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One dead and more than 30 missing after ferry sinks off Vanuatu coast in rough seas

One person has died and more than 30 are missing after a ferry sank off the coast of Vanuatu, the country’s government says. The vessel, MV Matui, had set sail with more than 40 passengers and crew on Friday from the island of Santo to Ambae island in very rough seas, but did not arrive. “Our hearts and prayers are with the families who have lost loved ones,” Vanuatu prime minister Jotham Napat’s office said in a statement on Sunday. “Search and rescue operations are continuing.” Fifteen of those onboard have been “accounted for alive” and one body has been recovered, the statement said. “Over 30 people remain missing at sea,” it said. “To the survivors, we ⁠pray for your strength and recovery. To the families of those missing and those we have lost, please know that the nation stands with you ‌in this time of grief.” An investigation into potential negligence has been launched. “This loss appears to be the result of strong winds and marine warnings not being heeded, and possibly of negligence including overloading of the vessel,” the statement added. The Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in New Caledonia said it was assisting with the search, and a French Armed Forces aircraft was deployed on Sunday morning. The centre said 12 people were located on Sunday morning. Matai Seremaiah, the member of parliament for Luganville who is assisting in the search, said efforts would concentrate on the south-east coast where currents may have carried survivors. With Agence France-Presse and Reuters

Ukraine war briefing: Nine killed and dozens wounded in Russian strikes as Kyiv braces for harsh winter

Russian airstrikes killed nine people, injured dozens and damaged buildings and infrastructure across Ukraine on Saturday, as Kyiv braces for a “very difficult” winter amid intensified attacks on the country. The civilian death toll has risen sharply in Ukraine over the past two ⁠months as Russia steps up attacks ⁠on power plants and other infrastructure. Ukraine has hit energy facilities and warehouses in distant parts of Russia, and both sides have targeted each other’s shipping. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, writing on Telegram, said Russia had deployed nearly 500 drones against Ukrainian targets since ⁠early morning. “Basically, the Russians have expanded the war away from the front, where they have no success, into the economy, and their tactics are as basic as it gets: destroying every site that could help people cope with the conditions of war,” he wrote. “Russia ⁠wants to kill the Ukrainian economy and break our resistance.” The city council in Kramatorsk, one of Ukraine’s frontline “fortress cities” that Russia wants to capture, said Russian forces attacked private cars, killing three people in three incidents over ‌a 90-minute period. Four people were injured. “These ‌are not military targets,” the council said. “They are ordinary civilian cars. People were going about their business.” The governor of Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region, Vitaliy Bunechko, said ‌a Russian strike on a grocery store killed two people in the town of Zviahel, west of Kyiv. Bunechko said two petrol stations also came under attack. Earlier, Zelenskyy reported attacks on the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia and Kryvyi Rih, his home town. The governor of Zaporizhzhia region, Ivan Fedorov, said two people were killed and 11 injured in assaults on Zaporizhzhia and other localities. In Odesa region, governor Oleh Kiper said 37 people, including an infant, were injured in a series of overnight attacks, while two people were missing. Russia’s defence ministry said Russian forces have maintained their strikes on Ukrainian ports, hitting a cargo ship in Odesa that it said was carrying goods ⁠for military use. Ukrainian officials said the country was bracing for a brutal winter as intensified Russian attacks on infrastructure and key export industries compound a ⁠deepening budget crisis. The economy minister, Oleksandr Kravchenko, said damage to infrastructure and fixed assets from Russian airstrikes was estimated at close to $10bn this year, while the broader economic costs of the attacks and ⁠the de facto blockage of its ports had cut 1.5 percentage points of GDP. “We anticipate a very difficult winter in terms of both critical infrastructure, which is being destroyed every day ⁠by Russian attacks, but also in terms of overall economic conditions in the country,” he said. With fighting on the frontline largely stalled, Russia and Ukraine have increasingly ‌targeted logistics networks and other economic assets in an effort to undermine each other’s war effort. For more than two weeks, Russia has carried out near constant attacks on Kyiv using faster jet-powered drones, disrupting life, business and government operations. Moscow has also effectively blocked Ukraine’s Black Sea ports by intensifying its air attacks on the country’s southern regions. Ukraine’s ‌main exports – agricultural products and iron and steel – are shipped via these ports. In Moldova on Ukraine’s western border, authorities closed national airspace for nearly an hour after a drone was detected near the border. Seven border crossings were temporarily closed. Zelenskyy said he would be willing to meet Putin at the G20 summit in Miami for talks on ending the war, in a media interview released Saturday, but the Kremlin immediately ruled it out. “It is impossible,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told AFP in New Delhi on Saturday, repeating Moscow’s demand that a meeting can only take place in the Russian capital. The gathering of world leaders takes place on 14-15 December and there has been no confirmation yet as to whether Putin would attend. Putin has repeatedly rejected offers for a face-to-face meeting with Zelenskyy.

