by BASHIR MOHAMED CAATO & OSCAR RICKETT

The decision applies to all agreements and cooperation in the ports of Berbera, Bosaso and Kismayo

The Somali government cancelled all agreements with the United Arab Emirates on Monday, ejecting the Gulf power from military bases and major infrastructure as tensions in the Red Sea soar.

According to a senior Somali government source and a document seen by Middle East Eye, the move by the Mogadishu government includes all agreements with government agencies, related entities and regional administrations.

“This decision applies to all agreements and cooperation in the ports of Berbera, Bosaso, and Kismayo,” the document reads.

“The Council of Ministers has also terminated all existing agreements between the Federal Government of Somalia and the Government of the United Arab Emirates, including bilateral security and defence cooperation agreements,” it added.

“This decision is in response to reports and strong evidence of serious steps being taken to undermine the sovereignty, national unity, and political independence of the country.”

Many Somalis have already praised the government’s decision on social media, with the journalist Isahaq Elmi saying: “It’s a step in the right direction. Somalia has no worse enemy than the UAE.”

Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, president of Somalia between 2017 and 2022, also welcomed the decision. There was no immediate comment from the United Arab Emirates.

Khadar Hussein Abdi, a minister in the Somaliland government, posted on social media: “Somalia’s daydreaming changes nothing. Berbera is the birthplace of our president, and the UAE is a trusted friend of Somaliland. They invested in Berbera when others doubted us – today, everyone is talking about Berbera… The UAE is here to stay, no matter what a weak administration in Mogadishu says.”

On Monday, Middle East Eye reported that the UAE was removing its military from bases across Somalia including Bosaso, a city in the Puntland region that hosts an Emirati base from which supplies have been sent to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary in Sudan.

“Based on the information available to us, they have been evacuating their security personnel and military equipment to neighbouring Ethiopia,” a senior Somali official told MEE.

The administration of the Puntland region rejected the ruling of the Mogadishu government, calling it illegal.

Israel, the UAE and Somalia

Questions of Somali sovereignty and territorial integrity have become increasingly urgent in recent weeks, with the UAE and its regional ally Israel growing ever closer to Somaliland, a breakway region of Somalia that has its own government.

On 26 December, Israel became the first country in the world to formally recognise the sovereignty of Somaliland, where the strategically vital port city of Berbera, on the Gulf of Aden coast, is situated.

MEE for more

by LAURA M. MACLATCHY & LAUREN SARRINGHAUS

Adolescents are known for risky behavior, with teenagers in the U.S. more likely than younger children to die from injury. But what’s responsible for this uptick in risk-taking around puberty?

Our new observations of physical risk-taking in chimpanzees suggests that the rise in risk-taking in human adolescence isn’t due to a new yen for danger. Rather, a decrease in supervision gives teens more opportunities to take risks.

We study locomotion in chimpanzees, one of humans’ closest relatives. It’s difficult to study physical risk-taking in people because it is not ethical to put anyone in danger. Chimpanzees are good alternative study subjects, since wild chimps of all ages need to move through the trees, often at great heights.

While working with us, Bryce Murray, an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, noticed that some of the movements that chimpanzees perform in the trees are more dangerous than others.

Typically, chimpanzees climb or swing while keeping a secure grip on branches. However, they also leap across gaps and sometimes let go of a branch entirely, dropping down to another branch or the ground. Unfortunately, they don’t always nail the landing. Years of observations in the wild have shown that falls are a major source of injury and even death among chimpanzees.

After watching these behaviors in chimpanzees, Bryce began to wonder whether their physical risk-taking follows the same patterns we see in humans. Do chimpanzees start taking more risks – like leaping and dropping from branches – once they enter puberty? Since there is evidence that human males take more risks than females, although this varies across cultures, we also wondered whether male chimpanzees are bigger risk-takers than females.

The Conversation for more

by JESSICA GOULD

Some New York City teachers say it’s high time for a refresher on old-fashioned clocks.

Tiana Millen, an assistant principal at Cardozo High School in Queens, said this year’s ban on smartphones revealed that many teens struggle to read traditional clocks. “That’s a major skill that they’re not used to at all,” she said.

Overall, Millen said, the phone ban has been a major success at the school, and has helped kids focus in class and socialize at lunch. Foot traffic is moving more swiftly in hallways. Without eyes glued to their phones, more students are getting to class on time. The problem is they don’t know it, she said, “because they don’t know how to read the clocks.”

