Read the daily news to learn English

Keir Starmer refuses to condemn US attack on Venezuela as Maduro is jailed in New York – live

Many countries viewed Nicolás Maduro as an illegitimate dictator but the legality of the operation to capture him and his wife has been seriously called into question – with some experts and observers saying it violated international law, ignored sovereign territorial rights and was reckless and potentially destabilising to the wider region. My colleague Geraldine McKelvie spoke to leading experts in the field of international law to ask for their view on the rapidly unfolding events in Venezuela. Here is an extract from her story: The experts the Guardian spoke to agreed that the US is likely to have violated the terms of the UN charter, which was signed in October 1945 and designed to prevent another conflict on the scale of the second world war. A central provision of this agreement – known as article 2(4) – rules that states must refrain from using military force against other countries and must respect their sovereignty. Geoffrey Robertson KC, a founding head of Doughty Street Chambers and a former president of the UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone, said the attack on Venezuela was contrary to article 2(4) of the charter. “The reality is that America is in breach of the United Nations charter,” he added. “It has committed the crime of aggression, which the court at Nuremberg described as the supreme crime, it’s the worst crime of all.”

Venezuelan leaders’ fever dream of a US invasion finally becomes reality

It was the fever dream of the revolution, a dark fantasy spun so many times – each version wilder than the last – until it almost became a joke: the Yankees are coming. Hugo Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, conjured the scenario again and again, warning that the US president and his henchmen in the CIA and Pentagon were mobilising forces to strike. Spies, saboteurs, assassins, special forces, mercenaries, missiles, poison, submarines, fighter planes – the empire would stop at nothing to smite Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution and overthrow its leader. “Would it be so strange that they’ve invented the technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?” Chávez said in 2011, when he was being treated for cancer. He evoked US submarines prowling off Caribbean beaches and airborne troops attacking Caracas. It was, in large part, theatre. A confection of claims to justify authoritarian rule, burnish anti-imperialism credentials and delegitimise opponents. Over time, even some supporters rolled their eyes at tales of the Yankee bogeyman. Yet now, 13 years after an ailing Chávez passed power to his protege, Nicolás Maduro, the fever dream is real. On Saturday US forces bombed Caracas and seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores – the “empire” of Chávez’s rhetoric made manifest. No UN mandate, no congressional approval, just raw military power. Amid the shock and uncertainty about what happens next there is a surreal twist. For years Chavismo – the ideology bequeathed by the late president – exaggerated the US threat in order to cry wolf. When the wolf showed up he turned out to be an American version of Chávez. Donald Trump’s populist authoritarianism echoes the Venezuelan strongman: both masters of thunder and dazzle who polarised voters, intimidated opponents and hijacked institutions. The real estate mogul obviously differs in myriad ways from an army officer who embraced socialism – but his ability to tap grievances, break norms, suck up all the oxygen and turn power into a TV show are pure Chávez. It transcends irony that Trump’s greatest spectacle is the operation to abduct Chavismo’s heir. As international law lies in shreds, and Venezuelans swing between hope and dread, history has completed a bizarre circularity. In 2002 George W Bush’s administration tacitly backed a coup that briefly ousted Chávez – a move that elicited comparisons to the cold war era, when the CIA toppled leftist leaders across Latin America. Chávez, backed by barrio-dwellers and the military, regained power, won fresh electoral mandates and spent the rest of his reign taunting Bush as a donkey, a cowboy, a devil. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq – justified by false claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons arsenal – many around the world agreed with Chávez that the US president was indeed more dangerous than a monkey with a razor blade. Chávez made repeated claims of US plots against him. Given CIA efforts to kill Fidel Castro and US military interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989, and Bush’s post 9/11 overreach, a strike against Venezuela was plausible. But none came. The US continued to buy Venezuela’s oil and sat back while Chávez hollowed out his economy. Maduro, taking the reins in 2013, continued the fiction of an imminent US military threat. With the economy cratering and voters rebelling, Maduro needed to rig and steal elections to stay in power – and a Yankee bogeyman was more useful than ever. The dictator talked up limited sanctions by the Obama and Biden administrations as a blockade. In recent months Trump deployed his own distortions and fabrications. He accused Maduro of heading a “narco-terrorist” cartel that was “flooding” the US with drugs – an extrapolation of Venezuela’s role as a conduit for Colombian cocaine, which mostly goes to Europe. Trump also accused Venezuela of a role in his debunked claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 US presidential election. On Saturday Trump claimed a victory for the ages. “This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history. No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved.” The US raiders cut the power supply to Caracas thanks “to a certain expertise that we have”, paving the way for a flawless operation that evicted a tyrant, Trump said. In his mausoleum, Chávez must have spun. He used to blame power cuts – the result of a crumbling energy grid – on CIA saboteurs. He used to say the gringo superpower wished to reimpose the 19th-century Monroe doctrine of US pre-eminence in the hemisphere, and here was Trump declaring a “Donroe doctrine” of “dominance”. That extends to the US running Venezuela for an indefinite period, said Trump. “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.” He added: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” Trump clouded the picture by saying the US would cooperate with Delcy Rodríguez, a Chavista who was Maduro’s vice-president and has reportedly been sworn in as president. Venezuelans, including the millions who have fled, are about to find out if they have woken from a fever dream or slipped deeper into nightmare. * Rory Carroll was based in Caracas as the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent from 2006 to 2012 and is the author of Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.

