Read the daily news to learn English

Middle East crisis live: Kuwait mistakenly shoots down three US fighter planes, as US says Iran’s ‘reckless’ attacks threaten regional stability

The Israeli military said it killed Hezbollah’s intelligence chief, Hussein Makled, overnight. The IDF also said earlier it killed Sayed Yahya Hamidi, who it said was Iran’s deputy minister of intelligence for ‘Israel affairs’, and Jalal Pour Hossein, who it claimed was the head of the espionage division (at the ministry of intelligence). We have not been able to independently verify these claims.

EU considers response to Middle East conflict as countries prepare to evacuate citizens – Europe live

In the meantime, the Cypriot government has confirmed that the evacuation of Paphos airport is now over, but the airport continues to report disruptions in its flight schedule for this afternoon with delays and divertions.

Oil prices rise and stock markets dip as Iran war threatens global economy

Oil prices rose and stock markets came under pressure on Monday after intense US-Israeli strikes on Iran prompted fears of significant global economic disruption. Brent crude jumped by as much as 13% during early trading – to hit $82 a barrel, a 14-month high – as the effective closure of the strait of Hormuz, one of the most important arteries for global trade, intensified concerns over oil supplies. While oil later fell back slightly from its initial highs, Brent remained up by 6% at nearly $78 a barrel. Markets fell in Europe, with London’s FTSE 100 down 1% to 10,798 points. IAG, the parent company of British Airways, and easyJet were among the worst performers, as thousands of flights were cancelled, down 5% and3%, respectively. However, the surge in the crude price pushed up shares in the oil companies BP and Shell, up about 5% and 3% respectively. Shares in the weapons manufacturer BAE Systems jumped by 4.5% as investors piled into defence stocks. Other European stock markets fell on Monday, with the German Dax index down by 1.6%, the French CAC 40 down 1.5%, the Italian FTSE MIB down 1.8% and the Spanish Ibex down 2.4%. European gas prices rose as much as 28%, the biggest increase since August 2023, on Monday morning. Power prices in Europe also rose on the higher gas and oil prices. The German year-ahead baseload contract rose 3.6% to €82.50 a megawatt-hour, while the equivalent French price rose by 1.2% to €51.00/MWh. QatarEnergy said on Monday it had halted production of liquefied natural gas after attacks on facilities in Ras Laffan and Mesaieed. In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 fell by nearly 2.4% as traders in Asia responded to the weekend’s developments. It later pulled back, to trade down 1.4%. Pre-market trading also put Wall Street on course to open lower on Monday. In Sydney, the ASX 200 opened down sharply, before recovering, to finish the day flat. China’s Shenzhen Composite fell 0.7%. Gold, often deemed a safe-haven asset by investors during times of crisis, rose 2.5% to $5,408 an ounce. Military strikes by the US and Israel on Iran showed no sign of lessening, with Donald Trump suggesting the conflict could last for four more weeks and saying that attacks would continue until US objectives were met. As prices rallied, all eyes were on the strait of Hormuz – with about a fifth of oil supplies and seaborne gas tankers passing through it. Within hours of Saturday’s US-Israeli strikes, Tehran had reportedly warned tankers in the strait that no ship would be allowed to pass through. Two ships have been attacked in the strait, one off Oman and the other off the UAE, according to United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), the British maritime security agency. While Iran has yet to officially confirm that the vital waterway has been blocked, marine tracking sites showed tankers piling up on either side of the strait wary of attack or maybe unable to get insurance for the voyage. The International Maritime Organization urged ships to avoid the strait of Hormuz. Arsenio Dominguez, its secretary general, expressed deep concern over reports that several seafarers had been wounded in attacks. “I urge all shipping companies to exercise maximum caution,” said Dominguez. “Where possible, vessels should avoid transiting the affected region until conditions improve.” Maersk, the shipping multinational, announced on Sunday it was halting passage through the strait of Hormuz and the Suez canal, another vital artery of the world economy, citing safety reasons. Some analysts suggested oil prices could exceed $100 a barrel unless flows through the strait of Hormuz were quickly restored. The Opec+ cartel of producing nations agreed on Sunday a modest oil output boost of 206,000 barrels a day for April, but a lot of that product still has to get out of the Middle East by tanker. Iran is one of the cartel’s largest producers, pumping 4.5% of global supplies, so any disruption to its own shipments is likely to have an impact on the wider market. “The disruption creates a dual supply shock: not only are current exports through the strait halted, but Opec+ additional volumes and ultimately most of Opec’s spare capacity – typically a key lever for balancing the global oil market – are inaccessible while the waterway remains closed,” analysts at the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie said in a note. In the UK, forecourt prices have already been rising in recent weeks but could climb further because of the conflict, according to the RAC. The RAC’s Simon Williams said: “Regardless of the current situation, petrol rose by a penny a litre in February and is likely to go up by another penny in the next week or so to an average of 134p a litre. “If oil were to climb to and stay at the $80 a barrel mark, then drivers could expect to pay an average of 136p for petrol. At $90, we’d be looking at over 140p a litre and $100 would take us nearer to 150p, but it’s all too soon to know.” • Reuters and AFP contributed to this report

