Multinational ‘anti-war bloc’ uses Istanbul summit to call for a diplomatic solution to Middle East crisis

Foreign ministers at a summit of eight European and Middle Eastern countries have urged the US and Israel not to renews their attacks on Iran, warning a fresh outbreak of fighting would spread conflict and push oil prices even higher.

The development of a new multinational “anti-war bloc” represents a challenge to the increasingly open plans by the US and Israel to relaunch strikes on Iran while talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme remain deadlocked.

Booker Ngesa Omole, general secretary of the Communist Party Marxist–Kenya (CPM-K), has been acquitted by the Mavoko Law Courts in Machakos County, ending a prosecution that the party has described as politically motivated since his arrest in February 2026.

In a statement issued on October 22, the party’s Central Organizing Committee welcomed the ruling as a victory for democratic rights and called for accountability over what it described as Omole’s abduction, torture, and political persecution.

Speaking outside the court after the ruling, Omole said the verdict confirmed the party’s position that the charges against him were intended to target his political activities.

“With finality, the court sitting today at Mavoko Law Courts has clearly indicted the current Ruto regime,” he said. “It has corroborated what we have told the Kenyan public, that framed-up charges against politicians and revolutionaries cannot endure in any competent court.”

Omole said the judiciary had a responsibility to act as a check on state power and defend “the people’s democracy and freedom.” He accused the state of using criminal proceedings to pursue political opponents, adding that it “continues to fail to indict us on criminal charges but wants to persecute us politically.”

“The acquittal is not for Booker only,” he said. “It is for the Communist Party and for all other people who want change in this country. I did not go to jail for nothing. I went to jail to make a statement, and today we prosecuted the case both in the court of public opinion and in Mavoko Law Courts.”

From arrest to acquittal

According to the party’s statement, Omole was abducted by armed men in plain clothes in Isiolo on February 24, 2026, and transported towards Nairobi before being detained at Mlolongo Police Station. The party says that he was tortured while in custody, sustaining injuries to his arm and tooth, as well as cuts to his fingers.

The party further alleges that Omole was detained for more than four days before subsequent court proceedings and his eventual release on bail. He faced criminal allegations involving firearms, ammunition, drugs, and assaults against police officers.

The prosecution case was subsequently weakened after the complainant and a prosecution witness, submitted a sworn affidavit on March 9 seeking to withdraw his complaint and earlier statements.

The court acquitted Omole on all counts on October 16, 2026. It also ordered the immediate return of the party’s property held by police, according to the Central Organizing Committee.

The acquittal brings the criminal proceedings against Omole to an end, but the party says it will continue pursuing accountability for the events surrounding his arrest and detention.

Party demands investigation and accountability

In its statement, CPM-K called for an independent investigation into the alleged abduction and torture, as well as the conduct of the police officers involved. 

The party also demanded full compliance with the court order to return its seized property and called for an end to what it describes as the criminalization of communist and revolutionary political activity.

“The court has acquitted our General Secretary. The state must now answer for what was done to him,” the statement declared.

CPM-K argued that the case should be understood within the broader political and economic conditions confronting Kenya, accusing the government of using state institutions to intimidate those organizing workers, poor peasants, students, and other oppressed groups.

The party said the acquittal would not end its political activities or its demands for accountability. Instead, it called on its supporters and international communist and workers’ organizations to intensify solidarity efforts and defend democratic freedoms.

Read more: CPM-K officials survive assassination attempt in Kenya

Omole has faced threats and arrests before. In April 2025, a car carrying him and other activists was shot at. In September 2024, he was arrested during a wider crackdown on leftist activists. He also survived an assassination attempt on his life while at his residence last year.

Switzerland says patient is wife of Swiss diplomat and believed to have contracted virus while travelling in Uganda

Health officials across Africa are racing to determine how Nigeria’s first Ebola patient ⁠in more than a decade ⁠became infected, amid fears ​the outbreak could spread further after reaching a fourth African country.

The Swiss foreign ministry said on Friday the patient in Nigeria, the Ugandan-born wife of a Swiss diplomat based in Abuja, had not travelled to the Democratic Republic of ⁠Congo, where the outbreak was first detected in mid-May before spreading to Uganda, Kenya and now Nigeria. The woman was believed to have contracted Ebola while travelling with her husband in Uganda, the ministry added.

On October 9, fighters from two jihadist groups clashed near Gonadaouri, in Burkina Faso’s Oudalan province, not far from the Malian border. One side belonged to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s Sahel affiliate. The other belonged to the Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP), known until 2022 as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. The two […]

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Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent knew the baby had died. As the infant’s head began to emerge, she waited for the slightest movement, a turn to the left or right, any sign of life. None came.

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A UAE-led international operation targeting AI-enabled fraud and cross-border networks identified more than $39 billion in funds and cryptocurrencies linked to scam activity.

Operation Confrontation Ghost, which ran from 1 July to 30 September, brought together law enforcement agencies from 30 countries including the UAE, UK, China and France. It also convened INTERPOL, the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) and 13 technology and financial sector companies including Huawei, Meta Platforms, TikTok and Mastercard.

