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Why has Trump ordered strikes in Nigeria and what has it got to do with the persecution of Christians?

After spending weeks accusing Nigeria’s government of failing to tackle the persecution of Christians, Donald Trump announced a series of strikes on the west African country on Christmas Day. The strikes, targeting Islamic State militants in the country’s north, mark the latest overseas military intervention from Trump, who campaigned on a promise to extricate the US from decades of “endless wars” during his 2024 run for president. What do we know about the strikes? In his announcement, Trump said the strikes were aimed at Islamic State militants who have been “targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” A Department of Defense official told the Associated Press that the US worked with Nigeria to carry out the strikes, and that they had been approved by that country’s government. The US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, said in a post on X: “More to come …” Nigeria’s ministry of foreign affairs said the cooperation included exchanges of intelligence and strategic coordination, while the country’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, said the strike on the Muslim-majority state of Sokoto was “part of joint ongoing operations”. Why has Trump targeted Nigeria? Parts of the US right have for years been amplifying claims that Christians are facing persecution in Nigeria. In September, the Republican senator Ted Cruz pushed for sanctions against Nigerian officials who “facilitate violence against Christians and other religious minorities, including by Islamist terrorist groups”. Claims that Christians face religious persecution overseas have become a major motivating force for Trump’s base – and the US president counts evangelical Christians as among his most enthusiastic supporters. Earlier this year he appeared to act on some of these concerns by designating Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” under the US International Religious Freedom Act, which followed weeks of lobbying by American lawmakers and conservative Christian groups. Soon after, he ordered the Pentagon to begin planning for potential military action in the country. At the time, the president said he might go in “guns-a-blazing” if the Nigerian government continued to “allow the killing of Christians”. Is there religious persecution in Nigeria? In the past, Nigeria’s government has responded to Trump’s criticisms by saying that people of many faiths, not just Christians, suffer at the hands of extremists groups who operate throughout the country. Nigeria is officially secular but is divided almost evenly between Muslims (53%) and Christians (45%), with the remaining population practising African traditional religions. Violence against Christians has drawn significant international attention and is often framed as religious persecution, but most analysts argue the situation is more complex and attacks can have varying motivations. For example, deadly clashes between itinerant Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farming communities are rooted in competition over land and water but exacerbated by religious and ethnic differences. Meanwhile, the kidnappings of priests is seen by many analysts as a trend driven more by money than religious hatred, as priests are viewed as influential figures whose worshippers or organisations can mobilise funds quickly. What does the Nigerian government say? After Thursday’s strikes, Nigeria’s foreign ministry praised the cooperation with the US but pointedly refused to acknowledge that America’s actions had anything to do with the persecution of Christians. “Terrorist violence in any form, whether directed at Christians, Muslims or other communities, remains an affront to Nigeria’s values and to international peace and security,” the ministry said in a statement. Successive Nigerian governments have struggled to get a hold on the nation’s deteriorating security crisis, with thousands of people killed and hundreds more abducted in the past few years. In the north-east, Boko Haram and its splinter groups such as Islamic State West Africa Province (Iswap) have waged an insurgency since 2009, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions. On Christmas Eve, a suicide bombing at a mosque in Borno state, where the insurgency began, killed at least five people and left more than 30 others seriously injured. In the north-west, heavily armed criminal gangs – often labelled “bandits” – carry out mass kidnappings and raids that affect both Muslim and Christian communities. Last month Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, said the characterisation of Nigeria as a religiously intolerant country did not reflect reality. He said: “Religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity and shall always remain so … Nigeria is a country with constitutional guarantees to protect citizens of all faiths.”

Venezuela says it released 99 people detained for protesting 2024 presidential election

