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‘Cockroach’ leader among thousands detained in Delhi protest crackdown

Indian authorities have placed Delhi under a severe lockdown and detained tens of thousands of people, including the leader of the youth-led “Cockroach” movement, in an attempt to stop an anti-government protest. Thousands of people from across India were blocked from attending the demonstration, which had been called by the “Cockroach Janata party” (CJP) to protest against an exercise that has stripped 130m names from India’s electoral roll. The Cockroach movement, as well as opposition parties, civil society and student groups, have alleged that the process of “purifying” India’s voter roll was done to entrench the power of Narendra Modi‘s government, and have called for India’s chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, who oversaw the exercise, to resign. Delhi police denied permission for the protest to take place in the centre of the capital, and in the days leading up to Saturday, officials began to barricade roads throughout Delhi. More than 25,000 police and security personnel were deployed across the city, many pulled from other states. Abhijeet Dipke, the founder and leader of the CJP, accused the government of being scared of the young people who were rising up in protest. “The mass crackdown on protesters and the shutdown of Delhi are not signs of strength but of a leader terrified of his own people,” said Dipke. On Saturday morning, police boarded Dipke’s plane as it landed at Delhi airport and detained him, alongside several other senior figures in the Cockroach movement. In a video recorded just before police detained him, Dipke said: “If you think you can stop us by threatening us with jail, then you have it wrong. Put us in jail if you want … but we will keep fighting to protect the democracy of this country.” Others in the CJP movement were detained across India, with arrests and detentions reported to be in the tens of thousands. One of India’s most popular YouTubers, Dhruv Rathee, who has 33m followers and has become a supporter of the CJP, was among those put under house arrest, while Delhi’s former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was detained at the protest site. Student groups, who have also been calling for Kumar to resign, had described the march as India’s “second freedom struggle”, akin to Gandhi’s fight for independence. As police began mass detentions on Friday night, Neha Bora, a student leader at the forefront of the protests, said: “History is repeating itself. Just like in 1942, the arrest of leaders could not stop the Quit India movement; this movement will also not stop.” By Saturday afternoon, Bora had been detained. Over its 14 years in power, the Modi government has been rigidly intolerant of dissent but few protests have prompted such a draconian nationwide crackdown. In major disruption to travel, all trains arriving into Delhi’s two main stations on Saturday were cancelled for 10 hours and almost 50 metro stations were shut. Delhi’s schools and courtrooms were instructed to go online for the day and hotel owners were told to turn away customers. Traffic diversions were in place across Delhi and police checkpoints were set up along the main highways from neighbouring states into the capital, with passengers being stopped and interrogated about their final destination. Delhi police told Uber drivers not to drop people near the protest area and said they were “tracking and stopping” bulk orders on food delivery services to Jantar Mantar. In Mumbai, housing societies sent out mass WhatsApp messages, telling parents to “mind your kids” and make sure they didn’t attempt to travel to join the protest. Around Jantar Mantar, which had previously been Delhi’s designated protest site and where the Cockroach supporters had hoped to gather, most of the main thoroughfares were shuttered and barricaded, surrounded by police and paramilitary officers. Riot-control vehicles and trucks fitted with water cannon stood nearby. Buses were used to transport more than 10,000 people who were detained while attempting to reach Jantar Mantar. Paravin Singhal, a 75-year-old lawyer, said he had left home at 5am and shown his court identity card at checkpoints along the way, only to be stopped about 200 metres from Jantar Mantar. Singhal said he had come to stand with young people fighting to save the country from a “lawless regime playing with the constitution”. He accused Modi’s government and the election commission of using the revision of electoral rolls to influence future votes. After voting in elections for 50 years, he said, he had recently been told that his name had been removed from the rolls. “How can this happen to someone who has been voting for 50 years? What is even more disturbing is that the government is taking away our most fundamental right – the right to vote.” Singhal said he would stay put in the hope that more protesters would arrive. “The government is afraid because young people in this country are awake. They know their rights and are fighting for them. That is why the government is behaving like a dictatorship.” Amina Minnath, an undergraduate student at Delhi University, had also travelled to the area with friends. They had left before sunrise and navigated the checkpoints. The police barricading of Delhi, she said, had only strengthened her determination to protest. “These restrictions show that the government does not care about people’s rights,” she said. “This will not stop us. We may be detained, but we will come back in greater numbers. This will not end in a single day.” The revision of electoral rolls, in a process known as “special intensive revision (SIR), began last year and attracted criticism from civil society groups and the opposition alliance after it emerged that millions of names were being deleted. The backlash grew when SIR was held in the state of West Bengal and it became clear that Muslims and other minorities, who traditionally do not vote for Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), were being disproportionately stripped of their vote. Yet it didn’t become an issue of national outrage until late last month, when the Indian Express newspaper published an investigation that exposed multiple irregularities in the SIR process, which had been flagged in more than a dozen internal objections but had been unilaterally overruled by Kumar. Opposition parties, the Cockroach movement and student groups began to call for the resignation of Kumar, who was appointed by a committee led by Modi. This week, India’s main opposition Congress party, also tried to reach Jantar Mantar to protest but were blocked by police, and the Congress leader, Rahul Gandhi, was detained twice. This week, the supreme court ordered the Modi government and the election commission to respond to the allegations. A BJP spokesperson said they had “no base, not an iota of evidence” and accused them of being driven by “an irresponsible, anarchist opposition”. Saturday’s protest follows the triumph of the Cockroach movement in July, when it led mass protests that forced the resignation of Modi’s education minister. Since then, India’s youth have proved more willing to criticise the Modi regime and have expressed mounting anger at the obstruction of their freedom to protest. Many, such as Prakhar Vashishth, who is in his early 20s, remained defiant despite the aggression of Delhi police. He had recently been asked to submit additional documents to establish his eligibility to remain on the electoral rolls. “We are living in extraordinary times, and young people in this country must come out to defend their future,” he said, as he stood near the police barricades around Jantar Mantar. “This government will go to any lengths to stay in power, even changing election rules or removing people it believes will not vote for it. But they cannot keep us away for ever.”

Don’t rebuild the dam: Ukrainian experts urge Unesco to protect site uncovered by Russian sabotage

On a warm September day, a group of underwater archaeologists and researchers were boiling water for tea on their campfire on the banks of the Dnipro River, tents pitched on the sandy shoreline. They were three weeks into an archaeological expedition of the waters around Khortytsia – a rocky island 12.5km long and 2.5km wide that lies just downstream of the city of Zaporizhzhia, in south-eastern Ukraine. High above the island, a Shahed drone whined on its way. A Ukrainian interceptor, and small-arms fire from the ground, tried, unsuccessfully, to bring it down. The archaeologists ignored it. This is life as normal, 28 miles (45km) from the combat zone in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Olena Dzneladze, senior research fellow at Ukraine’s national Institute of Archaeology, showed off their remarkable finds: a bronze-age deer antler, its tip shaped into a tool to press patterns into pottery or leather; a shard of ceramic most likely made by the Scythians, an ancient nomadic people of the steppe; a chunk of a Byzantine amphora; an 18th-century anchor. Most spectacular, though was an entire boat, hollowed out of a single tree trunk and beautifully preserved by a millennium’s river immersion – one of many remarkable vessels, including 18th-century warships, that have been discovered in this part of the Dnipro. The team was planning to lift it from the river the following day. With its neighbouring, smaller islands, Khortytsia comprises a natural and historical reserve – a place of profound symbolic importance to Ukraine’s national narrative as the first stronghold of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, and with traces of human life stretching back to the Mesolithic era. Khortytsia lies at the head of a vast landscape known as the “great meadow”. This 2,155 sq km area was, between the building of the Nova Kakhovka dam in the 1950s until 6 June 2023, covered by a reservoir. That was the day the 30-metre high, 3km-long structure was blown up – by the Russians, according to most analysts. Unchecked by the dam, the waters of the reservoir – 18 cubic km of it – drained out of its bed and roared downstream, creating an acute humanitarian crisis as its waters inundated towns and villages on both sides of the river, and both sides of the frontline. Now, however, a vocal group of historians, naturalists, ecologists and archaeologists want to see this territory of the “great meadow” protected as a Unesco world heritage site for its value as a natural and a cultural environment. The former reservoir bed has, with startling speed, regenerated itself into something like its pre-dam self: a habitat of wetlands, grassland and islands, richly populated with the traces of thousands of years of human life. The dam, say the experts, must never be rebuilt. Over 100 Ukrainian NGOs are formally supporting the bid. A letter of intent has been sent to Unesco, and cooperation sought from the Ukrainian government’s culture ministry. But other interests will want to see the dam replaced and the reservoir remade, to irrigate Ukraine’s southern farmlands. Soon after its destruction, the Ukrainian government set up a pilot project with the state-owned hydroelectric company Ukrhydroenergo to prepare the groundwork for its reconstruction after the end of the war. Valeriy Nefedov, leading the team of archaeologists on the island, is one of those pressing for the