Read the daily news to learn English

Iran war live updates: US temporarily lets India buy Russian oil amid energy fears; Israeli military launches strikes on Beirut

Donald Trump has pushed back against Iranian claims that it is ready for a ground invasion by US and Israeli forces. “It’s a waste of time,” the US president told NBC News. “They’ve lost everything. They’ve lost their Navy. They’ve lost everything they can lose.” He was responding to Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, who told the US network on Thursday that such a move would be a “big disaster” for the US and Israel. “We are confident that we can confront them,” said Araghchi. In a phone interview with NBC, Trump also spoke further about his plan to influence the future of Iran – talking in vague terms about who he wants to lead the country, but declining to name names. “We want to go in and clean out everything,” said Trump. “We don’t want someone who would rebuild over a 10-year period.” “We want them to have a good leader,” he added. “We have some people who I think would do a good job.”

Ukraine war briefing: Trump urges Zelenskyy to ‘get a deal done’ with Russia

US president Donald Trump on Thursday again urged Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy to strike a deal with Russia, claiming that Russian president Vladimir Putin was prepared to reach an agreement. “Zelenskyy, he has to get on the ball, and he has to get a deal done,” Trump said in an interview with Politico. Trump, returning to language he used during a tense White House meeting a year ago where he and vice-president JD Vance publicly berated Zelenskyy, suggested the Ukrainian president was in a weak position and needed to make compromises, saying “Now he’s got even less cards” and repeated his insistence that “Putin is ready to make a deal”, without providing evidence. Trump has long said that US support for Ukraine is wasteful to the US and has spoken admirably in the past about Putin, whom he invited to Alaska in August 2025. Zelenskyy said the US and its allies in the Middle East are seeking Ukraine’s expertise in countering Iran’s Shahed drones. The Ukrainian president said various countries, including the US, have approached Ukraine for help in defending against Iranian drones. He said he had spoken in recent days to the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait about possible cooperation. Russia has fired tens of thousands of Shaheds at Ukraine since it invaded its neighbor just over four years ago. Iran has responded with the same type of drones to joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian targets. Ukrainian foreign minister Andrii Sybiha accused Hungary early on Friday of detaining seven employees of Ukraine’s state savings bank while they were transporting cash from Austria back to Ukraine. Sybiha was writing on X after Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said Budapest would force Ukraine with “political and financial tools” to reopen the Druzhba pipeline carrying Russian oil to Hungarian refineries. Hungary is one of the few European countries to maintain close ties with Russia since its Ukraine offensive. “In fact, we are talking about Hungary taking hostages and stealing money,” Sybiha wrote. “If this is the ‘force’ announced earlier today by Mr Orban, then this is a force of a criminal gang. This is state terrorism and racketeering.” Repair crews have restored an external line to the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in south-eastern Ukraine nearly a month after it was taken out of operation, the head of Russia’s nuclear energy corporation said. Alexei Likhachev, director general of Rosatom, said in a statement that repairs to the Ferosplavna-1 line connecting the plant to the power grid were completed late on Thursday afternoon. Europe’s largest nuclear plant, with six reactors, was seized by Russia soon after Moscow’s troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022. A downed Ukrainian drone fell next to a five-storey apartment building in the port of Sevastopol in Russian-held Crimea, injuring nine people and causing considerable damage, the Russian-appointed governor said early on Friday. Mikhail Razvozhayev said the drone was filled with metal pieces and explosives fell next to the building, badly damaging it. Sevastopol hosts the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014.

Explosions heard across Tel Aviv – as it happened

This liveblog is closing now but you can continue to follow live coverage of the Middle East crisis here. Thank you for reading.

