Officials said a train accident in southern Mexico killed at least 13 people and injured dozens, halting traffic along a rail line connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Gulf of Mexico.The Interoceanic Train linking the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz went off the rails Sunday as it passed a curve near the town of Nizanda.“The Mexican Navy has informed me that, tragically, 13 people died in the Interoceanic Train accident,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum posted on X, adding that 98 people are injured, five of them seriously.She said she instructed the secretary of the navy and the undersecretary of human rights of the Ministry of the Interior to travel to the site and personally assist the families.In a message on X Sunday, Oaxaca state Gov. Salomon Jara said several government agencies had reached the site of the accident to assist the injured.Officials said that 241 passengers and nine crew members were on the train when the accident occurred.The Interoceanic Train was inaugurated in 2023 by then President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The rail service is part of a broader push to boost train travel in southern Mexico, and develop infrastructure along the isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow stretch of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.The Mexican government plans to turn the isthmus into a strategic corridor for international trade, with ports and rail lines that can connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Interoceanic train currently runs from the port of Salina Cruz on the Pacific Ocean to Coatzacoalcos, covering a distance of approximately 180 miles (290 kilometers) .
, CDMX —
Officials said a train accident in southern Mexico killed at least 13 people and injured dozens, halting traffic along a rail line connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Gulf of Mexico.
The Interoceanic Train linking the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz went off the rails Sunday as it passed a curve near the town of Nizanda.
“The Mexican Navy has informed me that, tragically, 13 people died in the Interoceanic Train accident,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum posted on X, adding that 98 people are injured, five of them seriously.
She said she instructed the secretary of the navy and the undersecretary of human rights of the Ministry of the Interior to travel to the site and personally assist the families.
In a message on X Sunday, Oaxaca state Gov. Salomon Jara said several government agencies had reached the site of the accident to assist the injured.
Officials said that 241 passengers and nine crew members were on the train when the accident occurred.
The Interoceanic Train was inaugurated in 2023 by then President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The rail service is part of a broader push to boost train travel in southern Mexico, and develop infrastructure along the isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow stretch of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
The Mexican government plans to turn the isthmus into a strategic corridor for international trade, with ports and rail lines that can connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Interoceanic train currently runs from the port of Salina Cruz on the Pacific Ocean to Coatzacoalcos, covering a distance of approximately 180 miles (290 kilometers) .
ABU DHABI/SINGAPORE, Dec 10 – Asian investors are piling into Gulf bonds and loans this year, reflecting both deepening trade and finance ties with the fast-growing region and an uncertain outlook elsewhere, including the world’s top two economies, the United States and China.
Bond issuance in the Middle East and North Africa region jumped 20% year-on-year to $126 billion in the first nine months of this year, according to LSEG data, with full-year records in sight both for the region and broader emerging market debt sales outside China.
That growth, driven largely by the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, represents both rising financing needs linked to oil- and gas-producing economies’ efforts to diversify, and growing demand from Asian investors reshuffling their portfolios.
“Clearly there has been a shift with Chinese investors actively diversifying away from U.S.-based investments,” said Nour Safa, head of debt capital markets for the Middle East and North Africa at HSBC in Dubai.
Chinese investors have become more comfortable with the region and were now doubling down on investments in both bonds and loans, which have seen particularly strong demand from Asia, Safa said.
Middle East loans syndicated in Asia-Pacific more than tripled to over $16 billion year-to-date from less than $5 billion last year, LSEG data showed.
With China’s economy slowing and Washington’s tariff-centred policies making investors rethink their exposure to the vast pool of U.S. assets, the Gulf appeals with its stability and solid growth prospects.
The IMF projects the region will grow 3.9% this year and growth will accelerate to 4.3% in 2026. In contrast, global growth, projected at 3.2% in 2025, is seen slowing to 3.1% next year.
“Investors are being more cautious about U.S. Treasuries and are diversifying into several alternate markets,” said Oliver Holt, Nomura’s head of debt syndication in Singapore, with high-rated government-backed Middle East issuers often catching investor attention.
