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Colombia prepares to go to polls in election shadowed by resurgence of political violence

Mateo Pérez Rueda was one internship away from completing a degree in political science. The 24-year-old also worked as a bicycle delivery rider and sold fruit salads and juice to finance his passion: the Colombian independent digital magazine El Confidente. On 4 May he travelled to Briceño, in the western province of Antioquia, to report on the long-running conflict between the army, paramilitaries and dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). The next day, he stopped responding to his parents. Three long days of agony followed, with relatives and friends pressing the authorities for information, until a humanitarian mission confirmed what many had feared: Rueda had been kidnapped, tortured and killed by one of the Farc dissident groups, known as the 36th Front. His case became yet another symbol of the surging political violence that has reached its highest levels in a decade – and that has made the decades-long internal armed conflict central to this Sunday’s presidential election. The vote will be a contest between left and right – and two entirely contradictory proposals for dealing with the war that claimed nearly half a million lives. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, who under the constitution cannot seek re-election, has backed the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda, 63, who is leading in the polls and is regarded as the architect of the government’s “total peace” effort to sign disarmament deals with all criminal groups. Many security experts consider the plan to have failed, noting that armed factions have taken advantage of temporary ceasefires to continue expanding, but Cepeda remains committed to the plan. The two main challengers, the far-right lawyer and “outsider” Abelardo de la Espriella, 47, and the rightwing senator Paloma Valencia, 48, promise a return to all-out war as soon as they take office. During the election period, there has been a surge in guerrilla attacks, homicides, kidnappings, forced displacement and massacres; and last year, the rightwing senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot during a campaign event and later died. The violence is widely seen as a reminder that although the landmark 2016 peace deal between the government and most of Farc dramatically reduced violence for years, it did not end it for good. Subsequent administrations slow-walked the implementation of the settlement, while some Farc factions and other rebel groups refused to sign any agreement, instead growing in strength and size. “Here in Antioquia, the war never ended,” said Jorge Rueda, Mateo’s cousin and godfather, who lived a few blocks away from the journalist in Yarumal, only 33 miles (53km) from where he was killed. Although the various rebel factions claim a political agenda, most of the violence is driven by competition over drug production, retail and smuggling (Colombia remains the world’s biggest producer of cocaine), illegal goldmining, logging and local corruption. “Here, the war is over micro-trafficking and another over the goldmines,” added Rueda. On Monday, more than 50 people were killed in clashes between two Farc dissident groups on the opposite side of the country, in the southern department of Guaviare. Many of them were children and teenagers forcibly recruited by the crime factions. Alejandro Chala, a researcher at the Fundación Paz y Reconciliación, argued that although the figures were high, the current moment was not comparable to the period before the peace agreement, when the homicide rate peaked at about 80 per 100,000 inhabitants; it now stands at about 26 per 100,000. “The violence now is much more territorially concentrated, largely entrenched in the main areas where illegal economic routes operate … It clearly generates a lot of media noise, but it does not have the national reach it had in the past,” he said. Even so, Espriella has argued that it is necessary to “save Colombia” from crime, while Valencia says that instead of “total peace”, the country needs “total security”. Until recently Cepeda remained firmly at the top of the polls, with Valencia in second place; but in the past two weeks she has been overtaken by Espriella. With a large share of voters still undecided, the outcome is uncertain: if no candidate wins more than half of the vote, a runoff will be held on 21 June. Valencia has been a senator since 2014, and is the granddaughter of the former president Guillermo León Valencia, and a loyal follower of the ex-president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, whose two terms between 2002 and 2010 were marked by an aggressive military confrontation with armed groups that produced limited results and became tainted by the “false positives” scandal, when innocent people were extrajudicially killed by the army and falsely labelled as enemy combatants. Espriella is a criminal lawyer and millionaire businessman with a lavish lifestyle who owns wine and rum brands and investments in cattle ranching and real estate, but has never held public office. He is an admirer of Donald Trump, and has courted controversy during the campaign, telling a radio host that he is winning female voters because of the size of his genitals. With his neatly trimmed beard, he has also modelled himself on El Salvador’s populist autocrat Nayib Bukele, who has imprisoned at least 2% of his country’s adult population as part of a controversial crackdown on gangs. Espriella promises to follow the Salvadoran mano dura (iron-fist) approach and build 10 maximum-security “mega-prisons”. Sandra Borda Guzmán, an associate professor of political science at Universidad de los Andes, said: “He also carries some elements of this new counterculture against political correctness, in the style of [Argentina’s president] Javier Milei and Donald Trump.” Despite Espriella’s openly declared admiration for Trump, the US president has so far refrained from endorsing either him or Valencia, unlike in other recent elections involving far-right candidates, such as in Hungary, Honduras and Argentina. Guzmán believes one reason may lie in Espriella’s recent past: he spent years as the lawyer for figures such as the Colombian businessman Álex Saab, widely regarded as the main financial frontman for Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, who was recently deported to the US by the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez. “As a criminal lawyer, Espriella has long been linked to people prosecuted or extradited by the US and those close ties remain concerning for Washington. So he’s not really the ideal candidate for the White House,” said Guzmán. She believes another reason why the US has not openly tried to interfere in the election is that “they eventually realised those interventions produce the opposite effect to what they want”, noting that Trump’s attacks on Petro – calling him a “sick man” and “drug-trafficking leader” – ended up boosting the Colombian president’s popularity. Petro, a former member of a smaller rebel faction that signed a peace deal years before the Farc agreement, is Colombia’s first leftwing president. His approval ratings are widely seen as high for a president nearing the end of his term, something many analysts attribute to the expansion of the government’s social programmes and increases in the minimum wage, alongside falling poverty rates. Despite losing his godson Mateo to the internal armed conflict, Jorge Rueda believes Colombia is doing better. “I could say something different out of anger, but from the heart I believe Colombia has improved enormously in recent years … such as giving young people better opportunities so they don’t join the armed conflict. However, there are some regions that never improved,” he said. In those areas, he added, the absence of the state allows criminal groups to take control and drive away any prospect of private investment. “That is why I think it is so important that Mateo’s case receives attention, and that his death serves to show that there is a part of Colombia still forgotten and that neglect is what keeps the war so intense.”

