Habemus papam: Catholic Church’s new pope could be one of these cardinals

When the Cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel on May 7 to choose a successor to Pope Francis, they will be looking above all for a holy man who can guide the Catholic Church. (AP)
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Updated 30 April 2025
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Habemus papam: Catholic Church’s new pope could be one of these cardinals

  • There are no official candidates for the papacy, but some cardinals are considered ‘papabile’ or possessing the characteristics necessary to become pope

Wanted: A holy man.
Job description: Leading the 1.4 billion-strong Catholic Church.
Location: Vatican City.
There are no official candidates for the papacy, but some cardinals are considered “papabile,” or possessing the characteristics necessary to become pope. After St. John Paul II broke the centuries-long Italian hold on the papacy in 1978, the field of contenders has broadened considerably.
When the cardinals enter the Sistine Chapel on May 7 to choose a successor to Pope Francis, the first pontiff from Latin America, they will be looking above all for a holy man who can guide the Catholic Church. Beyond that, they will weigh his administrative and pastoral experience and consider what the church needs today.
Here is a selection of possible contenders, in no particular order. The list will be updated as cardinals continue their closed-door, pre-conclave discussions.




Cardinal Pietro Parolin. (AP)

Cardinal Pietro Parolin
Date of Birth: Jan. 17, 1955
Nationality: Italian
Position: Vatican secretary of state under Francis
Experience: Veteran Vatican diplomat
Made a cardinal by: Francis
The 70-year-old veteran diplomat was Francis’ secretary of state, essentially the Holy See’s prime minister.
Though associated closely with Francis’ pontificate, Parolin is much more demure in personality and diplomatic in his approach to leading than the Argentine Jesuit he served and he knows where the Catholic Church might need a course correction.
Parolin oversaw the Holy See’s controversial deal with China over bishop nominations and was involved – but not charged – in the Vatican’s botched investment in a London real estate venture that led to a 2021 trial of another cardinal and nine others. A former ambassador to Venezuela, Parolin knows the Latin American church well and played a key role in the 2014 US-Cuba detente, which the Vatican helped facilitate.
If he were elected, he would return an Italian to the papacy after three successive outsiders: St. John Paul II (Poland), Pope Benedict XVI (Germany) and Francis (Argentina).
But Parolin has very little pastoral experience: He entered the seminary at age 14, four years after his father was killed in a car accident. After his 1980 ordination, he spent two years as a parish priest near his hometown in northern Italy, but then went to Rome to study and entered the Vatican diplomatic service, where he has remained ever since. He has served at Vatican embassies in Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela.
He is widely respected for his diplomatic finesse on some of the thorniest dossiers facing the Catholic Church. He has long been involved in the China file, and he played a hands-on role in the Holy See’s diplomatic rapprochement with Vietnam that resulted in an agreement to establish a resident Vatican representative in the country.
Parolin was also the Vatican’s point-person in its frustrated efforts to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. He has tried to make the church’s voice heard as the Trump administration began working to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Let’s hope we can arrive at a peace that, in order to be solid, lasting, must be a just peace, must involve all the actors who are at stake and take into account the principles of international law and the UN declarations,” he said.
Parolin might find the geopolitical reality ushered in by the Trump administration somewhat unreceptive to the Holy See’s soft power.




Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle. (AP)

Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle
Date of Birth: June 21, 1957
Nationality: Filipino
Position: Pro-Prefect, Dicastery for Evangelization under Francis
Experience: Former archbishop of Manila, Philippines
Made a cardinal by: Benedict
Tagle, 67, is on many bookmakers’ lists to be the first Asian pope, a choice that would acknowledge a part of the world where the church is growing.
Francis brought the popular archbishop of Manila to Rome to head the Vatican’s missionary evangelization office, which serves the needs of the Catholic Church in much of Asia and Africa. His role took on greater weight when Francis reformed the Vatican bureaucracy. Tagle often cites his Chinese heritage – his maternal grandmother was part of a Chinese family that moved to the Philippines.
Though he has pastoral, Vatican and management experience – he headed the Vatican’s Caritas Internationalis federation of charity groups before coming to Rome permanently – Tagle would be on the young side to be elected pope, with cardinals perhaps preferring an older candidate whose papacy would be more limited.
Tagle is known as a good communicator and teacher – key attributes for a pope.
“The pope will have to do a lot of teaching, we’ll have to face the cameras all the time so if there will be a communicator pope, that’s very desirable,” said Leo Ocampo, a theology professor at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.
That said, Tagle’s tenure at Caritas was not without controversy and some have questioned his management skills.
In 2022, Francis ousted the Caritas management, including demoting Tagle. The Holy See said an outside investigation had found “real deficiencies” in management that had affected staff morale at the Caritas secretariat in Rome.




Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu. (AP)

Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu
Date of Birth: Jan. 24, 1960
Nationality: Congolese
Position: Archbishop of Kinshasa, Congo
Experience: President of the bishops conferences of Africa and Madagascar
Made a cardinal by: Francis
The 65-year-old Ambongo is one of Africa’s most outspoken Catholic leaders, heading the archdiocese that has the largest number of Catholics on the continent that seen as the future of the church.
He has been archbishop of Congo’s capital since 2018 and a cardinal since in 2019. Francis also appointed him to a group of advisers that was helping reorganize the Vatican bureaucracy.
In Congo and across Africa, Ambongo has been deeply committed to the Catholic orthodoxy and is seen as conservative.
In 2024, he signed a statement on behalf of the bishops conferences of Africa and Madagascar refusing to follow Francis’ declaration allowing priests to offer blessings to same-sex couples in what amounted to continent-wide dissent from a papal teaching. The rebuke crystalized both the African church’s line on LGBTQ+ outreach and Ambongo’s stature within the African hierarchy.
He has received praise from some in Congo for promoting interfaith tolerance, especially on a continent where religious divisions between Christians and Muslims are common.
“He is for the openness of the church to different cultures,” said Monsignor Donatien Nshole, secretary-general of the National Episcopal Conference of Congo, who has long worked with Ambongo.
An outspoken government critic, the cardinal is also known for his unwavering advocacy for social justice.
In a country with high poverty and hunger levels despite being rich in minerals, and where fighting by rebel groups has killed thousands and displaced millions in one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises, he frequently criticizes both government corruption and inaction, as well as the exploitation of the country’s natural resources by foreign powers.
“Congo is the plate from which everyone eats, except for our people,” he said last year during a speech at the Pontifical Antonianum University.
Ambongo’s criticism of authorities has drawn both public admiration and legal scrutiny. Last year, prosecutors ordered a judicial investigation of him after accusing him of “seditious behavior” over his criticism of the government’s handling of the conflict in eastern Congo.




Cardinal Matteo Zuppi. (AP)

Cardinal Matteo Zuppi
Date of Birth: Oct. 11, 1955
Nationality: Italian
Current position: Archbishop of Bologna, Italy, president of the Italian bishops conference
Previous position: Auxiliary bishop of Rome
Made a cardinal by: Francis
Zuppi, 69, came up as a street priest in the image of Francis, who promoted him quickly: first to archbishop of the wealthy archdiocese of Bologna in northern Italy in 2015, before bestowing the title of cardinal in 2019.
He is closely closely affiliated with the Sant’Egidio Community, a Rome-based Catholic charity that was influential under Francis, particularly in interfaith dialogue. Zuppi was part of Sant’Egidio’s team that helped negotiate the end of Mozambique’s civil war in the 1990s and was named Francis’ peace envoy for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
He traveled to Kyiv and Moscow after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to the Holy See for help in winning the release of 19,000 Ukrainian children taken from their families and brought to Russia during the war. The mission also took him to China and the United States.
After making him a cardinal, Francis made clear he wanted him in charge of Italy’s bishops, a sign of his admiration for the prelate who, like Francis, is known as a “street priest” – someone who prioritizes ministering to poor and homeless people and refugees.
Zuppi would be a candidate in Francis’ tradition of ministering to those on the margins, although his relative youth would count against him for cardinals seeking a short papacy.
In a sign of his progressive leanings, Zuppi wrote the introduction to the Italian edition of “Building a Bridge,” by the Rev. James Martin, an American Jesuit, about the church’s need to improve its outreach to the LGBTQ+ community.
Zuppi wrote that building bridges with the community was a “difficult process, still unfolding.” He recognized that “doing nothing, on the other hand, risks causing a great deal of suffering, makes people feel lonely, and often leads to the adoption of positions that are both contrasting and extreme.”
Zuppi’s family also has strong institutional ties: His father worked for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, and his mother was the niece of Cardinal Carlo Confalonieri, dean of the College of Cardinals in the 1960s and 1970s.




