In more US-Russia relationship news, Interfax reports that Russian economy minister Maxim Reshetnikov will take part in a G20 trade ministers’ meeting in the US which is scheduled to start tomorrow.
Two ministers in Viktor Orbán’s former far-right government suspected separately of misusing millions of euros of public funds and taking millions more in bribes have been detained, hours after Hungarian MPs voted to lift their immunity. Prosecutors said on Tuesday that Balázs Hankó, Orbán’s culture minister and still an MP in the former prime minister’s nationalist Fidesz party, was taken into custody late on Monday. Hankó is suspected of misappropriation of funds. He has denied any wrongdoing. Miklós Seszták, an MP from Fidesz ally KDNP who served as minister for national development between 2014 and 2018, was also detained on Monday as part of an investigation into alleged bribery. He too has denied wrongdoing. “Yesterday was an important day,” said Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar on Tuesday. His Tisza party swept to victory in April elections promising to investigate alleged corruption and abuse of office during Orbán’s 16-year rule. “After decades of lies, for the first time, many millions of Hungarians could experience what real regime change and equality before the law really mean, Magyar said on social media. “Hungary is no longer a country without consequences.” The arrests came hours after Hungary’s parliament on Monday voted to suspend Hankó and Seszták’s immunity – but also that of Magyar, who had asked for his to be lifted so he could clear himself of what he called a “character assassination”. The graft investigations into the Orbán-era ministers are the first against senior figures in the former government. Magyar, meanwhile, is accused of snatching a phone from a man filming him in a nightclub in 2024 and throwing it into the Danube River. The prime minister has denied his conduct amounted to theft and called the case, which involves a damages claim of €300 (£260), a “sham”. He said he took responsibility for his actions but denied committing a crime and criticised prosecutors for “conflating” the ex-ministers’ corruption cases with “an attempted political character assassination”. Magyar has repeatedly said that in recent years corruption and misuse of public funds have cost Hungary between 8% and 10% of its GDP under successive governments led by Orbán, who has repeatedly denied allowing rampant corruption and outright theft of public money during more than a decade and half in power. Prosecutors allege Hankó oversaw the criminal misuse of 17.3bn forints (€47m) of public funds from Hungary’s national cultural fund (NKA), channelling the money to artists and groups with ties to Fidesz and financing its 2026 election campaign. “My conscience is clear, this is a political show trial,” Hankó said in a live video broadcast on Orbán’s Facebook page shortly before his arrest. In July, police raided the Fidesz offices and seized the party’s internet servers in connection with alleged “misappropriation and other criminal offences” at the NKA, prompting Orbán to accuse authorities of conducting a sham investigation in order to render his party “legally unviable”. Prosecutors also suspect Seszták of accepting more than 12bn forints (€32.6m) in bribes and kickbacks connected to vehicle procurements under Hungary’s state bus company, as well as to public construction projects. The case centres on the purchase of secondhand buses at allegedly inflated prices. Separately, Hungary’s national asset protection and recovery office, the anti-corruption body established by Magyar’s government as part of his anti-graft drive, on Monday announced the first four cases it intends to tackle. The first concerned “selling political connections to obtain residence permits for employment”, the body said in a statement, and the second case is about alleged corruption involving local council expenditure on park maintenance and public catering. The third case involved “a state-owned company and state investments” and has links to Dániel Jellinek, a real estate mogul and one of Hungary’s wealthiest businessmen, the statement said. The real estate firm that Jellinek heads has said he will cooperate fully with the authorities. “Our firm position is that Mr Jellinek has not committed any offence in connection with the matter. We are confident that the investigation will confirm this and that the proceedings against him will soon be discontinued,” it said in a statement this month. The fourth concerned “seemingly unjustified propaganda and event costs” at the sovereignty protection office, an Orbán-era body set up to monitor what Fidesz alleged was “undue political interference” by foreign entities in Hungary, and abolished by Magyar’s government in June.
