Global Pulse

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  • Harry and Meghan’s trip felt like a royal tour – except many Aussies weren’t interested

    Harry and Meghan’s trip felt like a royal tour – except many Aussies weren’t interested

    After four days of tightly curated engagements mixing charity work, cultural outreach and private commercial ventures, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have concluded their first private visit to Australia’s east coast, a trip that stands in stark contrast to their high-profile 2018 royal tour when the pair still served as working members of the British monarchy.

    In 2018, a nine-day cross-country official tour drew tens of thousands of well-wishers lining streets across the nation. This time around, as private citizens, the tour followed a far quieter script: most Australians surveyed by the BBC said they had little to no awareness of the visit, and public turnout for unscripted public appearances remained minimal. Despite its low profile, the trip has sparked heated debate over two key issues: potential taxpayer-funded security costs for the couple’s public events, and the blurred line between charitable outreach and commercial money-making activities amid Australia’s ongoing cost-of-living crisis.

    The itinerary echoed the structure of traditional royal tours, with stops to engage with Indigenous Australian communities, honor fallen service members at the Australian National War Memorial, celebrate national sporting culture, and advance the couple’s longstanding focus on mental health advocacy. Unlike official royal tours, every engagement was planned and executed by the Sussexes’ private team, with a deliberate focus on controlled, low-risk encounters to avoid public backlash or confrontation.

    Giselle Bastin, an associate professor at Flinders University specializing in Australian-monarchy relations, noted the tour’s carefully curated format was designed to minimize negative pushback. “They didn’t organize large, publicly advertised walkabouts where crowds could turn out to see them, so they’ve managed to cut down the risk of negative reactions, heckling or booing,” Bastin explained. “It’s been very carefully controlled, with spontaneous-seeming appearances at pre-vetted locations.”

    Even with the controlled structure, the pair displayed their characteristic warmth in small, personal interactions that aligned with their public brand. The BBC witnessed multiple warm encounters, including a meeting at the Sydney Opera House between Prince Harry and Michelle Haywood, daughter of Daphne Dunne — a 99-year-old war widow and long-time royal acquaintance who died in 2019. Haywood had waited days to present Harry with a vintage photo of her mother posing with him in army fatigues from a 2015 visit. “He just said, ‘Oh my gosh’ and then he gave me a big hug,” Haywood recalled. “He went through every time he’d met her, and even remembered the meeting where it was pouring rain. He remembered it perfectly.”

    Meghan similarly connected with attendees at multiple stops: she listened compassionately to survivors of the 2024 Bondi Beach attack, and chatted with a young boy about her children’s love of the popular Australian children’s book *Diary of a Wombat*. A review of daily press releases from the Sussexes’ media team found the word “connection” was used 30 times across post-day briefings, while “community” appeared 21 times and “wellbeing” eight times. Notably, the word “royal” only appeared once — in the official name of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, which the couple visited at the start of the tour.

    Mental health advocacy formed a core pillar of the public agenda, including a roundtable with young people focused on the harms of online bullying. During that discussion, Meghan opened up about her decade-long experience as what she called “the most trolled person in the world,” sharing personal stories of persistent online harassment and abuse.

    The couple’s 8.7 million-follower @sussexroyal Instagram platform remains a major asset, and the tour comes as the pair actively pursue new commercial opportunities following the end of their high-profile content deals with Spotify and Netflix. This shift to independent income has left the public with little clarity around which engagements are charitable and which are paid commercial appearances.

    Prince Harry headlined a high-profile mental health summit where he spoke candidly about grieving his mother Princess Diana while serving as a working royal. While tickets were heavily discounted, they still cost nearly AU$1,000 per person. Organizers repeatedly declined to confirm whether Harry received a speaking fee, only noting that all ticket proceeds were donated to Australian mental health charity Lifeline. Meghan did confirm a paid appearance at an exclusive, women-only luxury retreat, where VIP entry cost AU$3,199 per person. She also publicly announced her investment in OneOff, an artificial intelligence fashion platform that curates celebrity-inspired style recommendations, with creators and celebrity investors earning a small commission on sales generated through their profiles. The Duchess’s profile already features clothing she wore during the Australian tour.

    Compared to the 76 engagements the couple completed across 16 days of the 2018 tour (which also included stops in New Zealand, Fiji and Tonga), this four-day visit had significant gaps in the public schedule. Most notably, Meghan had no public appearances on the Wednesday of the tour, and it was later revealed she had been filming a guest spot on *MasterChef Australia*. It is understood she received no payment for the appearance, though she has a food-focused lifestyle brand, As Ever, which holds Australian trademarks for a range of products including cookware and table linens.

    The only mention of commercial activity on the tour came in a footnote of a five-page pre-tour briefing, which stated: “As with many visits of this nature, a small number of private engagements are included to support broader commercial, charitable, and community objectives.” As private citizens, the couple are under no legal obligation to disclose earnings or publicize every private engagement.

