There’s no point in speculating about the nature of this incident until we know more. But it will undoubtedly raise further concerns about and scrutiny of the security of UK airbases after last week’s Fairford incident. RAF Molesworth hosts some US troops and the Joint Intelligence Operations Center Europe Analytic Center (JAC), as well as Nato’s 24/7 intelligence fusion centre.
High school students have again blockaded schools and marched through cities across France, promising to continue their campaign despite government pledges to address the grievances underlying 10 days of protests that have left hundreds injured. Large crowds took to the streets on Thursday for mainly peaceful demonstrations in cities including Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Lyon, Toulon and Marseille, while in Paris a procession marched through the city centre to arrive at the Place de la Bastille. Eliane, 16, a pupil on the Paris march, said she had come to “defend and encourage high schools in an even worse state than mine”, calling the march “magnificent”. She said she planned to continue protesting until concrete progress was achieved. The education minister, Édouard Geffray, said after meeting students and teachers on Thursday at a school in the eastern city of Reims that he was “implementing an emergency plan to ensure absent teachers can be replaced on a long-term basis”. Heavy timetables were also under review, Geffray said, as were changes to the widely criticised university application system. The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has promised a “concrete, rapid and fully funded” response by the end of the month. Students said the government’s reaction was not sufficient. Ryad Rani, president of one high school student’s union, said the protesters had heard “no concrete measures whatsoever, no response to our demands”. The movement “will continue”, he said. Sabrine Kharbach, from another students’ association, said the protest would last “for as long as €10bn hasn’t been put on the table” – the amount students and some leftwing politicians have said needs to be urgently invested in France’s schools. According to an Elabe poll for BFM TV, 72% of French people think the students’ demands are legitimate but 55% of them think the protests should stop. Unions called for another national day of action in support of the students next Tuesday. The education ministry said fewer high schools had been forced to close than in recent days, with 224 shut on Thursday morning and 157 by lunchtime, meaning that about 95% of the county’s high schools were at least partly open. But several marches drew up to 5,000 protesters, and the demonstrations, backed by many teachers, parents and unions, involved further clashes with police in Paris. In Rennes riot officers used water cannon to disperse protesters. A prominent complaint on student banners and placards was the heavy-handed police response to the wave of protests. “Too young to be listened to, but old enough to be teargassed,” read one banner on the Paris march. Over the past two weeks, some demonstrators have set dustbins on fire outside their schools, destroyed bus shelters and hurled projectiles at riot police, who have responded using batons, teargas and riot-control rounds. At least 215 teenagers, 89 school staff and 761 police officers had been injured since the start of the protests, which were triggered by chronic teacher shortages, crowded classes, dilapidated buildings and long school days. The government on Wednesday suspended the use of stun grenades by police after a teenager’s hand was blown off, while saying it was “excessive” to speak of “police repression” and denying that officers had “orders to confront” the young protesters. The protests have rocked a government caught between popular demands for investments in deteriorating public services and pressure from markets to reduce France’s ballooning budget deficit and debt mountain, among the highest in the EU. The economy minister, Roland Lescure, said this week there was room to address demands for more school resources in the 2027 budget. In the current draft, schools have the second-largest funding increase after defence, with a 1.4% hike to €90.9bn. Six months away from a crucial presidential election to replace Emmanuel Macron, politicians are jockeying to exploit the protests, with the far-right frontrunner, Marine Le Pen, highlighted the damage to schools and called for parents to foot repair bills. Her hard-left opponent, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has praised the protesters as “incredible” and denounced police brutality.