Venezuela has said it has carried out its largest release of political prisoners this year, claiming to have freed 99 people detained for taking part in protests after the 2024 election, widely believed to have been stolen by the dictator Nicolás Maduro, as it comes under increasing military pressure from the US. Civil society organisations have treated the news with caution and stressed that the releases were insufficient, noting that at least 900 political prisoners remain in the country. The Maduro regime refuses to acknowledge the existence of political prisoners and said it had freed, in the early hours of Christmas Day, 99 “citizens who were deprived of their liberty for their participation in acts of violence and incitement to hatred following the electoral process of 28 July 2024”. It framed the move as an expression of its alleged commitment to “peace” and its “unrestricted respect for human rights”, at a moment when the country is facing what it described as an “imperialist siege and multilateral aggression” by the US. Beyond the deployment of about 15,000 troops and a massive naval fleet off Venezuela’s coast, the US has intensified pressure in recent weeks with a “total blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving the country, the seizure of two vessels and the pursuit of a third, and airstrikes on boats that have killed 105 people in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The prisoner releases followed a period of escalating internal repression, during which the opposition has been left with virtually no prominent figures either free or still in the country – the opposition leader María Corina Machado, for example, is temporarily in exile after travelling to Norway to receive her Nobel peace prize. In recent weeks alone, a political scientist, an activist and union leaders were arrested, while last week 17-year-old Gabriel José Rodríguez Méndez became the first teenager convicted of “terrorism”, sentenced to 10 years in prison for taking part in post-election protests. Demonstrations erupted across the country after Maduro – backed by electoral and state institutions under his control – declared himself the winner, despite the opposition presenting evidence that its candidate, the retired diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, had prevailed. He is now living in exile in Spain. As far as is known, no prominent opposition figures who had been detained, nor the 17-year-old Méndez, are among the 99 allegedly released, a group that does include at least three other teenagers. “The selective and discretionary nature of these releases confirms that deprivation of liberty has been used as an instrument of political persecution,” said the NGO Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón in a statement. The NGO acknowledged the “positive impact” of the measure on the lives of those freed, but said it was “clearly insufficient” given that hundreds of political prisoners remain, with estimates ranging from 900 to 1,000. The Committee for the Freedom of Social Fighters and Political Prisoners said most of those released would remain under “conditional” liberty, subject to precautionary measures such as travel bans, regular court appearances and restrictions on speaking to the media about their cases. The committee and other groups also said they had not yet independently verified that the number of people released was 99, suggesting it may have been lower.

Zelenskyy to travel to US for Trump meeting amid push for Ukraine deal

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is to travel to the US for a planned meeting with Donald Trump on Sunday, as Washington continues to push for a possible peace deal between Kyiv and Moscow. The Ukrainian president announced the visit on Friday in a social media post, saying he had received a briefing from Rustem Umerov, the secretary of Ukraine’s national security and defence council, on new contacts with US officials. “We are not losing a single day. We have agreed on a meeting at the highest level – with President Trump in the near future,” Zelenskyy said, adding that “a lot can be decided before the New Year”. Zelenskyy later told journalists the high-stakes meeting with Trump was planned for Sunday and would focus on Ukrainian security guarantees and reconstruction. He added that the proposed 20-point peace plan was “90% ready”. The plan is considered an updated version of an earlier 28-point document agreed several weeks ago between the US envoys and Russian officials – a proposal widely viewed as skewed towards the Kremlin’s demands. Ukraine has pushed for security guarantees modelled on Nato’s article 5 mutual defence pledge under any proposed peace deal with Russia, though it remains unclear whether Moscow would accept such terms. “I cannot say whether the meeting with President Trump on Sunday will lead to the signing of any agreements,” Zelenskyy said. Washington has not publicly confirmed the meeting. The announcement follows a burst of diplomatic activity last weekend in Miami, where Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met separately with Russian and Ukrainian representatives, as well as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. US officials described the discussions as “constructive”, though Moscow has played down expectations of progress and there are few signs that Vladimir Putin is prepared to soften his maximalist demands to end the full-scale invasion. At a closed-door meeting with Russia’s business elite on Wednesday evening, the Russian president reportedly reiterated his demand that Ukraine hand over the entire eastern Donbas region as part of any peace deal. According to Kommersant, one of Russia’s best-connected newspapers, Putin also indicated openness to a limited territorial exchange with Ukraine, with Moscow potentially exchanging small areas of land Russian forces occupy in Ukraine’s northern Kharkiv and southern Zaporizhzhia regions. Zelenskyy has previously said Ukraine would be open to withdrawing “heavy forces” from parts of Donbas it still controls, but only if Russia mirrored the move as part of a US-backed initiative to create a “free economic zone” in the region. It remains highly uncertain that Moscow would accept either a suggested demilitarised buffer zone or a withdrawal of its forces, even as other sticking points remain, including control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant that Kyiv says should be jointly managed by the US and Ukraine. On Friday, the Kremlin said Putin’s top foreign policy aide, Yuri Ushakov, had held a call with the US administration after Moscow received an updated US proposal on a potential peace deal, although there were no signs that a breakthrough had been reached. Russia has repeatedly said it was prepared to continue fighting in Ukraine if no peace deal were reached, saying it was confident it could achieve its war aims through military means. Yet while Moscow has made slow, grinding progress on the battlefield, Ukrainian forces have in recent days pushed Russian troops out of the city of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region. It marked a rare Ukrainian counteroffensive, undermining Putin’s repeated claims that the city was under Moscow’s control.