For years, parents and teachers have blamed technology for a range of lapsed skills — from legible handwriting to sustained attention to reading whole books — even as their proficiency with technology far outstrips their elders. Still, while educators have widely praised New York’s statewide smartphone ban that went into effect this fall, multiple teachers told Gothamist it has also laid bare an unexpected gap: How to tell time.

“The constant refrain is ‘Miss, what time is it?’ said Madi Mornhinweg, who teaches high school English in Manhattan. “It’s a source of frustration because everyone wants to know how many minutes are left in class. … It finally got to the point where we I started saying ‘Where’s the big hand and where’s the little hand?’”

According to the education department, students learn how to read clocks in first and second grade. “At NYCPS, we recognize how essential it is for our students to tell the time on both analog and digital clocks,” education department spokesperson Isla Gething said. “As our young people are growing up in an increasingly digital world, no traditional time-reading skills should be left behind.” Officials said kids are taught to master terms including “o’clock,” “half-past” and “quarter-to” in early elementary years.

After dismissal outside Midwood High School in Brooklyn, many students said they do know how to read wall clocks — but they have classmates who can’t.

“They just forgot that skill because they never used it, because they always pulled out their phone,” said Cheyenne Francis, 14.

“I know how to read a clock,” she added. ?”The only time I guess I would struggle is if the time is wrong on the clock. Because sometimes they don’t set the proper time.”

Several students said clocks in their school are often broken.

Farzona Yakuba, 15, said she can tell time the old-fashioned way, but she empathizes with classmates who struggle.

“I feel like I’m one of those students sometimes because I know how to read the clock if I really need to. But I feel like most students here, they just get lazy and they ask. And I feel like I do that a lot,” she said.

Gothamist for more

by TAJ HASHMI

Analyzing the contrasting leadership styles of Mujib and Yunus, particularly their ascension to power following the Bangladeshi revolutions of 1971 and 2024, will provide a deeper insight into the underlying issues at play. Although apples and oranges are unlikely to be compared, keeping in mind their differences, both fruits can be compared. The differences between 1971 and 2024 are significant in many aspects, including in Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Muhammad Yunus represent two distinct figures from different eras. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was a politician who became a national leader, while Muhammad Yunus is known as an NGO leader who later took on a governmental role and gained worldwide recognition as a Nobel Laureate and original thinker. Bangladesh has transformed from one of the poorest countries in the world to one that is likely to become a middle-income nation in the near future. With Yunus as the leader of the statecraft in the country, we can consider what the country went through before and after 1971 until the revolutionary changes of 2024 and beyond.

During the prolonged political crises in 1971 and 2024, Mujib and Yunus emerged as national leaders in Bangladesh. Mujib played a pivotal role in the political turmoil that ultimately led to the formation of Bangladesh following the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971. In contrast, Yunus stepped into the political spotlight during a different crisis, which culminated in the overthrow of the one-party Hasina dictatorship on August 5, 2024. While there was no evidence that Yunus played a role in Hasina’s overthrow, militant student protesters forced Sheikh Hasina, who was widely regarded as the most corrupt and brutal dictator since 1971, to welcome Yunus into the political arena as the Chief Advisor of the country, equivalent to the head of government. Mujib’s rise to political power was intentional, whereas Yunus assumed his role by default. The political vacuum that followed Hasina’s overthrow allowed Yunus to briefly lead an interim caretaker government tasked with organizing fresh elections and facilitating a transition to democracy. Mujib was a politician who championed complete autonomy (if not freedom) for East Bengal/East Pakistan in 1948 and again in 1971. In contrast, Yunus was celebrated as a Nobel Laureate and a pioneer of microcredit, a system credited with alleviating poverty in Bangladesh and beyond. While Mujib focused on political leadership, Yunus was previously an academic and NGO operator before becoming Bangladesh’s Chief Advisor in August 2024.

It’s crucial to provide a brief background on Bangladesh. We should explore the country’s prehistory, from the beginning of British colonial rule to the dismemberment of Pakistan in 1971. Understanding the dynamics of nationalism, religion, and the people’s political culture will allow for an objective comparison of Mujib and Yunus, along with their philosophies and the contexts in which they lived.

SAJ for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear Reader,

Béla Tarr died yesterday.

