Read the daily news to learn English

‘Sinn Féin traitors!’: how far-right rhetoric derailed party’s path to power in Ireland

For Siobhán Fenton, the dream of Sinn Féin winning power and leading a progressive leftwing government evaporated the day she was canvassing in Dublin and felt a cold, sharp sting on her neck. She was in the passageway of a block of flats in the inner city, knocking on doors, and looked around for the source. Fenton, a media adviser to the party leader, Mary Lou McDonald, felt another sting on her shoulder, then another on her forearm. They were coins, thrown from a balcony above, where a man’s voice was shouting. “Sinn Féin traitors!” he roared. “Mary Lou Mohammad! Ireland is full!” It was May 2024, and instead of steaming towards victory in local and European elections – widely deemed a foregone conclusion, to be followed by a historic triumph in a general election – the party was experiencing a backlash fuelled by anti-immigrant sentiment in what was usually a bastion of working-class support. The coins left Fenton with gashes and bruises that augured an electoral hammering. “By the time the party realised how bad things had gotten it was almost too late,” she said. “The far right had infiltrated lots of Sinn Féin strongholds and we hadn’t picked up on it.” In a rupture to the party’s reputation for secrecy and discipline, Fenton has written a rare insider’s account, titled Ourselves Alone: Sinn Féin Behind Closed Doors. It lifts the lid on a debacle that ambushed the party on the path to power. Instead of winning a general election and turbo-charging the campaign for Irish unification by ratcheting up pressure for a referendum, the party stumbled and today remains in opposition. It is a cautionary tale for progressive movements across Europe and elsewhere that struggle to reconcile tolerance for immigrants and refugees with clamours for crackdowns on new arrivals. A surge in xenophobia among grassroots supporters had blind-sided and, for a time, paralysed party leaders, Fenton said in an interview. “There was a moment of genuine sheer panic and just not knowing what to do. We were struggling to adapt because it was a sense that things had started to spiral out of control.” The book, published this week, depicts a largely well-intentioned but hapless party, and is also an account from a member of an organisation that many perceive as secretive and still in thrall to former IRA leaders on both sides of the Irish border, a perception Fenton disputes. Fenton, 34, was an atypical “Shinner”, the informal name for party adherents. She came from a middle-class Belfast family that abhorred the violence of the Troubles and favoured constitutional nationalism, not flinty republicanism. Fenton briefly worked for the Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) before studying English literature at Oxford, researching gender-based violence at Cambridge and becoming a London-based journalist for the Independent before returning to Northern Ireland in 2016, where she freelanced for the BBC and other outlets, including the Guardian, and wrote a book on the Good Friday agreement. In early 2020, Sinn Féin offered Fenton a job in Dublin. The party was on a high. It had just won 24.5% of first preference votes in the Irish general election, overtaking Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, two centrist parties that had alternated in power for a century. As successor to Gerry Adams, McDonald, a Dubliner universally known as Mary Lou, offered a fresh alternative, especially to young voters who blamed the political establishment for a housing crisis. Sinn Féin had run too few candidates to capitalise on the breakthrough, so Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael mustered enough seats to form a coalition, leaving Sinn Féin in opposition. Analysts expected it to win power after the next election. After Sinn Féin became the biggest party in Northern Ireland in 2022, which paved the way for Michelle O’Neill to become first minister at Stormont, the onus was on the party’s southern branch to ensure McDonald became taoiseach at Leinster House. “Don’t fuck it up,” a Belfast colleague half-jokingly told Fenton. For three years, Fenton, having relocated to Dublin, experienced the giddy nervousness of a party soaring in the polls while the ruling coalition slumped. The republican mantra – “tiocfaidh ár lá”, our day will come – seemed apt. A section titled “the long fall” chronicles the unravelling amid missteps and a volatile public mood. McDonald appeared to blame police for a riot that rocked Dublin in November 2023, and alarmed middle-class property owners by suggesting average Dublin house prices should fall to €300,000. More damagingly, the party failed to navigate growing xenophobia, the result of a housing shortage, a cost of living crisis, an influx of migrants and refugees, and far-right activism on social media and the streets. “It was a blind spot,” said Fenton. Covid-19 restrictions and a focus on the parliamentary party withered grassroots networking, leaving leaders unaware of the extent to which conspiracy theories and hostility to Muslims had taken hold, she said. The party should have tried to combat racist narratives by peeling people away from smartphones and having “really difficult conversations”, said Fenton. “Go door to door, talk about community concerns but be very, very clear that scapegoating immigrants and refugees is the wrong response.” Instead of gains in the May 2024 local and European elections, the cascade of coins on to Fenton foretold haemorrhaging support, especially in working-class strongholds that branded McDonald a “traitor” for not seeking greater curbs on migration. Months later the party limped into a general election that kept Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in power. Fenton’s contract was not renewed and she returned to her native Belfast, where she now works as a writer and analyst. She is no longer a member of Sinn Féin. Immigration remains a fraught issue for a party squeezed between those wanting a harder line and those who favour solidarity, said Fenton. Leaders may be tempted to sidestep the issue until the next election, then take a stance, she said. “It will be dependent on what the political environment looks like then.”