Thousands of flights cancelled as world faces worst travel chaos since Covid pandemic

Thousands more flights were cancelled on Monday as the turmoil in global air travel caused by the US-Israel war on Iran continued, with hundreds of thousands of passengers already stranded. Gulf airports and airlines have suspended all operations until at least 10.00 GMT on Tuesday. Airline and travel share prices fell sharply after days of disruption, with Donald Trump indicating that the US military action could last another four weeks. Some carriers and travel firms are offering refunds or free changes to those due to travel in the coming weeks. Major Middle Eastern airports, including Dubai – the world’s busiest international hub – closed for a third consecutive day amid the most acute aviation shock since the Covid pandemic paralysed the industry. Flights across the Middle East have been cancelled, disrupting thousands of services so far, as international carriers continued to suspend their services. By 10am, according to the analysts Cirium, at least 1,555 flights to the Middle East had been cancelled, although it warned that the figures were artificially low owing to limited data coming from Iran and the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds more flights were scheduled on Monday. Cancellations most affected the Gulf carriers, all three of which now connect passengers worldwide via their hubs. Emirates, based in Dubai, and Etihad Airways, in Abu Dhabi, said flights to and from their hubs would not operate until late Tuesday morning, while Qatar Airways has suspended operations as long as Qatari airspace remains closed. Almost 2,800 flights were cancelled on Saturday, and 3,156 cancelled on Sunday, according to the tracking platform FlightAware. Some flights to Cyprus have also been affected, with easyJet cancelling three return services between Paphos and Larnaca and the UK on Monday after a drone hit the RAF base in Akrotiri. British Airways said it had cancelled Monday’s Larnaca service. Airspace over Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, Bahrain, the UAE and Qatar was still virtually empty as of Monday, according to the flight tracking website Flightradar24. The impact has spread far beyond the Middle East, with passengers stranded from Bali to Frankfurt. Air India cancelled flights on Sunday departing from Delhi, Mumbai and Amritsar for big cities in Europe and North America. As the conflict spread to Lebanon – with Israel carrying out airstrikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut after Iran-aligned Hezbollah launched rockets at Israel – much of the region’s airspace remained closed. Crew and pilots are now scattered across the world, complicating the process of resuming flights whenever airspace reopens. As many passengers struggled to find information on the status of planned journeys, gathering at some of the world’s busiest commercial airports amid widespread delays and cancellations, the uber-wealthy found an alternative route out of the Middle East. “Saudi Arabia is the only real option for people who want to get out of the region right now,” Ameerh Naran, the chief executive of the private jet brokerage Vimana Private, told Semafor, putting the cost of private jets from Riyadh to Europe at up to $350,000 (£260,000). The region and its airlines have become used to travel disruption over the past few years, but such a prolonged closure of the skies – more than 24 hours – and the shutdown of all three big Gulf transit hubs is unprecedented, analysts said. Shares in Tui, Europe’s largest travel company, dropped 7% in early trade, while the British Airways owner IAG was down 9%. Tui said it would be contacting all customers due to travel to the Middle East in the coming week, while still making arrangements to bring people back from Dubai and Qatar. BA has told passengers due to fly out from London to the Gulf, Israel or Jordan until 15 March that they can delay travel free of charge. It has cancelled all flights to the Gulf until the end of Tuesday. Up to 25,000 passengers could have flown on 74 flights to the Middle East today, according to Cirium. Some flights to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Jordan have also been cancelled but Egypt flights are so far unaffected. Shares in airlines including Lufthansa, Air France-KLM, Qantas and Singapore also all fell between 5% and 7%. Hotelier Accor and the cruise company Carnival also fell sharply. US airline shares dropped about 5% in pre-market trading as investors contemplated the impact of the Iran war on the aviation industry. Carriers around the world face higher oil prices after Brent crude jumped by as much as 13% to hit $80 a barrel, with analysts predicting they could climb as high as $100. “For everyone the main impact will come through oil prices, which will obviously take a bump upwards,” said the aviation adviser Bertrand Grabowski. Some flights that have run have been rerouted to avoid closed or restricted airspace. Iranian and Iraqi overflight routes had grown more important since the Russia-Ukraine war forced airlines to avoid both countries’ airspace. Middle East airspace closures are now squeezing airlines into narrower corridors, with fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan adding a further risk, noted Ian Petchenik, the communications director at Flightradar24. “The risk of protracted disruption is the main concern from a commercial aviation perspective,” he said. The Gulf is also a leading intersection for air cargo, putting further pressure on trade lanes on top of disruption at sea. AP and Reuters contributed to this report