“Halt, stop right there,” shouts a Peruvian Navy Seal, firing warning shots into the air. But the fleeing man pays no attention, scrambling up to the rim of a football pitch-sized crater and disappearing into the dense rainforest as the commandos give chase, swearing and shooting. Meanwhile, other marines set dynamite charges on a makeshift wooden raft that floats in the crater, which is essentially an enormous pit of opaque, stagnant water. The raft has a diesel-fuelled suction pump motor with thick plastic tubing used to suck up and sift through river sediment for tiny particles of gold. Soon after, a mushroom of orange and black fumes envelops the trees – and seconds later comes the sound of the explosion, shattering the peace of the Tambopata National Reserve, one of Peru’s most prized Amazon parks. Located in the south-eastern Madre de Dios region, the reserve is visited by about 40,000 tourists a year, many of whom stay in luxurious ecolodges further down the Malinowski River that marks the Tambopata park’s northern border. But today eight patrols are moving along the river, by helicopter or boat – and every few hundred metres they encounter more evidence of illegal gold mining, operations that have laid waste to more than 500 hectares of the park’s rainforest in the last year, according to satellite mapping data from Amazon Conservation. In total, more than 140,000 hectares have been lost to mining in Madre de Dios – a shocking 97.5% of the total deforestation caused by mining in Peru’s Amazon rainforest, an area twice the size of the US state of California. Military crackdowns on illegal mining in the Amazon are not new in Peru. But the skyrocketing international price of gold has caused this destructive activity to spread, empowering local gangs and attracting transnational organised crime. “Dirty” gold has become the country’s most profitable illicit industry, even surpassing drug trafficking in the world’s second-biggest producer of cocaine after Colombia. “Gold prices have risen,” said Gen Víctor Cotrina, the military commander of Madre de Dios, who is leading the crackdown on illegal gold mining. “That’s why, if a miner’s motor is destroyed, he’ll replace it quickly because gold is at its peak price; the very next day he’s back to his mining activities. He’s back at work again.” For troops used to combating drug trafficking by targeting well-hidden plantations of coca, which is used to make cocaine, the fight against illegal gold presents new challenges as the end product is not an illicit drug but a legally traded commodity, Cotrina said. “The difference is that an open-pit mining operation doesn’t require covert operations, whereas drug trafficking does.” He said previous anti-mining crackdowns had been ineffective due to corruption and patchy enforcement. But now, with “aerial surveillance and military personnel who are available 24/7 to conduct patrols, we are determined to eliminate mining in this region”. According to Peru’s financial supervisory body, illegal gold mining is the top illicit finance threat to the country. For the first time, the illegal trade surpassed the legal production of gold in the first half of this year, according to the Peruvian Economics Institute think tank, which estimates it could reach as much as $18 billion in value by the end of 2026. The country’s Financial Investigation Unit found that illegal mining accounted for nearly 60% of all investigations in terms of value between 2021 and 2025 – far higher than drug trafficking (8%) or tax crimes (4%). The evidence is not difficult to find or destroy. Behind the wall of green that marks the edge of the reserve, troops and environmental prosecutors set ablaze a network of well-supplied mining camps, built with timber and blue tarpaulins and stocked with food and beer. In one location they find a jungle brothel with wooden tables, a bar counter, a stereo and a giant teddy bear, a shower still wet with beauty products inside. A lone cockerel crows as the abandoned camps go up in flames. But during four days of operations in late August, prosecutors arrested just a handful of suspects. Two women had been left behind by the fleeing miners: Andrea, 30, wept as she begged the officers not to arrest her, explaining she was a single mother who had been working as a cook and could find no other work to support a sick mother and two children. Liz Compi, 20, was found sitting on a boat with her one-year-old son. She said she had taken the job as a cook for $450 a month after being abandoned by her partner and sacked from a previous job. Authorities took both women back to the city and released them. Ronal Flores, a deputy prosecutor for Peru’s Office of the attorney Ggeneral who helped to rescue Compi, said it was pointless to arrest most workers at the camps as they tended to have no knowledge of the workings of the much bigger illicit enterprise. Many are left behind to sink motors in the river to avoid detection; even hours later, the machines can be winched up with pulleys and put back to work. “In these places, the big fish – the owners – are rarely caught. It’s usually the low-level operatives who we find,” said Flores, a short, energetic man with a black moustache who led the operations on behalf of the Public Prosecutor’s Office backed by the US non-profit Global Conservation. He admitted that they could only slow the pace of the rainforest’s destruction, but that the state agencies lacked the budget to maintain the intensity of raids, even though the military destroyed and