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Football federation president on the run with wife and sonConviction in absentia of wide-ranging corruption chargesAuthorities in Congo-Brazzaville have applied to Interpol for an international arrest warrant against Jean-Guy Blaise Mayolas, the president of the country’s football federation, Fecofoot, after he was convicted of embezzling $1.1m in Fifa funds.Mayolas is on the run with his wife and son after they were all sentenced to life imprisonment this month for embezzling funds provided by world football’s governing body as part of its Covid-19 relief plan in February 2021. As the Guardian revealed last year, that included almost $500,000 earmarked for the Congo women’s team. Continue reading...

MAGA influencer Steve Bannon slammed President Donald Trump's allies, like Fox News host Mark Levin, who called for escalating the war in Iran to retrieve nuclear materials that he likened to "fairy dust.""I wonder why Mark Levin, why are we not talking about a combination, IDF, Arab, you know, get the UAE Special Forces," Bannon said Monday on his War Room broadcast. "So my recommendation, all this talk about combat troops and ground troops, let's start with the IDF and let's start with the Arab nations.""Let's throw them over, then let's take the first wave," he continued. "It'll draw out the Iranians, and maybe we can kill the Persians easier. Use them as bait. I don't give a damn. I don't want to use American kids. Let's use theirs. If you got nuclear fairy dust over there, you got to get."Bannon noted that suggestions that ground troops be sent into Iran to obtain nuclear material were the "latest thing" to escalate the war."We got nuclear fairy dust you got to get," he mocked. "Well, send the IDF in there. They got all the special forces... Let them go get the nuclear fairy dust.""Tel Aviv and our Arab and our great Arab allies who still have not committed to the to, understand something, they have not committed to this war yet," he added. "They're kind of sitting there going, oh, this is horrible. We're getting shelled... Let's get your military. First wave in Kharg Island, the All-Arab, second wave, IDF."

One month into the Iran war, Donald Trump is discovering that his signature tactic — construct a narrative, declare it true, and force the world to submit — doesn't work when the other side refuses to play along.According to Guardian columnist David Smith, Trump's decades-long operating principle has finally collided with an immovable object: geopolitical reality that cannot be wished away or spun into submission.Because of that, "Trump is in trouble," he asserted."Donald Trump keeps declaring victory in Iran. But saying it over and over does not make it so." While the president insists his military campaign is a historic success, "the world is bracing for a conflict that continues to metastasize and could wreak havoc on the global economy."Trump's strategy has worked before — in Manhattan boardrooms, on reality television, even at the highest levels of Washington power. But Iran represents something fundamentally different: a conflict where "Trump's unique brand of 'truthful hyperbole' has collided with the truthful truth. His reality distortion field has run into a brick wall," Smith wrote.The track record of Trump's fantasy-based policymaking is well documented. During his first term, he made more than 30,000 false and misleading claims, according to the Washington Post. He constructed entire alternate realities. But that strategy catastrophically failed when COVID-19 arrived — hundreds of thousands of deaths couldn't be wished away — and voters rejected him in 2020.Now the Iran war is exposing the same fatal vulnerability at catastrophic scale. The conflict has already cost 13 American lives and billions of dollars, yet the Iranian regime shows no signs of collapse. Instead, exactly as predicted, "Tehran has triggered a global energy crisis by blocking the strait of Hormuz." Opinion polls show the war is deeply unpopular, and a ground invasion would be even more so. "There is no obvious exit strategy."Joel Rubin, former deputy assistant secretary of state, articulated the core problem: Trump's belief in his own mental supremacy fundamentally misunderstands how warfare actually functions."Trump clearly is a real believer in the power of the mind to control events and to shape how people perceive events and shape reality," Rubin said. "The problem with that in the case of the war is the Iranians don't have to bend to that. There are time-tested ways to win wars and end wars through force of arms or diplomacy that have nothing to do with the mind and willpower and willing it because the other side will do what we want. He's going to buck up against that and the sooner he relies not just on the reality of military power but the reality of diplomatic power the more likely he is to be successful."Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, was more blunt about the implications."Iran is Trump's Waterloo. This is the demolition of the Donald Trump myth. His supporters rave about his instincts and his improvisational style but the other interpretation is that he doesn't know what he's doing, that he hasn't taken care to investigate the devastating consequences of his actions and so he's digging himself deeper and deeper into a quagmire. This is plain to all."

