An explosive-laden drone was shot down near Iraq’s al-Harir air base which houses USforces, security sources told Reuters. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage from the incident which was reported east of Erbil.
The Hungarian chess legend Judit Polgár has said she will not accept the nomination for president, only a day after the prime minister, Péter Magyar, said he would ask her to take up the largely ceremonial role. Magyar had said he would meet Polgár on Monday to discuss the matter. “Our country needs unity, peace and a president that all Hungarians can be proud of,” he wrote on social media. “Judit Polgár’s name has been synonymous with talent and perseverance for decades.” Polgár said later in a Facebook post that she was grateful to be asked but “I do not feel enough strength within me to take on the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation, so I am unable to accept the request”. The subject of the documentary Queen of Chess released in February, Polgár is the only female player to have been ranked in the world’s top 10 of the male-dominated sport. She is the only woman to have crossed the rating of 2700, the threshold that many consider the definition of a super grandmaster. The latest developments come after a months-long standoff between the newly elected Magyar and Tamás Sulyok, the president appointed during the former leader Viktor Orbán’s time in power. Since his landslide victory in April, Magyar has repeatedly called on Sulyok to step down, accusing him of being a puppet who had failed to stand up for the country as Orbán’s rightwing, nationalist Fidesz party was criticised for weakening democratic institutions and undermining the rule of law. Hungary’s parliament – where Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party holds a two-thirds majority – voted last week to back a constitutional amendment that included an immediate end to Sulyok’s term. From there, Sulyok had five days to sign off on the amendment. The manoeuvre was criticised by several rights groups in Hungary, including Human Rights Watch, which said the rushed constitutional changes to oust the president were “reminiscent of [the] Fidesz era”. Magyar, however, has insisted that the changes are needed as part of a wider push to loosen Orbán’s lingering grip on the country. As news emerged that Sulyok had signed the legislation, bringing an end to his time in office, Magyar proposed nominating Polgár as his replacement. The idea was first floated in an open letter signed by 16 prominent Hungarians, including Ernő Rubik, theinventor of the Rubik’s Cube. Born in Budapest, Polgár, who will turn 50 in a few days, was the top-ranked female player for 25 years when she retired in 2014. She became the youngest grandmaster in the world at the age of 15, breaking the record set in 1958 by Bobby Fischer. She won victories against several male world champions including Garry Kasparov in 2002. Since being swept into power on the promise of “regime change”, Magyar and his party have moved swiftly to dismantle the bastions of Orbán’s 16 years in power, from suspending news broadcasts by public media outlets with ties to the former prime minister to abolishing the sovereignty protection office, which had allowed intelligence services to access information on individuals and organisations without judicial oversight. Additional reporting from Reuters
Ukraine’s commander in chief Oleksandr Syrskyi is widely expected to lose his job amid signs that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has bowed to pressure from protesters and will reshuffle the army’s top leadership. Over the past five days, thousands of demonstrators have gathered outside the presidential office in Kyiv, chanting: “Syrskyi out”. Some have waved cheese graters – a pun on the commander’s name, which sounds like cheese in Ukrainian. The country’s general staff denied media reports on Monday that Syrskyi was about to be sacked. It said Gen Syrskyi and his deputy, Andriy Hnatov, continued to carry out their duties. “Dismissal from these posts takes place on the basis of a decree by the president of Ukraine,” it added. Despite these denials, Zelenskyy’s influential chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, hinted that the government had listened to the popular mood. “The public’s position has been heard,” he said. The situation was being resolved “professionally and constructively”, he added, urging “everyone to keep calm”. “The enemy is closely watching every one of our internal disputes and waiting for us to start fighting among ourselves … Work is under way. Results will follow,” he stated. The noisy protests began last Thursday after Zelenskyy sacked Ukraine’s young and popular defence minister, Mykhailo Federov. Aged 35 and a moderniser, he is widely credited with improving the country’s position in the battlefield during the six months he was in the job. Zelenskyy confirmed last week that the relationship between Federov and Syrskyi had broken down. After his firing, Federov said Syrskyi had blocked reforms with “bureaucratic impediments” and ignored data, instead rewarding brigades that were loyal to him personally. One source in the armed forces confirmed Syrskyi’s imminent departure. “His destiny is decided. The question is who will replace him. There are a few important requirements. The person should be known and popular so everyone applauds,” they said. “But they should also not have open political ambitions so as not to create a new rival. It should be an experienced military guy who listens to the president and does what he wants to do,” the source added. On Monday, Zelenskyy held meetings with several possible replacements. The senior commanders included Mykhailo Drapatiy, the head of Ukraine’s joint armed forces. Drapatiy cemented his reputation by driving a tank through a pro-Russian blockade in 2014, when Russia first tried to seize the eastern city of Mariupol. The meetings with top military figures were attended by Yevheniy Khmara, whom Zelenskyy appointed as defence minister. It is unclear if Federov will be reinstated – a key demand from demonstrators – or brought back into government in another role. Protest organisers say that Zelenskyy has a deadline of Friday to give Federov his old job back. If this doesn’t happen they promise a “general indefinite protest” in towns and cities across the country. Zelenskyy praised recent long-range Ukrainian strikes on targets in Russia. “They have produced results against logistics facilities and an oil depot. The targets were more than 400km from our border. Two shadow fleet tankers and four cargo ships were also struck in the Black Sea,” he said. “We are responding, justly, to every Russian strike against our cities and communities. This war must be brought to an end, and that is only possible by increasing the pressure on the sole cause of this war – Russia,” Zelenskyy added.