All eyes on Saxony-Anhalt – what will AfD do if it wins German state poll?

Germany is embarking on a crucial election period this month, with three key state polls that could markedly change the political terrain and make life decidedly harder for the federal government under the chancellor, Friedrich Merz. All eyes are on Saxony-Anhalt on Sunday, where about 1.7 million people are eligible to vote, followed by Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin on 20 September. In all three contests, the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is expected to make strong gains. What is the AfD and why is the Saxony-Anhalt vote so significant? Founded in 2013 as an anti-euro force but later morphing into an anti-immigrant party, the AfD has harnessed and amplified the frustrations of voters aggrieved and vexed by economic stagnation, rising immigration and cultural shifts. Latest polls have put it at around 40-42% in the state, placing its ambition to achieve its first absolute majority at state level within reach. Securing power in the state would mark a first for the far-right since the second world war. This matters for the whole country. State governments in Germany are represented in the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat, so have broad powers over education, culture and ‌domestic security. For the chancellor, the leader of the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), an AfD takeover in the state could be the biggest disaster yet of a term already marked by seemingly relentless setbacks. The AfD’s leadership see their potential to gain power at state level as a natural springboard to electoral success at the next federal election in 2029. Currently the party is the main opposition in the Bundestag. The populists’ main obstacle is the stubborn resistance of other parties to collude with them, referred to as the Brandmauer, or firewall. However, this approach would be null and void if the AfD wins an absolute majority. What has the party said it plans to do if it gets into power in Saxony-Anhalt? On migration and identity, it has vowed to start deporting “irregular migrants” from “the first minute” and to foster patriotism by replacing the state’s current promotional slogan, “Think Modern”, with “Think German”. Cultural offerings deemed anti-German would be subject to a clampdown and funding to public broadcasters it views as “leftwing propaganda lackeys” would be drastically cut. In the education sector, German flags would replace rainbow flags in schools, students would sing the national anthem, and the children of asylum seekers would be educated in separate classes. Home schooling – long banned as a reaction to the Nazi era – would be allowed again, and the history curriculum would be changed to move away from what the AfD sees as an excessive focus on the Nazi era. Russian teaching would be expanded and programmes focused on combating rightwing extremism would be axed. On the environment, the party wants to ban windfarms. On family, it wants to boost the German birthrate by introducing “welcome money” for couples who have children, reducing childcare costs, and offering free school meals. On security, it wants to push for widespread changes to the domestic intelligence agency, the BfV, which has classified the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch as rightwing extremist. It also wants to introduce “citizens’ watch” groups to assist the police in attempts to clamp down on leftwing extremism. Critics of the last proposal have compared the idea to the auxiliary police structures set up by the Nazis, which led to the creation of a police state. Who is the face of the party in Saxony-Anhalt? Ulrich Siegmund, the party’s photogenic 36-year-old poster boy, has a considerable TikTok following and has been received like a pop star by supporters wherever he goes in the state, often travelling on a moped from East Germany’s pre-unification era. A former air freshener salesman with a degree in business psychology, he embodies a charm and wit that his party colleagues have often lacked. When Der Spiegel magazine recently ran a front page story calling him Germany’s most dangerous man, he gleefully signed the magazine at rallies. What stands between the AfD and an absolute majority? While a win for the AfD is now seen as a given, its prospects of winning an outright parliamentary majority are far from certain and, this being German election law, rather complicated. A lot depends on whether smaller parties reach the 5% minimum needed to make it into parliament. If they fail, the AfD would need less than 50% to form a government. The CDU and other mainstream parties, like the Social Democrats and the Greens, have voiced their intention to form a coalition if they gain enough votes among them. The CDU has repeatedly refused to coalesce with the AfD, and has also refused to work with the far-left Die Linke. However, it may well need Die Linke’s support to form a minority government. Die Linke would probably offer that, but mainly because it will not want to go down in history as the party that let the AfD come to power.