ABC News host George Stephanopoulos called out Secretary of State Marco Rubio after he said the U.S. was negotiating with "lunatics" in Iran, even though President Donald Trump had suggested new negotiators were reasonable people."You call them lunatics, but the president just had this post where he says we're in discussions with a new and more reasonable regime," Stephanopoulos told Rubio in a Monday interview on Good Morning America. "Let me try to pin you down on that. Who is this new and more reasonable regime?""Well, I'm not going to disclose to you who those people are because it probably would get them in trouble with some other groups of people inside of Iran," Rubio insisted. "Look, there's some fractures going on there internally. And at the end of the day, I think that if there are people in Iran who now, given everything that's happened, are willing to move in a different direction for their country, that would be great.""It's unfortunate the people of Iran are incredible people, the people who lead them, these this clerical regime that is the problem and there are new people now in charge who have a more reasonable vision of the future that would be good news for us, for them, for the entire world but we also have to be prepared for the possibility, maybe even the probability, that that is not the case."The ABC host pressed: "But the president said they are. Is that the case or is it not?""Well, what I mean is, yeah, you know, so you have people that are saying some of the right things privately," Rubio hedged. "Obviously, they're not going to put it out in press releases, and what they say to you or put out there for the world doesn't necessarily reflect what they're saying in our conversations.""There are clearly people there talking to us in ways that previous people in charge in Iran have not spoken to us in the past," he added. "We're going to test that proposition very strongly because we always prefer to settle things through negotiation and diplomacy. But we also have to be prepared for the fact that that effort might fail.""If it fails, the war expands?" Stephanopoulos wondered."Well, the war is about," Rubio replied before catching himself. "This operation, okay, and that's what this is, it's about very specific objectives."The secretary of state insisted that the "objective from the beginning" had been to destroy the Iranian air force, navy, missiles, and factories."We are on pace and, in fact, ahead of schedule in some of those things," he said. "And we are going to achieve those things in a number of weeks, not in a number of months."

More than 3,000 No Kings protest events in the United States were bolstered by activists across the world opposing Donald Trump. Rallies against the president were formed across the US, but also in Germany, Italy, and Australia. Protestors in Paris, France, were spotted holding up "Dump Trump" signs while those in the streets of Madrid, Spain, rallied around a sign reading, "Power to the people." A previous No Kings movement occurred on June 14, 2025, the same day as Trump's birthday. Further protests followed in October, and a third set of rallies across the world took place today (March 28). Protestors in Amsterdam carried a placard reading, "WTF America," The Daily Beast reported. In Sydney, a man held up a sign that read “We can’t stand him either."Naveed Shah, who founded the Common Defense group in 2016 to rally military veterans for the sake of progressive politics, spoke of the rapid No Kings growth. He said, "When I stood at the first ‘No Kings’ rally, we were fighting to protect democracy at home and against federal agents and troops that were deployed on American streets, against a government that was manufacturing a crisis to justify using its power against its own people."Today, we’re still fighting that same fight, but now that manufactured crisis has gone global." MoveOn executive director Katie Bethell added their grassroots support to the No Kings protests. "Our members will be turning out peacefully in the streets because they believe in a better future for this country, and they can’t sit by on the sidelines about what Trump and his administration are doing to our home," she said. "Let’s be clear, the Trump administration has become a threat to the American people at every level. They are waging violence at home and abroad."An estimated 7 million people showed up to rally against the Trump administration in October — more than the 5 million or so who protested in June — and No Kings organizers are anticipating nearly 9 million people will take to the streets this weekend.

