Explosions were heard in the vicinity of Khartoum International Airport amid uncertainty over its reopening.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have targeted Sudan’s capital Khartoum and its main airport with drones for a fourth consecutive day, as the government-aligned Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) attempts to resume air traffic after regaining control of the city several months ago.

Drones and surface-to-air missiles were heard above the capital in the early hours of Friday morning, residents living close to the Khartoum International Airport told Al Jazeera, before loud explosions went off.

It is unclear whether the capital’s main airport was successfully hit and the extent of the damage.

The attack marks the fourth consecutive day of attacks that began on Tuesday, a day before the airport was scheduled to become operational after at least two years of war.

A single plane operated by the local Badr Airlines landed on Wednesday, before an airport official told AFP on condition of anonymity that the airport’s reopening has been postponed “under further notice” because of incoming attacks.

Al Jazeera’s Hiba Morgan, reporting from Khartoum, said that “despite authorities saying that operations are scheduled to start on October 26, there are concerns that this will not happen”.

The war, which started in April 2023, has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced about 12 million more and left 30 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, making it the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

Return to Khartoum

The Sudanese military retook the capital from the paramilitary force in March. Since then, residents have been tentatively returning to their homes, often to find them destroyed.

Alfatih Bashir’s house in Omdurman, which he built using all his savings, has collapsed ceilings and damaged walls. “I built it when I was working abroad,” Bashir told Al Jazeera, adding that now he did not posses the necessary funds to repair the damage.

“I’m not working, I’m just sitting idly with my wife and two children. We sometimes barely have enough to eat. How can I even start to rebuild?” he said.

Authorities are still assessing how many houses have been damaged in the conflict, but the scars of the battle between the military and the RSF are visible across the capital.

Another resident, Afaf Khamed, said she fainted when she saw the extent of the damage.

“This house is where we were born, where all our family members got married. I now live here with my sister, and we can’t rebuild because we don’t have anyone to help us,” she told Al Jazeera.

The collapse of the local currency makes reconstruction an impossible feat even for those who have retained a job during the war. While salaries have remained stable, the Sudanese pound spiked from 600 pounds to the US dollar in April 2023, when the conflict started, to 3,500 pounds.

Goods are also hard to come by in the war-torn country, hampering reconstruction. Shop owner Mohammed Ali said materials take too long to arrive because of security checks, and that makes them more expensive. As a consequence, “fewer and fewer people are coming to buy building materials”, he said.

Sudan’s government has pledged to rebuild the capital, but its focus as so far has been on state institutions, while residents are left to figure out how to rebuild on their own.

US President Donald Trump has announced an immediate end to all trade negotiations with Canada over an advert critical of the tariffs he has imposed on the nation.

The advert, sponsored by the government of Canada’s province of Ontario, quoted Trump’s predecessor, Ronald Reagan, an icon of US conservatism, saying tariffs “hurt every American”.

Trump wrote on social media that the advert was “FAKE” and “egregious”, adding that trade talks were “HEREBY TERMINATED”.

His administration has imposed a 35% levy on many Canadian imports, as well as individual tariffs targeting particular industries like car and steel manufacturing. Ontario has been particularly hard-hit by these.

Trump has allowed exemptions for goods that fall under a free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that he negotiated during his first term.

But Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has since his election earlier this year attempted to strike a deal that would ease the US tariffs.

This has been complicated by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who is one of the most vocal critics of the taxes levied on US firms buying Canadian products.

In the minute-long advert published last week, Reagan’s voice can be heard narrating over images that include the New York Stock Exchange and cranes adorned with both US and Canadian flags.

The video excerpts a 1987 national radio address by Reagan that focused on foreign trade.

“When someone says ‘let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports’, it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes, for a short while it works, but only for a short time,” Reagan says.

“But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American, worker and consumer.

“High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars… Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs,” Reagan adds.

The Ronald Reagan Foundation – which is charged with preserving his legacy – released a statement on Thursday saying the advert had used “selective” audio and video of the former president’s remarks.

It said the advert “misrepresents” the former president’s address, without specifying why, and accused the Ontario government of not seeking permission to use and edit the remarks.

The foundation said it was “reviewing its legal options”.

Trump referenced this statement, and said the video was designed to “interfere with” the US Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in November on whether Washington’s sweeping tariffs on many nation’s products are legal.

The court’s decision represents the biggest test of Trump’s presidential authority and signature economic policy, potentially forcing the US to refund billions collected in tariffs.

The advert was run as part of a campaign worth $75m Canadian dollars (£40m; $54m) on mainstream TV channels in the US.

In the post accompanying the advert, Ford wrote that “we’ll never stop making the case against American tariffs on Canada”.

China’s embassy in Washington also used a similar Reagan clip in a post on X to cast doubt on Trump’s global tariffs earlier this year.

Ontario is Canada’s most populous province and its largest regional economy, and has suffered the most as a result of the US tariffs.