How Flightradar24 became the go-to platform for the world to watch global aviation crises unfold

Mikael Robertsson and Olov Lindberg did not set out to build one of the pre-eminent monitors of global airspace. In a bid to draw more eyes to their Swedish flight price comparison portal, the entrepreneurs added a page charting air traffic. That page became Flightradar24, the portal that people around the world now turn to when there is chaos – and drama – in the skies. “Very soon this flight tracker … became more popular than the price comparison [tool] itself,” recalled Robertsson, who spoke to the Guardian from the firm’s office in Stockholm. In 2010, when the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano released a vast cloud of ash that grounded flights across Europe, millions turned to Flightradar24 to monitor flight movements (or lack thereof) in real time. It was the first time the platform attracted an influx of curious users, keen to watch a major event unfold in real time. It wouldn’t be the last. “You can pick any kind of major aviation event you want after that,” said Fredrik Lindahl, chief executive of Flightradar24 – from the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in 2014 to the onset of the Covid pandemic, which crippled the travel industry in 2020. While crises affecting millions can trigger a sharp increase in the platform’s audience, so too can the flight of a single individual. When the late Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was evacuated to Berlin to be treated for suspected poisoning in 2020, and when he returned to Russia in 2021, users followed both journeys live in their droves. In recent days, as the US-Israel war on Iran rapidly cleared the airspace over the Middle East, prompting widespread travel chaos that disrupted hundreds of thousands of travellers, viewers from around the world gravitated to the platform. On Saturday, after the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, and Iran deployed a barrage of retaliatory missiles across the Middle East, countries across the region swiftly shut their airspace. On Flightradar24 the impact on aviation was clear. With large swaths of the Middle East closed to air traffic, two narrow flight corridors emerged, crammed with little yellow plane symbols – the first to the north of Iran, through the Caucasus, but below Ukraine’s closed airspace, and the second to the south, through Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Oman. “For each big aviation event, we do get a big traffic spike, and then it sort of dies down,” Lindahl said. “But the traffic stays slightly higher than it was before.” No event has yet drawn more attention to Flightradar24 than the journey of the late Queen’s coffin in 2022, when 4.8 million people followed the plane’s short journey from Edinburgh to Northolt. How does it work? Flightradar24 tracks all this through a network of about 58,000 radio receivers, including a dozen in Antarctica. It started with just two, installed by Robertsson and Lindberg on their respective homes, after they learned it was possible to monitor airspace with devices bought from the UK. “It sounded like something impossible,” said Robertsson. “Like, how can you track air traffic with a small box? I would probably classify it as scam if I found something like this today.” Every aircraft has a transmitter, sending out flight information – its callsign, position, direction, speed and altitude – which is collected by receivers. By early 2010, up to 40,000 people were visiting Flightradar24 each day. When Eyjafjallajökull erupted that April, it spewed out a gigantic ash cloud which closed over 300 airports, grounded more than 100,000 flights – and gave rise to an extraordinary surge of interest in global airspace. “I think we had, like, four million visitors in a couple of hours,” said Robertsson. As war broke out in Iran and the surrounding region on Saturday, visits to Flightradar24 were more than double the norm. “Saturday was a spike, then we went down a bit on Sunday, and then a bigger spike on Monday,” said Robertsson. “And now we’re slowly, slowly, losing some traffic again.” Flightradar24 has built a business around this intermittent audience, marketing a premium tier with more data to its most avid users. Subscriptions account for about 70% of its revenue, and it also sells commercial packages to industry operators, as well as advertising. The platform is reliant on aviation enthusiasts. “We’re really trying to have a very strong free product because … what underlies all this is like the crowdsourced aspect of Flightradar24, with people around the world hosting our receivers,” said Lindahl. To maintain a reliable map, “we need to have a strong product, that a lot of people are exposed to”, he added. “And then, some of them will become interested enough to maybe think ‘oh, maybe I should host one of these receivers.’” Today Flightradar24, which sold a 35% stake to Sprints Capital, a London-based venture capital firm, in September 2025, has a base of more than 1.5 million paying subscribers, and typically attracts about 60 million free viewers to its website each month. “It will definitely be higher in March,” said Lindahl.

