Pakistan’s army chief attempts to broker Iran peace talks in call with Trump
Pakistan’s military leadership has been attempting to broker negotiations between the US and Iran, after the White House confirmed that Pakistan’s army chief, Asim Munir, had a phonecall with Donald Trump on Sunday to discuss the conflict. Diplomatic sources said the US and Iran could meet for negotiations in Islamabad as early as this week, to discuss an end to the war which began almost a month ago. It was emphasised that Islamabad had yet to be officially confirmed as the venue for any peace talks, which neither side has formally agreed to so far. Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is believed to be preparing to travel to Islamabad but there was no confirmation that anyone from the Iranian side would be in attendance. Pakistani sources said that the US vice-president, JD Vance, is being put forward as a probable chief negotiator from the US side if talks do go ahead, rather than Witkoff or Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who led the nuclear negotiations with Iran before the war. After the phonecall between Trump and Munir, Pakistan’s prime minister, Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, spoke to the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, on Monday. According to an official readout of the call, they “agreed on the urgent need for de-escalation, dialogue and diplomacy”. Sources said that Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, was the most likely to lead any talks from the Iranian side. However, Ghalibaf has so far dismissed reports of talks between the two sides as “fake news”. An Iranian diplomatic source said that from the Iranian side there was “zero trust” in Washington and that they would not accept Witkoff and Kushner as negotiators for any discussions. Negotiations between the US and Iran were still happening when the US began its bombing campaign. The Iranian regime has since viewed those negotiations as an attempt by the Trump administration to deceive Iran into thinking it wanted a diplomatic solution, while it planned to attack. “With the previous negotiating team, there’s no chance,” said one diplomatic source. “The Iranian side regards the request for negotiations as another round of deception for the US-Israeli regime to find out a loophole and synopsis to aggravate the strikes again.” On Monday, Trump gave the strongest indication yet that he would be willing to halt US strikes after claiming that “strong talks” were being held between Iranian officials and Witkoff and Kushner. “We have had very, very strong talks. We’ll see where they lead. We have major points of agreement, I would say, almost all points of agreement,” Trump told reporters. The US president has now given a five-day deadline to an ultimatum he gave over the weekend, threatening to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants and energy infrastructure if they did not reopen the strait of Hormuz, the crucial shipping route currently being blockaded by Iran’s military. Trump’s announcement of talks helped to boost markets as it brought oil prices sharply down to below $100 (£75) a barrel, the lowest in days. The Iranians have so far denied that any direct talks are taking place with the Trump administration but claimed that “certain friendly states” had been conveying messages from the US regarding negotiations. Diplomatic sources have said Pakistan, Oman, Turkey and Egypt have been among the countries communicating with US and Iranian officials in an attempt to bring hostilities to an end. Pakistan’s powerful army chief enjoys a close relationship with Trump, who he has visited twice in Washington and was described by the US as my “favourite field marshal”. While Pakistan and Iran have complex ties, Pakistan is home to the second-largest population of Shia Muslims after Iran. Pakistan also has a close relationship with the Gulf countries, which have born the brunt of Iran’s retaliatory strikes, and has a freshly signed defence pact with Saudi Arabia. Pakistan is one of the south Asian countries already suffering from the severe economic fallout as a result of the war. Most of the country’s oil and gas comes through the strait of Hormuz and it has been facing costly shortages and fuel price rises. A statement by Pakistan’s foreign ministry said: “If the parties desire, Islamabad is always willing to host talks. It has consistently advocated for dialogue and diplomacy to promote peace and stability in the region.” The White House declined to comment directly on the reports of peace talks to be held in Islamabad. “These are sensitive diplomatic discussions and the United States will not negotiate through the news media,” said a spokesperson.
