Category: 2. World

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump on Friday said India and Russia seem to have been “lost” to China after their leaders met with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, highlighting his split from New Delhi and Moscow as Beijing pushes a new world order.

“Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!” Trump wrote in a social media post accompanying a photo of the three other world leaders together at Xi’s summit in China.

Asked about Trump’s post, the Indian foreign ministry spokesperson told reporters in New Delhi that he had no comment.

Representatives for Beijing and Moscow could not be immediately reached for comment on Trump’s post on his Truth Social platform.

Xi hosted more than 20 leaders of non-Western countries for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Putin and Modi were seen holding hands at the summit as they walked toward Xi before all three men stood side by side.

Modi’s warming ties with China comes as Trump has chilled US-India ties amid trade tensions and other disputes. Trump earlier this week said he was “very disappointed” in Putin but not worried about growing Russia-China ties.

Two blockbuster events in China this week were a successful exposition of President Xi Jinping’s vision of a new world order – one that puts him and his country firmly at its centre while sidelining his rival the United States.

Since Saturday, Xi has met with almost 30 world leaders around the edges of a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin and a huge military parade marking 80 years since World War II’s end.

No major Western powers sent leaders to either SCO or the parade, with Slovakia’s Robert Fico the only European Union member state head present.

A sharp decline in international education aid is set to push millions of vulnerable children out of school by the end of 2026, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned.

According to UNICEF, official development assistance allocated for education is expected to fall by 24 percent—amounting to $3.2 billion—by 2025 compared to 2023 levels. The agency revealed that nearly 80 percent of this projected drop is tied to reduced contributions from three of the world’s largest donors: the United States, Germany, and France.

If the forecasted cuts take effect, an additional six million children will be denied access to schooling by the end of next year, increasing the global out-of-school population from 272 million to 278 million. UNICEF compared the figure to “emptying every primary school in Germany and Italy combined.”

The repercussions are not limited to those entirely excluded from classrooms. The organization cautioned that nearly 290 million more children are at risk of enduring a steep decline in the quality of their education due to the financial shortfall.

“This is not just a budgetary decision; it’s a child’s future hanging in the balance,” said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell. “Every dollar cut from education jeopardizes the potential of a generation.”

The crisis is expected to weigh most heavily on regions already facing immense challenges. West and Central Africa could see 1.9 million children lose access to schools, while fragile contexts such as Haiti, Somalia, and the Palestinian territories are also at heightened risk.

Girls are likely to bear the brunt of the funding cuts, with vital programs—such as tuition subsidies and the construction of separate sanitation facilities—threatened. These supports are crucial to ensuring girls’ continued enrollment, particularly in crisis-affected and low-income regions.

Related: UNICEF Report Exposes Punjab’s Education Crisis

UNICEF has urged the international community to reverse the trend, warning that the future of millions of children—and the progress of entire societies—depends on sustained investment in education.

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It feels like there are so many things constantly vying for our attention: the sharp buzz of the phone, the low hum of social media, the unrelenting flood of emails, the endless carousel of content.

It’s a familiar and almost universal ailment in our digital age. Our lives are punctuated by constant stimulation, and moments of real stillness – the kind where the mind wanders without a destination – have become rare.

Digital technologies permeate work, education, and intimacy. Not participating feels to many like nonexistence. But we tell ourselves that’s OK because platforms promise endless choice and self-expression, but this promise is deceptive. What appears as freedom masks a subtle coercion: distraction, visibility, and engagement are prescribed as obligations.

As someone who has spent years reading philosophy, I have been asking myself how to step out of this loop and try to think like great thinkers did in the past. A possible answer came from a thinker most people wouldn’t expect to help with our TikTok-era malaise: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger argued that modern technology is not simply a collection of tools, but a way of revealing – a framework in which the world appears primarily as a resource, including the human body and mind, to be used for content. In the same way, platforms are also part of this resource, and one that shapes what appears, how it appears, and how we orient ourselves toward life.

