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Stable genius? How a defective ‘crying horse’ toy went viral in China

On 17 February China will celebrate the start of the year of the horse, the zodiac sign symbolising high energy and hard work. But the runaway success of a defective stuffed toy suggests that many Chinese are not feeling the vibe. A red horse toy produced by Happy Sister in the city of Yiwu in the west of China was meant to wear a broad grin, but a factory error meant it hit the shops sporting a despairing grimace. Because the smile was placed upside down, the horse’s nostrils could be interpreted as tears. Despite the manufacturing error, the toy has become an unexpected success with shoppers after going viral on Chinese social media and capturing a zeitgeist of corporate fatigue and worker burnout. It also taps into a broader trend for so-called “ugly-cute” toys, popularised in recent years by characters such as Pop Mart’s toothy monster Labubu. “People joked that the crying horse is how you look at work, while the smiling one is how you look after work,” Zhang Huoqing, owner of Happy Sister, told Reuters. By mid-January she said she was receiving daily orders of more than 15,000 units, prompting the factory to open up 10 additional production lines. Many Chinese white-collar workers have endured the notorious 996 system, which requires employees to work 9am to 9pm, six days a week. The practice is exalted by tech entrepreneurs including Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, but has been increasingly criticised since 2021 when an employee of a e-commerce company died suddenly after finishing a late-night shift. The 966 practice was outlawed that year, but long overtime hours are still common. “This little horse looks so sad and pitiful, just like the way I feel at work,” wrote an online buyer of the toy, by the name of Tuan Tuan Mami, according to SCMP. “Consumer products and internet memes can act as outlets for discussing work pressure, especially on platforms like Xiaohongshu, where consumer culture and emotional expression are tightly intertwined,” Jacob Cooke, the CEO of WPIC Marketing + Technologies, an e-commerce consulting firm, told Business Insider. Meanwhile, wholesale orders for the “crying horse” have been placed from South Africa, east Asia and the Middle East. Its image is expected to appear on a new range of merchandise in the coming year. Zhang never discovered who sewed the horse’s snout on upside down. “Since we can’t figure out exactly whose mistake it was, we’ll just give everyone a bonus,” she said.

Can Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez become a Latin American Deng Xiaoping?