preservation of the “unique historical and natural environment” that has re-emerged. In 1999 the underwater archaeologist an early-18th-century warship in these waters, now in the island’s Museum of Navigation. And, in the summer of 2023, he was one of the first to set foot on to the 2,155 sq kilometre territory revealed by the drained Kakhovka reservoir. Nefedov was serving in the army on 6 June 2023, in the Donetsk region, and quickly heard the news of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam. For him, there was a certain irony: since the 1990s, he had been pressing for the dam’s gradual dismantling, the draining of the reservoir and the restitution of the “great meadow” with its mosaic of grassland ecosystems and marshes, reed beds, scrub and sandy mounds. But not like this, in one single, catastrophic event. “The first crime was building the dam in the first place,” he said. “The second was blowing it up.” Later that month, he was asked to join a newly formed military unit consisting of experts – historians, ecologists, scientists and other researchers – to investigate the reservoir bed. “Of course, I had some expectations about what I might see. But when we reached the area, it is impossible to describe the impressions and emotions I felt. The consequences were staggering: what had been a reservoir had, within a very short time, turned into the exposed bottom of the body of water. On the other hand, there was a sense of danger.” This was the grey zone, no man’s land, “extremely tense”, he said. There was constant shelling. Though Ukrainian reconnaissance units had been there ahead of them, Russian sabotage groups were also on the prowl. And they could see the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, where the Russians were positioned. “It was a very strange feeling,” he said, “being between the positions of our Ukrainian forces and those of our Russian enemies.” It was more than that, though: a watery territory, that he knew intimately as a diver, was now dry land, and he was walking across it. “It felt like terra incognita, unknown land – as if we were the first people to set foot on it,” he said. “Everything we saw and found there made us feel like explorers or discoverers. “Very unusual, almost fantastical landscapes appeared before us. Ancient channels, straits and islands had been revealed. “We saw the remains of settlements, the foundations of houses, roads. We also found archaeological material lying directly on the surface, from the neolithic right through into the 20th century.” There were also toxic heavy metals revealed on the reservoir bed, which biologist Pavlo Oliinyk, one of the research team at Khortytsia, is involved in monitoring. But, he said, the rapid growth of vegetation in the drained “great meadow” area may provide a “green shield”. Trees, he said, had already grown up to as much as 7 metres high in the reservoir area, in just three years. “Building the dam was ecocide, destroying the dam was ecocide, and the third ecocide would be rebuilding it,” he said. The “great meadow”, this vast area of the Dnipro floodplain – which remains a grey zone between the opposing armies – has always had huge significance owing to its unique topography; its first surviving mention in the written record is by Herodotus, the fifth-century BCE Greek historian. This section of the Dnipro was the last easily navigable stretch of the river north of the Black Sea, before the rapids upstream at Zaporizhzhia rendered the river unmanageable by all but the most knowledgable. This protective geography created a safe haven for the Cossacks, who, fleeing persecution in the 16th century, established a free, quasi-democratic polity here. This Cossack state became a important reference for the 19th-century intellectuals, including national poet Taras Shevchenko, who led the modern Ukrainian national project. The area’s significance goes back even deeper. Also working on the island of Khortytsia in September was archaeologist Anatoliy Volkov, who, inland from the group of underwater archaeologists, was excavating one of a series of bronze-age stone enclosures. “We are in a frontline area,” he said of continuing his work during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “We are potentially threatened. There is always a chance a missile or rocket will land here, and so the more we research and preserve, the better.” The urgency of the research and monitoring was even more acute on the shoreline and riverbed, according to archaeologist Olena Dzneladze. After the blowing of the dam, she said, thousands of tons of sand started to move down the river, “with artefacts appearing in the moving sand”. Amid this volatile military and geographical situation, the Dnipro is settling into something like its old course, before the Nova Kakhovka dam was completed in 1956. Between Khortytsia and the next great dam upstream, at Zaporizhzhia, further rocky islands and sandy spits have been revealed as the water level has sunk 6-8 metres, transforming the landscape. Serhii Plokhii, Harvard’s professor of Ukrainian history, grew up in Zaporizhzhia hearing his grandfather’s stories of hunting in the wetlands of the “great meadow” before the dam was built. He recalled his emotions seeing the newly emerging landscape of the famous Zaporizhzhia rapids for the first time – though most of the rocky outcrops lie upstream, still submerged thanks to the Zaporizhzhia dam. “It was something that I read about and was part of history, but I had never seen before. And I thought: ‘Whatever happens with the Nova Kakhovka dam, whether they will rebuild it or not, I at least have had this chance to see this piece of history that was there, but was always invisible.’”