‘We could hear the roof collapsing’: how Russian missiles devastated Kyiv’s cultural sites

For four years, Vitalina Martynovska and her team had been working on a complete transformation of Kyiv’s National Chornobyl Museum. The new sleek displays were designed to tell a fresh story about the reactor explosion of 26 April 1986 – the most serious nuclear accident in history, a factor that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and an event that continues to shape Ukraine’s identity today. The museum was to be devoted not just to the extraordinary work of the “liquidators” who did the initial cleanup after the explosion. It was also the story “of all the people whose lives changed after the disaster”, said Martynovska, the museum’s director. It reopened to visitors on 26 April, 40 years to the day since the nuclear disaster. Then, less than a month later, on the night of 23 May, a shock wave from a Russian missile engulfed the museum’s handsome historic building, a former fire station. Five days later, a still profoundly shocked Martynovska was standing among the museum’s charred remains. Firefighters toiled amid the absolute destruction of everything she and her team had worked so hard to create. “There is practically no room in the museum that has not suffered damage,” she said. “The building itself sustained significant damage, the roof was destroyed, the floor between the second and third storeys was destroyed, and collapsed; the exhibition rooms and the museum laboratory were affected.” About 40% of the irreplaceable artefacts on display, according to early assessments, were destroyed. Martynovska first heard that her building was on fire around 5am on 24 May. Through the night, Russia sent 60 missiles and 600 drones to Ukraine, most of which were targeted at the capital. The attack killed two people and injured 90 more and significantly damaged many of Kyiv’s museums and culturally significant buildings. “Twenty minutes later, I was already there,” she said. “The first thing I saw was thick smoke and flames on the roof. The windows, doors and gates that were part of this building were already lying on the ground nearby. “Given that I had been working on the restoration project with the team and on the project to build a new exhibition over the last four years, you can imagine what a heavy blow this was for me.” As soon as the emergency workers allowed, she and the chief curator plunged into the building to try to save what they could. “We began evacuating the artefacts while the roof was still ablaze and the firefighting operation was still under way,” she said. “We could hear the roof collapsing. We were constantly wading through water.” As she spoke, emergency workers were making safe a space that had housed a display about the Chornobyl area before the building of the power plant. The artefacts included old Bibles, books, icons and ceramics, most of which were destroyed. A text on the wall describing the room’s theme remained intact – translated, it read, “Lost worlds”. The museum stores – housing the bulk of the collection of 22,000 artefacts – were safe, she said. And she had some hope that the 40% loss of artefacts on display may be revised down a little. She was clutching a pretty earthenware jug that the emergency workers had found in the blackened wreckage. They had also found, she said, the tail of a missile. Across town, wind and rain were blowing into the elegant Doric-pedimented building housing the National Art Museum of Ukraine (Namu). Shock waves had blown out nearly all its windows, ceilings were partly down and panels from its huge wooden front doors had been flung across the foyer. The sculpture of Apollo that sits atop its pediment had cracked. Its collection – ranging from ancient icons to old masters and Ukrainian modernists – is in storage or out on tour abroad. During the full-scale invasion, it has been hosting temporary exhibitions: the current show, titled Sunrise, of works by the 20th-century painter Anatoly Limarev, was protected from the onslaught of glass and debris by the temporary walls erected in the exhibition space, which acted as baffle walls. Since the attack, the exhibition has been hastily uninstalled and taken to safety. In one of its elegant galleries, the head of exhibitions, a senior conservator and two students from Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, attached to the institution for part of their art history degree, were shovelling rubble into carts. “It’s definitely an internship they won’t forget,” said the museum spokesperson Veronika Bublei. In the early morning of 24 May, she said, it was “stress, horrible – we were running about trying to do what we could and there was no time for emotion – or we turned the stress into trying to do something practical. “It felt like the epicentre of a tempest, with all the doors and windows blown out – as if a tornado had blown through the building.” “My initial feeling was one of shock,” said Namu’s director, Yulia Lytvynets, who, like the rest of her team, was dressed in workwear as the staff continued with the back-breaking cleanup operation on Thursday. “We understand that there is a war going on. Our halls are empty and our art is safe. But you’ll never be 100% ready for something like this. Even if you hide your collection, you can’t hide the building.” The museum had been preparing its next exhibition devoted to the modernist theatre designer Anatol Petrytskyi. That will now go ahead online, she said. The building is now closed to the public indefinitely. Numerous cultural buildings and institutions were reported damaged in the city after the night’s attacks, including the Zhytnyi market, a masterpiece of 1980s modernism. It was the latest attack to damage cultural buildings and cultural heritage in the country. According to Ukraine’s culture ministry, the Russian army has “destroyed or damaged 1,723 cultural heritage sites and 2,524 cultural infrastructure sites in Ukraine” since 2022. Fire had raged through a mall and market in the Lukianivka district of the city. At the Mala Opera, a performance venue across the street from the burned-out shopping mall, the venue’s chief technician, Oleksandr Buryma, was fitting plastic sheeting over blown-out windows as a temporary fix. The roof, he said, was damaged and a section of wall blown out at the rear. But the early 20th-century venue, once a cultural centre for tram workers and now a beloved small-scale stage for theatre and music, was still planning to go ahead with its performance on the evening of 29 May: Railroad, a play by the US writer Bryan Reynolds set amid the rise of nazism, he said. In this case, the show – if it possibly could – would go on.

