Category: 2. World

Prince William and Kate Middleton are ready to move into their ‘forever home’ Forest Lodge by the end of this year as restoration work on the property is already underway.

Kensington Palace made the big announcement on Friday to confirm the ongoing speculations for weeks about the Prince and Princess of Wales moving out of the Adelaide Cottage.

While the Wales family will be moving houses, they will remain in the vicinity of Windsor Great Park. However, as the family prepares for the big move, neighbours at the new property have already been issued an unexpected notice from the royal couple.

Two separate families, who lived in cottages next to the eight-bedroom mansion, were asked to vacate their properties.

“They were told to move out. I guess they were given somewhere else, but they were told they had to move,” a well-connected source told the Mail on Sunday.

“They were not expecting it,” the insider said of the surprise request. The source said the houses were “very close” to the lodge and William and Kate “don’t want any Tom, Dick or Harry living in those houses if there are going to be royals there.”

The cottages at the estate are owned by the Crown Estate and rented out to people. According to the report, the tenants were surprised “surprised” to receive the request.

However, the source emphasised that no eviction notices have been issued yet. 

KABUL, Afghanistan: Next to small bundles of belongings, Maruf waited for a car to take him and his family away from their village in northern Afghanistan, where drought-ridden land had yielded nothing for years.

“When you have children and are responsible for their needs, then tell me, what are you still doing in this ruin?” said the 50-year-old.

Many of the mud homes around him are already empty, he said, his neighbors having abandoned the village, fleeing “thirst, hunger and a life with no future.”

Successive wars displaced Afghans over 40 years, but peace has not brought total reprieve, as climate change-fueled shocks drive people from their homes and strain livelihoods.

Since the war ended between the now-ruling Taliban and US-led forces in 2021, floods, droughts and other climate change-driven environmental hazards have become the main cause of displacement in the country, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).

In early 2025, nearly five million people across the country were impacted and nearly 400,000 people were displaced, the IOM said in July, citing its Climate Vulnerability Assessment.

The majority of Afghans live in mud homes and depend heavily on agriculture and livestock, making them particularly exposed to environmental changes.

The water cycle has been sharply impacted, with Afghanistan again in the grip of drought for the fourth time in five years and flash floods devastating land, homes and livelihoods.

“Crop failure, dry pastures and vanishing water sources are pushing rural communities to the edge,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in July.

“It’s getting harder for families to grow food, earn income or stay where they are.”

Experts and Taliban officials have repeatedly warned of escalating climate risks as temperatures rise, extreme weather events intensify and precipitation patterns shift.

The country’s limited infrastructure, endemic poverty and international isolation leave Afghans with few resources to adapt and recover — while already facing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises worsened by severe aid cuts.

‘Everything comes down to water’

Abdul Jalil Rasooli’s village in the drought-hit north has watched their way of life wither with their crops.

Drought already drove many from his village to Pakistan and Iran a decade ago.

Now they’ve returned, forced back over the border along with more than four million others from the two neighboring countries since late 2023 — but to work odd jobs, not the land.

“Everything comes down to water,” said the 64-year-old, retreating from the day’s heat in the only home in the village still shaded by leafy trees.

“Water scarcity ruins everything, it destroys farming, the trees are drying up, and there’s no planting anymore,” he told AFP.

Rasooli holds out hope that the nearby Qosh Tepa canal will bring irrigation from the Amu Darya river. Diggers are carving out the last section of the waterway, but its completion is more than a year away, officials told AFP.

It’s one of the water infrastructure projects the Taliban authorities have undertaken since ousting the foreign-backed government four years ago.

But the theocratic government, largely isolated on the global stage over its restrictions on women, has limited resources to address a crisis long exacerbated by poor environmental, infrastructure and resource management during 40 years of conflict.

“The measures we have taken so far are not enough,” Energy and Water Minister Abdul Latif Mansoor told journalists in July, rattling off a list of dam and canal projects in the pipeline.

“There are a lot of droughts… this is Allah’s will, first we must turn to Allah.”

Hamayoun Amiri left for Iran when he was a young man and drought struck his father’s small plot of land in western Herat province.

Forced to return in a June deportation campaign, he found himself back where he started 14 years ago — with nothing to farm and his father’s well water “getting lower and lower every day.”

The Harirud river was a dry bed in July as it neared the border with downstream Iran, following a road lined with empty mud buildings pummelled back to dust by the province’s summer gales.

Praying for rain

Taliban authorities often hold prayers for rain, but while the lack of water has parched the land in some parts of the country, changes in precipitation patterns mean rains can be more of a threat than a blessing.

