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Russia and North Korea finalising first road crossing amid concerns it serves as Ukraine war supply route

Russia and North Korea are close to completing a bridge that will form the first road link ever built between them, amid concerns the two increasingly close allies are creating infrastructure to boost military cooperation in the Ukraine war. The bridge spans the Tumen River, between Khasan in Russia’s far east and Tumangang in North Korea, a remote, thinly populated stretch of borderland where the river marks the final few miles of the frontier before it reaches the coast. The crossing is now largely complete. North Korea finished its side of the project, including customs and quarantine facilities, ahead of a planned opening on 19 June, but Russia has fallen behind on its own side of the border, and no new opening date has been confirmed. Russian and North Korean authorities have made no secret of the bridge project, saying it is intended to expand trade and tourism. North Korea’s state media news agency, KCNA, has similarly cast the bridge as a way to boost “travel of persons, tourism and circulation of commodities” between the two countries. However, a new investigation by Ukrainian human rights group Truth Hounds and shared with the Guardian suggests it is intended more to provide a discreet military logistics corridor than to boost trade. Nazar Myhun, who led the open-source research at Truth Hounds, said a key reason behind its conclusion was the fact that it is much easier to evade satellite monitoring – a surveillance method used by the west to understand Russian and North Korean activities – by using roads compared with a rail network. The new crossing over the Tumen River runs alongside the Friendship Bridge, which is the only rail link between the two countries. Russia and North Korea’s road network is far bigger than their rail network, he said, making it harder to watch in its entirety. Loading and unloading of trucks can also take place much more quickly than for railcars, which are exposed to satellite passes for a longer period of time. “The type of railcar visible in an image reveals a great deal about the cargo, and certain categories of goods are transported in open railcars, which allows them to be identified,” Myhun told the Guardian. “Trucks, by contrast, almost always look the same in satellite imagery.” Road cargo can also be loaded anywhere, as opposed to trains, which rely on a handful of fixed rail hubs, Myhun said. Russian officials have presented the project as a way to expand trade and tourism. Andrey Nikitin, Russia’s transport minister, said: “The opening of the new road bridge will increase mutual trade, optimise logistics, strengthen cultural ties, and transform border areas into dynamically developing economic hubs.” However, Truth Hounds argues that the bridge’s economic rationale is weak. The crossing is estimated to have cost more than $100m, versus bilateral trade that was reportedly worth just $34m in 2024. Tourism from Russia into North Korea remains tightly controlled and largely limited to escorted tours, with around 10,000 Russian visitors in 2025. Pyongyang, where most foreign tourists visit, lies over 500km from the crossing. Instead, the investigation concludes that the crossing is better understood as strategic infrastructure: a corridor for moving North Korean troops, construction brigades and military officials into Russia, and for Russian technology and resources to move in the opposite direction. Myhun said Truth Hounds monitors Russia-North Korea cooperation closely because it considers it “one of the key factors affecting Russia’s strength in this war” on Ukraine. The deepening relationship has also made the two-way exchange of weapons and technology between the two countries “easier and less transparent”, he said, which also poses a threat to North Korea’s neighbours. The Kremlin has been contacted about the claims made in the investigation but has yet to respond. A growing military alliance The bridge over the Tumen River is about 1km long and seven metres wide, with two lanes, part of a wider 4.7km crossing that includes approach roads. Satellite imagery also shows supporting infrastructure being built on the Russian side, including a helicopter landing pad. However, the rail line is hobbled by a mismatch in rail gauge between Russia and North Korea, meaning wheelsets must be changed to allow trains to travel further into either country’s network, a limitation the new road bridge does not share. Open-source researchers have previously relied on satellite imagery of the rail crossing to monitor suspected weapons transfers between the two countries. Construction of the bridge began after Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un signed a comprehensive strategic partnership pact in June 2024, cementing military ties that have since seen North Korea provide troops, artillery ammunition and ballistic missiles to support Russia’s war in Ukraine. It forms a small part of a much broader military relationship. More than 14,000 North Korean troops have fought alongside Russian forces in the Kursk region, after Ukraine staged a surprise counter-invasion in August 2024. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has now warned that Russia is preparing to receive a further 30,000 soldiers. Moscow and Pyongyang have expanded cooperation on weapons, military technology and reconstruction. In 2023, Reuters reported that satellite images showed an estimated 2,000 containers exported from the North Korean port of Rason to Russia, believed to have contained artillery shells and possibly short-range missiles. Kim has praised North Korean soldiers who fought and died for Russia and unveiled housing for the families of those killed. At least 2,000 North Korean servicemen are believed to have died fighting in Russia’s war, with two badly wounded soldiers taken prisoner.