Even by the brutal standards of militant settler violence in the West Bank, the raid on Deir Jarir late on Sunday night that killed two Palestinians and left another in hospital with a gunshot wound was extreme. Palestinians in the town said settlers from a nearby outpost arrived after 9pm on Sunday claiming that they were searching for stolen livestock. Israeli soldiers and police soon joined them, protecting them as they sought to take several villagers’ sheep by force. But when villagers raised the alarm and a crowd gathered, soldiers shot two men, beginning a night of three successive raids by settlers from nearby outposts and Israeli soldiers that lasted until after 2am, according to Palestinian residents of Deir Jarir. Saber Ajaj, a relative of one of the victims, 53-year-old Odeh Farajna, said he found him moments after he had been shot through the chest. Farajna, a member of the village council, owned a flower shop and helped with the stonework at the local graveyard. “The moment I put him in the car I knew that he was dead,” Ajaj said in an interview during a reception held after the funeral. “This shooting was meant to kill.” In interviews as they buried the two victims on Monday, family and friends of the dead Palestinian men described several attacks each month in which they said settlers, backed by security forces, arrived in houses on the outskirts of the village and then stole livestock. “It’s a partnership between the army and the settlers,” said Adel Rashid, the father of the younger victim, Abdul Adel Rashid Abu Mukh, 26. Rashid said local settlers on Sunday had stolen 21 of his sheep, while 50 more had been taken from another member of the village. Video of Sunday’s incident showed a settler protected by four IDF soldiers in green camouflage leading a sheep out of a local house. The raids are part of a picture of worsening settler violence in the region as Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right allies have accelerated a land grab in the occupied West Bank. Arbitrary checkpoints and other restrictions to cut off towns like Deir Jarir after the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas have been bolstered by plans for the government to endorse new settlements in the West Bank before national elections that could challenge the Netanyahu government’s mandate. On the hill above the village is a settlement built last year that appears to share water infrastructure with an Israeli military base, according to Dror Etkes, an Israeli who founded Kerem Navot, an organisation that monitors Israeli land policy in occupied Palestine. Residents said the settlers and military appeared to have coordinated the raid. Seven people have been killed in the village since 7 October 2023. Their portraits have been spray-painted on the walls of the town, along with the date they died. “The killing in Deir Jarir is one example of how Israel promotes ethnic cleansing in the West Bank: settlers invade and steal, while the military and police accompany them and shoot Palestinians who try to protect their homes and property,” said Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, a human rights organisation based in Israel that catalogues violations by the security forces. A Guardian analysis has shown that Israel has not prosecuted its citizens for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade, creating impunity for a campaign of violence. The West Bank attacks are intensifying. Fadi Hamdallah al-Naasan, a 17-year-old from the town of al-Mughayyir, north-east of Ramallah, died on Saturday after succumbing to a gunshot wound to his leg during a raid on his house by the Israeli military and settlers on 11 July. Nearly a thousand mourners, mostly men, gathered in Deir Jarir on Monday shortly after noon for the burial. They marched from the mosque in the centre of the town, carrying the two bodies down to the old graveyard. On the road entering the area stands a new set of gates at a checkpoint established after 7 October that security forces are said to open or close arbitrarily, effectively cutting off the villages from the outside world. “Every time they come to attack us they are trying to make life here unlivable,” said Iyad Odah, 56, a member of the village council who knew Farajna. Since 7 October, he said, the town’s farmland, which once occupied thousands of hectares, was inaccessible as local settlers beat back farmers, attempting to access their orchards and grazing land. The Israeli military on Monday said they had gone to Deir Jarir to escort Israeli settlers, who claimed their livestock had been stolen and wanted to take it back. The military said they opened fire after Palestinians threw rocks and concrete blocks at the security forces. They did not respond to questions clarifying why they did not use non-lethal crowd control instead of live ammunition. Responding to the IDF’s claim that they had been attacked by “terrorists” in the village, Odah, of the town’s village council, said: “They are the real terrorists.”