This year, rains have come earlier and heavier amid above-average temperatures, increasing flood risks, the UN said.

A warmer atmosphere holds more water, so rain often comes in massive, destructive quantities.

“The weather has changed,” said Mohammad Qasim, a community leader of several villages in central Maidan Wardak battered by flash floods in June.

“I’m around 54 years old, and we have never experienced problems like this before,” he told AFP in the riverbed full of boulders and cracked mud.

Eighteen-year-old Wahidullah’s family was displaced after their home was damaged beyond repair and all their livestock were drowned.

The family of 11 slept in or near a rudimentary tent on high ground, with no plans or means to rebuild.

“We’re worried that if another flood comes, then there will be nothing left and nowhere to go.”

 

The Israeli military will begin preparing for the forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza City, it said on Saturday, as health officials said it had killed at least 40 people including a baby in a tent and people seeking aid in its latest attacks.

The announcement came days after Israel said it intended to launch a new offensive to seize control of Gaza City, the enclave’s largest urban centre, in a plan that raised international alarm. The Israeli offensive has already displaced most of the population, killed tens of thousands of civilians and created a famine.

Gaza residents would be provided with tents and other shelter equipment starting from Sunday ahead of relocating them from combat zones to the south of the enclave “to ensure their safety,” the Israeli military claimed on Saturday. It did not say when the mass displacement would begin.

Israel has repeatedly bombed areas it had declared as safe zones. On Saturday a baby girl and her parents were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit a tent in al-Muwasi, previously designated a humanitarian zone by Israel, in southern Gaza, Nasser hospital officials and witnesses said.

“Two and a half months, what has she done?” her neighbour Fathi Shubeir asked. “They are civilians in an area designated safe.”

Israel’s military said it couldn’t comment on the strike without more details.

Al-Muwasi is now one of the most heavily populated areas in Gaza after Israel pushed people into the desolate area. But prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week said Israel planned to widen its coming military offensive to include the area, along with Gaza City and “central camps” – an apparent reference to the built-up Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps in central Gaza.

According to the civil defence agency, at least 13 of the Palestinians killed on Saturday were shot by troops as they were waiting to collect food aid near distribution sites in the north and in the south.

There were also another 11 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza over the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Saturday, including at least one child. That brings malnutrition-related deaths due to the Israeli blockade on aid to 251.

In recent days, Gaza City residents have reported more frequent air strikes targeting residential areas especially in the east and south and including the Zeitun neighbourhood. Hamas said on Saturday the military was targeting the area with warplanes, artillery and drones.

Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal said conditions in Zeitun were rapidly deteriorating with residents having little to no access to food and water amid heavy Israeli bombardment.

He said that about 50,000 people were estimated to be in that area of Gaza City, “the majority of whom are without food or water” and lacking “the basic necessities of life”.

Ghassan Kashko, 40, who is sheltering with his family at a school building in the neighbourhood, said: “We don’t know the taste of sleep.” He said air strikes and tank shelling were causing “explosions… that don’t stop”.

Israel was carrying out ethnic cleansing in Zeitun, Bassal said. The Israeli military says it abides by international law though rights groups, including in Israel, say it is committing genocide.

In its announcement on Saturday the military said shelter equipment would be transferred via the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Gaza by the United Nations and other international relief organisations after being inspected by defence ministry personnel, the military said. Israeli inspections and bureaucracy have until now resulted in much aid being refused entry to the territory.

A spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs expressed concern over Israel’s plans to relocate people to southern Gaza saying it would only increase suffering.

But the UN body welcomed Israel’s recognition that shelter is a desperate need and that tents and other shelter equipment will be allowed again into Gaza. “The UN and its partners will seize the opportunity this opens,” the spokesperson said.

The UN warned on Thursday that thousands of families already enduring appalling humanitarian conditions could be pushed over the edge if the Gaza City plan moves ahead.

Palestinian and United Nations officials have said no place in the enclave is safe, including areas in southern Gaza where Israel has been ordering residents to move to.

The military declined to comment when asked whether the shelter equipment was intended for Gaza City’s population, estimated at around one million people presently, and whether the site to which they will be relocated in southern Gaza would be the area of Rafah, which borders Egypt.

Israel’s defence minister Israel Katz said on Saturday that the plans for the new offensive were still being formulated.

The Palestinian militant faction Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, said that the military’s announcement “as part of its brutal attack to occupy Gaza City, is a blatant and brazen mockery of international conventions.”

Protests calling for a hostage release and an end to the war were expected throughout Israel on Sunday, with many businesses, municipalities and universities saying they will support employees striking for the day.

