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Russia increasingly reckless, says Nato’s Rutte as Germany blames Moscow for Leipzig drone incident – Europe live

Amid Ukrainian warnings, Turkish carrier Pegasus Airlines said it had cancelled some flights to Russia last night for “technical and operational” reasons, without giving further details, Reuters reported. Vnukovo airport said Pegasus Airlines had cancelled six arriving and six departing flights at the hub on Tuesday. The carrier said overnight flights into Wednesday were affected, but other ongoing flights were “operating as scheduled“. Other carriers that fly regularly to and over ⁠Russia, including Turkish Airlines, Qatar, Etihad and Emirates, did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Tumbler Ridge mass shooting victims file 30 new lawsuits against OpenAI

OpenAI faces 30 new lawsuits filed on behalf of victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting. The suits, filed on Wednesday, allege the company’s ChatGPT chatbot induced the shooter to carry out the attack in rural Canada in February, in which eight people were killed and dozens more wounded – most of them children. “These were people who really endured just total hell that day,” Jay Edelson, the lead lawyer representing the plaintiffs, said in an interview. “Young kids who watched their teachers die, watched friends die and thought they were going to get shot and killed.” These new lawsuits, filed in federal court for the northern district of California, come after Edelson filed seven initial suits in April – bringing the total number of cases against OpenAI for the Tumbler Ridge shooting to 37. All of the suits allege that the violent intentions of the shooter, identified as 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, were well-known to the senior leadership of OpenAI, which failed to report her to the authorities. Employees on the company’s safety team had flagged the shooter’s account to executives eight months before the attack, describing her in internal messages as “a credible and specific threat of gun violence against real people”, according to court filings. OpenAI banned her account, but she was able to quickly create a new one, the suits claim. The lawsuits accuse OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of negligence, aiding and abetting a mass shooting and product liability. Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement that he thinks about what happened at Tumbler Ridge every day and that the company works hard to create standards for reporting cases to law enforcement. “The professionals working on these teams choose to do this incredibly difficult work because they care so deeply about keeping people safe,” Kwon said. “They come to work every day knowing that they may have to make a decision that they’ll think about for the rest of their lives.” A groundswell of cases have been brought against OpenAI and other tech companies alleging that their chatbots exacerbate mental health crises and provoke violent acts. OpenAI has been sued in seven separate cases that blame ChatGPT for acting as a “suicide coach”. A criminal investigation and civil lawsuit, brought by the attorney general of Florida, accuses OpenAI of concealing safety risks after a mass shooting at Florida State University. The shooting in Tumbler Ridge took place in a secondary school, shortly after Van Rootselaar killed her mother and 11-year-old brother in their family home. The new tranche of lawsuits includes cases from the family of one girl who was shot, along with the principal, teachers and students. The attack was one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canadian history. In the aftermath, questions swirled in the small British Columbia town about how it could have happened. Edelson singled out Chris Lehane, who is OpenAI’s head of global affairs and a former member of Bill Clinton’s administration who specialized in opposition research. He said Lehane was one of the people who received warnings from the company’s safety team but overruled repeated appeals to alert the authorities. That decision was also sanctioned by Altman, the lawsuits allege. “What’s clear is that OpenAI over and over has made decisions to hide how dangerous their platform is because they’re worried about regulation and public pushback,” Edelson said. In response, OpenAI’s Kwon said: “It is absolutely false to say Chris Lehane was involved with our original referral decision … It’s also completely untrue to say that the people at the center of these challenging decisions do not prioritize safety, or that there are ‘political’ or ‘public relations’ factors at play.” When the first seven lawsuits were filed against OpenAI in April, the company published a blog post about its “commitment to safety”. Altman also sent a letter to the Tumbler Ridge community apologizing for not notifying Canadian police about what OpenAI knew regarding the shooter’s potential threat. “While I know words can never be enough, I believe an apology is necessary to recognize the harm and irreversible loss your community has suffered,” Altman wrote. David Eby, the British Columbia premier, posted the letter to social media with the comment: “The apology is necessary, and yet grossly insufficient for the devastation done to the families of Tumbler Ridge.”