Iran’s president has said the country is in a “full-scale war” after the US expanded its aerial campaign and Tehran struck Washington’s Gulf allies, even as diplomats said talks to de-escalate were continuing. Iranian media reported strikes around Tabriz, believed to hold underground missile bases, as well as Bushehr, home to the country’s only operational civilian nuclear power plant. The US military said it had struck “military command centers, air defence and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites and communications networks”. Iran launched attacks against Bahrain, which hosts the US navy’s fifth fleet, and Kuwait, in addition to striking tankers in the strait of Hormuz, which carried a fifth of global oil and gas supplies before the war. Bahrain said its air traffic systems were damaged by the strikes, but that traffic was not affected. The Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen also announced a blockade of Saudi ports. “The reality is that today the Islamic Republic of Iran is engaged in a full-scale war,” the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said in a statement on Monday, warning it might have to endure more strikes. The tit-for-tat attacks came as the region lurched back towards a total war despite an interim peace deal agreed last month. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) to halt attacks and open the strait is more than halfway through a 60-day implementation period that was intended to provide breathing room for diplomacy. Shipping in the strait has slowed to a trickle as a result of the fighting and the price of oil reached its highest in a month, passing $90 (£67) a barrel, exacerbating the global energy crisis. A Houthi blockade of Saudi ports announced on Monday could further strain global energy markets as Saudi Arabia was using the Red Sea route to export millions of barrels of oil and circumvent Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz. The group said it was responding to what it called Riyadh’s targeting of Sana’a airport last week after it was bombed by the Saudi-backed Yemen government, and that it would answer a “blockade with a blockade”. But in a sign that talks could still stop the escalating round of conflict, an Iranian official told Reuters that mediators gave Iran a proposal for a 10-day-ceasefire to find ways to revive the MoU. The proposal follows a statement by Iran that diplomacy with the US was continuing despite the fighting, without giving details on the content of the discussions. Iran’s interior minister was expected to travel to Islamabad on Monday, Agence France-Presse reported. The Iranian foreign ministry’s spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, said at a press conference in Tehran: “We have been informed by mediators, we have received messages – without going into details – but the main point is that the diplomatic apparatus has been active in recent days and ideas have been conveyed to us by certain mediators.” Hours earlier, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the US was still open to negotiations with Iran, but that “it has to be real”. “We’re going to continue to respond. If the door opens to diplomacy – if the guys that want to do something productive for Iran win and take control of that system, or take control of the negotiations – that’ll be a very positive development,” Rubio said. Mediators including Qatar and Pakistan have continued to speak to both sides during the current round of escalation in an attempt to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table. The US military said a service member was killed on Saturday in northern Iraq, where the US has military bases, during a controlled detonation of what was called unexploded ordnance on a downed Iranian attack drone. It was the third US death in recent days, after two military service personnel were killed in an Iranian attack on a Jordanian airbase on Friday, with a third missing in action. “We hit them very hard again tonight,” Donald Trump said as he returned to Washington after the World Cup final, adding: “We did that in honour of the, probably three, it’s probably three great patriots.” Since the war began, 17 US service members have been killed. Iran’s health ministry said on Friday that 50 people had been killed and more than 500 injured in the current round of fighting. As the strikes began early on Monday, a ship caught fire in the strait of Hormuz near the coastline of Oman in the southern corridor the US military has encouraged ships to use to avoid Iran’s control. The crew safely abandoned the vessel, while the ship was recovered by a tug boat, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed two oil tankers were blown up after attempting to transit through the southern route, but there was no independent confirmation. The IRGC also claimed to have launched a “surprise attack” on an enemy command centre in the al-Tanf region of Syria, in a statement reported by the state news agency IRNA. After Iran targeted sites in Jordan on Sunday, Israel warned of the danger of the strikes spilling across its borders, reigniting a direct regional conflict that had been restrained even as tensions between the Trump administration and Iran have soared again. “If Iran fires missiles at Israel, we will attack them with full force,” said the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, on Sunday. The US is expected to send dozens of additional refuelling planes to Israel as part of a reinforcement of its force posture in the region, a US official told Reuters. Trump has threatened to target Iran’s power stations and bridges to try to compel Tehran to loosen its hold on the strait of Hormuz. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, defended the Trump administration’s strategy for the war, but argued that the mission had since shifted toward ensuring oil shipments could move through the strait. “We did a pause to try to get an agreement with the Iranian people to allow oil to flow without them attacking it,” Wright said on Sunday. “They’ve proven unwilling to do that, and we’ve pivoted. Now what we’re doing is assuring that that oil and gas and other products can flow through the strait of Hormuz with or without Iranian cooperation.” The US also announced that the “pilot zone” scheme in Lebanon had begun in three villages in the south, after peace talks in Rome between the governments of Lebanon and Israel. Under the programme, Israel will withdraw soldiers from areas it occupies in south Lebanon, to be replaced by the Lebanese army, which will be tasked with dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure in the areas. The US state department spokesperson Thomas Pigott said on Monday that the scheme started in the villages of Froun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiya.