Feeling Bayeux tapestry Fomo? Check out these ancient artefacts instead

Perhaps you got tickets for the British Museum’s “stupefying” Bayeux tapestry exhibition, which opens to the public on Thursday – and bully for you if so. Very likely, though, you didn’t. While tens of thousands of tickets were snapped up in minutes when they first went on sale in July, most of those who joined the frenzied online queue were left with an empty basket and a millennium-sized dose of Fomo. More tickets for slots in early 2027 will be released next month, though demand is certain to far outstrip supply again. So as narrative embroidery madness seizes Britain in the coming months – with dinner party chitchat and Instagram reels consumed by discussions of medieval couching stitch and the identity of the mysterious Aelfgyva – how will the have-nots cope? Luckily (and also thanks to centuries of conquest, piety and colonialism), Britain is home to a ridiculous wealth of ancient artefacts that are just there, all the time – no online queues or anything! Here are some less celebrated treasures to check out while everyone else is elbowing through the crowds in Bloomsbury. Iron age knitwear If it’s old textiles you’re after, this one’s a cracker. The Orkney hood, found in a peat bog on the Scottish islands in 1867, was made and worn between AD250 and 615 from three separate pieces carefully stitched together, possibly by the child who wore it. Now housed in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The world’s oldest wooden church Down an unassuming lane between Chelmsford and Harlow in Essex is an equally unshowy wonder – what is thought to be the world’s oldest surviving wooden church. Greensted church has been much added to since its oak trunk walls were built around 1053, but a millennium later they are still there holding up the roof. The church, wonderfully, is thought to have housed the body of St Edmund on his way to be buried at what would become Bury St Edmunds. It still holds weekly services. Countless other medieval church marvels Where to begin? The parish churches of Britain have been described as the nation’s greatest art collection, a vast and ubiquitous repository of jaw-dropping wonders that are almost always free and accessible. There are far, far too many to mention, but the ornate 15th-century rood screen at Llananno in Powys, Anglo-Saxon carved beast heads at St Mary’s Deerhurst in Gloucestershire and spectacular angel roofs in Swaffham, Norfolk, and March, Cambridgeshire, will do for starters. Stone circles that aren’t Stonehenge For those who prefer to avoid the coach parties and the A303, the UK has plenty of other Neolithic sites to wonder at. There are, in fact, at least 1,000 stone circles in Britain and Northern Ireland, from the village-swallowing Avebury and spectacularly sited Castlerigg to lesser-known beauties like the Hurlers in Cornwall, made up of three stone circles, or Beaghmore, a modest and lovely monument complex in the hills of County Tyrone that has seven. Carved crosses The greatest marvel of the 4.4-metre-high, implausibly slender Gosforth cross is perhaps that it’s standing at all, 1,100 years after it was raised in a small Cumbrian churchyard. But its carvings are pretty marvellous too. Made by Vikings that had converted to Christianity, its designs show deities from the Nordic myths alongside the crucified Christ, the sacred Norse tree of Yggdrasil winding stylised roots around the shaft of the Christian cross. The nearby Anglo-Saxon cross at Irton is smaller but older (early ninth century); many other examples are scattered across western Britain and Ireland. The world’s oldest woven garment More ancient textiles, and here’s one to really blow the millennium-old Bayeux tapestry out of the water. The Tarkhan dress, a linen garment excavated from an Egyptian cemetery in 1913, has been radiocarbon dated to the fourth century BC, making it more than 5,000 years old, or at least 500 years older than the Great Pyramid of Khufu. It is housed just seven minutes’ walk from the British Museum, at University College London’s Petrie Museum.