Swedish minister defends strict post-Brexit removals of Britons

The Swedish government has doubled down on its position on removing and deporting British citizens on the grounds they were late to apply for permission to stay after Brexit. The migration minister, Johan Forssell, issued a robust defence of the Swedish migration agency’s implementation of the Brexit withdrawal agreement on Wednesday in response to a question from an MP about the case of Joyce Thomas, a 78-year-old British widow who has been ordered to leave the country after 21 years. Forssell said the European Commission, which is legally mandated to ensure EU member states implement the withdrawal agreement correctly, was onboard with Sweden’s approach. “The migration board has followed up on the application of the withdrawal agreement and the assessment is that Sweden has fulfilled its commitments. This assessment is shared by the commission,” he said. There has been growing controversy over removal orders issued to British citizens who did not know that Sweden was one of 13 countries in the EU that required formal applications to stay in the country post-Brexit. In another case, a 34-year-old British man, John Sellers, has been deported despite having lived in Sweden since he was 10. Thomas’s local MP, Häkan Svenneling, of the Left party, told the Guardian: “It seems to me that the Swedish government thinks everything is fine even though British citizens are being deported from Sweden right now. Not acting is also an action in this situation. What Sweden needs is a new government and a new migration minister who stops deporting people with strong connections to Sweden.” In his written answer to Svenneling, Forssell offered British citizens facing deportation a sliver of hope. He said: “The relationship with the UK is very important to Sweden and the government will continue to safeguard the correct implementation of the withdrawal agreement. As part of this, the government is investigating whether further measures can be taken to facilitate the process in the future.” Thomas has been told she must remove herself from Sweden by Tuesday 8 September or face deportation and a potential ban from the Schengen area. She is one of several British citizens who have been faced with removal orders after the migration agency rejected their late applications to stay. The UK Foreign Office has raised Sweden’s approach to late applications for post-Brexit residency a number of times in the specialised committee on citizens’ rights, a structure set up to ensure the withdrawal agreement is implemented properly. David Milstead, who runs the grassroots organisation Brits in Sweden, said the Swedish response was not a surprise. “The government was hardly going to disown the decisions of [the migration agency] or the Swedish courts. The real question is whether Sweden’s approach is consistent with EU law and the [withdrawal agreement],” he said. He pointed out that under the agreement, the UK was obliged to set up a statutory body, the Independent Monitoring Authority (IMA), to independently ensure the Home Office implemented the Brexit deal correctly, while the European Commission performed the correspondent role for EU member states. “The IMA has taken a much more robust approach. It is hard to imagine it not challenging the UK had it operated a policy like Sweden’s, which would have put the rights of around a quarter of a million successful late applicants [in the UK] at risk,” Milstead said. “Sweden’s approach now needs either to be tested before the European court of justice or addressed through measures that remedy the problem. The government’s response leaves open the possibility of change, and that must include fixing unjust deportation decisions.” The European Commission has been approached for comment. According to Eurostat data, between 2021 and 2025 a total of 2,490 UK nationals were ordered to leave Sweden. Analysis by the Foreign Office found this was 32.9% of the 7,565 UK nationals ordered to leave the 27 EU member states over this period. Although it is not possible to determine exactly how many were in Sweden prior to the end of the UK-EU transition period, it is likely that the majority will have been. Thomas has been in Sweden for 21 years and says her late husband inquired about the impact of Brexit and was told by the authorities there was nothing they needed to do to remain in the country legally. The couple moved to the country to be close to their son and grandchildren, and Thomas said she had been left feeling sick with worry after receiving the removal order.