Ford hit back at Trump’s earlier tariff threat against Canada by saying he was willing to cut off power supply to the US.

He had also described Washington’s trade policies against Canada as having pulled a knife and “yanked it into us“, and called on US lawmakers to put pressure on Trump.

Trump’s sector-specific levies on Canadian goods include a 50% levy on metals and 25% on automobiles.

The White House’s global tariffs – particularly on steel, aluminium and cars – have hit Canada hard, forcing job losses and putting pressure on businesses.

Carney and Ford have not yet commented on Trump’s announcement.

It is the second time Trump has said he was ceasing trade talks with Canada, after Ottawa announced it would impose a digital services tax on US technology firms earlier this year.

When Canada rescinded the tax, the White House said Carney had “caved” to pressure from Trump.

Growing up in Rawalpindi, a city adjacent to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, Mahnoor Omer remembers the shame and anxiety she felt in school when she had periods. Going to the toilet with a sanitary pad was an act of stealth, like trying to cover up a crime.

“I used to hide my pad up my sleeve like I was taking narcotics to the bathroom,” says Omer, who comes from a middle-class family – her father a businessman and her mother a homemaker. “If someone talked about it, teachers would put you down.” A classmate once told her that her mother considered pads “a waste of money”.

“That’s when it hit me,” says Omer. “If middle-class families think this way, imagine how out of reach these products are for others.”

Now 25, Omer has gone from cautious schoolgirl to national centrestage in a battle that could reshape menstrual hygiene in Pakistan, a country where critics say economics is compounding social stigma to punish women – simply for being women.

In September, Omer, a lawyer, petitioned the Lahore High Court, challenging what she and many others say is effectively a “period tax” imposed by Pakistan on its more than 100 million women.

Pakistani governments have, under the Sales Tax Act of 1990, long charged an 18 percent sales tax on locally manufactured sanitary pads and a customs tax of 25 percent on imported ones, as well as on raw materials needed to make them. Add on other local taxes, and UNICEF Pakistan says that these pads are often effectively taxed at about 40 percent.

Omer’s petition argues that these taxes – which specifically affect women – are discriminatory, and violate a series of constitutional provisions that guarantee equality and dignity, elimination of exploitation and the promotion of social justice.

In a country where menstruation is already a taboo subject in most families, Omer and other lawyers and activists supporting the petition say that the taxes make it even harder for most Pakistani women to access sanitary products. A standard pack of commercially branded sanitary pads in Pakistan currently costs about 450 rupees ($1.60) for 10 pieces. In a country with a per capita income of $120 a month, that’s the cost of a meal of rotis and dal for a low-income family of four. Cut the cost by 40 percent – the taxes – and the calculations become less loaded against sanitary pads.

At the moment, only 12 percent of Pakistani women use commercially produced sanitary pads, according to a 2024 study by UNICEF and the WaterAid nonprofit. The rest improvise using cloth or other materials, and often do not even have access to clean water to wash themselves.

“If this petition goes forward, it’s going to make pads affordable,” says Hira Amjad, the founder and executive director of Dastak Foundation, a Pakistani nonprofit whose work is focused on promoting gender equality and combating violence against women.

And that, say lawyers and activists, could serve as a spark for broader social change.

The court docket describes the case as Mahnoor Omer against senior officials of the government of Pakistan. But that’s not what it feels like to Omer.

“It feels like women versus Pakistan.”

‘It’s not shameful’

Bushra Mahnoor, founder of Mahwari Justice, a Pakistani student-led organisation whose name translates to “menstrual justice”, realised early just how much of a struggle it could be to access sanitary pads.

Mahnoor – no relation to Omer – grew up in Attock, a city in the northwestern part of Pakistan’s Punjab province, with four sisters. “Every month, I had to check if there were enough pads. If my period came when one of my sisters had hers too,” finding a pad was a challenge, she says.

The struggle continued in school, where, as was the case with Omer, periods were associated with shame. A teacher once made one of her classmates stand for two entire lectures because her white uniform was stained. “That was dehumanising,” she says.

Mahnoor was 10 when she had her first period. “I didn’t know how to use a pad. I stuck it upside down; the sticky side touched my skin. It was painful. No one tells you how to manage it.”

She says that shame was never hers alone, but it’s part of a silence which starts at home and accompanies girls into adulthood. A study on menstrual health in Pakistan shows that eight out of 10 girls feel embarrassed or uncomfortable when talking about periods, and two out of three girls report never having received information about menstruation before it began. The findings, published in the Frontiers in Public Health journal in 2023, link this silence to poor hygiene, social exclusion and missed school days.