‘I think I could run even faster’: the NZ teenager shattering athletics records

Before the teenage New Zealand runner, Sam Ruthe, took to Boston University’s famous indoor track in January, he told his father he was aiming to run a 3.48-minute mile. The 16-year-old had already stunned the athletics world in 2025, when he became the youngest person ever to break the four-minute mile barrier – aged 15 – but his father, Ben Ruthe, raised his eyebrows over his son’s aspirations for his next race, which if achieved could mean he will be considered for New Zealand Commonwealth Games selection. “I thought, for him to qualify for the Commonwealth Games, he would have to run faster than anybody his age in the history of the world by five seconds,” Ben said. “And then he did.” Sam had intended to fall in behind his training partner, the New Zealand Olympian Sam Tanner, at the John Thomas Terrier Classic – a prestigious annual indoor meet at Boston University– on 31 January. But shortly into the race Tanner injured his leg and pulled out. Ruthe appeared unfazed, overtaking the Belgian Olympian Pieter Sisk in the final lap to cross the finish line in first place, with a time of 3.48.88. It was the fastest mile ever run by an athlete under 18, and was the 11th fastest time ever recorded for an indoor mile. Sam eclipsed the New Zealand mile record of 3.49.08, set by John Walker in 1982. After the race, Sam told a television crew that he had just travelled 50 hours from New Zealand to attend the race, and was “feeling a bit heavy”. “I think I could run even faster but I’m super stoked with that,” he said, with a degree of humility that has become typical of Sam’s reactions to his accomplishments. He has been billed as a “phenomenon”, a “sensation” and a “prodigy” by media and the athletics world but he is “not aiming for records”, he told the Guardian in February at the end of his US trip. “I’m just lucky to be in fast races. If I can race people in a race that goes fast then my time ends up being quick. Running a fast time doesn’t mean a lot to me as there are always a lot of people faster, even if they are a bit older.” Sam continues to shatter records. Alongside his international feats, he holds every under-20 middle-distance record in New Zealand. “He’s put himself in the top 20 or so men in the world for the mile distance, which is unheard of for someone so young,” Craig Kirkwood, Sam’s trainer, said. “It’s hard to wrap your head around just how fast he ran, and how well he is going for a kid his age – it’s remarkable.” When asked what makes Sam so good, Kirkwood said there were “just so many things” that needed to stack up. In Sam’s case, those “things” stack up neatly – not only does he come from an incredible line of talented runners, he is dedicated to the sport and has a supportive home life. Ruthe also lives in Tauranga, the same city as Kirkwood – who is one of the country’s foremost athletics coaches. Sam’s mother, Jess Ruthe, has taken out national titles in middle-distance running, competed at world cross-country championships and won the Auckland marathon six months after he was born. She was running up to 100km a week while seven months pregnant. Jess herself comes from stellar running stock. Her mother, Rosemary, won gold for Scotland in the 1970 Commonwealth games, while her father, Trevor, was a top marathon runner. Meanwhile, Ben has also won the Auckland marathon and represented New Zealand at world cross-country championships. Ruthe’s sister Daisy, 14, recently won her first under-20 3,000m New Zealand championship. ‘Humble and incredibly disciplined’ Much is made of Sam’s extraordinary genetics, but Ben also credits his sons’ talent to an active childhood spent playing tag at the beach and hiking, a good diet and healthy sleep habits. Sam showed promise as a runner early, bounding ahead of his peers at primary school cross-country races. His parents delayed his training until he was almost 14 to ensure he could handle the pressure of becoming an athlete – a move that Ben believes has paid off. “He’s really humble and incredibly disciplined … he’s just comfortable and he enjoys it.” Moreover, Kirkwood’s coaching has been transformative. He “takes the raw ingredients and launches it on to the international stage”, Ben said. Kirkwood started training junior squads roughly 10 years ago. He takes a “cautious” approach to training: three sessions a week to slowly build up skills. While Sam “shines pretty bright” in the squad, his coach says the group environment is a big part of his success. Sam is a “quick study”, with an intuitive sense of the race and an ability to react to minute changes “almost perfectly every time”, Kirkwood said. With the US event now behind him, Ruthe is looking towards selection for the Commonwealth Games and competing in the World Junior champs in Oregon in August – but he is already tempering expectations, suggesting his school demands may slow down his running pace. Whether he continues his extraordinary streak or not at those events, the world will be watching and they can sure of one thing: Sam will be thoroughly enjoying himself. “When I’m racing I go into a space where my mind goes blank and I feel my body takes over … those brief moments are ones that I really enjoy as it feels like I’m outside my own body,” he said. “I just love it.”