Exam fail: Indian students complain en masse about marking errors in key final exams

A national outcry has erupted in India after more than 400,000 students requested copies of their answer sheets amid mounting complaints of errors in the marking of the country’s most important school-leaving examinations. Within days of the grade 12 exam results being issued, students began reporting marking discrepancies they linked to a new digital marking system. The government-run Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) says it has received requests for 1.1 million answer sheet copies from more than 400,000 students to crosscheck the results. At least 1.7 million students sat the class 12 exams, which are key to university admissions. The board says the new on-screen marking (OSM) system is aimed at reducing human error and increasing efficiency. Instead, many students say it has resulted in wrong grades. In the new system, physical copies of answer sheets are scanned and uploaded to an online portal for teachers to evaluate, with a software then calculating the total mark. Some students said scanned answer sheets were incomplete or had missing pages, while others reported incorrect marking, blurry scans and mismatched answer sheets. One mother, Geetu Moza, posted on X that her daughter had lost at least 30 marks despite answers that “exactly matched the official answer”. “Do the authorities even understand what 30-35 marks can mean for a Class 12 student whose entire future and admission process depends on these scores?” she said. “This is playing with the careers, mental health and future of thousands of students.” The problem surfaced when Delhi student Vedant Srivastava said in a now viral post that the physics exam answer sheet sent to him after he requested it was not his. He said the handwriting differed and the paper contained answers he had not written. “I studied for an entire year. I sacrificed sleep, peace of mind, outings, everything for these exams,” he wrote. “And now I don’t even know whether my actual physics paper was checked.” Days later, the board emailed Srivastava what it called the “correct copy” of his answer sheet. Srivastava’s complaint triggered a flood of similar stories from students, many sharing screenshots they said showed incorrect marking, missing pages or papers that didn’t belong to them. The board announced the new marking system just eight days before exams began, leaving teachers scrambling to adapt to a major marking change. Education minister Dharmendra Pradhan acknowledged “some discrepancies” in the new system. “I take responsibility for this and assure you a solution will be found,” he said.

‘Essentially diving in coffee’: Australian diver among team rushing to rescue people trapped in flooded Laos cave

An Australian cave diver is part of an international team that has brought one man out alive from a remote flooded cave in Laos, with the rescue operation continuing for six more men still trapped underground. One man was brought alive from the labyrinthine cave complex late on Friday. Four remain stranded on a rocky ledge about 300m from the cave entrance, while two men are still unaccounted for. The men who have been found in the cave are weak with hunger, and some have injuries. A group of eight prospectors entered the cave in Xaysomboun province, central Laos, to search for gold more than a week ago, but sudden heavy rain blocked the cave entrance. One man managed to escape, and alerted authorities to the seven men who remained trapped. Five of them were found alive this week, but they had lost contact with two others also in the cave system. The rescuers, some of whom were involved in the rescue of a young Thai football team in 2018, still need to extract the survivors from the inundated passageways. “The first one is out. Safe and sound!!!” Manat Artmongkron, a rescue technician for Saithan Saphanboon Foundation, a Thai rescue group, wrote in a Facebook post, when the first man was brought from the cave on Friday. Video posted on social