Isack Hadjar to replace Yuki Tsunoda at Red Bull for 2026 F1 season
Red Bull Racing will pair another new driver with Max Verstappen after Isack Hadjar replaced Yuki Tsunoda for next year. Published On 2 Dec 20252 Dec 2025 Click here to share on social media share2 Share Isack Hadjar will replace Yuki Tsunoda as Max Verstappen’s Red Bull teammate next season, with Arvid Lindblad joining Liam Lawson at Racing Bulls, the Formula One (F1) teams announced on Tuesday. Frenchman Hadjar, 21, has made a big impression in his debut season with sister team Racing Bulls, including taking his first podium with third place in the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list British-born Lindblad, who also has Swedish nationality and Indian heritage through his mother, moves up from Formula Two to partner with Lawson and will be the sole rookie on the 2026 grid. Tsunoda’s departure leaves Formula One without a Japanese driver on the starting grid. Red Bull said he will remain in the team as a reserve. Hadjar is the third driver to fill the second Red Bull Racing seat in the past 12 months. Lawson was named as the replacement for Sergio Perez in December. The New Zealander was then replaced by Tsunoda in March after the opening two Grand Prix of 2025. Verstappen will compete for the fifth straight World Drivers’ title at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on Sunday. Max Verstappen, left, and Isack Hadjar will form the Red Bull Racing driver lineup for the 2026 Formula One season [File: Clive Rose/Getty Images] Adblock test (Why?)
Europe should seize Russia’s frozen assets now
The Trump administration is now determining what the future holds for Ukraine, and by extension for Europe, in matters of territorial integrity, sovereignty and security. Washington aims to make a deal to end the full-scale war Russia launched in February 2022 that Russian President Vladimir Putin has waged against Ukraine, even if it means abandoning longstanding international principles that prohibit the recognition of territory acquired through military occupation. For Europe more broadly, and the European Union in particular, however, there is far more at stake than those principles, which Washington has rarely prioritised in its own foreign policy. Deterring Putin from further aggression, and ensuring that Ukraine is stable both politically and economically, lies at the core of the bloc’s security and political concerns. A settlement to the conflict that fails to achieve either would risk the bloc’s own long-term security. Of course, all of this must be managed while ensuring that the Trump administration does not itself further endanger European security by once again casting doubt on its commitment to NATO’s security infrastructure. But Europe has already, if belatedly, begun to wake up to these concerns. By last year, 23 NATO members were spending the target 2 percent of GDP on defence, and the alliance agreed a new goal of raising core defence spending to at least 3.5 percent of GDP by 2035, with up to another 1.5 percent of GDP to be spent on critical infrastructure and on expanding their defence industrial bases. Advertisement More immediately, Europe has also surpassed the US for the first time since June 2022 in total military aid for Ukraine, with 72 billion euros ($83.6bn) allocated compared with Washington’s 65 billion euros ($75.5bn) by the end of April, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker. Yet, regardless of the outcome of the Trump administration’s efforts to push Ukraine towards a negotiating position that Putin might be willing to accept, the increased European support is not enough to offset the standstill in US funding. Military aid is also only one part of the picture: Kyiv is dependent on the West’s fiscal aid as well, to ensure the continued functioning of its government. And the bill for reconstruction only continues to grow as Russia’s assaults and aerial attacks continue. In February, the World Bank estimated it at $524bn (506 billion euros) —about 280 percent of Kyiv’s 2024 GDP. Without dramatic action, Europe risks being left to Trump’s whims as to its future security, despite having bowed to his demands not only on NATO spending and military support for Ukraine, but also on trade through agreements that have seen the US’s average tariff rate on imports from the EU and UK rise sharply. But there is a clear policy choice that Europe can make to ensure that financial support for Kyiv remains sufficient over the coming years and to shape the outcome of any settlement to the conflict, while simultaneously further deterring Putin. The European Union and the United Kingdom can move to confiscate the sovereign Russian funds frozen in their jurisdictions since 2022. Most importantly, they can seize the 185 billion euros ($214.8bn) frozen at the Belgium-based clearing house Euroclear – the majority of which