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Senior managers at St Basil’s aged care, where 50 died from Covid, can’t remember it all. Grieving loved ones can’t forget

Quiet sobs could be heard in Melbourne’s coroner’s court, as several families attended to finally hear from the pair who were the most senior managers when, throughout July and August 2020, almost a quarter of the 188 residents at St Basil’s aged care home died from Covid-19 or neglect. Following multiple failed legal bids to avoid giving evidence after 50 residents died in the Victorian aged care home they managed, Konstantin Kontis and Vicky Kos were compelled to testify at a coronial inquest resuming on the sixth anniversary of the tragedy. During his evidence on Friday, Kontis said that the board of St Basil’s, operating under the auspice of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia, never signed off on the facility’s Covid-19 management policy and that he believed, as chair, he had the delegated authority to approve it without them. Counsel assisting the coroner, Naomi Hodgson, told the court the policy contained no strong guidance on close contacts of Covid cases, and that the main guidance on symptoms was to follow the directives of the state and federal governments. The policy document was not updated as new directives came in from the government, the court heard. Instead this information was printed and put into a yellow folder for staff to keep up-to-date with. Kontis accepted under questioning that there was no delegation of authority that allowed him to approve “such a significant document” without input from the board. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email Kontis was also questioned about why he did not convene board meetings as the outbreak grew, especially once testing of 116 residents and 95 staff on 15 July 2020 – as organised by the federal department of health – revealed 28 positive cases. “My communication then had switched to the archbishop direct,” Kontis said. “I don’t want to put tickets on myself, but he had full confidence that I would handle the matter in the most appropriate way.” Hodgson put it to Kontis that regardless of whether an approved aged care provider was a not-for-profit, for-profit, or religiously run, the leadership had obligations under the aged care and corporate laws to inform the board. She suggested Kontis was wrong in some of his understanding of these obligations, which he accepted. Kontis said a board meeting was held in April 2020 before the outbreak at the home and after Covid was spreading through aged care elsewhere. Discussions would have occurred then, he said, about what to do if a significant portion of the workforce became infected. The court heard that no minutes from that meeting had been found in about 10,000 pages of briefing evidence provided to the coroner. It prompted the inquest – due to close its questioning of witnesses on Friday – to be delayed to allow St Basil’s representatives to conduct a search. Kontis’ evidence is due to resume on 16 November. The yellow folder Earlier in the week, the court heard that no cohort plan for separating Covid positive residents from uninfected ones could be found in documents provided to the court. Kos, who was director of nursing and facility manager at the time, said this plan was placed in the yellow folder. Some documents from that folder had gone missing, she said. She gave evidence that many documents from the state and federal government were being added to this folder, and that staff were expected to keep up-to-date with it when starting shifts. Information was also shared during handovers, she said. Following this evidence, a search on Monday night of electronic and hard-file repositories of documents, including those previously seized by Victoria police, did not reveal such a cohort plan, the court heard on Tuesday from St Basil’s barrister, Conor O’Bryan. O’Bryan said because some files had been lost it could not be proven that a cohort plan never existed. ‘I didn’t attend’ During his evidence, Kontis was pressed on why he did not attend key meetings, organised by senior management of the home and attended by health officials, once it became clear the outbreak was significant and the entire workforce needed to be stood down. Kontis said he disagreed with a directive from the chief health officer at the time, Prof Brett Sutton, to furlough the entire workforce and replace them with agency staff to prevent further spread. Kontis said he did not trust the staff would be competent and Covid-free. “You’ve just received the news that your entire staff is going to be stood down,” Hodgson said. “Why didn’t you attend [meetings] as the only person on the board with vision of what was happening here?” Kontis responded: “I can’t answer that. I didn’t attend.” He said he was informed about what happened at meetings immediately afterwards by attenders. Kontis said there were also some meetings he did not believe he was invited to. Hodgson said that St Basil’s, as an approved aged care provider, had a duty under law to implement policies and procedures to manage risk and ensure care for consumers. Asked why he did not convene a meeting of the risk and audit committee before or throughout the outbreak, Kontis said, “I couldn’t get anybody to attend a meeting because of Covid.” Hodgson responded this was “an improbable answer in circumstances where you’ve already told me you can get people on the phone”. The court previously heard that agency staff brought in to take over struggled to find the information they needed to run the facility, from passwords and logins for computers, to notes about the clinical care of residents. Kontis said this information could be found in folders. “We had folders in the kitchen, folders