media showed a man covered in mud clambering out of the cave to safety. He was met with some cheers and wrapped in an emergency blanket. The rescue effort is continuing. Kengkard Bongkawong, the head of operations for Metta Tham Rescue, a Thai group, said on social media that searching for the two missing men would be even more challenging, requiring teams to dive through a 30m narrow tunnel, checking along the way for any intersections. “The next mission will be harder,” he wrote. Extracting the survivors will also be challenging, due to low oxygen supplies, more rain and a lack of dive experience among the people who are trapped. Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email Divers with a specialised skill set to handle the extremely narrow conditions in the cave were flown in from around the world on Friday. They will be taken by a military helicopter to the remote and hostile jungle terrain where the men are stuck. Australian cave diver Josh Richards, who leads a cave exploration team in Australia called the Soggy Wombats, named after a marsupial known for its burrowing, flew in on Friday to help with the rescue operation. “It’s pretty awful, by the looks of things,” Richards said. “We’re predominantly dealing with clay and mud walls, which are particularly unstable and unpleasant. That mud and clay also [affects] the water; you’re essentially diving in coffee. You’re not going to be seeing anything through it. “It’s all being done by touch and feel, following the lines that have been laid through the mine.” Richards said he was not a “physically large guy”. He said his fellow international divers, who had been asked to support the rescue team, were “all fairly small, we’re all fairly light, and we’ve all spent a fair bit of time underground, squeezing into small places”. “I’m very comfortable underwater with a regulator in my mouth, twisting and turning and doing all those bits and pieces, contorting myself around in order to get into particularly nasty places,” he said. “And unfortunately, this mine sounds like it’s one of them.” Other diving specialists are reportedly arriving from Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and France. A diver from Malaysia joined the mission on Thursday. Richards said the rescue plan was now being developed among the divers, “that will be as safe as possible for everyone involved. There’s a lot of different ideas being thrown around.” As sections of the tunnel between the miners and the surface are completely flooded, the team on the ground was also trying to pump out as much water as possible in a two-pronged approach, Richards said. “If they’re not able to pump all that water out, and there are sections that are completely flooded, that’s … why we need to be there to potentially get these folks through short sections, where they’ll be using scuba equipment,” he said, “and they almost certainly have never used scuba equipment before in their lives.” For people who are familiar with the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand, Richards said there were similarities but also “glaring differences”. The Laos cave is a “considerably” smaller site in terms of length and the physical size of the tunnel itself. The Tham Luang cave is kilometres long, with numerous air chambers where rescuers could set up base stations. Thai rescuers could pump out huge amounts of water, but were also dealing with much more water. “This site is about 350m long. It is much, much smaller, but at the same time, the actual tunnels that we’re trying to squeeze down into are considerably smaller again,” Richards said. “So, there’s similarities in that you’ve got a group of folks who are not trained cave divers but are stuck in a cave, and flooding is a concern, but it is a radically different environment that we’re dealing with, and also not dealing with kids is another factor.” Heavy machinery is being used to clear a route to the cave site, so that equipment can be transported more easily. Additional reporting by Ben Doherty and Rebecca Ratcliffe