Millions of people from Louisiana to Florida are under hurricane warnings on Thursday as Hurricane Isaias looked set to head towards the US Gulf coast with weather officials warning of dangerous storm surge, hurricane-force winds, heavy rainfall, and flooding. Isaias intensified into a hurricane from a tropical storm on Wednesday night, becoming the first hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season. In an advisory on Thursday morning, the National Weather Service (NWS) said that Isaias, which is currently a category 1 hurricane with sustained winds of 80mph, is expected to pass to the north of the Yucatán peninsula later on Thursday before reaching the northern Gulf coast where it is expected to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday. The NWS said that Isaias is “expected to strengthen and be a strong hurricane when it approaches the northern Gulf Coast on Friday” and warned that a “life-threatening storm surge” is expected along a portion of the northern Gulf coast. Storm surge warnings are in effect on Thursday from the mouth of the Mississippi River to Steinhatchee, Florida, and residents in the warning area have been urged to “follow advice given by local officials and evacuate if told to do so”. Hurricane warnings are also in effect in the areas from Ocean Springs, Mississippi to the Bay/Gulf county line, Florida. The NWS has warned that “damaging hurricane force-winds are expected over portions of the Florida Panhandle, southern Alabama, and southern Mississippi” and urged residents to prepare for the possibility of “long-duration power outages”. Isaias is also expected to bring “areas of heavy rainfall” to the central Gulf coast and much of the south-east from Friday into the weekend, and the NWS said that flash and urban flooding, along with isolated river flooding, will be possible. Isolated tornadoes are also possible on Friday night in coastal areas of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle and far southwestern Georgia, the NWS said, adding that “the tornado threat will continue Saturday for eastern Alabama, Georgia and northern Florida.” On Wednesday, the Alabama governor, Kay Ivey, declared a state of emergency in 40 counties, saying that the order “will allow us to take any needed steps ahead of landfall”. The emergency declaration is scheduled to remain in effect until 14 October. The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, also declared a state of emergency this week for 25 counties as the state prepares. “This order ensures communities have the time and resources necessary to prepare for potential severe weather impacts to the Panhandle and Big Bend region of Florida,” DeSantis said in the announcement. At the local level, officials in Okaloosa county, Florida, declared a local state of emergency on Wednesday and ordered some residents in coastal areas to evacuate. Panama City also declared a local state of emergency “due to the potential effects of Isaias and its near threat to the citizens and property in Panama City and surrounding communities”. Several school districts in Alabama and Florida have also announced closures ahead of Isaias. The Federal Aviation Administration also warned on Thursday that Isaias may “lead to Gulf route closures”. In Tennessee, the NWS office in Morristown warned that “remnants of Hurricane Isaias will bring heavy rain and strong, gusty winds to our area this weekend.” The office said that “high winds could top 60–70+ mph in the eastern TN mountains and foothills, with isolated flash flooding possible in heavy rainfall areas.”
A former Labour MP and justice minister has been found not guilty of charges around his role in a fraudulent Covid-19 testing company. Shahid Malik, 58, was MP for Dewsbury between 2005 and 2010 and served as a minister in three departments in Gordon Brown’s government. Malik was one of five people charged with offences relating to RT Diagnostics, a company that prosecutors said was a “cash cow” set up to take advantage of the UK government’s expanding test-and-trace system in March 2021. On Thursday, Malik was found not guilty of fraudulent trading, causing a public nuisance and money laundering in a trial at Bradford crown court, which was, unusually, conducted without a jury. The trial began in October last year and jurors were sent out to start their deliberations in March. In April, they were discharged by Judge Smith after an allegation of jury tampering. Smith took the decision to continue the trial without the jury, and that he would decide on the verdicts. The court heard that Malik started the business with the pharmacist and former Labour councillor Faisal Shoukat, 39, when the third national lockdown was ending in March 2021. Shoukat was found guilty of all three offences. Paul Moore, 57, who had a senior role in RT Diagnostics and was Malik’s office manager when he was an MP, was cleared of causing a public nuisance and of fraudulent trading. Lynn Connell, 64, a manager at the company, and Alexander Zarneh, 70, who was its clinical director, were also cleared of the same two offences. Prosecutors said RT Diagnostics, which made £6.67m in three weeks, was set up in “shoddy and inadequate premises” in Halifax and gave out false negative results to customers. The defence barrister, Jonathan Laidlaw KC, said Malik’s role in the business had been “very limited indeed” and he had acted as “a facilitator – putting the money up and making introductions”. Giving his closing speech to jurors in March, Laidlaw said Malik never went to the premises when it was in operation. He told the court that for most of the time the business was operating, Malik was out of the country and there was no evidence he was told about any of its issues while he was abroad. Laidlaw said the fact that the former MP had made money from RT Diagnostics “can’t possibly be the basis for a guilty verdict”. The court heard that as the third national lockdown was ending in March 2021, the government was looking to expand its test-and-trace system by increasing the number of laboratories offering PCR testing. The defendants were accused of “taking advantage” of that process with an “inadequate and non-compliant” testing company which, prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford KC said, “generated a suspiciously low number of positive results”. Sandiford said the Halifax laboratory was set up in inadequate premises with holes in the walls and ceilings, and rubbish strewn around. Jurors heard that the company employed “numerous young people who had little or no training in the handling of Covid-19 samples” and set them to work with no social distancing and no personal protective equipment. Along with Sadiq Khan, Malik was the first British-born Muslim to become an MP and the first to become a government minister. He was appointed as an international development minister in 2007 and he later had ministerial jobs at the Department of Justice and the Department for Communities and Local Government.