Digital culture revolves around speed, visibility, algorithmic selection, and the compulsive generation of content. Life increasingly mirrors the logic of the feed: constantly updating, always “now” and allergic to slowness, silence and stillness.

What digital platforms take away is more than just our attention being “continuously partial” — they also limit the deeper kind of reflection that allows us to engage with life and ourselves fully. They make us lose the capacity to inhabit silence and confront the unfilled moment.

When moments of silence or emptiness arise, we instinctively look to others — not for real connection, but to fill the void with distraction. Heidegger calls this distraction “das man” or “they”: the social collective whose influence we unconsciously follow.

In this way, the “they” becomes a kind of ghostly refuge, offering comfort while quietly erasing our own sense of individuality. This “they” multiplies endlessly through likes, trends, and algorithmic virality. In fleeing from boredom together, the possibility of an authentic “I” disappears into the infinite deferral of collective mimicry.

Heidegger feared that under the dominance of technology, humanity might lose its capacity to relate to “being itself”. This “forgetting of being” is not merely an intellectual error but an existential poverty.

Today, it can be seen as the loss of depth — the eclipse of boredom, the erosion of interiority, the disappearance of silence. Where there is no boredom, there can be no reflection. Where there is no pause, there can be no real choice.

Heidegger’s “forgetting of being” now manifests as the loss of boredom itself. What we forfeit is the capacity for sustained reflection.

Boredom as a privileged mood

For Heidegger, profound boredom is not merely a psychological state but a privileged mood in which the everyday world begins to withdraw. In his 1929 to 1930 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he describes boredom as a fundamental attunement through which beings no longer “speak” to us, revealing the nothingness at the heart of being itself.

“Profound boredom removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.”

Boredom is not absence but a threshold — a condition for thinking, wonder, and the emergence of meaning.

The loss of profound boredom mirrors the broader collapse of existential depth into surface. Once a portal to being, boredom is now treated as a design flaw, patched with entertainment and distraction.

Never allowing ourselves to be bored is equivalent to never allowing ourselves to be as we are. As Heidegger insists, only in the totality of profound boredom do we come face to face with beings as a whole. When we flee boredom, we escape ourselves. At least, we try to.

The problem is not that boredom strikes too often, but that it is never allowed to fully arrive. Boredom, which has paradoxically seen a rise in countries drowning in technology like the US, is shameful. It is treated like an illness almost. We avoid it, hate it, fear it.

Digital life and its many platforms offer streams of micro-distractions that prevent immersion into this more primitive attunement. Restlessness is redirected into scrolling, which, instead of meaningful reflection, produces only more scrolling. What disappears with boredom is not leisure, but metaphysical access — the silence in which the world might speak, and one might hear.

In this light, rediscovering boredom is not about idle time, it is about reclaiming the conditions for thought, depth, and authenticity. It is a quiet resistance to the pervasive logic of digital life, an opening to the full presence of being, and a reminder that the pause, the unstructured moment, and the still passage are not failures – they are essential.

Putin was commenting on the readiness of the West’s so-called coalition of the willing to provide postwar security guarantees to Ukraine, which could include the deployment of troops and air patrols to the country, as well securing maritime traffic in the Black Sea.

Crucially, the precondition for that to happen is a ceasefire or peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. 

However, Putin repeated he doesn’t see the point in meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “it will be almost impossible to agree with the Ukrainian side on key issues.”

He also ruled out that unlikely meeting taking place in any city other than Moscow.

“If someone really wants to meet with us, we are ready. The best place for this is the capital of the Russian Federation, the hero city of Moscow … We will definitely provide working conditions and safety,” said Putin at the forum. Zelenskyy has already dismissed Putin’s idea of meeting in Moscow.

The Kremlin chief has been playing for time over meeting Zelenskyy as the White House attempts to set up a meeting with a view to ending the conflict.