‘We’re not asking for luxury’: school protesters in Paris suburb feel abandoned by French state

On a normal school day, Mohammed, 17, wakes at 6am, cares for his younger siblings to help his single mother who works as a security guard, then takes two crowded buses and a local train to get to his high school in Sevran, a low-income banlieue town in the suburbs north-east of Paris. “There aren’t enough chairs or desks to go round, so some students have to stand up,” Mohammed said. “Classes can be so packed you can’t interact with the teacher. In this year’s heatwaves, it felt like 40 degrees in overcrowded classrooms with no shade or curtains. It was so hot my brain couldn’t function.” The 17-year-old in his last year of high school wants to study management and digital communication at a Paris university. But he said conditions were so poor, he felt all odds were stacked against him and his classmates. “Some of us have to go months without teachers when absent staff aren’t replaced,” he said. “One class had no French teacher for several months just before the French baccalaureate, so they couldn’t even study all the set texts for their exam. Recently we needed a teacher for a subject taught through English, but when that teacher arrived they didn’t speak English.” The biggest youth protest movement in the country in decades brought hundreds of thousands on to the streets across France this week demonstrating against inequality in the French education system, decrepit schools, a lack of teachers and large class sizes. Hundreds of schools were blockaded, thousands of teenagers were arrested, and rights groups warned of alleged police brutality, with one child losing the use of eye and another losing a hand. Mohammed and his classmates, often supported by their parents and teachers, have been at the frontline, barricading their school, the Lycée Blaise-Cendrars, which is in one of mainland France’s poorest départements, Seine-Saint-Denis. They have voted to continue their protests next week, taking their grievances to the local mayor, elected officials and education representatives. Many local politicians have supported their demands. Even the French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, conceded that teenagers had “legitimate” concerns. Photos on the Sevran students’ phones showed broken classroom chairs, holes in walls, holes in ceilings, mould, buckets to catch leaks, faulty lights. They said basic needs weren’t met, with some toilets broken, others with no doors and often no toilet paper or soap. Video projectors and science equipment were lacking. “We’re not asking for luxury, just the basics to learn in decent conditions,” Mohammed said. “And yet police on horseback charged us when we were gathered to protest outside our school, firing teargas at us and making arrests. It’s so dangerous to be charged by a horse, it could kill you. I just ran, I was trying to help my classmates.” The high schools of Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburban area nudging against northern Paris, have been a driving force in the protests. The area has the youngest population in mainland France, one of the highest birthrates and the among the lowest average income. Local high schools have a high turnover of young teachers. Despite co-hosting the 2024 Paris Olympics, and numerous government plans to try to combat long-running problems of inequality and poverty, the area north-east of Paris is still disadvantaged compared with the capital. In 2005, Seine-Saint-Denis was the starting point for weeks of unrest on housing estates across France, leading to a state of national emergency being declared, after the death of two young boys hiding from police in an electricity substation. This week’s protests have shown that inequality and discrimination has not been addressed in the Paris suburbs and the mistrust between young people and police persists. Sevran’s Lycée Blaise-Cendrars, with more than 1,000 pupils, has been at the heart of protests about school conditions before. In 2024, students and teachers made a viral video about the state of classrooms, toilets and equipment. The local Île de France region said it had put in place a major refurbishment project for high school buildings. But the teenagers said key issues had not been addressed. “We’re starting at an unfair advantage because our parents aren’t as rich as others, they can’t buy us books, they can’t take us to films,” said Ilian, 17, whose family has Moroccan roots and whose father is a traffic warden. “We’re missing school during these protests, we risk falling behind in an exam year, we’re desperate to get back into class to study, but the conditions we’re facing are so bad we can’t stop until the government promises action.” The education ministry this week promised 3,000 teachers to urgently fill gaps, but teachers’ unions expressed doubts and said longer-term plans and more