    Critics have argued the commercial focus of the trip is out of step with Australia’s current economic struggles. Bastin described many of the commercial ventures as “tone deaf in a cost-of-living crisis,” while a Sydney Morning Herald columnist wrote that “Australia was good to Harry and Meghan. Now they want to use us as an ATM.”

    Supporters push back against that framing, however. Michael Hartung, chief executive of Invictus Australia, the national arm of Harry’s Invictus Games for wounded and ill veterans, said the criticism overlooks the tangible positive impact of the couple’s charitable work. “A lot of criticism is thrown their way, but what we’ve seen this past week is they do an enormous amount for charity and for organisations like ours,” Hartung told the BBC. “Their presence here has moved our work years forward, something that would have taken us countless hours of outreach and effort to achieve on our own. It really does make a difference.”

    Fans who met the couple during the tour echoed that sentiment, noting the pair are entitled to earn a living as private citizens. “They’ve chosen their path in life and if that’s their brand and they need to make a living and do it how they wish, they should be allowed to do so,” said Lisa Perry, a Sydney visitor who got a selfie with the couple. Vida Benic, who met the pair in Melbourne, said she avoided negativity around the visit. “They’re welcome to come here any time. Our big Australian arms and hearts are fully open to them – and to their children hopefully one day.”

  • Chernobyl’s last wedding: The couple who married as a nuclear disaster unfolded

    Chernobyl’s last wedding: The couple who married as a nuclear disaster unfolded

    On the cusp of their wedding day in April 1986, 19-year-old trainee teacher Iryna Stetsenko and 25-year-old nuclear power plant engineer Serhiy Lobanov had every reason to look forward to their future. The young couple were building their life in Pripyat, a purpose-built, newly constructed Soviet city constructed to house workers of the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. What they could not know that night was that 4 kilometers from their apartment, the world’s worst nuclear disaster was already unfolding.

    It was just after midnight when Iryna, who had just finished polishing her nails for the ceremony, stepped out onto her balcony and heard an unfamiliar, deep rumble. “It was as if a hundred planes were roaring overhead, everything hummed, and every window pane shook,” she recalled. Serhiy, sleeping on a kitchen mattress in a relative’s apartment full of wedding guests, felt a low, rolling wave that he mistook for a minor earthquake before drifting back to sleep.

    When dawn broke on April 26, Serhiy woke full of excitement for his sunny wedding day. As he ran pre-ceremony errands, he noticed signs that something was very wrong: soldiers in gas masks patrolled the streets, workers hosed down roads with foamy decontamination solution, and colleagues from the plant told him they had been called in urgently for an emergency they could not explain. Glancing across the city, he could see dark smoke billowing from the damaged Reactor Number Four. What would later become clear is that firefighters and plant workers had spent the entire night fighting a massive toxic blaze, absorbing potentially lethal doses of radiation to contain the disaster.

    Though anxiety prickled at him, Serhiy continued with his plans. He found the city market nearly deserted on what was usually a busy Saturday morning, and picked five simple tulips for his bride. Back at Iryna’s apartment, her mother had spent the night fielding frantic calls from neighbors warning of an unspecified catastrophe, but Soviet information controls kept any details of the accident from being released. When Iryna’s mother called local authorities for answers, officials insisted all scheduled city events proceed as planned. Schools stayed open, and the wedding went forward.

    The wedding party processed in a line of cars to Pripyat’s Palace of Culture, the city’s central venue for both state ceremonies and popular local discos. The couple exchanged their vows standing on a cloth embroidered with their names, then moved to a nearby café for their wedding banquet. But the joy of the day was swallowed by uncertainty. “Everyone knew something terrible had happened, but nobody knew what it was,” Serhiy said. The couple had practiced a traditional waltz for their first dance, but as the weight of the unfolding tragedy settled over them, they lost the rhythm almost immediately. “We just hugged each other and stayed that way, moving together in the hug,” Iryna remembered.

    By the early hours of Sunday, just hours after they were married, the couple were warned to evacuate immediately: a mandatory evacuation train was set to depart Pripyat at 5 a.m. Iryna only had a thin celebration dress with her, so she slipped her voluminous wedding dress back on to run back to her mother’s apartment to pack. Her new shoes had already given her blisters, so she ran barefoot through rain puddles, wedding dress trailing behind her. As their train pulled out of the station in the pre-dawn dark, they could see the glowing, collapsed reactor against the sky. Serhiy described it as “looking straight into the eye of an active volcano.” Authorities told evacuees the displacement would only last three days. The couple never returned.

    The 1986 Chernobyl explosion, which occurred in what is now northern Ukraine, was caused by a catastrophic failed safety test. The International Atomic Energy Agency and World Health Organization estimate the blast released 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Soviet Union faced widespread international condemnation for its slow, opaque response: it only confirmed the accident two days later, after Swedish nuclear monitors detected abnormal radiation drifting across Western Europe, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev did not address the disaster publicly for more than two weeks.