Why the Bayeux tapestry and Franco-British relations are natural bedfellows

Five British prime ministers ago – and six French ones – when Emmanuel Macron first confirmed that France would return the Bayeux tapestry to Britain after 1,000 years, he told an audience at Sandhurst and Theresa May – the No 10 seat-warmer of the day – that when it came to France and Britain there were “two things that nothing can change, be it a vote or a political decision: our history and our geography”. It was January 2018, 18 months after the UK had voted to leave the EU, and relations between the near neighbours were not good. The French political establishment had been shocked and angered by Brexit; personal relations were frazzled, and cross-Channel government contacts measurably dwindling. This was not a rupture that a piece of embroidered medieval linen, however perfectly it represented that tangled history, was going to solve on its own. It took only eight and a half years and many, many changes in personnel, but this week Macron finally made good on that pledge with the unveiling of the tapestry at the British Museum in London, in scenes of such amitié that one could almost forget the bilateral chill that had gone before. No one pretends that the Bayeux tapestry alone has been responsible for stitching together two nations whose connections had visibly frayed. (When it comes to the tapestry, as every commentator this week has shown, the needlework metaphors are hard to resist.) But the French president’s single-minded commitment to drive through a loan that he has previously called “seemingly impossible” illustrates that, in diplomatic terms, the London exhibition is not just a decorative sideshow. “It is much more than just a linen canvas embroidered with wool,” Macron told an audience at the museum on Wednesday. “It represents a whole chapter of French, British and European history.” In that context, it was notable that he speculated that people “decades or even centuries from now” would look back not only on the tapestry itself but on “what we did here today” – the very fact of its loan to the British Museum – as being a significant marker in the long span of Franco-British relations. “Two countries which, after centuries of shared history, [chose] to forge a bond as close as the threads of this thousand-year-old embroidery,” he said. The latest UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, agreed in language tailored to suit his own political project. As a “tremendous demonstration of goodwill”, he said, the loan “says so much about the friendship of our two nations … It shows the power of collaboration to lift people’s lives.” The Bayeux tapestry, of course, was always a highly political artefact, even before it acquired its status as a foundational text for the English nation (1066, the date of the Battle of Hastings, is “the nation’s pincode”, the British Museum chair, George Osborne, noted drily on Wednesday). Much remains unknown about the circumstances of its commission and creation, but a vast artwork showing a clash of kings and wholesale invasion of a nation is not a neutral object. “It was definitely designed with a political purpose in mind when it was first made,” says the historian Dr David Musgrove, who has written a book, The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry, with Prof Michael Lewis, the curator of the exhibition. “That political purpose was essentially to legitimise the invasion of William the Conqueror, to explain why he did it, why he chose to send his fleet across the Channel,” argues Musgrove, who is the content director of HistoryExtra magazine and podcast. The “crux scene”, he argues, is not the famous bit where Harold takes an arrow to the eye, but an earlier portion that shows the then English earl Harold making an oath to support William’s future claim to the English throne. Harold reneges on this later when he has himself crowned king of England. “So he perjures himself and that gives William the reason to invade,” Musgrove says. “My take is that the tapestry is entirely predicated on making that justification. So it’s very modern in that sense; people trying to justify military action today is kind of the same thing. It’s a retrospective justification for what happened.” Most historians believe it was made in Canterbury, but “just about everything around [the tapestry’s creation] is a little bit uncertain”, according to Leonie Hicks, a professor of medieval studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. She says historians’ “best assumption” – based on the internal evidence of the embroidery itself and other contemporary documents – “is that it was likely commissioned by Bishop Odo, who was William the Conqueror’s half-brother, bishop of Bayeux and also earl of Kent after the conquest. Or somebody very close to Odo.” Odo and Willliam had fallen out, so an elaborate narrative wall covering at Odo’s Norman cathedral celebrating the new English king could be seen as an attempt to regain favour. But if the tapestry undoubtedly flatters William, it is not a piece of crude propaganda, argues Hicks, and the politics of its depiction are nuanced. “It’s not a straightforward piece of ‘Yay, aren’t the Normans great, they dumped the English and took the throne.’” Among the most intriguing details, she notes, are the depictions in the margins of the human cost of war – all stitched, most likely, by English women who may have lost husbands and sons in the battle. “We have the scene where a house is being burnt and a woman is holding a child’s hand and leaving the house. [There are] very graphic depictions in the margins of decapitated soldiers, and bodies being looted. It does give that sense that war is horrific and terrible.” It is context which, we can assume, was lost during the tapestry’s long afterlife. History records nothing about it until it turns up in an inventory of the Bayeux Cathedral treasury in 1476. The tapestry, it noted, was hung around the cathedral for a few days each year. During the French Revolution it was narrowly rescued from being used as a wagon cover. It would not be long, however, before the tapestry’s political usefulness would again be recognised. Napoleon, planning an English invasion of his own in 1803, displayed it in Paris where “it was quite a sensation”, says Musgrove. “I think Napoleon probably thought it was useful to have an artefact which showed a previous cross-Channel invasion by forces from France into Britain.” When the invasion plans foundered, the tapestry was quietly returned to Bayeux. The Nazis were “obsessed” with the tapestry – “they basically saw it as part of their worldview of Aryan Teutonic supremacy”, says Musgrove – and in the days before the liberation of Paris planned to whisk it away to Germany. They were, however, frustrated by the French resistance, who had been alerted by codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Eight quiet decades followed before the renovation of the museum where it is housed in Bayeux prompted its removal from display. But if that immediate circumstance opened the possibility of the artwork being loaned to Britain, there was certainly no inevitability that this would happen. Britain first made a request almost a century ago, in 1931. A request to borrow the artwork in 1953 to mark Elizabeth II’s coronation was initially agreed by France, before it reversed the decision over conservation concerns. Another attempt in 1966, to commemorate 900 years since the battle, foundered in the face of local and national French opposition. Another bid in the 1980s came to nothing. Macron could easily have come to the same judgment, not least because there was plenty of opposition in France to the loan, including from artists and conservation experts. Why, then, such commitment to making happen a loan which, he only half joked last year, had been more complicated to negotiate than the Brexit withdrawal agreements? To Helen Drake, a professor of French and European studies at Loughborough University London, making the loan happen fits with Macron’s view of himself as a cultured international statesman – but also with the value he attaches to repairing the Franco-British relationship in the face of mutually threatening global forces. “Macron is a French president who has pulled the maximum levers that the constitution give him to operate on the international stage, and that will probably be his legacy. So from that perspective it would make sense to him to be seen to be behind the transfer of the tapestry. “But he has also very much made it part of his mandate to be at the forefront of ameliorating France’s relations with the UK.” On Ukraine, defence and security, migration and Trump, British and French shared interests have become ever more pressing, she says. “The external environment, to put it bluntly, has pushed the two together.” But for all the genuine bonhomie over a dazzling piece of history, Drake says, neither side has any illusions about the dynamic tension that has always characterised their love-hate relationship. “The fact is that France habitually plays hardball with the UK in its negotiations with the EU post-Brexit,” she says. “You can have all the warmth you like in the British Museum, [but] the Quai d’Orsay will still drive a hard bargain. The two co-exist and they’re not even contradictory – they’re just part of how we see the Franco-British relationship.”

