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French students continue protests, saying ministers’ pledges not enough

High school students have again blockaded schools and marched through cities across France, promising to continue their campaign against the poor state of the national education system in the tenth day of protests that have left hundreds injured. Large crowds took to the streets on Thursday for mainly peaceful demonstrations in cities including Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Lyon, Toulon and Marseille, while in Paris a large procession marched through the city centre to the Place de la Bastille. An estimated 25,000 students thronged the square in the east of the capital, with some climbing the monument at its centre, which commemorates France’s 1830 July revolution, while waving the tricolour flag and singing the Marseillaise. As the evening drew in, riot police fired teargas and crowd-dispersal rounds and carried out repeated baton charges to clear the protesters, some of whom hurled bottles, paving stones and other projectiles at the heavily armoured squads. Eliane, 16, a pupil on the Paris march, said she had come to “defend and encourage high schools in an even worse state than mine”, calling the march “magnificent”. She said she planned to continue protesting until concrete progress was achieved. The education minister, Édouard Geffray, told TF1 television on Thursday night that 3,000 substitute teachers would be deployed to about 100 high schools identified as having particularly acute teacher shortages “between tomorrow and Tuesday”. Geffray said he would also authorise the recruitment of “several hundred” new teachers. The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, said on social media that the government would propose amendments to the 2027 budget to “translate certain of the high school students’ demands into concrete measures”. Students earlier said the government’s reaction was not sufficient. Ryad Rani, the president of one high school students’ union, said the protesters had heard “no concrete measures whatsoever, no response to our demands”. The movement “will continue”, he said. Sabrine Kharbach, from another students’ association, said the protest, over teacher shortages, long school hours and dilapidated buildings, would last “for as long as €10bn hasn’t been put on the table”, the amount students and some leftwing politicians have said needs to be urgently invested in France’s schools. According to an Elabe poll for BFM TV, 72% of French people think the students’ demands are legitimate but 55% of them think the protests should stop. Unions called for another national day of action in support of the students next Tuesday. The education ministry said fewer high schools had been forced to close than in recent days, with 224 shut on Thursday morning and 157 by lunchtime, meaning that about 95% of the country’s high schools were at least partly open. But more than 71,000 protesters took to the streets on Thursday, the interior ministry said. The demonstrations, backed by many teachers, parents and unions, involved further clashes with police around some school barricades in Paris. In Rennes riot officers used water cannon to disperse protesters. A prominent complaint on student banners and placards was the heavy-handed police response to the wave of protests. “Too young to be listened to, but old enough to be teargassed,” read one banner on the Paris march. Over the past two weeks, some demonstrators have set dustbins on fire outside their schools, destroyed bus shelters and hurled projectiles at riot police, who have responded using batons, teargas and riot-control rounds. At least 215 teenagers, 89 school staff and 761 police officers have been injured since the start of the protests, which were triggered by chronic teacher shortages, crowded classes, dilapidated buildings and long school days. The government on Wednesday suspended the use of stun grenades by police after a teenager’s hand was blown off, while saying it was “excessive” to speak of “police repression” and denying that officers had “orders to confront” the young protesters. The protests have rocked a government caught between popular demands for investment in deteriorating public services and pressure from markets to reduce France’s ballooning budget deficit and debt mountain, among the highest in the EU. The economy minister, Roland Lescure, said this week there was room to address demands for more school resources in the 2027 budget. In the current draft, schools have the second-largest funding increase after defence, with a 1.4% hike to €90.9bn. Six months away from a crucial presidential election to replace Emmanuel Macron, politicians are jockeying to exploit the protests, with the far-right frontrunner, Marine Le Pen, highlighting the damage to schools and calling for parents ⁠to foot repair bills. Her hard-left opponent, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has praised the protesters as “incredible” and denounced police brutality.