    Nikolai Solovyov, a lead turbine engineer on shift at the plant when the explosion hit, described the moment: “It felt like an earthquake under our feet. We saw the roof collapsing, a blast of hot air rushed toward us carrying thick black dust, and then the sirens started.” He and his colleagues rushed to the site assuming a generator had exploded, never imagining the reactor itself had blown. One worker’s dosimeter registered radiation levels far beyond its measuring capacity. They found a colleague alive but vomiting, a clear sign of acute radiation sickness—he was among the first to die from the disaster.

    The official death toll in the immediate aftermath of the accident stands at 31: two killed directly by the blast, 28 who died from acute radiation sickness in the weeks that followed, and one fatality from cardiac arrest. The long-term death toll remains fiercely contested: a 2005 UN agency study estimated up to 4,000 people may eventually die from radiation-related causes, while other independent estimates put the number as high as tens of thousands.

    To contain the spreading radiation, Soviet authorities launched a massive clean-up operation, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” from across the union to stabilize the site and clear radioactive debris. Extreme radiation levels fried electronic equipment, forcing many workers to clear toxic debris by hand in short shifts designed to limit lethal exposure. Jaan Krinal, one of dozens of liquidators deployed from Soviet-era Estonia, recalled wearing 20+ kilograms of lead plating for protection, plus a construction helmet, goggles, and a dosimeter tucked in his pocket. He and fellow Estonian liquidator Rein Klaar worked in 60-second bursts on the roof of Reactor Three, with no time to process the danger they faced. “Nobody could tell us what was what,” Rein said. “There was no time to think.”

    In the months after the evacuation, Iryna and Serhiy were staying with Iryna’s grandmother 300 kilometers away in the Poltava region, east of Kyiv, when doctors made an unexpected discovery: Iryna was three months pregnant. Evacuated women were broadly warned that radiation exposure could harm fetuses, and many were advised to terminate pregnancies. “I was scared to have the baby, and scared to have an abortion,” Iryna remembered. But one supportive female doctor encouraged her to carry the pregnancy to term, and later that year, Iryna gave birth to a healthy daughter, Katya. Today, Katya is a mother herself, and the couple have a 15-year-old granddaughter.

    Four decades on, the legacy of the Chernobyl disaster stretches across generations, and new upheaval has again upended the lives of those who survived it. The site of the explosion has become an active war zone following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, Russian tanks seized the Chernobyl plant complex, holding staff hostage for five weeks, laying mines, and digging defensive trenches across contaminated land. In 2025, a drone strike punched a hole in the 1.6 billion USD safety shield installed over Reactor Four in 2016, replacing an unstable original concrete sarcophagus. While radiation levels did not spike after the strike, the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed the shield can no longer perform its primary safety function. The plant requires constant monitoring and maintenance to prevent further radiation leaks.

    Much of the 1,000-square-mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is now safe for short-term visitor tours, but permanent settlement remains banned, and hotspots of deadly contamination remain in areas like the Red Forest, a stand of pine trees killed by radiation that remains heavily toxic. Pripyat, once celebrated as a beacon of Soviet technological progress and youthful optimism, is now a crumbling ghost city. The Palace of Culture where Iryna and Serhiy married stands abandoned and derelict, succumbing to decades of neglect.

    For Iryna and Serhiy, displacement became a second reality in 2022, after a Russian missile struck their daughter’s Kyiv apartment. The couple fled Ukraine for a new life in Berlin, forced to uproot their lives for the second time—once for a nuclear disaster, once for war. Though they suspect radiation exposure has contributed to long-term health issues Iryna has endured, including two total knee replacements, and a 2016 heart attack Serhiy suffered, their four-decade marriage has become their anchor through every crisis.

    “I think we really had to go through so many difficulties in life to understand that we really can’t be one without the other,” Iryna said. “After 40 years, I can say with certainty that we are like a thread and a needle. We do everything together.”

    This story accompanies new BBC programming marking the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. UK viewers can watch *What Happened at Chernobyl* on BBC One at 8:30 p.m. on April 20, with streaming available on BBC iPlayer from 6 a.m. the same day. *The Last Dance Floor in Chernobyl*, a podcast telling the full story of Iryna and Serhiy’s wedding against the backdrop of disaster, will also be released.

  • ‘I am going crazy’: Families of missing Gaza children endure agonising uncertainty

    ‘I am going crazy’: Families of missing Gaza children endure agonising uncertainty

    It was supposed to be a simple, ordinary trip to gather cooking fuel for the family evening meal. For 14-year-old Anas al-Sayed, that June 2025 outing in northern Gaza would turn into a missing person case that has left his family trapped in a nightmare of unknowing that has stretched on for 10 months.

