• Birthright order blocked: A federal judge temporarily blocks President Donald Trump’s executive order ending the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship regardless of parents’ immigration status. 
• Opioid settlement: Members of the Sackler family, which owns OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, and the company itself both agree to pay up to $7.4 billion to settle lawsuits over the toll of OxyContin. 
• Saudi Arabia seeks to invest in U.S.: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman says the kingdom wants to invest some $600 billion over the next four years.
• New fires force evacuations: Powerful winds and dry conditions challenge firefighters battling new wildfires in Southern California.
• Arrest warrants for Taliban leaders: The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor says that he requested arrest warrants for two top Afghan Taliban officials over the repression of women.

Read these news briefs.

Organized religion provides space for worship and spiritual study. Amid disaster, it can also provide a built-in system of caring and an active faith.

President Donald Trump is charting an uncertain course in a global economy now dominated by rivalry, especially between the United States and China. The path will depend on how he resolves a battle over tariffs within his White House.

Around the world, citizens are losing faith in the liberal international order, citing its failure to make them feel safer or better off. Does Donald Trump’s inauguration mark the end of the 80-year-old Western project?

With a baker’s dozen nominations, including the first for an openly transgender actress, “Emilia Pérez” has emerged as the Oscar front-runner. That cultural conservatives are not ardent fans is not a surprise – but some of the strongest criticism is coming from trans rights advocates.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made Ukraine’s book publishing industry a target of the war. But the industry and Ukrainian readers are keeping books alive as a source of Ukraine’s resilient culture, and for solace and distraction.

Librarians have faced challenges from book bans to natural disasters. We caught up with the 2025 librarian of the year, who leads the Los Angeles Public Library, about the wildfires and about why libraries are needed now more than ever.

A truce between Israel and Hamas is only days old – marked by a limited release of hostages and prisoners as well as a silencing of war in Gaza and a delivery of aid to its people – yet this precious period of peace has also brought something else: Top leaders of Hamas, Israel, and the United States have all thanked the tiny Gulf nation of Qatar for brokering the Jan. 15 agreement.

Despite many outside efforts to shake Qatar’s role as neutral arbiter, it “was ready to deal with all these pressures,” one Hamas official, Basem Naim, told Doha News.

These public expressions of gratitude reflect Qatar’s own mediating style: focus less on finding the specific problems between adversaries and more on nurturing qualities such as empathy to build respect and a mutual recognition of a vision of harmony.

While Israel’s military might has swayed the conflict in its favor, it took Qatar’s soft leverage of being patient and listening to both Hamas and Israel to hammer out compromises for peace.

Qatar’s years of success in mediating in international conflicts – such as negotiating the return of children whom Russia had moved from Ukraine – have relied in part on its willingness to play host to both big powers and reviled militant groups. Hamas and the Taliban have been allowed to set up offices in the capital, Doha, even as Qatar is home to the largest U.S. military installation in the Middle East. The country has also learned valuable lessons from balancing ties with two giant and rival neighbors: Iran and Saudi Arabia.

“In contrast to the more Western focus on swiftly identifying problems and executing interventions, the Gulf approach significantly emphasizes the slow and careful building of trust and rapport,” wrote Nickolay Mladenov, a former United Nations envoy to the Middle East, in a paper.

Now, after its role during 14 months of negotiating a deal between Hamas and Israel, Qatar is active in starting talks to fulfill the next phase of the agreement: more releases of captured people and a full withdrawal of Israeli forces. Qatar has built up the trust and channels of communication between the two sides. In their thanks for that role, Israel and Hamas may have learned something about the qualities necessary for peace.