Number of UK anti-migrant vigilante groups surges in last 18 months

At least 28 anti-migrant vigilante groups have formed in the UK in the last 18 months, ranging from unauthorised street patrols claiming to protect women and children to groups harassing migrants in France and blocking ports. From Belfast to the south coast of England, the number of active groups has surged since the summer of 2025, according to analysis by the Guardian, amid widespread concerns over fresh disorder after black-clad vigilantes, many of them wearing balaclavas, blocked roads in Portsmouth and Dover last weekend. Often arguing that they are filling gaps left by the police or taking action on migration that the government is unable to, the groups range from small-scale community patrols near asylum-seeker accommodation to those attempting to stop migrants crossing the Channel from France. They include Scots Active, which conducts late-night patrols around Glasgow city centre claiming to protect the public from migrants, sometimes wearing balaclavas and stab-proof vests. It says its activities help ensure the safety of women and girls. It was one of two groups banned from TikTok earlier this year after reportedly sharing footage claiming to expose migrant hotels. Another is the British Security Project, a self-styled civilian safety group that has described itself as the “tip of the spear in mass deportation under a Rupert Lowe government”. It recruits “visible deterrent patrol” volunteers via its website and social media platforms, and responds to reports from the public about incidents claiming to involve migrants. It aims to “provide 124,000 security personnel to public spaces by 2035”, according to its Facebook page. When the Guardian contacted the group for comment, a spokesperson said it was neither vigilante nor anti-migrant. “The British Security Project is a developing non-profit community protection organisation committed to lawful, peaceful and accountable volunteer action,” they said. “It has no police or immigration-enforcement powers, does not permit people to be targeted because of their nationality or immigration status, and expressly prohibits vigilantism, intimidation, racism and unlawful discrimination.” Members of another group, Raise the Colours, made several trips to France in 2025 to try to stop migrants crossing the Channel in small boats. They filmed themselves claiming to have slashed dinghies on French beaches. France subsequently banned 10 members from the country. Members of far-right Patriot Platform blocked roads near Dover for several hours last Saturday, disrupting traffic to and from the port. Kent police initially said they had received no warning, but later admitted officers had failed to act on calls made on Friday evening. On Sunday, about 200 black-clad men gathered in Portsmouth after 120 asylum seekers rescued from a dinghy were brought ashore there. They blocked roads and allegedly assaulted several police officers. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, urged police on Thursday to curb the activities of such groups, telling senior officers to make full use of their powers. The rise in vigilante groups is a recent phenomenon, overwhelmingly happening in the last year. Of the 31 active groups the Guardian was able to establish initiation dates for, 28 were set up since last summer, with a spike in August 2025 after Raise the Colours’ flag operation and unrest at an asylum hotel in Epping. Setup dates were taken from online activity on Facebook and Instagram, domain name registrations and media reports. To classify as anti-migrant vigilantes, the Guardian considers that a group must have taken the law into its own hands in the name of opposing migrants or asylum seekers. Groups limited to more conventional protests and far-right political parties were not included. In a campaign of intimidation last summer, a vigilante group called the Belfast Nightwatch First Division was involved in targeting dark-skinned males in the city, challenging them to produce identification documents. Dr Julia Ebner, an expert on extremism at the University of Oxford, said the figures showed a rapid shift in the ways anti-migrant activists were mobilising which was particularly striking. “At the heart of most vigilante groups is the claim that the authorities are incapable or unwilling to protect a country’s citizens,” she said. “This is a dangerous dynamic, because when trust in authorities is undermined this can quickly translate into justifications of running their own policing operations or even violent campaigns – all supposedly for a good cause. “Another underlying narrative that is not new but has been amplified across social media is the idea that ‘our’ women and children are threatened by men of migrant backgrounds. There is also a performative aspect of vigilante movements: uniforms, patrols and security equipment can project authority and legitimacy even when the groups themselves are relatively small. “This can help far-right movements recruit new members and produce visually appealing social media content to increase their public profile and expand their followership.” Alex MacKinnon, a researcher at Hope Not Hate, said vigilantism had long been part of far-right activism, but that there had been a dramatic increase in extremists’ grassroots efforts in the last 18 months. “While vigilante groups typically purport to protect the wider community, the majority do not properly vet their members, resulting in several being exposed for their violent criminal histories,” he said. “Furthermore, they regularly engage in intimidatory behaviour, as seen in Patriot Platform’s Dover demonstration. Vigilante groups of this type often promote aggressive anti-migrant agendas, using ‘community protection’ as a cover for racist thuggery.” In response to the Guardian’s analysis, the National Police Chiefs’ Council said it was important for the public to report concerns about crime and safety. “Police officers are specially trained to respond to a wide range of incidents safely and lawfully,” a spokesperson said. “While we understand people may want to protect their communities, taking enforcement into your own hands can be dangerous, and could compromise a police investigation.”