The Hungarian filmmaker, who made slowness an art form and silence a character, passed away on January 6, 2026, after a prolonged illness. He was 70. The European Film Academy announced his death, describing him as “an outstanding director and a personality with a strong political voice”. Those who have seen his work would add: a man who understood despair the way a doctor understands disease—intimately, diagnostically, without flinching.

Tarr was born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1955 and began making films at 16. His early work documented the poverty and spiritual exhaustion of post-communist Eastern Europe with an unflinching eye that earned him both admirers and enemies. The Hungarian authorities shuttered his Társulás Filmstúdió in 1985 for political reasons; Tarr never softened his anarchist convictions. His 1988 film Damnation premiered at Berlin and established his signature: controlled camera movements that seemed to breathe, compositions that made you conscious of time as a physical object, a weight.

And then came Sátántangó. The Satan’s Tango.

Seven and a half hours of monochrome devastation, adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s novel, depicting a dying Hungarian village whose inhabitants follow a charismatic figure returned, supposedly, from the dead. Those who sat through it came out with what film critic Peter Bradshaw called “a kind of filmic PTSD”—transformed, somehow, by the experience of watching people trudge through mud, drink themselves into oblivion, and surrender their agency to a con man promising salvation (sounds familiar?).

I watched Sátántangó a decade ago. The experience defies description. Tarr’s long takes—some lasting 10, 12, 15 minutes without a cut—forced a tectonic shift in how attention functioned in me. You stopped waiting for something to happen and began noticing what was already there: the texture of rain on stone, the particular quality of light in a bar where hope had gone to die, the way a human face in extended close-up reveals not personality but something closer to geology. The silences were structural, load-bearing. In them, you heard the film thinking.

Frontline for more

by AASIM SAJJAD AKHTAR

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters” — Antonio Gramsci

The more things change, the more they stay the same. China may have emerged as a power of global import, but America is still the world’s sheriff, and the Trump ad­­ministration wants everyone to know that.

The dust had barely settled on the audacious kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro that the Yankee propaganda machinery started fanning the flames of war on Iran. Imperialism abroad has been accompanied by Trump’s unleashing of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) goons on American streets with orders to literally shoot ‘suspects’ at sight.

The combination of bravado and terror portends more darkness ahead. But what is the end game?

There isn’t one. At a base level, Washington still just wants the oil, the lifeblood of the global capitalist order over which it has presided since the end of World War II. This order is creaking at the seams, but a better world system is not visible yet. Venezuela sits atop the biggest reserves of black gold in the world. Iran is number three on the list. US imperialism wants it all.

Then there is the other bedrock of the military-industrial complex — making war. In the face of China’s inexorable economic rise and partial erosion of dollar hegemony, US power is not what it was. But Washington possesses 10 times the means of destruction of any other single country. It still bombs and invades other countries at will, kidnaps heads of state in broad daylight.

The combination of bravado and terror portends more darkness.

Will military might and oil stave off America’s terminal economic decline? The answer depends on who monopolises the new global commodity on the block — critical minerals. Or maybe you prefer the term ‘rare earth’. Whatever your fancy, control over the rock equates to monopolies of renewable energy, electric vehicles, everyday smart technology, high-grade weapons systems and so much more.

Dawn for more

by HAMZA RAO

A Washington-based outfit is quietly spreading Modi’s Hindutva by weaponising lawsuits, lobbying, liberal discourse

As the political air around India is thick with the threat of increased minority persecution at home and murmurs that Delhi is turning rogue abroad, an unexpected frontline of Hindutva is taking shape thousands of miles away: the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a US-based organisation that has mastered the art of cloaking a majoritarian project in the language of American liberalism.

The HAF has emerged as one of Hindutva’s most diligent custodians on foreign soil, quietly and at times leaping at its critics’ throats to fortify its ideological frontiers and assert an Islamophobic narrative, often in alliance with the American far-right.

Its leadership and founding personnel trace roots to older Hindu-right organisations, some of which are linked to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), such as the Vedic Foundation (VF) and Hindu Education Foundation (HEF).

More recently, the organisation openly rebuked Western media outlets, including the New York Times, for “whitewashing” the Pahalgam attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir, calling them out for ignoring the “religious element” of the attack.

Suhag Shukla, executive director of the organisation, even suggested a better framing of the attack: “Hindus massacred in Kashmir by Islamists in a terror attack by Pakistan-backed group”.