Leading UK far-right activist spoke at Russian extreme nationalist event

The head of a leading British far-right group spoke at a summit of European extreme nationalist groups convened in Russia by an influential oligarch linked to Vladimir Putin, it can be revealed. The revelation has led to renewed concern among MPs over the Kremlin’s links to extremist groups and its attempts to disrupt democracy and sow societal divisions in the UK. The event in St Petersburg was addressed by Mark Collett, a longstanding far-right activist and founder of Patriotic Alternative, which attempted to exploit the summer of unrest outside asylum hotels in Britain. A range of groups from across Europe, including some far-right ideologues from France and other countries, also attended the inaugural gathering of the Forum of the International Anti-Globalist League. Pride of place was given to Alexander Dugin, an ultranationalist Russian who has been described as “Putin’s brain” and whose views helped shaped ideas behind the invasion of Ukraine. Calvin Bailey, a Labour MP and member of the Commons defence committee who has been vocal about Russia’s hybrid war in western Europe, said the links between Patriotic Alternative and Russia were the latest example of the Kremlin’s attempts to use political subversion against Britain and other countries. “Russia considers itself at war with us. It absolutely wants to see systematic paralysis here and is eager to find ways of undermining the fabric of our nation,” he said. “That dovetails with what the far right wants and what it believes. It’s even more than just groups and individuals on the far right being used as proxies. They are literally a vehicle for attacking the ideas that underpin our democracy.” Russian “influence operations” in Britain have been ratcheted up in recent years, in addition to espionage operations ranging from arson to spy rings. However, there have also been worries about more subtle attempts to sow societal divisions. The Guardian revealed earlier this year how a network of Telegram channels with Russian links was encouraging UK residents to commit violent attacks on mosques and Muslims and offering cryptocurrency in return. There have been calls for a ban on Patriotic Alternative, regarded as the UK’s largest far-right group, albeit one that has faced challenges from newer rivals. Collett, once a young acolyte of the then BNP leader Nick Griffin and now a veteran far-right figure, founded the group after splits in the BNP. It quickly became a home for a digital-savvy younger generation of activists. He confirmed to the Guardian that he had attended the Russian event, as an online participant. Collett said that he gave a three-minute speech discussing birthrates and immigration in Britain, how white Britons would be reduced to a minority in future “and that eastern European countries must not allow the same thing on their soil”. Collett said he had been invited by the Brotherhood of Academists, a nationalist student movement operating in universities across Russia and in occupied parts of Ukraine. “I do not believe that Russia desires war with the west, or with Britain. What’s more, I have never received any contact or payment from anyone within the Russian establishment, so the idea that myself or Patriotic Alternative is being ‘used’ by the Russian state is absurd, and a groundless suggestion,” he told the Guardian. He believed the conflict in Ukraine was “stoked” by the previous US government because it desired a proxy war with Russia. The key figure behind the event, which took place at St Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly building on 12 September, was Konstantin Malofeyev, a banker whose business interests include the Kremlin-supporting Tsargrad media group and who founded the Brotherhood of Academists. Malofeyev, who has been described by the US authorities as “one of the main sources of financing” for the promotion of Russian interests in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, hailed the conference in a post on Telegram. “More than 50 delegates from 15 rightwing patriotic organisations across three continents came to St Petersburg. Diverse, but united on key issues: a desire to defend Christian values, a fight for national identity and sovereignty, and resistance to our common enemy – globalism,” said Malofeyev, who is known as the “Orthodox oligarch” because of his support for the Russian church. He said that the event opened with a “Christian memorial” and a moment of silence for the rightwing US activist Charlie Kirk, who was killed two days before the forum. The Guardian has previously reported how Malofeyev appears to have been involved in the movement of millions of dollars through the global banking system with the help of a Cypriot financial services firm after he was placed under sanctions by western governments. In addition to Collett, other participants included the French author Alain de Benoist, the Franco-Swiss ideologue Alain Soral and a German politician, Alexander von Bismarck.