funding was needed, even if the government argues there is little spare cash. Children’s mental health is also an issue in Seine-Saint-Denis. Ilian has been waiting to see a child psychiatrist for months. At the high school, there was no school nurse and a lack of support staff for children with disabilities, he said. “The police look down on us as if we’re animals”, Ilian said. “They talk to us with such cruelty.” He told local politicians that some teenagers alleged police had made racial insults against them during protests. Stéphane Troussel, the Socialist head of the Seine-Saint-Denis département council who met the pupils this week, said: “It’s intolerable that policing is causing part of the difficulties.” He called for the police to stop using a type of rubber-bullet launcher, after they suspended use of stun grenades following injuries. The French interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, has defended policing tactics. Stéphane Blanchet, the mayor of Sevran, said he supported the school protesters’ demands. He said many in his town of 52,000 people, with a higher than average poverty rate, felt “relegated” and forgotten by the state. Sarah, 17, who wanted to study at an elite Paris engineering faculty, and whose warehouse worker father was proud she was protesting and meeting the mayor, said teenagers in the banlieue “really feel abandoned”. She said: “We’ve been surprised and so appreciative of other teenagers in better-off places in France marching in the streets to support us this week. We know we’re disadvantaged and that we have to work 10 times as hard as others to escape discrimination against our postcode. But we can’t learn properly in these conditions when we’re not even guaranteed a chair to sit on in school.” Students’ names have been changed

France’s dilemma: protesters demand spending as markets require fiscal restraint

Eight years have passed since rising fuel prices brought the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) demonstrators to the streets of France, prompting the first big crisis of Emmanuel Macron’s time in the Élysée Palace. As the French president contemplates his exit next year, turmoil has again gripped the streets in the form of student protests, but this time the financial markets are unhappy too. Investors are concerned about the government’s failure to bring spending under control and end a long period of “fiscal incontinence”. Financial markets are unnerved by similar trends in the UK, the US and more recently Italy, causing jitters in global bond markets. But it’s France that has become the biggest worry, hemmed in by debts across the public and private sectors, limiting their scope to dig the country out of a deepening hole. France’s debt-to-GDP stood at 115.6% in 2025, while its budget deficit was 5.1%, compared with 94.3% and 4.3% for the UK respectively. In Britain, the chancellor, John Healey, is on course to reduce the budget deficit this year and in 2027. His French counterpart, Roland Lescure, has promised to follow suit after a rise to 5.4% this year, but has yet to say how. ‘I am panicking’ One victim of the uncertainty is business investment. A survey by Medef, France’s largest employer federation, showed 82% of firms were pessimistic about the impact of the next government’s economic policy. In a warning to all politicians, 66% said their business would become vulnerable or even go bankrupt if economic policy remained deadlocked for the next five years. A rescue operation could be mounted by the European Central Bank (ECB), but France would demand unconditional support when the ECB’s rules say bailouts must come with strict conditions. Antonio Fatas, a professor of economics at Insead, the European business school, says the political and economic situation has pushed France to the edge of a financial collapse. “I am very worried about the economic situation because growth is low and it is difficult to see how the dynamics change. Then you have the debt numbers, which are bad, and the financial markets are thinking the government is not in control. “If I look at the political situation, I am panicking. That’s because too many political parties are saying let France burn. They want a crisis, believing it will improve their share of the vote.” There is much about the economic situation in France that mirrors what has happened in the UK and the US. A huge spending splurge during the Covid pandemic was followed by another round of subsidies to offset the worst side-effects from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Investors have become wary of lending to all three countries, but the rise in interest rates is strongest in France. Last week, the yield, or interest rate, on ⁠10-year French bonds hit the highest level since July 2002, just short of 5%. Yields go up when bond prices go down. Japanese investors, typically strong supporters of France as a haven