Russian airspace becoming unsafe for commercial airlines, Zelenskyy says

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia’s airspace is becoming unsafe for commercial airlines, as Vladimir Putin promised to step up strikes against Ukraine’s energy facilities in the run-up to winter. The Ukrainian president said there was no intention to directly threaten civilian flights, but the growing number of attack drones being flown into the country by Ukraine would have to be “taken into account” by the aviation industry. “We want to warn every airline that uses Russian airspace, every insurer, and everyone who still uses Russia’s key airports: Russian airspace is becoming completely unsafe,” he said in a statement. A rapid escalation of Ukrainian military capability in the past few months has allowed the country’s forces to strike locations deep inside Russia. Reliable figures for the number of drone flights are hard to obtain but Ukraine is already capable of launching several hundred a day, and military sources say the country is chasing a target of 1,000 drones in an effort to hurt Russia’s economy. Ukraine’s commercial airspace has been closed since the beginning of the full scale invasion in February 2022 because Russia has been able to strike targets throughout the country, making airports unsafe for civilians. This year, Ukraine has begun bombing oil refineries and warehouses near Moscow and St Petersburg, as well as hitting military and industrial sites at ranges in excess of 2,000km (1,250 miles) from its border. Concerns about the safety of civilian aviation in the war zone linger. A Malaysian airlines plane was shot down as it flew over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 by Russian separatists operating a surface to air missile launcher. All 298 people onboard were killed. Putin described Zelenskyy’s remarks as “state terrorism”, saying: “Negotiations are not conducted with terrorists.” Giving one of his most detailed updates on the war, the Russian leader told a news conference that Moscow was preparing to step up its campaign bombing Ukraine’s energy facilities this winter, aiming to knock out heating and electricity supplies. “The Russian armed forces have been ordered to prepare and carry out mass strikes on Ukraine’s energy facilities. They are striking us, and they will get a response,” Putin told reporters after a two-day summit in Kyrgyzstan. “I’m not saying we’ll collapse the economy there, but it’s a serious challenge for them.” Asked whether Russia would strike British military facilities in the UK that produced weapons for Ukraine, Putin sidestepped the question, saying: “That’s a military secret.” Russia earlier accused the UK of “escalation” and threatened “consequences” after reports that British-made drones were used by Ukraine in long-range strikes deep inside its territory. Putin sought to stress that Russian forces retained the initiative on the battlefield in Ukraine, despite Moscow’s slowing progress. He appeared to push back against western intelligence reports suggesting he was being given an overly optimistic picture of the war, saying he relied on numerous sources of information that together provided him with an “objective assessment” of the battlefield. At one point, however, Putin claimed that Russian forces had captured the Ukrainian town of Sviatohirsk in the Donetsk region. The claim was not supported by battlefield maps produced by DeepState, a Ukrainian monitoring group. Even some pro-war Russian commentators disputed Putin’s account. “This is simply a lie. Sviatohirsk has not been liberated,” wrote the pro-war blogger Alexei Larkin. “The level of the president’s misinformation is critical.” Russia’s sluggish advance on the battlefield has fuelled widespread speculation inside the country that the Kremlin could resort to another round of mobilisation, the first since Putin called up about 300,000 reservists in September 2022. Zelenskyy and western officials have warned that Moscow could be preparing such a move, though its diplomats do not consider it is a certainty. Addressing the speculation for the first time, Putin dismissed the prospect of a new mobilisation as “nonsense”. The Russian leader also said he was comfortable dealing with Donald Trump’s special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner as part of efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, although he acknowledged talks were “currently frozen, to a certain extent”. The CIA director, John Ratcliffe, made a rare visit to Moscow last week and reportedly pressed the Kremlin to end the war.