The families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas called for the “nationwide day of stoppage” on Sunday to express growing frustration over the war. They fear the coming offensive will further endanger the 50 hostages remaining in Gaza, just 20 of whom are thought to still be alive.

IF the Gaza genocide does not serve as a strong enough daily reminder of how bereft of principles Western politics is, images of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump beamed live from Alaska this weekend reinforced the point quite unequivocally.

President Trump makes no bones about how he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. In his no-holds barred quest for being acknowledged as a peacemaker, not only did he bring in from the cold the Russian leader who has been a pariah in the eyes of the West, since his invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but also gifted his guest a great optics win.

From the arrival at an airbase near Anchorage where the two landed within minutes of each other and then alighted from their respective planes and walked on their respective red carpet strips to where they converged, it was a carefully choreographed move that seemed more designed by the guest than the host.

As Trump waited for Putin to walk the final few steps he brought his two hands together to applaud the Russian leader and then the two met and smiled before a handshake, patting each other in a gesture of warmth, even affection. It isn’t clear what the US TV networks were saying but the BBC seemed to struggle with the live broadcast.

Till he arrived in Alaska, Putin did not appear prepared to return any part of eastern Ukraine.

The BBC North America correspondent saw the presence of F-35 stealth warplanes on the tarmac as a force projection. A flypast by a B2 stealth bomber and four F-35s was also similarly described (with a mention of how the B2s released their bunker buster bombs against Iranian nuclear sites in June).

But to the unbiased observer, Putin appeared amused rather than being awed or fearful at the spectacle. In all likelihood, he saw it as a salute by the USAF just as the soldiers lined up either side of the red carpet to ‘present arms’ salute with their ceremonial rifles.

Such was the Russian leader’s confidence at being welcomed back into acceptance by reputedly the most powerful nation’s president that he set aside protocol and security considerations to ride in the Trump limousine while his own limousine, flown in from Russia earlier, followed.

Again, bizarrely, one of the people commenting on BBC TV said they weren’t sure if Putin spoke or understood English, while the Russian leader was visibly engaged in a continuous conversation with his host and later told the media he greeted Trump with a ‘Good afternoon, neighbour. Good to see you’ when he met him. In Alaska, only the Bering Strait separates the two.

As the motorcade was pulling away from the airport, Putin smiled and waved to the cameras. The significance of all this is clear from the fact that over the past three years, Putin, who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, has not been received by any Western country. And here the red carpet had been rolled out for him.

After three hours of talks, the two leaders faced the media but did not answer questions. Putin read from a prepared statement where, after talking about the US-Russia history with specific reference to Alaska, he seemed to flatter Trump, saying that he endorsed the latter’s view that the Ukraine war would not have happened if he had been the US president.

Putin said the meeting, and what was agreed in it, will mark the beginning of peace in Ukraine if what he called the ‘root causes’ were addressed. For his part, Trump spoke briefly and started by saying, “There no deal until there is a deal”. He described the meeting as productive where many points were agreed on but “a few” remain.

Before leaving the podium, he also said he would now call the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, European leaders and Nato officials for consultations.

The discussions must have gone well with the late-night White House announcement that the Ukrainian leader is arriving in Washington on Monday and will be received by Trump for talks. The European leaders, too, reacted positively to whatever they were told.

A peace deal will hinge on how far Putin and Zelensky and the latter’s Western European allies are willing to compromise on their ‘no land for peace’ stance. Till he arrived in Alaska, Putin did not appear prepared to return any part of eastern Ukraine his forces have captured. He also wants recognition of his 2014 annexation of Crimea.

For now, the security guarantees for Ukraine that are being discussed exclude any eastward expansion of Nato into Ukraine. Putin will also be averse to Western boots on the ground. It was, inter alia, talk of Nato expansion plans that first spooked Russia because, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow saw Ukraine as a buffer between Western Europe-Nato and itself.

Trump’s word may not amount to much as has been demonstrated by his support to the Gaza ethnic cleansing by Israel in contrast to his earlier reservations, but in this European conflict, he has moved away a shade from his earlier stance that only Ukraine will have to give up land for peace and it will be Europe and not the US which will offer security guarantees to Kiev.

But for Putin to leave the summit meeting beaming tells one how many compromises he has been forced to agree to, including the amount of land he would swap for peace. For now, he has pushed back by several weeks the likelihood of sterner US sanctions and also charmed his way to having Trump listen to his point of view face to face.

Trump can give himself any prize he wants, like our leaders have done, but hundreds of millions around the world will find any accolade he gets legitimate only if he moves from the end to the war in Ukraine to peace in Gaza and gives up his support for the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of the Palestinians.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.

abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2025