After days of acrid smoke from northern wildfires choking major US cities and inspiring Donald Trump to threaten Canada with tariffs, officials now say the reverse is also happening as parts of Canada issue air quality warnings caused by American fires to the south. Officials in the Canadian province of British Columbia warned in an alert on Saturday evening that smoke from US fires, spurred on by thousands of lightning strikes in the north-east, was creating smoky conditions as polluted air drifted north. “Much of this smoke is originating from fires south of the Canada-US border in Washington and Oregon,” the provincial wildfire service said. Twenty-two large fires are burning across Washington and Oregon, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, the fire coordination agency for both states. British Columbia has air quality warnings in place for two regions, Kootenay Lake and Cranbrook, located along the south-east border with the US. Despite the US facing its own wildfire issues, Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have chosen to accuse Canada of improper wildfire management and have threatened to hit Canadian officials with sanctions. In a social media post on Friday, Trump wrote the US had been “invaded” by dirty air. “[The] cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying,” he said. The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to several climate protections. Wildfires continue to blaze across the US and Canada. According to the Canadian government, as of Monday there were 843 active wildfires burning across Canada. Of those 181 are considered “out of control”, meaning the fires are spreading and not responding to suppressive actions. Another 532 of those fires are also considered “out of control” but suppressive actions have not yet been taken. The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who sat alongside Trump at the World Cup final on Sunday, where the US president again suggested slapping Canada with tariffs, has sidestepped the criticisms. “Fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States,” he told reporters last week. But Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, where many fires are burning, said on Friday: “If there’s politicians out there chirping away, well maybe what you should do rather than complain is send support, send help, because we have done the exact same thing for our American friends.” Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency preparedness, said in a statement that Canada had invested C$12bn (£6.36bn) on fire prevention and forest sustainability over the past five years. “This is a challenge that knows no borders,” she said.
And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. Ten people were killed in a Russian strike near the Ukrainian port city of Odesa on a merchant ship flying the flag of Guinea-Bissau (9:42). Overnight, Ukraine struck Moscow with hundreds of drones, wounding at least 10 people (9:38, 10:24). The attacks come as Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues behind-the-scenes talks looking at defusing a political crisis triggered by his decision to oust a popular defence minister last week (10:41, 12:32, 14:24, 15:07). Lithuanian defence minister Robertas Kaunas warned that Russia sees the Baltic countries and Poland as possible next targets as it looks for “a new escalation” amid stalling war in Ukraine (10:15). In other news, Andy Burnham has become the new British prime minister, replacing Keir Starmer and pledging his arrival in power will be a “circuit breaker” moment for Britain and continued support for Ukraine (10:20, 12:56, 14:19). Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar, has announced plans to ask Judit Polgár, widely considered the greatest female chess player of all time, to take on the largely ceremonial role of president (16:02). A fire that burnt down an entire neighbourhood in a town near the Norwegian city of Drammen was still smouldering on Monday and authorities said they expect to be fighting the fire for days to come (12:13). If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.
