Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires from 24 countries are calling on global leaders to increase taxes on the super-rich, amid growing concern that the wealthiest in society are buying political influence.
An open letter, released to coincide with the World Economic Forum in Davos, calls on global leaders attending this week’s conference to close the widening gap between the super-rich and everyone else.
The letter, signed by luminaries including the actor and film-maker Mark Ruffalo, the musician Brian Eno and the film producer and philanthropist Abigail Disney, says extreme wealth is polluting politics, driving social exclusion and fuelling the climate emergency.
"A handful of global oligarchs with extreme wealth have bought up our democracies; taken over our governments; gagged the freedom of our media; placed a stranglehold on technology and innovation; deepened poverty and social exclusion; and accelerated the breakdown of our planet,” it reads. “What we treasure, rich and poor alike, is being eaten away by those intent on growing the gulf between their vast power and everyone else.
Ty Cobb, who worked as a White House attorney in President Donald Trump’s first administration, said Trump’s cognitive decline is “palpable.”
Lindsey Halligan, a Trump-appointed federal attorney who led the failed prosecutions of two of the president’s political opponents, has left her position at the US justice department, attorney general Pam Bondi said on Tuesday.
U.S. military forces boarded and took control of a seventh oil tanker connected with Venezuela on Tuesday as the Trump administration continues its efforts to take control of the South American country’s oil.
Virginia voters gave Democrats another special election win on Tuesday, according to Decision Desk HQ, adding to a string of recent victories for the party in the Old Dominion.
The Israeli military has launched a “large-scale” operation in Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, deploying hundreds of soldiers and heavy machinery in a move that has paralysed the city’s southern districts.
“I never lost hope, and I never will,” said Nael Barghouti, a 68-year-old Palestinian from the occupied West Bank who spent more than four decades in Israeli captivity. It has been a year since Barghouti won his freedom through a prisoner exchange deal signed between Hamas and Israel in January 2025.
