Top Stories — Saturday, April 18, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- In Angola, Pope Leo XIV Faces the Legacy of Slavery — nyt News
- A Potent Threat in Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s “Mosquito Fleet” — nyt News
- Trump Spat Gives Spain Leader Pedro Sánchez a Political Lifeline — nyt News
In Angola, Pope Leo XIV Faces the Legacy of Slavery
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/18/2026, 9:31:17 AM
When Pope Leo XIV visits the African nation of Angola on Saturday, he will encounter one of the Catholic Church’s enduring challenges on the continent.
Angola has more than 20 million Catholics, but not a single cardinal, making the country a stark example of Africa’s lack of representation in Vatican leadership.
Only 14 of the 121 cardinals eligible to elect a pope are from Africa, where the church is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. There are 365,000 Catholics for every bishop in Africa, a ratio higher than any other continent.
But the Angolan church is the oldest Catholic community in southern Africa, with a history that goes back more than 500 years.
Portuguese settlers arrived in the Kongo Kingdom, which is part of present-day Angola, toward the end of the 15th century. Its Black rulers quickly embraced Catholicism. They were baptized, established local clergy and sent an envoy to represent them at the Vatican.
Within just a few decades, Catholicism had become the kingdom’s dominant religion, leading to a rare instance, historians say, of African and European states interacting as equals during slavery.
But a power imbalance quickly emerged.
The kingdom asked Vatican officials to appoint a local bishop. Instead, at Portugal’s urging, they gave control of the kingdom’s church to a bishop nearly 800 miles away on the tiny Portuguese island colony of São Tomé. It was a bitter pill to swallow.
Since then, Angola has only ever had two cardinals, and just one of them was Angolan. Portugal, which colonized Angola in the 16th century, currently has six cardinals.
“I believe we have not been treated with the same attention that the Vatican gives to other regions,” said Albino Pakisi, a former priest and now a professor at Catholic University in Luanda, the capital of Angola. “We feel a bit like stepchildren when other churches have cardinals and we do not.”
While many members of the Angolan clergy are looking at the pope’s visit through the lens of spiritual enrichment rather than Vatican politics, some analysts see Leo as uniquely positioned to address the needs of the church in Africa.
He has African roots — something many Africans remain unaware of — and a familiarity with the continent, having visited more than a dozen times as a bishop, including at least nine trips to Nigeria and five to Tanzania. He belongs to the Order of St. Augustine, a bishop who did some of his most important work in Algeria and encouraged the church to speak out on biblical values, such as the rights of the most vulnerable.
Many African Catholic leaders, including in Angola, have had to grapple with those values in the face of autocratic governments.
Leo is scheduled to meet with Angola’s president, João Lourenço, whose government has been accused by the church and civil society leaders of failing to address grinding inequality. Despite the country’s oil wealth, more than half the population lives on less than $3.65 per day.
Three out of four Angolans are under 30. Young people in the country face mass unemployment and lack of access to health care and education. Young Africans more broadly represent a critical demographic in the church’s growth. While other regions struggle with aging populations, Africa is experiencing a youth boom.
José Manuel Imbamba, the Archbishop of Saurimo in eastern Angola, said he hoped that Leo’s visit would help heal the political and societal tensions that have lingered in Angola after its 27-year civil war, which ended in 2002.
Leo will be the third pontiff to visit Angola, after John Paul II in 1992 and Benedict XVI in 2009. Diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Angola span seven centuries. António Manuel Nsaku Ne Vunda of Angola was the first African diplomat to reach the Vatican, said Carlos Bumba, a historian in Luanda.
Ne Vunda met with the pope in Rome in 1608 to negotiate better treatment and representation for African Catholics in the kingdom before succumbing to a severe illness shortly after his arrival.
Despite his short stay in Rome, Ne Vunda became a popular figure at the papal court. He was immortalized with a bust in the Vatican and buried in the Papal Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where Pope Francis is also buried.
Filomeno do Nascimento Vieira Dias, the Archbishop of Luanda, said in a news conference this month that he hoped Leo would, “at his own pace and without pressure,” appoint an Angolan cardinal because the country had one of the oldest Catholic communities in Africa, according to the Angolan newspaper Novo Jornal.
Some in Angola say that the country should have an archdiocese with a cardinal’s seat, meaning that the bishop who occupies it would automatically become a cardinal.
While in Angola, Leo will also pray with pilgrims at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Conception of Muxima, a shrine along the Cuanza River where enslaved Africans were baptized before being forced into a treacherous voyage to the Americas.
Today, the shrine, known as Mama Muxima, is one of the most popular pilgrimages in southern Africa, where visitors offer up their prayers to the Virgin Mary. The shrine’s visitors rarely focus on its role in the slave trade, and several Angolan clergy members said they looked forward to Leo sharing a positive message while in the country.
