YEMEN - On Thursday, August 29, 2025, Israel carried out an airstrike in Yemen that killed Houthi Prime Minister Ahmad Ghaleb al-Rahawi along with several senior officials. The strike targeted a villa in Beit Baws, an ancient village in southern Sanaa, where Houthi leaders had gathered to watch a speech by Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the group’s secretive leader. Among the confirmed dead were the energy, foreign, and information ministers, while the status of the defense minister remains unclear. Israeli intelligence sources believe the entire Houthi cabinet, 13 ministers in total, including the prime minister, may have been eliminated, though this assessment is not yet definitive. The attack marked the first time Israel has eliminated top Houthi officials and came just days after another strike, which followed the interception of Houthi drones launched toward Israel.

SWITZERLAND - For decades Switzerland has been perceived as Europe's most stable country, with its picture-perfect Alpine vistas, private banking vaults and neutral status during conflict. It has long appeared immune to the rising social and political tensions its French, German and Italian neighbours - and increasingly the UK - have been grappling with. But that perception was shattered this week - after the death of 17-year-old Marvin 'Shalom' Manzila in Lausanne sparked rioting that exposed bitter social divisions that have been quietly festering there without coming to the attention of the wider world.

USA - California school board tables rules on avoiding sharing facilities with transgender classmates. The Temecula school board voted Tuesday, August 26, to table a policy that would have required students to seek special accommodations if they don’t want to share a locker room or restroom with transgender classmates. The board voted 4-1 to push a vote on two policies that would have set a requirement for written requests seeking mental health or religious exemptions if [students wished] to avoid sharing facilities with trans students. Barham, who suggested postponing the vote, said he listened to parents and wanted more time to create a different policy that would not stigmatize students by using mental health exemptions. He said that the district needs something on the books, so that if a parent comes to them, they will have a legal obligation to do something. “We are trying to work around the law to help families and keep boys from looking at girls’ parts and girls looking at boys’ parts,” Barham said. “The problem is adults allowing these boys to think that they’re girls and go down that dangerous path and vice versa,” Shaw said. “We need to stand strong.”

USA - The political earthquake has struck. President Donald J Trump has openly declared that George Soros and his son should face RICO charges — accusations usually reserved for mafia bosses and criminal cartels. In his official statement, President Trump did not mince words: “George Soros, and his wonderful Radical Left son, should be charged with RICO because of their support of violent protests, and much more, all throughout the United States of America. We’re not going to allow these lunatics to rip apart America any more… Soros, and his group of psychopaths, have caused great damage to our Country!” This is not campaign bluster. This is the President of the United States declaring that one of the most powerful globalist figures in modern history should be treated as an enemy of the Republic.

USA - RICO — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — is America’s most powerful legal weapon against organized crime. It allows prosecutors to hold leaders accountable for the crimes of their networks, even if they never personally committed them.

If RICO is turned against Soros, the implications are staggering:

• A full-scale federal investigation into Open Society Foundations and its web of affiliates.


• Scrutiny of NGO and activist funding streams across the US and Europe.


• Possible exposure of coordination between Soros-linked groups and violent protest movements.

This is not just a legal risk for Soros. It is existential.

CANADA - According to a recent article in The Atlantic, assisted suicide is now so popular in Canada that doctors cannot keep up with the demand. Appropriately titled Canada is Killing Itself, the article described how Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAiD), passed just 10 years ago, now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada. That number is more than the total number of combined deaths from Alzheimer’s and diabetes, and it surpasses many countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer. The shortage of “care” is not due to a lack of interest from medical professionals. Doctors are in fact flocking to join what the Atlantic article called “the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime.”

GERMANY - Germany’s unemployment has surged past 3 million for the first time in over a decade, reaching 3.025 million in August 2025. The jobless rate ticked up to 6.4%, with manufacturing and energy-intensive sectors hit hardest. Labour Minister Baerbel Bas called for “countermeasures,” while Chancellor Friedrich Merz faces mounting pressure to deliver reforms.

RUSSIA - Three giants at one table: Can Russia, India, and China rewrite the global rules? In the wake of the Putin-Trump Alaska summit, Russia once again demonstrated that it remains an indispensable actor in global diplomacy. The very fact that Washington and Moscow returned to the table underscored that neither side can afford to exclude the other in discussions on international security. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s visit to New Delhi a few days later included rounds of strategic discussions. He co-chaired the boundary talks alongside NSA Ajit Doval, held bilateral consultations with India’s Minister of External Affairs S Jaishankar, and met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, underscoring India’s continued openness to managing contentious issues through established dialogue channels.