with the cleaners, folders with the maintenance people,” he said. Hodgson put it to Kontis that, as an approved aged care provider and chairman, he had responsibility for the agency staff and to assist them to fulfil their duties. “Well, that’s your interpretation,” Kontis said. Hodgson replied: “I’d suggest to you … that it’s not my interpretation, it was your responsibility as an approved provider.” “That’s that’s your assertion,” Kontis said. Signs in ‘simple language’ Kos had earlier told the court that English was a second language for 95% of the original St Basil’s staff, and the majority did not have laptops or computers. Asked how critical and sometimes complicated Covid information was then communicated, she said signs in “simple language” were placed around the facility and information was shared during shift handovers. Kos disagreed under cross-examination that the process of adding documents constantly to folders and expecting staff with English as a second language to keep across these during shifts was a complex task for them. She agreed that having a clear Covid plan in place would make it less likely that people would die. The inquest had previously heard from staff and family members in 2021 that infected residents were mingling with those who had not tested positive to the virus, and that infection control procedures throughout the home were poor. Kos told the court that on 9 July 2020, when the first case in a staff member was identified, she began to follow a Covid-19 aged care checklist issued by the federal government about what to do in the first 24 hours. Kos told the court she did not complete the step that said to alert the commonwealth department of health at a dedicated aged care email address within 30 minutes. She said she spoke with the state public health hotline as the document required, and because she was told to wait to hear about next steps, she did not proceed to the next step on the checklist, which was to email the commonwealth. The checklist said the commonwealth could connect aged care homes with resources to manage the outbreak including testing, additional PPE and a surge workforce, the court heard. Delays in the commonwealth learning of the case meant staff and residents were not mass-tested until days later. The inquest previously heard this was a root cause of the outbreak. Kontis said he did not believe it was his role to email the commonwealth as he trusted facility staff to do so and to follow procedures in place. ‘I don’t remember’ Throughout the five days, Kontis had to be reminded several times not to interject during questioning, and to listen before responding. With years having passed since the tragedy, Kos’ response to many questions throughout the week was, “I don’t remember”. Both Kontis and Kos refused to testify, only doing so after a certificate was granted by the coroner, Liberty Sanger – meaning their evidence can not be used against them in criminal or civil litigation. Spiros Vasilakis, whose mother, Maria, died at the home during the outbreak, attended each day. “It still hurts for all of us families here,” Vasilakis said. “It hurts to hear anyone say that because it’s been six years, they can’t remember. I can tell you that families remember, detail by detail, what occurred. I haven’t forgotten anything.” The inquest continues.

Argentina’s government posts ICE-style video of immigration operation

The Argentinian government posted a video on social media showing a 60-year-old woman being led away in handcuffs by two federal police officers during an immigration operation in Buenos Aires. The woman’s face is shown unblurred in the video, which has nearly 1m views and depicts one of hundreds of such operations carried out by the administration of the far-right president, Javier Milei, directly inspired by Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in the US. Visibly distressed, appearing to be in pain and with one hand bandaged, the woman is shown against a heavy metal soundtrack as the words “Illegal foreigner or criminal record? Out!” flash across the screen. In another video, she is described as “a Peruvian national subject to an arrest warrant for fraud and robbery”. But there was no arrest warrant for her. The woman, who asked to be identified only by her initials, PLS, said she was released just minutes after being paraded in handcuffs before photographers and television crews covering the operation, which took place last February. “They just drove me around the block and said: ‘Get out. You’re free.’ I asked: ‘Why did you put me through all this?’” she said. “My face was everywhere on social media. I started getting calls from relatives living abroad – back in Peru, in Spain, the US and Germany – asking me: ‘What happened? What did you do?’” she added. According to her lawyer, PLS is a legal permanent resident and was subject only to a “whereabouts inquiry” – requiring her to be notified about a separate case – which, under Argentinian law, does not entail arrest or any other form of coercion. “Her detention was unlawful, and the authorities used it as propaganda for their operations against immigrants,” said Lucía Galoppo, a lawyer at the NGO Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS), which is representing PLS. CELS sees her case as a striking example of how Milei is reshaping the country’s immigration laws to bring them closer to those of Trump – whom the Argentinian president openly admires – including by creating an Argentinian version of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Checks on people’s immigration status existed before, but they have become far more frequent, large-scale operations involving not only immigration agents but federal police. Much like Trump, Milei has turned raids in poorer, traditionally immigrant neighbourhoods into a “public spectacle”, said Galoppo. Since taking office in December 2023, the self-styled libertarian has introduced a series of changes to immigration law by decree, bypassing congress. The latest came in late July, when Milei invoked his claim that there had been an “anti-Argentina” wave since the World Cup to justify a decree allowing the deportation of foreigners who promote “messages of hate” against the country or any Argentinian citizen. Critics pointed to the irony that, had countries Milei recently visited adopted the same rule, the president himself could have been expelled after insulting Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. Other decrees include ending the automatic right to permanent residency for foreigners who have a child born in the country or marry an Argentinian citizen, and requiring immigrants to prove they have sufficient financial means to support themselves – in a country where more than 40% of workers are informally employed. While making it harder to obtain documentation, Milei has also restricted free access to public hospitals, previously available to everyone but now limited to permanent residents, except in emergencies. “The state is manufacturing a problem to manufacture a security-based response,” said Galoppo. “Argentina doesn’t have an immigration problem,” she added. In the 2022 census, immigrants made up 4.2%, the lowest proportion since records began in 1869. Galoppo believes Milei is targeting immigrants as part of a strategy to create an “internal enemy” that distracts from domestic problems – alongside corruption scandals, his “chainsaw” austerity policies have brought inflation under control, but unemployment and poverty have risen. Milei did not respond to requests for comment. CELS filed freedom of information requests with the government about its immigration operations. There were 851 between 1 January and 26 June. The government provided further details on only 590 of them, in which just 2.2% of the foreigners stopped were found to have irregular immigration status. “These operations are highly theatrical, deploying hundreds of police officers in an attempt to imitate raids in the US, but the tiny number of people found to have irregular status shows they are not justified,” said Galoppo. In the lawsuit filed against the state on behalf of PLS, CELS alleges that she was subjected to unlawful deprivation of liberty, degrading treatment, public humiliation and abuse of authority. PLS has lived in Argentina since 2006. The “whereabouts inquiry” involving her relates to a 2021 case. In it, a person whose phone was stolen alleged that money had been transferred from their account to one in PLS’s name and then to a third account. PLS denies any involvement, saying her own phone had been stolen months earlier and may have been used to create an account in her name. Her lawyer said being sought for notification did not justify her detention. The security ministry also did not respond to requests for comment. PLS said she felt ashamed and afraid to leave home after the operation, costing her her livelihood as a street food vendor. “If I saw a police officer, I was frightened thinking they might arrest me,” she said. But she added that she had no intention of leaving: “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m not a criminal. I’m someone who works. I liked Argentina, and I want to stay here.”

Businessman was ‘preparing champagne’ to celebrate Caruana Galizia murder, court hears

The businessman accused of paying for hitmen to murder the journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was impatient for the killing to take place, and once texted from his boat to say he was “preparing champagne” to celebrate, a jury in Malta has heard. Yorgen Fenech, the 44-year-old heir to a property empire that includes several Hilton hotels, is on trial in Malta for complicity in the murder of Caruana Galizia. She died in a car bombing in October 2017 after publishing a series of revelations about senior politicians that were so damaging they triggered a snap general election. The key witness in the case, a taxi driver who says he acted as middleman between Fenech and three men already convicted of accepting €150,000 (£128,000) to carry out the killing, took the stand on Friday to begin his testimony. Melvin Theuma, who has been living under witness protection since agreeing to testify in return for a pardon, said Fenech had told him to contact a known criminal and set up the killing because he wanted to protect his uncle Raymond Fenech, the head of the family business. “Bring him here, I need him to kill Daphne because she’s going to publish information about Uncle Ray,” Theuma claimed Fenech had told him. Theuma has previously testified that over time the explanation changed, and the hit was designed to stop revelations about Yorgen himself. The conversation took place in April 2017. The two men were friends, having known each other for years, although Theuma told the jury it was not an equal relationship. “He’s a lion and I’m a mosquito,” Theuma said of the accused. The taxi driver, who had cultivated a friendship with Fenech over a shared interest in horseracing and betting, is regarded by the prosecution as key to securing a conviction. He has given police multiple recordings of conversations he had with Fenech after the murder. Before taking the stand, Theuma had to be certified as fit to give evidence, having previously tried to take his own life. In 2020, having already secured a pardon, he swallowed acid and slit his own throat. He will be allowed to give evidence seated, with his back to Fenech and his lawyers, having previously complained of intimidation. He began his testimony by apologising to the victim’s family, saying: “My cross was too much to bear; I can’t imagine what theirs was like.” After receiving the order from Fenech, Theuma said he went to the docks in Marsa, where the hitmen, brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio and their associate Vincent Muscat, used a warehouse known as the potato shed as a base. “Alfred got into my taxi and I told him ‘I have someone who wants to kill Daphne Caruana Galizia’. “He asked if the person could pay, and I said yes, of course.” Theuma said he never told the hitmen who had sent him. He told the court Fenech had agreed to the price, but then asked him to call off the attack after Malta’s then prime minister, Joseph Muscat, called a snap general election. Instead, he asked Theuma to place a €150,000 bet for him on Muscat securing a second term. When Muscat was returned to power with a landslide victory in June 2017, Theuma said Fenech rang him that night. “He sounded tipsy. He told me to go ahead with the Daphne job. I didn’t do anything, he sounded drunk.” A few days later, he gave Fenech his winnings from the bet – €300,000, minus a commission. Nothing more was said about Caruana Galizia. But a few days later, Fenech summoned him and gave him an envelope stuffed with cash. “I asked him, ‘What’s this?’ He said: ‘It’s the €150,000 to have Daphne killed.’” The hitmen were given a €30,000 deposit and began scoping the journalist’s movements. Theuma was given a burner phone to contact them with. The witness said he took the phone with him to Disneyland for a family holiday, and that Fenech wanted reassurance he had not left Malta without it. The businessman became impatient as time passed. “Yorgen would ask me every few days: ‘When will they kill her?’ Once, he was on his boat and texted me to say he was preparing champagne in case it happened.” Theuma said Fenech helped to plot Caruana Galizia’s routine, identifying a cafe and restaurant that she frequented. The witness broke down as he described the moment he learned of the death from the television news. Wiping his eyes, he said: “I was living a normal life, I didn’t want for anything. Then I turned on the TV and saw that Daphne was dead. My life ended. When she was killed, my life was blown up.” He also revealed he had been in regular contact by text message with Caruana Galizia’s sons, Matthew and Paul. He said: “I was involved in their mother’s murder, and they speak to me. They tell me I will feel better after the trial. But I know I won’t. The remorse is too great.” Fenech, who is on trial for complicity in the voluntary homicide of Caruana Galizia, denies the charges. The trial continues.

Colombia on the brink: ELN guerrilla group prepares for return to war

As the boat approached the riverbank, camouflaged figures watched from the tree line. Behind them, in the dim understory of the jungle, a commander of the National Liberation Army (ELN) sat with his rifle on his lap, amid the buzz and whine of insects and the thwacks of machetes on bamboo as his troops set up camp, hidden from enemy drones. Colombia’s 62-year old armed conflict is on the brink of a new chapter, with the country’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, who takes office on Friday, vowing an end to peace talks and launch a new military offensive. Colombia’s last guerrilla group says it is ready for whatever might come. “Where we can go on the offensive, we will,” said the commander of the group’s Western War Front, who goes by the moniker Yerson. “And if the ELN leadership says we have to carry out a military offensive at the national level, we will. Attacks in cities, in the countryside, wherever.” Yerson and his troops were deep in the Pacific department of Chocó, in an ELN stronghold accessible only after hours of river travel, where humid heat soaks through the cloud cover. Occasional communities, each a line of wooden shacks on stilts, broke the dense forest on the banks. Giant mining barges were moored on the river, with diggers clawing up the riverbed to extract the particles of gold it contains. The ELN and rival armed groups fight to control the San Juan River, its resources and its population. At one point in the journey, armed men from the Gulf Clan, a violent paramilitary group, stopped the Guardian’s boat to question the passengers, before promising to liberate the area from the ELN. Yerson was unfazed. “All of the ELN territories are being invaded by bands of mercenaries,” he said. “They are very violent, but they are not disputing political power.” Colombia’s conflict began in the 1960s, rooted in extreme land inequality and exclusionary politics. Leftwing guerrillas emerged to challenge the state, battling government forces later allied with rightwing paramilitaries, forerunners of the Gulf Clan. Money from cocaine trafficking fuelled all sides. The conflict has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. Along with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the ELN was the most important of the guerrilla groups. Founded in 1964, it fused Marxism-Leninism with Che Guevara’s foco theory – the idea that a small armed band in a remote rural area can eventually topple the state – and Liberation theology, which framed the struggle against poverty and oppression as an expression of Christian faith. In their pursuit of revolution, the two groups have carried out killings and kidnappings, and forced the confinement and displacement of civilian populations. The Farc demobilised in 2016 after striking a peace deal with the Colombian state, but the ELN says its members will only lay down arms after the country’s political and economic system has been transformed. “The Farc surrendered in exchange for nothing,” said Yerson, adding that subsequent presidents have failed to fully implement the peace deal, while former Farc