Israel launches huge strikes against south Beirut after mass evacuation order

Israel has launched massive strikes against the southern suburbs of Beirut just hours after its military ordered the entire population of the area – more than 500,000 people – to evacuate immediately. The Israel Defense Forces had told all residents of the area to “save your lives and evacuate your homes immediately”, prompting an exodus of the Lebanese capital’s population in scenes of panic, before its warplanes launched strikes against what it claimed were Hezbollah targets in the area. The area covered by the order included several hospitals and government ministries. The strikes marked a significant escalation in Israel’s growing offensive in Lebanon, which began after Hezbollah fired missiles and drones into Israel on Monday. Footage on Thursday evening showed smoke billowing over the neighbourhood of Dahiya. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said that the strikes would make the Beirut suburb “look like [Gaza’s] Khan Younis”, a section of southern Gaza that has been almost entirely destroyed by Israeli bombs. On the same day, Tehran launched retaliatory airstrikes against Israel and US bases across the region, and Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, promised a further escalation. “If you think you’ve seen something, just wait,” he said. At the White House, Donald Trump said that members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) would be given immunity if they threw down their weapons, but otherwise would face “guaranteed death”. He said the offer for immunity extended to Iran’s military and the police. Trump claimed he should be involved in choosing Iran’s next supreme leader to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a US-Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war. Trump said Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the late supreme leader – the country’s head of state and commander-in-chief – would be an “unacceptable” choice. “We want to be involved in the process of choosing the person who is going to lead Iran into the future,” Trump told Reuters. “We don’t have to go back every five years and do this again and again.” Iran expanded its campaign of strikes, firing more ballistic missiles towards Israel, striking an airport in Azerbaijan, and raising fears that the conflict – now affecting 14 countries across the Middle East and beyond – could spread further. The Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Thursday that the decision to assassinate Khamenei was made in November, far predating the breakdown in the nuclear programme negotiations that Donald Trump claimed led to the US launching a preemptive strike on Iran. The original timeline was for Israel to target Khamenei in the middle of 2026 but Netanyahu moved it up the schedule after riots broke out in Iran, Katz said. The claim could bolster critics of Trump, who say that Israel had dragged the US into a large war in the Middle East with Iran. Secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said earlier that the US launched the strike on Iran because it expected to be targeted after the Israeli attack. Katz has also said that Khamenei’s successors will be “unequivocal targets for elimination”. Thursday’s sweeping evacuation order for southern Beirut was unprecedented in its scale: even during the 13-month war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2024, no evacuation order so broad was issued. Traffic was at a standstill throughout the city and thousands of people resorted