UK RAF airbase in Cyprus hit by drone strike

A one-way attack drone struck the UK’s RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus at about midnight on Sunday, prompting a partial evacuation of the military facility. Two more drones were successfully intercepted on Monday morning, the Cypriot authorities said, as part of what appears to be a sustained targeting of the base on the third day of the war in the Middle East. It has not yet publicly determined from where the drones were launched, though officials said the first drone was launched before Keir Starmer announced the UK would allow the US to use its airbases to bomb Iranian missile sites. A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: “Our armed forces are responding to a suspected drone strike at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus at midnight local time. Our force protection in the region is at the highest level and the base has responded to defend our people.” A security alert put out to residents in the vicinity of Akrotiri by the British base’s administration on Sunday night advised residents to shelter in place until further notice “following a suspected drone impact”. On Monday morning, a Cypriot government spokesperson said: “Two unmanned aerial vehicles that were moving towards the direction of the British bases at Akrotiri were confronted in time.” Anti-drone measures had been stepped up at Akrotiri, the Ministry of Defence said, but these were insufficient to stop the first drone getting past the local defences. The incident is not thought to have caused any casualties and only limited damage. Family members of British military personnel have been asked leave to leave the base for their own safety, and will be based elsewhere in Cyprus until the alert passes. The drone struck hours after the UK agreed to let the US use British military bases to attack Iranian missile sites, but officials indicate the possible flight times mean it was launched before the prime minister announced the new policy. It is possible the drone could have been launched from Iran, though it may also have been fired by one of Iran’s proxies in the region, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon. Though the UK has tried to limit its involvement in the conflict so far, it is considered by Iran to be a close ally of the US. In a recorded statement on Sunday evening, Starmer said Iran’s approach was becoming more reckless and putting British lives at risk, leading to the decision to allow the US to use its military bases. He said British forces would not be directly involved in the strikes, and the bases would only be used for the “specific and limited defensive purpose” of targeting missile storage depots and launchers being used to attack Iran’s neighbours. “We have taken the decision to accept this request, to prevent Iran firing missiles across the region … killing innocent civilians … putting British lives at risk … and hitting countries that have not been involved,” he said. The US president, Donald Trump, has indicated he wants to use RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Diego Garcia – the largest of the Chagos islands in the Indian Ocean – most likely for stealth B-2 bombers which will attack Iran’s deep-lying missile silos with bunker busting bombs. The MoD confirmed on Monday that people who live at RAF Akrotiri were being moved to accommodation nearby on Cyprus “as a precautionary measure”. “Our base and personnel continue to operate as normal protecting the safety of Britain and our interests,” it added. On Monday morning, the president of Cyprus, Nikos Christodoulides, said the Akrotiri base was hit overnight by an unmanned Shahed drone which caused minor material damage. “I want to be clear: our country does not participate in any way and does not intend to be part of any military operation,” Christodoulides said in a statement. Britain retains sovereignty over the territory of two bases on Cyprus, which is a member of the EU. RAF Akrotiri covers a sprawling, square-shaped peninsula on the southern tip of the eastern Mediterranean island. The last time it was directly attacked was by Libyan militants in the mid-1980s. According to the MoD’s website, the joint operating base is “used as a forward mounting base for overseas operations in the Middle East and for fast jet training”. It is understood the UK government recently moved additional resources to bases in Cyprus as part of its operations in the Middle East. Hostilities in the Middle East entered their third day on Monday, with the US and Israel continuing to strike Iran after the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in an airstrike. Asked about the safety of hundreds of thousands of UK nationals in the region, Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday that about 102,000 people – of a possible total she put at 300,000 – had registered their presence with UK authorities.

Islam scholar Tariq Ramadan goes on trial in Paris accused of raping three women

The prominent Swiss academic and Islam scholar Tariq Ramadan will go trial in Paris on Monday on charges of raping three women in France between 2009 and 2016. Ramadan, who advised previous British governments on Islam and society, denies all the charges in a case that has been seen as one of the biggest repercussions of the #MeToo movement in France. Ramadan, 63, was a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford before taking a leave of absence in 2017 when rape allegations were first made against him. He took early retirement from Oxford in June 2021. Ramadan is accused of the rape of three women. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. Henda Ayari, 41, a former Salafist Muslim who is now a feminist campaigner, went to the police in 2017 to accuse Ramadan of rape, sexual violence, harassment and intimidation. She said he raped her in a hotel room in the east of Paris in the spring of 2012 during a conference where he was speaking. Another woman, known by the pseudonym Christelle, told investigators Ramadan raped her in a Lyon hotel room in October 2009 during another conference and subjected her to a violent attack. A third woman said Ramadan raped her in 2016. At the start of the investigation in 2017, Ramadan, who is married with four children, denied any form of sexual encounter with the first two women. In 2018, he changed his account, telling investigating judges that he did have sexual relations with Ayari and Christelle, but that they had sought the encounters and fully consented to the “dominant-submissive” relationship. The third woman’s complaint was added to the investigation later. Sarah Mauger-Poliak, the lawyer for Henda Ayari, told Agence-France Presse that the trial was “not a conspiracy or political battle” but simply a case of rape. Lawyers for Christelle said they would ask for the trial to be held in private, without media or the public present, which is a legal right in France. They said this was to protect her identity and to avoid her being harassed. They said the trial was a “crucial moment” after a long investigation. Ramadan’s lawyers expressed concern over him having a fair trial, telling AFP that because of his multiple sclerosis he was not fit to appear in court without his health being put in danger. In 2024, a Swiss appeals court found Ramadan guilty of raping a woman in a Geneva hotel in 2008 and sentenced him to three years in prison, two of them suspended. Switzerland’s highest court upheld the conviction in a ruling last year. Ramadan’s Swiss legal team announced they would take the case to the European court of human rights.

‘Simply not true’ UK is being dragged into Iraq-style conflict, says foreign secretary

It is “simply not true” that the UK is being dragged into another Iraq-style conflict in the Middle East, Yvette Cooper has said, after an RAF base in Cyprus was struck by an Iranian drone. The attack was part of a barrage of strikes by Tehran around the Middle East after a US-Israeli attack on Saturday that killed the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The UK foreign secretary confirmed ministers were considering possible plans to evacuate about 300,000 Britons from the region. Britain had no involvement in the initial attack but in a statement late on Sunday, Keir Starmer said he had agreed to let the US use British military bases to attack Iranian missile sites, so as to limit the impact of Iranian strikes. The decision prompted alarm among some opposition parties, with the Liberal Democrats demanding it be put to a vote in parliament. Asked if the UK risked being pulled into an escalating conflict with no end goal, simply because Donald Trump had asked, Cooper said: “That’s simply not true.” She told Sky News on Monday: “We took a very specific decision not to provide support for strikes that were taking place over this weekend. We have been clear that we believe there should be a diplomatic process, negotiations process.” With Iranian missiles and drones causing damage and casualties around the Gulf, as well as in Israel and Cyprus, the UK had to “recognise responsibilities we have around defensive support”, Cooper said, adding: “This is about the defence of our partners in the Gulf and defence of countries where we have so many British citizens and interests in those countries. “It’s a specific, limited agreement about the defence of Gulf countries, and many of those Gulf countries were not involved in any of the strikes on Iran. So, for example, it doesn’t mean political and economic and infrastructure targets, but there is a significant issue about ballistic missiles and launchers that were effectively pointed at the Gulf, pointed at our partner countries, and countries where we have so many British citizens.” Asked about the safety of hundreds of thousands of UK nationals in the region, Cooper told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that about 102,000 people – out of a possible total she put at 300,000 – had registered their presence with UK authorities. While a full evacuation was being planned for, Cooper said, the sheer numbers involved meant other options were more likely. “We’re sending out rapid deployment teams to the region to work with the travel industry, to work with airlines, to work with those governments in the region as well, on what the options will be to ensure that people can safely return home,” she said. “When we’ve had situations like this in the past, where we have wanted to make sure that British citizens can get safely home, normally it’s been on a much smaller scale than the number of people and the number of countries involved here, but we’ve normally looked to ensure that people can get back to using their normal commercial routes, the flights that they had booked, and so on, and their industry and their provider can support them. “But we have also looked at other options where the UK government can also provide support. So we’re looking at the full range of options.” Cooper said the strike at RAF Akrotiri was an “unmanned drone strike specifically on the airport runway”, but said she was unable to give further further information. The Ministry of Defence confirmed that people who lived at the base were being moved to accommodation nearby on Cyprus “as a precautionary measure”.