European Union

Cemil Tugay, the mayor of İzmir, on Tuesday switched alliegences from the opposition CHP to the ruling party AKP. President Erdoğan welcomed him personally at a parliamentary group meeting and presented him with a party pin. Tugay's switch is the latest in a series of defections across Turkey, and has sparked protests in İzmir, a CHP stronghold. Reactions in the Turkish press vary.

Two weeks after her eviction from the Madrid home she had lived in for seven decades, 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal has died. Her eviction sparked nationwide protests against the housing crisis in Spain. A general strike has been called for 11 November to protest the problem. The media examine the symbolic power of Maricarmen's death.

L’Afrique du Sud a connu des flambées de violence récurrentes, ciblant souvent les migrants des pays voisins.

L’Afrique du Sud a connu des flambées de violence récurrentes, ciblant souvent les migrants des pays voisins.

Pete Hegseth affirme que l'exécution sera publique, mais un expert juridique déclare que cette décision « sans précédent » se situe sur un « terrain juridique incertain ».

La phase B du projet Asphaltage se déploie dans plusieurs rues du quartier Fidjrossè-Centre à Cotonou. À Gondouana, les travaux sont en cours sur l'axe reliant le Lab de la Fondation Zinsou au passage supérieur de Houéyiho, derrière le mûr de clôture de l'aéroport de Cotonou.

À Cotonou, les travaux routiers se poursuivent. Dans le 12e arrondissement, plusieurs rues de Fidjrossè sont en chantier dans le cadre de la phase B du projet Asphaltage. Parmi elles, l'axe reliant le Lab de la Fondation Zinsou, à Gondouana, au passage supérieur de Houéyiho, derrière l'aéroport, connaît une transformation progressive. L'entreprise HNRB a démarré les travaux sur cet axe, il y a quelques semaines. Les gros engins et les camions effectuent des allers-retours sur le site.

Difficile d'accès en période de pluie, ce tronçon fait aujourd'hui l'objet de travaux d'aménagement, de bitumage et d'assainissement. Pour les habitants et usagers, cette transformation est perçue comme une évolution importante pour le quartier. « La route en terre nous causait beaucoup de difficultés, surtout quand il pleut. Le bitumage de cette voie va permettre de réduire les embouteillages au niveau du carrefour Erevan. Arrivés au carrefour Fidjrossè fin pavé, les usagers pourront rejoindre directement le passage supérieur de Houéyiho », estime Parfait Dossou, conducteur de taxi-moto.

« C'est bien pensé. On ne pouvait pas faire le projet Asphaltage sans prendre en compte cette voie-là. Elle est vraiment stratégique. Mieux, avec l'échangeur en cours à Vêdoko, cela permettra de réduire les embouteillages aux heures de pointe », soutient Solange, habitante de la zone.

Au-delà du bitumage, certains habitants insistent sur la nécessité de réussir les travaux d'assainissement. « On attend surtout que les travaux aillent jusqu'au bout. Ce qui nous intéresse, ce n'est pas seulement le bitume, mais aussi l'assainissement et la gestion des eaux de pluie », souligne Cédric Assogba, habitant.

Rue Houdou Ali bitumée à Fidjrossè

Trois zones d'intervention à Fidjrossè et Togbin

Les interventions dans cette partie de Cotonou ont été réparties en trois zones, selon le ministère du Cadre de vie et des Transports. Au total, 134 rues seront entièrement bitumées et les trottoirs pavés. La zone 1 comprend 34 rues autour du Centre national hospitalier de psychiatrie de Cotonou, dans le secteur de Jacquot.

La zone 2 correspond au secteur de Fidjrossè-Centre. Elle couvre le côté droit de la route des Pêches, jusqu'à la limite de la rue dénommée Houdou-Ali. Au total, 53 rues sont prévues pour être modernisées dans cette zone. La zone 3 concerne la localité de Togbin et prend en compte 47 rues. Plusieurs rues du quartier Fidjrossè-Centre ont déjà été bitumées dans le cadre du projet Asphaltage.

À Fidjrossè, le paysage urbain change progressivement. Après plusieurs semaines de travaux, les engins continuent de s'activer. Pour les habitants et les usagers, l'enjeu est désormais de voir la transformation en cours aller jusqu'à son terme, avec des voies praticables et un système d'assainissement répondant aux réalités du quartier.

Akpédjé Ayosso

Source : © European Union, 2026 - EP

Le Premier ministre Benjamin Netanyahu a refusé d'assumer une quelconque responsabilité personnelle dans ce qui s'est passé ou d'ordonner une enquête d'État.

Children in Gaza wait in the hope of receiving food. Credit: UN News

By UN Women
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 9 2026 (IPS)

Since October 2023, 50,000 women and girls in Gaza have been killed or seriously injured.

• UN Women estimates that nearly 50,000 women and girls in Gaza have been killed or severely injured since the onset of war in October 2023 [1], amounting to one in 21 Gazan women and girls losing their life or living with lifelong disabilities [2].


• More than 38,000 women and girls have been killed and 11,700 severely injured, the result of Israeli airstrikes and land military operations.

• While most of the casualties recorded took place during the first two years of the war, women and girls continue to be targeted despite a ceasefire agreement entering into effect in October 2025. Two hundred seventy-seven women and girls are among those who have been killed in Gaza over the past year.

Nearly every woman and girl in Gaza is displaced.

• More than 150 evacuation and movement orders have been issued across Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces since October 2023, forcing nearly one million women and girls from their homes – nearly every woman and girl in Gaza.

• The majority of women and girls in Gaza live in tents or in the ruins, with no privacy. In conditions that are incompatible with survival and dignity, women and girls are caring for children, the sick, the injured, and for the elderly, cooking and cleaning without the basic means to carry out these responsibilities.

• Women are being forced to deliver babies in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, putting their lives at risk. At the same time, the number of miscarriages reached almost 4,000 in the first six months of 2026, triple the number recorded during the last six months of 2025.

The number of widows and those assuming the role of head of household in Gaza has doubled since October 2023.

• Nearly one in four households in Gaza – an estimated 86,290 households – is now reportedly headed by a woman, compared to the pre-October 2023 rate of one in nine.

• For women-headed households, the impact extends beyond the grief of losing a husband, father or other loved one. Many are now carrying sole responsibility for providing for, protecting, and holding their families together in increasingly devastating conditions.

Despite the ceasefire, women and girls in Gaza continue to face severely limited access to food, shelter, safe water, and hygiene supplies, alongside ongoing hostilities and insecurity.

• Intense and widespread bombing has leveled homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, and shops, making it extremely hard for women and girls to access essential services and basic goods.

• Restrictions on humanitarian access and bombardment continue to cause immense suffering. Between July and December 2026, an estimated 702,000 women and girls are projected to face high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3+, crisis or worse), with devastating effects on their health, including the risk of malnutrition [3].

The steepest recorded decline in aid is threatening a lifeline to women and girls in Gaza: women’s organizations.

• UN Women surveyed women’s organizations working on the frontlines of the response in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Thirteen of the 14 organizations surveyed reported that the level of need among women and girls has increased since 2025. All organizations surveyed had seen an increase in gender-based violence, poverty, and mental health distress since 2025. Thirteen of the 14 organizations had seen an increase in child marriage.

• At the same time, 13 of the 14 organizations surveyed by UN Women reported that they do not have the capacity to meet the growing needs of women and girls. To cope with the lack of funding, nearly two thirds of the organizations told UN Women they had been forced to put women and girls on waiting lists or turn them away.

UN Women is on the ground in Gaza. We work with women-led and women’s rights organizations to provide lifesaving and critical support to women and girls, including protection services and gender-based violence case management, legal aid, mental health and psychosocial support, and emergency cash and livelihoods assistance.

From fitting women and girls with prosthetics and offering counselling to survivors, to ensuring that the humanitarian response is shaped by the experiences and perspectives of women and girls, our support is helping them to stay afloat. But women and girls in Gaza need peace.

UN Women calls for the ceasefire in Gaza to be fully implemented. We call for international law to be upheld, accountability for violations, and the protection of women and girls and all civilians. Humanitarian assistance must reach those in need – at scale and without obstruction. Women and girls must be placed at the centre of response and recovery efforts.

[1] The proportion was calculated by combining women and girls killed or injured (38,000 and 11,700, respectively).

[2] The proportion was calculated by dividing the combined figure of 49,700 women and girls killed or injured (38,000 and 11,700, respectively) by PCBS’s estimated female population of Gaza at the end of 2025 (approximately 1.06 million). This gives 4.69 per cent, equivalent to approximately one in 21 women and girls. The calculation assumes no overlap between the reported deaths and injuries. Population source: PCBS, 8 March 2026.

[3] UN Women estimate based on the IPC Gaza Strip Special Brief, published 13 August 2026. The estimated 702,000 women and girls facing acute food insecurity at crisis-level or worse (IPC Phase 3+) during July–December 2026 is calculated by applying PCBS’s 2025 female population share (49.7 per cent) to the IPC projected caseload of 1,412,421 people. The calculation assumes proportional representation of women and girls across IPC phases and is rounded to the nearest thousand.

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

South Africa has experienced recurrent outbreaks of violence, often targeting migrants from neighbouring countries.