Cardinal Peter Erdo. (AP)

Cardinal Peter Erdo
Date of Birth: June 25, 1952
Nationality: Hungarian
Position: Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, Hungary
Past experience: Twice elected head of the umbrella group of European bishops conferences
Made a cardinal by: John Paul
Known by his peers as a serious theologian, scholar and educator, Erdo, 72, is a leading contender among conservatives. He has served as the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest since 2002 and was made a cardinal by John Paul the following year. He has participated in two conclaves, in 2005 and 2013, for the selection of Benedict and Francis.
Holding doctorates in theology and canon law, Erdo, speaks six languages, is a proponent of doctrinal orthodoxy, and champions the church’s positions on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
Erdo opposes same-sex unions, and has also resisted suggestions that Catholics who remarry after divorce be able to receive communion. He stated in 2015 that divorced Catholics should only be permitted communion if they remain sexually abstinent in their new marriage.
An advocate for traditional family structures, he helped organize Francis’ 2014 and 2015 Vatican meetings on the family.
From 2006 to 2016, Erdo served as president of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences, helping to foster collaboration among Catholic bishops across Europe and to address contemporary issues facing the church on the continent.
While careful to avoid taking part in Hungary’s often tumultuous political life, Erdo has maintained a close relationship with the country’s rightist populist government, which provides generous subsidies to Christian churches.
He has been reluctant to take positions on several of the government’s policies that divided society in Hungary such as public campaigns that villainized migrants and refugees and laws that eroded the rights of LGBTQ+ communities.
When hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers entered Europe in 2015 fleeing war and deprivation in the Middle East and Africa, Erdo emphasized that the church had a Christian duty to provide humanitarian assistance to those in need, but stopped short of the full-throated advocacy for migrants that was one of Francis’ top priorities.


Madrid’s ghost towns revived as Spain’s housing crisis escalates

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Madrid’s ghost towns revived as Spain’s housing crisis escalates

  • Sesena, a development near Madrid, gained notoriety as one of the so-called ‘ghost towns’ created when Spain’s property bubble burst in 2008
  • Sesena has been adopted as a commuter town as Madrid overflows, even though it is located in the neighboring Castile-La Mancha region
SESENA, Spain: The first call came two minutes after estate agent Segis Gomez posted a listing in Sesena, a development near Madrid that gained notoriety as one of the so-called “ghost towns” created when Spain’s property bubble burst in 2008.
Half-built and half-empty for more than a decade, these days the squatters have gone from this development 40 kilometers south of the capital and middle-class families, driven out of the city center by an acute housing crisis, are moving in. Construction, meanwhile, has restarted.
Demand is so strong in Sesena that Gomez has a waiting list of 70 people for each property. Property prices have recovered their original value after plunging to less than half during the crisis, he said.
As anger grows over the cost of housing in Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has made providing affordable homes one of his main goals – even as he encourages population growth through immigration. The size of the challenge is clear in Madrid, which grew by 140,000 people in 2024, but only registered permits to build 20,000 new homes.
Short supply is being exacerbated by a boom in holiday lets, record migration and onerous planning laws.
“The problem is that we can’t match supply and demand quickly enough. So prices go up, or people have to trade price for distance,” said Carles Vergara, a real estate professor at IESE Business School in Madrid.
Sesena has been adopted as a commuter town as Madrid overflows, even though it is located in the neighboring Castile-La Mancha region and still lacks good transport links to the capital and public services, which caused homebuyers to reject it in the past.
Its founder and original developer, Francisco Hernando, had a vision of 13,000 affordable apartments with gardens and swimming pools on the Spanish plain where author Cervantes set his best-known work Don Quixote, but the project became a byword for speculative greed and corruption. Only 5,000 homes ended up being built. Hernando, who began his project in 2004, failed to tell homebuyers he hadn’t secured access to water or that the town had no public transport or schools. Hernando died in 2020.
When the market collapsed, initial investors saw the value of their property plummet, while many homes ended up in the hands of banks.
Madrid’s expansion
Today, Sesena teems with life as parents drop children at its three schools, drink coffee in its bars and visit recently-opened gyms and pharmacies. Impact Homes, a developer, is constructing 156 one-to-four bedroom apartments it expects to complete this year. Next door, another building has already pre-sold 49 percent of its units, it said in an email. “Sesena is at 100 percent,” said Jaime de Hita, the town’s mayor.
Nestor Delgado moved to Sesena in 2021 with his family from Carabanchel in south Madrid because an apartment cost 20 percent less to rent. In May, he bought a house with his wife for €240,000 ($272,808).
“We chose (Sesena) because we can afford it,” Delgado, 34, said.
The trade-off is rising before 5 a.m. (0300 GMT) to be among the first in the queue for the 6.30 a.m. bus to Madrid to arrive at his construction job by 8 a.m. or face an hour’s wait for the next bus.
Back to life
Other ghost towns are also coming back to life. Valdeluz, a development 75 km east of Madrid originally envisioned to house 30,000 people, was abandoned a quarter of the way through when the property bubble burst.
Mayor Enrique Quintana told Reuters the town’s 6,000-strong population is swelling with people from Madrid and could expand by 50 percent in the next four years.
A development on the edge of the village of Bernuy de Porreros, 100km north of Madrid, which as recently as six years ago was mostly abandoned, is now bustling with activity as handymen put the finishing touches on homes.
Lucia, a 37-year-old state employee, bought her house in April. Her daily commute to Madrid involves a 15-minute drive to the train station in Segovia and 28 minutes on the high-speed train, which costs her 48 euros for 30 trips thanks to a frequent traveler discount.
The development began to revive when Spain’s so-called bad bank Sareb, which was set up to take bad loans from the financial crisis, in 2021 began selling the homes for as little as €97,000. Four years later, one property was resold for double that, said resident Nuria Alvarez.
Until recently a relatively compact city, Madrid is on the way to becoming a metropolis like Paris or London, with commuter zones stretching beyond its administrative boundaries, said Jose Maria Garcia, the regional government’s deputy housing minister.
The metropolitan area’s population of 7 million will grow by a million in the next 15 years, the government estimates. Madrid has a deficit of 80,000-100,000 homes that’s growing by 15,000 homes a year and plans to build 110,000 homes by 2028, Garcia said.
Sesena, meanwhile, is once again dreaming big.
Its mayor, de Hita, said the town is securing permits for a new project dubbed Parquijote, with a proposed investment of €2.3 billion to build a logistics park that will create local jobs, along with 2,200 homes.
It’s no quixotic fantasy, de Hita said.
“This time we have learned from what happened,” he said. “It is fundamental that we look for growth by learning from the past.”