After years of political and social upheaval, hunger and despair, the Great Helmsman departs and is replaced by a francophile economic reformer who catapults a traumatised country into a new era of prosperity and growth. That is what happened in China half a century ago when the croissant-loving communist Deng Xiaoping became paramount leader after Chairman Mao Zedong’s 1976 death and set in motion one of history’s biggest economic booms. Some believe it might also turn out to be an apt description of the situation in today’s Venezuela after its “Gran Timonel”, Nicolás Maduro, was toppled and replaced by his Sorbonne-educated vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez. In her first address after filling the dictator’s shoes, Rodríguez hinted at plans to launch her own period of “reform and opening up” – just as Deng did after a heart attack ended Mao’s life and his catastrophic 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. “Where Chavismo has had to rectify [itself], it does so,” Rodríguez said in a speech with echoes of Deng’s 1978 plea for Chinese communists to “emancipate their minds” after that decade of bloodshed and upheaval. Declaring the start of a “new chapter” in Venezuela, Rodríguez called for revamped oil laws to help foreign firms access the world’s largest proven reserves and pledged closer ties with Washington, despite its “kidnapping” of Maduro. “Venezuela has the right to relations with China, with Russia, with Cuba, with Iran … and with the United States,” said Maduro’s substitute, who some have started calling “Delxiaoping”. Critics see efforts to portray Rodríguez as a Latina Deng as a spin campaign to obscure her role in helping Maduro wreck Venezuela’s democracy and her responsibility for the feared intelligence agency, Sebin, while vice-president. “They’re trying to make her more palatable. Delcy is now going through a face wash,” said Andrés Izarra, an exiled former minister under Maduro and his mentor, Hugo Chávez. But sinologists say they understand why leaders of the United Socialist party of Venezuela might look to the Communist party of China for inspiration as they seek to leave behind years of social and economic chaos – without losing political control. “The Deng Xiaoping reform era is a very interesting model for Venezuela,” said Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on US-China Relations at Asia Society in New York. “They need to open up to the outside world and get the economy going … If she [Rodríguez] has brains, she will economically reform because, my God, she’s got to get their oil industry back pumping and irrigating her government with some funds.” Venezuela’s interim leader is soon expected to make an official visit to the US – the first by a Venezuelan president in more than 25 years – although it seems unlikely she will appear at a Texas rodeo sporting a 10-gallon cowboy hat, as Deng did in 1979 to signal Beijing’s desire to engage with the world. But China’s authoritarian experience suggests anyone expecting a political thaw to accompany economic reform in Venezuela will be bitterly disappointed. Schell recalled how Deng briefly flirted with political reforms in the 80s. “There were village elections – even some higher-level county elections were allowed … Publishing bloomed. Media suddenly opened up. Universities were much freer and there was almost nothing you couldn’t talk about,” he said. But deep down, Deng remained wedded to his “four cardinal principles” philosophy that insisted the party’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” could not be challenged. “The fundamental structure of the polity did not change,” Schell said. Any hope of democratic change evaporated in June 1989 when Deng ordered troops to clear protesters from Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed. Schell also said he suspected Venezuela’s current leaders would be reluctant to cede power and predicted Rodríguez – who didn’t seem “a Jeffersonian Democrat” – would “go very cautiously” when it came to political reform. “They are the elite, and they do not want to give up their privileges … a bit like the Chinese Communist party. They did not want to give up theirs either and migrate into a multiparty [system], where they had to actually compete politically.” “Venezuela is not China, but autocracies do have some common chords,” Schell added. Maduro’s heirs have shown clear signs of wanting to follow in the footsteps of Deng, whose economic pragmatism was captured by the phrase: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” Long before Maduro’s abduction, he and his close allies repeatedly visited China to understand how it became the world’s second largest economy and helped millions lift themselves from poverty after decades of famine and violent political extremism. During a 2023 trip to Shanghai, one prominent Maduro envoy, Rafael Lacava, told his hosts: “From the economic point of view we are in a transition and this transition looks to the Chinese model … We strongly believe that this is the model we need to follow in the coming years.” Those visits resulted in the creation of five special economic zones in Venezuela, inspired by the areas Deng set up to attract foreign investment in south-east China in the 1980s. Phil Gunson, an analyst in Caracas for the International Crisis Group, said Chavista intellectuals had been pondering the need for Deng-style change for several years. Rodríguez, who was put in charge of Venezuela’s oil industry and economy after becoming vice president in 2018, was one of the key proponents of such thinking, alongside her brother, Jorge. “They have been seeking controlled economic reform for a while,” Gunson said, noting how Rodríguez oversaw a modest economic recovery by partly dollarising the economy and courting business leaders and foreign investors. She has travelled frequently to China since becoming Maduro’s foreign minister in 2014. A central goal now was reviving Venezuela’s decrepit oil industry by reversing Chávez’s 2007 nationalisation in order to attract tens of billions of dollars of foreign investment. “It was one thing to shut out foreign firms at the height of a commodities boom … while oil was $120 a barrel. But now it’s less than half that and there’s a desperate need for inward foreign investment because [state oil company] PDVSA simply cannot revive the oil industry on its own,” Gunson said. Ricardo Hausmann, a Venezuelan economist and former minister who runs Harvard’s Growth Lab, said it was possible a China-style economic opening was the “gameplan” of Rodríguez’s new regime, which Donald Trump has unexpectedly backed while sidelining the opposition movement led by the Nobel peace laureate María Corina Machado. But Hausmann said he believed such an effort would fail, doubting foreign investors and oil companies would risk their money in a place ExxonMobil’s CEO recently called “uninvestable”. If the strategy does succeed, the long-term consequences for Venezuelan democracy could be dire. Frank Dikötter, the author of several books about China, said the heirs of the Great Helmsman had used the “socialist modernity” pioneered by Deng to “build up an economy which has given them enough clout to enforce and enhance limits on democracy … with much greater controls on every aspect of life.” Today, under Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao, the east-Asian country is the world’s No 2 economy, but also its largest and most sophisticated surveillance state. Schell said he suspected Trump had decided to ditch Machado because he felt comfortable with Venezuela becoming an economically prosperous autocracy, so long as it obeyed Washington. “That’s why he didn’t bring Machado back. He doesn’t want someone with a Nobel prize and a lot of woolly ideas about democracy.”