Pope John Paul II prayed for forgiveness for the church’s role in the atrocities of slavery during visits to Africa in 1985 and 1992.
In the present day, the church has to contend with other challenges. Although about 40 percent of the population is Catholic, the church has stiff competition from evangelical Christian sects. They combine local faith systems, like the belief in modern-day prophets, with evangelical Christian teachings. They host huge conferences throughout the country that reach into both rural and urban areas.
One of the most popular evangelical churches in Angola, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, has experienced huge growth over the last two decades, including among politicians, and built large cathedrals in Luanda.
Father Celestino Epalanga, who leads a commission of justice and peace in the Angolan bishop’s conference, said the growth of evangelical churches in the country reflected the richness of its religious diversity. But those churches also present “a challenge to society” because of what he said were their predatory practices, such as equating support for particular politicians with salvation.
Catholic leaders and analysts say that the challenges for the church in Angola and other African nations are both internal and external. The Angolan church does not have enough bishops and priests writing about “profound theological issues,” said Mr. Pakisi, the Catholic University professor.
Manuel de Jesus João Dias Brandão, the director of liturgy in the Saurimo archdiocese, said African priests and bishops needed to show more leadership and influence in their communities. He pointed to the church in Latin America as a model.
Even though the church in Latin America is younger than Africa’s, it has greater representation at the Vatican and is more influential worldwide, Father Brandão said. Latin American Catholics also have more parishes and missionaries around the world than Africans, he said, “which tells me we need to be more conscious of our responsibilities.”
Father Epalanga questioned whether the church in Africa was doing enough to help people live the message of the Gospel, and added that could be one reason for the lack of African representation at the Vatican.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s difficult to judge if really the Vatican is looking down upon us or we Africans are not doing enough.”
John Eligon is the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times, covering a wide range of events and trends that influence and shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa.
Read the full story at nyt News.
A Potent Threat in Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s “Mosquito Fleet”
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/18/2026, 9:31:08 AM
Iranian warships sunk by U.S. and Israeli attacks litter naval harbors along the Persian Gulf coast, but what is sometimes called a “mosquito fleet” lurks in the shadows.
It’s a flotilla of small, fast, agile boats designed to harass shipping, and it forms the heart of the naval forces deployed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a force separate from Iran’s regular navy.
These boats, and especially the missiles and drones that the Guards navy can launch from them, or from camouflaged sites onshore, have been the main threat stymying shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran had vowed to keep the strait closed until there was a cease-fire in Lebanon. On Friday, senior Iranian officials made conflicting statements about whether that truce had prompted Iran to open the strait. Some suggested that the continued U.S. blockade made doing so impossible, while the Guards navy commander said that any opening would involve the military supervising all transits.
Welcoming the initial Iranian announcement of the opening, President Trump pronounced the Hormuz situation “over,” while stressing on social media that the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports would remain in place until a peace deal was reached.
The task of keeping the strait closed would fall to the Guards navy.
“The I.R.G.C. navy works more like a guerrilla force at sea,” said Saeid Golkar, an expert on the Guards and a political science professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
“It is focused on asymmetrical warfare, especially in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz,” he added. “So instead of relying on big warships and classic naval battles, it depends on hit-and-run attacks.”
During the war, at least 20 vessels were attacked, according to the International Maritime Agency, a United Nations agency. The Guards navy rarely claimed the attacks, which analysts said were most likely carried out by drones fired from mobile launchers on land, which generate a faint footprint, difficult to trace.
On April 8, after a two-week cease-fire in the war was announced, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said more than 90 percent of the regular navy’s fleet, including its main warships, sat at the bottom of the ocean.
An estimated half of the Guards navy’s fast attack boats were also sunk, General Caine said, but did not specify how many. Estimates of the overall number range from hundreds to thousands; it is difficult to count them.
The boats are often too small to appear on satellite images, and they are moored along piers within deep caves excavated along the rocky coastline, ready to be deployed in minutes, analysts said. Their arsenal poses a major threat to commercial ships in the gulf and the strait.
“It remains a disruptive force,” said Admiral Gary Roughead, a retired chief of U.S. Naval Operations. “You never quite knew what they were up to and what their intentions were.”
The Guards land forces were formed soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution because its leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, did not trust the regular army to protect the new government.
The Guards navy was added around 1986. The regular navy had proved reluctant during the Iran-Iraq war to attack oil tankers from Iraq’s financial backers, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, said Farzin Nadimi, a specialist on the Guards navy at the Washington Institute, a policy think tank in the U.S. capital.
Eventually those attacks ratcheted up, and the United States then deployed warships to escort tankers. One of them, the USS Samuel B. Roberts, almost sank after hitting an Iranian mine. In a subsequent battle, the U.S. Navy scuppered two Iranian frigates and a number of other naval vessels.
Three years later, the Iranians watched as the U.S. laid waste to the Iraqi military during the first Persian Gulf war.