Thousands march in Madrid after death of evicted pensioner Maricarmen

About 20,000 people took part in a march through the centre of Madrid on Thursday evening in memory of María del Carmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman whose eviction from her flat in the capital a fortnight before her death triggered mass protests over Spain’s housing crisis. The pensioner, whose flat had been bought by an investment firm that sought to increase her rent by 230%, had become the public face of the crisis before her death in hospital on Wednesday night. Abascal’s eviction unleashed waves of demonstrations across Spain, led to the setting up of a protest camp in the centre of the capital, and prompted the socialist-led government to propose emergency measures to try to make the rental market more equitable. When those measures were voted down by rightwing and far-right parties last week, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced a snap general election, to be held on 29 November. Anger over the plight of the woman who had become known around the country as Maricarmen remained undimmed a few hours after her death. On the pavement across from the apartment building where she had lived for seven decades, a steady stream of people visited a small, steadily growing memorial. Some came to light candles or leave flowers, while others left handwritten messages such as, “You made history Maricarmen,” and “Thank you for changing Spain”. Sara, 41, who had come with her young son and a sign that read, “Maricarmen, we’ll fight for you”, said: “We’re here because I think Maricarmen’s death shows how institutions can kill a person by failing to care for them.” For many, the site was a reminder of all that Maricarmen had gone through as she tried to stay in her home, fending off three eviction attempts before the investment firm succeeded in forcing her out. “When people are protected less than investors, that leads to these kinds of things happening,” Sara added. “This woman could have died – if she had died of natural causes – she could have died peacefully in her home.” Jaime, 34, pointed to all that Maricarmen had come to represent, particularly in a country like Spain, where social rights are supposedly guaranteed. “She had become a symbol, albeit one she never wanted to be, of the fight for decent housing,” he said. “So I came here because I think it’s important to restore some of the respect that Spanish society took away from Maricarmen.” Visitors included some of the housing campaigners who had helped Maricarmen fight off previous eviction attempts. “This is really hard to take,” said Miguel, 59, fighting back tears as he added a red rose to the memorial. “When money is more powerful than people’s lives, it’s unbelievable.” He said he hoped Maricarmen’s death would mark a turning point in Spain. “At least now we’re talking about this and putting names to those who are being evicted,” he said. “Because until now, there were 44 people a day being forced out of their homes. To the people in power, those are just numbers – now at least we’ve started putting names to those going through this.” The Madrid tenants’ union announced a commemorative march at 8pm on Wednesday from the camp in the Puerta del Sol square to Abascal’s flat. “Farewell, Maricarmen!” the union said in a post on social media. “Tonight we’ll honour you with a march … to the place that was your home for 70 years, and where you just wanted to stay until the end.” Abascal’s ordeal has made housing a key issue in the forthcoming election, with Sánchez’s government seeking to push a redrafted package of measures through the council that operates when parliament has been dissolved. Meanwhile, the rightwing and far-right parties that opposed the legislation in congress last week have accused the prime minister of failing to act to address the housing crisis over the course of his eight years in office. Sánchez offered his condolences to Abascal’s family and friends on Wednesday night. “A hug also to everyone who’s feeling this loss today as their own,” he wrote on social media. “Rest in peace.” Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party (PP), which voted against last week’s emergency measures, also offered his condolences. “No campaigning, no political parties, no partisan ends, no more bricks in the wall,” he wrote on social media. “When a person dies, there should be nothing but respect.” The following day, however, Feijóo accused the government of trying to “manipulate the emotions of the Spanish people” by focusing on one particular eviction when there had been countless others during Sánchez’s time in office. PP politicians also joined forces with the far right on Thursday to veto attempts to hold a minute’s silence for Maricarmen in Madrid’s regional parliament and the country’s senate. In Madrid’s municipal council, meanwhile, a rightwing attempt to block a minute’s silence was thwarted by opposition parties. Abascal’s death has prompted reflection on how she had been treated by politicians and the media. The far-right Vox party, which also voted down the new decrees, had falsely suggested that Maricarmen would have had a home had she been an immigrant from North Africa, while one commentator had opined that “Maricarmen was chosen during a casting call for people facing eviction” to become a leftwing saint. At least two far-right figures, including one of Vox’s MEPs, sought to sow doubt over the cause of Abascal’s death, with one even suggesting an autopsy should be carried out to determine whether the government had been involved. Another wrote: “Maricarmen was probably already made to send in her postal vote before they did her in. I expect anything from this scum.”

A teen tried to navigate Canadian mountains with Claude. His trek ended in an emergency rescue

The route up the Widowmaker Arete, a 1,700-foot wall in British Columbia, is deceptively described as “mostly easy slab climbing”, interspersed with “short steep sections that can include finger cracks, blocky face climbing”. It requires careful planning, and the right equipment. When 16-year-old Bryce Vincent Gowryluk found himself facing its sheer headwall last week, he had neither. He did, however, ask the AI chatbot Claude for directions. Last week, Gowryluk had to be rescued after those directions proved wildly incorrect, in the latest incident to raise questions about the growing reliance on digital maps for wilderness navigation. On Saturday morning, Gowryluk took a gondola up to the top of Grouse Mountain and, while ascending, asked Claude to plan a route to nearby Crown Mountain and back. After navigating scree and more than 2,000ft of elevation gain, the summit promises 360-degree panoramic views of Greater Vancouver, the Fraser valley and the Capilano watershed. Typically, the trek takes eight hours and hiking guides warn it is not for beginners. As Gowryluk, a keen indoor climber, navigated down the Crown Pass and up through Crater Slabs and into a boulder-strewn valley, the directions from Claude took him away from the planned course. He found himself at the final headwall of the Widowmaker Arete – a climb that requires ropes, cams and a clear plan for ascent. As he climbed, Gowryluk soon realized the terrain was far too steep and that he was stuck at the base of a cliff. He phoned his mother, then called emergency services for help. Police notified North Shore Rescue, which sent a helicopter, but Gowryluk was too close to the rock face for the rotors, so two members of the rescue team were hoisted down to lift him up. He was flown to the rescue base near the Cleveland Dam. In their debrief the rescue crew said Gowryluk was “far off” his intended route. While the incident is believed to be the first time a hiker has been lost because of AI, it is the latest in a string of mishaps in the mountainous region of south-western British Columbia, where hikers increasingly rely on imprecise mapping directions. In July, three people were rescued after they planned a route on the Howe Sound Crest Trail using Google Maps, which gave them wildly inaccurate time estimates, suggesting a route that often takes as long as 14 hours could be done in just over five. Search manager Paul Markey warned that mountaineers should not rely on the directions of artificial intelligence, and that proper prepartion was key. “In this particular case, the boy had a headlamp. He had good clothing. He had he had a good pair of boots, spare battery and spare food. He was was pretty well equipped for hiking and scrambling. But he was certainly not prepared or equipped for rock climbing,” Markey said. “Claude in this particular situation, has never been in the area that this 16-year-old boy found himself in. Claude can only go so far with regard to describing what the area may be like. “There’s definitely a trend towards using electronic applications as opposed to map and compass skills. But is really no substitute for the good map and compass training and education.” He noted that in some cases apps give too much information. “We have found that some of the apps have identified trails in areas where, really, our preference as a rescue team would be that those trails or routes are not actually identified,” he said, adding that people see routes they think are good trails only to get into difficulty. “The main thing is: do not blindly rely on a on AI as as a route planning tool. It can never substitute for good education, good training, a good experience, good decision making in the field.”

Nicolás Maduro and his wife indicted for alleged torture of US citizens

The deposed Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted for alleged conspiracy to commit torture, according to Manhattan federal court papers unsealed on Thursday. The superseding indictment was unsealed shortly before Flores appeared at court in her ongoing push for pretrial release – which was denied by Judge Alvin Hellerstein. Maduro and Flores have been jailed in New York City since early January. They were captured by US special forces during a shocking predawn assault on Caracas and transported to New York to face “narcoterrorism”-related charges in a move that sparked widespread international outrage. Charging documents at the time alleged that Maduro spearheaded a “corrupt, illegitimate government that, for decades, has leveraged government power to protect and promote illegal activity, including drug trafficking”. Maduro and Flores have previously pleaded not guilty in the criminal case against them. CNN on Wednesday first reported that a new indictment was expected. The new charging document described how Maduro and his wife allegedly wielded untold horrors to suppress opposition and maintain their control. Maduro, Flores and other Venezuelan leaders “presided over a system of repression that relied on violence against political opposition, arbitrary detention, and the torture of detainees, including United States citizens”, the just-released charging document said. Maduro and Flores, the superseding indictment alleged, “sat atop that violent power structure”. They allegedly “developed and facilitated the systems which they and their co-conspirators used corruptly to amass immense wealth and power, rewarding allies with ill-gotten funds and terrorizing perceived opponents through persecution and violence”. Flores was integral to this effort, authorities claimed, saying she “helped develop this system of repression and ordered that individuals be tortured to protect her family members’ illegal activities”. The victims of their torture included US citizens “who were believed to pose a threat” to Maduro’s power. “One particular United States citizen was detained in Venezuela and subjected to, among other things, deprivation of food and water, simulated drowning, repeated beatings, electric shock to his testicles, and forced injections.” Maduro and Flores also put pressure on Venezuela’s judiciary to make legal decisions that supported their efforts to thwart opposition, charging papers alleged. When one official resisted, Venezuelan intelligence agents arrested and tortured their family members, charging papers stated. “For example, one family member … was forced to drink latrine water; assaulted with tear gas in Victim-1’s cell; threatened that Victim-1 would be killed at gunpoint; and placed in a cold room known as the ‘Freezer’ in which a bright light was left on at all times of day and night and music was blared on repeat,” the superseding indictment said. This official “ultimately … relented and blocked the opposition figures from running for political office”. During another alleged torture incident, authorities allegedly abused the friend of a suspected opponent by “asphyxiating him with a bag, applying electric shocks to his testicles and knees, and kicking and beating him with a blunt object”, court papers said. One torture victim, who was repeatedly interrogated, endured numerous threats “including that his daughter would be kidnapped and raped if he did not confess and name his supposed confederates”, court papers state. “On one occasion, interrogators produced women’s underwear, claiming it belonged to his daughter.” Shortly after this indictment surfaced, Flores’s attorneys argued for her release in an already scheduled proceeding, pitching house arrest guarded by 24-hour private security. In doing so, they invoked chronic health issues, including cardiac infirmities. Hellerstein pushed back on this claim, noting that Flores was refusing to have catheterization while detained in general population. “I’ve undergone it, so I know what it is,” Hellerstein said, noting that it was generally an outpatient procedure. “There’s no pain. There’s no general anesthesia.” Flores’s attorney then pointed to her high blood pressure. “It’s controllable by pills,” Hellerstein said. Her team also said in court that Flores dropped more than 25lbs and lost two teeth since her detention. “For whatever it’s worth, her appearance today is no worse than, and perhaps a little better, than when I first met with her [at] her arraignment,” Hellerstein said. Flores’s lawyer said that during her arraignment she was “still bandaged up” from her rough arrest. Flores wore dark jail scrubs during her court appearance. She listened to the proceedings with headphones through a Spanish-language interpreter. The US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, which is prosecuting this case, opposed Flores’s now-failed bail request. Prosecutors have argued that Flores was a flight risk. Prosecutors also maintained that she had received appropriate medical care. Donald Trump has defended the controversial raid on Maduro, insisting it was a “surgical law enforcement operation”. At Maduro’s first US court appearance, he said: “I’m a kidnapped president – a prisoner of war!” After Maduro’s forced ouster, Trump worked swiftly to gain access to Venezuela’s expansive oil reserves. In August, Trump announced a new oil agreement with Venezuela – claiming that the US would have “majority” control over 65bn barrels of proven reserves. Venezuela boasts approximately 303bn barrels of proven oil reserves – the largest in the world. The White House has tried establishing a consistent flow of Venezuelan crude oil to US refineries while boosting US investment into the country’s flagging petroleum industry. Trump has faced mounting pressure over skyrocketing gas prices in advance of November’s midterm elections. Greater access to cheaper oil and broadened output could help lower costs. A Guardian investigation found, however, that Trump’s proclaimed “biggest oil deal in world history” is likely to fail due to legal and logistical problems.