Middle East crisis live: Iran dismisses Trump claim of talks; von der Leyen says global energy situation is ‘critical’
Germany’s foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, told broadcaster MDR that he believed Donald Trump’s announcement about talks with Iran could mark a turning point in the US-Israeli war on Iran. “Something is happening, and that’s a good thing in this time when there have been more risks of escalation than possibilities of bringing this conflict under control,” he said. As a reminder, Trump yesterday said the threatened US strikes on Iranian power plants had been postponed after “very good and productive” discussions with Iran about a “complete and total resolution of our hostilities” in the Middle East. Iran, however, denied that any such talks took place, although countries, including Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, are reportedly trying to reduce tension between Washington and Tehran. Wadephul said he believed Trump did hold serious talks with Iran because “otherwise he wouldn’t have said it that way” and he would not have postponed his threatened attack on Iranian power plants. “It’s a fragile beginning, but it’s a start nonetheless,” Wadephul said. “We should all strive to ensure that this progress flourishes and that there’s a way to control this conflict.”
Fate of Argentina’s disappeared remains ‘open wound’ as more victims identified
Soledad Nívoli was four months old and sleeping in her mother’s arms when plainclothes officers burst into the family home in Córdoba, Argentina. They were looking for her father, Mario Alberto Nívoli, 28, an electrician and leftwing activist. The men searched the house, beat Mario and tied his wrists. They stole all but a handful of the photographs in the house, and dragged Mario away to a waiting car. He was never seen again. After seizing power on 24 March 1976, Argentina’s armed forces immediately set about crushing armed leftwing groups, but also the political opposition. They established a network of clandestine detention centres, and forcibly disappeared 30,000 people – workers, students, teachers and political activists. The fate of the “desaparecidos” became the defining cause for human rights groups like the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who throughout the brutal dictatorship and the country’s return to democracy in 1983, have fought to reveal the truth of the military rulers’ crimes. Fifty years after the coup, however, Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, describes the state terror as a war in which some “excesses” were committed, and dismantled official efforts to preserve the country’s historical memory. According to historian Marina Franco, Argentina’s far-right “is not downplaying the repression or the dictatorship; rather, it is justifying it”. For victims’ families, the crimes of the dictatorship are far from a historical abstraction. Earlier this month, Soledad Nívoli’s lawyer called her with the news that 49 years after he disappeared, investigators had found her father’s remains. She collapsed in tears, hugging her eight-year-old son, Emiliano. “We felt relief when we found those little bones,” said Soledad. “[Emiliano] no longer has a disappeared grandfather – he has a grandfather who is dead, who was murdered, but that, finally, we can give him a proper sendoff.” Mario was one of 12 people whose remains were recently identified at La Perla, a former concentration camp in the province of Córdoba. The 14,000-hectare site, 12km from Córdoba city, was the province’s main detention centre, where an estimated 3,000 prisoners were held between 1975 and 1979. The first reports of mass executions there emerged in 1985, but almost 20 years later Lt Col Guillermo Bruno Laborda, already on trial for crimes against humanity, confirmed that in early 1979 prisoners’ bodies had been exhumed using heavy machinery. Authorities had learned that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was planing to visit Argentina – and the military were trying to cover their tracks. “I asked [Laborda], ‘Why should I look for anything if they were so thorough?’” said Anahí Ginarte, a forensic anthropologist who has worked at the site since 2004, first with the Argentinian Team of Forensic Anthropology (EAAF), a non-governmental scientific organisation, and more recently with the region’s forensic service. “He replied: ‘When you clean your house, do you clean every nook and cranny? No. There has to be something left.’” The first burnt bone fragments were found in 2014, within the grounds of La Perla. The EAAF found bone fragments from four medical students and activists, which, according to Ginarte, “bore witness to that cleanup”. In late 2024, aerial photographs from July 1979 enabled geologist Guillermo Sagripanti to identify excavator traces in the field, reducing the search area from 14,000 hectares to 10. Excavations began in September 2025, and it took five days to uncover the remains: not a mass grave, but bone fragments left after a cleanup operation. Carlos Vullo, geneticist and director of the EAAF’s forensic genetics laboratory, said identification in this case was “largely driven by genetics” since the remains were fragmentary – a finger bone here, a tooth there. The team generated genetic profiles from available evidence and matched them against a database of relatives. Not everybody got a definitive answer. One