Global Pulse

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  • Ukraine dismisses Iranian threats as Caspian Sea strike directly links wars

    Ukraine dismisses Iranian threats as Caspian Sea strike directly links wars

    A historic escalation in the Ukraine conflict has sent shockwaves through global diplomatic circles, after Ukrainian forces carried out the first direct strike on an Iranian cargo vessel operating in the strategically critical Caspian Sea – a key supply corridor linking Russia and Iran. The incident has drawn immediate angry retaliatory threats from Tehran, which Kyiv has outright dismissed as baseless.

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha took to the social platform X to reject Iran’s rhetoric, arguing that Tehran’s authoritarian regime has long served as a willing accomplice to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which launched in 2022. “The regime in Tehran is a direct accomplice to Russian aggression against Ukraine, fuelling Moscow’s criminal war with weapons that have killed Ukrainians since 2022,” Sybiha wrote.

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky first confirmed the operation Saturday, announcing that long-range strikes across the Caspian Sea had delivered “very good results” for Kyiv, with targets including vessels used to move military cargo tied to Iranian-Russian cooperation. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) later expanded on the operation’s details, confirming that drone attacks also hit a northern Caspian Sea oil platform, a Russian missile boat, and multiple cargo vessels already subject to international sanctions.

    Iran’s ambassador to Russia Kazem Jalali told Iran’s state-run news outlet that the targeted vessel, the Anna, had been anchored roughly five kilometers off the mouth of the Volga River when the strike hit. But Ukraine’s ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk clarified that the ship was not carrying civilian goods – it was transporting drone and missile components from Iran to Russia, to support Moscow’s war effort. Speaking to Israeli outlet N12, Korniychuk asserted that Ukraine and Israel face the same hostile “axis of evil” on separate regional fronts.

    The military partnership between Moscow and Tehran stretches back years, and deepened rapidly after Russia’s 2022 invasion. Iran began supplying Moscow with its domestically produced Shahed drones that year, which Russia has since upgraded and deployed extensively in airstrikes against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. In a weekend interview with Sky News, Zelensky revealed that new intelligence indicates Tehran is preparing to ship ballistic missiles to Russia – multiple open sources already suggest short-range Iranian missiles have been delivered to Moscow since 2024.

    In response to Iran’s ongoing military support for Russia, Kyiv has in recent months dispatched its own military experts to several Gulf Cooperation Council states, to help local forces defend against Iranian drone attacks launched in retaliation for strikes by the U.S. and Israel. Prior to Saturday’s operation, Kyiv had repeatedly condemned Iran for its complicity in drone strikes that have killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians, but this attack marks the first time Ukraine has directly targeted an Iranian asset on the high seas.

    Tehran’s reaction to the strike was swift and fierce. Iranian officials confirmed the assault left one sailor dead and multiple others injured, and flatly denied any involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called the attack a blatant violation of the United Nations Charter, claiming it was carried out at Israel’s direction in an attempt to draw Europe into a wider conflict. “The incident CANNOT GO UNANSWERED,” Araghchi wrote on X.

    Sybiha responded directly to Araghchi’s statement on Monday, sharing the Iranian foreign minister’s post and overlaying the words “Iranian lies” across the message. He also accused Iran of attempting to distract the global community from Russia’s repeated attacks on cargo ships carrying grain out of Ukrainian Black Sea ports, actions that have put global food security at severe risk.

    The Caspian Sea strike is part of a broader, sustained Ukrainian campaign to disrupt Russian logistics and cut off key Kremlin revenue streams. For months, Kyiv has targeted Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers to reduce Moscow’s energy export income, while carrying out parallel drone strikes on Russian oil depots and commercial infrastructure. Zelensky refers to this strategy as Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions campaign,” which analysts say is already inflicting growing damage on the Russian economy.

    Despite the campaign’s early successes, some security experts have raised questions about the strategic wisdom of opening direct conflict with Iran. Former Ukrainian intelligence official Ivan Stupak told the BBC that while disrupting Russian supply routes is a core Ukrainian goal, opening a second active front against Tehran carries major downsides for Kyiv. “The main idea… is to disrupt trading routes and cause as much damage as possible. But it’s not a good idea for Ukraine to have another battlefront with Iran. It’s not good for us,” Stupak said.

    Other analysts frame the strike differently, arguing it is less an opening of a new front and more an extension of Kyiv’s existing efforts to dismantle networks that sustain Russia’s war. Olha Polishchuk, a researcher with the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Acled), noted that targeting the Caspian supply corridor allows Ukraine to squeeze Russian military logistics far beyond the boundaries of the traditional front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine. “Targeting that route allows Kyiv to put further pressure on Russia’s supply networks beyond the traditional battlefield,” she explained.