New Zealand could see more deadly landslides as climate crisis triggers intense storms, experts warn

New Zealand could experience an increase in landslides – its most deadly natural hazard – as global warming triggers more intense and frequent storms, experts have warned in the wake of two landslide tragedies in the North Island. New Zealand’s landscapes are scarred with the evidence of landslides – they are responsible for more than 1,800 deaths since written records began – more than earthquakes and volcanoes combined. In January, a series of tropical storms swept through the North Island, bringing torrential rain and causing two fatal landslides. On Thursday morning, a landslide crashed into a holiday park, in Mount Maunganui in the eastern city of Tauranga, burying six people. Authorities have confirmed they are unlikely to be alive. Earlier that morning, another landslide tore through a house south of the city, killing two. On Wednesday, Tauranga city council evacuated 150 people from 30 homes in to assess a new slip posing a “risk to life”. As it grapples with the tragedies, questions have emerged over how the country can better protect itself from landslides and the increasingly extreme weather that can trigger them. New Zealand sits on a tectonic boundary, which pushes up land and creates slopes, and has a maritime climate with high rainfall – factors, which combined, make it prone to landslides. Humans are also responsible for reshaping the landscape including through deforestation, and cutting into slopes for transport and housing, says Martin Brook, professor of applied geology at the University of Auckland. “Land use change has been so profound, that we just aren’t resilient,” he said, adding that while mapping landslide susceptibility in regions had increased, the next step would be using that data to better inform planning decisions. Global warming, meanwhile, is already intensifying tropical storms that can set off landslides, said Dr Thomas Robinson, senior lecturer in disaster risk and resilience, specialising in landslides, at the University of Canterbury. “The more we have intense storms, the more frequently they occur, the more landslides we’re going to have, and then the more impacts we’re going to experience,” he said. Storms in recent years have wreaked havoc across New Zealand. In 2023, roughly 800,000 landslides were caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, making it one of the most extreme landslide-triggering events ever recorded globally, according to Earth Sciences New Zealand. “The losses and the impacts are increasing,” Robinson said. “We need to have a really serious conversation nationally and internationally about how we’re going to manage the risks we’re faced with.” Professor of climate science at Victoria University of Wellington, James Renwick, said, increasingly, storms were causing “devastation and misery” to the country. “To stop such events becoming worse, to stop them overwhelming our abilities to adapt, we must stop adding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the air,” he said, adding government and business leaders had to find ways to decarbonise the economy as soon as possible. Politicians have traded accusations in recent days over the coalition government’s climate change policy, which includes slashing targets for reducing emissions, and its decision to scrap a Labour government-era NZ$6bn resilience fund for communities, set up in the aftermath of Cyclone Gabrielle. The government had “dragged their heels on issues around climate change”, Labour leader Chris Hipkins told media on Tuesday. “Almost every major action New Zealand was taking to really tackle the challenge of climate change has been wound back under [the government’s] leadership.” Finance minister, Nicola Willis accused Hipkins of politicising the tragedy and said the government had made “significant allocations of funding towards infrastructure, flood resilience [and] roading repair … needed to respond to the effects of climate change”. Hipkins responded that the broader debate around climate change was “legitimate”. Meanwhile, the Tauranga city council has ordered a local inquiry into the Mount Maunganui event, while prime minister Christopher Luxon is seeking advice on a government inquiry, after questions emerged over whether local authorities could have done more to prevent the deaths. Members of the public say they alerted emergency services to the potential threat before the landslide occurred, while others have pointed out the mountain’s history of landslides. Despite the dangers landslides pose, they “don’t stick in our psyche” in the same way earthquakes might, said Robinson. The latest tragedies may go some way to shifting that mindset, he said. “If anything good can come out of this, then having a better and broader understanding of landslide risk and how to prepare for them is a positive.”