    Anas left the damaged, makeshift refuge his family occupied in Gaza City’s Shati refugee camp at around 4 p.m. on June 24, accompanied by his 12-year-old cousin, who also needed firewood for his own household, his mother Naima al-Sayed recalled in an interview with Middle East Eye. The pair traveled to a stretch of land located close to an Israeli military outpost. What should have been a quick foray soon turned to chaos when Israeli artillery opened direct fire on the two boys, forcing them to flee in separate directions to seek safety.

    “My nephew ran west toward the sea, while my son turned east, deeper into territory closer to Israeli forces,” Naima, 49, explained. The cousin managed to take cover behind large boulders, calling out for Anas repeatedly, but got no response. By roughly 10 p.m., the young boy returned to the family alone, with no clue what had become of Anas.

    Panicked, Anas’s father immediately set out to search for the teen, but was turned back by an Israeli quadcopter that appeared overhead and opened fire on the area. He returned home with a warning that the zone was far too dangerous to enter. “I didn’t sleep a wink that night. I counted every minute until the sun came up,” Naima said. At dawn, she set out on foot, walking for hours, asking every person she encountered if they had seen her son. Rumors swirled: some said Anas had been detained, others claimed he had been killed. That same day, the family made three trips to al-Shifa Hospital to cross-reference his name with incoming bodies, but found no trace. Anas had vanished without a clear explanation.

    Anas’s case is not an isolated tragedy. According to the Palestinian Centre for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared (PCMFD), roughly 2,900 Palestinian children have been reported missing across the war-ravaged Gaza Strip since Israel launched its military campaign in October 2023. Overall, the group estimates that nearly 8,000 Palestinians of all ages remain unaccounted for across the enclave.

    Of the 2,900 missing children, PCMFD data suggests around 2,700 are likely killed, their bodies still trapped beneath the thousands of tons of collapsed rubble that litter Gaza following months of intensive airstrikes and ground operations. Another 200 children have simply disappeared without a trace across different areas of the Strip. “These children are either detained and forcibly disappeared by the Israeli military during operations, or killed in targeted strikes that left their remains in dangerous, inaccessible areas including aid distribution sites and zones under direct Israeli military control,” explained Mona Abunada, PCMFD’s media coordinator. “Families don’t even get the closure of knowing whether their child is dead or alive. Many have told us they would accept any answer — they just can’t bear this endless uncertainty.”

    Since the start of Israel’s ground invasion in October 2023, Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians from their homes, at military checkpoints, and in areas near force deployments. Israeli authorities have consistently refused to release information about people in their custody, including minor detainees, and have rejected repeated requests from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for access to detention facilities and details on detainee whereabouts.

    Ten months after Anas went missing, his family has reached out to multiple international humanitarian organizations, including the ICRC, for help tracing the teen, but none have been able to confirm where he is or what has happened to him. The family has combed through every list of released detainees, searching for Anas’s name. “I check the ages first. I look for 15 now, because he would have turned 15 by now,” Naima said. They have shown Anas’s photo to every recently released detainee they can meet, but no one has been able to confirm they saw him in custody.

    Patrick Griffiths, an ICRC spokesperson for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, confirmed the organization’s inability to assist desperate families. “We have had no access to Israeli detention facilities since October 2023, and we have not received any notification of people being detained,” Griffiths told Middle East Eye. “That creates an information black hole — we can’t share any details with families who are waiting for news of their loved ones.”

    For those who may be killed and trapped under rubble, the situation is no less intractable. Thousands of bodies remain buried beneath destroyed buildings across Gaza, and rubble removal operations are severely limited by a lack of equipment and extreme safety risks. “There are almost no functional heavy machines to clear debris. We’re talking one or two working bulldozers for the entire habitable part of Gaza, and the whole area is littered with unexploded ordnance that makes clearing rubble incredibly dangerous and slow,” Griffiths added.

    When the al-Sayed family was forced to flee northern Gaza for the relative safety of southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, Naima packed a plastic bag of Anas’s clothes to bring with her. Today, she keeps the bag beside her sleeping space in the family’s makeshift tent, holding onto the only tangible piece of her son she has left.

    “I wish we knew whether he was dead or alive — just to know whether we are looking for a detained child or a body,” Naima said. “I don’t know if he’s in prison, hungry, being tortured, or if his body is already decaying. The anguish I feel is unbearable. I feel like I am going crazy.”

  • Iran says to control traffic through Hormuz until war definitively ended

    Iran says to control traffic through Hormuz until war definitively ended

    TEHRAN – In a decisive statement released Saturday, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has confirmed the country will maintain full control and regulatory oversight of all maritime traffic passing through the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz until a definitive end to regional hostilities and the establishment of a lasting regional peace.