Ukraine war briefing: Russia preparing ‘massive new strike’, Zelenskyy says

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia is preparing a “massive new strike” on the country, calling on the population to take action to “protect your lives”. Kyiv was hit particularly hard last weekend by a huge Russian bombardment attack – one of the largest since the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Moscow has warned foreign diplomats to leave Kyiv, threatening to escalate attacks as it seeks revenge for a Ukrainian strike on a dormitory and high school in the Russian-occupied Luhansk region, which Moscow says left 21 people dead. “We have intelligence information about Russia preparing a new massive strike,” Zelenskyy said in a social media message. “Please pay attention to air alerts, protect your lives. Our services are working efficiently and are prepared; the Air Force and other defenders of our skies will be on duty 24/7, as always.” Zelenskyy has reiterated his call to allies to allow and finance the supply of Patriot missiles, which can intercept Russian ballistic missiles. He wrote to Donald Trump and the US Congress earlier this week asking for Patriot systems to respond to the intensifying Russian air attacks. A Ukrainian drone attack killed two people in a car in Russia’s border region of Belgorod, officials said early on Saturday. The region’s operational headquarters, in a post on Telegram, added that two people were injured. The region has been a frequent target of Ukrainian attacks in war between the two countries. A Russian drone that smashed into a Romanian apartment building set off furious condemnation of Russia by Romania and its Nato allies. Two people were injured in the first drone hit on a building outside Ukraine since the start of the war. Romania called the incident a “serious and irresponsible escalation” by its neighbour. Vladimir Putin attempted to suggest, without evidence, that the drone might have been a stray Ukrainian weapon. The drone hit the roof of an apartment building in the centre of the city of Galati, close to the border with Ukraine, sparking a fire and sending a 14-year-old boy and 53-year-old woman to hospital with injuries, officials said. The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, said the alliance was “ready to defend every inch” of its territory after the incident. “Russia’s reckless behaviour is a danger to us all,” Rutte wrote on social media after a call with the Romanian president, Nicuşor Dan. Romania summoned the Russian ambassador, and Dan convened a national defence council meeting on “the most serious incident to have affected our national territory” since Russia invaded Ukraine. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said Russia’s “war of aggression” had “crossed yet another line”, pledging to increase deterrence on the EU’s eastern border. German chancellor Friedrich Merz said the incident showed Russia’s “willingness to escalate”, and Britain’s Keir Starmer condemned the “serious violation of Nato airspace”. Putin meanwhile said Russia has all the means necessary to destroy anyone who attempts to attack the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Putin was responding to a question about remarks made by Lithuania’s foreign minister Kestutis Budrys this month who said Nato had to show Moscow it was capable of penetrating Kaliningrad. Separately, responding to a question about Russian intelligence reports alleging that Ukraine had sent drone operators to Latvia, Putin reiterated that any location that posed a threat against Russia was considered a legitimate target. The UN has added Russia and Israel to a blacklist for sexual violence in conflict, citing abuse by security forces, including the rape of male detainees.