to walking, with women pushing strollers holding infants through bumper-to-bumper traffic. Families made appeals for rescue services to help extract elderly people who could not leave their homes on their own. The Israeli military spokesperson provided preapproved routes north and east which it said people should use to flee – a tactic reminiscent of evacuation orders Israel issued in Gaza. At least 102 people have been killed and 638 injured in Lebanon by Israeli airstrikes, Lebanon’s ministry of health reported before Thursday night’s bombardment. The war, now in its sixth day, has also killed at least 1,230 people in Iran and about a dozen people in Israel. Six US soldiers have been killed. The evacuation order was issued just a day after the Israeli military ordered all residents to flee the area south of the Litani River, which compromises about 10% of the country. Israeli and Hezbollah soldiers were fighting in south Lebanon, according to UN peacekeepers in the area, as Israel continued its retaliatory campaign against the pro-Iran force that launched missiles into Israel on Monday. The US and Israel continued their bombardment of Iran, hitting key ballistic missile launchers, weapons caches and security installations on Thursday. Israel’s military also warned residents in eastern parts of Tehran to evacuate, while Iranian media reported blasts across the capital. “Today is worse than yesterday,” one resident of the city told Reuters. “We have nowhere to go. It is like a warzone. Help us.” Sri Lanka said its navy had recovered at least 87 bodies after a US submarine sank an Iranian warship, IRIS Dena, on Wednesday. Thirty-two sailors were rescued out of a total crew of almost 130. The country reported that another Iranian ship had arrived in its waters, without reporting further details. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, reacted with fury to the US’s sinking of Dena, accusing it of carrying out an “atrocity of sea”. “Mark my words: The US will come to bitterly regret [the] precedent it has set,” Araghchi said in a post on X, while a senior Iranian cleric called for the exacting of “Trump’s blood” on state TV. Iran’s retaliatory campaign of strikes has hit targets as far afield as Cyprus and created the world’s largest travel disruption since Covid as countries shut down their airspaces, and caused oil prices to spike. Gulf countries reported more incoming Iranian projectiles throughout the day, which Iran said were targeted at US bases and personnel stationed there. A drone was shot down near Al Dhafra airbase in the United Arab Emirates, wounding six people when shrapnel fell. Qatar said there was a missile attack on the capital, Doha, and Saudi Arabia announced it had destroyed a drone. A tanker was attacked off the coast of Kuwait but it was unclear if the ship was damaged. In Azerbaijan, a drone strike wounded four people near an airport in Nakhchivan, in an area bordering Iran, while another drone fell close to a school. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, said Iran had committed a “groundless act of terror and aggression” and said the military was prepared to retaliate. Tehran denied the claims, and the general staff of the Iranian armed forces denounced the allegations as baseless. Iran also targeted the headquarters of Iranian Kurdish forces in northern Iraq as it increased its strikes on Kurdish forces in Iran and Iraq. The attacks came as the US and Israel pressed forward with an apparent plan to help thousands of Kurdish fighters to push into Iran as part of a ground operation.