Saudi Arabia shuts down key oil pipeline, blaming drones from Iraq

Saudi Arabia has shut down a critical oil pipeline, accusing militants in Iraq of launching drone attacks on the export route being used to bypass the lockdown of the strait of Hormuz. The world’s largest ⁠crude oil exporter has increased its use of the 745-mile (1,200km) pipeline running across the Arabian peninsula, which links Abqaiq, near the Gulf, to the port of Yanbu, on the Red Sea, since the US-Israeli war against Iran began. The Saudi foreign ministry condemned “the targeting of the East-West pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions by several drones coming from Iraq, which caused human injuries and damage”. An energy ministry official told the SPA news agency earlier that the pipeline was “stopped as a precaution”. Baghdad is under mounting pressure to prevent militant groups, including those backed by Saudi Arabia’s regional rival Iran, from launching attacks on Gulf countries from Iraqi soil. The US president, Donald Trump, said he believed Tehran was responsible for the aerial attack. “I ‌think they ‌are, probably they are,” Trump told reporters in ‌Dublin during a visit to Ireland. On Saturday, Iraq’s government confirmed the attacks were launched from its territory and ordered an investigation. It condemned “the attacks targeting our brethren in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, and the office of the Iraqi prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, said the commander in charge of the southern province of Maysan had been dismissed. Satellite images from Copernicus Sentinel Data taken on Thursday showed black smoke billowing near Medina, along the general route of the East-West pipeline. According to the International Energy Agency, Saudi oil exports through the Red Sea port at the pipeline’s end have more than doubled since the war began. The news comes as Yemen’s Houthi forces have captured the strategic island of Perim in the Bab al-Mandab strait, expanding their control of the narrow waterway, one of the world’s vital shipping routes linking Europe and Asia. Oil prices climbed past $100 (£74) a barrel this week, while average US diesel prices topped $6 for the first time on Friday – a potential headache for Trump before midterm elections in November. A failed attempt by the US and Israel to overthrow the Iranian regime this year has destabilised the Gulf, and Iran and its proxies have now tightened their grip over two crucial shipping routes – the strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. Trump said ⁠on Saturday ⁠that everything would “work out ⁠just fine” when asked whether he ⁠could help move ‌traffic ‌through the strait ‌of Hormuz in light of fresh concerns about Saudi ‌Arabia. “Everything will work out just fine,” Trump said, speaking in Dublin ⁠after meeting the Irish president, Catherine Connolly. But Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, speaking on the sidelines of a developing nations Brics summit in India, said the Middle East did not need the US to be a “regional policeman”. Saudi Arabia has previously accused Tehran-backed Iraqi militias of targeting its oil infrastructure. It said the kingdom “reserves the right to take all necessary measures to protect its sovereignty, its security, its facilities” and its people. Bahrain, Jordan and Qatar also condemned the attack on the Saudi pipeline, while the Gulf Cooperation Council denounced “a dangerous escalation and an unacceptable threat to the security of the kingdom”. Ed Miliband, the British ⁠foreign secretary, said ⁠on ⁠Saturday that he had spoken ⁠with his Saudi counterpart, Prince Faisal bin ⁠Farhan Al ‌Saud, and ‌discussed the attacks. He added that the UK “stands firmly with ⁠Saudi Arabia and the internationally recognised government of Yemen against ‌these attacks”. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels announced a maritime blockade in July against Saudi Arabia – which supports the Yemeni government – and attacked its oil tankers in the Red Sea. After taking control of the Yemeni Red Sea coast on Friday, the Houthis said navigation through the Bab al-Mandab strait was “safe” for all but Saudi Arabia.

IDF soldier filmed shooting Palestinian in leg amid West Bank settler standoff

An Israeli soldier has shot a Palestinian man, wounding him in the leg, as settlers confronted villagers by grazing livestock on Palestinian-owned land in the town of Faqqua in the occupied West Bank. Witnesses said a group of settlers had entered the area with their livestock, prompting residents to try to stop them. Israeli forces then intervened and, according to men at the scene, opened fire at residents. One of them shot Qassem Hussam, a Palestinian man in his mid-30s, wounding him in the leg. Reached by the Guardian, the IDF confirmed it had received a report of the incident and that the person who fired was one of its soldiers. “Earlier today [Saturday], a report was received regarding friction between Israeli civilians and Palestinians near the area of Faqqua,” the IDF said. “An IDF force that was at the scene fired into the air and toward a Palestinian.” Mohammed al-Sheikh, 34, who was standing next to Hussam, told the Guardian the confrontation began when villagers encountered Israeli settlers grazing livestock on Palestinian-owned land. “Then the Israeli soldiers came,” al-Sheikh said. “They started shooting. One soldier shot Hussam and he fell to the ground. We immediately went to help him and move him away. We couldn’t get an ambulance to the area, so we took him to hospital in a private car.” Hussam was taken to hospital in a light-to-moderate condition, according to the Palestine Red Crescent. The Israeli military said the incident was being reviewed by commanders and that its findings would be forwarded to the relevant authorities for examination. The IDF added that the military was investigating the soldier who shot the Palestinian man, apparently in breach of army protocol, according to the Times of Israel. Video of the incident shows a group of Israeli soldiers and settlers confronting unarmed Palestinian men before shots are fired. The incident is the latest to raise questions over the Israeli government’s ability or willingness to curb violent settlers in the occupied West Bank, where attacks have continued to increase. On 8 September, the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, said he would “not stand by” as horrific suffering continued, writing in the Guardian that for too long the UK had been hesitant to act, “fearful of being accused of being anti-Israel”. Ed Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, said the government would now take the official position that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was unlawful in its entirety, and announced sweeping sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements. The dramatic shift in the UK’s position came after a summer of intense diplomacy against a backdrop of rising settler violence in the West Bank, which led 12 countries, including France and Canada, to announce sanctions. After Miliband described violent Jewish settler activity in the occupied West Bank as “ethnic cleansing” carried out with the tacit backing of the government of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, announced retaliatory measures including the closure of the consulate and entry bans on several MPs. It marked the latest stage in a rapidly worsening dispute between the two countries, with diplomatic relations at their lowest point in years, even as violence in the West Bank has continued. Israeli forces also carried out raids across Jenin governorate on Saturday, arresting six people and injuring a 14-year-old boy, who suffered a broken hand, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa. Soldiers also raided several villages around Jenin, while forces entered at least five towns in Bethlehem governorate and set up a checkpoint at Za’atara. East of Ramallah, Israeli settlers attacked the outskirts of Burqa, throwing stones at homes and vehicles. On 4 September, two Palestinian teenagers were shot dead in al-Mughayyir after settlers entered the village under police and military escort and took dozens of sheep from a Palestinian home, residents and Israeli activists said. The victims were Khalil Abu Alia, 16, and Omar al-Nassan, 19. Three other pupils from their 470-strong school had already been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers this year. According to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 1,111 Palestinians, including at least 243 children, have been killed in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 7 October 2023.