By Madhu Rao and Tyson Miller
SINGAPORE, Oct 9 2026 (IPS)

When governments gather in Yerevan this month for the 17th UN Convention on Biological Diversity, they will weigh a promise nearly 200 countries adopted six years ago: to effectively conserve at least 30 percent of land, inland waters, and sea by 2030. Achieving the ambitious 30×30 target is essential to sustaining the systems humanity relies on for survival—including crop pollination, purification of water and air, and climate regulation—as well as the biodiversity that underpins food production, fisheries, and tourism.

Unfortunately, the world is not on track to achieve this target. Moreover, the emphasis on the quantitative dimension of the 30×30 target has often overshadowed its more critical objective: ensuring that areas of high biodiversity value are protected, conserved, and connected through effective and equitable management.

The struggle to deliver on international commitments reflects a fundamental challenge. The Global Biodiversity Framework requires countries to halt and reverse biodiversity loss while pursuing economic growth, and businesses are increasingly expected to mitigate nature-related impacts. The ongoing expansion in infrastructure, mining, and the energy transition places additional pressure on biodiversity-rich ecosystems, creating difficult trade-offs that must be carefully managed.

The fundamental question remains: how do we reconcile economic development with meeting biodiversity commitments?

A new analysis of tropical countries contains insights vital to answering that question. Most importantly, it found that oil and gas concessions overlap nearly 61 million hectares—roughly two and a half times the size of the United Kingdom—of protected and conserved areas. Mining concessions overlap another 43 million hectares. Such conditions can turn protected and conserved areas into ‘paper parks’: places protected in law but vulnerable to extractive industries in practice.

What the Maps Reveal

The analysis examined a wide range of some of the world’s most vital ecosystems and the industrial pressures closing in on them—oil and gas, mining, industrial logging, and large-scale agriculture—across the Amazon, Central America, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia, with further examples from the Global North. The report focused on the tropical forests and marine ecosystems that not only harbor irreplaceable biodiversity but also remain at the center of conflicts between extraction and conservation.

Senegal, for example, is close on paper to protecting 30 percent of its territory, yet oil and gas blocks cover 99 percent of both the country’s protected areas and identified Key Biodiversity Areas. The remaining undisturbed forest in Cambodia largely lies inside protected areas, yet a fifth of those areas face mining concessions and most contain land of interest to oil and gas companies. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, nearly three-quarters of the ambitious new Kivu-Kinshasa Green Corridor overlaps with oil and gas blocks included in a recent licensing round.

This contradiction between conservation in policy and extraction in practice can also be seen in high income countries. The United States has opened Bears Ears National Monument to mining and is threatening new oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and the UK also allows fossil-fuel companies to drill in protected areas.

There is further tension. Some of the mining pushing into protected areas is for minerals fueling the energy transition. Securing a stable climate and securing nature are both essential, and one should not be pursued by quietly sacrificing the other.

We need to consider not only how much additional territory must be brought under protection by 2030, but whether areas already counted as protected and conserved are genuinely conserved, effectively managed, and delivering meaningful biodiversity outcomes.

The Path Forward

High-integrity implementation of 30×30 means prioritizing places that matter most for biodiversity and ensuring they remain ecologically intact, connected, effectively conserved, and equitably governed. It means upholding Indigenous Peoples’ and local community rights and protecting these places from incompatible extractive and large-scale industrial activities.

There are four critical components. The first is the mitigation hierarchy, which calls for avoiding harm whenever possible before considering other measures. Areas of highest biodiversity value, including strictly protected areas, should be no-go zones for extractive industry.

The second is policy coherence. A protected area sits with a ministry of environment while a mining concession sits with a ministry of mines or energy, and unless biodiversity is built into the decisions of every economic sector, the two will keep colliding.

The third is biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning, which enables governments to clearly recognize where nature is protected and where development can proceed. Protect here, develop there.

Finally, effective and equitable governance, including rights-based approaches, is essential. Indigenous peoples and local communities steward some of the world’s most intact and biodiverse lands, including many areas of global importance for biodiversity. Their rights, knowledge and leadership are central to effective conservation.

With only four years left, the commitment worth making in Yerevan is durable protection for the areas that matter most, so they remain intact, connected, and free of the industries that would undermine them. We must make sure that 30×30 is not a promise that only exists on a map, but is a pathway to true biodiversity protection for our collective survival.

Madhu Rao, Chair of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas and Tyson Miller, Executive Director of Earth Insight

IPS UN Bureau

 

 

 

 

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Remarks by Eurogroup President Kyriakos Pierrakakis on global energy markets, the effectiveness of public finances and fiscal challenges, progress on the capital markets union, and international economic developments.