WASHINGTON: The US has ordered the deployment of 10 F-35 fighter jets to a Puerto Rico airfield to conduct operations against drug cartels, two sources briefed on the matter said, in a move likely to further inflame tensions in the region.

The advanced fighter jets will be added to an already bristling US military presence in the southern Caribbean as President Donald Trump carries out a campaign pledge to crack down on groups he blames for funneling drugs into the United States.

Friday’s development comes three days after U.S. forces attacked a boat that Trump said was carrying “massive amounts of drugs” from Venezuela, killing 11 people.

The strike appeared to set the stage for a sustained military campaign in Latin America.

The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the 10 fighter jets are being sent to conduct operations against designated narco-terrorist organizations operating in the southern Caribbean.

The planes should arrive in the area by late next week, they said.

The U.S. has deployed warships in the southern Caribbean in recent weeks, with the aim of carrying out Trump’s crackdown.

Seven US warships and one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine are either in the region or expected to be there soon, carrying more than 4,500 sailors and Marines.

US Marines and sailors from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit have been carrying out amphibious training and flight operations in southern Puerto Rico.

The buildup has put pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “effectively a kingpin of a drug narco state.”

Maduro, at a rare news conference in Caracas on Monday, said the United States is “seeking a regime change through military threat.”

US military carries out strike on vessel carrying drugs from Venezuela, officials say

U.S. officials have not said what legal justification was used for Tuesday’s air strike on the boat or what drugs were on board.

Trump said on Tuesday, without providing evidence, that the US military had identified the crew of the vessel as members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which Washington designated a terrorist group in February.

Authorities in India banned the X account of an Austrian economist after he shared a map showing Khalistan having been carved out of India and called for “dismantling India”, the local media reported on Friday.

The Khalistan movement is a Sikh separatist movement seeking an independent state for the religious minority carved out of Indian territory. It is considered a security threat by the Indian government.

The economist, Gunther Fehlinger-Jahn, appeared to be calling for the creation of Khalistan in his post on X, stating: “I call to dismanlte India into ExIndia. Narendra Modi is Russia’s man. We need friend of freedom for @KhalistanNet.”

The map also seemed to be implying the separation of various other regions of India.

According to NDTV, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology “flagged the viral post and directed X to withhold access to the account for Indian users. The account has since been disabled in India”.

The report added that the post resulted in “angry reactions” on social media.

The post came after Modi met with the Russian President Vladimir Putin
during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in China earlier this week.

Sharing a picture of their interaction in another post on Monday, Fehlinger-Jahn stated: “I call for ExIndia. India is now a hostile state to [the] Free World. We must boycott India now! … No Visa for Indians as long as Putin’s friend Narendra Modi stays in power.”

Hehlinger-Jahn, as per his X and Linkedin, poses as the chairman for an “Austrian committee” the enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato).

However, a Google search did not bring up any results for such a committee.

In September 2023, Hehlinger-Jahn remarked about Armenia — whose relations with Russia have been strained in past few years — needing to join the Nato, according to Tass news agency.

In a post earlier today, Hehlinger-Jahn also called for the “fall of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the break up of Russia”.

According to a Reuters report in May, Putin’s conditions for ending the war in Ukraine include a demand that Western leaders pledge in writing to stop enlarging Nato eastwards.

New Delhi purchases oil from Moscow and after meeting Modi earlier this week on the sidelines of the summit in China, the Russian president reiterated the need for the issue of Nato’s eastward enlargement to be addressed.

MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump could meet again in the near future, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview published on Friday.

“I have no doubt that if the presidents consider it necessary, their meeting can be organized very quickly. Just as the meeting in Alaska was quickly organized,” Peskov told the news outlet Argumenty i Fakty, referring to last month’s Trump-Putin summit.

Working contacts were taking place all the time, he said.

Trump said on Thursday that he will speak to Putin in the near future.