seized an estimated $500m in machinery, supplies and illegal dredgers, according to government figures. Flores said the raids had destroyed about 150 mining barges and motors in the Amazon park, but that was “nothing compared to the magnitude of the damage being caused within the reserve”. A single mining dredger, operating 24 hours a day, can produce as much as 50 grams of gold – which, with the price of gold at more than $4,650 a troy ounce in late August (having peaked at roughly $5,600 an ounce in late January), could fetch more than $6,000 in Madre de Dios. Since the beginning of Covid-19 pandemic, the price of gold has tripled. Tens of thousands of miners have poured into protected Amazon parks and Indigenous reserves, stripping away vast tracts of rainforest and leaving behind a denuded, pocked terrain, stagnant pools and disrupted river courses. Mercury is the cheapest and easiest way to extract gold because it binds with the particles in the river sediment. As a result, an estimated 180 tonnes of the toxic metal contaminates Peru’s waterways every year, poisoning wildlife and damaging human health, particularly among Indigenous communities that depend principally on freshwater fish as their main protein source. The latest raids, dubbed Operación Mercurio II, follow on from an earlier iteration, Operación Mercurio, which began in 2019 and achieved a 62% overall reduction in illegal mining deforestation, including a 92% drop in the most critical illegal hub, La Pampa. But the miners returned to La Pampa and deforestation surged, while extortion and hired killings spiralled as a local gang, Los Guardianes de la Trocha, took control of the $1bn trade. The dirty gold departs Peru as contraband to Bolivia and Brazil, but much of it is laundered into the legal trade via a controversial registration system called Reinfo. The system, in theory, should bring informal miners into the legal economy, but critics say it allows them to continue working without environmental permits and laundering illegal gold through formal companies. The trade is so lucrative that members of Congress have backed five repeated extensions of Reinfo, despite pushes to reform or eliminate the registry. “The government’s response is moving very slowly,” said Flores after another day of relatively fruitless jungle raids, destroying camps that are likely to spring back up soon after. “Meanwhile, illegal mining operates 24 hours a day. The miners measure time in grams, not minutes, so we need to rethink how we investigate mining,” he said. “Unfortunately, as we can see today, they are getting the better of us.”
Victims of Mohamed Al Fayed have accused the medical regulator of allowing his sexual abuse to continue unchecked by refusing to investigate allegations that doctors were complicit in his crimes. Survivors of Fayed’s abuse have called for the General Medical Council (GMC) to be investigated after it dismissed a request in 2017 to scrutinise a doctor accused of subjecting a woman to intrusive sexual health examinations and sharing the results with Fayed. Almost a decade after complaints were first made to the GMC about Dr Wendy Snell, who died in 2022, the doctors’ regulator has now taken action against two other surviving doctors who are also accused of passing sexual health information to Fayed about women who he later abused. Fayed, the former owner of Harrods died in 2023 a year before hundreds of women went public with accusations of sexual assault by Fayed over the previous decades. Pelham Spong complained to the GMC in 2017 about Snell, a doctor employed by Fayed who subjected her to sexual health tests in 2008 as part of an interview process for a job with the former Harrods owner. The same day Fayed grabbed her face and forcibly kissed her, Spong alleged. Fayed also quizzed Spong about a sexually transmitted disease that Snell had assured her would be kept confidential along with all her results, she claimed. Her complaint, seen by the Guardian, said: “I know that there are other women who have similar stories involving both Fayed, and doctors and improper health screenings at Harrods. In fact, the recruiter who sent me on this interview had previously sent another candidate.” It added: “I felt humiliated, ashamed, and embarrassed that this potential employer knew the most intimate details of my body.” The GMC told Spong it was not in the “greater public interest” to investigate Snell. It added: “We have no powers to investigate, resolve or comment on whether a gynaecological examination should have formed part of your recruitment process.” Spong, who was 23 at the time of the abuse, told the Guardian: “It’s shocking that the GMC received intelligence like mine in 2017 and did nothing. They have been sitting on this for almost 10 years and let my abusers escape. There was an alarming lack of curiosity by the GMC which begs all sorts of questions. I was reporting trafficking.” In October 2017 Spong also reported her ordeal to the Metropolitan police, which obtained a copy of her complaint to the GMC as part of its initial inquiries, before taking no further action. She said: “Fayed continued abusing women until he died. So