  • ‘Erasing historical facts’: India orders massive crackdown on books in Kashmir’s libraries

    ‘Erasing historical facts’: India orders massive crackdown on books in Kashmir’s libraries

    A sweeping ideological purge of public libraries and educational institutions across Indian-administered Kashmir has been ordered by the New Delhi-appointed regional administration, triggering fierce condemnation from scholars, local residents and academic freedom advocates who warn the campaign systematically erases dissenting perspectives and destroys independent inquiry in the restive Himalayan territory.\n\nThe official order, issued earlier this month, mandates a full, region-wide audit of every resource held by institutional libraries and learning centers, covering books, academic journals, reference material, periodicals, digital archives and supplementary reading resources. The directive explicitly bars institutions from acquiring, retaining, circulating or making accessible any material deemed \”objectionable, inflammatory or inappropriate\”, including content that promotes secessionism, extremism, anti-national ideology or any narrative that prejudices what the order terms the \”sovereignty, unity and integrity of the Union of India\”.\n\nThis latest campaign was triggered by objections from legislators of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over two government-distributed textbooks. The texts — *Personalities and Legends of Jammu and Kashmir* by Hilal Ahmad and Santosh Meena, and *Great Personalities of Jammu and Kashmir* by Dr. Sushant Giri — were rolled out to more than 250 regional schools under the federal government-funded Samagra Shiksha education initiative. BJP opposition leader in the region Sunil Sharma claimed the books used terminology including \”Indian-occupied Kashmir\” and called their presence in school libraries \”a direct challenge to India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity\”, labeling their inclusion an act of \”academic jihad\” designed to indoctrinate young students.\n\nIn response to the BJP outcry, regional administrative head Manoj Sinha suspended eight School Education Department officials, launched a formal investigation into both the volumes and their authors, and blacklisted the two publishing houses that produced the books, ordering all previously published material from both firms withdrawn from circulation immediately. Controversy centers on a small number of entries in the 240-page *Personalities and Legends of Jammu and Kashmir*, which profiles prominent Kashmiri figures, including pro-independence leaders alongside well-known international and Indian writers. The text refers to Maqbool Bhat, founder of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front armed group, as a \”shaheed\” (martyr); Bhat was hanged by India in 1984 after a Supreme Court death sentence, and his remains were secretly buried inside New Delhi’s Tihar Jail. The book also quotes late Kashmiri resistance leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani describing Kashmir as a \”disputed region awaiting political resolution under the UN\”. No detailed information about the content of the second book has been made public.\n\nThis audit is far from an isolated measure: in August 2024, the administration already banned and seized 25 major academic and political texts on Kashmir, labeling them forfeited to the state under Indian criminal law. The blacklist includes landmark scholarly works on the region’s dispute such as AG Noorani’s *The Kashmir Dispute*, Victoria Schofield’s *Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War*, Arundhati Roy’s essay collection *Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction.*, Sumantra Bose’s *Contested Lands* and *Kashmir at the Crossroads*, Hafsa Kanjwal’s *Colonising Kashmir: State-Building Under Indian Occupation*, Anuradha Bhasin’s *A Dismantled State*, and Christopher Snedden’s *Independent Kashmir*. Additional raids on independent bookstores last year saw authorities armed with lists of banned titles clear shops of customers and seize blacklisted volumes, while a 2025 raid confiscated Islamic literature from shops and private homes across the Kashmir Valley.\n\nScholars warn the current full library audit represents the latest escalation in a years-long campaign to enforce state-sanctioned ideological narratives in the region, which accelerated dramatically after the 2019 unilateral abrogation of Article 370, the constitutional provision that granted Indian-administered Kashmir semi-autonomous status, including protections for local land ownership, limited independent political decision-making and reserved local employment. Following the revocation, New Delhi split the region into two centrally administered union territories, introduced laws allowing non-Kashmiri citizens to purchase land and settle in the region, and expanded a broad crackdown on dissident political voices, independent journalism, human rights organizers and critical thought. Enforcement agencies have implemented widespread high-tech surveillance, expanded police powers and imposed harsh restrictions on public expression.\n\nDr. Ather Zia, a professor of anthropology and gender studies at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley whose own book *Resisting Disappearances* was among the flagged works, framed the purge as part of a long-standing pattern of systemic censorship. \”The removal of so-called ‘objectionable material’ is not a new thing but part of a continuity in the long history of censorship and suppressing critical thinking and scholarship in Kashmir,\” Zia explained in an interview. \”It is meant to reinforce the systemic erasure of grounded knowledges and histories of people. Any normal and intellectually healthy society operates on dissent, disagreements and critique, and examining difficult histories and multiple perspectives openly. Once again, this extreme purge, which is recurring and roots out any form of dissenting or critical voice from academic and mainstream discourse, points to democratic engagement in Kashmir being a true illusion. It tells us about a system that demands extreme compliance of thought and deed to survive, and has normalised repression.\”\n\nProminent pro-freedom Kashmiri leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq emphasized on social platform X that banning books cannot erase shared historical memory: \”Banning books will not erase historical facts and the repertoire of lived memories of people of Kashmir.\”\n\nOutside scholars of Kashmir have also condemned the campaign as a direct attack on core democratic principles and academic freedom. Dean Accardi, a historian at Connecticut College specializing in Kashmir studies, noted that state censorship of academic material almost always stems from ruling elite fears of public opposition to state policy. \”Rather than addressing the sources of the people’s discontent, censorship aims to decrease public knowledge of facts on such matters as well as open public debate, replacing these core constituents of any true, open democracy with propaganda and punishment in the name of ‘security’,\” Accardi said. \”The history of Kashmir and its people involves great conflict and often troubling, uncomfortable truths. The state should not attempt to suppress those truths through censorship but instead address them openly and make things better for Kashmiris.\”\n\nGoldie Osuri, a sociologist and critical Kashmir studies scholar at the University of Warwick, said the audit follows last year’s 25-book ban as part of a sustained assault on independent academic inquiry that conflicts with the Indian state’s official narrative. \”We are witnessing an ongoing war against any academic material that might differ from the Indian state’s narratives where it concerns Kashmir,\” Osuri said. \”The Indian state, it seems, cannot brook any narrative that attests to Kashmiri contestation of Indian rule. In essence, this is a war against academic freedom. If academic work can only serve ‘national’ interest, then it cannot be called academic work. And schools and universities cannot be understood any more as genuine places of learning. Where it concerns academic material, it seems that educational institutions are being forced to serve as checkpoints for the Indian state rather than places where students can be exposed to differing narratives and understand the contexts for these differing narratives.\”\n\nThe climate of fear generated by the audit has already spread to private life across Kashmir, with many local residents quietly destroying or discarding their personal collections of books on Kashmiri politics, history and religion to avoid potential official repercussions. Nafees, a government employee and avid reader who recently cleared his shelves of decades of collected works on Kashmir, including books inherited from his late father, said fear has become pervasive in daily life. \”Some of these were part of my late father’s collection,\” Nafees said. \”I didn’t want to give them away, but as a government worker, I couldn’t risk keeping them. Fear has taken over. You never know what excuse the authorities might find to trouble you.\”\n\nA local Kashmiri research scholar, who requested anonymity to avoid official retaliation, summed up the steady expansion of state control over expression: \”The government has been keeping an increasingly close and continuous watch on what gets written, printed and read in Kashmir.\”\n\nThe Kashmir region has been a site of unresolved geopolitical contestation since the 1947 partition of British India, when both newly independent India and Pakistan claimed the entire Himalayan territory. The two nuclear-armed nations have fought multiple wars over the region, and decades of armed uprising and state repression have left Indian-administered Kashmir one of the most heavily militarized regions in the world, with daily repression shaping the lives of millions of local residents.