‘Every girl now wants to be a boxer’: excitement in Katie Taylor’s home town for her valedictory bout

When Katie Taylor steps into the ring on Saturday night to defend her titles and once again enthral Ireland, there will be a bittersweet tinge. After a singular career that pioneered women’s boxing, the super-lightweight champion and Olympic gold medallist is bowing out. She is 40 and it is to be her final bout. “The end of an era, isn’t it?” said Trevor McMahon, her brother-in-law and founder of a gym where she trains. “It’ll be an amazing night but it’ll also be a little bit sad. Everything she did, it might not ever be achieved again.” There is consolation in the manner of her farewell. Taylor will fight in front of an 80,000-strong roaring, pulsing crowd at Dublin’s Croke Park, the citadel of Irish sport, in a valedictory like no other. Before tickets went on sale in June, some worried that a boxing match might not fill such a vast stadium. The event out in 17 minutes. Westlife and other musical acts have joined the bill, adding to the sense of extravaganza. The national broadcaster, RTÉ, will broadcast proceedings free to air, so every home and pub can tune in for Taylor’s showdown with Flora Pili, an unbeaten French champion. David Finnegan, 55, who was selling Taylor hats, flags and posters from a stall in her home town of Bray, County Wicklow, this week, said: “Business is tipping away. This is her farewell, everyone wants to be part of it.” Catherine Hill, 45, had a precious ticket and wanted a Taylor T-shirt for the occasion. “It’s going to be amazing for Katie, the whole country and all women,” she said. “Every young girl now wants to be a boxer or an athlete. It wasn’t like that before.” Another customer, Denise, 71, bought flags for a pub in Kerry where she planned to watch the bout. “What I love about Katie is that she’s not full of herself. She’s down to earth and still meets up with her friends here. She’s so good with the children.” Even those with no interest in boxing have been swept up in excitement for an athlete who is adored for blazing a trail in female sports with talent, grit and humility. Encouraged and trained by her father, Pete, Taylor began sparring as a young girl at a gym so rudimentary it was nicknamed the Tin Can. Women and girls were banned from the ring in Ireland and the UK, so she disguised herself as a boy and signed up to bouts as “K Taylor”. Father and daughter helped to persuade Irish authorities to lift the ban in 2001, when she was 15, and were instrumental in having women’s boxing added to the Olympic Games. Taylor won gold at London 2012 and went on to headline Madison Square Garden and win an epic trilogy with Amanda Serrano. McMahon, whose Liberty Boxing gym hosts Taylor during her return visits to Bray, said: “The talent was always there but it was more the dedication. She knew from the get-go what she was going to do. When she comes down to train in the club, the place is packed.” The last time Croke Park hosted a boxing match was in 1972, when Muhammad Ali fought Alvin Lewis. McMahon said Taylor’s farewell promised to be even more special. Pili, 29, has won all 12 of her professional fights and holds the IBO world super-lightweight title. She will be no pushover but McMahon said Taylor was determined to add another belt to her titles and go out on a high. “No matter how tough the fight is, Katie always seems to rise to the occasion. If she’s beaten, you’d have to carry her out of there in a box.” Laney O’Connell, 28, who lives on the estate where Taylor grew up, said she had inspired girls to be fit and active. “When you meet her, she’s completely normal. I don’t think she realises just how big she is,” she said. “And it’s great to see the country represented by a woman instead of a man, especially not McGregor,” she added, referencing the mixed martial artist Conor McGregor. Anne-Marie McHugh, 58, speaking below a supermarket’s Taylor mural, hoped that Bray’s most famous daughter will enjoy a restful post-boxing life. “It’s time for her to relax,” she said. “She’s earned it.”

Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy calls air truce as Kushner and Witkoff head for Kyiv via Moscow