Deepening economic ties are also helping with Gulf-Asia trade rising 15% to a record $516 billion last year, around double the value of the region’s trade with the West, according to London-based Asia House.
ASIA TAKES BIGGER BOND ALLOCATIONS
Ritesh Agarwal, Emirates NBD Capital’s head of debt capital markets, said Asian institutions – hedge funds, asset managers and private banks – have driven a rise in the region’s debt allocations over the past 12 to 18 months.
According to Agarwal, average Asian allocation in Gulf debt issues now ranged between 15% and 20%, up from 5% to 7% in early 2024. He said that while the majority of investors were not from mainland China, Chinese capital was flowing through Asian accounts in Hong Kong, Singapore and, for Islamic bonds, Malaysia.
A combination of high demand and strong credit fundamentals has allowed Gulf issuers to price bonds at near historic-low spreads over U.S. government debt.
For example, Asian investors bought 40% of AA-rated Qatar’s $1 billion 3-year bond last month which priced at just 15 basis points over U.S. Treasuries.
Gulf bonds typically can give Asian investors higher yields compared to similarly rated credits in Asia, said Chong Jiun Yeh, group chief investment officer at Singapore-based UOB Asset Management.
Typically, a BBB-rated U.S. dollar bond from the Gulf can add 10 to 20 basis points in total yield compared with similar Asian credits, he said.
Chinese interest rates have generally been below those in the U.S.
Several Gulf borrowers were also planning to issue bonds in yuan on China’s domestic fixed-income market – so-called “Panda bonds” – said Clifford Lee, global head of investment banking at Singapore’s DBS Group, who has organised meetings for Gulf banks with Chinese onshore investors.
“We predict that once regular issuance flow begins, it can unlock access to an over $20 trillion market,” Lee said.
In some early deals, Saudi National Bank issued the first Singapore dollar bond in late November, while the UAE emirate Sharjah raised 2 billion yuan ($280 million) in October.
(Reporting by Rachna Uppal in Abu Dhabi and Yantoultra Ngui in Singapore; Additional reporting by Utkarsh Shetti in Dubai; Editing by Karin Strohecker and Tomasz Janowski)
BEIRUT — For years, Persian Gulf nations staked their defense on one thing above all: A U.S.-supplied security umbrella, paid for with tens of billions of their petrodollars and agreements that allowed the U.S. to dot the Middle East with some of its largest military facilities.
The thinking was that being users of U.S. weaponry and having a U.S. military presence was a virtual guarantee of protection if enemies came to call.
That thinking was upended on Tuesday, when Israel, arguably the U.S.’s top ally, dispatched warplanes and hurled 10 missiles at Hamas’ political office compound in the Qatari capital Doha.
The attack, which targeted the Palestinian group’s senior negotiation team as it was discussing a ceasefire proposal from President Trump, killed five Hamas members and a Qatari security officer. Hamas denies any of its senior leadership was killed.
But whether the targeting succeeded is irrelevant to Gulf leaders pondering the effectiveness of decades-old security arrangements with the U.S.
“The message to the region appears to be, ‘If you think close ties with and major military support for Washington provides protection… think again,’ ” said Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute.
“They’re all vulnerable to attack by larger and more powerful neighbors, and they expect a commitment that helping the U.S. militarily comes with a certain degree of protection. It clearly doesn’t,” he said.
This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC taken on Wednesday shows damage after an Israeli strike targeted a compound that hosted Hamas’ political leadership in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday.
(Planet Labs PBC via Associated Press)
Qatari officials were apoplectic after the strike, calling it cowardly and a violation of the country’s sovereignty.
Especially galling to Qatar — which houses the Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the region — is that it allowed Hamas officials to openly live in a well-appointed district of its capital at Washington’s request, just as it had with the Taliban during the group’s negotiations to end America’s war in Afghanistan.
“Everything about that meeting [with Hamas] is very well known for the Israelis and for the Americans. It’s not something we’re hiding,” said Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.
“I have no words to express how enraged we are from such an action [by Israel]. This is state terror,” he said.
