New Lines Magazine

Fatimah Muhammed Latest from Fatimah Muhammed Legal changes in Kuwait are stripping its people of their citizenship, with 1 in 5 Kuwaitis potentially set to lose their current status as the country’s rulers attempt to undo decades of reform.

Dania Arayssi is a senior analyst at the Central Asia Center of the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. Dr. Arayssi also serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and teaches at George Washington University. Latest from Dania Arayssi In a Ceasefire Between Hezbollah and Israel, the Lebanese Government Has Little Pull The country wants a ceasefire but will not disarm Hezbollah.

Before leaving for work, Mohamed Bashoun says goodbye to his family as if it might be the last time. At 51, his job is simple: keep the water flowing. Each day, he drives to a pumping station in southern Lebanon — the same one where two of his colleagues were killed. They were working when the strike hit, just days before the ceasefire in November 2024. Now, Bashoun returns alone, and fighting has resumed since March 2. A fragment of the rocket still lies on site.

In October 2025, Nasser Abu Srour traveled by coach from Israel into Gaza and then through the Rafah crossing. As he entered Egypt, he pulled back the curtain to reveal the streaming sunshine — an act that had been forbidden by the Israeli guards who had escorted him earlier in his journey. The sight that greeted him was unfamiliar: not just the Sinai desert, where he’d never been, but the sense of space itself.

Prize-winning, high-profile international journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin has been in prison in Kuwait for the past six weeks, with limited access to his lawyer. Charges are yet to be brought, but it is feared that he, and others detained with him, will be tried under new national security laws for posting footage and photos relating to the Iran war. The government has been warning people against reposting such reports, and surveillance of the population is constant.

On Monday, Pope Leo XIV stood before a soggy crowd gathered at the Maqam Echahid Martyrs’ Monument in Algiers and declared: “The future belongs to men and women of peace.” An anodyne enough intonation from the outside, but it is the latest in a series of darts hurled toward the leaders of his native United States, as a war of words unfolds between the pontiff and President Donald Trump and his proxies alongside the growing conflict in the Middle East.

In an AI-animated video called “Khamenei again,” a Lego rendition of an angry Donald Trump appears as a caricature of excess in a casino. The president plays dice before the scene quickly cuts to Trump on the edge of a navy vessel, adrift above a graveyard of sunken ships bearing American flags.

Barbara Matejčić is an award-winning freelance journalist, nonfiction writer and audio producer focused on social affairs and human rights in the Balkan region. Barbara collaborates with activists, artists and scholars, as well as with international and Balkan media, and produces multimedia projects. She lectures in journalism studies in Zagreb.

Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary’s election on Sunday to Péter Magyar of the center-right Tisza Party is widely seen as a repudiation not only of the prime minister’s 16 years in power, but of U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who went to Budapest to stump for the right-wing Hungarian incumbent in the final stretch of the campaign. Orbán’s defeat is widely seen as a failure for Vance and the Trump administration.

Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary’s election on Sunday to Péter Magyar of the center-right Tisza Party is widely seen as a repudiation not only of the prime minister’s 16 years in power, but of U.S. Vice President JD Vance, who went to Budapest to stump for the right-wing Hungarian incumbent in the final stretch of the campaign. “Vance Bitterly Humiliated as Voters Turn Out in Droves to Reject His Pleas,” a Daily Beast headline read.