  • Five protesters convicted of criminal damage face sentencing as terrorists

    Five protesters convicted of criminal damage face sentencing as terrorists

    A controversial legal case unfolding in the United Kingdom has raised urgent alarms over expanding the use of terrorist sentencing designations for non-violent direct action protesters, after five Palestine Action activists convicted of criminal damage for a 2024 demonstration at a Barclays bank branch learned they could be punished as terrorists without the original trial jury ever being informed of this possibility.

    The five defendants — Brendon O’Hagan, 28, Amanda Kelly, 31, Hmeera Atiqnisar, 31, Mohammed Malik, 28, and 70-year-old Alma Yaniv — were found guilty in June 2026 of causing £212,000 (approximately $283,000) in damage during the August 2024 protest at the Barclays location in Burnley, northern England. The demonstration targeted the bank because at the time, Barclays held public shares in Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems, a major manufacturer of military technology used in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The bank has since divested from all of its 16,345 Elbit Systems shares, a change first reported by Middle East Eye (MEE) in October 2024.

    Following the guilty verdict on criminal damage charges, presiding judge Phillip Parry notified defense legal teams that he is considering applying a formal “terrorist connection” to the offenders’ crimes, a classification that would trigger enhanced terror sentencing guidelines. Critically, jurors who delivered the guilty verdict were never informed during the trial that such a designation could be applied. To support his consideration of the classification, Parry circulated a prior ruling from Justice Owen Johnson, who handled an earlier high-profile Palestine Action case.

    In that June 2026 case, Johnson applied the terrorist connection designation to four Palestine Action activists convicted of criminal damage for a raid on an Elbit Systems factory near Bristol, also carried out in August 2024. Johnson justified the classification on the grounds that the activists caused serious property damage, acted with the intent to influence UK government policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and intended to intimidate segments of the British public. That sentencing marked a historic first for UK law: it was the first time the terrorist connection designation had been applied to activists who committed only non-violent direct action, had not been convicted of any formal terrorist offenses, and did not cause intentional physical harm to any person. The four activists received lengthy prison sentences and will be required to comply with strict 15-year terrorist notification obligations after their release.

    The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has backed the application of terror sentencing in the Barclays case, despite the fact that prosecutors never mentioned the possibility of a terrorist classification during the full trial. For the defendants, this last-minute push for enhanced sentencing has come as a major shock.

    Mohammed Malik, one of the five convicted activists, told MEE in an interview that the defense team had no advance warning that any terror-related designation would be added to the case, and that the prosecution never raised the issue at any point during proceedings. “I was shocked that broken windows and red paint can be deemed as terrorism,” Malik said. He added that the attempt to sentence the group as terrorists highlights the dangerous precedent set by Johnson’s earlier ruling, which punished four Palestine Action protesters as terrorists for destroying Israeli-made quadcopter drones owned by Elbit Systems.

    If the terrorist connection is applied, the designation will drastically change the sentencing outcome for the five activists. Under UK rules, a terror-related sentence requires defendants to serve at least two-thirds of their full custodial term behind bars, and parole boards can require activists to renounce their core political beliefs as a condition of early release.