Ukraine war briefing: Nearly 2 million military casualties to date, study finds, with Russia bearing brunt of losses

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused nearly 2 million military casualties – killed, wounded or missing – between the two countries, according to a study published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US thinktank. Moscow’s forces have borne the brunt of the losses, with as many as 325,000 killed out of an estimated total of 1.2 million casualties since the war began nearly four years ago. Ukrainian forces have also suffered major losses – between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, of which between 100,000 and 140,000 were killed – from February 2022 to December 2025. “Combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties may be as high as 1.8 million and could reach two million total casualties by the spring of 2026,” the thinktank said. UN monitors say civilian casualties have reached almost 15,000 verified deaths since 2022 but that the actual total “is likely considerably higher”. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told NBC in February 2025 that his country had lost nearly 46,000 troops since 2022, with tens of thousands missing or taken prisoner, numbers which analysts consider an underestimate. Russian losses remain a closely guarded state secret, with the last official figures from the Ministry of Defence released in September 2022 putting the toll at 5,937, according to Agence France-Presse. The BBC’s Russian service and the Mediazona outlet, which rely on publicly available data such as death notices, have identified more than 163,000 Russian soldiers killed in four years of war, while acknowledging that the actual number is likely higher. A Russian drone strike on a passenger train in north-eastern Ukraine has killed five people in an attack denounced as terrorism by Zelenskyy. Prosecutors said fragments of five bodies had been found at the scene of the strike on the train, which occurred on Tuesday near a village in the Kharkiv region. In a post on Telegram, Zelenskyy said the train was carrying more than 200 passengers, including 18 in the carriage that was hit. “Each such Russian strike undermines diplomacy, which is still ongoing, and hits, in particular, the efforts of partners who are helping to end this war,” he wrote. The train bombing was part of a wave of Russian drone and missile attacks that left 10 dead across the country and dozens wounded, with the injured including two children and a pregnant woman. Three were killed and 32 wounded in a drone strike on Odesa that also inflicted “enormous” damage on a power facility, according to the private energy firm DTEK. The energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, said 710,000 residents of Kyiv remained without electricity and heating in the aftermath of Russian attacks – conditions which could turn deadly in the freezing winter cold. Other casualties occurred in the regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Poland’s foreign minister has urged Elon Musk to cut Russia’s access to the Starlink satellite internet service, which the tech billionaire owns. Radosław Sikorski – who is also the country’s deputy prime minister – spoke out after the US-based Institute for the Study of War said that the Russian army uses Starlink satellites to guide its drone attacks deep into Ukraine. He posted on X: “Hey, big man, @elonmusk, why don’t you stop the Russians from using Starlinks to target Ukrainian cities. Making money on war crimes may damage your brand”. Musk denied in 2024 that Starlink terminals had been sold to Russia; according to Ukrainian intelligence services, the Russian army has obtained terminals through third countries rather than any official contract with Musk.