Scientists long ago envisioned the end of climate cooperation

Updated 3 min 10 sec ago
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Scientists long ago envisioned the end of climate cooperation

  • Scientists are currently updating SSP projections and crafting a new set of climate narratives

PARIS: They warned it could happen: a world of surging nationalism, stalling economic development and the unravelling of decades of international cooperation on climate change and other global challenges.

Long before Donald Trump lurched away from diplomatic norms and the international rules-based order, scientists mapped out different potential futures to understand the possible implications for greenhouse gas emissions.

Developed a decade ago, five of these "pathways" became crucial to the work of the United Nations' IPCC climate expert panel.

These are not predictions for the 21st century. Rather, they envision what could happen with various societal changes including for trade, economic development, technological innovation and global population.

The most optimistic narrative foresees sustainable growth and improved equality. A second "middle-of-the-road" scenario is an extension of current trends.

The third is a world riven by rivalries, a fourth is blighted by increasing inequality, and the fifth assumes supercharged economic growth grounded in expanding fossil fuel use.

Keywan Riahi, of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, who coordinated the development of the so-called Shared Socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), said the world has largely developed in line with the third scenario in recent years.

While it is certainly not a perfect fit, what we see now "is a much more fragmented world," Riahi told AFP. "Collaboration is more difficult, economic development is actually also not so optimistic."


Scientists' original description of the SSP3 scenario was: "A resurgent nationalism, concerns about competitiveness and security, and regional conflicts push countries to increasingly focus on domestic or, at most, regional issues."

This "rocky road" is arguably the worst of all the hypothetical futures.

Planet-heating emissions are second only to economic expansion driven by oil, gas and coal.

But the fractured SSP3 world ranks first when it comes to damages from climate change, showing the largest population boom, and the weakest economic growth.

This scenario "reflects a current strain of populist isolationist politics that is ascendent today", climate scientist Zeke Hausfather noted in a recent newsletter post.