Two ⁠US peace negotiators ⁠will visit Ukraine ⁠on Sunday after visiting ⁠Moscow, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on ⁠Friday. Ukraine’s president said Kyiv ‌would ‌guarantee the safety ‌of Russian airspace during the visit of Steve Witkoff ‌and Jared Kushner to Moscow, after which they are expected to travel on to Kyiv. He called on Russia to also halt ⁠its air attacks on Ukraine during the negotiators’ visit. Donald Trump, the US president, said: “We ‌have an idea for peace … I sent Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two ‌great negotiators.” The New York Times reported that Washington has asked both sides for a ceasefire during the envoys’ visit. Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law and Witkoff deals in real estate. A Russian strike killed four people in Kamianske, a city in the Dnipropetrovsk oblast of south-eastern Ukraine, the head of the regional military authority said on Saturday morning. Five more were wounded, including a 30-year-old woman who was placed in intensive care. The headquarters of Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency took a direct hit from a Russian drone on Friday, Amy Hawkins reports from Kyiv. Zelenskyy said he had instructed the SBU to deliver an “appropriate, tangible response” to the strike, while the foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, described it as a “major escalation”. Zelenskyy said: “The drone was aimed directly at the office of the head of the security service in that building.” At least nine people were injured in Friday’s strike, according to Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. Air ⁠Tanzania said it was ⁠suspending ⁠flights from Dar es Salaam ⁠to Moscow from Friday, becoming ⁠the first airline ‌to do ‌so after ‌Zelenskyy warned this week that the skies over ‌Russia were unsafe because of Ukraine’s retaliatory drone attacks. The airline said on Facebook that it took ⁠the step after “a routine risk assessment of the operating environment ‌along the route”. Vladimir Putin on Thursday falsely claimed that Ukraine was threatening to attack civilian aircraft. Moscow has protested to the UN’s aviation agency after Ukraine asked it to have member countries keep their airlines out of Russian airspace. “Ukraine does not threaten civilian aviation as such – not a single civilian aircraft,” Zelenskyy said during the week. “There will simply be drones in Russia’s skies on a scale that has to be taken into account.” A “massive” overnight Russian attack on the Odesa region killed one person and injured at least five others, including a child, regional head Oleh Kiper said on Friday. The attacks damaged multiple residential buildings, including two multistorey blocks. Strikes elsewhere in Ukraine killed two police officers in Dnipro, officials said, while a drone attack in Kyiv wounded three people after hitting a residential building. In Russia, a large-scale Ukrainian drone strike hit the Black Sea resort city of Sochi and the nearby district of Sirius, regional officials said on Friday. They said the attack sparked a blaze at an oil depot. Russian media outlets reported two oil depots were hit, with one fire in Sochi and another in Sirius. Finnish authorities said they were investigating how a Russian-made drone ended up on the shore in the Pellinge archipelago east of Helsinki. Finland’s border guard said it appeared to be a Geoscan 701 drone, manufactured by a Russian company. “The device model in question is used by both state and civilian operators, and it is not possible at this stage to determine its intended use or identify the country or entity operating it.” A World Health Organization warehouse storing humanitarian medical supplies was struck during an air attack on the Kyiv region, continuing what the WHO said was a pattern of such attacks across Ukraine. In 2026, at least 20 attacks have affected depots storing humanitarian goods including healthcare supplies, said a WHO spokesperson in Geneva. A vice-president in the far-right party of French presidential contender Marine Le Pen has sparked a furore by saying France would “turn off the tap” to Ukraine if National Rally (RN) came to power. Louis Aliot claimed the RN “condemned the Russian aggression” but said the war had “weakened Europe”. One of Le Pen’s leading rivals in the elections, centre-right politician Edouard Philippe, who served as Macron’s first prime minister, retorted that “turning off the tap to Ukraine is serving Russia”. “Weakening Ukraine, as Marine Le Pen wishes, is threatening the security of Europe and France. I will do everything to prevent it.” Le Pen herself entered the fray, claiming that her party was pushing for a “diplomatic resolution of this abominable war”. The head of Memorial, Russia’s Nobel peace prize-winning rights group, has told AFP she fears a fresh crackdown after September’s legislative elections, with more people arrested and sent to fight in Ukraine. Elena Zhemkova also vowed to keep up the fight for human rights in Russia, despite her group being declared illegal and herself forced into exile. “Unfortunately, I think that now everything is getting worse, but not so fast,” the 65-year-old said. “But after the elections, there will be a very sharp deterioration.”

Rescue of Nepal hydropower workers ‘triumph for humans and humanity’, tunnelling expert says

There is renewed hope amid the devastation wreaked by the flash flooding disaster on the Nepal-Tibet border as the world witnesses “one of the great rescues of the 21st century”. Nine days after the deadly floods, two workers were pulled out alive from a flooded hydropower tunnel in Nepal. Sanjay Shah and Kabir Maharajan were rescued from the Trishuli 3A hydropower project on Friday, more than a week after a glacial collapse created a torrent of mud, water and debris that swept away buildings, roads and bridges along the border between Nepal and China. Hundreds more employees who worked in various hydropower projects along the banks of Nepal’s Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers remain missing, but the Australian engineer and geologist Arnold Dix, who was invited by Nepali authorities to advise on the Trishuli 3A operation, says Friday’s successful rescue will help lift spirits. “We’ve found two people alive, so that gives us hope,” Dix says. “After more than a week, everyone’s exhausted, but this spurs us on to try even harder and it now also gives us focus for how we might approach other rescues in other locations. “We now have proof that people can survive this long.” Dix has previously assisted at other disaster sites such as the 2023 Silkyara tunnel operation, where all 41 workers were rescued after a tunnel collapsed in India, and the tunnels of Ground Zero after 9/11. But with almost 30 hydropower projects reported damaged, the Nepal floods are unlike any other disaster he has worked on. “Normally, I deal with a single disaster – this is 27 concurrently,” he says. On his specific rescue operation, workers had already had trouble identifying the location of Trishuli 3A. They then had to work out which tunnel would give access to the power station before the digging could begin. But as the process began, rocks the size of vehicles blocked rescuers, forcing them to use explosives. This isn’t the preferred method, as it can pose risks to those on the other side, Dix says. When they reached the tunnel, rescuers found it was full of water, forcing them to dig an emergency trench to try to drain it. They worried the workers inside could have already drowned, but on Friday morning about 50 metres in, they reported hearing a faint voice. The team called out, “Don’t panic, we are rescuing you.” From inside the tunnel a voice replied: “OK.” Watching the video of the men pulled from the tunnel alive reminds Dix of why he does this. “We do it because we’re decent human beings and that’s what human beings do: help one another,” he says. “This is a real triumph for humans and humanity.” Another 40 workers are believed to be trapped inside Trishuli 3A and rescuers face significant risks. If there is water in the tunnel ahead of the team and they break rock, they could drown, and as they are now below flood-plain level, water could also inundate rescuers from behind. “Yes, we have the reward of having rescued two people now, but we have to be so careful,” Dix says. “The team’s lives are at risk right now and if they can’t get out in time they will drown. “Like, this is not a drill, we are witnessing one of the great rescues of the 21st century.” The rescue team was on Friday tunnelling to what is known as the “Goldilocks zone” at the top of the 11-storey Trishuli 3A power station, where they are hoping to find more survivors. More than 270 people have already been rescued from various hydropower projects. At least 1,294 people were killed in the floods and more than 5,000 remain missing, according to the country’s disaster management agency. Thirty-eight Australian government officials, disaster response specialists and humanitarian workers are now on the ground in Nepal assisting in search-and-rescue and relief efforts. The latest cohort to arrive – a 15-person Australian Disaster Assistance Response Team providing specialist drone services – landed in Kathmandu late on Friday night. A further seven disaster victim identification specialists from the federal police will leave Australia on Saturday. As at 4 September, the Nepali government has reported 1,294 confirmed deaths, while 5,053 people remain missing, including 583 foreign nationals. As at 5 September, the Chinese government reported 31 confirmed deaths and 531 missing people, with 261 of those being foreign citizens. Additional reporting by Ben Doherty