A 68-page investigation produced by Rutgers Law School in New Jersey earlier this year offers a stark assessment of how the organisation does this.

The report, “Hindutva in America: A Threat to Equality and Religious Pluralism”, traces how these groups have strategically ridden the currents of post-9/11 Islamophobia, leveraging the political and cultural climate generated by the so-called “war on terror” to normalise and advance an ethnonationalist project within American public life.

“By couching their rhetoric within the mainstream narrative that Muslims worldwide are presumptively terrorists and violent, Hindutva organisations join the chorus of other anti-Muslim right-wing groups.”

The study further identifies two core objectives guiding Hindutva’s diaspora strategy in the US: the systematic construction of Muslims as perpetual outsiders and security threats, and a sustained effort to curtail academic freedom by intimidating scholars, policing curricula, and narrowing the space for critical inquiry.

On one side, HAF keeps a polished, liberal-friendly exterior, borrowing the vocabulary of pluralism and progressive inclusion while scrumptiously smuggling in Hindutva’s conceptual DNA. On the other hand, it lashes out at scholars, journalists and activists who try to expose the toxin hidden beneath its rhetoric.

Tribune for more

THE STAR

While the usual East Asian spots remain popular, Uzbekistan has emerged as a compelling alternative for those wanting a mix of alpine adventure and deep Islamic history.

Amirsoy: A New Winter Standard

The highlight for any winter traveller is the Amirsoy Mountain Resort, the largest ski destination in Uzbekistan. Nestled on the spurs of the Chatkal Ridge within the western Tian Shan Mountains (a Unesco World Heritage site), it is located just an hour’s drive from Tashkent. It is easy to see why the resort is a draw as the majestic, sprawling peaks create a stunning backdrop, offering a sharp, beautiful contrast between the crisp, sunny air and the endless blankets of white snow.

Amirsoy features high-speed gondolas that take visitors up to 2,290m to ski down the slopes. Even if you aren’t a skier, the “top of the world” views from the peak are worth the trip.

The Star for more

by PHIL ROCKSTROH

From the Zionist lobby’s media buyouts, to Christian-nationalism’s grudge match with Christian-Zionism, to Mamdani-envoked moral panic to “the Mar-a-Lago face.”

The face of last stage empire on display at a Mar-a-Lago event:

The human psyche’s lexicon is imagistic in nature. The psyche speaks in visual metaphors. At empire’s end, the psyche becomes an artist of the absurd. Hence, the nature of the zeitgeist will be limned by means of fashion, form, and feature into emblems of the era.

Pictured: “The Mar-a-Lago face” i.e., human beings transformed by Spiritus Mundi into (inadvertent) supernumeraries of a Gogolian theatre of the (cringe-inducing) grotesque.

In contrast, the type of image above brings me solace, because, now, when I gaze upon my aging face, it seems as if its time-touched features are being drawn by the very hand of a redemptive force.

*****

More mingling amid confederacies of ghouls and galleries of grotesques:

Pro-Zionist billionaires are among the High Dollar donors — thus are among the ownership class — that dictate the agendas of the US political class. Said billionaires have, as of late gone, on a buying spree of corporate media properties. Their gambit being, to enforce narratives that are a litany of pro-Israel lies e.g., foremost among them prevarication e.g., the denial of genocide perpetrated on the people of Gaza.

With vast resources at their disposal their employ media operatives to intimidate and cancel critics, even for the most mild criticism of Israel. As a consequence, there has been a noxious return of antisemitic tropes regarding Jews as a whole e.g., as hidden, scheming controllers of the world.

Are the vast majority of anti-Zionists antisemites? No. Are Nick Fuentes’ and his knuckle-dragging Groypers antisemitists? You can bet your jackboots they are.

The greatest threat to power-devoid Jews such as myself in the coming years: the conflation of Zionism and Judaism by Israeli propagandists.

Regarding Israel: A schism among the religious right:

At present, we are witnessing a power struggle among death cultist Christian rightists between Christian-nationalists nativism-gripped xenophobes and Christian-Zionist End Timer zealots. The former’s ranks are comprised of young, online, Groyper types who are possessed by a Brown Shirt mindset while the latter are (far) older Jesus fetishist fantasists — who believe every Israeli transgression against humanity, from ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, to perpetual war on its neighbors, to prison guard rape gangs bring the sin-reeking earth closer to their humanity-loathing fantasy of End Times wrought salvation.

Dissident Voice for more