    The official confirmation from Iran’s top security body comes only hours after the Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, Iran’s primary military command, ordered the resumption of strict Strait of Hormuz controls, citing the unbroken implementation of a U.S. naval blockade targeting Iranian commercial and maritime activity.

    Under the new control framework laid out by the SNSC, Iran will manage all transits through the strait by mandating pre-submission of vessel identification and cargo information, requiring official passage permits for all ships, collecting fees for the provision of regional security protections and environmental monitoring services, and directing all maritime movement in line with Iran’s domestic regulations and active wartime protocols.

    The statement clarified that any effort by adversarial forces to disrupt vessel transits, including the enforcement of a naval blockade that violates the existing two-week ceasefire agreement, will prompt Iran to abandon the conditional, limited reopening of the strait that was implemented during the truce.

    The SNSC further emphasized that a large share of military equipment for U.S. military bases across West Asia transits through the Strait of Hormuz, a flow of materiel that the council characterizes as a direct threat to both Iranian national security and broader stability across the Persian Gulf region.

    In a separate development included in the statement, the SNSC confirmed that Iran has received new diplomatic proposals from the United States, which were transmitted via Pakistani officials during a recent visit to Islamabad by Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir. Iranian authorities are currently reviewing the terms of the new offers, the statement added, stressing that Iran’s negotiating team will refuse any concessions that compromise Iranian national interests and will defend the country’s sovereignty with full force.

    The current standoff over the Strait of Hormuz dates back to February 28, when Iran first tightened restrictions on transits through the waterway immediately after the United States and Israel launched joint airstrikes on Iranian territory. Tensions escalated further after preliminary peace talks held in Islamabad broke down, prompting the U.S. to formalize its naval blockade of vessels traveling to and from Iran.

    Just one day before Saturday’s announcement, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi had confirmed that the Strait of Hormuz would remain fully open to commercial commercial shipping for the duration of the two-week ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. that took effect on April 8, aligned with the broader truce agreement reached between Israeli and Lebanese forces. The reversal of that temporary opening comes as direct violations of the ceasefire terms by the U.S. have prompted Iran to reimpose full military and regulatory control over the strategic waterway, through which roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil supplies transit.

  • Players, enthusiasts in New York mark 55th anniversary of Ping-Pong Diplomacy

    Players, enthusiasts in New York mark 55th anniversary of Ping-Pong Diplomacy

    On a crisp Friday in Manhattan, a diverse crowd of table tennis competitors, enthusiasts, and diplomatic figures filled SPIN New York Flatiron to commemorate a half-century of a people-to-people exchange that fundamentally altered the trajectory of China-US relations: the 55th anniversary of Ping-Pong Diplomacy.

    The event brought together a cross-section of global table tennis talent and community members, ranging from former United States national champions and a former Swedish national team competitor to amateur community players, college athletes, and legal and finance professionals who share a passion for the sport. All joined in honoring the small, accidental moment that opened a new chapter in bilateral ties five and a half decades ago.

    In her opening remarks at the celebration, Chen Li, China’s Consul General in New York, walked attendees through the unexpected origins of the historic diplomatic breakthrough. Fifty-five years earlier, an American table tennis player accidentally stepped onto the Chinese team’s bus during the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan. What began as a simple misstep quickly bloomed into an unplanned friendly exchange, sparking the series of interactions that became known as Ping-Pong Diplomacy and clearing the path for the first official visit by an American sports delegation to the People’s Republic of China.

    Chen recalled the enduring Chinese sports motto, “Friendship first, competition second,” noting that even in that first encounter, American athletes observed that Chinese spectators cheered for every outstanding shot, no matter which side scored the point. “They realized that rivals had become friends overnight. Few could have imagined that a friendly paddle volley would help turn the wheel of China-US relations,” Chen told the gathered crowd.

    Reaffirming the core role of ordinary people in shaping bilateral ties, Chen emphasized, “The foundation of our relations was built by the people, and its future rests with our youth. You are all ambassadors of friendship.”

    Across the club’s tables, players from every cultural background and skill level competed side by side, carrying on the spirit of exchange that defined the 1971 breakthrough. Among the attendees was Rory Hayden, who was just 20 years old when she served as a translator for the Chinese table tennis delegation during their historic first visit to the United States in 1972, bringing a direct personal link to the history the event honored.

  • US Coast Guard spots overturned vessel near Saipan during search for missing ship with 6 on board

    US Coast Guard spots overturned vessel near Saipan during search for missing ship with 6 on board

    Coast Guard authorities announced Saturday that a U.S. search aircraft has detected an overturned hull matching the profile of the missing American-registered cargo ship Mariana, which disappeared off the coast of the U.S. territory of Saipan with six crew members on board. Confirmation of the vessel’s identity has not yet been completed, search teams confirmed.