France and Spain race to contain huge wildfires before fresh heatwave begins

Firefighters in France and Spain are racing to bring huge wildfires under control before another heatwave this week that will complicate efforts to tame the flames. Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said Monday and Tuesday were “absolutely crucial days” before temperatures rise again from Wednesday. EU officials have said wildfires could still be burning until early November in what threatens to be a record-breaking year for the area of land burned. A fire in the hilly terrain of Ávila, west of Madrid, has become Spain’s largest on record, burning 50,000 hectares (125,000 acres). Authorities are battling two separate fires north-west of Madrid, taking the total area of scorched land near the capital to 70,000 hectares. France was also in “a race against time” to control wildfires before another heatwave this week, said Eric Brocardi, a fire service spokesperson. Weather forecasters have said temperatures could reach 40C (104F) is some parts of the country from Tuesday. This would complicate efforts to control the wildfire in Gironde in south-west France, which the interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, described as “extremely intense and unpredictable … generating its own winds and advancing erratically toward the Bordeaux metropolitan area”. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, on a visit to Bordeaux, said: “The coming weeks will be tough and we have to hold out.” But he said a smaller fire in the adjoining Landes – which forced the evacuation of more than 30,000 people – was “contained” but remained “virulent”. “We must be extremely cautious over the next few hours and the coming days,” he said. The Gironde fire has so far burned 42,000 hectares, making it one of the biggest devastations of land in France since the second world war. In the Cestas commune, about 10 miles from the city of Bordeaux, firefighters used mechanical diggers to uproot trees in an attempt to create a firebreak. The vast fire, which has triggered the evacuation of 220,000 people, had not progressed during the early hours of Monday but was “not contained” and remained “very complicated to control”, Nuñez said. Speaking after an emergency meeting of the French government on Monday, he described this year’s wildfires as “completely exceptional”. More than 116,000 hectares of forest and vegetation have been burned since January, far exceeding the 70,000 hectares reported for the whole of 2025. Spain’s government said the 172,000 hectares of forested land burned this year was six times greater than the equivalent figure for 2025. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, told a climate conference the wildfires were not isolated incidents. “It is the most painful manifestation of a climate emergency that is making … wildfires more voracious and heatwaves more frequent, and as a result our land more vulnerable,” he said. “It is no longer an exception. It is the rule.” The European Commission’s lead official on the green transition, Teresa Ribera, said Europe was not prepared for the consequences of the climate crisis. In an interview with El País she said the commission would propose an adaptation strategy in October that would be much more comprehensive than policies implemented so far. A series of heatwaves, including record-breaking temperatures in June, that scientists say would have been impossible without the climate crisis, has left parched soils and tinder-dry vegetation that have fuelled this summer’s fires. A European Commission official said the wildfire season had begun in April and could last until early November. Officials also stressed the rising risks for fighting wildfires from the middle of the week in France, Spain and Greece. The EU executive has coordinated the dispatch of seven planes and four helicopters to France, as well as six planes and three forest firefighting teams to Spain, after the countries triggered the bloc’s emergency assistance mechanism. EU officials have also been sent to the Bordeaux region to assist local authorities. Officials stressed the unprecedented nature of recent fires, which have spread rapidly over large areas. A commission official said that a recent fire in southern Spain that killed 13 people had reached speeds of 4 mph, while firefighters are able to react only to fires moving 300 metres an hour or less. The scale of Europe’s wildfires has raised questions about the continent’s ability to respond. Italy is among about 10 European countries that have sent firefighting equipment or teams to France and Spain while grappling with its own blazes. Firefighters fought to extinguish a major wildfire in Italy’s southern region of Puglia on Monday. More than 400 people, many of them tourists staying in campsites set among pine forests, were evacuated by sea from the Gargano peninsula on Sunday as the blaze, fanned by strong winds, encroached on beaches. A further 58 people were evacuated from their homes in Maratea as a wildfire swept through neighbouring Basilicata. Italy is bracing for its fourth heatwave this year as temperatures edge up towards highs of 38C to 40C from Wednesday. Smoke from the fires in France is continuing to cause a “marked deterioration” in air quality across a swathe of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region and beyond, with health authorities warning about the danger. Elderly people, pregnant women and those with respiratory issues and chronic conditions were advised to take precautions. Local health authorities said people should close windows, wear an FFP2 mask outside and avoid strenuous activity. The prime minister’s office said more than 1.5 million FFP2 masks had been sent to the region.