That combination of events convinced Iran that it could never prevail in a direct confrontation with the U.S. military, so it developed a stealth force to harass ships in the gulf, Mr. Nadimi said.
The Guards navy has an estimated 50,000 men, he said, and divides its forces into five sectors along the gulf, including some presence on many of the 38 gulf islands that Iran controls.
Overall, it has constructed at least 10 well-hidden, fortified bases for attack boats. One, Farur, is the center of operations for the naval special forces, whose equipment, even their sunglasses, are modeled on their U.S. counterparts.
“The I.R.G.C. navy has always believed that it is at the forefront of the confrontation with the Great Satan, and has been in constant friction with the Americans in the gulf,” Mr. Nadimi said.
Iran started by using recreational boats mounted with rocket-propelled grenades or machine guns, naval analysts said. Over the years it built a range of specially designed small boats, as well as miniature submarines and marine drones. Those boats often reach speeds of more than 100 knots, or more than 115 miles per hour.
The Guards navy also recently developed larger, more sophisticated warships, many of which were targeted in the war, said Alex Pape, the chief maritime expert at Janes, a defense analysis firm. Those damaged included its largest drone carrier, the Shahid Bagheri, a converted container ship that could also launch anti-ship missiles.
To counter a potential swarm of smaller boats, U.S. warships have high-caliber cannons and other weaponry, experts said. Commercial vessels, though, have no way to fend off such attacks.
But the Iranians have never tested swarm attacks of small boats in combat, said Nicholas Carl, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
Since President Trump on Monday imposed a naval blockade on ships traveling from Iranian ports, even the most powerful U.S. warships are avoiding spending any time patrolling in the vicinity of the narrow Strait of Hormuz. There is little room to maneuver and almost no warning time to ward off a drone or a missile fired from nearby, experts said.
The U.S. warships enforcing the blockade are likely to remain outside the strait, in the Gulf of Oman or even farther, in the Arabian Sea, where they can monitor shipping traffic but are far more difficult for the Guards to attack, experts said. On Wednesday, Iran warned that it could expand operations into the Red Sea, another key shipping route in the region, through its proxy force in Yemen.
The Guards navy has long played games of cat-and-mouse with the U.S. military inside the gulf. Admiral Roughead remembers that in the 1990s and 2000s, the small attack craft would approach American warships at high speeds and then veer off when they were half a mile away.
Drone warfare has amplified the danger level, he said. Drones are cheap and sometimes hard to detect, but they can inflict significant damage on a warship costing billions of dollars.
Occasionally the Guards navy has fought directly with American or other forces. In early 2016, it captured two small U.S. naval boats. The 10 sailors, filmed on their knees, were later released unharmed. The episode caused an uproar in the United States.
Brigadier Gen. Mohammad Nazeri, a founder of the Guards naval special forces, who led that attack, achieved cultlike status in Iran. He inspired a reality show on state television, “The Commander,” which ran for five seasons.
Each season, about 30 contestants competed for the chance to become a naval commando. They demonstrated their survival skills or feats of daring like jumping off cliffs into the gulf. After each round, viewers voted for their favorite “hero.”
Neil MacFarquhar has been a Times reporter since 1995, writing about a range of topics from war to politics to the arts, both internationally and in the United States.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Trump Spat Gives Spain Leader Pedro Sánchez a Political Lifeline
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/18/2026, 9:31:08 AM
To leftists abroad, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain is a hero for standing up to President Trump. At home, Mr. Trump is seen as Mr. Sánchez’s political savior from thorny domestic challenges.
For many on the global left, Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain, has emerged as a progressive superhero. He has not only championed liberal positions on immigration, renewable energy and civil rights, but he has also stood up to President Trump over tariffs, the abduction of Venezuela’s leader and now, most prominently of all, the war in Iran.
But as liberal leaders gather to venerate Mr. Sánchez at a global progressive summit in Barcelona, they are inhabiting an alternate Spanish universe where Mr. Trump is widely seen as coming to Mr. Sánchez’s rescue by engaging him in international quarrels that distract from the Spanish leader’s domestic problems.
Far from a political threat, Mr. Trump is seen here as a life preserver in a sea of Spanish scandals and setbacks aiding the political survival of Europe’s most accomplished escape artist.
Mr. Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister since 2018, is better known at home for his willingness to say and do anything to stay in power. His liberal backers applaud him for his deftness in wielding a political dagger — a skill that, they say, is in short global supply and is necessary to defy the rise of the right.
“He needs to be a great prime minister in this vital time,” said Carmen Calvo, Mr. Sánchez’s former deputy prime minister. With a general election due by next year, his aides said in interviews, he will go to any legitimate length to stay in power and prevent the country falling to the far right, 50 years after the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. When it came to doing what was necessary to survive, Ms. Calvo called him “a very flexible leader.”
But for some, Mr. Sánchez has been too flexible.
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