NIGERIA - A horde of motorcycle-riding gunmen stormed the village of Gamdum Mallam in Nigeria’s Zamfara State on Saturday, shooting up the town and riding off with over a hundred captives, mostly women and children. Zamfara has long been plagued by “bandits” with a penchant for mass kidnappings. Saturday’s attack would bring the total number of people abducted over the past year to almost 5,000. Local residents said the attackers roared into town on motorcycles with guns blazing, then split into two groups. One group established a roadblock to prevent any of the residents from escaping, while the other set about stealing livestock and taking human prisoners. “We were being treated like slaves in our own land, as if there is no government,” one of the villagers told Reuters on Wednesday.

USA - Our society is constantly telling us that true happiness is just around the corner. We are promised that if we will just buy the next product, adopt the latest trend, get more education, get a better job, make more money or win a better looking romantic partner, we will finally be happy. But once you successfully make the next step on the hamster wheel, you discover that it was just another empty promise. In fact, there is a very deep emptiness to our modern liberal society as a whole. We are all constantly chasing after the things we are told to chase after, and at the end of the day most of the population still feels an irrepressible emptiness. It is an ache that cannot be controlled or restrained, and that is why so many people spend so much time and effort trying to dull the pain that they are feeling inside. Modern liberal society offers an extremely “me-centered” philosophy...

CANADA - A banking industry climate coalition spearheaded by Mark Carney is to vote on whether to break itself up after suffering an exodus of lenders amid a backlash against green initiatives. The Net-Zero Banking Alliance said on Wednesday that it was suspending its activities while its remaining signatories decide on a proposal to abandon its membership-based structure. Under the plan, the UN-backed group would switch to an organisation that provides guidance for banks as a “framework initiative”, it said. The alliance was co-founded in 2021 by Carney, the former Bank of England governor who is now the Canadian prime minister, while he was the UN’s special envoy on climate action and finance.

UK - Many FTSE 100 businesses continue to readjust reported metrics as they struggle to assess whether they are hitting climate targets. That companies seemingly cannot accurately tell their stakeholders what their emissions are will raise further doubts about whether lenders or investors should be relying on this data when making decisions. Steve Baker, the former minister who led the net-zero scrutiny group of backbench Conservative MPs, urged businesses and the government to “take stock”. He added: “Unfortunately, this data seems to suggest that firms are, as one would expect, failing to achieve impossible things. And yet under pressure they are too often making statements which turn out to be untrue, undermining everyone’s faith in the integrity of policy and institutions trying to comply with it. This has become a fable for our times.”

GERMANY - The German government has introduced a new bill aimed at rapidly increasing the size of its armed forces. Germany hopes to recruit 100,000 new soldiers by the end of the decade as the country continues plans to rapidly strengthen its armed forces. War in Europe has seen Germany alter its approach to defence, with the government voting to change the law to allow it to invest heavily in defence earlier this year. Since the end of the Second World War, the country has resisted heavy spending in defence, in part due to the legacy of the Nazis but also driven by economic prudence following the financial crisis of 2008. The country will now seek to pass a new law which will allow it to enhance its voluntary recruitment as it seeks to respond to war in Ukraine. German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said as he presented the Military Service Modernisation Act: “A functioning Bundeswehr requires a functioning country. A strong army - in terms of personnel and equipment - is the most effective means of preventing wars.”

GERMANY - When Nigel Farage announced his plan to deport 600,000 illegal migrants from Britain, he put forward Germany as an example of how it could be done. The Reform UK leader pointed to two deportation flights organised by Berlin, transporting a total of 102 failed Afghan asylum seekers back to their homeland. The flights were the first to leave Germany for Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power and the European nation closed its embassy in Kabul in 2021. Germany accomplished this without leaving the European Union, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) or any other international treaties. But it took a colossal legal, political and diplomatic juggling act to get the wheels off the ground.

UK - Popular for adults undergoing career and life transitions, and expanding into specialisms from dating to bereavement, life coaching is also gaining popularity with the parents of children and teens. The International Coaching Federation (ICF), which trains coaches globally, says it has seen a rise in child specialist life coaches in the UK in the years since the pandemic. Advocates say that the coaching methodology, which is based on instilling practical tools to deal with challenges and emotions rather than traditional psychotherapy’s exploration of the roots of these emotions, translates well to the travails of modern childhood: online friendship groups, uncertainty about the future and the low self-esteem that can creep up on us all in the teenage years but is hyper-powered by social media. The specialism is unregulated. Some clinical child psychotherapists, and coaches themselves, warn of a “Wild West” that has potential to cause harm. Others wonder whether child coaching encroaches on the nurturing and advisory roles that are best left to parents.