is now in cash and can thus rapidly be deployed or reinvested – as well as the Russian government funds frozen at Euroclear’s Luxembourg-based rival, Clearstream, which are estimated to amount to around 20 billion euros ($23.2bn). Europe is not unaware of this possibility, and in fact, it has been debating doing so for months. The Euroclear assets have already been used to underpin an earlier $50bn (43 billion euros) loan to Ukraine finalised in January 2025, which is secured over earnings from those assets. Europe had been expected to advance a plan to create a new loan – one amounting to as much as 140 billion euros ($162.6bn) – secured over the assets at the European Council meeting on December 18-19, after delaying a final decision at the previous council meeting on October 23. The delay was largely due to obstinacy from the Belgian government, which has demanded indemnification from the rest of Europe while endorsing Kremlin talking points that such a move would be unprecedented. Advertisement Yet there is ample precedent. German and Japanese government assets were seized by the United States in the course of the second world war. In the latter case, Japan’s assets were even frozen before the attack on Pearl Harbour, the majority of which were later retained under the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951. The Kremlin’s threats to tie up Belgium in decades-long litigation are also overblown. They rely on a pre-Soviet-collapse bilateral investment treaty that Putin and his proxies have already failed to invoke successfully to unfreeze their assets or challenge previous sanctions. Additionally, there are dozens of unresolved claims worth tens of billions of dollars against Russia in European courts — including the roughly 13-billion-euro ($15bn) arbitration award won by energy firm Uniper against Gazprom for disruption to gas supplies in 2022. The largest and most significant case remains the 2014 award to former shareholders of Yukos, over the Kremlin’s expropriation of their company. That award survived all appeals: in October 2025, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands rejected Russia’s final challenge, confirming that the award — now valued at more than $65bn, including interest — is final and enforceable against Russian state assets worldwide. Enforcement, however, will still depend on locating suitable Russian assets that courts are willing and able to seize. The Kremlin will certainly engage in lawfare and litigation over these disputes, as it has repeatedly throughout Putin’s tenure. But it will lose, and when its national interests are at stake, it will pay. Russia has repeatedly complied with adverse rulings when vital access to Western markets or assets was at stake. The only clear-cut cases of either the West or Russia returning funds owed as a result of litigation arising from Russia’s war have been the settlements paid by Russian state insurer NSK and aviation firm
Juan Orlando Hernandez freed after Trump’s ‘full and complete’ pardon
Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year sentence for drug conspiracy, received ‘full and unconditional pardon’, lawyer says. Authorities in the United States have released former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a lengthy prison sentence for drug trafficking, after US President Donald Trump pardoned him. Hernandez’s lawyer, Renato Stabile, confirmed that the former Honduran president was freed on Tuesday, a day after being pardoned. Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of list “President Trump has issued a full and unconditional pardon, signed, Dec 1, 2025. President Hernandez was released from prison early this morning,” Stabile told Al Jazeera in an email. A federal prison database showed that Hernandez was released from a detention centre in West Virginia after spending more than three years in US jail. Last year, Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years for involvement in a scheme to export cocaine in the US, which prosecutors described as “one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world”. Trump announced plans to pardon the former Honduran president last week as he called for the people in the Central American country to back right-wing candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura, a member of Hernandez’s party. “I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump wrote in a social media post on Tuesday. “This cannot be allowed to happen, especially now, after Tito Asfura wins the Election, when Honduras will be on its way to Great Political and Financial Success.” Hernandez was convicted of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from violent drug-trafficking organisations over 18 years, which he used to fuel his rise in politics. Advertisement “During his political career, Hernandez abused his powerful positions and authority