    The sighting was made by the crew of a HC-130 Hercules aircraft early Saturday, roughly 100 nautical miles northeast of the Mariana’s last reported position, 34 nautical miles northeast of Pagan, an uninhabited small island lying north of Saipan in the western Pacific Ocean. Preliminary assessments from the Coast Guard confirmed the overturned vessel aligns with the physical description of the 145-foot dry cargo ship, which is officially registered in the United States.

    The incident unfolded in the path of Super Typhoon Sinlaku, which bore down on the Mariana Islands archipelago this week. On Wednesday, as the massive storm brought ferocious wind speeds and continuous torrential rain to Saipan and surrounding islands, the Mariana suffered a critical engine failure. The crew of the cargo vessel issued a distress call reporting they had lost power to their starboard engine and required emergency assistance. After receiving the call, the Coast Guard established a scheduled hourly check-in protocol to maintain contact with the stranded ship.

    However, all communication with the Mariana was lost on Thursday. A HC-130 search plane was launched from Guam shortly after contact went dark, but severe wind conditions from the typhoon forced the aircraft to abort the mission and return to base.

    The Mariana’s final known location was approximately 140 miles north-northwest of Saipan, which sits more than 3,800 miles west of the Hawaiian Islands. As of Saturday, Coast Guard command centers in Honolulu were processing new details from the sighting to coordinate next steps in the operation.

    Officials have not yet released information on the nationalities of the six missing crew members. A multi-agency, multinational search effort has been assembled to continue the operation and confirm the identity of the capsized vessel: a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol plane, a Coast Guard cutter, a Japanese Coast Guard aircraft, and a Japanese vessel outfitted with a specialized dive rescue team are all scheduled to join the search.

    Beyond the missing ship, Typhoon Sinlaku has caused widespread damage across the Northern Mariana Islands. The storm has triggered flash flooding, ripped roofs off residential and commercial buildings, and flipped vehicles across Saipan. Because of the typhoon’s unusually large size, Saipan endured nearly 48 hours of continuous severe wind, which significantly delayed initial damage assessments and emergency response operations across the territory. Local officials have warned that some parts of the Northern Marianas could remain without electrical power for weeks following the storm.

  • ‘I thought I might die’: A Palestinian mother’s account of Israeli detention

    ‘I thought I might die’: A Palestinian mother’s account of Israeli detention

    Even months after walking free in the Gaza Strip, Saeda al-Shrafi cannot outrun the nightmares of her 46 days in Israeli detention. Every night, she finds herself pulled back to the cramped, cold cell of Damon prison: the thud of military boots echoing down corridor concrete, shouted headcounts cutting through the dark, the bitter chill that seeped into her bones and never truly left. For the Palestinian mother of two, the trauma of her arrest and abuse remains an inescapable part of daily life.

    Shrafi’s ordeal began in late 2023, amid the mass forced displacement of civilians from northern Gaza following the outbreak of Israel’s military campaign. Like tens of thousands of other residents, she followed Israeli military instructions to travel south along what the army had advertised as a “safe corridor”, fleeing relentless air strikes that had already destroyed her home. She set out with her two young children — three-year-old Zain al-Din and one-year-old Adam — and her brother-in-law Youssef, desperate to reach safety. Before the war, she had lived a quiet life in the Jabalia refugee camp; her husband Mohammed, a local musician, had gone missing in the early weeks of the conflict.

    When the group reached an Israeli military checkpoint on Salah al-Din Street, a soldier called her out over a loudspeaker, singling her out by her purple shawl and ordering her to leave her children with Youssef and approach. “My one-year-old son, Adam, clung to my clothes in terror until I was forced to hand him to Youssef,” Shrafi told Middle East Eye in an account of her detention. “I began to cry, fearing it might be the last time I would see my children. I promised to return, not knowing if I could keep that promise.”

    As soon as she reached the soldiers, they bound her hands in shackles. Two female soldiers escorted her to a makeshift canvas search area, where they forced her to strip and subjected her to a violent, humiliating search. “They told me to take off my clothes, threw me to the ground, blindfolded me and beat me,” she recalled. When she repeatedly begged for information about her children, Israeli interrogators used them as leverage, telling her the children would only be returned to her if she confessed to involvement in the October 7 attacks — a claim Shrafi, a civilian housewife, immediately denied. After repeated beatings, she was dragged by her limbs and thrown onto a truck packed with other detained Palestinian civilians, beginning a journey that would end in months of abuse.

    Shrafi remained blindfolded through multiple transfers, enduring ongoing beatings and verbal insults from soldiers, before she was placed in a crowded holding cell with six other Palestinian women. The number of detainees grew steadily in the small space, and for a full week, she was given no information about where she was being held or what charges she faced. Her thoughts never strayed far from her children, and interrogations brought new threats: when Shrafi stuck to her denial of any militant ties, interrogators threatened to kill her children and bomb her extended family still in Gaza. By the end of repeated questioning, she says she was on the edge of psychologically breaking, telling a interrogator her children were already dead just to end the pressure.