    Notably, the 2024 Barclays demonstration took place before the UK government officially proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. The government’s proscription only links three specific Palestine Action incidents to terrorist activity, all of which involved more than £1 million in alleged damage — far more than the damage at the Burnley Barclays branch.

    Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori has warned that Johnson’s original ruling established a dangerous legal precedent that paves the way for widespread use of terror designations against political protesters. She called the move to consider terror sentencing in the Barclays case a clear sign that the “flood gates are opening” for expanded criminalization of pro-Palestinian protest in the UK.

    A sentencing hearing for the five activists is scheduled to take place on 4 September.

  • A Nigerian soldier is arrested for tipping off criminals – but does it go deeper?

    A Nigerian soldier is arrested for tipping off criminals – but does it go deeper?

    For more than a decade, widespread violence carried out by a fragmented network of armed groups has terrorized civilian populations across Nigeria, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. Now, a recent high-profile arrest has pulled long-simmering allegations of insider collusion between military personnel and violent non-state actors into the public spotlight, prompting renewed scrutiny of the country’s struggling security apparatus.

    According to Nigerian military spokesperson Mohammed Goni, Private Mohammed Yusuf was taken into custody Saturday evening at a bus terminal in Maiduguri, the largest city in Nigeria’s violence-plagued northeastern Borno State. The arrest came less than two weeks after Yusuf deserted his post at an army equipment manufacturing facility, where he had access to standard-issue military uniforms. Goni confirmed that the soldier had been hiding in Maiduguri with assistance from an unidentified associate, and was intercepted while attempting to cross the border into neighboring Cameroon to evade capture. Yusuf has not issued any public response to the allegations against him as of this reporting.

    The arrest has immediately reignited widespread public and expert speculation that covert cooperation between serving military personnel and armed groups is a key driver of Nigeria’s persistent insecurity crisis. Multiple factions of armed actors – including jihadist insurgents Boko Haram and its offshoot Islamic State’s West Africa Province (ISWAP), separatist militias in the country’s southeast, and bandit gangs that target civilians for ransom in the northwest – regularly operate disguised in stolen military uniforms to carry out attacks and avoid detection.

    Official data underscores the staggering scale of the violence. Between January 2024 and April 2025 alone, Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission recorded at least 3,000 kidnappings and 3,580 killings linked to armed groups. Mass abductions have surged in recent years, driven largely by ransom-seeking bandit gangs and insurgent attacks, with school kidnappings emerging as a particularly devastating recurring threat. Data from the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) shows that between April 2014 and May 2026, 26 major attacks on educational institutions resulted in the abduction of at least 2,416 students. Official estimates put annual ransom payments to criminal groups in the millions of dollars.

    The claim of insider collusion is not new. In April 2025, Borno State Governor Babagana Zulan, who has overseen years of counter-insurgency efforts in his state, publicly alleged that Boko Haram informants and collaborators operated within the Nigerian armed forces, national political leadership, and local communities. “What we need to do is to strengthen our intelligence and to deal with them ruthlessly,” Zulum stated during a public security meeting at the time. Just months after Zulum’s remarks, a special court-martial sentenced three Nigerian soldiers to life imprisonment after convicting them of involvement in a large-scale illegal arms and ammunition trafficking scheme, finding them guilty of theft, unlawful weapons dealing, and “aiding the enemy.”

    Security analysts point to multiple root causes for this alleged corruption within military ranks. Retired army major and security analyst Bashir Galma told the BBC that inadequate compensation for low-ranking soldiers creates financial incentives for corrupt collaboration, while ideological alignment with armed groups also drives some personnel to secretly support extremist or criminal factions. “I know there have been instances where plans are made for an attack on a location and the information finds its way to either Boko Haram or another criminal gang,” Galma explained, confirming long-reported patterns of insider tip-offs to armed groups.

    A serving Nigerian soldier, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity to protect their safety, confirmed that collusion cases are regularly discovered but frequently handled internally without public transparency. “There have been instances of soldiers caught dealing with the other side, but such matters are often hushed and dealt with internally,” the soldier said.

    Accounts from kidnapping survivors add chilling anecdotal weight to the collusion claims. One recently freed hostage, whose family paid a 57 million naira ($42,000) ransom for their release, described a disturbing encounter after his release: “They dropped us off in one location and there were security personnel who they shook hands and laughed with,” the survivor said, speaking on condition of anonymity. While he has no concrete proof, the survivor said he believes the security personnel he encountered received a cut of the ransom payment.

    Other survivors have raised allegations of high-level collusion. A farmer who was held hostage for 30 days in late 2024 recalled hearing a military helicopter land just meters from the remote camp where he was held blindfolded. “The first time I heard it I was expecting that the Nigerian Air Force had come to rescue us,” he said. “But we could hear the helicopter leaving afterwards.” He told the BBC he heard the helicopter return multiple times, leading him to conclude that the gang holding him had high-level logistical support from within the security establishment.

    Farmer Yahuza Isa, who survived a kidnapping in Nigeria’s northwestern Zamfara State, voiced the widespread frustration of communities living under constant threat of violence. “I myself know where these criminals are,” he said. “So why not deal with them completely?”

    Security expert Abdullahi Abdullahi noted that armed groups benefit from collaboration not just from rogue security personnel, but from civilian informants embedded within local communities – a dual support network that has allowed the insurgency and criminal violence to persist for more than a decade despite repeated military crackdowns. “And that is why the issue is continuing after all these years,” he said.

    While the decade-long security crisis has exposed deep systemic failures in Nigeria’s governance and security infrastructure, the arrest of Yusuf marks a rare public acknowledgment by the military that collusion within its own ranks is a real problem. Whether this acknowledgment will lead to widespread, systemic reforms that root out corrupt collaboration remains to be seen. Yusuf remains in police custody, and investigations are ongoing to identify any additional co-conspirators and map the full scope of his alleged smuggling operation. The BBC’s request for comment to Major General Markus Kangye, the Nigerian military’s director of media operations, went unanswered as of publication.

  • UNESCO adds Brazil’s Amazonia theaters to the World Heritage List

    UNESCO adds Brazil’s Amazonia theaters to the World Heritage List

    In a landmark decision announced on Monday during the ongoing World Heritage Committee session in Busan, South Korea, UNESCO has inscribed two iconic Brazilian Amazonian performance venues to its coveted roster of sites of outstanding global value. The dual addition brings Brazil’s total number of World Heritage sites to 26, marking a new milestone for the country’s cultural preservation efforts.

    The two newly listed sites, collectively named the Amazonia Theaters, are the Theatro da Paz in the northern Brazilian city of Belem, Para state, and the famous Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, capital of Amazonas state. Both cultural landmarks were constructed in the late 1800s, at the peak of the global rubber boom that transformed the Amazon region into a major global commercial hub. Built at a time of unprecedented economic growth in the rainforest, the two structures embody the era’s political and urban development ambitions, blending cutting-edge European architectural design trends with locally sourced materials and region-specific symbolic motifs that root the buildings firmly in the Amazonian landscape.

    Theatro da Paz, which opened to the public in 1878, was designed to cement Belem’s status as a critical strategic port for the global rubber trade, while Teatro Amazonas, inaugurated nearly two decades later in 1896, mirrors the explosive urban growth that turned Manaus into one of South America’s wealthiest late 19th-century cities. Brazil submitted a joint nomination for the two venues, arguing that they share a cohesive historical context and represent a unified 19th-century project to modernize the Amazon region and integrate it into global commercial and cultural networks.

    “Architecturally and artistically, they blended imported influences and materials with local woods and forest-inspired motifs, creating a distinctive aesthetic that was at once cosmopolitan and deeply Amazonian,” the Brazilian government noted in its official nomination statement.

    UNESCO’s annual World Heritage designation is one of the most prestigious cultural recognitions in the world. Sites granted the status join an elite list that includes some of humanity’s most celebrated cultural landmarks, from China’s Great Wall and Egypt’s ancient pyramids to India’s Taj Mahal and New York’s Statue of Liberty. Beyond the symbolic honor, World Heritage status typically delivers significant long-term benefits, including expanded global tourism opportunities and formal international protections to preserve the sites for future generations.

    This year’s committee session, which runs through Wednesday in Busan, has already added several major global sites to the list. On Sunday alone, the body added France’s Normandy D-Day landing beaches and Greece’s iconic Mount Olympus, among other sites from around the world.

    Beyond the two newly inscribed theaters, the Brazilian Amazon is already home to another UNESCO World Heritage site: the Central Amazon Conservation Complex, a vast protected area located at the confluence of the Negro and Solimoes rivers in Amazonas state. UNESCO recognizes the complex as one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, hosting a wide range of Amazonian ecosystems including intact upland rainforests and seasonally flooded varzea lowland forests that support thousands of endemic plant and animal species.

    This coverage, reported by The Associated Press, receives funding from multiple private foundations for AP’s climate and environmental reporting, with AP retaining full editorial control over all content.

  • Chile captures fugitive convicted of singer Victor Jara’s murder under Pinochet

    Chile captures fugitive convicted of singer Victor Jara’s murder under Pinochet

    Nearly three years after fleeing a definitive prison sentence for his role in the kidnapping and murder of iconic Chilean protest folk singer Victor Jara, retired Chilean colonel Nelson Haase has been apprehended by national police in the country’s southern region. Haase, one of eight former military officers convicted over the 1973 killing that became a global symbol of state brutality under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, was located Saturday in Puyehue, a remote community in Los Lagos Region some 950 kilometers south of the capital Santiago.

    Jara’s murder stands as one of the most searing atrocities committed in the immediate aftermath of the 1973 CIA-backed coup that brought Pinochet’s military regime to power, just five days after the coup ousted democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. A beloved performer whose pacifist, pro-labor protest songs made him a leading voice for Allende’s government, Jara was among roughly 5,000 political dissidents rounded up in the coup’s first days and detained at Santiago’s National Stadium. Surviving detainees documented that Jara was subjected to horrific torture: soldiers intentionally crushed his hands and fingers, taunting him that he would never play guitar again, before executing him with 44 gunshot wounds.

    Haase was first found guilty of Jara’s kidnapping and murder alongside seven other officers in a 2018 trial. After five years of prolonged appeals, Chile’s Supreme Court upheld the convictions and issued a final sentence in August 2023: 15 years in prison for murder and an additional 10 years for kidnapping. The 80-year-old retired officer failed to turn himself in to authorities to begin serving his sentence and immediately became a fugitive.

    Haase’s capture marks the close of another chapter in the decades-long fight for accountability for crimes committed during Pinochet’s 17-year authoritarian rule, which saw an estimated 3,000 people killed or disappeared and thousands more tortured. Of the seven other officers convicted alongside Haase, former General Hernan Chacon died by suicide as police moved to arrest him in 2023, while the remaining five have been in custody serving their sentences. Separately, in 2023 the United States extradited retired army lieutenant Pedro Barrientos to Chile to face trial over Jara’s killing, after a Florida civil jury previously found him liable for the murder in a 2016 ruling.

    Decades after his death, Victor Jara remains a global symbol of artistic resistance against authoritarianism and a lasting reminder of the human cost of Pinochet’s coup, with his case continuing to drive demands for full accountability for dictatorship-era crimes in Chile.

  • Chad says will withdraw from the International Criminal Court

    Chad says will withdraw from the International Criminal Court

    In a move that adds to a growing wave of withdrawals from the International Criminal Court (ICC), the central African nation of Chad announced Monday it would exit the Hague-based tribunal, citing longstanding criticisms of the court’s uneven effectiveness and its disproportionate focus on African nations.

    Chad becomes the fifth country in recent months to launch withdrawal procedures, following Venezuela, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — all of which have raised similar objections to the ICC’s mandate and operations. The announcement comes just days after ICC member states voted to remove chief prosecutor Karim Khan over unproven sexual assault allegations that Khan, 56, has categorically denied. His legal team has already announced plans to challenge the dismissal, questioning both the legality and fairness of the decision reached by member states.

    In an official statement released by the government, Chadian officials confirmed the exit decision followed a comprehensive review of the ICC’s performance since the court first began operations in 2002. The review, the statement said, confirmed longstanding concerns that the tribunal’s impact has remained limited and inconsistent across global regions.

    A core point of criticism from Chad is the ICC’s disproportionate focus on African states. Since the court entered into force, 9 of its 13 active investigations target African nations, while only four probes have been opened in other regions — none of which have yielded meaningful progress, according to the Chadian government. To date, the court holds just seven individuals in custody, six of whom are linked to African conflict situations, the statement added.

    The timeline of the decision has sparked controversy over external influence: last week, an initial posting on the Chadian foreign minister’s official website claimed the withdrawal came in response to a request from the United States. The statement noted that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State for African Affairs had pressed Chadian officials to re-evaluate their ICC membership during a Thursday telephone call with Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Sabre Fadoul, adding that U.S. officials had raised their own concerns about the court’s functionality and urged Chad to reconsider its ratification of the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC. However, Fadoul pushed back on that narrative Friday, telling AFP that “it was not at the Americans’ request that we decided to withdraw from the ICC.”

    Chad’s exit announcement also arrives amid heightened international scrutiny of the country’s role in the ongoing civil conflict in neighboring Sudan. The Sudanese army and multiple international non-governmental organizations have accused Chadian authorities of allowing the United Arab Emirates to ship weapons through Chadian territory to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group fighting Sudan’s sitting government.

    Legal advocates warn that the withdrawal will complicate ongoing efforts to hold actors accountable for potential war crimes in the region. French lawyer Vincent Brengarth, who submitted a formal report on the alleged weapons transfers to the ICC on behalf of NGOs, said Chad’s exit undermines the chances of the accountability initiative succeeding. “Beyond this case, this withdrawal weakens the international architecture of criminal justice and heightens fears that the perpetrators of the most serious crimes will escape any prosecution,” Brengarth said.

    Chad’s decision fits into a rapidly growing trend of rejection of the ICC among nations across Africa and Latin America. Last Friday, Venezuela formally confirmed its own withdrawal, also citing claims of institutional bias. Venezuela’s exit comes as the ICC conducts an active investigation into alleged crimes against humanity committed under the government of President Nicolás Maduro. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger — all Sahel nations currently led by military governments — have previously denounced the ICC as an “instrument of neocolonial repression in the hands of imperialism.”

    Earlier this month, the ICC’s executive leadership issued a formal statement expressing deep concern over the withdrawal of the three West African nations, noting that repeated exits undermine the global effort to deliver justice for mass atrocities. The growing number of departures has sparked new debate over the court’s legitimacy and its ability to fairly prosecute grave crimes across all regions of the world.

  • Devastating European wildfires in maps – and how they’re being tackled

    Devastating European wildfires in maps – and how they’re being tackled

    A catastrophic wave of unprecedented wildfires is sweeping across large swathes of France and Spain, triggering mass evacuation orders for more than 300,000 residents as climate-fueled heatwaves create extreme, fire-friendly conditions across Southern Europe.

    In France, the country is facing its most destructive wildfire season in 22 years, with the southwestern Gironde region surrounding Bordeaux bearing the brunt of the destruction. More than 200,000 local residents have already been forced to flee their homes, as flames have consumed more than 420 square kilometers of land—an area four times the size of the French capital—in less than four days. The fire line currently sits just 15 kilometers from the southern edge of Bordeaux, advancing rapidly through the country’s iconic wine-growing region, destroying forests, agricultural land and threatening critical infrastructure along the way.

    The blazes have even put sensitive military and industrial sites at risk, including facilities involved in ballistic missile development, rocket motor production and hazardous chemical processing. Satellite imagery captured over Gironde reveals a vast, scorched black landscape, with plumes of thick smoke drifting hundreds of kilometers inland. Most alarmingly, the extreme intensity of the fires has spawned a rare fire-generated thunderstorm, a meteorological phenomenon that occurs when intense wildfire heat pulls smoke, ash and water vapor rapidly into the upper atmosphere. As the heated air cools, it forms cumulonimbus thunderclouds capable of producing lightning that can ignite new blazes, alongside unpredictable hail and rain outbreaks. These erratic conditions have made containing the fires far more challenging for emergency crews.

    To the west, in the mountainous region surrounding the Spanish capital Madrid, three separate large wildfires have burned roughly 770 square kilometers of land, with regional officials labeling the event the worst wildfire disaster in the region’s recorded history.

    Thousands of emergency responders have been deployed across both countries to combat the spreading blazes. In Gironde alone, the response effort includes 2,500 firefighters, 1,500 military personnel and 1,200 police officers and gendarmes. Aerial firefighting assets, including Canadair water-bomber aircraft capable of scooping 6,000 liters of water from nearby lakes or the Atlantic Ocean in just 12 seconds, have conducted continuous shuttle missions to drop water and fire retardant along fire perimeters. Near the coastal town of Lacanau, heavy construction equipment has been used to carve 100-meter-wide firebreaks, stripping all vegetation from strips of land to starve advancing flames of fuel. Spanish emergency teams have deployed similar tactics to contain their blazes.

    This year’s extreme wildfire season comes on the heels of a record-breaking sweltering summer across Europe, where widespread heatwaves have pushed temperatures above 40°C (104°F) across much of the continent. Climate scientists and on-the-ground officials warn that rising global temperatures driven by climate change have created the hotter, drier conditions that allow wildfires to spread faster and burn with far greater intensity. With forecasts calling for sustained high pressure that will bring continued dry, rising temperatures across the region over the coming week, officials and residents in both countries are bracing for worsening conditions as emergency crews work around the clock to contain the unprecedented disaster.

  • A gay belly dancer turns grief into joy after fatal attack on Berlin’s Pride festival

    A gay belly dancer turns grief into joy after fatal attack on Berlin’s Pride festival

    BERLIN — Just hours after a deadly extremist terror attack targeting Berlin’s annual Pride celebrations left one person dead and nearly 30 others injured, the city’s LGBTQ+ community and its allies refused to let hate steal their space, with a collective performance of resilience kicking off as scheduled on Sunday night at Museum Island.

    Haidar Darwish, a 30-year-old Syrian belly dancer and performance artist who fled his home country for Germany in 2016, opened the show clad in a dramatic hoop skirt and a bold red fez, opening with a call for a quiet moment of remembrance before declaring that artistic expression and community solidarity would not be canceled by violence. “Yesterday there was an attack and a hate crime on our community in Berlin during the Pride Parade,” Darwish told the gathered crowd, his voice thick with emotion as he fought to retain his composure. “It’s heavy on our community but we are pushing through, and we are here specifically today, myself and my artists, to show up and be visible.”

    Authorities confirmed on Sunday that Saturday’s attack, which involved a suspect ramming a van into crowds near the Pride festival and carrying out a stabbing spree, was classified as an extremist terrorist act. The suspect, identified as Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen born in the country to Lebanese family, was shot and killed by police Sunday evening after he charged toward responding officers wielding a bladed weapon. The case has already sparked urgent official scrutiny: multiple public officials are now questioning how Ballout was able to move freely across Germany despite a prior conviction tied to his documented connections to the Islamic State extremist group.

    Darwish took the stage as a core member of Queens Against Borders, a Berlin-based performance collective built to foster solidarity among LGBTQ+ refugees, migrants, and immigrants. He was joined on Sunday by fellow multidisciplinary queer artists: Egyptian belly dancer Aleya and Nigerian drag performer Countess Sasha Seduction, all of whom opted to proceed with the planned performance rather than cancel in the wake of the attack.

    After his opening remarks, Darwish pushed through the collective grief of the community to begin his performance, starting with a slow, meditative spin in the style of traditional Anatolian dervishes. His voluminous red skirt billowed into a graceful cone as traditional Arabic melodies echoed through the venue. As the music rose in volume and tempo, Darwish shed his outer skirt, and launched into dynamic, rhythmic belly dance moves to roaring cheers from the audience.

    Speaking to the Associated Press after the performance, Darwish, who performs under the stage name “The Darvish,” emphasized that the decision to perform the night after the attack carried intentional meaning beyond the queer community, reaching out to Berlin’s diverse general population and the many international tourists visiting the city. He acknowledged the exhaustion that comes with constant resistance: “we are tired to constantly be put in a position where we have to fight endlessly.” But he added that the choice to step on stage was a deliberate rejection of despair. The troupe could have easily chosen to stay home in mourning, he noted, but instead opted to channel shared pain into collective joy.