in Honduras to facilitate the importation of over 400 tons of cocaine into the US,” the US Justice Department said after he was sentenced last year. “Hernandez’s co-conspirators were armed with machine guns and destructive devices, including AK-47s, AR-15s, and grenade launchers, which they used to protect their massive cocaine loads as they transited across Honduras on their way to the United States, protect the money they made from the eventual sale of this cocaine, and guard their drug-trafficking territory from rivals.” During his trial, Hernandez denied taking bribes from drug dealers, arguing that he cracked down on the narcotics trade and citing his administration’s cooperation with the US military. Trump’s pardon of Hernandez comes at a time when his administration is carrying out deadly air strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean that it says are carrying drugs – a campaign that critics say violates domestic and international law. Trump has also been issuing threats against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro after accusing him without evidence of leading a drug cartel that the US labelled as a “terrorist” group. Washington has also been ramping up its military presence in the Caribbean in what it calls an anti-drug trafficking operation, which raised speculations about a possible war to topple Maduro. Pardoning Hernandez has intensified criticism of the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America. “As President, Juan Orlando Hernandez personally helped the Sinaloa Cartel and El Chapo traffic deadly drugs into the United States. Drugs that killed Americans,” Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto said in a social media post on Monday. “But instead of standing with law enforcement who brought Hernandez to justice, Trump is letting this criminal go free.” In Honduras, an election took place on Sunday, but the race is still too close to call, with sports journalist Salvador Nasralla leading against Asfura by only hundreds of votes. Trump – who continues to falsely claim that his 2020 election loss to former US President Joe Biden was due to widespread fraud – is already casting doubt over the outcome of the vote in Honduras. “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform on Monday. “If they do, there will be hell to pay!” Adblock test (Why?)
Beware travelers! Waiting for more than 8 mins at Bengaluru Airport to now fetch heavy fines, check charges, new rules
To ease passenger movement and reduce congestion, the Bangalore International Airport Limited will introduce a lane segregation system to prevent long waiting of private cabs and vehicles at the pickup zone of Kempegowda International Airport.
Sanchar Saathi app: Is your mobile phone genuine? Here’s step-by-step guide to check
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has taken a big step ?to safeguard the citizens from buying the non-genuine handsets, and has mandated the the (Cybersecurity) Sanchar Saathi mobile application to be pre-installed on all mobile handsets manufactured or imported for use in India.
Centre reveals key details on Census 2027, will be held in two phases, check schedule here
Rai also informed the Lok Sabha that the census questionnaire is prepared on the basis of inputs and suggestions from different ministries, departments, organisations, and census data users before each exercise.
‘Sanchar Saathi is like a…’: BJP’s Sambit Patra addresses spying concerns, explains app’s privacy, security role, other features
Amid the controversy surrounding the government’s app, Sanchar Saathi, BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra on Tuesday addressed concerns about the app, clarifying its purpose and functionality. He detailed the app’s role in maintaining privacy and security.
Who is Vedamurti Devavrat Mahesh Rekhe? 19-Year-Old Vedic Scholar whom PM Modi praised for…
Vedamurti Devavrat Mahesh Rekhe, a 19-year-old Vedic scholar from Varanasi, has successfully completed the Dandakrama Parayanam, a challenging recitation of 2000 mantras in Shukla Yajurveda in 50 days without interruption. PM Modi praised him for his remarkable achievement.
Air India takes BIG action, suspends officials after finding major noncompliance, here’s what we know so far
The DGCA has launched an investigation into Air India after the airline was reported to have operated aircraft in eight revenue sectors with an expired Airworthiness Review Certificate ARC. The DGCA was tasked with conducting the first ARC renewal for all 70 former Vistara aircraft.
BIG breakthrough for India, DRDO successfully tests fighter aircraft escape system, WATCH
The DRDO successfully carried out a high-speed rocket-sled test of a fighter aircraft escape system which reached a controlled velocity of 800 km/h. This test put India among the nations with advanced in-house escape system testing capability.