tooth was identified as belonging to either Adriana or Cecilia Carranza, fraternal twins reportedly captured together in May 1976 at the age of 18. “I was 13 then – they were my idols,” said Fernanda Sanmartino, their niece, who remembers them as funny, loving and “really cool”. “[They wore] black velvet hot pants with straps and those tall boots with lots of laces, and they also had Oxford pants that covered their platform shoes. “Even now, when my mother speaks about them, she calls them ‘the girls’,” Sanmartino said. Both twins were members of the leftwing Revolutionary Workers’ party, but until this month, Sanmartino had not been certain they had been held at La Perla. “Families didn’t dare to speak up … even after democracy was restored,” she said. “Now, we know [they were disappeared] because they believed in something.” Instructing judge Miguel Hugo Vaca Narvaja said more identifications remained possible. His own grandfather, after whom he was named, is also one of the disappeared. “There is always the hope that someday we will be able to find his remains, just as we did with these 12 families,” he said. Franco, the historian, said that the findings demonstrate that the dictatorship “is not an old story, nor is it a story that has come to an end, [but] an open wound” in Argentinian society. “When the far-right government justifies the dictatorship by calling it a war, it legitimises repression today,” she said. Franco said that while Milei’s government was democratic, like the dictatorship, it “builds its political opposition around the figure of internal enemies – communists, Marxists and so on – and in particular the figure of the terrorist, which allows [Milei] to identify and stigmatize any form of political opposition”. Last week, United Nations human rights experts warned that Milei had reduced the state’s role in criminal investigations for crimes against humanity, obstructed access to dictatorship archives and weakened reparation mechanisms. Vaca Narvaja said the current government’s position “can only be sustained either because they are genuinely unaware of what happened during the era of state-sponsored terrorism – or because they are actively committed to the outcomes of that genocide”. Search efforts are set to continue. Graciela Geuna was captured and taken to La Perla with her husband, Jorge Carzola, in 1976. “They tortured me, took me straight to the electric-shock room, and halfway through the session, they dragged me out to show me Jorge’s dead body. That was the last time I saw him,” she said. This month, investigators unearthed a pendant engraved with her name and the date of her 19th birthday. “I gave it to Jorge to protect him,” she said. The finding, Geuna said, brought a “sense of peace” for herself and her daughters. “What one generation doesn’t solve becomes a burden to the next. I have to solve this myself; I don’t want my children to keep looking – I want to find him,” she said. “And we are finding them, right? We are finding them.”
Airbnb in firing line as Cape Town’s housing crisis catches up with middle class
Earlier this month, graffiti appeared on the promenade in Sea Point, on Cape Town’s wealthy Atlantic Seaboard: “Digital nomads go home! Now!” Social media is full of complaints about the abundance of American and German accents, foreign property buyers, and properties being listed on Airbnb, all of which are being blamed for soaring housing costs. In the last five years, property prices have risen 31%, according to official data. That was double the rise across South Africa’s seven other metropolitan municipalities. Rents grew 5-7% last year, also above the national average, according to The Africanvestor, a property research firm. Cape Town has suffered from a housing crisis long before middle class residents started feeling the pinch. Like most of South Africa, the geographic inequality of apartheid persists, more than 30 years since the end of white minority rule. Townships, where non-white people were forcibly moved to from the 1960s, remain largely non-white and poor. Informal settlements have mushroomed. Cape Town is generally considered South Africa’s best-run city, in a province with the country’s lowest unemployment rates. This has lured people at all income levels, including “semigrants” from other parts of the country, foreign and local retirees and digital nomads. But it has also long had insufficient housing and infrastructure development, according to experts. The city’s population grew 65% to 4.8 million between 2001 and 2022. More than 400,000 were on the waiting list for social housing in September 2024, according to the most recent city government data, while 18.8% of residents lived in informal housing. While the national government funds social housing, cities are responsible for infrastructure and services such as rubbish collection. Ivan Turok, a University the Free State professor who has studied housing in Cape Town, said the city long neglected the latter for poorer people moving there. He said: “There was an historically somewhat conservative mentality, on the part of civic leaders, that Cape Town is an attractive and desirable city and will be spoiled with large-scale growth … That’s changing now, because the city recognises that it’s inevitable.” Jean-Marie de Waal Pressly, a spokesperson for the city government, said more land had been released for affordable housing since mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis took office in November 2021 than over the previous decade, with 12,000 affordable units in the pipeline. “The city is committed to reversing the impact of apartheid spatial planning by bringing jobs closer to people and bringing people closer to jobs,” he said. In January, a video of Alexandra Hayes, 31, went viral. The freelance operations manager and waitress, tearfully explained how she and her daughter were facing homelessness. Her lease had not been renewed, as the landlord was listing the property on Airbnb. The video struck a nerve, both among people empathising with Hayes and non-white South Africans saying, “I told you so.” “You guys thought you were the exception to the rule. Capitalism doesn’t give a damn about what race you are. You might be white, but you are South African,” current affairs commentator Amahle-Imvelo Jaxa said in a TikTok video that got almost 700,000 views. In an interview, Jaxa said: “The conversation around housing in Cape Town has been going on for at least 10 years. And we’d get comments from white people: ‘Well, if you can’t afford to live in the city, you should move to the outskirts’. “And if you’ve been to Cape Town, you know exactly what that means. It’s that if you cannot afford to be one of us, you need to go to the township, you shouldn’t actually be here and sit with us.” Hayes, who earns around 20,000 rand (£895) a month and is currently living with friends and family, agreed with Jaxa. “When apartheid ended … they never really paid attention to bring up the [historically] non-white areas up to the same standard of the white areas,” she said. Meanwhile, non-white people who can afford to live in Cape Town’s more desirable neighbourhoods are still facing racism when trying to rent. Ayodele Ogunnoiki, a Nigerian non-profit worker who has lived in Cape Town since 2011, is facing long wait times to hear back from landlords and estate agents, while her Norwegian-Hungarian husband gets far quicker responses. “Being married to a white man, irrespective of his background, has enhanced my profile,” she said. Much of the middle class ire about the increasing difficulty of finding an affordable place to rent has been directed at Airbnb. There are more than 26,000 listings in Cape Town, 82.6% of them entire homes, according to advocacy group Inside Airbnb. That is higher than numerous cities worldwide including Copenhagen, Lisbon and Los Angeles. An Airbnb spokesperson said: “Airbnb takes claims about housing affordability very seriously. We are acutely aware of Cape Town’s housing challenges, rooted in the city’s unique geography, the lasting impact of apartheid-era land dispossession and exclusionary spatial planning.” They said that short-term lets accounted for less than 0.9% of formal housing in Cape Town last year and that that proportion had fallen since 2020, adding: “What the evidence consistently shows is that the fundamental problem, globally, is the lack of homes being built to meet increasing housing needs.” De Waal Pressly said the city was introducing a bylaw to make sure short-term landlords would pay commercial rather than residential tax rates.
Albanese urged to help Australians struggling with fuel crisis, as NZ offers first-of-its-kind cash relief
Pressure is mounting on the Albanese government to help households struggling with fuel prices, with working from home and free public transport posited as possible solutions. Nearly 150,000 New Zealand families will soon receive a weekly cash payment to help them afford petrol, believed to be the world’s first fuel relief package that directly pays citizens since the Israel-US war on Iran began. Expectations are increasing on the federal government to act similarly in a bid to ease the spiralling cost-of-living crisis worsened by the conflict in the lead-up to its May budget. On Tuesday, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, again ruled out any cut to the fuel excise, which adds more than 52 cents per litre to the price of petrol – but doesn’t increase or decrease when the fuel price changes. Tax rate cuts coming into effect from next financial year are the main area of focus, he said. On Monday, the minister for social services, Tanya Plibersek, said working from home would be “helpful” for those struggling to afford petrol, but did not call for a directive. “We’re not telling people that they must work from home,” she told Sunrise. “The most helpful thing people could do is just buy the fuel they need and no more.” The shadow employment minister, Jane Hume, who was behind the failed opposition policy to end the public service’s working from home arrangements, said it was “terrific” for people to work from home if they could, but it “wouldn’t touch the sides” of fuel supply issues. The Nationals, the Greens and the crossbench voted for a motion against the federal government on Tuesday afternoon urging Labor to deliver “accessible, free or affordable nationwide public transport” during the fuel crisis. The Liberals ultimately abstained. In NSW, the opposition called for an upper limit on fuel prices every 24 hours and free public transport across Easter, but the premier, Chris Minns, said transport was already subsidised heavily. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email The independent ACT senator, David Pocock, proposed a flat 25% export levy on gas producers to redirect “wartime profits” to support struggling Australians. On Tuesday, he said that revenue could also be used to lift welfare payments. “People on fixed incomes, like pensioners or those reliant on safety net payments, are hurting the most from increased petrol, groceries and other essentials while benefiting the least from things like electric vehicles and rooftop solar,” he said. “If the Albanese government had the guts to get the big gas companies to pay a fair share of tax for the export of the gas resources that all Australians own we could fund things like free public transport, food pantries and desperately needed increases to safety net payments.” In a letter written to Chalmers on Tuesday, the Greens senator Penny Allman-Payne urged the government to pause requirements on welfare recipients in order to keep their payments, known as mutual obligations “People forced to survive on these poverty payments have been smashed by the cost of living crisis,” she said. “With fuel prices going through the roof, many people will simply not be able to afford to go to appointments or travel to work for the dole sites to do unpaid labour.” If almost 1 million Australians on the welfare compliance regime do not fulfil activities – such as completing job applications or attending meetings with job providers – their payments can be suspended. Allman-Payne’s letter follows another request last week by poverty experts, the Antipoverty Centre, to the employment minister, Amanda Rishworth. Jay Coonan, the centre’s spokesperson, said “privatised welfare compliance should not have the power or discretion to force people to travel”. A government spokesperson encouraged participants to contact their employment services provider if they were struggling to attend appointments or look for work. “A range of supports, including flexibility in attending face-to-face appointments and assistance with transport for employment-related activities, may be available.” Economic Justice Australia (EJA) say mutual obligations are often paused in natural disasters and when there are “major personal disruptions to home”. EJA’s chief executive Kate Allingham said she had spoken to women in regional, rural, remote and very remote Australia. “The testimonies we have received as part of this research make it clear, in particular, that compulsory activities in remote parts of Australia can require travelling huge distances, without access to public transport, to reach employment service providers,” she said. “The cost of petrol required to take such a trip would be astonishing at the best of times.”
Group of dogs that went missing in China go viral after walking 17km home
A group of seven dogs that went missing in China have gone viral after a video emerged of them walking more than 17km back home to their village, reuniting with owners who had been searching for them for days. The video, first posted online on 15 March, shows the dogs – including a golden retriever, labrador, German shepherd and Pekinese – walking along the highway in Changchun, the capital of China’s north-east Jilin province, where temperatures are dropping below 0C overnight. Leading the pack is a corgi, later identified in Chinese media as Dapang, or “big fatty”. The video went viral online and reportedly clocked up more than 230m views. One volunteer for a local stray dog rescue centre called Tong Tong said that she went door-knocking in nearby villages and posted missing dog flyers for the hounds after seeing the video, because she was concerned about their welfare in the sub-zero temperatures. “On the morning of 18 March, I woke up to find it was snowing in Changchun. I was especially worried about the seven dogs, afraid that they hadn’t eaten or drunk anything. So I borrowed a drone and set off to search for them,” Tong Tong said in a video posted by the rescue centre. On 19 March, it was reported that the dogs had found their way home. Three of the dogs, including Dapang, belong to a woman who lives in a village near Changchun. She told Chinese media that she had been looking for her dogs for four days, and was on the point of giving up, when Dapang wandered into the house on 18 March. The owner then searched in nearby villages and found the other dogs, who had been taken in by another villager. It is not clear why the dogs went missing but some netizens raised concerns that they could have been kidnapped for dog meat, which is still eaten as a delicacy in some parts of China. However, some theorised they could have also been stolen to be resold as pets or for other purposes, or have wandered off by themselves. On 21 March Jilin’s provincial culture and tourism bureau said that the dogs had wandered off of their own accord, attracted by the German shepherd who was on heat and has been known to disappear for a few days at a time. State media warned that the incident “reflects the shortcomings of online information dissemination – a mixture of true and false information, where subjective speculation is easily taken as fact and spread”. Some netizens joked that the dogs’ adventure could be turned into a film, or a real life version of Paw Patrol, a Canadian cartoon for children about a boy and his pack of rescue dogs. “Watching this made me want to cry. Dogs are humans’ friends forever,” wrote one Weibo user. Additional research by Yu-Chen Li
Tuesday briefing: With the horror of conflict throughout the globe, how likely is world war three?