A Russian missile strike on a bus in the eastern city of Kramatorsk has killed at least 30 people, officials have said, in one of the worst attacks by Moscow on Ukrainian civilians this year. The regional prosecutor’s office in the Donetsk region said on Thursday the vehicle had been hit at 10am by an aerial bomb. “As of now, the death toll from this morning’s attack has risen to 30. Eighteen people were wounded,” it said, adding that all local public transport had been suspended. Images posted by police showed bodies strewn across a street littered with debris, as well as a charred shell of what appeared to be a bus. A second bus had also caught fire, officials said. The strike targeted an area next to a dental clinic on the city’s Yuvileina Street. Three people had also been killed by shelling in the village of Bilenke, outside Kramatorsk, they added. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Kremlin had deliberately targeted an “ordinary public transport stop”. Some of those killed could not be identified because of the severity of their injuries, Ukraine’s president added. He said the number of victims could “sadly rise”, as doctors fought to save the lives of those wounded. He said: “This strike will not go unanswered. Russia is trying to destroy all life in Donbas, and a response from the world is a must. A forceful response – exactly as the Russians deserve for all the deaths they have brought. May all those killed rest in peace.” The bombing follows a gruesome Russian strike on Wednesday on a five-storey block of flats in Pryluky in the northern Chernihiv region. The building collapsed, entombing those inside. At least 22 people were killed, including five children, aged between one and eight. Visiting the scene with Ed Miliband, the British foreign secretary, Zelenskyy urged the US to expand Starlink satellite internet coverage so that Ukraine could hit targets inside Russia such as launch sites. So far, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have refused Kyiv’s request. Miliband said there was “no clearer sign of Putin’s evil, evil intent and strategy in this conflict” than this week’s murderous attacks. He said: “Putin once said that he was going to win on the battlefield. He is trying to win by terrorising civilians.” Writing earlier on social media, Zelenskyy called on western allies to take “concrete steps” to boost Ukraine’s depleted air defences, amid a round-the-clock Russian onslaught in recent weeks featuring ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones. “Supplies of anti-ballistic capabilities, ammunition for our combat aircraft, and investments in interceptors – all of this is directly helping save lives every day. Important talks with our partners will take place today and tomorrow,” Zelenskyy said. Kramatorsk and neighbouring Sloviansk form part of a “fortress belt”. They are the last two big cities in northern Donetsk under full Ukrainian military control. Russia has been trying to capture them for more than a decade, after a brief period in which Russian forces occupied Sloviansk in 2014. The cities are home to thousands of civilians, as well as Ukrainian soldiers. In recent months, roads have been festooned with nets to protect traffic from marauding enemy drones. These defences offer little protection, however, against aerial bombs. “These are not ‘the consequences of war’, nor dry statistics. These are people killed by the Russian army,” the Donetsk regional governor, Vadym Filashkin, said on Telegram after Wednesday’s strike. “Russia comes to Ukrainian land with death.” He added: “The Russians are deliberately targeting civilians. For them, a bus full of passengers is an attractive target precisely because a single strike can kill as many people as possible. “Russia deliberately flouts every conceivable rule of warfare and the norms of international humanitarian law. It selects targets where it can inflict the greatest suffering on civilians.” There was criticism of the White House’s policy of engaging with Vladimir Putin, whom Donald Trump has invited to December’s G20 summit in Miami, Florida. The Kremlin has yet to say if Russia’s leader will take part. The former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul said on social media that Russia was guilty of terrorism. “There is no other word for it. Putin is running a terrorist state. That officials from my country call this terrorist a nice guy is deeply embarrassing for me.” Putin has demanded Ukraine cede the rest of the eastern Donbas region still under its control. Kyiv refuses to hand over its territory, believing Russia will take any concessions and carry on fighting.