for their savings, have been instrumental in the panic after they found better returns on home turf, heaping further pain on the French treasury. Political turmoil According to many metrics, it is difficult to see why France should be so badly affected. The French economy has many things going for it, from relatively low electricity prices to better than average infrastructure. The schools that are the focus of recent protests are better funded than the OECD average. On the debit side of the ledger, Macron’s plan to raise the pension age from 62 to 64, saving tens of billions of euros from an almost entirely socialised retirement system, stalled at 62 and nine months after parliament was deadlocked after the 2024 snap election. This might have mattered less if the economy was growing, but Macron’s much-vaunted economic revival remains stuck in first gear. Laurent Warlouzet, a professor of history at the Sorbonne, says it is understandable that international investors are confused about France when Marine Le Pen, the frontrunner in presidential elections next year, says she will roll back the retirement age to 62 and at the same time introduce a “debt brake” via a referendum, restricting further borrowing. He said: “The far right used to be a spendthrift populist force, especially under Le Pen’s leadership, broadening the appeal of National Rally voters in the country’s rust belts. In 2016–17, she still wanted France to leave the eurozone, which she regarded as a straitjacket.” Warlouzet, the author of Liberty, Solidarity and Community: capitalism and European integration, 1945 to the present, added: “Nowadays, Le Pen has become an improbable fiscal hawk. How can she reconcile this with her voters’ demands for more nurses, teachers, police officers and judges?” ‘Too big to save’ Erik Britton, the director of Fathom Consulting, an international advisory firm, says the prospect of a runoff between Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the leftwing La France Insoumise (LFI), and Le Pen next April has spooked investors more than the failure to bring down the annual deficit. “What has changed is the likely runoff. In the second round, it now looks likely that Le Pen will contest the presidential election against Mélenchon from the far left. Le Pen’s election might mean a 20% risk of Frexit: Mélenchon’s election, though less likely on current polling, would have a much higher risk of Frexit.” Britton says the collapse of the centre ground would have implications far beyond its borders. “Where France goes, the euro area as a whole tends to follow. If it led to another test of the euro, all the considerations about debt and debt mutualisation would resurface, and bond yields would pop right across the euro area (perhaps with the exception of Germany) and beyond.” It may seem improbable for financial market traders to consider France’s exit from the euro when it has occupied a central position in the single currency since its inception. Yet it is understood several eurozone finance ministers and ECB officials have made representations to the French government, urging it to devise a budget formula that will gain a majority in parliament and a win over leading lenders. Without a budget, France may be left to fend for itself. And if that means traders boycott French bonds without a huge interest rate premium, the country may be forced to default on its debts. A bailout would also be expensive. As the US Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said recently: “If France does need to be bailed out, it would be extremely expensive. As the second largest economy in the eurozone, France may have crossed the line from too big to fail to too big to save” Dhaval Joshi, an independent City economist, said: “Ultimately therefore, France will have to make painful adjustments to bring its debt maths back under control. Just like Italy, Spain (and, of course, Greece) did a decade ago, from which these southern European economies have emerged much stronger. “The crucial question is how much political pain France must go through before it makes, or is forced to make, this adjustment.” The head of France’s central bank, Emmanuel ⁠Moulin, denied last week that France needed help from the ECB, but inflamed the situation by adding the rider, “not at this point”. Albert Edwards, a senior global strategist at Société Générale, said France may survive the onslaught from bonds market traders – some of them termed vigilantes for their habit of sniffing out weak nations – should another country begin to look vulnerable. “Although France has been in the crosshairs recently, the bond vigilantes’ focus is merely rolling from one market to another. Next month their attention might be back on Japan, the UK or indeed the US. “It is the way of the bond vigilantes to jab away and test each market to find out which is the weakest before launching an all-out attack,” he said.