Israel promotes film that mimics NAZA documentary

The Israeli government is promoting an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA, the award-winning documentary that details Israel’s mass killings of civilians in Gaza, in an attempt to counter the real film’s findings. The real documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and produced by the Guardian, is in cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries. The Israeli government has denounced the film and announced plans to strip Abraham and Szor of their citizenship, accusing them of treason. In recent days, Israeli embassies have been promoting a link to a hastily produced online film entitled NAZA: The Real Story. Mimicking some of the style of the real documentary, including the use of anonymised interviews shot on rooftops in Tel Aviv, it is hosted on a website called nazadocumentary.com. Ariel Averbuch, an Israeli attorney and army reservist who made the new documentary, described it as an “offensive move” intended to shift the world’s focus from allegations about the Israeli military’s killing of civilians. The film claims that Israel has the “most moral army in the world”. Another film-maker listed on the website for NAZA: The Real Story is Roi Danino, a candidate for the rightwing Israel First party. The website domain was registered on 16 September, six days after NAZA’s premiere at the Venice international film festival, where it won the special jury prize after receiving the longest ovation in the festival’s history. Initially, the website falsely presented itself as a promotional page for NAZA itself, naming Abraham and Szor as the directors, and listing film festivals where the documentary was due to be screened. “Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of terrorists in Gaza,” it said, distorting the film’s official synopsis by removing the reference to the deaths of Palestinian civilians. That wording was removed from recent updates of the website, once the video for NAZA: The Real Story had been added to the page. It now appears as a platform for the rival film, with a counter that implausibly suggests the short film has been watched more than 42m times. (The film’s official YouTube page is listed as having just 30,000 views.) According to a technical analysis, the discrepancy suggested the viewer counter could have been driven by requests made to the website, by humans or bots, rather than the number of people who actually watched the video. When asked about the source of the 42m claim, Averbuch said he did not know and referred the questions to his tech team. The Israeli military has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza since the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, in a military campaign that a United Nations commission has described as genocide. The 24 interviews with Israeli military insiders in the original film NAZA detail how an AI-assisted apparatus of mass surveillance was activated during the Gaza war, revealing the systems that were used to target Hamas operatives in the knowledge large numbers of Palestinian civilians would also die. The Israeli embassy to the US, which shared the new documentary on its social media, said the ministry of foreign affairs was not involved in producing the film, and that it had intended only to “amplify the message of its creators and expose wider audiences to arguments challenging and dismantling the blood libels and false allegations”. The Israeli government said on Thursday that it was awarding the film-makers with a certificate of appreciation “for their contribution to Israeli public diplomacy”, claiming the production had garnered tens of millions of views. A Guardian spokesperson said: “We are aware that the Israeli government has been promoting a film hosted on a website that initially – and falsely – claimed it was Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary. “This was a brazen attempt to mislead audiences and distract from the urgent questions raised by NAZA.” As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November. Averbuch is the founder of an organisation that says it conducts “advocacy warfare”, including through the publication of scripts to help influencers criticise Abraham and Szor’s critically acclaimed previous film, No Other Land, which documents the destruction of the Palestinian village Masafer Yatta. The two Palestinian co-directors of No Other Land, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, have been harassed or detained by the Israeli military since the film won an Oscar in 2025. Israeli government officials have scrambled to discredit NAZA’s content, while far-right activists have threatened to hunt down the directors. The Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, has said they will use “every tool at our disposal” against the film, while the military has issued a 10-page response to the film, which was based on interviews with more than 100 sources with knowledge of the military systems used in the war. Within a week of NAZA’s premiere, Israel’s ministry of culture had announced a formal investigation into the documentary, calling for Abraham and Szor to be stripped of their citizenship. Demonstrators gathered outside the home of Szor’s parents, demanding that the she face the death penalty, and a mural depicting the film-makers through the sights of a gun appeared in the Israeli city of Ashdod. On Monday, the far-right Israeli activist Mordechai David announced he was fundraising in order to establish a team that would “chase” Abraham. “We’ll find him,” David said in a video posted to Instagram. Szor and Abraham addressed the backlash to their documentary at a Q&A after its New York premiere. “Our country is doing so much to hide these systems,” Szor told the audience. “It’s not a world that is open even to the Israeli public.” At the London film festival on Thursday, one of NAZA’s producers, James Wilson, said Israeli politicians’ “hysterical, vituperative, aggressive backlash” to the documentary had not been anticipated by the team behind it. Wilson said although Abraham and Szor had “anticipated displeasure … there wasn’t an anticipation of the level of aggression leading to these threats and the rabble-rousing aspect”. He added: “To have made a film, a documentary film and be threatened by the political elites of your home country, with charges of treason and defamation … it’s been very difficult and stressful and horrible and scary for them. “I try to look at the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the film in the majority of the world.” Additional reporting by Philip McMahon and Rachel Hall