Authorities exchanged more than 9,000 pieces of intelligence during the three month operation, which focused on AI-enabled fraud, digital financial crime and technology-facilitated sextortion which often targeted children and teenagers.

The initiative identified more than 15,500 victims and 3,500 suspects, resulting in more than 960 arrests and raids on 29 fraud centres. Investigators also shut down more than 570 social media accounts linked to fraudulent activity and identified 4,126 bank accounts associated with scams. Efforts to recover the identified assets remain ongoing.

Dana Marzouqi, DG of the International Affairs Bureau at the UAE Ministry of Interior, noted the Operation Confrontation Ghost “transformed international shared intelligence into coordinated operational impact”, adding it boosted “collective resilience for all participating nations”.

Concerns over the safety of increasingly autonomous AI systems have been mounting worldwide. AI chiefs including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google Deepmind co-founder Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk have called to slowdown the pace of frontier AI development and establish regulatory guardrails, warning AI driven-cyberattacks could pose an existential risk to humanity.

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Drone strikes in war-torn Sudan have killed hundreds in just three days. Most of the deaths were in West Kordofan state, including in an area contested with South Sudan, sparking fears of a spillover of the war.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) reportedly killed 41 people by striking a gathering of Internally Displaced People (IDPs) near Sudan’s southeastern border with Ethiopia in the Blue Nile state last Friday, October 9.

Later on Sunday, October 18, air defenses of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), which heads the government, intercepted multiple suicide drones launched by the RSF. The drones targeted Upper Atbara and Setit dam complex in Gedaref state, and the Khashm El-Girba dam in neighboring Kassala.

The following day, on October 19, the RSF launched a wave of drones toward the airport in the national capital, Khartoum. While the air defenses intercepted most of them, one drone struck near the airport, killing four people, including three children.

The RSF took over the capital soon after starting this war in April 2023 against the SAF, the national army with which it had ruled as part of a military junta. The SAF regained control of the capital in March 2025.

In the meantime, later in October 2025, the RSF consolidated control over most of Sudan’s vast western region of Darfur, overrunning the SAF’s last holdout, El Fasher, and depopulating the city in a campaign deemed genocidal by a UN investigation. 

Read more: A bloodbath visible from space: RSF’s massacres in Sudan’s El Fasher   

After thus taking over Darfur – except for some SAF small holdouts on the border with Chad – the RSF has since been pushing eastward toward Khartoum. The Kordofan region in between, comprising three states, has since become a main front of this war.

Here, on October 18, in West Kordofan’s RSF-controlled town of al-Dabba, SAF struck a transport hub that was crowded on a market day, killing 80 people on the spot. 30 others later died in hospital. Another SAF drone also struck a market in the Al-Mujlad town.

Then, on the morning of October 19, SAF drones struck yet another market it suspected to be a source of fuel supply for the RSF, killing 153 people in Abyei, an area disputed by Sudan and South Sudan, ever since the latter seceded from the former in 2011.​

This area in the Nile oil basin has over 4,000 UN peacekeepers and is jointly administered by Sudan and South Sudan. South Sudan’s government summoned Sudan’s ambassador to protest this strike.

A spillover of Sudan’s war into South Sudan could have dire consequences, especially since South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, is itself at a heightened risk of slipping back into its own disastrous civil war, which had claimed up to 400,000 lives between late 2013 and mid-2015.​

The death count of the war in Sudan has been lost after exceeding 150,000 as early as June 2024. By the time the war entered its fourth year in April 2026, drone strikes had become the main driver of civilian casualties in this war, causing 80% of all the civilian deaths in the first four months of this year, killing at least 880 people.  

“We are alarmed by the continued deadly drone strikes across the country that are killing civilians, including children, and that are disrupting essential services,” UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said on October 19.

​Read more: The war in Sudan is “between two wings of a comprador parasitic capitalist class”

Middle Eastern operators Zain Group and Ooredoo Group officially launched a joint venture tower platform after closing the first phase of the transaction by combining portfolios in their home markets.

The operators stated they have brought together the assets of Zain Kuwait and Ooredoo Qatar, comprising 4,000 towers in total.

They each own a 50% stake in the platform.

Announced in 2023, the tower company was pitched as the largest of its kind in the MENA region, with a combined value of $2.2 billion.

At the time, the companies and UAE-based TASC Towers stated the entity would comprise nearly 30,000 towers in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Tunisia, Iraq and Algeria.

In the latest statement, the companies highlighted how the transaction is expected to create significant value through greater scale, capital efficiencies and a dedicated operating model focused on passive telecoms infrastructure.

Additional towers are expected “to be integrated progressively into the platform”, subject to closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

They further pointed to opportunities for operators to access infrastructure in a more capital-efficient manner while supporting the region’s digital infrastructure.

Zain CEO Bader Al-Kharafi said the first closing of the tower platform “reflects our shared strategy of creating focused, scalable and sustainable platforms”.

Ooredoo counterpart Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo added it is “now executing across every digital infrastructure segment identified in our strategy as we continue building a leading regional portfolio”.

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