Hurricane Isaias makes landfall in Florida and hammers Gulf coast

Hurricane Isaias crashed into the US Gulf coast on Friday as a dangerous category 2 storm, hammering communities in Alabama and the Florida panhandle with damaging winds, heavy rain, flooding and life-threatening storm surges. The first hurricane of the Atlantic season made landfall near Destin, Florida, the National Hurricane Center said. It had maximum sustained winds of 105 mph (169 kph). The storm weakened to just below major hurricane status before it came ashore. “The storm is here. Buckle down at this point. Don’t be getting out on the roads,” Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said at a news conference, adding flash flooding would be a hazard “throughout the region”. In Pensacola, about 50 miles (80km) west of Destin an Agence France-Presse reporter witnessed howling winds rip the roofs from some homes and businesses, snapping tree branches as the power went out. “Things are flying really fast, and I’ve never seen wind this fast before, so it’s intense, it’s scary,” Jonathan Ramos, a 40-year-old government employee, said from his hotel in Pensacola, where the power went out. “I don’t recommend people coming down here for fun to do this.” President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House late Friday night: “We’re watching it very closely, the hurricane,” adding that it was “under control”. Forecasters had expected Isaias to weaken from its peak earlier on Friday as a major category 3 hurricane because of shifts in wind speed. But even as a weaker storm system, the NHC warned of a ‌life-threatening storm surge affecting the Gulf Coast as dangerous hurricane conditions and flash floods spread inland. The hurricane is expected to cross Alabama and into the Tennessee Valley on the weekend, the ‌agency added. Warnings included a storm surge of up to 7ft (2.1 meters) along the Alabama-Florida line, and powerful wind gusts reaching parts of northern Georgia. In the Florida Panhandle, Isaias’s early impacts also came into view. In Panama city beach, Noaa officials observed a water level 5.4 feet (1.64 meters) above average. About 125 miles west, at the Pensacola city hall, a wind gust up to 102 mph (164km/h) was recorded. Powerful gusts of wind and heavy rainfall appeared to down the canopy of a Crestview gas station on Friday evening, according to a video captured by meteorologist Nick Stewart. The tattered cover hung on top of a filling station. “The storm is here. Buckle down at this point. Don’t be getting out on the roads,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said at a news conference, adding that flash flooding would be a hazard “throughout the region”. The governors of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida all declared states of emergency ahead of the storm’s arrival, urging some residents of coastal communities to evacuate and many more to prepare for the storm’s likely violent arrival. Alabama governor Kay Ivey announced shortly before the hurricane made landfall that Donald Trump had approved the emergency declaration for her state. “This will help cut tape for our federal partners to aid in any response,” Ivey said. The Mobile office of the National Weather Service warned parts of Florida could see “extremely dangerous” tornado-like winds. By Friday evening, nearly 500,000 customers had lost power across Alabama and Florida, according to PowerOutage.com. “Things are going to get really, really treacherous,” Jamie Rhome, deputy director for the National Hurricane Center, told the AP. Florida’s national guard deployed roughly 5,000 soldiers and airmen to aid with the response, the AP reported. Some prisons were also evacuating their incarcerated populations. Most flights were grounded at several airports in Florida’s Panhandle. The state guard has deployed about 400 soldiers to assess the hurricane’s damage and assist with route clearance, among other duties. The Florida fish and wildlife conservation commission has readied 10 airboats, 18 shallow-draft boats, nine ATVs and six larger platform vessels in the event of damage or flooding. Uber has also partnered with the state to offer free-round trips, up to $40 each way, to and from state-approved evacuation shelters. Isaias is notable as one of the two latest-forming Atlantic hurricanes on record, tying a record set on 8 October 1905. None of the eight previous named storms of the 2026 Atlantic season intensified above tropical storm status. Ahead of the storm, oil and gas producers shut down a significant share of offshore production in the Gulf, which accounts for almost 15% of crude pumped annually in the US. In a sign of how serious the warnings are, dozens of Waffle Houses in the Florida Panhandle were closed, according to the company’s website. The beloved Southern breakfast chain is known for staying open through severe weather and often is a measuring stick of a storm’s severity. Kelsei Frazier, a Florida native living in Pace who is no stranger to hurricanes, knows all about the Waffle House Index. “We joke because if Waffle House is still open, then you know it’s not a bad hurricane, but all the Waffle Houses that I know of within at least a normal range from us are closed,” said Frazier. “Which is a pretty big deal.” Associated Press contributed reporting.