The country's new leader said Cyclone Gezani had destroyed nearly three-quarters of Madagascar's second-largest city Tsiky Sikonina / AFP Cyclone Gezani made landfall on Tuesday, slamming into the country's second-largest city, Toamasina, with winds reaching 250 kilometres (155 miles) per hour. The National Office for Risk and Disaster Management (BNRGC) said it had recorded 20 deaths, many after houses had collapsed.
In 2025, the administration of US President Donald Trump ordered the US Agency for International Development to be closed; this year, it withdrew the country from 66 international organizations. Other Western nations that are plagued with high levels of debt and pressure to prioritize domestic challenges have slashed their foreign aid, too. According to projections, official development assistance dropped by 9-17% in 2025, amounting to some US$55 billion.
Aid cuts could lead to more than 22 million avoidable deaths by 2030, including 5.4 million children under five, according to the most comprehensive modelling to date. In the past two decades there have been dramatic falls in the number of young children dying from infectious diseases, driven by aid directed to the developing world, researchers wrote in the Lancet Global Health. But that progress was at risk of reversal because of abrupt budget cuts by donor countries, including the US and the UK.
India is already delivering aid to Sri Lanka, an island nation just south of India's coastImage: ANI/IMAGO Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Colombo-based Centre for Policy Alternatives, accuses the Sri Lankan government of failing to heed warning signals and allowing the calamity to spiral beyond human control.
Spending more on defence will be pointless unless western governments also tackle the climate crisis in poor countries, the UN's departing chief of international development has warned. The more you restrict your ability to act by simply focusing on what's happening inside your country, the more vulnerable you become, said Achim Steiner, who recently completed his second term as administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which works on overseas aid and lifting people out of poverty.
Four miles by foot into the Colombian Amazon, in war-torn Guaviare, a stunning prehistoric rock painting known as the "Sistine Chapel of the Ancients" stretches across a full eight miles of cliff face. The frieze, estimated to be about 12,500 years old, depicts massive ice age beasts thought to have once roamed South America, including mastodons and ground sloths the size of a car.
In the 1990s, the fight against extreme poverty was a success story. However, global poverty reduction has stagnated, with 700 million still living on less than $2.15 a day.