‘It has hit us very hard’: grief grips Crans-Montana as police identify more victims

Mourners have continued to bring flowers and light candles at a makeshift memorial in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana to commemorate those who lost their lives when a blaze ripped through a packed bar popular with young people celebrating the new year, killing at least 40. “We came to light a candle,” said Sisi Boisard, a regular visitor to Crans-Montana from France for the last 20 years. “We have five children and can’t begin to imagine what these families are going through. This is a tragedy that has cut profoundly, but not just here – it’s being felt across the world.” She and her husband, Arlindo, were celebrating the new year with their daughter, who lives in a nearby town, when they heard about the fire. On Sunday, police said they had identified 24 of those killed in the fire at Le Constellation, including 11 minors and six foreign nationals. Local officers, who had already identified eight Swiss victims, said they had identified 10 more Swiss nationals – four women and six men aged between 14 and 31 – as well as two 16-year-old Italians, a 39-year-old French man, a 16-year-old dual national of Italy and the United Arab Emirates, an 18-year-old Romanian and an 18-year-old from Turkey. The blaze also left 119 people injured. Identifying the dead and injured is a painstaking process owing to the extent of their burns. The bar owners and managers, Jacques and Jessica Moretti, a French couple, were put under criminal investigation by prosecutors on suspicion of committing homicide, bodily harm and arson by negligence. Emanuele Galeppini, a 17-year-old Italian golfer who lived in Dubai, was on Friday the first of the victims to be identified publicly. The tragedy has cut deep into the community of Crans-Montana. The resort is popular with the rich and famous, who come to ski, enjoy the luxury hotels and spend in many nearby designer shops. But it is also home to a close-knit population of about 6,000 year-round residents, who during the holiday periods welcome back the families of mostly French and Italian second-home owners. Several masses have been held since Thursday and some shops have closed in a show of respect. Local people have rushed to give blood to hospitals treating the injured, so much so that appointments for donations are booked up until the end of January. Others have offered homes for the families of those who remain unaccounted for. The extent of the community’s heartbreak can be gleaned from the messages left at the memorial in front of the bar. “We will take your pain in our broken hearts … here in Crans-Montana, we will cherish their memories, you can count on us. 1 January 2026, the day our lives for ever changed with yours,” read one. Maurice and Isabelle Direnne, from Crans-Montana, reflected on the disaster as they left flowers at the scene on Saturday morning. “We don’t know anyone who died but still we feel an immense despair, a very strong pain,” said Maurice, adding that usually at this time of year, the resort is bustling and everyone is joyful. “But now we all feel completely crushed.” Isabelle described a friendly and supportive community. She said she had considered how the tragedy might affect the image of the resort and tourism. “But really, thinking about this feels too early,” she said. “Our hearts are heavy with sadness.” The tragedy dominates conversations on the streets and in bars of the resort as people reflect on the lives lost and their tragically young age. Inevitably, as an investigation into manslaughter gets under way, people are asking questions about the cause of the fire and whether the bar had adequate safety measures in place. Prosecutors said on Friday that the blaze probably began when sparkling candles were held too close to the ceiling of the venue’s basement level. They said the investigation will focus on renovations made to the bar, the fire-extinguishing systems and escape routes, as well as the number of people in the building when the fire started. Le Constellation was especially popular with young people because it was free to enter and drinks were affordable. Groups of teenagers travelled across the border from France and Italy especially to spend the new year there. Many living in the town have fond memories of the bar, where you could play on the pinball machines and watch live sport. Marta Ramirez, who works in a clothes shop, recalled going there as a teenager. “It was a nice place to go at that age,” she added. She said there was a lot of solidarity among residents, and people were checking in on each other. “It has hit us very hard.” The shop reopened on Saturday even though trade is subdued. Most of the Christmas and new year holidaymakers have left, while other visitors cut short their time because of the tragedy. Even though skiers, many coming up for the day or weekend from nearby towns, continue to take to the slopes, Ramirez said it was too soon to think about the impact the disaster will have on the resort. “If I’m really honest with you, we are just thinking about right now, and what happened two days ago,” she said. “I don’t think many people are thinking about next year. At the same time, this is not something that will be forgotten in a year. It will never be forgotten.”