Trump claims to be on verge of peace deal but Iran signals no agreement reached

Donald Trump has claimed he could approve an Iran peace deal on Friday that contains major concessions from Tehran, including the opening of the strait of Hormuz and the elimination of the country’s nuclear programme. However, top Iranian officials signalled a final agreement had not been reached. The two versions indicate Trump may once again be practising his “art of the deal” as he seeks to talk his way out of a war that has disrupted global energy supplies and rocked the world economy. Trump emerged from the White House situation room after spending more than two hours with senior aides but did not immediately announce his decision. The New York Times, citing a senior administration official, reported that Trump had not made a decision on the peace deal. Describing the terms of the purported deal on his Truth Social platform, the US president said Iran “must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb”, open the strait of Hormuz for all traffic without tolls, eliminate mines in the waterway and allow the US to unearth and destroy highly enriched uranium from a secure nuclear site in Iran. He also said the deal would preclude the transfer of frozen assets to Iran. Trump also said he would lift the US naval blockade against Iran, although it was not immediately clear whether that would be subject to the agreement being confirmed. “I will be meeting now, in the Situation Room, to make a final determination,” he wrote. The virtual wishlist of US demands in the negotiations was presented as a completed deal and would indicate that Iran had capitulated on key positions, including its right to exact tolls from ships traversing the strait of Hormuz, the release of the frozen assets and an insistence on the country’s right to maintain its nuclear programme. But Iranian officials signaled defiance after Trump’s announcement, and those close to the government denied that a deal has been reached. The semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Friday that no final understanding had been reached between Iran and the US and that Trump’s post was “in line with his usual pattern of making unilateral and egotistical statements”. The foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei told state media: “Regarding the understanding, as I said while speaking to you, exchanges of messages are continuing, but no final agreement has been reached yet.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said he and his Omani counterpart had discussed the “future administration [of the strait of Hormuz] in line with our sovereign responsibilities and international law”, indicating Iran was not likely to open the waterway under the same system it had been using before the war. A White House official told AFP on condition of anonymity: “The Situation Room meeting has concluded and lasted approximately two hours. President Trump will only make a deal that is good for America and satisfies his red lines. “Iran can never possess a nuclear weapon.” A meeting in Washington between the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, ended without any public comment on the negotiations, of which Pakistan is a key mediator. Tasnim reported that there had been no discussion about the nuclear issue, and that Trump’s reports of lifting the US’s own blockade in the strait of Hormuz should be met with “scepticism”. Iran’s Fars news agency said Trump had published a “mixture of truth and lies” about the terms of an agreement, which did not include provisions for the opening of the strait of Hormuz without fees, or the destruction of Iran’s nuclear material. On Friday, Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, wrote that Iran had “no trust in guarantees or words – only actions are the measure”. Ghalibaf also sent out a defiant message that Iran was ready for another round of fighting if talks to extend the ceasefire and end the war failed. “We seize concessions not through dialogue, but with missiles; in negotiations, we merely make them understand,” he wrote. “The winner of any agreement is the one who is better prepared for war from the day after.” The US vice-president, JD Vance, hinted on Thursday night that an agreement was close, but Trump was reported to need more time to decide whether to back a negotiated agreement that would defer many of the difficult issues, including the fate of Iran’s remaining stockpile of nuclear materials, into subsequent negotiations. Senior Iranian officials repeated there was no plan to allow the export of its uranium, but observers have suggested that does not rule out downblended uranium that is further from weapons grade. Trump may need time not just to reflect, but to persuade a reluctant Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the need for a ceasefire in Lebanon as part of the agreement. The Israeli prime minister has been using the past few days to step up attacks on Hezbollah positions throughout Lebanon, including in the capital, Beirut. Netanyahu did not immediately comment on the Iran deal, saying: “Our forces have crossed the Litani and advanced into strategic areas. We are operating in Beirut, in the Bekaa valley, and across the entire front, and we are directly targeting Hezbollah.” Baghaei has said the “silence and the indifference of international institutions” will provoke Israel to “further embitterment”. He also described the US as “an accomplice and partner in all of Israel’s crimes” in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and the entire region. Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesperson for the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, suggested Iran was in no mood to back down on its plans to change the management of the strait of Hormuz. He claimed Iran’s management of the waterway had been recognised worldwide, which is “why countries obtain permission, pay the costs, and, with the guidance of the IRGC Navy, pass their vessels through. The only one who hasn’t believed it, or doesn’t want to believe it, is Trump; every now and then he sends his army to open the strait, they come and get beaten and go back.” In a televised interview, Rezaei questioned whether it was necessary for Iran in the agreement to renounce any desire to acquire nuclear weapons. “Why should we commit to America that we will not build a nuclear weapon?” he said. “This matter is none of America’s business.” At the same time, Ebrahim Azizi, the chair of the parliament’s national security and foreign policy commission, denied reports about the possible transfer of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles to a third country or mediator, saying the Islamic Republic has no intention of handing over or transferring these materials. Earlier, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Pezeshkian, adopted a more conciliatory tone, thanking Pakistani mediators for their effectiveness toward reaching an agreement. He spoke by phone with the Pakistani prime minister, Shahbaz Sharif.