In 2022, when floods devastated Pakistan, Mahnoor began Mahwari Justice to ensure that relief camps did not overlook the menstrual needs of women. “We began distributing pads and later realised there’s so much more to be done,” she says. Her organisation has distributed more than 100,000 period kits – each containing pads, soap, underwear, detergent and painkillers – and created rap songs and comics to normalise conversations about menstruation. “When you say the word ‘mahwari’ out loud, you’re teaching people it’s not shameful,” she says. “It’s just life.”

The same floods also influenced Amjad, the Dastak Foundation founder, though her nonprofit has been around for a decade now. Its work now also includes distributing period kits during natural disasters.

But the social stigma associated with menstruation is also closely tied to economics in the ways in which its impact plays out for Pakistani women, suggests Amjad.

“In most households, it’s the men who make financial decisions,” she says. “Even if the woman is bringing the money, she’s giving it to the man, and he is deciding where that money needs to go.”

And if the cost of women’s health feels too high, that’s often compromised. “[With] the inflated prices due to the tax, there is no conversation in many houses about whether we should buy pads,” she says. “It’s an expense they cannot afford organically.”

According to the 2023 study in the Frontiers in Public Health, over half of Pakistani women are not able to afford sanitary pads.

If the taxes are removed, and menstrual hygiene becomes more affordable, the benefits will extend beyond health, says Amjad.

School attendance rates for girls could improve, she said. Currently, more than half of Pakistan’s girls in the five to 16 age group are not in school, according to the United Nations. “We will have stress-free women. We will have happier and healthier women.”

‘Feeling of justice’

Omer says her interest in women’s and minority rights began early. “What inspired me was just seeing the blatant mistreatment every day,” she says. “The economic, physical, and verbal exploitation that women face, whether it’s on the streets, in the media, or inside homes, never sat right with me.”

She credits her mother for making her grow up to be an empathetic and understanding person.

After completing school, she worked as a gender and criminal justice consultant at Crossroads Consultants, a Pakistan-based firm that collaborates with NGOs and development partners on gender and criminal justice reform. At the age of 19, she also volunteered at Aurat March, an annual women’s rights movement and protest held across Pakistan on International Women’s Day – it’s a commitment she has kept up since then.

Her first step into activism came at 16, when she and her friends started putting together “dignity kits”, small care packages for women in low-income neighbourhoods of Islamabad. “We would raise funds with bake sales or use our own money,” she recalls.

The money she was able to raise enabled her to distribute about 300 dignity kits that she and her friends made themselves. They each contained pads, underwear, pain medication and wipes. But she wanted to do more.

She got a chance when she started working at the Supreme Court in early 2025, first as a law clerk. She’s currently pursuing postgraduate studies in gender, peace and security at the London School of Economics and says that she will go back to Pakistan to resume her practice after she graduates.

She became friends with fellow lawyer Ahsan Jehangir Khan, who specialises in taxation and constitutional law. The plan to challenge the “period tax” emerged from their conversations.

“He pushed me to file this petition and try to get justice instead of just sitting around.”

Khan, who is a co-petitioner in the case, says that fighting the taxes is about more than accessibility and affordability of sanitary pads – it’s about justice. “It’s a tax on a biological function,” he says.

Tax policies in Pakistan, he says, are written by “a privileged elite, mostly men who have never had to think about what this tax means for ordinary women”. The constitution, he adds, “is very clear that you cannot have anything discriminatory against any gender whatsoever”.

To Amjad, the Dastak Foundation founder, the fight for menstrual hygiene is closely tied to her other passion – the struggle against climate change. The extreme weather-related crisis, such as floods, that Pakistan has faced in recent times, she says, hit women particularly hard.

She remembers the trauma many women she worked with after the 2022 floods described to her. “Imagine that you are living in a tent and you have mahwari [menstruation] for the first time,” she says. “You are not mentally prepared for it. You are running for your life. You don’t have access to safety or security. That trauma is a trauma for life.”

As temperatures rise on average, women will need to change sanitary pads more frequently during their periods – and a lack of adequate access will prove an even bigger problem, Amjad warns. She supports the withdrawal of taxes on sanitary pads – but only those made from cotton, not plastic ones that “take thousands of years to decompose”.

Amjad is also campaigning for paid menstruation leave. “I have come across women who were fired because they had pain during periods and couldn’t work,” she says. “When you are menstruating, one part of your brain is on menstruation. You can’t really focus properly.”

Meanwhile, opponents of the taxes are hoping that Omer’s petition will pressure the Pakistani government to follow other nations such as India, Nepal and the United Kingdom that have abolished their period taxes.

Taking on that mantle against the government’s policies didn’t come easily to Omer. Her parents, she says, were nervous at first about their daughter going to court against the government. “They said it’s never a good idea to take on the state,” she says.

Now, they’re proud of her, she says. “They understand why this matters.”

To her, the case is not just a legal fight. “When I think of this case, the picture that comes to mind … It’s not a courtroom, it’s a feeling of justice,” she says. “It makes me feel a sense of pride to be able to do this and take this step without fear.”