Death on the road to Rafah: the night the IDF targeted World Central Kitchen aid workers

On the evening of 1 April 2024, a team of aid workers from World Central Kitchen (WCK) stood on Gaza’s Mediterranean shore overseeing the unloading of a barge full of desperately needed food on a makeshift jetty made of sand and rubble. The Gaza war had been raging for six months and Israel’s closure of land crossings had left the whole territory facing the threat of famine. WCK and local Palestinian contractors had constructed the jetty out of everything they could lay their hands on, including debris from the bombed house of one of the contractors, so that the pallets of humanitarian assistance could be delivered by boat from Cyprus. A consignment of 200 tonnes of rice, flour and other proteins had arrived two weeks earlier, the first sea shipment to dock in Gaza since 2007. This was the second shipment and it was even bigger, with enough food to prepare more than 1m meals, as well as a Ramadan gift of dates from the United Arab Emirates. The choreography of the delivery had been coordinated over several days with the Israeli army, and an officer was on the jetty to observe the proceedings. In the midst of a devastating bombing campaign after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, this humanitarian effort was supposed to be carried out under internationally agreed military protection. The shipment had been unloaded by 8.30pm but despite the lengthy planning, there was a delay in receiving final Israeli security clearance for the eight hired trucks and two WCK escort vehicles to leave the jetty. By the time the green light came from local Israeli commanders and the convoy began to move south, night had fallen. There was no initial overhead surveillance but two drones joined somewhere along the route to the first stop, a WCK welcome centre 6 miles to the south. Those drones were assigned to the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) Nahal brigade, which had not been fully briefed on the aid convoy’s itinerary. A special adviser assigned by the Australian government to assess the case (in the interests of justice for the Australian victim Lalzawmi Frankcom), found that “specific details about the pre-coordinated WCK aid mission had not been passed down from higher levels of Southern Command to the brigade and UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] operator”. Local guards At the WCK welcome centre, a few local men hired as guards were waiting, at least one of them armed. At a time of widespread hunger, many food convoys had been mobbed by desperate crowds as well as organised gangs, some of whom may have had been linked to Hamas, though Hamas never had the grip on food deliveries alleged by the Israeli authorities. Using local security for aid deliveries was not unknown in Gaza, but it was directly against WCK policy to use armed escorts. The WCK says it is unclear why the local team on that night agreed to accept armed guards. The official Israeli version of events suggests it was “due to the convoy’s delayed departure, during night-time hours,” and noted it “was not coordinated with IDF authorities”. The official Israeli version does not say how many armed men were waiting for the convoy (unofficial versions vary between two and four), but drone footage reportedly showed one of them climb on top of the cabin of one of the trucks and fire a shot in the air shortly afterwards, for reasons that remain unknown. The Nahal brigade officers and the drone operators assigned to them concluded it was a Hamas hijack, based in part on the false assumption that such hijackings were commonplace. “The troops also identified vehicles surrounding the trucks in a manner that, in their assessment and based on accumulated operational experience, corresponded to a scenario in which the Hamas terrorist organisation had taken control of the convoy,” the official account says. The Israeli military prosecutor’s version of events, published last month to justify his decision not to pursue criminal proceedings, does not mention the breakdown in communication between the army’s coordination and liaison administration, which handles humanitarian needs in the territory, and the Nahal brigade controlling that sector of the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, the prosecutor’s version says efforts by IDF personnel to contact WCK were unsuccessful. But according to WCK sources and the Australian report on events, contact was established that night with WCK headquarters in the US, which in turn got in touch with an employee in Gaza. According to the Australian report, the WCK worker on the ground told headquarters staff the guards only had “fake guns”. It remains unclear what the basis for that claim was, but the WCK assured the IDF that it had not lost contact with the convoy and it had not been hijacked. Arrival at destination It is unclear whether this exchange with WCK was relayed to the Nahal brigade before the strikes. But even if it was not, the fact that the convoy of eight food trucks continued on its journey and arrived at its intended destination, the WCK warehouse in Deir al-Balah, should have been ample proof that the aid had not been seized by Hamas. The military prosecutor’s summary acknowledges that the “convoy arrived at the designated warehouse and unloaded the aid” but does not address the seemingly straightforward conclusion that it had therefore not been diverted. The IDF has yet to release audio recordings of military communications that night. After the trucks entered the warehouse, the WCK workers and the local guards stayed outside by their own vehicles for about 10 minutes. That short period, observed by operators of Israeli drones, appears to have helped seal the aid workers’ fate. As far as the Nahal brigade’s chief of staff, reserve Col Nochi Mendel, was concerned, they were “mingling” with Hamas. Under the very loose procedures of “incrimination” that delegate much to the discretion