Iran war briefing: Israeli military tells hundreds of thousands to leave Beirut

The IDF has begun striking what it describes as Hezbollah infrastructure in the Dahiya neighbourhood, a densely populated commercial and residential area in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The IDF had earlier issued forced evacuation orders for the whole population of Beirut’s southern suburbs – home to 500,000 people – sparking widespread panic and leading to huge queues of traffic as people tried to flee. It comes in spite of calls from world leaders including Emmanuel Macron urging Israel not to expand the war into Lebanon. According to the Lebanese health ministry, Israeli strikes have killed at least 123 people and injured 683 in Lebanon since Monday. Donald Trump has claimed – without evidence – that Iran’s air force and navy are “gone”. Speaking during an event at the White House, the US president said: “We’re destroying more of Iran’s missile and drone capability every single hour – knocking them out.” He went on: “So [Iran] have no air force, they have no air defence. All of their airplanes are gone, their communications are gone. Other than that, they’re doing quite well. Their navy is gone, [they lost] 24 ships in three days, that’s a lot of ships,” he said, along with 60% of Iran’s missiles and 64% of its missile launchers.” Echoing comments he made earlier this week, Trump added that the US military and Israel are “totally demolish[ing]” Iranian targets “far ahead of schedule”. Trump also said he must “be involved in the appointment” of Iran’s next leader as he was in Venezuela, and dismissed the idea of the assassinated ayatollah’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, succeeding his father as supreme leader as “unacceptable”. Read more about the US president’s remarks here. The UK’s defence secretary John Healey declined to rule out Britain joining US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Read more about that here. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he received a request from the United States “for specific support” in dealing with Iran’s Shahed attack drones, as the US and its allies in the Middle East seek Ukraine’s expertise in countering such attacks from Russia. “I gave instructions to provide the necessary means and ensure the presence of Ukrainian specialists who can guarantee the required security,” Zelenskyy wrote on X. “Ukraine helps partners who help ensure our security and protect the lives of our people.” More on that here. Azerbaijan has responded strongly to an alleged drone strike in the Nakhchivan region near the border of Iran. Although Iran has denied any involvement, Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, has ordered the country’s armed forces to be at “the highest level of readiness” for any retaliatory action and summoned Iran’s ambassador to the foreign ministry in Baku. Iran claimed it had hit a US oil tanker in the northern Persian Gulf and that the vessel was on fire. There was no immediate confirmation of the incident or comment from the US. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it maintains full control of the strait of Hormuz and has effectively closed it to oil and gas exports. Iran continued to launch a wave of missiles at Israel, sending millions of residents into bomb shelters, just hours after moves to limit Trump’s ability to prolong the war were blocked in Washington. Other countries in the Gulf region continued to deal with the fallout: six people were injured in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates from falling debris after air defences intercepted a drone, and Qatar officials urged residents to stay inside as air defences worked to halt an attack. The ministry of defence in Bahrain said on Thursday that their air defences had destroyed 75 missiles and 123 drones since the start of the conflict. The Israeli military said it was beginning a new widespread wave of attacks in Tehran. Israel also said it carried out strikes on Beirut targeting Hezbollah; while Lebanese state media reported an Israeli drone strike killed a Hamas official. The World Health Organization said it had verified more than a dozen attacks on health infrastructure in Iran amid the US-Israeli campaign. Four healthcare workers have been killed and 25 others injured, according to the organisation.

EU agrees to chop meaty names from vegetarian and vegan food products

EU lawmakers have agreed to ban meaty names such as steak and bacon for vegetarian and vegan foods, but “veggie burgers” and “meat-free sausages” will remain on the table. Negotiators from the European parliament and EU council of ministers found a recipe for compromise on rules for food names on Thursday, although critics said they were creating needless complexity. The lawmakers agreed to ban the use of 31 meat-related names to describe vegetarian and vegan products, including bacon, beef, chicken, drumstick, loin, ribs, steak, T-bone and wing, according to a statement published on the EU council website. But an earlier proposal to prohibit names such as burger and sausage was abandoned. The naming rules are part of a broader regulation aimed at strengthening the position of farmers in food supply markets. The agreement has to clear further procedural hurdles, which are usually formalities, although leave open the possibility of last-minute haggles. Céline Imart, a French centre-right MEP, who devised the amendment to ban meaty names, hailed the outcome as “an undeniable success for our livestock farmers”. Imart, also a cereal farmer, said the agreement reached on Thursday “recognises the value of livestock farmers’ work and protects their products, fruits of unique know-how, against a form of unfair competition”. Anna Strolenberg, a Dutch Green MEP who negotiated on the issue, said farmers would lose out and said the law should have done more to strengthen their bargaining power. She also said: “Fortunately, the conservative word police has failed to ban the veggie burger. Unfortunately, a number of other words still end up on the blacklist. That’s a shame; Europe should be backing innovative entrepreneurs, not putting new obstacles in their way.” The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) described the banning of some names as regrettable. “Consumers want to eat healthier and need convenient and affordable options,” said Agustín Reyna, the BEUC director general. “These names make it easy for those who want to integrate these options in their diets, and the new rules will increase confusion and are simply not necessary.” Maria Panayiotou, the minister for agriculture of Cyprus, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said: “By improving support for farmers and enhancing the role of producer organisations, we are giving farmers additional tools to secure a more predictable and sustainable future.”