‘It has become difficult to live’: Hungarian writers bemoan country’s hostile environment

Gyula, a tranquil and picturesque town in the east of Hungary, is best known for its sausages. It has no direct rail connection to Budapest, but it does have a library and a castle. Soon, it will also have an official copy of a Nobel medal. “Congratulations to László Krasznahorkai, the first Nobel winner from Gyula,” proclaim billboards in the town, paying tribute to the 71-year-old writer who won this year’s Nobel prize in literature for “his compelling and visionary oeuvre.”. In December, as he accepted the medal at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, many compatriots watched live, including an audience gathered in Gyula’s wood-panelled library. The town marked the occasion with a week-long programme of readings, workshops and an exhibition dedicated to Hungarian Nobel laureates. The author himself was absent – and not just because he was accepting the award. Like many Hungarian artists and writers these days, Krasznahorkai no longer lives in his home country. As it prepares for its toughest re-election campaign since winning power in 2010, Viktor Orbán’s far-right Fidesz government is presiding over an increasingly hostile and repressive climate, say authors and rights groups. The state has taken control of one of the country’s largest publishers, homophobic legislation has reshaped bookshops and writers complain of shrinking opportunities. In an interview with the Swedish broadcaster SVT to mark his Nobel prize, Krasznahorkai likened Hungary to an alcoholic parent. “My mother drinks, she loses her beauty, she fights,” he said. “Still, I love her.” Many Hungarian intellectuals have emigrated. Gergely Péterfy, an award-winning author, is among them: he moved to the south of Italy, where he set up an artists’ community. The move, he said, was driven partly by curiosity and a love of the Mediterranean lifestyle, but also by politics. “In the past 15 years, it has become very difficult to live in Hungary because of Orbán’s anti-culture stance,” he said. Since Fidesz came to power, governmental actors have gained control of universities, galleries and popular media outlets. The national cultural fund, chaired by the culture and innovation minister, has redirected money from independent unions and periodicals to pro-government journalists and writers. Those independent literary outlets that remain are struggling to survive amid growing state influence over advertisers, leaving publications with less revenue and unable to adequately pay contributors. “I don’t know any young writer [in Hungary] who makes a living,” said Csenge Enikő Élő, a 32-year-old author. Élő writes prose and poetry, and her first book was published last year by an independent publisher. She complains of the polarisation of literature: “One side is getting a disproportionately large amount of funding, and the other very little.” The Fidesz government has also poured hundreds of billions of forints into Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a conservative educational institution chaired by Orbán’s political director, which has several international outposts and its own publishing house. In 2023, MCC acquired 98.5% of the shares in Libri, Hungary’s leading publisher and bookshop chain. The same summer, Libri’s shops wrapped books in plastic if they depicted same-sex relationships, corresponding to Fidesz’s “child protection” law, which prohibits the promotion and display of homosexuality and gender reassignment. “A significant portion of literary works were effectively banned for the sake of a political campaign,” said Krisztián Nyáry, a writer and creative director of Líra, the country’s second-largest bookshop chain and publishing group. Líra has been fined multiple times for defying the anti-LGBTQ law, and is contesting the penalties in national and international courts. While Nyáry finds reassurance in the fact that Libri employs the same people as before MCC’s acquisition, he is still wary. “There are Chekhovian rifles hanging on the wall here. No one has fired them yet, but we know that if there’s a rifle on stage, sooner or later someone will fire it,” he said. The Fidesz government has been criticised for favouring rightwing and controversial writers, incorporating them into the national curriculum and seeking their official recognition. In 2020, teaching unions expressed outrage when the state’s list of mandatory texts included the work of József Nyírő, who was a member of Hungary’s far-right government during the second world war, but excluded Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor and the country’s first Nobel literature laureate. By contrast, the government had made little effort to promote Krasznahorkai internationally, said János Szegő, his editor. But although Krasznahorkai is critical of the government, describing it in a recent interview as “a psychiatric case” because of its ambivalent stance on Russian and Ukraine, his prize was celebrated all around the country, regardless of party lines. “It makes one’s heart skip a beat when a person of Hungarian descent receives the Nobel,” said Szegő. “It’s a great confirmation for a small language that’s always wary of extinction.” Ernő Görgényi, the Fidesz mayor of the writer’s home town, said: “For us, as a community, the greatest recognition is that the books that feature locations and people from Gyula have now made their way on to the bookshelves around the world.” His administration will install a plaque on the house in which Krasznahorkai grew up, and name a school library after him. Eventually, it plans to organise Krasznahorkai-themed tours around the city, inspired by Dublin’s Ulysses walk. “There’s no need to bring politics into this,” said Márta Becsiné Szabó, 75, a resident of Gyula who took part in the town’s Nobel celebrations. “The important thing is that he is from Gyula, and that he is Hungarian.”