Other Gulf leaders — even those harboring lingering reservations about Qatar and its regional policies — presented a united front on Qatar’s behalf.
Saudi Arabia called the strike a “brutal aggression” and said the kingdom would “stand with Qatar without limit.” Bahrain expressed its “full solidarity.”
Mohamed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates, traveled to Doha the next day to meet the Qatari emir — a surprise given how assiduously the UAE has worked to improve ties with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords, the Trump-brokered agreements that saw a number of Arab and Gulf nations normalize relations with Israel in 2020.
“The Gulf states view an external attack on one member as an attack on all,” said Yasmine Farouk, the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Project director at the International Crisis Group.
Farouk added that trust in the U.S. was already diminished in recent years when Washington failed to defend or respond to attacks on Saudi Arabia in 2019 and the UAE in 2022 by Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Qatar, which suffered through an Iranian missile assault on Al Udeid in June, now has the dubious honor of having its territory become a proxy battleground for both sides of the larger U.S.-Iran conflict.
This week’s strike also represents a setback for the anti-Iran coalition the U.S. has worked to forge with its Arab allies and Israel. But the feeling among many in the Gulf is that Israel is just as belligerent and destabilizing an actor as Iran.
“Israel has misinterpreted the willingness of Gulf countries to normalize relations with it as an acknowledgment of its dominance in the region,” Farouq said.
“The Gulf states do not want to live in a region dominated by either Israel or Iran,” she added. “They reject that kind of behavior, rather than rejecting a specific country.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the immediate motive for the strike was Hamas claiming responsibility for the killing of six Israelis by Palestinian gunmen in Jerusalem earlier this week. He insisted the operation was planned and conducted entirely by Israel.
At the same time, the more than 1,000-mile distance between Israel and Qatar means Israeli warplanes flew over multiple Arab countries, almost all of them with U.S. bases presumably able to detect incoming aircraft. (The U.S. has 19 bases across the region.) The building the Israelis struck is less than 20 miles away from Al Udeid.
Trump said he learned about the attack shortly before it began and instructed members of his administration to “immediately” inform the Qataris. But Al Thani said the call from the U.S. came 10 minutes after the planes lobbed their missiles on Doha.
In May, when Trump visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, they feted him with grandiose events heavy on the pomp and circumstance and pledged trillions of dollars for investments in the U.S. The expectation was that this would buy some leverage, but Trump is reported to have done little more than scold Netanyahu over Tuesday’s strike, even while stopping short of condemning his actions. (Also in May, Qatar donated a luxury Boeing 747 aircraft for Trump to use as Air Force One.)
The conclusion for Gulf countries expecting U.S. protection from all threats, said Abdulaziz Al-Anjeri, founder of the Kuwait-based think tank Reconnaissance Research, is that some threats are more equal than others.
“U.S. security assistance is effective against Iran or its allied armed factions, but it does not extend to Israel,” he said, adding that historical alliances with the Gulf don’t carry the same weight for Trump as they may have in the past.
The issue, said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University, is that there’s little specificity as to what a U.S. security umbrella actually entails.
“America’s No.1 ally is now striking another American partner, and all they got from Trump is that they ‘felt badly.’ That it happened this way is not in America’s favor,” Al-Saif said.
He added that Gulf nations, especially Saudi Arabia, have been pushing for more formal — and well-defined — defense pacts, but that the relationship with the U.S. needed to reflect recent changes. “You’re here as a security guarantor,” he said of the U.S. “We cannot be cash dispensers if we feel that our basic security is not guaranteed.”
With year one under its belt, Pappas Restaurant group’s first chef-driven concept has built a major following among seafood fans. Evenings find the dining room and patio full of diners happily slurping down freshly shucked oysters on the half shell, lobster on ice and gorgeous stone crab claws slathered through Creole mustard aioli. Then comes the finest chargrilled octopus in town, a lobster gnocchi dish you never knew was missing in your life, seasonal delights like blue crab stuffed squash blossoms, and mains from a beautiful King Salmon to chicken-fried American red snapper. Pro-tip that has nothing to do with seafood at all: pair something, anything, with the housemade Dill Breaker cocktail.