Keir Starmer walks tightrope over myriad issues in quest to bolster China ties

Keir Starmer has travelled to China with a vow to bring “stability and clarity” to the UK’s approach to Beijing after years of what he described as “inconsistency” under the Tories, but a series of issues may get in the way of his efforts to improve relations with the economic powerhouse. Human rights One of the thorniest issues on the agenda is the case of Jimmy Lai, the jailed former media tycoon and one of Hong Kong’s most famous pro-democracy voices. Lai is a British citizen and was found guilty by a Hong Kong court of national security offences last month that the UK sees as politically motivated. Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, has called for his immediate release and summoned the Chinese ambassador after his conviction. Lai faces spending the rest of his life in prison, amid increasing fears about his physical condition. Starmer is under pressure to do what he can to secure his release. He may also raise the fate of the Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim minority in China who have been co-opted into forced labour programmes. The UK has a long tradition of defending human rights and as a former human rights lawyer, Starmer is likely to bear this responsibility heavily. Taiwan President Xi could raise Taiwan, the self-governing island that Beijing claims as its territory, although it is an issue China wants the west to stay out of. Unification is one of Xi’s main priorities and he has not ruled out the use of force to achieve it. Under his rule, aggression towards Taiwan has increased, with intense military intimidation and non-military attacks and harassment designed to convince or coerce Taipei to give up the territory. US intelligence believes Xi has ordered the military to be ready to win a fight for it by 2027, making this a crucial year. The UK does not recognise Taiwan as a state and has no diplomatic relations with it. China threatened to cancel high-level trade talks with the UK last year over a government minister’s visit to the territory, but they ultimately did go ahead after diplomats privately scrambled to contain the fallout with Beijing. Starmer is likely to tread carefully. Embassies The UK government finally gave the green light to China to build a controversial new mega-embassy near the Tower of London last week, years after it was first approved by Boris Johnson in his time as foreign secretary. Beijing has made the embassy a priority in the UK-China relationship. Xi raised the matter directly with the prime minister in their first phone call in August 2024, so the decision came at a helpful time for Starmer. MPs from across the political spectrum had voiced their opposition to the application, warning of the risks of espionage from the huge site, which sits close to data cables that run into the City of London. But it was signed off after spy chiefs reassured ministers that the risks could be managed. It could be years before the development is actually built, however, as local residents plan a legal challenge. Government insiders hope the decision will give them some leverage over a reciprocal decision for the UK’s crumbling embassy in Beijing, which had been blocked because of the row. National security There is deep concern in the UK, from across the political spectrum, over China’s attempts to spy on politicians and infiltrate critical infrastructure. Last November MI5 issued an espionage alert after an attempt to recruit parliamentarians through two LinkedIn profiles linked to the Chinese intelligence service. China has sanctioned several MPs and peers. While in 2014, the UK imposed sanctions on groups alleged to have targeted politicians, journalists and critics of Beijing in an extensive cyber espionage campaign. Beijing has also been accused of harassing Hong Kong pro-democracy activists in the UK and suppressing criticism by an academic at a British university. And that’s all before China’s attempts to infiltrate British critical infrastructure. Downing Street has insisted Starmer is “clear-eyed” about the national security threat China poses at home – and abroad – and will not flinch from raising difficult issues. This could include pressing Xi on Russia’s war in Ukraine. China has always insisted it is neutral in the conflict but has quietly supplied Moscow with finance, components and crucial diplomatic cover. The prime minister could ask the Chinese president to use his leverage with Vladimir Putin to stop the fighting. Economic ties The central purpose of Starmer’s trip – and the reason he is taking a 50-strong business and cultural delegation with him. As important as any deals which are actually signed, however, is the symbolism of the first British prime minister in eight years visiting China – and what that says about the UK’s focus on growth and prosperity. The PM will also want to secure ongoing investment in key national infrastructure such as steel. But in the grand scheme of Beijing’s international relationships, the UK is a relatively small player. Even though China, the world’s second biggest economy, is the UK’s third biggest trading partner, Britain is not even in Beijing’s top ten, with the Chinese apparently more interested in the EU bloc. Starmer will be keen to give Xi the big sales pitch. However, China will regard closer political ties with the UK as a big win, especially as it advances its own global ambitions as the US recedes from its role as the most significant and stable ally to most western nations. Trump reaction Donald Trump is an unpredictable ally, and his views on China are known to be particularly trenchant. So much so that after Mark Carney visited Beijing, the US president threatened to impose a 100% tariff on goods imported from Canada if the US’s northern neighbour did any trade deal with Beijing. The Canadian PM quickly clarified his country had no intention of pursuing a free trade deal. But Trump’s threat was a warning shot to other western nations keen to deepen their own economic ties with China, which Downing Street will have noticed. The government has highlighted Starmer’s good relationship with Trump, and pointed out that the president is planning to travel to Beijing himself in April. Starmer will also be under pressure to get assurances from China on its intentions towards the Chagos islands after Trump spectacularly U-turned on his support for the deal.