Good morning. The world is at war. From the trenches of eastern Ukraine to the missile-streaked skies of the Gulf, a growing proportion of humanity is living under the horror of conflict. For some observers, there are gnawing fears that the worst is yet to come. The apparent collapse of the rules-based international order, the irrelevance of institutions designed to uphold it, and the interconnectedness of the fighting have sparked warnings that we could be at the beginning of a third world war. Indeed, half of Britons polled in a recent YouGov survey thought world war three was likely in the next five to 10 years. On Monday, Donald Trump stepped back from deepening the US and Israel’s war with Iran, announcing that he would postpone military strikes on Iranian power plants for a five-day period after “very good and productive conversations” about the end to the fighting. Iran denied this version of events, claiming Trump had been scared off by their threats of attacks on water infrastructure in the Gulf. But, despite calmer stock markets and a sharp drop in the oil price, there is little sign that the fighting is near an end. For this morning’s First Edition, I asked the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, about the credibility of the claims that we are sliding into a third major global conflict in a little over a century. First, the headlines. Five big stories Middle East | The Israeli military said it had launched a new wave of strikes on Tehran, after Donald Trump signalled a pause in US attacks against energy infrastructure after what he said were productive talks with Iran. UK Politics | Ministers are looking at providing support for household bills next winter, Keir Starmer said, as he suggested the energy price shock unleashed by the Iran conflict could continue for months to come. London | Security agencies are investigating whether a group linked to Iran is behind an arson attack on four ambulances belonging to a Jewish charity in north London. Climate crisis | More countries will face critical food insecurity if world heats up by 2C, analysis shows. New York | The pilot and co-pilot of an Air Canada Express regional jet have been killed after it collided with a fire truck while landing at New York’s LaGuardia airport. In depth: ‘The conflicts are inextricably linked’ It is a horrifying question to contemplate: are we in the foothills of a third world war? President Trump’s former Russia adviser, Fiona Hill, is among the loudest voices arguing that we are, says Patrick Wintour. She points to the scale and interconnectedness of current conflicts, imploring us all to recognise the severity of the situation. “So many parts of the globe are in conflict. The Middle East, Europe and China are all locked in conflict, not necessarily all military. Sometimes it’s diplomatic, sometimes it’s sort of a shadow war, sometimes it’s cyber. We are, I think, in a linked set of conflicts now,” says Patrick. “Take one example, which is illustrative. The Russians have offered to stop giving Iran intelligence or military help if, in return, the Americans force Ukraine into concessions about land. The conflicts are inextricably linked there.” A major driver of global instability, says Patrick, is the collapse of Pax Americana, the term given to the prolonged post-second world war period of reduced large-scale conflict maintained by US might. Under Trump, the US has given up on its position of maintaining a rules-based international order through alliances and organisations such as the UN, prompting a rapid global realignment. In many parts of the world, the consequences of the American pullback from this system – however flawed – have been brutal. “No one can quite understand what America is, due to the lack of stability and predictability which was the basis of Pax Americana. There was an alliance of nations, and they had a shared view of how the world should be led. Now that’s gone, and America acts alone,” says Patrick. “The US is also struggling to come to terms with the fact that when it used to say jump, Europe would jump. Now they are not because there is a battle going on inside Europe to try to become more independent from America.” For the global south, western hypocrisy – perceived or otherwise – is a major diplomatic issue when trying to build common positions to stop fighting, Patrick tells me. There is a sense that the west has not been able to apply the same moral standards to conflicts, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the conflict in Israel and Palestine. “For the global south, the argument will be that they’re expected to show undying support for Ukraine against Russia. Yet Europe is very silent about what Israel is doing in Palestine, which obviously the global south feels very strongly about. This bleeds into the kind of relationship the global south has with Europe,” he adds. *** A ‘multidimensional war scenario’ For Patrick, the threshold for a third major global war has not yet been met. An opportunistic Chinese invasion of Taiwan would change that. But that appears unlikely, at least in the short term, he says. “What everyone’s looking at is whether China sees an opportunity with America [being] so distracted, and goes for Taiwan. The Chinese insist that’s not the case, and they certainly won’t do it for a year or two, but it must be tempting for people in the Chinese government if they are intent on recapturing Taiwan. This would be a good moment to do it because America is massively overstretched and also led by an incredibly unpopular leader,” he says. “That would be how we got to a world war, but I don’t think that’s what China is actually going to do. I think we’re in this multidimensional war scenario, and we are going to be like that for quite a long time.” *** Military readiness v reality I end by asking Patrick whether the UK would even be ready for such a conflict. At Davos earlier this year, the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, urged middle powers to form alliances that could operate together in a world where US and China are increasingly in competition, warning: “If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” It depends on what kind of war we are talking about, says Patrick. “We are moving very slowly to try to re-establish our military strength. Reputationally, we are still strong. We still have a very good military officer class. But the actual weaponry and the number of people to fight are limited. “In Europe, there has been a belief that we could spend more on welfare and less on defence. And now that’s got to change, I’m afraid. That’s going to be very painful, but I think it’s going to be a requirement. And then it is also going to require the UK to think more about its relations with Europe. You don’t have to reverse Brexit, but you’re going to have to recognise that Europe is our future and not America.” What else we’ve been reading This week’s pet I’ll never forget – a series that never disappoints – is Harriet the hedgehog, who took to living in Roger Leitch’s airing cupboard. Martin Belam Chinamaxxing (pictured above) has been one of the biggest social media trends of the last year, with influencers celebrating Chinese customs by drinking hot water, wearing slippers around the house, using chopsticks and eating Chinese food. Read Isabella Lee’s piece about what she hopes remains from the social media fad. Patrick Fotohane Darkroom is a space for the children of Mardin – a Turkish city that borders Syria and Iraq – to learn how to shoot, develop and print their own analogue photographs, giving them the chance to tell their stories themselves, Flora Medina reports for i-D magazine. Martin While immigration enforcement raids have made international headlines in the US, a recent crackdown in the UK has gone largely unnoticed. Sammy Gecsoyler investigates the huge spike in immigration raids on businesses since Labour came to power. Patrick Hartlepool hit the headlines for saying it had too many, but here Anne Karpf argues, with the aid of a lovely anecdote about children dancing, that memorial benches keep the dead part of the flow of everyday life. Martin Sport Cricket | The England Wales Cricket Board has said it will stand by director of cricket Rob Key and multi-format head coach Brendon McCullum despite the men’s team’s humiliating Ashes tour. Football | Ben White has been recalled by Thomas Tuchel for England men’s friendlies against Uruguay and Japan, ending his partly self-imposed exile. Tuchel also called up Harvey Barnes, whom Scotland had been hoping to lure for their World Cup squad. Football | Uefa has rejected requests from English clubs to increase the size of Champions League squads to 28 next season, after a backlash led by their counterparts in Spain. The front pages “Trump stalls strikes amid claims of ‘productive’ talks with Tehran” is the Guardian splash. “Trump: I’ll run the Strait with ayatollah” is top story at the Telegraph, the FT has “Trump touts diplomatic end to war” and the Mirror says “It’s not over”. The Mail headlines on “Trump blinks first” and the Times runs “Trump: I’d bet on a deal with Iran”. The i Paper splashes on “UK investigates possible Iran link to arson attacks on Jewish ambulances”, while the Sun says “Barmy Beeb bans Bob”, in reference to Bob Monkhouse. Today in Focus Israel’s second front: on the ground in Lebanon The conflict in the Middle East is being fought from the air – except in southern Lebanon where Israel and Hezbollah are fighting a bitter ground war. Will Christou reports. Cartoon of the day | Pete Songi The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Deep in Cambodia’s limestone caves, scientists have revealed a hidden world of life – including species never seen before. Surveying more than 60 caves across 10 hills in Battambang, a team led by international wildlife conservation charity Fauna & Flora found “a vast array of wildlife” thriving in karst landscapes of sinkholes, springs and caverns. Among the discoveries: a “spectacular new species of pit viper” (pictured above) and multiple new geckos, including a “night wanderer” spotted only in this habitat. The findings suggest many more species may yet be uncovered. In one of the planet’s most fragile ecosystems, the work is a reminder that there are still extraordinary new discoveries waiting in the dark. Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply