BIG Wrap

(Al Jazeera Media Network) Air Canada has said it is suspending service to Cuba due to an ongoing aviation fuel shortage on the island. “Air Canada took the decision following advisories issued by governments about the unreliability of aviation fuel supply at Cuban airports,” the airline said in a press release on Monday. “It is projected that, as of February 10, aviation fuel will not be commercially available at airports on the island. For remaining flights,...

(CNN) Jeffrey Epstein had a message he wanted to get to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was June 2018 – about a year after Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations Vitaly Churkin had suddenly died. Churkin had been someone Epstein met with regularly in New York, according to new documents released by the Department of Justice, and Epstein had even offered to help Churkin’s son, Maxim, get a job at a wealth management firm in New York. Now...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) Hamas’s political leader abroad, Khaled Meshaal, has rejected calls to disarm Palestinian factions in Gaza, arguing that stripping weapons from an occupied people would turn them into “an easy victim to be eliminated”. Speaking on the second day of the Al Jazeera Forum in Doha on Sunday, Meshaal described the discussion around Hamas handing over its weapons as a continuation of a century-long effort to neutralise Palestinian armed resistance. “In the context that our...

(CNN) A suicide bomber killed at least 31 people and injured 169 during Friday prayers at a Shiite Muslim mosque in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, authorities said. It was the deadliest attack in the country since January 2023, when a blast at a mosque in the northwestern city of Peshawar killed more than 100 people. Pakistan has witnessed a rising wave of militancy in recent years, but attacks have been less frequent in the heavily guarded capital....

(Al Jazeera Media Network) Ukraine braced for more attacks on its energy infrastructure this week as winter temperatures continued to fall to -20 degrees Celsius, and sought to adapt its defences against Russian drones. On Thursday, Ukraine’s energy minister, Denys Shmyal, warned Ukrainians to prepare for more power blackouts in the coming days as Russian air attacks continued. Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said Russia had struck energy infrastructure 217 times this year. Shmyal said 200 emergency crews...

(CNN) French police raided the Paris offices of Elon Musk’s X Tuesday and summoned the tech billionaire for questioning as part of a widening probe into the social media company and its AI chatbot Grok. The search was linked to an investigation France opened in January 2025, the prosecutor’s office said Tuesday, adding that its cybercrime unit conducted the raid with help from Europol. Both X chairman Musk and former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino have been...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) United States border security chief Tom Homan has announced that the administration of President Donald Trump will “draw down” 700 immigration enforcement personnel from Minnesota while promising to continue operations in the northern state. The update on Wednesday was the latest indication of the Trump administration pivoting on its enforcement surge in the state following the killing of two US citizens by immigration agents in Minneapolis in January. Homan, who is officially called Trump’s “border czar”,...

(New York Times) House Republicans on Tuesday canceled a planned vote to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in criminal contempt of Congress for refusing to testify in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, after the Clintons agreed to be deposed on camera this month and requested that they be allowed to do so at public hearings. The agreement marked a tense resolution to a bitter months-long feud between Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman...

(Al Jazeera Media Network) The New START treaty, the last of the nuclear arms control treaties between the United States and Russia, which was signed in 2010, will expire on Thursday. Here is what the treaty entails, and what its lapse could mean for Washington and Moscow: START stands for Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. It was a 10-year agreement signed in 2010 by then-US President Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev, a close ally of Vladimir Putin who served...

(CNN) The US government’s release of more than 3 million documents related to Jeffrey Epstein has raised further questions about the ties of three prominent figures in British public life to the disgraced financier, who appears to have been granted access to the heart of Britain’s government and royal family. The former Prince Andrew, his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson and Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the US, are all listed multiple times in the latest trove of...