A controversial overhaul to electoral law that critics say is aimed at boosting Giorgia Meloni’s chances of clinging on to power in elections next year has been given final approval by the Italian parliament. Meloni, the Italian prime minister, says the new system, which introduces a fully proportional model, including bonus seats for any coalition that wins the most votes, will bring about greater political stability, while opposition parties argue that it mainly serves the interests of those in power. The change was passed in a secret ballot in the lower house with 227 MPs voting in favour and 164 against. There were protests from opposition politicians who held up signs decrying the law as a “scam” and a “con” when the result was announced. Opposition parties have vowed to challenge the changes in the constitutional court, arguing that the bonus seat element, which would be granted to any coalition that reaches a vote threshold of 42% of the vote, distorts voter representation. Another contentious requirement of the changes is that parties and alliances would be required lay out their government programme and name their candidate for prime minister well before a general election. Meloni, who leads the far-right Brothers of Italy, had made the vote a test for her ruling rightwing coalition, warning MPs from her allies, including Forza Italia and the League, that, if defeated, the government would face a crisis. While there are tensions within the coalition, which has suffered setbacks in recent months and is under threat from the rise of new far-right rival Roberto Vannacci, leader of Futuro Nazionale, it has put on a show of unity and has stability on its side after becoming Italy’s longest serving government since the second world war in early September. Whereas the broad leftwing alliance, led by the Democratic party, is highly fractious with no clear leader or programme. Meloni said the victory was a response to those who wanted to see her coalition divided. “Today we respond with action: we are united, cohesive and determined to fulfil the commitments made to citizens,” she wrote on social media. Elly Schlein, the leader of the Democratic party, said Meloni’s alliance sought to change the electoral system because it feared losing the next general election, which is officially due to be held before October 2027 but could be brought forward to April or May. According to a recent survey by Ipsos Doxa, the opposition coalition could reach the 42% threshold if it overcame internal divisions and managed to convince two small radical parties to join forces.
Even before María del Carmen Abascal died on Wednesday night, a mere fortnight after her eviction from the Madrid flat where she had lived for most of her life, the frail 87-year-old woman had become the enduring face of Spain’s housing crisis. Her plight – and the wider issue it embodied – had led to street demonstrations, the creation of a protest camp in the middle of the Spanish capital, and spurred the socialist-led government to propose emergency measures to facilitate and protect access to housing. When rightwing and far-right parties voted down those measures in congress last week, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, responded by announcing a snap general election for the end of November. Abascal’s death now looks set to focus even more attention on housing in the run-up to that election and, in particular, on what her lawyer has called “the shameful violence of these types of evictions and the evident impact and consequences they can have on people’s health”. With more than 42% of Spaniards identifying access to housing as their main worry and with rents having risen by 80% over the past decade, the most pertinent question may be: why has it taken the eviction of an octogenarian and the accompanying protests to shake Spain’s political class into action? To which the answer could be that, despite years of protests against overtourism and gentrification, the tipping point had not been reached. Now, arguably, it has. On Thursday, Spain’s state centre for sociological research published polling that showed that 76.3% of those surveyed were in favour of the state intervening in the market “as much as necessary to guarantee everyone’s access to housing”, while 79% believed housing should be prioritised as a constitutional right. Sánchez’s socialist-led government is keen to persuade voters that it is the only political force that cares about rents and tenants’ rights – hence the emergency measures, which have been redrafted into two new decrees after their defeat in parliament last week. The 21 measures include facilitating renting or buying a new home; extending eviction protections for vulnerable residents; prohibiting speculative real estate purchases, and granting tax breaks to property owners and tenants who pay on time. “These are measures that, if I may say so, are a matter of simple common sense; a matter of humanity,” the prime minister said on Tuesday. “They unite small property owners and tenants while standing up to vulture funds, precisely because they target only those who view housing merely as a commodity for speculation.” The measures come almost three years after the prime minister promised to build 184,000 affordable public rental homes. His government has also sought to address soaring housing prices by introducing a law allowing authorities to cap “disproportionate” rent prices in some areas. Those who had voted down last week’s decrees, Sánchez said, had done so despite studies showing the measures enjoyed “cross-cutting support that transcends ideology”, adding that the public was in favour of regulating “a dysfunctional market”. He is now hoping that at least one of the decrees will be passed by congress’s permanent council, a special body that operates when parliament is not in session. Its approval could go some way to convincing voters that his administration is taking the housing issue seriously. Others disagree. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party, which voted down the measures last week, has said it is a bit late for Sánchez, who has been prime minister since 2018, to suddenly appoint himself Spain’s housing champion. “Housing has been the big failure of this government but will be the success story of the one that follows it,” he said on Monday. Feijóo, whose party is leading the polls, added: “When a prime minister has been in power for eight years, it’s hard to blame others for what he’s failed to do.” The PP has promised to address the crisis by building 200,000 homes a year, lowering taxes and cutting down on bureaucracy. However, the PP’s decision to side with the far-right Vox party and the rightwing Catalan pro-independence Junts party to fell the measures has left it looking less than committed to the issue of the day. Sánchez and his allies will be hoping that fact will not be lost on voters as the election campaign kicks off and as trade unions prepare a general strike over housing for 11 November. Mindful, perhaps, of the distance between his words and his party’s voting history in congress, Feijóo called for people not to manipulate Abascal’s death to suit their own purposes. “No campaigning, no political parties, no partisan ends, no more bricks in the wall,” he said on Wednesday night. “When a person dies there should be nothing but respect.” And yet, despite the primacy of housing as an issue, Feijóo opted to start his campaign in Spain’s North African territory of Ceuta, where at least 141 people died as tens of thousands tried to cross over from neighbouring Morocco at the end of July. The Spanish government’s handling of the mass crossing, which saw about 80,000 people enter Ceuta, has been criticised at home and abroad. Speaking in the territory on Wednesday, Feijóo promised that its safety would be at the “top of [the] in-tray” if he became prime minister. Vox, meanwhile, has responded to Absacal’s death by posting footage of a TV interview in which she said she held Sánchez responsible for what had happened to her. The far-right party accused the socialists of using “the suffering of an elderly person to stage a campaign to hide the government’s responsibility in the housing disaster”. It also suggested that Sánchez had visited “ruin and death” on Spain in the form of the floods that killed 230 people in Valencia two years ago, last year’s nationwide power cut, the deadly train crash in southern Spain in January, and recent events in Ceuta.
This July was the worst on record for wildfires in England, provisional data shows, with England experiencing a clear upward trend in the total number of wildfires recorded. This summer has been a stark reminder of the vulnerability of the UK to climate breakdown, after punishingly hot and dry weather turned large parts of the countryside into a tinderbox. Provisional government data reveals 1,354 wildfires have been recorded so far this year, with 624 of these in July alone, making 2026 the second worst year on record. July’s wildfires included a devastating fire that burned close to the Sizewell B nuclear power station in Suffolk and destroyed vast areas of a protected nature reserve. The summer of 2026 was the UK’s hottest on record, according to provisional data from the Met Office, with 40 days of temperatures above 30C (86F) recorded, smashing the previous record of 34 days. Scientists have said the record heat of 2026 has only been possible due to the climate crisis driven by fossil-fuel burning. This year also marks the first time in the data series, which runs from 2010–26, that a death has been recorded due to a wildfire. This incident involved the death of a 70-year-old man after a fire burned in fields behind Berrington Road and Castle Gardens in Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. Last week, the Guardian revealed that the government quietly scrapped plans to prepare the countryside in England for wildfires. This was despite new data showing fire crews do not have the proper protective gear to tackle them. Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland and the chair of the Commons environment food and rural affairs committee, said this raised “serious questions” about whether this summer’s wildfires could have looked different with more resources on the ground. This year is the second worst year on record in terms of total number of wildfires, with the worst being 2022, when 1,592 were recorded. 2022 was also a record year for heat, with the UK recording temperatures of 40C for the first and only time. The 2026 data covers January to August only, whereas the 2022 data covers the full 12 months. Despite this, 2026 has already had a record number of woodland and forest fires, with 88 recorded. After a wildfire spread across an area including several homes in Stourbridge in the West Midlands in August, the prime minister, Andy Burnham, convened an emergency Cobra meeting and issued a temporary ban on the sale of disposable barbecues. The data shows a clear upward trend in the number of wildfires being recorded. Between 2010 and 2017, annual totals remained consistently under 750 (ranging between 310 and 721). In contrast, four out of the last nine years exceeded 950 incidents. The environmental author and campaigner Guy Shrubsole has accused respective governments of “fiddling whilst Britain burns”. He called on the prime minister’s upcoming Wildfire Summit to include “radical changes to how we fire-proof our landscapes – by restoring peat bogs, ponds and wetlands – and cut out the fossil fuels making wildfires worse”. A government spokesperson said this summer was one of the “most challenging wildfire seasons on record”. They added: “We have to make sure we are prepared for the threat of wildfires – which is why we have invested nearly £100m to upgrade national resilience assets and we are convening a summit with fire and rescue service partners to inform decision-making and make sure we have the right equipment and resources to be as resilient as possible.”