Xi Jinping gets red carpet at Brics summit amid thaw in India-China relations

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, has received a red-carpet welcome in India for a summit of Brics developing nations, as regional rivals Beijing and Delhi make a public display of thawing relations while quietly competing to lead at a time of shaky US global dominance. As Xi stepped off the plane, he was walked past an honour guard of Indian soldiers and traditional dancers in colourful dresses. Later on Saturday, he was due to attend a gala dinner for the two-day summit. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, had already been welcomed by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, who is hosting one of the group’s most closely watched gatherings since its inception. The summit marks Xi’s first visit to India in seven years and is seen as the biggest step towards reconciliation after a deadly 2020 military clash along the disputed Himalayan border, in which ‌20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers were killed. Ties between the nuclear-armed Asian giants have been warming recently, with flights and high-level contacts gradually being restored. China was “willing” to work with India to properly manage differences and be “good neighbours and friends”, China’s foreign ministry said on Friday. Leaders and diplomats have been convening in India for the annual gathering of the Brics grouping, named after five of its earliest members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – that was conceived as a counterweight to western dominance. This summit comes as wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, along with rising US-China tensions, test the bloc’s ability to find common ground. Since its inception in 2009, Brics has expanded as a forum for major emerging economies to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The group now rivals the US-dominated G7 forum of advanced economies, accounting for half of the global population. But its growth has also created new fractures and disunity – Iran was bombing Saudi Arabia and the UAE earlier this year, and Brics foreign ministers failed to agree on a joint statement when they met in Delhi in May. On Saturday, the bloc managed to unanimously agree on the wording of a joint declaration that reiterated a commitment to peaceful resolution of international disputes “through dialogue, consultation and diplomacy”. The “New Delhi declaration” called for “maximum restraint” in the Middle East, although it was worded so as not to call out member countries actively involved in conflicts. Jiang Shixue, the vice-president of the expert committee of the China thinktank Council for BRICs cooperation (China), said the 11 members “cannot speak with one voice on many issues”. “The only solution is to continuously strengthen political consensus,” he told the South China Morning Post. Beijing and Delhi have differing views on the role of the group. China has sought to expand Brics power as a counterweight to the US under Donald Trump’s leadership, which has launched global tariff and trade wars and retreated from multilateral institutions such as the UN, which afforded it international credibility. India has taken a more cautious approach, seeing Brics as a bridge between the west and the developing world. Saturday’s talks began with an address by Modi, who said Brics was “not against anyone”. Chietigj Bajpaee, a senior research fellow for South Asia in the Asia-Pacific programme at Chatham House, said this week that Delhi had found it hard to maintain its policy of “strategic hedging” during such a disruptive US presidency. “India’s position can appear out of sync in a forum whose membership includes countries with more overtly anti-western agendas, including China, Russia and Iran. And two other Brics countries, South Africa and Brazil, have suffered high-profile diplomatic disputes with the US,” he wrote. “The challenge for Delhi is that it wishes to promote this worldview in a way that is non-western but not explicitly anti-western.” Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

From socialist student to Trump proxy: the 25-year rise of Venezuela’s Delcy Rodríguez