‘I was simply luckier’: Holocaust survivors warn against forgetting Nazi atrocities

Survivors of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp, laid flowers and candles at the memorial site on Tuesday, as commemorations marking its liberation 81 years ago took place around Europe and beyond. Marking International Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish leaders across the continent warned against forgetting the extermination of millions, while some of the few remaining survivors urged ordinary people to stand up against populism and extremism. One survivor, Tova Friedman, 87, who is due to address the German parliament on Wednesday, said she would be speaking directly to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland in her speech and asking them: “How dare you? Who do you think you are?” The official day of remembrance of Soviet troops’ liberation of the few surviving prisoners of Auschwitz in 1945 from the clutches of their Nazi German captors is 27 January. It was declared the official German day of remembrance in 1996, and officially adopted by the United Nations in 2005. At the Auschwitz memorial site 24 former prisoners braved freezing temperatures to lay wreaths at the “death wall” where German soldiers killed mainly Polish political prisoners. Polish president Karol Nawrocki later joined survivors for a ceremony at nearby Birkenau, the huge site to which Jews from across Europe were transported to be murdered in gas chambers. About 1.1 million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz alone, as well as Poles, Roma and others, including people persecuted for their religious or sexual orientation. At the snow-covered Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in central Berlin, a sea of grey concrete blocks built as an indelible symbol of Germany’s contrition, candles were lit and white roses laid on the slabs. Elsewhere events were held at museums, schools and railway stations across the country while informal gatherings took place in towns and cities across Europe at Stolpersteine, small brass plaques cemented into pavements marking former residences of Jews who were deported to concentration camps. Present-day inhabitants laid candles and flowers on them. In Terezín, site of the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, where thousands of Jews were collected and died or were sent from there to Auschwitz and other death camps, a candlelit procession was due to take place on Thursday evening. The Netherlands marked its national Holocaust memorial day on Sunday with a silent procession through Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter. In Ireland, the government announced more funding for Holocaust education in schools after a survey found 15% of young people had never heard of it and 10% of those aged between 18 and 29 thought it was a “myth”. An estimated 196,600 Jewish survivors are believed to still be alive globally, compared to the 220,000 estimated to have been alive a year ago, according to the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Friedman, who is due to address the Bundestag on Wednesday, was five when she and her mother were deported from their home in Gdynia near Gdansk in Poland, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She likely survived due to a technical malfunction of the gas chambers and, during death marches in January 1945, hid among corpses. “I represent one and a half million children who were murdered and who are not here to speak for themselves,” Friedman told German media. “My story is representative of all their stories because we all had similar experiences. I was simply luckier than them, because I survived.” Together with her grandson, Aron Goodman, 20, who also accompanied her to Berlin, Friedman has a TikTok account called “TovaTok”, in which the two talk about her experience and warn against the growth of antisemitism. Goodman is one of a growing number of surviving relatives choosing to take on the vital task of telling the stories of their parents and grandparents. Friedman, who emigrated to the US where she became a successful therapist, warned against the rise of the populist far-right in Europe. She said she would directly address the AfD, which is up for election in five states this year and is predicted to do well in at least three of them. The anti-immigrant party, which backs policies such as the mass deportation of non-naturalised citizens, has repeatedly called for an end to what it calls “Schuldkult” or a “culture of guilt”, to describe the perpetuation of the memory of Nazi crimes. “I want very much to face up to them, not to hide away from them,” said Friedman. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat warned that antisemitism was more rampant than at any time since the Holocaust, and was “taking on new and disturbing forms”. She also warned of AI-generated content which was being deliberately created “to blur the line between fact and fiction, distort historical truth and undermine our collective memory”. The Frankfurt-based Anne Frank Educational Centre drew attention to a “flood” of AI-generated content being used like propaganda, in which the victims were ridiculed, with the aim of denying or trivialising them. Representatives of the Jewish community across the world, including Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, urged people to show “civil courage” and stand up for democracy at a time when there was a considerable and growing swell in favour of “pushing us as a Jewish community out of public life”. “These forces will continue to grow stronger if society fails to stop these threatening developments,” he warned. Police said they were investigating who was behind the weekend vandalism attack of a memorial in front of the remains of the synagogue in the northern port city of Kiel, which was destroyed in the state-sanctioned attacks on Jewish property in November 1938. Flowers and candles laid at the site were crushed and scattered, local media reported.