TEXAS — With its unprecedented tear through the ultrawarm waters of the southeast Caribbean, Beryl turned meteorologists’ worst fears of a souped-up hurricane season into grim reality. Now it’s Texas turn.
Beryl hit Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as a Category 2 hurricane on Friday, then weakened to a tropical storm. It’s expected to reach southern Texas by Sunday night or Monday morning, regaining hurricane status as it crosses over the toasty Gulf of Mexico.
National Hurricane Center senior specialist Jack Beven said Beryl is likely to make landfall somewhere between Brownsville and a bit north of Corpus Christi Monday. The hurricane center forecasts it will hit as a strong Category 1 storm, but wrote “this could be conservative if Beryl stays over water longer” than expected.
The waters in the Gulf of Mexico are warm enough for the early-season storm to rapidly intensify, as it has several times before.
“We should not be surprised if this is rapidly intensifying before landfall and it could become a major hurricane,” said Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters, a former government hurricane meteorologist who flew into storms. “Category 2 may be more likely but we should not dismiss a Category 3 possibility.”
Beven said the official forecast has Beryl gaining 17 to 23 mph in wind speed in 24 hours, but noted the storm intensified more rapidly than forecasters expected earlier in the Caribbean.
“People in southern Texas now need to really keep an eye on the progress of Beryl,” Beven said.
Masters and University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy said hurricane center forecasters have been very accurate in predicting Beryl’s track so far.
Already three times in its one-week life, Beryl has gained 35 mph in wind speed in 24 hours or less, the official weather service definition of rapid intensification.
The storm zipped from 35 mph to 75 mph on June 28. It went went from 80 mph to 115 mph in the overnight hours of June 29 into June 30 and on July 1 it went from 120 mph to 155 mph in just 15 hours, according to hurricane center records.
Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach, using a different tracking system, said he counted eight different periods when Beryl rapidly intensified – something that has only happened in the Atlantic in July two other times.
MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel doesn’t give Beryl “much of a chance for another 35 mph wind speed jump in the Gulf of Mexico, but said it’s a tricky thing to forecast.
Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now and the figurative hot water the Atlantic hurricane belt can expect for the rest of the storm season, experts said.
The storm smashed various records even before its major hurricane-level winds approached the island of Carriacou in Grenada on Monday.
Beryl set the record for the earliest Category 4 with winds of at least 130 mph (209 kilometers per hour) – the first-ever category 4 in June. It also was the earliest storm to rapidly intensify with wind speeds jumping 63 mph (102 kph) in 24 hours, going from an unnamed depression to a Category 4 in 48 hours.
Colorado State University’s Klotzbach called Beryl a harbinger.
Forecasters predicted months ago it was going to be a nasty year and now they are comparing it to record busy 1933 and deadly 2005 – the year of Katrina, Rita, Wilma and Dennis.
“This is the type of storm that we expect this year, these outlier things that happen when and where they shouldn’t,” University of Miami’s McNoldy said. “Not only for things to form and intensify and reach higher intensities, but increase the likelihood of rapid intensification.”
Warm water acts as fuel for the thunderstorms and clouds that form hurricanes. The warmer the water and thus the air at the bottom of the storm, the better the chance it will rise higher in the atmosphere and create deeper thunderstorms, said the University at Albany’s Kristen Corbosiero.
“So when you get all that heat energy you can expect some fireworks,” Masters said.
Atlantic waters have been record warm since April 2023. Klotzbach said a high pressure system that normally sets up cooling trade winds collapsed then and hasn’t returned.
Corbosiero said scientists are debating what exactly climate change does to hurricanes, but have come to an agreement that it makes them more prone to rapidly intensifying, as Beryl did, and increase the strongest storms, like Beryl.
Emanuel said the slowdown of Atlantic ocean currents, likely caused by climate change, may also be a factor in the warm water.
A brewing La Nina, which is a slight cooling of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, also may be a factor. Experts say La Nina tends to depress high altitude crosswinds that decapitate hurricanes.
