilt?

“The science doesn’t leave room for complacency,” Olhoff told reporters. “Delay makes the math steeper. It makes the political choices harder and the costs bigger.” The question the world — and you, as a reader — must wrestle with is simple and brutal: what price do we assign to patience?

In Belém the marchers gather, voices threading through the humid air: teachers, students, elders, fishermen, and doctors. They do not chant numbers; they chant futures. If the Emissions Gap report is a ledger of failures so far, let it also be a ledger of accountability, one that the world can still balance if we choose to act with speed, fairness, and imagination.

Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney Passes Away at 84

hanad

November 4, 2025

Former US vice president Dick Cheney dies aged 84 — Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice following the September 11th attacks (Pic: US National Archives)

A Quiet Life, A Stormy Legacy: Remembering Richard B. Cheney

Richard “Dick” Cheney died last night at 84, his family said, succumbing to complications of pneumonia and longstanding cardiac and vascular disease. The short statement that accompanied the news captured a private tenderness that often sat oddly beside the public ferocity of his years in power: “a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing.”

It is a final image that feels quintessentially Cheney — an angler’s calm, a family vignette — set against a public life that reshaped the American presidency and altered the course of the early 21st century.

From Plains to Power: The Making of a Vice President

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on January 30, 1941, Cheney’s life was a long arc from the wide skies of the American West to the narrow corridors of Washington. He moved to Wyoming as a child, worked with his hands on power lines and coal plants in his twenties, and returned to school at the University of Wyoming to finish degrees in political science. Even his return to politics had the feel of a Western tale — practical, stubborn, uncompromising.

“He had the plainspoken look of someone who’d spent winters in a wind and summers in a trout stream,” said a long-time neighbor from Jackson Hole. “But that didn’t make him any less formidable in a room.”

Cheney’s résumé reads like a map of modern Republican governance: congressional staffer, White House operative under Nixon and Ford, member of the House for a decade, Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush, CEO of Halliburton, and then — the decision that cemented his place in history — George W. Bush’s choice as running mate in 2000. He served as the 46th vice president from 2001 to 2009, guiding a vice-presidential office that many argue was transformed into a second center of power.

The Power of the Office

Cheney believed the presidency had been diminished after Watergate and made it a mission to rebuild executive strength. He assembled an inner national security team that often operated as a government within the government, a configuration that thrilled some allies and alarmed many critics.

“He wasn’t interested in ceremonial roles,” said a former administration official. “He wanted an engine. He wanted to run the engine.”

That engine revved fastest after September 11, 2001. In the months and years that followed, Cheney became one of the administration’s most ardent voices for preemption and for aggressive counterterrorism measures. His advocacy fed decisions that would reverberate across the globe and for generations of Americans.

Iraq, Intelligence and Controversy

Perhaps nothing illustrates Cheney’s imprint more starkly than the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He was an unrelenting advocate for war, arguing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a direct threat to the United States. History now records that the WMDs were not there; intelligence assessments that had been used to justify the invasion were later found to be flawed.

“He truly believed the intelligence he was given,” said an academic who has studied the era. “Even when the facts on the ground didn’t match the premises, he stayed resolute.”

The human cost of that conflict is measured in complex, contested numbers: more than 4,400 U.S. service members killed, thousands more wounded, and civilian toll estimates that range widely, with some studies suggesting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths from violence and the wider collapse of infrastructure.

Cheney’s tenure is also closely linked to a darker debate about methods. The administration authorized “enhanced interrogation techniques” — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions — measures that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and many international human-rights bodies later described as torture. Supporters said they were necessary for national security; opponents called them a moral and legal breach that damaged America’s standing in the world.

“We were at war and we did what we had to do,” Cheney told an interviewer years later. “History will judge.”

Industry, Influence and the Personal

Between stints in government, Cheney spent five years at Halliburton and left with a retirement package reported at roughly $35 million. Halliburton subsequently became a major contractor in Iraq, a fact critics seized on as proof of cronyism and tangled motives. Supporters countered that Cheney’s decisions were driven by national security concerns, not private gain.

Politics, however, was never divorced from the personal. Cheney’s family life — his long marriage to Lynne, his daughters Liz and Mary — often attracted as much attention as policy memos. Liz Cheney emerged as a hawkish Republican congresswoman, eventually breaking with her party’s dominant faction to oppose Donald Trump — a move that cost her politically but reinforced a public image of principled contrarianism.

“He taught us to reason from principle,” said Liz Cheney in a speech in the wake of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021. “Even if the price is high.”

That price was real. Her political fortunes suffered after she voted to impeach Trump, and the father-daughter alignment on certain issues — including Cheney’s later public denunciations of Trump’s threat to democratic norms — made their household a flashpoint in modern conservative politics.

Health, Humor and the Public Image

Cheney’s body had often betrayed him. He suffered his first heart attack at 37, battled chronic cardiac problems throughout his life, and in 2012 received a heart transplant. He became, in his later years, an unmistakable public figure: bald, blunt, frequently mocked by late-night comedians who compared him to Darth Vader — a comparison Cheney sometimes laughed off. Once, he even wore the villain’s mask on a talk-show stage as a piece of theatrical self-mockery.

“If people want to call me Darth Vader, that’s fine,” he quipped once. “I’ll take the dark suit.”

He had lighter infamy too: the hunting accident in 2006 when he accidentally shot his friend Harry Whittington — a story that became a staple of late-night jokes and political cartoons.

How Should We Remember Him?

There are two converging images in the obituary of Dick Cheney: the quiet fisherman who loved fly fishing and family dinners, and the hulking architect of a more muscular — and more controversial — executive power. Both are true, and both are inadequate on their own.

What do we do with leaders whose actions were consequential but deeply contested? How do societies balance national security and human rights, vigilance and restraint? These are not academic questions but living arguments that play out in parliaments and courtrooms, in veterans’ hospitals and in the surveillance of everyday life.

“He changed how people think about power in the presidency,” said a historian of American politics. “Whether that change is judged wise or ruinous depends on what you value most.”

As the global community takes measure of Cheney’s life and legacy, it is worth pausing not only to tally policies and casualties, but to remember the human contradictions: the man who loved his country and his grandchildren, who championed a robust defense and endorsed tactics others called torture, who could be tender about fly rods and merciless in meetings.

In the end, his family asked that memories be of courage, honor and kindness. The public will have its own ledger. For readers around the world — many of whom felt the reverberations of Washington’s decisions in their own streets — the question remains: how will history balance the private and the political, the creeks where he fished and the deserts where soldiers fought?

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