Israel’s downgrading of UK consulate aims to tighten its hold on Jerusalem

Israel’s attempt to close the British consulate general in Jerusalem was primarily designed to deter London from imposing sanctions on settlements in occupied Palestine. But it also served the current government’s ambitions to fully annex Jerusalem as a national capital, diplomatic and legal experts said. The UK mission to the city has an unusual diplomatic status, which dates back to before the founding of the state of Israel, rooted in a vision of Jerusalem as a neutral enclave under international control. Unlike other consulates general around the world, it is not a satellite of the British embassy in Tel Aviv. Instead its diplomats are part of an independent team, who report directly to London. That is anathema to those in Israel who claim all of Jerusalem as their territory. Israeli forces occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, and the Knesset passed a law annexing the city in 1980, but that status has not been recognised by most of the world. Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli foreign minister, threatened to close the consulate general a month ago in an attempt to deter the UK government from proceeding with plans to bar trade with West Bank settlements and put sanctions on companies that provide them with services including financing. The UK threatened to respond with a mass expulsion of diplomats but the two countries appear to have backed away from a full-blown diplomatic spat as Israel prepares for national elections, due on 27 October. Britain will rebrand its consulate general ⁠as a UK “mission” and reduce the number of diplomats, but it will remain independent of Tel Aviv in a compromise one source described as a temporary “ceasefire”. If Israel gets a new leader in three weeks, negotiations on the status of the consulate and its staff could resume. Maintaining a foothold in Jerusalem and the independent status of UK diplomats was important, said Daniel Seidemann, an Israeli lawyer and expert in the geopolitics of Jerusalem who has advised western diplomats including a British foreign secretary. “The arrangement that the UK arrived at with Israel was probably the optimal among a number of options that were even worse. So I’m not faulting anybody, but this is far from a victory,” he said. “The British presence in Jerusalem after almost a century and a half has been downgraded from one of the diplomatic mission to another office. And that is a stark qualitative change.” There are seven other consulates general in East Jerusalem, all opened before 1948, representing their nations’ interests in Jerusalem and occupied Palestine. Like the UK one, they are independent and report directly to their foreign ministries. They have long been a particular thorn in Israel’s side because of their unusual status, which reflects the designation of Jerusalem as “corpus separatum”, an independent body, under the UN’s 1947 partition plan for historic Palestine. Never implemented, it envisaged Jerusalem as a sort of Vatican-like independent enclave, under international administration. That clashes with Israel’s claim on the city, and Sa’ar’s attack on the consulate should be seen in that context, and not purely as a response to sanctions. “This is part of the overall attempt to establish the primacy of a very specific Jewish-Israeli Jerusalem,” Seidemann said. “Any diplomatic presence in Jerusalem that does not pay fealty to the government of Israel and Israel’s sole sovereignty is targeted.” Other countries have missions based in Ramallah to manage relations with Palestinians, but these are technically subsidiary to Tel Aviv embassies. The US had a consulate general but closed it after Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel during his first presidency. The UK sanctions plan represents the most consequential attempt by one of Israel’s allies to halt settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank. Israeli banks are rattled by a proposal they fear could affect their business, Haaretz reported on Thursday. An assessment by Israel’s Association of Banks laid out concerns that they could be affected, and they are refusing to say whether they will provide financial guarantees needed to underpin construction contracts for the E1 settlement in the West Bank. When Ed Miliband, the UK foreign secretary, announced his plans, he said the timing was driven partly by the Israeli government’s decision to put out tenders for this project. Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has boasted that it will “bury” the possibility of a Palestinian state by severing parts of the occupied West Bank. Ilan Baruch, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, left diplomatic service to advocate for a two-state solution, including pushing foreign governments to move beyond condemnations of Israeli policy to imposing a “meaningful price”. The threats to Britain’s Jerusalem consulate were a sign the UK had finally done that. “I was relieved [by Israel’s position], realising Miliband touched a nerve,” he said. Renaming the consulate while preserving its independent status indicated Israel had stepped back from confrontation, helped by Britain making smaller “face-saving” concessions, he said.