of field commanders like Mendel, the WCK workers became unwitting targets as they celebrated the completion of a successful delivery of aid, because they were in the proximity to armed men. “There was incrimination. The incrimination was according to the rules,” Mendel said. “There were armed men there with certainty. With certainty, they [the aid workers] had mingled with armed Hamas men.” Other IDF officers have confirmed to the Guardian that such a process of guilt by association is used widely to determine targets, though different field commanders use different standards in making decisions. The Israel military prosecutor, in making his assessment on criminal responsibility, did not address the practice of incrimination in targeting. Parting of ways After the brief pause outside the WCK warehouse in Deir al-Balah, the guards and the WCK workers went in separate directions. “The WCK vehicles departed together west towards the coast. Concurrently, the vehicle containing the locally contracted security personnel, including the previously identified gunmen, drove north,” the Australian report says. It also makes clear that the IDF was aware of this parting of the two groups. “One UAV tracked the locally contracted security vehicle heading north for approximately three minutes until it arrived at another warehouse where up to four gunmen were identified exiting the vehicle and entering the building,” the report says. “A decision was made to discontinue targeting them due to the time available before they entered the northern warehouse.” The military prosecutor’s version makes no mention of this drone or the fact that the suspected gunmen were seen driving off in a different direction and entering a separate building. It claims instead that “several individuals mistakenly … identified as armed persons” were observed getting into WCK vehicles. That is at odds with the Australian report and the accounts of Israeli officers familiar with the investigation. They said a bag was spotted by a drone operator being put in a WCK car, and that the operator mistook it for a gun, though sources briefed on the drone video said that later analysis showed no sign of a suspicious bag. Whether or not it was a gun was irrelevant as far as Mendel was concerned. He saw his task as carrying out the government policy of crushing Hamas governance in Gaza, which included stopping its seizure of aid deliveries. “If a Hamas operative takes over a truck and after that he sells it and that’s how he recruits more people, then what does it matter if he’s armed or not?” Mendel said. *** In its economical, dry prose, the Australian report describes what happened next as the WCK workers left the warehouse at about 11pm. “The WCK vehicles proceeded west to the coast. Due to the time delays encountered, rather than return to the WCK welcome centre as planned, a decision was made to return directly to the accommodation in Rafah,” the report says. “After turning south on to the coast road, the three WCK vehicles were struck in relatively quick succession, each strike being approximately two minutes apart. There were two survivors from the strike on the first (up-armoured) vehicle who quickly moved to the second vehicle, then two survivors from the second (up-armoured) vehicle who moved to the third vehicle. There were no survivors from the third (soft-skinned) vehicle. Over the four-minute period 23:09 – 23:13, the seven WCK workers were killed – likely one in the first vehicle, two in the second and four in the last.” The seven victims of the IDF drone strikes were from the UK, Australia, Poland, Palestine and the US. The Britons John Chapman, James Kirby and James Henderson were working as security consultants. Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, a Palestinian driver and translator, was the youngest killed, at 25. Frankcom, Damian Soból, a Pole, and Jacob Flickinger, a US-Canadian dual citizen, were humanitarian workers for WCK. The military prosecutor claimed that in turning south towards Rafah, the WCK workers were “deviating from the route that the organisation had coordinated in advance with the IDF”, giving weight to the Nahal brigade’s mistaken impression that “Hamas operatives had taken control of the convoy”. Mendel also mentioned this “deviation” as a mitigating factor. However, the Australian report found that the fact that the WCK workers had changed their route only became known after they were killed, and “as such it did not play a factor” in the decision to open fire. The official Israeli version of events says Mendel and his brigade fire support commander ignored an order on the night of the airstrike from a superior officer to cease any attacks on humanitarian convoys, but Mendel has said the order is a fabrication. “It never happened, never existed,” Mendel said. “No operational directive reached the brigade to cease the strikes … We checked it a thousand times.” In explaining his own decision-making, Mendel stressed he was carrying out Israeli government policy by stopping Hamas taking control of food deliveries. He had been lauded by his superiors for ordering strikes on several earlier alleged Hamas attempts to hijack aid. In his mind, the events on the night of 1 April 2024 fitted the same pattern. “I didn’t plan to kill the aid workers,” Mendel said, but added: “They were not innocent because they were connected to Hamas.” Justifying this conclusion, he said: “They were mixed together with Hamas operatives …near them, talking, playing, hanging out and so on.” In a written statement, WCK said: “It is extraordinary to learn now that some in the IDF considered our humanitarian work to be enemy activity based on the flimsiest evidence, or no evidence at all. “This undefined, unjustified and unlawful view is a mortal threat to all humanitarians. The IDF’s shifting excuses and explanations for these unlawful airstrikes are precisely why we continue to demand an independent investigation with the full release of the IDF’s evidence.”