In 2021, Hausfather got blowback for calling SSP3 "Trump World". But "the actions in his second term around energy and trade seem to be playing out much more closely to SSP3 than other pathways", he said.

The US has ditched the Paris climate treaty, turned its back on global cooperation on science, trade and health, and eviscerating its international development budget.

Washington has lambasted UN sustainable development goals, especially related to climate change and women's rights.

Domestically, the world's second biggest carbon polluter has undermined progress on low-carbon technology, cancelled climate research, and even stymied weather data collection.

World leaders have expressed their disquiet.

"The global economy thrived on a foundation of openness and multilateralism underpinned by US leadership... but today it is fracturing," said European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde in late May.

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney declared the global trade system in place for 80 years "over", and China's Xi Jinping urged the preservation of "the international order based on international law, and global fairness and justice".


There are important ways in which today's reality differs from the hypothetical SSP3 world.

World population projections are significantly lower, for instance.

And the development of climate tech has been "much more successful", Riahi said.

A dramatic drop in the cost of solar and wind power, as well as electric vehicles and batteries, has boosted the growth of low-carbon technologies.

Carbon dioxide emissions have also slowed, while predicted warming for the end of the century is lower than a decade ago -- albeit still reaching catastrophic levels.

Scientists are currently updating SSP projections and crafting a new set of climate narratives.

They have much to unpack.

Riahi said that even if there was a "complete collapse of climate policies globally", the previous worst-case emissions projections will likely not materialise because clean energy has become so cheap.

At the same time, he said, the world will almost certainly overshoot the Paris deal's aspirational goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the coming years.

This has forced scientists to consider a new set of questions.

What is the new best-case scenario for bending emissions down to zero?

If current policies persist, will emissions stay high for a longer period, causing temperatures to keep rising in the coming decades?

"What are the implications climatically of this high overshoot, which is unfortunately a more and more likely scenario if you extrapolate what we see at the moment?" said Riahi.


More than 200,000 Afghans have left Pakistan since April: Islamabad

Updated 11 min 59 sec ago
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More than 200,000 Afghans have left Pakistan since April: Islamabad

  • Millions of Afghans have poured into Pakistan over the past several decades, fleeing successive wars
  • Over one million Afghans have left Pakistan since Islamabad launched its repatriation program in 2023

ISLAMABAD: More than 200,000 Afghans have left Pakistan since the government renewed a deportation drive in April, Islamabad’s ministry of interior said.

More than 135,000 Afghans left Pakistan in April, while the number dropped to 67,000 in May and more than 3,000 were sent back in the first two days of June, according to the ministry.

Millions of Afghans have poured into Pakistan over the past several decades, fleeing successive wars. Hundreds of thousands have come since the return of the Taliban government in 2021.

But over one million Afghans have left Pakistan since Islamabad launched its repatriation program in 2023, the ministry added.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration on Tuesday voiced concern over a surge in Afghan families being deported from Iran, recording 15,675 crossing in May, a more than two-fold increase from the previous month.

The influx across both borders threatens to strain Afghanistan’s already “fragile reception and reintegration systems,” IOM said in a statement.


South Korea’s new president Lee Jae-myung vows to pursue talks with North and bolster ties with US and Japan

Updated 48 min 10 sec ago
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South Korea’s new president Lee Jae-myung vows to pursue talks with North and bolster ties with US and Japan

  • Lee Jae-myung’s government to deal with North Korean nuclear threats and its potential military aggressions with ‘strong deterrence’
  • But he would ‘open a communication channel with North Korea and establish peace on the Korean Peninsula through talks and cooperation’

SEOUL: South Korea’s new President Lee Jae-myung vowed Wednesday to restart dormant talks with North Korea and bolster a trilateral partnership with the US and Japan, as he laid out key policy goals for his single, five-year term.

Lee, who rose from childhood poverty to become South Korea’s leading liberal politician vowing to fight inequality and corruption, formally began his term earlier Wednesday, hours after winning a snap election that was triggered in April by the removal of then-President Yoon Suk Yeol over his ill-fated imposition of martial law late last year.

In his inaugural address at the National Assembly, Lee said that his government will deal with North Korean nuclear threats and its potential military aggressions with “strong deterrence” based on the solid South Korea-US military alliance. But he said he would “open a communication channel with North Korea and establish peace on the Korean Peninsula through talks and cooperation.”