Mexico’s president says cancellation of oil shipment to Cuba is ‘sovereign’ decision

Mexico has cancelled a shipment of oil to Cuba, the country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, appeared to confirm on Tuesday, but she insisted the decision was “sovereign” and not a response to pressure from the US. Fuel shortages are causing increasingly severe blackouts in Cuba, and Mexico has been the island’s biggest oil supplier since the US blocked shipments from Venezuela last month. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Pemex, Mexico’s state oil company, had “backtracked” on plans to send a much-needed delivery to Cuba this month. Asked whether she denied the report in her daily press conference, Sheinbaum said: “It is a sovereign decision and it is made in the moment when necessary.” The cancelled shipment comes amid reports that the Mexican government had been privately reviewing whether to keep sending oil to Cuba amid fear of reprisals from the US. After the US captured and renditioned Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela at the start of the year, it appeared to turn its attention to Cuba, Venezuela’s longstanding ally, with Donald Trump writing in a 11 January Truth Social post: “THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA – ZERO!” Sheinbaum sidestepped a question about whether the cancelled shipment is a one-off or could represent a more lasting suspension of oil shipments, while restating Mexico’s longstanding stance against the US blockade on Cuba. “Cuba has been under a blockade for too many years now. And this blockade has caused supply problems on the island,” said Sheinbaum. “Mexico has always shown solidarity and Mexico will continue to show solidarity.” The issue of oil shipments to Cuba is a fraught one for Sheinbaum, who is striving to show the Trump administration that Mexico is a partner on trade and security without alienating the left wing of her party, Morena. The Trump administration has recently repeated its threats of unilateral military strikes on drug trafficking cartels in Mexico, just as the two countries begin to renegotiate the trillion-dollar USMCA North American free trade agreement. “Whenever Sheinbaum gives mealy-mouthed answers, it’s not for lack of preparation,” said Alexander González Ormerod, a political analyst. “It’s because it’s probably an answer made by committee on the best way to avoid upsetting all the different constituencies within the Morena and the US-Mexico coalition.” “When the answer’s easy, she’s decisive,” he added. “When it’s not, she’s evasive.”