‘This is business as usual’: boss of bombed Ukrainian vodka maker seeks to expand exports

Businesses in Ukraine are “not sitting and waiting for the war to end” and are working to expand despite bombs hitting shipments out of the country, according to a leading vodka exporter to the UK. Yuriy Sorochynskyi, the chief executive of Ukraine’s largest spirits export brand, Nemiroff vodka, has said its products have continued to flow to big chains including Tesco and Sainsbury’s as it copes with the harsh realities of almost four years of war. Late last year one of the brand’s shipping containers, holding 17,000 bottles, was hit by bombing at the Ukrainian port of Odesa. A supplier’s shipment was also recently hit. “We had one or two containers destroyed in port by missile attacks,” he said. “This is now business as usual.” Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, keeping production of major exports going, from vodka to grain and sunflower seeds, has been an important part of the country’s ability to fight back. With Russian vodkas pulled from most supermarket shelves across Europe in support of Ukraine, the brand has grown rapidly. In the UK sales rose 24% last year to £6.25m, and it is now one of the fastest-growing premium vodka brands. Nemiroff has sponsored Ukraine’s heavyweight boxing champion Oleksandr Usyk and partnered with the Premier League football clubs Aston Villa, Fulham, West Ham and Everton. The brand is now listed in Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and the Co-op, and in October it returned to the duty free market with products at Heathrow and Gatwick. More than 40% of the brand’s sales are now in the west, after sales dived from about 10m cases globally in 2010 to 2.4m cases in 2022 following its exit from the Russian and Belarusian markets. Global sales have partly recovered, to 4.4m cases this year, as Ukrainian demand has held up and exports to the west expanded. Sorochynskyi said the company ceased sales in Russia, one of its biggest markets where its products were produced under licence, which was terminated immediately after the invasion of Ukraine. Since the start of the war, keeping production going has involved measures such as buying a gas generator, so that the factory can keep going as Ukraine’s power stations have come under attack, and finding spare space to rehouse its bottle top supplier, an Italian company that had a subsidiary in Sumi in the north-east of Ukraine, close to the Russian border, which took a direct missile hit in August last year. Nemiroff was also providing bottling facilities for some competitors with the aim of “supporting business in Ukraine”, said Sorochynskyi. “There are a huge number of examples of competitors helping each other out in order to survive.” Another potential move on the horizon is the provision of bathing facilities for workers who are struggling to wash at home amid power cuts and shortages because of attacks on power infrastructure. Sorochynskyi said that life is particularly tough for those living in flats in cities as they are less likely to be able to set up their own energy sources such as wood-burning stoves or solar panels. As a result, he said, it is not uncommon to see queues of cars heading for shopping centres, as much for the electrical supply or wifi as for shopping. Nemiroff, whose distillery and bottling plants are located in its namesake city of Nemyriv, in Vinnytsia oblast in the east of the country, where there has been a distillery since 1752, is owned by the siblings Yakov and Bella Finkelstein, along with Anatoliy Kipish. The three have controlled the company since it was privatised by the state in the 1990s. Another shareholder, the Glus family, was ousted after an internal battle for control in 2013. As ports have come under attack, Sorochynskyi said Nemiroff has been forced to reroute shipments more than once. “Now we are mostly shipping out by truck. Before 2022 we used a lot of sea containers but we stopped that when the Black Sea was blocked. It took us four months to find an alternative.” The Ukrainian government, helped by the EU, is also building up railway infrastructure to help provide other freight routes. New railway lines with the European standard gauge of track will allow easier exports via train. A track to the borders with Hungary and Slovakia opened in September and one to Poland is set to open in 2027. Facilities to help take goods to Romania’s Black Sea ports have also been ramped up. Production halted for about a month in the early days of the war and exports were also held up as the borders were overloaded with refugees and the movement of military equipment.