UN adds Israel and Russia to blacklist for sexual violence in conflict

The UN has added Israel and Russia to a blacklist for sexual violence in conflict, citing abuse by security forces, including the rape of male detainees. The UN verified sexual abuse of 31 Palestinian men, women and children from the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank between 2023 and 2025. Israeli attacks included repeated gang-rapes and the use of sexual violence as a form of torture, the report said. Other violations included rape with objects, attempted rape, attacks on genitals, targeted shooting of genitals, touching of breasts and genitals, forced nudity and threats of rape. These cases were “indicative of incidents and patterns” rather than a comprehensive summary of conflict-related sexual violence by Israelis, because of restrictions on UN investigators. Israel barred UN experts from detention centres, blocked travel to Gaza, and has threatened Palestinian detainees if they report abuse after their release. Russia also obstructed investigations into “systemic” sexual violence against Ukrainians, barring monitors from accessing prisoners of war and civilians in detention, the UN said. Despite these challenges, investigators verified 310 cases of Russian abuse, including rape and gang-rape, genital mutilation and applying electric shocks to genitals. Most victims were men, with 26 women and four girls also abused. Russia deployed systematic sexual torture against Ukrainians, both civilians and prisoners of war, in “almost all” detention centres, the UN had previously found. In two-thirds of cases, Russian forces used multiple forms of sexual violence, and more than half of survivors endured repeated sexual attacks, the report said. Most were interviewed in Ukrainian-held territory after their release. Israel and Russia both deny the use of sexual violence by their military. Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said the country had cut ties with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, in response to the blacklisting. Danon said in a social media post that “Israel submitted evidence, documents, and detailed responses to every claim”. He did not share any evidence publicly. Israel has not allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit detainees since October 2023. Details of the report, which lists 77 countries and armed groups, were shared by Israeli diplomats at the UN before its release, and the full report was posted online by the US news site PassBlue. Worldwide, the report found that conflict-related sexual violence had risen sharply from 2024, “marked by extreme brutality, and overwhelmingly targeted [at] women and girls”. Israel and Russia, however, diverge from this trend by also targeting men. The UN documented nine cases of rape by Israeli forces, mostly of men or boys from Gaza, who were targeted in detention centres or during interrogation. One attack took place in a police station in the Gush Etzion settlement in the occupied West Bank, the report said. Perpetrators included Israeli soldiers, prison officers and members of an elite police counter-terrorism unit. A “systemic lack of accountability” for sexual violence helped create a culture of impunity, the UN said, citing the assault and rape of a detainee from Gaza that was filmed on security cameras and reported to police by Israeli medics. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, described the alleged perpetrators as “heroic” and an attempt to prosecute them, which failed, as “criminal”. The victim was never charged or tried and has since been released. Over the past three years, violence, including rape, extreme hunger and humiliation, has been normalised in Israeli jails. Rights groups say detention centres have become “torture camps” for Palestinians. The far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has boasted of a “prison revolution”, caused a diplomatic crisis last week by publishing footage of Israeli security forces abusing international activists detained while trying to sail to Gaza with aid. The forms of abuse captured in the video have been routinely used against Palestinian prisoners in Israel. After the activists’ release, at least 15 said they had been sexually assaulted in custody, including a rape. The UN had already added Hamas to the sexual violence blacklist for the October 7 attacks in Israel and for abuse of hostages in Gaza. The militant group has not recognised any cases of sexual violence or held any alleged perpetrators responsible. Ukrainian forces have also committed conflict-related sexual violence, with 31 incidents, including beating of genitals, applying electric shocks and forced nudity, verified since 2022, most before 2025. The Ukrainian government had allowed access to independent monitors and lawyers and was taking steps to strengthen laws to address sexual violence, the report said.