Trump warns of return to ‘strong military action’ if Iran diplomacy fails

Donald Trump has once again warned that the US will return to “strong military action” against Iran if diplomatic efforts do not bring a rapid resolution to the crisis in the Middle East. “We are in very deep talks with Iran. If they don’t work out, we will go back to very strong military action,” the US president told Axios on Monday. Asked for how long he would allow the talks to proceed, he answered: “Not much time. Either it goes fast or not at all.” He reiterated the line to reporters later the same day on Air Force One. “They want to meet, and we’re meeting. Without what we did, they wouldn’t even be talking to us … They would not have requested the meeting if we were doing poorly. The only reason they want to meet is because we’ve been hitting them very hard.” He doubled down at a rally in Michigan soon after. “You ⁠can’t bribe them. You’ve ‌got ‌to beat them, ‌and we’ll beat the hell out of them. But we’ll ‌see how it turns out,” he said . “Right now, ⁠there are very friendly negotiations going on.” Earlier, Tehran said there were no direct talks with the US to end the conflict, which began in late February with a wave of US-Israeli strikes and has rocked the region and the global economy. “Mediators may convey messages from the American side to us regarding current developments in the region. But at present we are not engaged in any negotiations with the United States,” said the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei. The diplomatic back and forth came as Oman and Iran drew closer to an agreement in principle on the future management of the strait of Hormuz, but remained unable to resolve Tehran’s demand that all ships passing through the strategic waterway must pay some type of transit fee or toll to a consortium led by the two countries. Oman and Iran met for technical talks in Tehran on Friday and Saturday that may hold the key to preventing a further round of fighting. Perceived progress in the talks – backed by China, Qatar and Pakistan – was understood to have fed into the US decision to pause its attacks on Iran after nearly two weeks. Senior US officials are also reported to have warned Trump over dwindling US munitions stockpiles and the impact of Iranian reprisals on US bases in the region, including Kuwait and Jordan. The top US military commander in the Middle East, Adm Brad Cooper, reportedly recommended stopping the bombing campaign around the strait because it had reached the limit of its effectiveness. The US attacks have been described by Washington as a response to repeated Iranian breaches of the memorandum of understanding signed in June, including by trying to prevent commercial shipping from transiting the strait through a southern route overseen by the US. Iran argues the southern route breaks the ceasefire agreement, which it insists left the country in sole charge of how the strait was reopened. A diplomat said: “The aim of the Tehran talks is to marry the Iran and Oman proposals so what emerges is clearly compliant with the law of the sea, and internationally acceptable.” At a Tehran press conference, Baqaei denied that the pause in US fighting amounted to an informal ceasefire. Oman has been trying since May to persuade Tehran that any plan for charging fees in the strait must be voluntary, to comply with the law of the sea. It has proposed a model similar to that which governs the strait of Malacca: countries that use it voluntarily contribute to a fund that provides for environmental and safety services to shipping. Oman argues that a similar entity could be set up in the strait of Hormuz with the agreement of the UN and the International Maritime Organization. The IMO secretary general, Arsenio Dominguez, has told the Guardian that the Malacca strait model is worth considering for the strait of Hormuz. Iran’s department of environment has drafted its own plan, under which “the annual passage of over 50,000 ships and oil tankers through the strait of Hormuz and their role in polluting the Persian Gulf” must be compensated for. Under the plan, Iran would be able to collect “fees” from passing vessels proportional to the type of ship, cargo volume, navigation history and history of pollution. The comparison between the straits of Malacca and Hormuz is imperfect since fewer ships see ports in the Malacca strait as a destination point. But the Iranian media appear increasingly drawn to the Malacca model. The Khabaronline news agency argued such an agreement would be “a win-win situation for Iran”. Baqaei described the talks with Oman as useful and constructive but said they had nothing to do with the US. “The goal is for Iran and Oman, as two coastal states, to develop mechanisms to ensure safe shipping in the strait of Hormuz, while respecting the sovereign rights of the two coastal states and also preserving Iran’s security and national interests,” he said. Oman is in a tight spot since it knows the US is opposed to the introduction of tolls, but it may accept a very clearly delineated system of fees for specific services. The talks come as the US continues to encourage commercial shipping to test the strength of the Iranian blockade of the strait. Iranian officials reported that six vessels with their navigation systems switched off attempted to pass through the southern route of the strait on Sunday. One of them was fired upon and the others were turned back to the Persian Gulf. The US has reimposed a blockade of Iranian oil exports and ended a sanctions waiver on its oil exports. The United Nations Office for Project Services said on Monday that transits through the strait of Hormuz had fallen to an average of approximately five ships a day over the past week, compared with nearly 130 a day before the war.