Spain approves decree to regularise half a million undocumented migrants

Spain’s socialist-led coalition government has approved a decree it said would regularise 500,000 undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, rejecting the anti-migration policies and rhetoric prevalent across much of Europe. The decree, expected to come into effect in April, will apply to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and people in Spain with irregular status. To qualify for regularisation, applicants will have to prove they do not have a criminal record and had lived in Spain for at least five months – or had sought international protection – before 31 December 2025. Announcing the decision after Tuesday’s weekly cabinet meeting, Elma Saiz, Spain’s minister for inclusion, social security and migration, said it was a “historic day”, adding the initiative was designed to “break the bureaucratic barriers of the past”. Saiz said the programme, which is being brought in by royal decree meaning it does not require parliamentary approval, would benefit Spain as a whole. “We’re reinforcing a migratory model based on human rights, on integration and on coexistence that’s compatible with both economic growth and social cohesion,” she said. The decree followed pressure from the socialists’ former allies in the leftwing Podemos party, which has a fraught relationship with the government. “We reached a deal with the [socialist party] for the extraordinary regularisation of undocumented people,” Podemos’s leader, Ione Belarra, wrote on social media on Tuesday morning. “No one else has to work without rights … Today and always, yes we can!” In recent years, Spain has become a European outlier on migration. Addressing parliament in October 2024, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said the country was at a demographic crossroads and needed migration to grow its economy and sustain its welfare state. “Throughout history, migration has been one of the great drivers of the development of nations while hatred and xenophobia have been – and continue to be – the greatest destroyer of nations,” he said. “The key is in managing it well.” The announcement was welcomed by the Brussels-based Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants (Picum). “Today’s decision by the Spanish government to adopt a broad regularisation measure is a powerful reminder that regularisation is not only possible – it works, and it’s the right thing to do,” said Laetitia Van der Vennet, a senior advocacy officer at Picum. “For thousands of undocumented people who have built their lives in Spain, this could mean dignity, stability and access to basic rights. At a time when a hostile environment against migrants is spreading on both sides of the Atlantic, this move shows both humanity and common sense. We hope more governments will follow this example and invest in policies that protect, empower and include people, and make societies stronger.” The decision also drew approval from Spain’s Regularisation Now! movement, which added it had come “in an international context marked by the tightening of immigration policies, border closures, and the criminalisation of migrants in much of Europe”. However, the move has been bitterly criticised by the conservative People’s party (PP) – even though the party ordered similar initiatives when in government – and by the far-right Vox party. The PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, accused the prime minister of using the announcement to deflect attention from the government’s response to last week’s deadly rail crash, in which at least 45 people died. “Sánchez’s first response is a massive regularisation to distract attention, to increase the pull effect and to overwhelm our public services,” he said. “In socialist Spain, illegality is rewarded.” Vox, which is rising in the polls and outflanking the PP on the right with an explicitly anti-migrant discourse, went further by using familiar tropes about the great replacement theory and urging the mass deportation of migrants, euphemistically referred to by the far right as “remigration”. “Five hundred thousand illegals!” said its leader, Santiago Abascal. “Sánchez the tyrant hates the Spanish people. He wants to replace them – that’s why he’s using a decree to promote the pull effect and to accelerate the invasion. He must be stopped. Repatriations, deportations and remigration.” Regularisation programmes have long been used across the EU, with 43 put in place by more than a dozen countries between 1996 and 2008. In Spain, nine such programmes have been carried out since the country’s return to democracy, with the PP conducting more regularisation programmes than any other party. The roots of the current push lie in a citizens’ initiative, signed by more than 700,000 people and backed by about 900 social organisations, presented to parliament in 2024. Unemployment levels have fallen to their lowest since the 2008 financial crisis, and Spain’s economy is outperforming those of its neighbours. Sánchez hailed the unemployment news in a post on X on Tuesday, saying: “For the first time since 2008, unemployment falls below 10%. Spain has almost 22.5 million people with jobs, a new record.” Even some of the most ardent critics of immigration have conceded its necessity: in June, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, the far-right leader who has long called irregular migrants a threat to Europe’s future, said her government would issue nearly 500,000 new work visas for non-EU nationals in the coming years, in addition to the 450,000 granted since she took power.