Alarm at Mexico bill allowing elections to be annulled for ‘foreign interference’

Amid fierce criticism from opposition groups, Mexico’s senate has passed ‌a constitutional amendment to include “foreign interference” as grounds to annul election results in the country. The bill, which was presented by the country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, defines foreign interference as “illicit financing, propaganda, the systematic ⁠dissemination of misinformation, digital manipulation, and ⁠the intervention of foreign governments ⁠or agencies”. But critics say that the broadness of the bill’s language means virtually anything could be used to annul the results of an election: an article in a British newspaper, a statement from a US official, a report from an international NGO. “This is one of the most egregious, alarming and retrograde pieces of legislation in Mexico’s young democratic history,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the US, on X. “This law doesn’t prevent foreign interference. It hands the government a veto over election outcomes it doesn’t like.” The amendment has already been passed by the lower house of congress and now needs to be ratified by a majority of Mexico’s 32 states. Sheinbaum’s Morena controls 24 statehouses. The bill comes as Mexico has faced increased pressure from the US on security, with Donald Trump repeatedly threatening to invade the country and tackle cartels. Last month, the US justice department indicted 10 current and former officials from the state of Sinaloa, including the governor, for ties to a powerful drug-trafficking group. The indictment of Rubén Rocha Moya, the governor of Sinaloa and a close ally of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as Amlo), sent shock waves across Mexico’s political establishment. Sheinbaum has called for more evidence from the US before considering extradition. The Mexican president also doubled down on the importance of sovereignty and non-intervention since the indictment was made public. “All Mexicans should agree that there should be no foreign interference in elections in Mexico,” Sheinbaum said at a news conference on Thursday. “We must all agree that in Mexico, we Mexicans decide who governs us.” The bill comes as Mexico faces midterm elections next year, which could see the governing Morena party lose its stranglehold on power: it currently controls the presidency and both the upper and lower chambers of congress. The bill would allow Mexico’s electoral court to toss out election results if it determines there was interference from an overseas organization, a foreign government or citizen. But the court was stripped of its independence under Amlo and is now largely aligned with Morena. “If [Morena] wanted, they could allege foreign intervention and the court would rule in their favor,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst. “The truth is, I don’t see any point in [the bill], any merit, any validity. This is an abuse.” The Mexican opposition has been equally critical of the proposed change. “It’s a trap so that Morena can literally annul any election they want,” Ricardo Anaya, a senator from the opposition Pan party, told reporters. “What they want to ensure is total control.”