Seventeen months after King Charles III rose from the title of world's longest-waiting heir to a throne, now comes news that Britain's monarch has cancer – and it’s not just royal watchers who care.

So what's the deal? No sooner had an emergency EU summit began that Hungary lifted its objections to a €50 million lifeline for Ukraine. The aid is vital for a country whose support from Washington is currently frozen. So what did Viktor Orban get in return?

The only thing more difficult than guessing what goes on behind the walls of the Kremlin is guessing what goes on in Pyongyang. The leader of one of the planet's most reclusive regimes made a rare trip abroad last September to neighbouring Russia. Then, it was Western claims of North Korean munitions winding up on the battlefield in Ukraine. Now, it's more.

The French call the first general policy speech of a prime minister before parliament the great oral exam. That expression takes on a whole new layer of meaning when the prime minister is just 34. We ask how Gabriel Attal, the youngest head of government in two centuries, weathered the traditional jeers and whistles from the opposition benches, in a National Assembly where the ruling centrists do not have a majority. With farmers' tractors converging on the capital, we also ask how he's handling his first nationwide protest movement.

What is Washington to do about Middle East mission creep? What response from the United States after the weekend attack in Jordan that killed three of its troops? The US has already hit back at Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria in the past, but to what effect?

Their tractors have been bearing down on Europe's capitals. From Berlin to Bucharest, from Warsaw to Brussels, farmers are venting their fury at having their margins squeezed by inflation and big distributors that drive down market prices in the name of protecting consumers' pocketbooks. Their tractors have been bearing down on Europe's capitals. From Berlin to Bucharest, from Warsaw to Brussels, farmers are venting their fury at having their margins squeezed by inflation and big distributors that drive down market prices in the name of protecting consumers' pocketbooks.

So much for the primaries. Donald Trump is all but killing suspense this January with an 11-point win in New Hampshire over Nikki Haley, his sole Republican rival left standing. Never Trumpers can try the "it’s only 11 points" argument in a state he won by 20 points during his first run in 2016, but New Hampshire is an outlier that lets independents vote in primaries. Exit polls suggest the former president won the votes of three quarters of the party faithful.

As pressure on Israel to formulate an exit strategy mounts, the fighting in Gaza seems to only intensify, with more than 25,000 Palestinians killed. And while the Israeli military claims to have encircled the southern city of Khan Younes, it is also burying its dead after the army's deadliest single day since October 7. We hear reactions to the death of 21 Israeli reservists.

India's prime minister calls it a "new era". Narendra Modi has consecrated the Ayodhya temple in the nation's most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, fulfilling a decades-old promise to build a proper shrine to the Hindu deity Ram on the site where a Moghul-era mosque was torn down by Hindu nationalists in 1992. That destruction sparked deadly riots that killed some 2,000 people, mainly Muslims.

Has Iran just opened a new front? On top of support for Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, now come tit-for-tat strikes with Pakistan to the east. Both sides say they targeted separatist Baloch insurgents, but the sudden escalation between usually friendly neighbours adds a whole new layer of uncertainty to a region that's already close to boiling point.