New constitution in Guinea-Bissau will undermine democracy, opponents say

Guinea-Bissau voters have approved a new constitution, which critics say will undermine democracy, that significantly expands presidential powers ahead of elections due in December. According to provisional results, 70% of voters approved sweeping changes in the tiny west African state’s first constitutional amendment since revisions that ended the one-party socialist state more than three decades ago. The turnout for Sunday’s referendum was reportedly over 55%, amounting to an estimated 544,060 people. The new constitution will reduce the number of seats in parliament from 102 to 65 and cut electoral constituencies from 29 to 12. New provisions will require presidential candidates to have lived continuously in the country for at least five years before the vote, which is believed to target diaspora-based politicians with significant followings. The referendum’s outcome is expected to pave the way for December’s elections, which many hope will steady the political landscape in Guinea-Bissau, which has been through a series of politically turbulent periods since its declaration of independence from Portugal was globally recognised in 1974. Since then it has had at least 10 coup attempts, half of which have been successful. The most recent came after last November’s disputed presidential elections. Both candidates declared themselves winners, citing electoral malpractice by the other’s camp. The military forcefully intervened, setting up a transitional ruling council headed by Gen Horta Inta-A Na Man, a former military chief of general staff. Na Man said: “What we want after this referendum is to allow whoever wins the elections to see out their mandate without hindrance.” Nelson Moreira, the second vice-president of the transitional council, said the outgoing constitution, which came into effect in 1993, had often been cited as “the cause of instability in Guinea”. The leading opposition party, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), which was barred from fielding a presidential candidate in the 2025 election, had asked its supporters to boycott the referendum, which it called a democratic farce. “What will happen on 30 August is the continuation of the coup d’état carried out on 26 November,” its leader, Domingos Simões Pereira, had said.

No eggs, no potatoes but ‘a lot of imagination’: how Spain cooked in war’s hunger years

Few dishes are simpler to prepare than Spain’s signature dish of tortilla de patatas, which – aside from disputes about onions – requires nothing more than two basic ingredients and a pinch of salt. But where to begin if you have neither eggs nor potatoes? That is the question the chef and food writer Berta Álvarez Acal sets out to answer in Recetas de Guerra (Wartime Recipes), a compilation of recipes covering the years of hunger after the end of the Spanish civil war in 1939. In the case of the tortilla de patatas, the absent eggs and potatoes were substituted by moistened bread and onion to try to simulate the texture of an omelette. “There was a formula using water, bicarbonate of soda and a bit of oil which simulated an egg perfectly and the potatoes are substituted by bread to make a tortilla that really is delicious,” Álvarez said. In the recipe for “fried squid without squid”, deep-fried onion rings masquerade as squid while the “wartime hake” is instead salt cod. As for the “wartime and postwar breakfast”, this consists of “coffee” made from a blend of barley, malt and chicory. “I got the idea for the book when I came across one of my great-aunt’s handwritten recipe books and I noticed that some of the recipes were marked ‘wartime’,” Álvarez said. “That led me to research recipes from other sources such as Ignacio Doménech, who wrote a book during the war about how to substitute ingredients and how to make the most of leftovers.” She added: “Doménech showed us hundreds of examples of how, with a lot of imagination, we could survive those terrible days of starvation.” Some of Doménech’s recipes, although born of privation, could well find themselves on the menu of an upmarket restaurant today, such as his rose petals with milk and honey. Álvarez did not just compile the recipes. “We recreated them and shared them with friends and family,” she said. “Some dishes, although they were prepared from scraps, surprised us as they were real gems, others were not so great.” The recipes in the book span the period from the founding of the second republic in 1931 to the phasing out of ration cards in 1952. In between, starvation stalked the land, especially in areas that supported the losing republican side in the civil war. According to Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco, a historian at the University of Granada, between 1939 and 1942 about 200,000 people died of starvation in Spain. While people in the countryside could to some extent subsist on olives and whatever they could grow, Álvarez said “the hunger in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia was horrific”. “It may seem implausible,” she said. “But for far too long, food in the postwar period was far worse than during the war.” Produce previously fed to livestock such as beetroot and turnips found its way to the table while the shortage of protein meant pets, cats in particular, were at risk. “They were dangerous years for cats,” Álvarez said. “People used to put notices up in the hallway saying ‘please respect your neighbour’s cat’. But the cats lived on rats and were not good to eat.” Álvarez said that what she learned while researching the book was to make the most of every kind of produce, adding that the book was also a homage to the generation that lived through those grim years. “I think it’s important that everyone knows what our grandparents lived through because it marked them as a generation. They were incredibly strong.”