World News Insights: Tensions Rise in Defense and Diplomacy

While many leaders compare the wildfire crisis to the second world war, governments fail to adopt the real lessons of pre-emptive wartime action As France and Spain battle historic wildfires, comparisons to the second world war abound. “One of the continent’s biggest evacuation efforts since World War II,” reports the Associated Press. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called the wildfires his country’s “most difficult situation since the second world war”. The images crossing all our screens certainly feel war-like – emergency aircraft and black smoke fill the skies, frantic civilians seeking shelter, historic towns lying in ruins, charred forests and burned-out vehicles, exhausted and sweat-soaked emergency responders...

Tehran at War (Part 2/2). In Iran, the war with the United States is also fought through enormous, state-sponsored posters. Murals transform walls into billboards advertising the official narrative, designed to carry the government's voice far beyond its borders. FRANCE 24 examines this visual strategy, shaped during the Islamic Revolution and supercharged by artificial intelligence.

As Abelardo de la Espriella takes office as president vowing a new military offensive, the country’s last leftwing rebels are getting ready to fight back As the boat approached the riverbank, camouflaged figures watched from the tree line. Behind them, in the dim understory of the jungle, a commander of the National Liberation Army (ELN) sat with his rifle on his lap, amid the buzz and whine of insects and the thwacks of machetes on bamboo as his troops set up camp, hidden from enemy drones...