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President Donald Trump said Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should be worried about a U.S. military building up in the region, and hinted at a new round of strikes if Tehran attempts to restart its nuclear program.

"I would say he should be very worried," Trump said of Khamenei during an NBC News interview. "Yeah, he should be."

Trump has been trading bellicose barbs with Khamenei for weeks and had threatened military action in response to a violent crackdown on protesters, in which the Iranian government is accused of killing thousands. He has also said the country needs "new leadership" and repeatedly talked up an "armada" of warships he's deployed to the region.

The U.S. president previously credited himself with preventing mass executions in Iran, and said in the NBC interview that he'd had protesters' backs. He invoked U.S. strikes last summer on Iran's nuclear facilities and said he'd been told Iran is trying to restart its nuclear program.

"We said, 'You do that, we're going to do very bad things to you,'" Trump added.

Khamenei has hit back, accusing the U.S. of trying to "seize control" of the country. He said on Feb. 1 that any country that initiates war with Iran will "face a decisive blow" and warned that a conflict with America would become a regional war.

Special envoy Steve Witkoff is expected to meet with Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, this week for direct talks that could lay the groundwork an agreement between the two nations. Trump told reporters this week that he'd like to strike a deal with Tehran. "And if we can't, probably bad things would happen," he said on Feb. 2.

The U.S. president previously credited himself with preventing mass executions in Iran, and said in the NBC interview that he'd had protesters' backs. He invoked U.S. strikes last summer on Iran's nuclear facilities and said he'd been told Iran is trying to restart its nuclear program.

"We said, 'You do that, we're going to do very bad things to you,'" Trump added.

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In Kyiv, hundreds of multi-story residential buildings remain without heating.

While Russian strikes on energy infrastructure and thermal generation have had virtually no effect on the front line, they have plunged civilians in the capital and other cities into darkness and cold during one of the harshest winters in memory.

The resulting mass shutdown of electricity and heating in Kyiv, with temperatures dropping to -20°C (-4° F), has put those who are least protected at risk – the elderly, people with disabilities, those with limited mobility, and those without relatives.

(Photo of Mrs. Bardash). She lives alone in a building that has had no heating for two weeks and practically no electricity after Russian strikes.

It’s only 11°C (52°F) inside, as we can see on the thermometer in her living room.

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French prosecutors raided the offices of social media platform X on Tuesday as part of a preliminary investigation into allegations including spreading child sexual abuse images and deepfakes. They have also summoned billionaire owner Elon Musk for questioning.

X and Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI also face intensifying scrutiny from Britain's data privacy regulator, which opened formal investigations into how they handled personal data when they developed and deployed Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

Grok, which was built by xAI and is available through X, sparked global outrage last month after it pumped out a torrent of sexualized nonconsensual deepfake images in response to requests from X users.

The French investigation was opened in January last year by the prosecutors' cybercrime unit, the Paris prosecutors' office said in a statement. It's looking into alleged "complicity" in possessing and spreading pornographic images of minors, sexually explicit deepfakes, denial of crimes against humanity and manipulation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, among other charges.

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A message from Donald Trump celebrating the 19th-century US invasion of its southern neighbour – and the subsequent loss of more than half its territory – has touched a historical nerve in Mexico, with some seeing it as a veiled threat for future incursions.

Reacting to the US president’s statement, which described the invasion as “a legendary victory”, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s president, said during her morning news conference on Tuesday: “We must always defend our sovereignty.”

Others were less subtle in their criticism. “Never, in the recent annals of Mexico-US relations had we seen anything like this,” wrote the former Mexican ambassador to the US Arturo Sarukhan, on X. “This is not only spiking the ball in the end zone; it’s an in your face F… You.”

The message, posted by the White House on Monday, said the US-Mexico war “reasserted American sovereignty, and expanded the promise of American independence across our majestic continent”.

But the conflict has long been a historical sore spot for Mexico: Following the capture of Mexico City by US troops in 1847, Mexico gave away 55% of its pre-war territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, much of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

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Israeli authorities have intensified their campaign of forced displacement across the occupied West Bank, issuing expulsion orders to an entire Bedouin community east of Ramallah and escalating demolition policies in occupied East Jerusalem.

The measures come amid a surge in settler violence targeting educational institutions in the Jordan Valley and residential homes in Qalqilya, further shrinking the living space for Palestinians under military occupation.

On Sunday morning, Israeli forces raided the Abu Najeh al-Kaabneh Bedouin community in al-Mughayyir village, east of Ramallah.

Local sources confirmed to the Wafa news agency that soldiers delivered a military order requiring the community’s 40 residents to dismantle their homes and leave the area within 48 hours. The army declared the site a “closed military zone”, a tactic frequently used to clear Palestinian land for settlement expansion.

During the raid, Israeli troops arrested three foreign solidarity activists attempting to document the eviction order.

The expulsion order is part of a widening campaign of ethnic cleansing in the region. It follows the complete displacement of the Shallal al-Auja community north of Jericho, which concluded on Saturday. After years of systematic harassment, the last three families of the community were forced to leave, marking the erasure of a presence that once included 120 families.

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Ukraine is enduring the most severe strain on its energy system since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, with freezing temperatures, sustained missile and drone strikes, and the loss of local generation in Kyiv creating what one energy analyst described as a uniquely dangerous phase for the country’s power and heating networks.

A cascading electrical disruption over the weekend – which energy officials said was triggered by load imbalances and weakened transmission links – forced emergency power cuts across parts of the capital, even as Moscow publicly floated what it called an “energy ceasefire.”

Speaking at a Media Center Ukraine briefing on Wednesday, Jan. 28, Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Research Center, said the capital is now being supplied almost entirely from outside the city – a task he called “a complex technical challenge even in peacetime,” made far more difficult by ongoing damage to transmission networks.

“This is the hardest stretch of the war for Kyiv’s energy system,” Kharchenko said, warning that the next several weeks of winter cold would be critical.

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