    By the end of the night, that choice resonated: Darwish and the other performers danced until the entire audience rose from their seats, joining the dance floor and transforming what was expected to be a somber night of grief into a powerful demonstration of solidarity and joy in the face of hate.

  • French wildfire created a monster cloud, unleashing lightning that ignited more fires

    French wildfire created a monster cloud, unleashing lightning that ignited more fires

    In a groundbreaking and alarming development that underscores the growing risk of extreme wildfire behavior linked to climate change, French officials have confirmed that an out-of-control wildfire in southwest France grew powerful enough to spawn its own thunderstorm — a rare weather event never before recorded in the nation’s history.

    The massive blaze, which ignited near the commune of Saumos in the Gironde region on July 22, has already carved a devastating path across the region. As of official updates, it has consumed more than 420 square kilometers of protected forest and dry scrubland, ruined or completely destroyed over 240 residential structures, and forced an unprecedented 220,000 local residents to flee their homes to escape the advancing flames.

    Two days after the fire first broke out, at approximately 6:20 p.m. local time on Friday, Gironde’s departmental fire and rescue service confirmed the formation of a pyrocumulonimbus, or pyroCb — an enormous, storm-forming cloud generated entirely by the extreme heat of an intense wildfire. The cloud weakened temporarily overnight as atmospheric humidity climbed, but reformed repeatedly in subsequent days as the inferno continued to rage.

    Unlike ordinary thunderstorms that form from atmospheric heat exchange, a pyrocumulonimbus is born directly from the extreme heat of a large wildfire. Theodore M. Giannaros, a fire meteorologist at the National Observatory of Athens, explains the phenomenon simply: it is what happens when a wildfire grows so large and hot that the smoke and hot air rising from its flames condense into a full-fledged storm cloud.

    The conditions required to spawn a pyroCb are very specific. There is no set threshold temperature for formation, but the atmosphere must match the structure that breeds dry thunderstorms: extremely hot, parched air close to the ground, capped by a layer of cooler, more moisture-rich air higher in the atmosphere. As superheated air loaded with smoke, ash and water vapor surges upward from the wildfire, it cools as it climbs, and water vapor condenses around tiny ash particles. Above the freezing altitude, these condensing droplets turn to ice crystals, whose collisions separate electrical charges just as they do in a regular thunderstorm.

    The result is an electrified black storm cloud that generates lightning, erratic winds and unpredictable fire behavior. Unlike a normal storm that forms independent of a fire, this storm system amplifies the disaster that created it. Rising air pulls powerful gusts of wind straight toward the heart of the blaze, while cold downdrafts hurl strong gusts back to the surface across the surrounding landscape. These sudden wind shifts can redirect the fire’s path, split it into multiple separate fire fronts, or send flames racing into untouched areas that were previously considered safe.

    Giannaros notes that this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, not a one-sided side effect of the fire. “Once it forms, the cloud becomes its own weather system, sitting on top of the fire and making it harder to predict,” he explained. In the most extreme cases, these systems can even spawn rotating fire columns called fire whirls — essentially fire-fueled devils that move across the landscape spreading destruction. True fire tornadoes are far rarer, but one such event hit Redding, California during the 2018 Carr Fire, packing EF-3 equivalent winds and killing a fire inspector.

    For frontline firefighting crews, the formation of a pyroCb creates unprecedented danger. Escape routes can be cut off without warning when lightning sparks new wildfires far beyond the reach of deployed crews and equipment. Direct attacks on the main blaze become impossible, forcing teams to abandon containment efforts and retreat to defend populated communities at risk. The biggest threat, Giannaros emphasized, is that the fire can spread faster than emergency managers can organize evacuation orders for at-risk populations.

    Until this event, pyrocumulonimbus events were almost exclusively documented in North America and Australia, where they only form over the most extreme large-scale wildfires. Canada alone recorded a staggering record 142 pyroCb events in 2023. In Europe, the phenomenon has been extremely rare: only one confirmed event was recorded in Portugal during the catastrophic 2017 wildfire season. France’s 2022 Gironde fire marks the first confirmed pyroCb in the nation’s recorded history, according to the French National Firefighters Federation.

    The emergence of this rare extreme fire event in France aligns with broader climate trends across the European continent. Data from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service and the World Meteorological Organization shows that Europe has been warming faster than any other continent on Earth — at roughly twice the global average rate since the 1980s. As a result, heat waves have grown far more frequent and severe, widespread drought has parched much of southern Europe, and dense forests have dried out into ideal wildfire fuel.

    Giannaros explained that hotter, drier conditions create far more opportunities for the extreme wildfires that can spawn pyroCbs, but the scientific community still lacks sufficient long-term data to confirm a clear upward trend in these events across Europe. The European research project ROSETTA is currently working to close this knowledge gap, to help emergency managers better prepare for and respond to these extreme events in the future.

    Giannaros added that one of the most common public misunderstandings about pyrocumulonimbus is that the storm cloud is just an inconsequential side effect of a large fire. In reality, for as long as the storm sits above the flames, it actively shapes the fire’s future path and intensity, turning a predictable blaze into an unpredictable, deadly disaster.