How did the Cockroach Janta party emerge? The Cockroach Janta party (CJP) might have started out as an online joke, but – driven by millions of discontented young people in India – it has swiftly grown into one of the most unexpected challenges to the powerful rightwing government of Narendra Modi. The CJP was founded in May by Abhijeet Dipke, 30, an Indian national who recently graduated from university in the US. Enraged to hear comments made by the chief justice of India, who compared the country’s unemployed youth to “parasites” and “cockroaches” during a supreme court hearing, Dipke jokingly put out a call on social media: “What if all cockroaches came together?” The response was overwhelming. Dipke built a website and social media accounts for a satirical Cockroach Janta party – a poke at Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) – complete with a biting manifesto taking aim at the government and a tagline: “A political party for the people the system forgot to count.” Within two weeks, the CJP’s Instagram page had more than 22 million followers, overtaking the BJP. The Modi government, highly intolerant of criticism, attempted to block its social media accounts on national security grounds but was not successful. What are the causes championed by the CJP? As the CJP began to mobilise support, Dipke focused the movement on a burning issue for many of India’s millions of students: leaks of medical entrance exams, which have repeatedly been sold to the highest bidder. The pressure on students to succeed is cripplingly high: more than 2 million students compete for just 130,000 places. Many families spend their life savings and get into high levels of debt to pay for their children to be coached for these notoriously gruelling medical exams, known by the acronym NEET. More is now spent in India on private tuition than the government’s entire higher education budget. A string of exam leaks has forced millions of students into re-takes and been linked to dozens of suicides in recent years. The NEET exams are also not the only papers to have been leaked. The Modi government has been accused of not taking responsibility for the exams fiasco. The CJP began to rally supporters around the issue; calling for the government to be held accountable for exam leaks and for the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to resign. For many of India’s gen Zs and millennials, the CJP has also given voice to wider frustrations over an education system in crisis and a job market that has been systematically failing them. According to one recent study, almost 40% of India’s graduates below the age of 25 are unemployed. When did the CJP first take to the streets? The CJP’s first offline protest took place in Delhi in early June, calling for the resignation of Pradhan. Dipke returned from the US to lead the demonstration, first in Delhi and then at events across the country. Later that month, CJP supporters held their second major protest in Delhi, where this time they pledged not to move until Pradhan was gone. The protesters were joined by Sonam Wangchuk, an eminent engineer and education activist from the Indian state of Ladakh, who was last year arrested and detained under terror laws by the government for his activism. Wangchuk announced he would embark on a Gandhian hunger strike in solidarity with the students and would not eat until the education minister stepped down. As the protest and Wangchuk’s hunger strike went on into July, they were visited by multiple senior opposition figures. However, the Modi government did not engage with the CJP or Wangchuk and Pradhan dismissed them as the “B-team of terrorists”. How has Sonam Wangchuk mobilised support? As Wangchuk’s conditioned worsened more than two weeks into his hunger strike, the government faced mounting criticism. After 18 days, the Delhi court ordered for his health to be monitored on a daily basis. Early on Sunday morning, 20 days into his hunger strike, Delhi police sparked national outrage after they arrived and forcibly removed Wangchuk and took him to a government hospital against his will. The police said it was to protect his health – his wife condemned it as “illegal detention”. From his hospital bed, Wangchuk called on CJP supporters to march to parliament on Monday and demand Pradhan’s resignation. How large was Monday’s protest? The CJP protest on Monday swelled into one of the largest anti-government protests in years. By early morning, thousands of protesters began to flock to the streets of central Delhi, joining hundreds who had already been camped out overnight. The crowd was largely made up of students and other young people, but parents whose children had been affected by the leaks were also present in high numbers. Delhi police refused permission for the protesters to march on parliament. Roads across the city were blockaded with barriers, the internet was shut down and protesters were kettled into a designated protest site about a mile away from parliament. However, protesters still continued to arrive in droves, with more than 20,000 people gathered by the early afternoon. As the crowds tried to push towards parliament, police responded with violence, including baton charges and teargas, prompting criticism from CJP leaders and opposition politicians. Protesters and police were injured in the clashes. Dipke condemned the police response as “absolutely brutal”. What happens next? After weeks of ignoring the CJP movement, the Modi government offered a meeting on Monday morning. At a brief 10-minute interaction, three CJP demands were put forward but so far “no commitments were made”, according to the CJP’s spokesperson. There was no public response to the protest by Pradhan. By late on Monday, even as the police tried to clear the Delhi protest camp, Dipke emphasised that as long as Pradhan remained in his position, they would not be moved. “This peaceful protest is not ending!” read the party post on X.