Europe wildfires: Officials warn that wildfires could still be burning in November – as it happened

Firefighters in France and Spain are racing to bring huge wildfires under control before another heatwave later this week that will complicate efforts to tame the flames. Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said Monday and Tuesday were “absolutely crucial days” before temperatures rise again from Wednesday onwards. EU officials have said wildfires could still be burning until early November in what threatens to be a record-breaking year for the area of land burned. A fire in the hilly terrain of Ávila, west of Madrid, has become Spain’s largest on record, burning 50,000 hectares (123,000 acres). Authorities are battling two separate fires north-west of Madrid, taking the total area of scorched land near the capital to 70,000 hectares. The wildfire in Gironde is “unlike any we have ever seen in France” as it “follows its own logic rather than any known pattern,” the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region’s prefect Sophie Brocas warned. Updating the media on the fight against the blaze, she said the constantly evolving nature of the fire forced firefighters to “constantly adapt” to the circumstances. Spanish state meteorological agency Aemet has just issued a new warning, saying the heatwave expected to start on Wednesday will be “long” and “last, at least, until Sunday,” with “the risk of fire rising to extreme levels, hindering firefighting efforts.” Aemet’s note warns of “a significant of even extraordinary level of danger” for those involved in outdoor activities and vulnerable groups, including elderly people and people with cardiovascular conditions. The wildfires around Bordeaux in southwestern France have delivered a shock to the regional economy, finance minister Roland Lescure said. The region is one of the centres of French wine production and a major centre for tourism, Reuters noted. Firefighters battling devastating fires in France have had to contend with a new threat: immense fire clouds that create their own wind and even lightning that can spark fresh blazes. Known as “fire clouds” or pyrocumulonimbus clouds, these ominous-looking thunderstorms are created by extreme wildfires and can exacerbate already extremely dangerous conditions. The European Union is ramping up the number of firefighting planes and helicopters sent to help tackle blazes raging in southwest France, the bloc’s crisis management chief told AFP. “We currently have nine aerial assets deployed on site, and tomorrow we will have 11, drawn from our European strategic reserve,” EU commissioner Hadja Lahbib said. Provisional data on wildfires in Spain shows that more than 170,000 hectares of forest land have been affected since the beginning of the year – a nearly sixfold increase on the almost 29,000 recorded in the same period in 2025.