    Instead of being released as they had been promised after interrogations, Shrafi and the other detainees were transferred to Dimona prison, a maximum-security facility in Israel’s Negev Desert. On arrival, guards made clear the brutality that awaited them. “You are in Dimona. You are in hell,” one guard whispered to her as she was processed. “They didn’t order us to move. They moved us by beating us and pulling our hair. I thought I might die under the torture,” Shrafi said.

    Conditions in the cell were catastrophic. Shrafi was placed in a cell roughly 2.5 meters long by 1.5 meters wide, a space that eventually held 12 Palestinian women detainees. The group was given barely enough food to survive, access to unclean drinking water, only one shared toilet for all the prisoners, no access to medical care, and a total ban on speaking to one another. “It was unbearable,” she said. During her time there, she witnessed a 24-year-old pregnant detainee from Gaza suffer a miscarriage in the cell’s toilet; the woman’s husband had already been killed by Israeli forces, and prison staff refused to provide her any medical care, leaving only the other detainees to comfort her.

    Frequent cell searches brought new psychological abuse. Guards mocked Shrafi when she cried, falsely telling her her entire family had been killed in Gaza, taunts that escalated until she collapsed from a panic attack. Promises of release were used repeatedly as a tool of torture: guards would tell the women they would be freed in days, only to reverse the decision, breaking down detainees’ sense of hope. When Shrafi was finally told she would be released, she did not believe the announcement at first.

    Even the days leading up to her release brought more abuse. After being ordered to hand back their prison uniforms, the women were transferred to another facility in Beersheba, where they spent three days blindfolded, forced to sit prostrate on the ground and beaten repeatedly. Shrafi says she was struck with military boots, while another woman beside her fainted from the physical strain of being held in the painful position for hours.

    On the morning of January 12, 2024, Shrafi and the other released women were handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross in southern Gaza, and transported to Rafah, where dozens of families had gathered to wait for their loved ones. When she was reunited with her aunt, she learned the devastating scale of loss her family had suffered while she was detained: more than 50 of her relatives had been killed, including her brother Mansour and the brother-in-law she had travelled south with. The one piece of good news was that her two children were alive and safe. When they walked into the room, she held them close, barely able to believe she was seeing them again. Her youngest son Adam, who had been just a year old when she was taken, did not recognize her, and flinched away in fear.

    Shrafi’s experience is far from an isolated case. Since the start of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinian civilians from Gaza during displacement operations and ground incursions. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces have also ramped up daily arrest raids, detaining dozens of Palestinians every week. As of April 2024, more than 9,600 Palestinian and Arab detainees are held in Israeli prisons, around half of them held without formal charge or trial. This figure does not include hundreds of civilians detained in temporary military facilities since the outbreak of the war.

    Marking Palestinian Prisoners’ Day on April 17, the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and other leading Palestinian human rights organizations released a statement warning that detainees currently held by Israel are facing “the harshest levels of torture, abuse, and extermination in the history of the Israeli occupation”. Over the past three years, the group reported, Israeli prison authorities have overseen “severe and widespread crimes” against thousands of Palestinian detainees. At least 89 detainees have been confirmed dead in custody since that period began, but rights groups say the true number of deaths caused by torture and neglect is far higher. Dozens of detainees taken from Gaza since October 2023 remain forcibly disappeared, with no information released to their families about their whereabouts or status.

    Today, even back with her surviving children, Shrafi carries the trauma of her detention with her constantly. She thinks daily of the hundreds of Palestinian women and men still held in Israeli prisons, enduring the same abuse she survived. “Palestinian prisoners live in a dark world of torture that can break a person’s mind,” she said. “I still hold on to the same wish I had in prison: that Palestinian prisoners will not be forgotten, and that they will be free soon.”

  • Mexico’s Sheinbaum denies ‘diplomatic crisis’ with Spain after conquest row

    Mexico’s Sheinbaum denies ‘diplomatic crisis’ with Spain after conquest row

    On a Saturday gathering of progressive leaders in Barcelona, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum moved to ease longstanding tensions over colonial history, stating publicly that there is “no diplomatic crisis” between Mexico and Spain after years of strained bilateral relations. Her remarks, delivered ahead of a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, came amid a carefully orchestrated rapprochement that ends an eight-year gap in visits by sitting Mexican presidents to the European nation.

    The friction between the two countries stretches back to 2019, when Sheinbaum’s predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador publicly demanded a formal apology from Spain for systemic human rights violations committed during the 16th-century conquest of Mexico, a campaign that saw Spanish conquistadors topple the Aztec Empire and leave hundreds of thousands dead from violence and imported disease. When no official apology was forthcoming, Sheinbaum made a sharp diplomatic gesture in 2024 by uninviting Spain’s King Felipe VI from her inauguration, prompting Madrid to recall all official representatives from the event.