Two Latvian men arrested for trespass offences at RAF airbase – as it happened

And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. Two Latvian men were arrested in the early hours of Thursday after they were discovered inside the perimeter of RAF Molesworth, a Cambridgeshire base used by the US military and Nato for intelligence operations (16:52, 17:26, 17:42). RAF Molesworth is a non-flying base that hosts critical US and Nato intelligence operations (17:02, 17:22). In other news, Thousands of people gathered at the Place de la Bastille in Paris this afternoon on another day of students protests across France (16:29). Police briefly clashed with protesters near the square, with batons and teargas seen on video footage from the demonstration. Several other demonstrations took place across the country, with students calling for another day of protests on Tuesday next week (15:41, 16:11). The overall number of school blockades was gradually decreasing, officials numbers suggested (13:55, 15:14). Elsewhere, A Russian missile strike on a bus in the eastern city of Kramatorsk has killed at least 30 people, officials have said, in one of the worst attacks by Moscow on Ukrainian civilians this year (11:49). Hours after the attack, US secretary of state Marco Rubio warned about the risk of an escalation in Russia’s war with Ukraine, saying it could “could quickly turn what is a war between two countries into a much broader and far more dangerous regional conflict” (16:15). If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

Former Labour MP cleared over role in fraudulent Covid-19 testing company

A former Labour MP and justice minister has been found not guilty of charges around his role in a fraudulent Covid-19 testing company. Shahid Malik, 58, was MP for Dewsbury between 2005 and 2010 and served as a minister in three departments in Gordon Brown’s government. Malik was one of five people charged with offences relating to RT Diagnostics, a company that prosecutors said was a “cash cow” set up to take advantage of the UK government’s expanding test-and-trace system in March 2021. On Thursday, Malik was found not guilty of fraudulent trading, causing a public nuisance and money laundering in a trial at Bradford crown court, which was, unusually, conducted without a jury. The trial began in October last year and jurors were sent out to start their deliberations in March. In April, they were discharged by Judge Smith after an allegation of jury tampering. Smith took the decision to continue the trial without the jury, and that he would decide on the verdicts. The court heard that Malik started the business with the pharmacist and former Labour councillor Faisal Shoukat, 39, when the third national lockdown was ending in March 2021. Shoukat was found guilty of all three offences. Paul Moore, 57, who had a senior role in RT Diagnostics and was Malik’s office manager when he was an MP, was cleared of causing a public nuisance and of fraudulent trading. Lynn Connell, 64, a manager at the company, and Alexander Zarneh, 70, who was its clinical director, were also cleared of the same two offences. Prosecutors said RT Diagnostics, which made £6.67m in three weeks, was set up in “shoddy and inadequate premises” in Halifax and gave out false negative results to customers. The defence barrister, Jonathan Laidlaw KC, said Malik’s role in the business had been “very limited indeed” and he had acted as “a facilitator – putting the money up and making introductions”. Giving his closing speech to jurors in March, Laidlaw said Malik never went to the premises when it was in operation. He told the court that for most of the time the business was operating, Malik was out of the country and there was no evidence he was told about any of its issues while he was abroad. Laidlaw said the fact that the former MP had made money from RT Diagnostics “can’t possibly be the basis for a guilty verdict”. The court heard that as the third national lockdown was ending in March 2021, the government was looking to expand its test-and-trace system by increasing the number of laboratories offering PCR testing. The defendants were accused of “taking advantage” of that process with an “inadequate and non-compliant” testing company which, prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford KC said, “generated a suspiciously low number of positive results”. Sandiford said the Halifax laboratory was set up in inadequate premises with holes in the walls and ceilings, and rubbish strewn around. Jurors heard that the company employed “numerous young people who had little or no training in the handling of Covid-19 samples” and set them to work with no social distancing and no personal protective equipment. Malik and Sadiq Khan, now London mayor, were the first British-born Muslims to become MPs, and Malik was the first to become a government minister. He was appointed as an international development minister in 2007 and he later had ministerial jobs at the Department of Justice and the Department for Communities and Local Government.