He said he’ll pursue pragmatic diplomacy with neighboring countries and boost trilateral Seoul-Washington-Tokyo cooperation based on the robust South Korea-US alliance.

“Through pragmatic diplomacy based on national interests, we will turn the crisis posed by the major shift in global economic and security landscapes into an opportunity to maximize our national interests,” Lee said.

Security and economic challenges lie ahead

It was unclear whether Lee’s election would cause any major, immediate shift in South Korea’s foreign policy. Lee, previously accused by critics of tilting toward China and North Korea and away from the US and Japan, has recently repeatedly stressed South Korea’s alliance with the US as the foundation of its foreign policy and avoided any contentious remarks that would raise questions on his views on the US and Japan.

“We’ll have to now see if the pressures of office will cause Lee Jae-myung to govern from the center — at least when it comes to matters of national security and the alliance with the United States,” said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The toughest external challenges awaiting Lee are US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy and North Korea’s expanding military partnerships with Russia. But experts earlier said whoever becomes president can’t do much to secure major progress in South Korea’s favor on those issues.

During his inauguration speech, Lee didn’t directly mention trade issues with the US

US and Japan react

The US and Japan said they congratulated Lee’s election and expressed their commitments to developing three-way cooperation.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba said he wants to hold summit talks with Lee “as early as possible,” saying he hopes to further promote bilateral ties, both public and commercial. The US State Department said that Seoul and Washington share “an ironclad commitment” to the alliance grounded in their mutual defense treaty, shared values and deep economic ties.

It’s unclear how North Korea would react to Lee’s speech, as it has shunned any talks with South Korea since 2019. North Korea in recent years has supplied weapons and troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine, and South Korea, the US and their partners suspect Russia might in return transfer high-tech technologies to North Korea to help it perfect its nuclear weapons program.

Russia’s Tass news agency said Wednesday that one of President Vladimir Putin’s top security officials, Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, has arrived in Pyongyang for a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in the latest sign of the countries’ alignment over Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Lee said revitalizing a slowing domestic economy would be his top priority and that his government would immediately launch an emergency task force to wage a “head-on battle” against the threats of recession. He also promised more aggressive government spending to help spur economic activity.

South Korea’s central bank last week cut its key interest rate and sharply lowered its growth outlook for 2025 to 0.8 percent, as it moved to counter Trump’s tariff hikes and weak domestic demand worsened by recent political turmoil.

South Korea still faces political divide

Lee also called for unity to address the country’s stark political divide deepened after Yoon’s martial law debacle, saying that he will “answer the people’s solemn call to let hope bloom over deep and painful wounds.” Lee still promised a thorough investigation into the circumstances surrounding Yoon’s martial law imposition, describing it as a “rebellion that seized people’s sovereignty with arms.”

Yoon and some of his top military and police officers already stand trial on high-stakes rebellion charges in connection with martial law. Lee’s push to bring those involved in Yoon’s martial law stunt accountable has subsequently caused speculations among his opponents that he would launch political revenge against Yoon associates and senior prosecutors whom he previously accused of fabricating evidence to initiate criminal charges against him.

Lee faces five trials on corruption and other allegations, but experts say those trials will likely stop during his term because the South Korean constitution gives a sitting president immunity from most criminal prosecutions.

Lee also reiterated his campaign vows to reduce inequality and pledged to address the imbalance between the greater Seoul capital area and less developed regions. He said that “the polarization fueled by inequality is now hindering further growth.”

Lee’s term began immediately without the usual two-month transition period after the National Election Commission formally confirmed his election victory.


NATO’S Baltic drills are part of preparations for a potential clash with Russia, TASS reports

Updated 04 June 2025
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NATO’S Baltic drills are part of preparations for a potential clash with Russia, TASS reports

  • BALTOPS – NATO’s annual exercise in the Baltic Sea and the regions surrounding it – is being held this month

NATO’S Baltic drills are part of the alliance’s preparations for a potential military clash with Russia, TASS news agency cited Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko as saying in remarks published on Wednesday.

“We assess NATO’s military activity as part of preparations for military clashes with Russia,” TASS cited Grushko as saying.

“If we look at the focus of these exercises, the concept, the structure of the deployment of forces, the forces themselves, their quality, the tasks that are formulated for these exercises, then this is a fight against a comparable adversary,” Grushko said according to TASS.

BALTOPS – NATO’s annual exercise in the Baltic Sea and the regions surrounding it – is being held this month.