Southern separatists in Yemen report Saudi airstrikes near positions

A separatist group in southern Yemen that this month seized two oil-rich provinces has claimed that Saudi Arabia has fired warning airstrikes directed at its forces. Videos issued on Friday by media linked to the United Arab Emirates-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) showed airstrikes that it said were close to its positions in Wadi Nahab, Hadramaut province. The strikes – which were not independently confirmed – would be the first military step by Saudi Arabia since it made a diplomatic appeal urging the separatist forces to relinquish newly captured Hadramaut and al-Mahra. Amr al-Bidh, a foreign affairs special representative for the STC, said in a statement to the Associated Press that airstrikes came after its fighters in eastern Hadramaut were involved in ambushes that left two dead. Officials in Saudi Arabia have not so far commented. Two weeks ago, the STC – a longstanding voice calling for Yemen to return to the pre-1990 settlement of a Yemen divided into north and south – entered the two large, oil-rich provinces in the south not yet under its control. The capture of the huge governorates of Hadramaut and al-Mahra, the province bordering Oman, occurred without much sign of resistance, as the Hadramaut forces retreated in the face of well-armed STC troops. Since then, the Saudi-backed and UN-recognised elements in Yemen’s divided southern government have been trying to mount a political and diplomatic counteroffensive against “STC unilateralism”, arguing that there is no support across the south for the STC’s call for separation from the north. European countries and Gulf states such as Kuwait and Qatar, as well as the Arab League secretary general, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, have called for Yemen to remain a unified country – backing the Saudi position – but the US has said little so far. Europe has voiced concerns that fractures within the south would divert energy away from the struggle to oust the Houthis, who have run the north of Yemen since 2015, including the former capital, Sana’a. The STC said the UN-recognised government had done little to take the battle to the Houthis, and that a separated, cohesive south would be a more effective bulwark against the Iranian-backed Houthis, and would be better equipped to protect the ports along Yemen’s southern coast. There were demonstrations on Thursday in the south-western port city of Aden calling for the STC president, Aidarous al-Zubaidi, to declare independence, a step he is considering. On Thursday, the Saudi ministry of foreign affairs issued a conciliatory but firm statement calling for the STC to withdraw and to reopen negotiations with the remnants of the UN-recognised government. Riyadh said unilateral acts harmed the integrity of Yemen, and it insisted it “had prioritised preserving unity and making every effort to reach peaceful solutions to resolve the situation in both governorates”. It added: “The kingdom remains hopeful that the public interest will prevail through ending the escalation by the Southern Transitional Council and the withdrawal of its forces from the two governorates in an urgent and orderly manner. The kingdom stresses the importance of cooperation among all Yemeni factions and components to exercise restraint and avoid any measures that could destabilise security and stability, which may result in undesirable consequences.” In response, the UAE put out a brief statement commending Saudi Arabia’s role “in serving the interests of the Yemeni people and fulfilling their legitimate aspirations for stability and prosperity”. It did not endorse the call for the STC to withdraw, but private discussions over the political preconditions necessary for a withdrawal have been held. Most observers do not believe the STC could survive without UAE military and political endorsement. If the UAE does not, publicly or privately, withdraw its reassurances to back the STC, then the UAE and Saudi Arabia face a major confrontation.