the fact that the Met and the GMC didn’t do their job in 2017 means more women were harmed. That’s on them, so absolutely they should be investigated.” Spong is backing calls for a public inquiry into Fayed’s crimes that would include failures by the Met and the GMC. Joan* alleges she was raped in the 1990s by Fayed’s brother Salah Fayed after a sexual health examination by Dr Ann Coxon. She alleges that before she was raped, Salah Fayed, who died in 2010, phoned Coxon in her presence and put her on speaker. She alleges Coxon then told him the results of her sexual health tests over the call. Joan said: “I heard it first-hand and I’ve got it all written up in an affidavit that I made at the time. I have also got the test that she refers to.” Joan said: “If the GMC had acted when the first complaints were made in 2017, Fayed could have been stopped and held to account. If they were hearing reports about malpractice they should have escalated it to the police. But instead the GMC, very begrudgingly, very slowly, after massive political pressure, are only now finally starting to take action. This is just the wrong way around. What is the GMC for?” A third victim Judith*, says she was groped by Mohamed Al Fayed after a humiliating sexual health examination by Snell as part of a recruitment process for a job working for the family. She said the examination occurred after Fayed sold Harrods in 2010. Judith said: “I had a full gynaecological test with sexually transmitted disease testing as well. I was really shocked and traumatised that this was needed and I felt so much shame. As a result, I have really struggled with having smear tests since. So the whole episode has really put my life at risk.” She said: “I don’t want an apology from the GMC and a promise that this will never happen again. Instead there has to be clear legislation in place to ensure private doctors are monitored. At the moment there seems to be no oversight at all. “A public inquiry needs to be started as soon as possible and that the GMC should be part of that.” Coxon told the Guardian she could not comment but has previously denied carrying out sexual health tests on Harrods staff. The GMC has imposed restrictions on her ability to practise, and that of another doctor, pending a full investigation. Emma Jones, a solicitor at Leigh Day who is representing several of Fayed’s victims, said: “The GMC is finally taking things seriously, because they’ve imposed interim conditions on these doctors which isn’t always a standard step in these investigations. This is far too little, far too late. “When the complaints were first made to the GMC it should have reported them to the police. It beggars belief why they were not investigated earlier – they were such serious allegations they were conducting sexual health examinations and reporting back to Fayed without permission of the patient. “The failings of the GMC is one of the crucial areas that needs to be investigated, and the only way to do that properly is through a public inquiry.” A GMC spokesperson said: “The reports of sexual abuse carried out by Mohamed Al Fayed are horrifying and shocking. “We are investigating doctors employed by Mr Al Fayed, and have written to the parties involved to provide an update on our investigations. We are taking these concerns very seriously and remain in contact with relevant authorities, including the Metropolitan police. “We will take the appropriate action if we identify any potential fitness to practise concerns about individual doctors, but cannot provide information about individual investigations.” * Names have been changed
A play based on the trial of the men who drugged and raped Gisèle Pelicot will come to London for one night only this November – and promises to feature a star-studded cast. The four-hour production of The Pelicot Trial: Tribute to Gisèle Pelicot has been performed around the world, including in New York City and Avignon, the city in France where the trial took place. This autumn, it is coming to London County Hall, the home of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution. “I saw it in French originally – all four hours of it. It was jaw-dropping, harrowing, really emotional,” said Nadia Fall, artistic director and co-chief executive of the Young Vic, which is putting on the performance. “It was the act of witnessing that really got me: it is long-form and testimonial in form.” Fall expects the show to sell out immediately. “Because it’s one night only, what we are able to do is ring our best actors, people you will know ‘off the telly’ as well,” Fall said. The full cast will be announced before tickets go on sale in the coming weeks. Fall added: “The ensemble rehearses together just once. That allows you to call up the best of people who are available for a short commitment. I really can’t wait to announce the company. It is, I think, 27 actors all in all.” The play was created by Milo Rau and Servane Dècle. The Swiss director and playwright Rau is known for adapting court cases for the stage, including the Moscow trial of the Russian punks Pussy Riot and the trial of the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaușescu. Pelicot