Pinochet-era soldier jailed for killing folk singer Víctor Jara 53 years ago

More than 50 years after the murder of the Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara, the last man wanted in connection with his death has been tracked down and brought to justice. Nelson Haase Mazzei, a retired colonel, fled from authorities in 2023 after he and six other retired soldiers were sentenced in absentia for murdering Jara and another man. Chilean police announced on Saturday that Haase Mazzei had been arrested in Puyehue, in the rural south of the country, with a judge ordering his immediate imprisonment. The Víctor Jara Foundation, set up by his widow, the British dancer and activist Joan Jara, said in statement: “We learned that retired Colonel Nelson Haase Mazzei, who had been a fugitive from justice since 2023, was found and imprisoned. We welcome this news. “However, it is important for us to emphasize that, half a century after the murders of Víctor Jara and Littré Quiroga, it is difficult to see this as this justice.” Jara, a singer and leftwing activist, was arrested in Santiago, the capital of Chile, on 11 September 1973, the day after Gen Augusto Pinochet’s bloody US-backed coup to depose the socialist president, Salvador Allende. Jara was held along with thousands of others at a small covered stadium in central Santiago. Four days later, he was murdered in the changing rooms alongside Allende’s national director of prisons, Littré Quiroga. Haase Mazzei’s arrest is likely to be the final act in the long quest for justice on behalf of Jara, one of the most recognisable victims of the Pinochet dictatorship, which killed or disappeared more than 3,000 people and detained and tortured tens of thousands during 17 years of repressive rule. At the stadium, Jara was tortured and humiliated by officers who played Russian roulette with him before breaking his hands, shattering his skull, and riddling him with automatic gunfire. His body was found dumped near the main cemetery in Santiago with 44 bullet wounds and 56 broken bones. He was 40 years old. The body of Quiroga, who had been shot 23 times, was found at the same time. After evading justice for nearly half a century, seven retired soldiers were found guilty of the murder and sentenced in absentia to varying jail terms in August 2023. Haase Mazzei received a 25-year sentence. He claimed for years that he was not at the stadium, since renamed Estadio Víctor Jara, but sworn testimony placed him at the scene. Haase Mazzei joined the Chilean army’s notorious Tejas Verde brigade in 1972, and was later part of Pinochet’s secret police, the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (Dina), where he worked closely with its leader, Manuel Contreras, a renowned regime loyalist who was sentenced to more than 500 years’ jail time for crimes against humanity before his death in 2015. Sentenced alongside Haase Mazzei was 86-year-old Hernán Chacón. When police arrived to arrest him at his home in a wealthy district of Santiago in 2023, he asked officers for a moment to take his medication, before slipping off into a side room and taking his own life. Another Tejas Verde officer sentenced for the killing was Pedro Barrientos, who left Chile for the US in 1989 and was deported back in December 2023, more than a decade after his extradition was first sought. One former soldier testified that Barrientos had the habit of brandishing his pistol and declaring: “I killed Víctor Jara with this!” Barrientos was eventually arrested in the US after a routine traffic stop, and lost his US citizenship not because of his crimes, but on the grounds that he had failed to disclose his military background in his application. Jara’s widow died at the age of 96, just weeks before Barrientos was returned to Chile to face justice. Haase Mazzei’s defence has already requested his transfer from a prison in the southern city of Osorno to Punta Peuco, a well-appointed jail north of Santiago, built to house the human rights criminals of the Pinochet era.

‘It felt like being in a disaster movie’: uncertainty after evacuation from France’s Gironde wildfire

Sitting in their suburban apartment in Mérignac on the outskirts of Bordeaux, Krishma, an interpreter, and her husband, Nassir, first felt a sense of dread when a strange black cloud turned the sky dark in the middle of the day. Then a bitter burning smell filled the air outside. “The sky changed colour. It seemed like a cloud but it was smoke covering the sun – it wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It didn’t seem real,” said Nassir, an English literature graduate from Kabul who has been living in France for seven years. “We couldn’t breathe easily, you could feel it in your lungs.” The acrid smell, which at first seemed like burning rubber then unmistakably like wood smoke, was blowing on the wind from the massive wildfire in Gironde in south-western France. The blaze has torn through 42,000 hectares, an area four times the size of Paris, causing one of the biggest devastations of land in France since the second world war. The government said on Monday that although the fire had stopped growing, it was still blazing and a new heatwave this week could make it harder to fight. As authorities carried out one of the biggest evacuations in modern French history, Krishma and Nassir were among 220,000 people ordered to flee their homes in Gironde. Many people were evacuated from wooded areas directly hit by fire, where at least 240 homes were destroyed. But in an unprecedented move, tens of thousands more were ordered by police to evacuate from more built-up, urban streets as the fire reached 9 miles (15km) from the outer edge of Bordeaux’s vast suburban area. Krishma and Nassir had to evacuate their suburban street at midnight on Friday. With their two children aged 10 and eight, they quickly packed toothbrushes, toys, one change of clothes and personal documents into their car. On Monday afternoon, they were sitting on camp beds among hundreds of people sheltering in a hangar at Bordeaux’s exhibition centre. They had slept there for three nights and did not know when they would be allowed home. The fire had not reached their residential area, but with the French government warning that the blaze was “extremely intense and unpredictable”, authorities would not yet allow a return, they said. The couple’s main feeling was great sadness to see the Gironde forest destroyed. Krishma said: “When we were in Afghanistan there were lots of explosions, suicide attacks, but that was related to around 30 years of war. When we came here, we never thought there would be a situation like this. It brought us back to the bad memories from our past.” Across the vast hangar, Yves, who used to work on road maintenance in Bordeaux, was sitting with his 13-year-old mastiff dog, Ichka. Yves had fled his suburban house and garden in Le Haillan outside Bordeaux with his dog’s bed under one arm and had carefully laid it out next to his camp bed. He had been ordered to evacuate in the early hours of Saturday morning. “We had to leave because of the smoke,” he said. His wife, an administrator who did not want to be named, said she still felt shaken. “It was terrifying – you would look up at the sky and it was completely orange, even after nightfall. It was bizarre. The fire was causing that, and it really made you anxious. I feel quite a lot of anger that all this forest has burned and been lost. Seeing all that is beautiful in nature just go up in smoke is extremely painful and sad.” Others who had fled slept in their cars. Loïc, 66, a widower who worked in the metals and glass industries before becoming a decorator, had to leave his house in Saint-Jean-d’Illac outside Bordeaux. “I had been watching this strange fog in the sky. It was a darkness almost like an eclipse,” he said. “There was a kind of ochre mist as light from the sun was diffused through falling ash. So much ash was falling that my car was turned completely grey.” At 1am on Saturday, Loïc was woken by banging on the door from his neighbour, a fire officer, saying he had to leave immediately. He grabbed only his wallet and car keys and ran to the car, leaving his mobile phone behind. There were so many people on the road and heading to the evacuation centre that he decided to stop elsewhere and get a bit of sleep in his car. When he woke on Saturday, listening to the news on the car radio, he knew he could not go home and headed instead for central Bordeaux, thinking the cinema would be a safe and comfortable place. “I watched the two-part Charles de Gaulle epic – the wrong way round, with the second film first, but I knew the story already – then I watched The Odyssey. Then I went back to sleep in my car.” The next day, he visited the graveyard where his wife was buried. On Monday morning, he arrived at the Bordeaux evacuation centre to get information on what to do next. He felt deeply saddened by the loss of the forest. “My generation grew up really attached to nature,” he said. Florence, a former teaching assistant in a primary school, sat on a camp bed with her two cats in their travelling cases after having to evacuate Le Haillan outside Bordeaux. “I was distraught,” she said. “I’m asthmatic, I put tape around the windows of my apartment but I could still smell the smoke which was seeping in under my front door, so I put down wet rags. The sky was orange and grey, and there was soot everywhere.” She said having to suddenly evacuate knowing a fire was raging in Gironde felt like something out of a war. “It felt like being in a disaster movie,” she said. “I’ve always really loved disaster movies – but now I feel like I’ve actually been in one, so I don’t ever want to watch a disaster movie again.”