A child is born: Italians celebrate village’s first baby in 30 years

In Pagliara dei Marsi, an ancient rural village on the slopes of Mount Girifalco in Italy’s Abruzzo region, cats vastly outnumber people. They weave through the narrow streets, wander in and out of homes, and stretch out on walls overlooking the mountains. Their purrs are a consistent hum in the quiet that has come with decades of population decline. But less so since March, when rapturous celebrations marked a rare occurrence: the birth of a child. Lara Bussi Trabucco is the first baby to have been born in Pagliara dei Marsi in almost 30 years, bringing the village’s population to roughly 20. Her christening in the church opposite her home was attended by the entire community – including the cats – and such is the novelty of having a baby in the village, she is now the main tourist attraction. “People who didn’t even know Pagliara dei Marsi existed have come, only because they had heard about Lara,” said her mother, Cinzia Trabucco. “At just nine months old, she’s famous.” Lara’s arrival is a symbol of hope, but also a sobering reminder of Italy’s worsening demographic crisis. In 2024, births in the country reached a historic low of 369,944, continuing a 16-year negative trend, according to figures from Istat, the national statistics agency. The fertility rate also fell to a record low, with an average 1.18 children born to women of child-bearing age in 2024 – one of the lowest in the EU. Reasons for the decline are myriad, from job insecurity and the huge wave of youth emigration to inadequate support for working mothers and, as in other countries, the rise in male infertility. Furthermore, an increasing number of people are simply choosing to not have children. Istat’s preliminary data for the first seven months of 2025 points to a further decrease, and of Italy’s 20 administrative regions, nowhere has it been more acute than in the already sparsely populated Abruzzo, which between January and July had a 10.2% drop in the number of births compared with the same period in 2024. Pagliara dei Marsi is tiny, but it is emblematic of a country-wide landscape that is becoming dominated by ageing populations and emptying schools, putting pressure on public finances and presenting daunting economic and social challenges for leaders at local, regional and national levels. “Pagliara dei Marsi has been suffering from drastic depopulation, exacerbated by the loss of many elderly people, without any generational turnover,” said the local mayor, Giuseppina Perozzi. Perozzi, who lives a few doors away from baby Lara, said she was grateful to Trabucco, 42, and her partner, Paolo Bussi, 56, for starting a family and hopes it will inspire others to do the same. Their situation is uncommon. Trabucco, a music teacher, was born in Frascati, close to Rome, and worked in the Italian capital for years before deciding to move to the village where her grandfather was born because she had always wanted to raise a family far from the chaos of a city. She met Bussi, a construction worker from the area, a few years ago. The couple benefited from a €1,000 “baby bonus” after Lara’s birth, a one-time payment for each child born or adopted since January 2025, introduced by Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government as part of its pledge to tackle what the prime minister has called Italy’s “demographic winter”. They also receive a child benefit payment of about €370 a month. But their main struggle is juggling childcare around work. Italy’s childcare support system is chronically insufficient and Meloni’s administration, despite depicting the birthrate crisis as a battle for national survival, has so far fallen short in its promise to boost the number of nurseries. Many women who become pregnant are forced to leave the workforce and later struggle to re-enter. The couple worry about Lara’s future schooling, too. The last time Pagliara dei Marsi had a teacher – whose home doubled-up as the school – was decades ago. There is an infant and primary school in nearby Castellafiume, but given the school closures across Italy due to the birthrate decline, it remains to be seen whether there will be enough children to sustain the facility over the long term. Trabucco said financial incentives were not enough to stymie the trend. “The entire system needs to be revolutionised,” she added. “We’re a country of high taxes but this does not translate into a good quality of life or good social services.” About an hour’s drive from Pagliara dei Marsi is Sulmona, a once-thriving city where the hastened pace of depopulation over the past decade has led to a battle to save its maternity unit, located at Annunziata hospital, from closure. The unit, which serves the city and nearby towns, delivered 120 babies in 2024, well below the 500 required for maternity units to maintain funding. If it closes, pregnant women would need to travel to L’Aquila, the regional capital, about an hour’s drive away, posing risks in emergency situations. “The region is vast and especially in winter, travel conditions can be treacherous,” said Gianluca Di Luigi, a gynaecologist at the hospital who recalled a woman in labour who got stuck in a snow storm for eight hours. “By the time we got her to the hospital, we had to do an emergency caesarean. This was her first child and she was traumatised by the whole experience.” Those fighting to keep the unit open argue that the figure of 500 births a year, established in 2010, is no longer realistic. “We never did reach the magic 500 here,” said Berta Gambina, a midwife who has worked in the unit for 39 years. “Even in the best of times, we averaged about 380 births a year. But I will do all I can to keep it open – my biggest fear is abandoning pregnant women.” Ornella La Civita, a city councillor with the centre-left Democratic party, said financial incentives to encourage births were welcome. “But how can you give women money to have babies but not guarantee them a safe and secure place to give birth?” One often overlooked topic in Italy’s birthrate debate is preserving fertility, said Di Luigi, through means such as freezing eggs. “Ideological thinking in Italy has always been a block,” he added. “But if we want newborns, then we need enlightenment too – yes, provide young people with dignified jobs but let’s start teaching them about preserving fertility.”

‘All brakes are off’: Russia’s attempt to rein in illicit market for leaked data backfires

Russia is scrambling to rein in the country’s sprawling illicit market for leaked personal data, a shadowy ecosystem long exploited by investigative journalists, police and criminal groups. For more than a decade, Russia’s so-called probiv market – a term derived from the verb “to pierce” or “to punch into a search bar” – has operated as a parallel information economy built on a network of corrupt officials, traffic police, bank employees and low-level security staff willing to sell access to restricted government or corporate databases. While leaked databases exist everywhere, the scale and routine use of probiv is uniquely Russian. It grew out of the country’s deeply corrupt state infrastructure and became indispensable both to those seeking to exploit the system and to those trying to expose it. For a modest fee – sometimes as little as $10 – buyers can obtain passport numbers, home addresses, travel histories, car registrations and internal police records. At the higher end, entire dossiers could be purchased on individuals, including metadata on calls and movements. Probiv, whose use remains controversial among Russian journalists, have underpinned high-profile investigations, including tracing the FSB state security unit behind the poisoning of Alexei Navalny. It also served the police and security services themselves, who routinely used the black market to track activists, opposition figures and anyone who fell outside the state’s favour. “It is one of the paradoxes of modern Russia: on the one hand, these services are illegal and rely on leaked data, yet on the other, they are far more convenient for day-to-day police work than the multitude of official departmental databases,” said Andrei Zakharov, an investigative journalist who recently published a book on probiv. But as the war in Ukraine stretched into its fourth year, the Kremlin began to view probiv less as a tolerated convenience and more as a threat. Phone scam syndicates were using leaked data on an industrial scale, while Ukrainian intelligence had learned to exploit the country’s porous information landscape to identify and assassinate military officials inside Russia. During his annual phone-in with the nation last year, President Vladimir Putin himself admitted that a close friend had fallen victim to a phone scam. That incident, said Zakharov, was the signal for security services to start closing down on the probiv market. Over the past year, Putin has signed laws tightening penalties for data leaks, imposing up to 10 years in prison for accessing or distributing such information. The security services have also begun an aggressive hunt for probiv operators, detaining several brokers and targeting the infrastructure they rely on. Among the most high-profile arrests was of the team behind Usersbox, one of the widest-used and cheapest services. But the Kremlin’s war on probiv appears to have had the opposite effect, Zakharov said. Many of the leading probiv operators and brokers have moved their businesses abroad where they are far less constrained by informal deals with the security services or fear of immediate arrest. “Before, they still worked with the security services, or would think twice before releasing something extremely sensitive. Now all their brakes are off,” Zakharov said. “They’re dumping one sensitive leak after another.” He cited last year’s massive FSB database known as Kordon-2023, which was leaked online, containing details of people who had crossed Russia’s borders between 2014 and 2023. Zakharov described it as one of the largest and most consequential leaks to date. Well-known services such as Himera, which had been known to cooperate with the authorities, have changed course: the group said it had cut off law-enforcement access and relocated all its staff. Ukrainian hackers have joined in. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, pro-Ukrainian hackers and other intelligence groups have repeatedly breached Russian state and commercial systems, stealing data and releasing it openly – often for free, and largely for ideological reasons. Last year, the Ukrainian hacker group KibOrg published online a database belonging to clients of Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank. The leak allegedly contained personal data on roughly 24 million individuals and more than 13m organisations. “Taken together,” Zakharov said, “it has never been easier to find private Russian data on the market.”

Former Malaysian PM Najib Razak found guilty of abuse of power in latest 1MDB trial

Jailed former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak has been found guilty of abuse of power, in the biggest trial yet in the multibillion-dollar fraud scandal related to state fund 1MDB. Najib had been charged with four counts of corruption and 21 counts of money laundering for receiving illegal transfers of about 2.2bn ringgit ($544.15m) from 1MDB. He has consistently denied wrongdoing. Malaysian and US investigators say at least $4.5bn was stolen from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a state fund Najib co-founded in 2009 while in office. More than $1bn allegedly made its way into accounts linked to Najib, who has denied wrongdoing. Najib, 72, has been in prison since August 2022, when Malaysia’s top court upheld a corruption conviction for illegally receiving funds from a 1MDB unit. His 12-year jail sentence in that case was halved last year by a pardons board. Najib has repeatedly said he was misled by 1MDB officials and fugitive financier Jho Low, who has been charged in the US for his central role in the case. Low, whose whereabouts are unknown, has denied wrongdoing. This is a breaking news story, check back for updates