became internationally recognised after she waived her right to anonymity to ensure a public trial of her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, who, for almost a decade from 2011, drugged her unconscious and invited dozens of men from an internet forum to rape her. Her husband was sentenced to 20 years in prison in December 2024 and guilty verdicts were returned for all 51 accused men. She wanted the story to be public, saying “shame must change sides”. “We do it one time only in each city,” said Rau. “It is more of a political act really, than a play.” “It is a harsh watch,” said Dècle, “but people stay for the whole time. We let them come in and out if they want, but very few do. Even Gisèle Pelicot herself came to watch in New York. That was amazing. She said, ‘The actress was doing better than I did on trial.’” Journalists covering the trial gave Rau and Dècle thousands of pages of their notebooks, and the play is based on what was said in court. “Everyone wanted to share with us,” said Rau. “It became a trial of our society, of the patriarchy. And we have toured it in at least 15 different countries, in different languages, some I barely understand myself, and the audience still understands the play. Sadly it is a universal experience. It would be better for humanity if this was just a French experience.” “It isn’t scenes and costumes in a set like a traditional piece of theatre. It is the facts. It just floors you,” said Fall. The large majority of the audience has been female, Dècle said. “I wish more men would see it. The very interesting thing about this whole affair is you can really dive into who these male perpetrators were.” Fall said: “Pelicot represents so much for everybody, especially women; resilience and courage and a radical joy for me that she triumphed and lives on. She’s in love and lives her life. That is two fingers up to the patriarchy and I think that is really empowering for us women. This piece and her story is not just about the specifics about her story and sexual assault.” She agreed to the play, the writers said, because she wanted to keep the conversation that was started by her trial going. “We always say she opened the door, and we just keep it open,” said Rau.
Good morning. Vehicles suspected of carrying explosives zipping across Britain, entirely unbeknownst to authorities, is a disconcerting prospect. Initially, it seemed precisely this had occurred in Gloucestershire early on Sunday. A major attack on RAF Fairford appeared to have been scuppered by “pure luck”, a local farmer said, after she noticed suspicious vans and masked men on an otherwise deserted country lane. Had she not tipped off police, the vigilant villager believes the five men arrested on terror offences would not have been apprehended. That account prompted questions about whether police and security services had been caught off guard. Bu new details emerging suggest there are competing, if not conflicting, versions of how events unfolded in the Cotswolds this weekend. So what exactly happened in the early hours of Sunday morning? In today’s First Edition, we’ll explore this, and some other unanswered questions, with the help of Guardian international security correspondent Jason Burke. Before that, this morning’s headlines. Five big stories Energy | Andy Burnham will take his first major step to putting Britain’s utility companies into public control when, at the Labour conference, he announces a new government-backed body to invest in the electricity grid. Immigration | Home secretary Shabana Mahmood has signalled she is considering watering down her plans to make it harder for foreign workers to claim permanent residence in the UK, amid growing demands for a U-turn from cabinet colleagues and unions. AI | Two of the “godfathers” of modern AI and senior executives at OpenAI and Anthropic have warned governments to prepare for an AI “intelligence explosion”, which they say could be the most consequential technological development in history. Petrol | The price of diesel on UK forecourts has hit an all-time high average of 199.18p a litre, as the conflict in the Middle East continues to drive the cost of fuel to record levels. Ebola | A senior member of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s ruling party was beaten to death on Sunday after appearing on a radio programme to raise awareness about the Ebola outbreak, a party representative has said. In depth: What we do (and don’t) know about a suspected bomb plot in the Cotswolds In the early hours of Sunday, a farmer from the village of Whelford was travelling home from a party along quiet rural roads. She was about to drop off a friend, while her husband dozed in the passenger seat. Around 1am, however, she encountered three vans “parked in a really weird fan shape” blocking the path to her farm, close to RAF Fairford, an airbase operated by the US air force. Forced to turn around, she then described seeing “a large group of hooded and masked men” at a nearby junction, who quickly dispersed. After a failed attempt to contact the Ministry of Defence, she phoned the police at 1.36am and posted in the local residents’ WhatsApp group. Roughly 10 minutes later, armed officers were on the scene. Five men were arrested 300 metres from the base’s perimeter, first under the Explosives Act, and subsequently also on suspicion of preparing a terrorist act. All five – UK nationals from London aged between 23 and 25 – were released on bail yesterday. In interviews, the farmer, who has remained anonymous, reiterated her belief that her tip off “foiled whatever plans” were unfolding. “I am absolutely staggered that it was left to me, as a member of the public, to see and report this,” she said. That the high-security site was so exposed, and that the vans suspected of carrying explosives in its vicinity went totally unnoticed, has since raised questions. While thanking the farmer for her efforts, defence secretary Wes Streeting was quick to cast doubt on her assertions, hinting that UK security services were aware and that her account only offered “a partial picture”. Donald Trump has claimed the US and UK agencies worked together and had the five men “under view for a long time”, adding the suspects “were looking to do big damage to our fort, and working with the British worked out great”. The farmer acknowledged there had been “activity” by what she “assumed were plain-clothed police officers” in the area in recent days. Another local told the BBC that while walking their dog early on Saturday evening they were stopped by armed police and told to return home. Gloucestershire constabulary said they were first alerted to the suspicious vans at 12.45am on Sunday – almost an hour before the farmer’s 999 call. Counter-terror police have confirmed the three vehicles had been travelling overnight and been subject to extensive examination, with the support of military assets and forensic experts. It is now understood that the material found inside them was not viable explosives, but police have said the investigation is continuing. And then there’s the expeditious nature of the response: the speed with which armed officers and police helicopters arrived at a rural location in the middle of the night appears improbable. *** Questions around the arrests Police are still working to establish motive. Yesterday afternoon, the head of UK National Counter Terrorism Policing, Laurence Taylor, confirmed it may have been the work of proxies, or individuals working on behalf of a foreign state. On Monday night, US secretary of state Marco Rubio told Fox News that a foreign actor was involved in the suspected plot, but provided no evidence for his claims. Iran is the centre of speculation, having explicitly stated it considers RAF Fairford “a legitimate target”. Yesterday, the Iranian embassy said it “categorically rejects” any involvement. Used by the US military for decades, RAF Fairford’s two-mile long runway was specially constructed by the Americans to allow long-range bombers to take off and land. Fairford has played a significant role in Trump’s war on Iran; since former prime minister Keir Starmer allowed the US to use UK bases in its assaults, bomb-laden American B-52 and B-1 planes have regularly been spotted taking off. The airbase is one of only two available to the US in Europe that can facilitate these operations, after Spain, France, Italy and Switzerland rejected similar American requests. “Most observers and analysts would place Iran at the top of the list of potential suspects here,” Jason Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent, tells me, “though we have very little in the way of information to work on, so it’s entirely possible an altogether different scenario is at play.” As for the five suspects, their being British nationals is likely of little help when determining who may be behind the plot. “The Iranian modus operandi – borrowing a leaf from the Russian playbook – relies on using local hires,” Jason says. “Instead of deploying their own intelligence operatives, they recruit low-grade agents on the ground, some of whom may not fully realise what they are involved in.” *** Growing security concerns Since the US-Israel war on Iran began, a series of UK security incidents have been linked with Iran. Earlier this month, a man and a woman were arrested after raids on homes in north London on suspicion of assisting Iran’s foreign intelligence service. In March, four Jewish community ambulances were destroyed in an arson attack – counter-terror police explored the possible involvement of Iranian proxies, though aside from a reference to a “terrorist connection”, no mention of Iran was made by prosecutors in court when four men admitted responsibility. Similar suggestions have been made about tens of other antisemitic attacks in the UK and Europe – Iran’s embassy in the UK has denied any involvement. In April, Jason reported that, while direct proof of Iran’s involvement in incidents on UK soil remained elusive, the consensus among security officials was the attacks look to be part of a campaign of hybrid warfare launched by Tehran. Since then, Jason says, more evidence has emerged, in part due to the prosecution of 32-year-old Iraqi national Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi in a US court. “This