combatants have been killed. Gustavo Petro, a leftist who was a guerrilla with the defunct M-19 in the 1980s, was elected president in 2022 on a promise of “total peace”, vowing to make good on the Farcdeal and negotiate with all of Colombia’s remaining armed groups on the left and right. But after a few years, almost all the talks – including those with the largest groups – the ELN, the Gulf Clan and Farc dissidents who refused to demobilise in 2016 – either stalled or collapsed. Yerson rejected the idea that the election of Colombia’s first leftist president meant that the ELN’s goals could be achieved through the current political system. “They handed out lands [to the poor]. They did a kind of pension reform. They were looking for ways to improve healthcare,” he said. “But in the end these are small things. They don’t help with the popular awakening.” In Yerson’s telling, Petro was allowed to take power by the “Colombian oligarchy”, which needed to pacify the people after an explosion of inequality protests in 2019 and 2021, but knew he “was never going to undertake fundamental reforms, that he could be controlled”. Colombia’s political system “is not the democracy it claims to be”, he said. “That is where the trap is.” Now the ELN faces a very different proposition in the form of De la Espriella, a Trump-admiring millionaire who rose to prominence as a criminal lawyer representing accused leaders of the AUC, a rightwing paramilitary group that fought the guerrillas and killed civilians accused of collaborating with them.. De la Espriella has given Colombia’s armed groups a month to submit to him or face the consequences, while promising to deepen security cooperation with the US and build mega-prisons inspired by the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele. Security analysts, however, say armed groups have gathered strength and resources in recent years. The ELN has about 6,300 members between armed fighters and unarmed support, spread across Colombia and Venezuela. The 60 or so fighters in the camp were evenly split between men and women, indigenous and Afro-Colombian members. “The majority [of the ELN] has always been the poor, the lowest down,” said Yerson. “Here, as Chocó is more Afro-Indigenous, that’s what we are.” Each of them had a modern assault rifle, either an AK-47 or an AR-15, some with “Made in USA” stamped on the body. One also had a .50 calibre sniper rifle, the bullets of which can punch through vehicles, while another flew a drone. The camp was deep in ELN territory, and they were relaxed. When someone took out a portable speaker and began to play vallenatos – popular Colombian folksongs – they left their rifles resting against trees or slung them over their backs and paired up to dance, suddenly looking like the young Colombians they are. Various groups, including the UN and Human Rights Watch, have accused the ELN of recruiting minors – but Yerson said their rules only allow people over 16 to join. It was impossible to verify details of his troops’ backgrounds, as they had been told not to discuss anything sensitive. Yerson presented two women to be interviewed in his presence, who spoke about the hardship of their lives before joining the ELN, but struggled to answer questions, apparently afraid of saying the wrong thing. Yerson himself described the ELN as “a life choice” for Colombia’s poor, who have few options. “Maybe that’s why they join, but once they are here they come to understand why we are fighting,” he said. The ELN functions by taxing “every commercial entity” in the territory it controls, and in Chocó that means illegal gold mining and logging are their key sources of income, said Yerson. It also carries out kidnappings for ransom. “We are an embryonic state, and every state takes taxes,” he said. “If they can strangle us economically, we will cease to exist as a rebel organisation.” Yerson claimed coca cultivation has disappeared in ELN territory in Chocó. He denied the group was involved in the drug trafficking, but acknowledged it taxes the business like any other. The US, which has given its military a new role to take on “narcoterrorism” across the Americas, might not think much of that distinction. “The question of guilt doesn’t matter to the US. What matters to them are interests,” said Yerson. “We are the only guerrilla group with political principles left standing in Colombia and the world. We will always be something they want to destroy.” He says the ELN will not simply be on the defensive, but will strike back where it can. A car bomb attributed to the group exploded outside a police station near the border with Venezuela last week, injuring 12 police officers and three civilians, and drone attacks have become common. “They have to be legitimate objectives. We don’t put car bombs where the civil population will die,” said Yerson, who pointed to the 2019 suicide car bombing of a police academy in Bogotá that killed 22 as a model. “The comrades could go and make kamikaze attacks of that impact.” Despite the election of De la Espriella and other rightwing leaders across the continent, Yerson was adamant that the ELN was not losing the ideological battle. Voters are being deceived, he said, before quoting the South American revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar: “An ignorant people is the blind instrument of its own destruction. “The ideological battle is not being lost,” he repeated, as if irritated by the phrase. “We are on the right side of history.” Asked whether Colombia was any closer to the ELN’s goals after decades of conflict, Yerson was unsure: “I don’t know. But I can tell you that the only way to win things for the people is through the struggle,” he said. “We’ve been in the struggle for 62 years, and there will be many more.”

Thailand school shooting: teen suspect killed at least seven people and injured more than 30, officials say – as it happened

We are closing this blog now. You can read more about the Thailand school shooting in our story here.

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey sign Nato-style defence pact amid deadly Houthi strikes in Yemen

Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey have signed a mutual defence agreement, placing three of the Muslim world’s most influential states into a Nato-style pact, as Riyadh confronts attacks from Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis and Saudi Arabia have increased their military exchanges in the past month and the first test of the tripartite pact long in preparation may come in Yemen. On Thursday, one of the deadliest days in the conflict for years, the Houthis killed at least 58 Yemeni government troops in missile and drone attacks, according to a military source. A separate attack into southern Saudi Arabia, bordering Yemen, injured 11 civilians. The three Sunni Muslim-led countries are concerned by increasing regional jeopardy after the US-Israeli war on the Shia government in Iran, with Donald Trump unable to contain ‌the conflict. Although the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said the alliance would be open to other countries, some Iranians consider the new alliance a direct threat to Tehran. Hesamoddin Ashna, a former adviser to the Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, said on social media: “The trilateral agreement alters the rules of the peripheral war. Its immediate effect is the reduction of the threat’s effectiveness against the Gulf countries and an increased likelihood of Turkey and Pakistan entering the conflict in the event of an attack on Saudi Arabia. Its structural effect is the creation of a nucleus for a new security order centred on Riyadh, Ankara and Islamabad.” But other Iranians saw the alliance in a wider, less threatening, context reflecting growing Sunni doubts about the reliability of the US security umbrella, and concerns over Israel’s increasingly assertive regional posture. In this reading, the military alliance is considered an attempt by the region to determine its security architecture itself, rather than have it imposed by outsiders, especially the US. It is disputed whether the Houthi group is acting on the instruction of Iran, or instead, as it insists, trying to lift what it regards as a Saudi blockade of Houthi-controlled territory inside Yemen. The present conflict broke out when an Iranian plane flew to the Houthi-controlled capital, Sana’a, supposedly to transport a Yemen delegation to the funeral of the former Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Saudi intelligence claimed the plane was carrying Iranian weaponry for the Houthis. Riyadh has already developed a 10-nation naval coalition that is supposed to protect commercial shipping from Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb strait. The Houthis say they are firing only on Saudi-linked shipping, and there is no immediate sign that the naval coalition is deterring the Houthis. A Houthi drone strike on Friday killed a further three members of Yemen’s government in an attack on a military camp in Marib. Ten missiles and seven explosive drones were fired. The Houthis said they were reacting to what appeared to be a large Saudi-led military buildup. Saudi intelligence sources say they are picking up reports not just of increased Houthi hostility but likely attacks on Saudi interests by Iranian-backed militia inside Iraq. Saudi Arabia has been working to persuade Trump not to launch massive attacks on Iran. The Mecca joint defence agreement stipulates that an attack on one country will be deemed an attack on all, but whether any conditions are attached to this collective defence pledge is unclear. A Saudi spokesperson, in response to the Houthi attacks, said it did not “seek escalation but we will not allow the current balance of power on the ground to be changed”. Yemeni sources said recently they believed Saudi Arabia was preparing for a major military offensive against the Houthis by sea and possibly by land in central Yemen, in a move to break their chokehold on Saudi oil exports through the southern Red Sea. In a separate attack early on Friday, a Saudi official accused the Houthis of indiscriminately shelling civilian areas in Saudi Arabia, injuring 11 civilians, including a four-year-old child. Maj Gen Turki al-Maliki, a spokesperson for the Saudi-led military coalition supporting Yemen’s government, said the coalition would continue taking all necessary ⁠measures to protect civilians. The attack was in southern Najran province, and injured seven Saudis, one Yemeni, two Egyptians ⁠and one Pakistani national, al-Maliki said. Neither the Houthis nor Iran immediately commented on Friday’s attack. Saudi Arabia and the Houthis have been vying for control of Yemen for more than a decade, but over the past month an uneasy status quo has unravelled, with the Houthis mounting attacks against Saudi Aramco oil facilities. The Houthi movement, which controls Sana’a and much of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, declared a naval blockade of Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea last month. Saudi Arabia has been leading a military coalition supporting Yemen’s government against the Houthis since 2015. Yemen, already battered by more than a decade of war, has increasingly been drawn into the regional confrontation centred on Iran. The Houthis abandoned a largely successful 2022 truce with the Saudi-backed government. Separately, after the implosion of the separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) in the south of Yemen in January, Saudi Arabia took greater responsibility for funding and organising the UN-recognised government in Yemen. The STC leadership overreached in December, trying to take control of the whole of the south, but were beaten back by a surprisingly fierce Saudi reaction. Saudi Arabia has subsequently reconstructed Yemen’s government, excluding southern separatists, but the government is struggling to provide services, and the latent support for separatism in the south remains. The bulk of the STC leadership is in exile or under a form of arrest in Riyadh. Iran and Oman have said negotiations on an agreement over the strait of Hormuz are in the “final stage” of drafting. The agreement is expected to be contingent on the US lifting its blockade on Iran’s ports. The strait is crucial to global shipping and energy supplies. Before the war, which began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February, about one-fifth of the world’s traded oil and fossil gas passed through the waterway at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Reuters, Associated Press and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Scramble to house hundreds camping in Rome heatwave after squat eviction

Rome authorities are scrambling to find homes for hundreds of people sleeping in tents in extreme heat after talks aimed at saving Italy’s most high-profile centre for housing and social assistance collapsed amid a crackdown by Giorgia Meloni’s government on squatted buildings. The approximately 400 evicted residents of Spin Time Labs, located in a 10-floor building in Rome’s Esquilino district occupied by grassroots groups since 2013, will not be allowed to move back in after its private owner refused Rome council’s offer to buy the property. The residents were forced out at the end of last month. A spokesperson for Italy’s interior ministry, which had set its sights on shutting down Spin Time, confirmed that the owner had taken repossession of the building “in accordance with the law”. The move has reignited political debate over occupied or squatted buildings, which Meloni’s government regard as dens for criminality – including those supported by leftwing associations. Critics have questioned why Meloni and her coalition allies have long been so decisively against Spin Time while the neofascist CasaPound has occupied a state-owned building in the same neighbourhood for more than 20 years, using the premises as its headquarters. People of all nationalities, about a quarter of them children, were forced to evacuate Spin Time on 29 July after a minor fire, which was quickly extinguished by a group of residents before it could spread. The building was locked up by police during safety checks, before being placed under two judicial seizure orders – one linked to the owner’s long-running legal battle to regain possession and the other to the fire. While some people were accommodated by friends and family, more than 200, including elderly people and those with ill health, have been sleeping in tents outside the building. One child was hospitalised this week after suffering breathing difficulties. Rome’s leftwing council, supported by the Catholic church-run charity Caritas, is now seeking alternative solutions. In an interview on In Onda, a talkshow broadcast on the TV channel LA7, the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, said the response to the council’s offer had been an “irrevocable no” and that despite presenting what he believed was the best possible deal he “had the impression that the decision had already been taken”. The owner had cited unspecified legal weaknesses in the proposal, Gualtieri said, adding that he felt “irritated” about the situation. He described Spin Time, which over the past decade has transformed into a space offering various social and cultural services, including a food bank, a restaurant and co-working, as “the mirror of a failure of Italy’s Second Republic, which stripped away a pillar of welfare”. The Second Republic is a political term for the era of government that began in the early 1990s. The initiative has provided a lifeline for hundreds of people, including Marco Perilli, an Italian construction worker who was one of the community’s first residents. He became homeless after a divorce. As of Friday, people were still camped outside. Perilli said they would continue to do so until a real solution was found. “We are trying to understand how things will proceed but we resist and will continue to resist. The owner refusing the offer means Spin Time is over, but for us it’s not over – we will find another space.”

Iran plots to deal Trump a blow in midterms by keeping him entangled in war

Tehran has set out a protracted negotiating timetable designed to keep Donald Trump embroiled in the Iran conflict until the midterm elections, in the hope of inflicting the same ruinous blow on his presidency as Jimmy Carter suffered over the 1979-81 US embassy hostage crisis. For many inside Iran, inflicting meaningful revenge on Trump is a legitimate and self-standing war aim, reflected in the mood of those attending the funeral of the supreme leader Ali Khamenei where demands for retribution were ubiquitous. While Iranian officials since the 1979 Islamic revolution have never trusted the US, that animus is now also directed personally towards Trump. He not only tore up the painfully negotiated nuclear deal in 2018, but he sanctioned the assassination of the military leader Qassem Suleimani and twice involved Iran in negotiations on its nuclear programme only to launch wars against it. He shows no remorse for the killing of the country’s supreme leader, or for the attempt on the life of Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian. As the countdown to November’s midterms begins, what could be Trump’s political demise has become a subject of obsessive speculation in Tehran. Iranian media track the US president’s waning ratings, attributing the decline to the war’s unpopularity and high oil prices. The changing politics of the Democrats is minutely examined. But the focus on the midterms became more obvious this week when the deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, told the official IRNA news agency that after agreeing a route for commercial shipping through the strait of Hormuz, it would take two to four months to reach the second phase of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. The original plan – to commence the nuclear phase of the talks within 30 days of signing June’s memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the US – had been jettisoned by the Trump administration, Gharibabadi said. To get to that second stage, he laid out an obstacle course including the lifting of sanctions, the end of the US blockade of Iranian ports, the unfreezing of Iranian assets and new commitments on non-belligerence in a process that could last well beyond the midterms. If Tehran gets its way on this timetable, Trump will be going to the polls with no Iranian commitment on nuclear weapons, only a hefty economic bill for a failed war. “This raises the very likely scenario of continued cycles of conflict between the US and Tehran over the strait,” said Jason Brodsky from United against a Nuclear Iran, an advocate of the war. “There won’t be any true quiet before the midterm elections – Tehran has no interest in giving this to the Trump administration … It will continue to play games.” Mehr News, an agency close to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, published a piece saying Iran had given Trump a major dilemma. “Continuing the war could increase political and economic pressure on the government and exacerbate the decline in his popularity. On the other hand, backing down, or moving towards reducing tensions, could also be interpreted by some of Trump’s supporters as a retreat from his campaign slogans,” it said. From this perspective, the outcome of this war will not be played out on the battlefield, but at the ballot box. The agency suggested the outcome could affect the course of American domestic and foreign policy for years to come. Few in Iran take Trump’s statements at face value. But his denials that the midterms affect his Iran strategy are treated with special scepticism. Iranian media point to comments from Marc Zell, chair of Republicans Overseas Israel, who has said: “It’s all about the midterms … the American public simply is tired of war and the administration is navigating the pre-election waters adroitly in order to avoid a Democratic takeover of Congress.” Such remarks fuel the debate inside Iran about how much the midterms should be part of Iran’s calculus. Some believe the loss of Congress will inhibit Trump or lead to his impeachment; at the very least, it may mark the end of the war’s funding. Mostafa Zahrani, a former Iranian diplomat, argued electoral defeat “will make it inevitable that Trump will not be able to go back to war and will take the negotiations seriously”. Others such as Nasser Hadian, a professor of international relations at Tehran University, disagree, advocating cashing in on Iran’s victories now rather than waiting for Trump to become weaker. “If he loses, he’ll have less incentive to reach an agreement with Iran, because in that case he’ll be weakened, and Israel and others will find it much easier to attack him – something they don’t dare do now,” he said. “Those who say we should wait for the midterm elections have no understanding of politics in America.” Iran’s pleasure in seeing Trump defeated would indeed be reduced if he felt he had nothing left to lose, but its diplomats overall believe the US president’s freedom to act will be constrained by the unpopularity of more conflict and by Republican presidential candidates’ anxiety to wrap this up. Trump would also be at risk of seeing his whole second term consumed by a disastrous war. The bigger question is what Iran itself wants to achieve. Agreeing to keep the dispute simmering until November is not an answer to that question – one that Iranians are better at debating than resolving. Pezeshkian, working in alliance with Mohammad Ghalibaf, the chief negotiator, repeatedly says he does not want endless war, and insists that almost all the supreme national security council concur. He still has faith in the MoU, saying it should be the cornerstone of Iran’s foreign policy. But the conservative newspaper Kayhan describes the memorandum as worthless since the US always breaks its commitments. “Accordingly, officials should know that the strait of Hormuz is not a bargaining chip and should not be opened as a passage for America,” it said. Both hardliners and moderates envision the war leading to a new regional security architecture. But the hardliners put the emphasis on America’s expulsion and see this as something less to be negotiated and more to be enforced using control of the entry points to the strait of Hormuz as a lever to close US bases. Pezeshkian says he sees a place for legitimate US investment in Iran, while the former foreign minister Javad Zarif, in an essay this week, argued Iran in “a post-polar era would benefit from not depending solely on Russia and China in future”. If Iran developed “a balanced and multifaceted foreign policy”, Tehran would not be forced into relationships based on necessity, he wrote. “Continuing uncontrolled tensions with the United States not only imposes direct costs on Iran, but also makes it more difficult for other countries, even close partners such as China and Russia, to cooperate with Iran.” Just as Trump cannot resolve from one sentence to the next what he thinks of Iran, nor can Iran agree what it thinks it can get from America.