It was April 2002 and Delcy Rodríguez was a woman on a mission. Venezuela’s then president, Hugo Chávez, had been temporarily toppled by a bungled coup and Rodríguez, a junior diplomat who had been studying at Birkbeck, University of London, decided to act. Rodríguez, then 32, set about trying to convince two reporters from the BBC programme Newsnight to accompany her to Venezuela’s capital to tell the world about what had happened. “She desperately wanted to get the story of Chávez and the coup out there on a big platform,” says one of those journalists, Meirion Jones, who engaged Rodríguez as their fixer and flew to Caracas with her. As the trio travelled around the South American city trying to land an interview with Chávez – who by then had reclaimed the presidency after being briefly detained – Jones had no inkling that his Venezuelan field producer and interpreter might one day become president herself. “She looked like she was still a student really … it was just impossible to imagine at that point that she would become president of Venezuela,” Jones says. Yet that is precisely what Rodríguez, now 57, has become, albeit in extraordinary circumstances precipitated by Donald Trump’s decision to abduct Chávez’s authoritarian heir, Nicolás Maduro. When US special forces snatched the unpopular Maduro on 3 January this year, he was widely expected to be replaced with María Corina Machado, the Nobel-winning opposition leader whose movement beat him in the stolen 2024 election. Instead, Trump discarded Machado and backed Maduro’s vice-president, Rodríguez, who became Venezuela’s interim leader two days after the downfall of her boss. Eight months later, Rodríguez is still in power – despite leading a country many now consider a US protectorate – and looks likely to remain there for the foreseeable future, with scant sign of fresh presidential elections being called. “We are very happy with the president-elect that we have right now,” Trump said of the un-elected Rodríguez after announcing what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history”. Imdat Oner, a former Turkish diplomat in Caracas, believes the deal has strengthened Rodríguez and dealt a big blow to those hoping for democratic change. “Delcy is winning … I see Delcy Rodríguez staying in the presidency for at least four or five more years,” he says. The Delcy Rodríguez that Jones flew with to Caracas more than two decades ago was a well-connected but politically insignificant figure known fundamentally because of her father. Jorge Antonio Rodríguez was a Marxist activist who died in police custody in 1976, when his daughter was seven, reputedly after being tortured while detained over the kidnapping of a US businessman. “All the Chavistas knew who her father had been – but they didn’t really know who she was,” says Jones, who is now a freelance investigative journalist. “[But during our time in Caracas] she’d made herself known to all these people … and I think by the end of the trip she was starting to think: ‘Maybe there is an opening for me in politics in Venezuela.’” Soon after, Rodríguez returned to Venezuela, landing jobs with its state oil company, PDVSA, and foreign ministry. By 2006, she had become Chávez’s chief of staff, although she fell out of favour after clashing with Venezuela’s then ambassador to Russia during a visit to Moscow. That row interrupted Rodríguez’s rise but she was rehabilitated by Maduro when he became president after Chávez’s 2013 death. In the years that followed, as her country nosedived into hunger and authoritarianism, Rodríguez enjoyed a rapid ascent. She served as foreign minister before taking charge of the country’s economy as petroleum minister, finance minister and Maduro’s vice-president. Her brother, a psychiatrist turned politician, Jorge Rodríguez, established himself as the head of the national assembly. After Maduro’s capture, the siblings formed a powerful triumvirate, alongside the feared interior minister, Diosdado Cabello. “Delcy is not Delcy. Delcy’s Delcy and her brother. They do everything in tandem … they don’t do anything without each other’s approval or consent,” says Andrés Izarra, Chávez’s communication minister who went into exile after falling out with Maduro. Those who have encountered Rodríguez during her unlikely 25-year rise, from being a leftwing student in the UK to the pinnacle of power in Venezuela, paint her in dramatically different ways. Admirers describe a pragmatic, witty and intelligent workaholic who they credit with helping Venezuela escape years of hyperinflation and believe can fulfil promises to revive the country’s decaying oil industry and economy. “Venezuela under Delcy is going to have the best possible kind of technocratic care – and that’s what is needed right now … she’s going to get that oil moving,” says Greg Palast, the other journalist who flew to Caracas with Rodríguez for the BBC in 2002. Palast believes Venezuela is “way better off” under Rodríguez than the incompetent Maduro, calling her a clever strategist who plays politics “on a four-dimensional chessboard”. Detractors paint Rodríguez as a belligerent, power-hungry chameleon whose political leanings can change on a dime and who, as a key member of Maduro’s regime, was herself responsible for Venezuela’s slide into poverty and dictatorship. “They’re evil, they are crazy and they are smart … they’re evil geniuses,” a prominent opposition politician, who asked not to be named, says of the Rodríguez siblings. Izarra says his former friend is “very machiavellian” and has a taste for luxury. Tom Shannon, a retired US diplomat who has worked with Venezuela since the 1990s, describes the multilingual Rodríguez as a “very smart, very articulate, very determined” and profoundly ideological person. Shannon recalls being “intercepted” by Rodríguez – then foreign minister – after flying to Caracas to meet Maduro during Barack Obama’s second term. Their conversation was wide-ranging. “But I remember very distinctly, at one point I raised the issue of human rights – our interest in especially seeing the release of certain people from prison,” Shannon says. “She … turned to me, with a look almost of contempt, not for me, but for the subject I was raising and she said: ‘You might not know my story, but my father was a revolutionary member of an armed revolutionary movement in Venezuela who was arrested [and] tortured during interrogation and killed by the Venezuelan security services when I was a girl.’ “And she said: ‘This interrogation and the killing of my father took place during a time when, from your point of view, Venezuela was a democratic country governed by the rule of law. But I can tell you, the security services weren’t.” Shannon adds: “It was very striking … it was evident to me that she saw her father as kind of a revolutionary north star, kind of a martyr point of reference – and I believe that’s still the case.” He thinks Rodríguez’s objective in her new partnership with Washington is political survival “and to make sure that a revanchist, conservative, elitist, democratic opposition does not return to power”. Speaking in the White House, Trump heaped praise on his unlikely Venezuelan partner. “Delcy is doing a very, very good job – very highly respected,” he told reporters. Trump claimed Venezuela had only just escaped a “very nasty” regime and was not ready for elections. “You know, it’s very new. We took them out of a dictatorship, and we’re getting along great with the government,” he said. Such comments will have been music to Rodríguez’s ears. “Delcy wants to survive,” says Oner. “And she knows that if she gives enough to the Trump administration, the Trump administration will allow her to stay in power.”