case laid out in extraordinary detail how he, on behalf of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, commissioned, organised, and executed a series of attacks in Europe, including in Britain.” *** A significant escalation If Iran is proven to be responsible, an intended attack on this scale would represent a significant escalation. “It would be a major step up from targeting synagogues, Israeli embassies and US-owned banks,” says Jason, “given this is a piece of major military infrastructure in Britain.” With Andy Burnham leading a new government, it’s possible there may be a recalibration of UK foreign policy. He has said he’d be willing to deviate from Trump when necessary. Burnham’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, was reportedly central to attempts made during a national security meeting to dissuade then-PM Starmer from granting the US permission to use UK bases. But this would not significantly alter the risk of attacks, Jason says. “Iran’s targets are not necessarily chosen to directly punish a country; most experts believe they are selected to sow division in societies, distract policymakers, and divert resources.” For now, the investigation continues. What else we’ve been enjoying Palliative nurse Jane Turner makes a poignant point in this column: regardless of your belief about assisted dying, every side agrees on the need to radically improve end-of-life care in the UK. Charlie Lindlar, newsletters team I devoured Jess Cartner-Morley’s interview with Celia Birtwell, in which Birtwell talks about her friendship with David Hockney and her marriage to Ossie Clark: “He was spectacular, at the beginning,” says Birtwell – even if he did leave her the day after their wedding, pregnant, to honeymoon in Barbados on his own. Lucinda Everett, newsletters team Some vital tips in this piece by Sarah Phillips on the conversations every couple should have to keep a household running safely and happily – I’ve already pencilled in my first weekly “check-in”. Charlie All of the photographs in this gallery of the Porthcawl Elvis festival are wonderful. But my favourite has to be of Brian, AKA Smurf Elvis, who remixed his costume this year after a decade of attending the largest gathering of Elvis fans in Europe. Lucinda Rob Draper’s look back at how Arsenal’s hiring of Arsène Wenger changed football is brilliantly reported – make sure to share it with your nearest mustachioed graphic designer friend called Sam, Ed or Harry. Charlie Sport Nations League | Israeli football team captain Manor Solomon has hit out at Ireland after his team’s 3-o loss in a politically charged Nations League game, saying “They hate us and we don’t like them.” Rugby | In west Wales, fans want to know why the Scarlets and Ospreys, two teams who have won titles and turned out hundreds of Test players, are on the chopping block under the Welsh Rugby Union’s proposal to cut a club by 2028. Football | The Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, is poised to bow to demands from Uefa and Concacaf to distribute more money from its $6bn cash reserves to member associations. The front pages The Guardian splashes on “PM unveils electricity grid plan in push for public control of utilities”. The Mail leads with “PM to vow public control of energy, water and housing” and the Mirror looks at Burnham’s energy prices pledge with “Taking back power”. The Financial Times also reports “Burnham to outline plans for social care, welfare and ‘control’ of utilities.” The Times goes with “Labour split on prospect of ending triple lock”, the Telegraph has “Burnham signals end of triple lock”, while The i Paper says “End of UK state pension triple lock moves a step closer”. The Sun looks at the RAF terror drama, asking “Plot’s going on, PM?” Today in Focus The Pussy Riot activist turned Kremlin informer In August, Rita Flores, a Russian artist, activist and former member of the Pussy Riot collective, revealed in a video that she had been working as an informant for Russia’s FSB security service, a cooperation she only broke days after fleeing the country. Masha Alekhina, a founding member of Pussy Riot who was jailed for her support of the group and fled the country, tells Helen Pidd about why she does not feel angry at her former comrade in activism. Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Our weekly series The pet I’ll never forget is always a source of joy. And the story of scruffy little terrier Dennis is no exception. Sophia Money-Coutts got Dennis in 2024 with her then-boyfriend, but within three months the couple had split. “I was distracted from my sadness by this small, bouncy, intensely disobedient dog,” says Money-Coutts, explaining that he raced after every squirrel, raided her bins, licked a man she was dating during an amorous moment, and “once farted on Jilly Cooper’s sofa”. Dennis had accompanied Money-Coutts, a journalist, to an interview with the animal-loving novelist, whose response was typically indulgent. “It doesn’t matter a bit, does it darling?” she recalls Cooper crying, clutching Dennis closer to her. “He can do whatever he likes.” 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