Swathes of Cairngorms unrecognisable after 12 days of ‘cataclysmic’ wildfires

It is the jewel in the crown of the Highlands, one of Scotland’s most impressive natural landscapes, but 12 days on from the start of an enormous wildfire that is tearing through moorland and forest, the Cairngorms national park is unrecognisable. Hectares of blackened land were visible as low cloud cleared on Sunday, with smoke billowing into the air from large areas still ablaze. In the evening, the sky glowed an eerie orange. Authorities have warned the danger is far from over in what has been described as the worst fire the Cairngorms has ever seen. It will be weeks, if not months, before the blaze is fully extinguished but emergency services are hoping they can stop it spreading much further. The damage so far has been significant and it will take decades to put right. Flames have claimed areas of the Caledonian pinewood forest, which contains Scots pine trees 300 years old, but most of the older forest has been saved by fire breaks urgently bulldozed into the land in the early days of the fire. “For rare habitat loss, it really is a challenge,” says Ian Allsopp, the Forestry and Land Scotland planning manager for the north region, saying larger animals, such as deer, would have escaped but smaller mammals, lizards, insects and ground-nesting birds would have perished. Grant Moir, the chief executive of the Cairngorms national park, told the Guardian it was the worst fire the park had seen. “The fact that this is right in the centre of the Cairngorms, in the actual Cairngorm mountains and Abernethy – it is such a precious place,” he says. A national park bylaw was introduced in April, banning campfires and barbecues over the summer to help reduce ignition points. It is still unknown what caused this fire but the vast majority of UK wildfires have a human origin and can be something as small as a discarded cigarette or abandoned glass bottle. Police Scotland said on Saturday night it was no longer treating the fire as a major incident. However, anxiety is still high, particularly among local people who were told it was “contained” last week, only for strong winds to fan the flames, leading to the evacuation of Nethy Bridge village on Friday night. Residents have been told they can return home. Inside Nethy Bridge community centre, which is being used as a makeshift base for the emergency services, a long table against a wall is groaning under the weight of donated food, while the fire service, police and volunteers bustle around, many looking exhausted. “It’s absolutely heartbreaking,” says Sandy McCook, a retired press photographer from the village. “The flames on Friday were cataclysmic.” He is angry too. Many locals feel the fire could have been prevented. McCook shows the Guardian a photo he took of the wildfire when it was only the size of a tennis court. “Had we had a helicopter there on government contract to deal with such incidents, that fire could have been dealt with within two hours of it being reported,” he says. He wants to see a model similar to the Scottish air ambulance, with a specialist firefighting helicopter and crew able to scramble to tackle hard-to-reach fires, and he is not the only one. Three private helicopters have been contracted to provide assistance in the Cairngorms, depositing approximately 750,000 litres of water a day on wildfire hotspots, something that is essential to getting the blaze under control. Allsopp says it was “so lucky” the helicopter companies were able to assist in water-bombing what he says was an “inferno”. The Cairngorms area is an “extremely challenging landscape”, including steep mountains and forest, “access is so difficult, you just can’t get people up here”. On Monday, the Scottish Green party called for publicly available firefighting aircraft during the wildfire season, saying Scotland “cannot continue to rely on a patchwork of private operators and borrowed resources”. It came after the UK government offered military support on Sunday but said it had no access to specialist firefighting helicopters requested by the Scottish government. Firefighters said an “intensive operation” was still under way but better weather conditions, including heavy rain and low winds, had slowed the fire and limited its spread. More than 75 firefighters remained at the scene, the Scottish fire and rescue service said on Sunday. Light rain has brought some relief but everyone on the ground is anxious in the face of more dry weather to come. “Wet weather is not enough to put out the fire on its own,” says Allsopp. It requires helicopter water-bombing “for days and days and days” to contain it. The operation is a massive coordinated effort between Forestry and Land Scotland, the national park authority, the police, fire service, RSPB, Highland Council and other partners, with assistance being offered from the Scottish and UK governments. Allsopp says each organisation has worked well together, pooled skills and knowledge, and helped each other out. “Even our accountants are here, running errands and getting water and sun cream for people,” he said. “At times, it has been completely overwhelming and we’ve been struggling to keep up. It feels like a war strategy.”

Mayo beat 75-year-old ‘curse’ to become Gaelic football champions

The hex is broken, dispelled, banished, and a story that bewitched Ireland for decades has ended in fairytale: Mayo are all-Ireland champions. Seventy-five years after a supposed curse condemned its Gaelic men’s football team to endless defeat, the county prevailed and uncorked a wave of emotion that engulfed even its rivals. The team will return to the west of Ireland for a euphoric homecoming on Monday evening after winning the senior football championship, a victory that thrilled Ireland and Mayo’s diaspora, including Joe Biden, Mark Carney and Noel and Liam Gallagher. “Mayo 1-20, Kerry 1-17. Chisel it on the gravestones, scribble it in the sky,” the Irish Times exulted. “Croke Park untethered, the whole place afloat for an hour on a lake of the sweetest tears that were ever cried.” Most pundits had favoured Kerry to win the 138th all-Ireland final and write another chapter of Mayo woe at Sunday’s contest at the Dublin stadium. Instead the underdogs triumphed and even some Kerry fans wept at the catharsis. Few seriously believed in the curse – it was said no member of the last winning team from 1951 would live to see another – but there was no doubting the drought that followed, with 11 defeats in 11 finals since 1989. A book about Mayo’s quest was titled House of Pain. Whenever the county made it to a final, a frisson gripped television viewers and the 82,000-strong stadium crowd: was this the day they would witness the end of the hex? On Sunday it was. “To every young boy and girl across Mayo and our diaspora across the world, never stop dreaming, stick your chest out and be proud to be from Mayo,” the team captain, Jack Coyne, declared as he held aloft the trophy named after Sam Maguire, a legendary player. “The wait is over. Sam is home.” Authorities had provisionally estimated a crowd of 40,000 would greet the team at McHale Park in the county town of Castlebar on Monday but that looks conservative, Gerry Bourke, the homecoming committee chair, told RTÉ. “After what I saw in Croke Park yesterday, I think we’ll have to revisit the plan.” Mayo, a landscape of bogs, rocks and Atlantic cliffs, is the third biggest of the island of Ireland’s 32 counties. It is sparsely populated, with just 130,000 people, but players and supporters have a reputation for fervency in the Gaelic Athletic Association, the sport’s governing body. According to lore, the young victors of 1951 were on their way home to celebrate when they passed through the village of Foxford and failed to pay their respects to a funeral, prompting the enraged priest to utter the fateful words: “For as long as you all live, Mayo won’t win another all-Ireland.” Seven decades later, the last surviving member of that team, Paddy Prendergast, told friends he would willingly “roll over and die” if there was any truth to the curse, but that it was a myth. “There was supposed to have been a funeral in the local church; I don’t know whether there was or not. I saw people standing around the church but we didn’t get off the truck because we couldn’t get off the bloody truck,” he told an interviewer in 2017. Researchers who probed church records, press cuttings and other sources failed to find any verification of the supposed curse, which gained currency in the 1990s. The legend, however, is intact: Prendergast died in 2021, aged 95, two weeks after Mayo lost the final. Biden – who concluded a 2023 presidential visit to Mayo with the rallying cry “Mayo for Sam!” – congratulated his ancestral home county. “Today, the dream becomes reality,” he posted. “You earned this victory. Enjoy every minute.” Carney, the Canadian prime minister who made his own ancestral pilgrimage to Mayo last month, echoed the joy. “The curse is broken,” he posted. The Gallagher brothers of Oasis, who also have family ties to Mayo, expressed pride. “Finally!! Up Mayo!!” Noel posted.