Donald Trump could be judged harshly by the world if he breaks a promise at the heart of the American Dream, an analyst has claimed. The president and his administration have cracked down hard on immigration in a way that could undermine the "credibility" of the country, Brent McKenzie argued. The Hill columnist considered the crackdown on immigration as a move that could shatter the American Dream in the eyes of the world. "The process might be long and complicated, but immigrants who followed the rules would eventually find opportunity," McKenzie wrote. "The U.S. was not only a place where people could succeed; it also openly welcomed those willing to work, contribute and build a life. Increasingly, people outside the U.S. are beginning to wonder whether that promise still holds."McKenzie went on to argue that the "cultural confidence" of the United States depends on immigration, and that the Trump administration is actively undermining the future of the country. He added, "But recent policy decisions are testing that narrative. When lawful permanent residents are excluded from government programs designed to help small businesses grow, or when people deep in the legal immigration process are suddenly caught in policy pauses and reversals, the message is larger than any single rule."In recent years, that confidence has eroded. Immigration has become a central point of political conflict. Today, immigration is no longer just a policy debate. It has become a cultural and political dividing line. And for people watching from outside the U.S., that shift is impossible to miss."The question facing the U.S. today is not whether immigration policy should evolve. Every country revises its policies over time. The question is whether the larger promise that once defined the American experience still holds."Trump's changes to immigration policy in the US could, McKenzie argues, change the tide in countries across the world. This, he believes, is the reason there is such a close eye on the president. "How the U.S. answers that question will shape not only immigration policy but the country’s place in the world," he wrote. "If the U.S. wants the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs and builders to continue choosing America, it must do more than defend its borders. "It must also defend the promise that’s drawn them here for generations. The world is watching to see whether that promise still stands."

Donald Trump has made life harder for his Oval Office successor with a series of changes that will likely be impossible to undo, an analyst claimed.The president's tough stance on geopolitical relations during his second term has hindered the chance of reconciliation under the 48th President of the United States, Salon writer Mike Lofgren argued. The political analyst suggested that Trump's team was undermining steps taken by previous administrations to improve international relations. Lofgren claims that Trump has pressed the US into a position where there is "no going back to the status quo ante" of previous administrations. Actions taken against Venezuela and Iran, as well as a period of time where the president appeared set on subsuming Greenland into US territory has seemingly worn international relations thin. This, Lofgren suggests, is a point of no return that a future president from either party would struggle to navigate. He wrote, "Yet another future president might have retraced a path toward more balanced economic or security policies once the disadvantages of trade wars or diplomatic and military isolation became obvious."But Trump, in large part through his feral nastiness and adolescent vulgarity, has made that sort of reversal all but impossible. A hypothetical president might have distanced himself from NATO, but it’s inconceivable that he would covet an alliance partner’s territory to the point where that government made plans to blow up the airfields in the coveted territory in case of invasion."Lofgren went on to suggest that longstanding treaties and decades-old friendships between the US and other countries had been ground down slowly, and that Trump had simply sped up the process of a breakdown. "Trump hates reading, as his spotty education and lack of general knowledge testify," Lofgren wrote. "That reflects his profound lack of intellectual curiosity. "He attempts to disguise this deficiency with endless boasting about himself and endless denigration of others. He is obsessed with popular media and showbiz and the shabby values they embody."It is almost certain, to this observer anyway, that after the last hanging chad in Florida, after the rubble of the World Trade Center had cooled, after the first improvised roadside bomb exploded in Iraq, and after Lehman Brothers collapsed, Trump, or someone like him, was inevitable."

At least 77 people killed in anti-corruption youth uprising in September, which began over a brief social media banNepal’s former prime minister KP Sharma Oli was arrested early on Saturday morning over his alleged role in the deaths of dozens of people who took part in the gen Z protest that toppled his government last year.Police detained the three-time former prime minister at his residence in the capital Kathmandu, and also arrested his former home affairs minister Ramesh Lekhak. Continue reading...