    In recent months, however, a series of incremental steps have signaled a gradual warming of ties. During a March visit to a Madrid exhibition highlighting Indigenous Mexican women, King Felipe became the first Spanish monarch to openly acknowledge the harm of colonial rule, admitting that “a lot of abuse” occurred during the conquest, and that events judged by modern values cannot be a source of national pride. A month before that public acknowledgment, Sheinbaum had extended an invitation to the king to attend the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which Mexico will co-host alongside the United States and Canada. The Spanish royal palace confirmed Sheinbaum framed the tournament as a chance to highlight the deep, unique bonds between the two nations. This diplomatic shift follows a 2024 statement from Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, who recognized the “pain and injustice” of shared colonial history and won praise from Sheinbaum for his candor.

    Following Sheinbaum’s comments in Barcelona, Spanish Economy Minister cast the Mexican president’s attendance at the summit as a “very important and positive sign of rapprochement” between the two nations, while Sánchez himself declined to comment on the current state of bilateral relations.

    The Barcelona gathering, formally the fourth edition of the “In Defence of Democracy” summit, brought together left-leaning global leaders to push back against a global surge in illiberal politics and extremist ideology. The event was deliberately convened to counter a parallel far-right rally held the same weekend in Milan, Italy, where leaders of Europe’s most prominent nationalist parties gathered to denounce immigration and European Union bureaucracy.

    Opening the summit, co-host Pedro Sánchez warned that democratic norms can no longer be taken for granted. “We are witnessing attacks on the multilateral system, one attempt after another to challenge the rules of international law, and a dangerous normalisation of the use of force,” he told attendees. His co-chair, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, launched a scathing critique of the United Nations Security Council, arguing the body has become dysfunctional under the influence of its five veto-wielding permanent members – the United States, China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom – whom he labeled “lords of war.” “No president of any country in the world, however powerful, has the right to keep imposing rules on other countries,” Lula added.

    Across the Italian peninsula in Milan, thousands of supporters assembled for a rally organized by Patriots for Europe, the right-wing European Parliamentary grouping. The event featured major far-right figures from across the continent: Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s Rassemblement National and head of Patriots for Europe; Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, the rally’s organizer; and Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom. Among the absentees was Hungary’s outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose Fidesz party is part of the Patriots for Europe alliance. Orbán was ousted from power last weekend in Hungary’s general election by Péter Magyar, a former close ally turned political rival.

    In his address to the crowd, Bardella said attendees would focus on two core grievances: uncontrolled immigration and the mounting regulatory burden imposed by the European Commission and EU institutions on eurozone industry and national economies. Salvini doubled down on this anti-establishment rhetoric, framing the Patriots for Europe alliance as the only genuine opposition to “Brussels bureaucrats who serve a few businessmen and warmongers.”

  • Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado draws a huge Madrid rally and rebuffs meeting with Spain’s Sánchez

    Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado draws a huge Madrid rally and rebuffs meeting with Spain’s Sánchez

    MADRID – On a Saturday during her multi-nation European tour, exiled Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado gathered thousands of supporters at a rally in Madrid’s iconic Puerta del Sol, while confirming she had turned down a planned meeting with Spain’s progressive Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The timing of the rejection carried sharp political irony: the same day Sánchez was hosting a high-profile summit of progressive leaders from across the globe who share his ideological alignment.

    Unlike Sánchez, who has long been an outspoken critic of former U.S. President Donald Trump, Machado has openly praised Trump’s January action that ousted long-time Venezuelan authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. Earlier this year, the opposition figure even awarded Trump her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, a step she says she has no regrets over, despite the Trump administration having largely sidelined her pro-democracy advocacy efforts.

    In comments to reporters after the rally, Machado justified her refusal to meet Sánchez, arguing that the proceedings of his Barcelona gathering of global progressive leaders made any such meeting inappropriate. She had previously stated her firm intention to return to Venezuela to continue her political work, though she declined to share specific details of when or how the return would be carried out, while openly acknowledging the immense challenges that would accompany any homecoming under current circumstances.

    Machado’s European tour has already included meetings with top leaders from France, Italy and the Netherlands, and it unfolds against a shifting political landscape in Venezuelan opposition circles. Interim President Delcy Rodríguez has remained in her temporary role beyond the original 90-day deadline set for her position, and the U.S. government has recently relaxed a number of sanctions targeting Rodríguez. Machado has been openly critical of Rodríguez’s leadership, framing her interim government as a force that perpetuates “chaos, violence and terror” in the country. She has repeatedly reaffirmed her commitment to holding free, democratic elections in Venezuela, saying she is confident such a transition is coming.

    Maintaining close ties to the former U.S. administration, Machado confirmed she is in permanent contact with Trump administration officials and says she trusts Washington’s phased approach to Venezuela following Maduro’s ouster. She went so far as to single out Trump as the only global head of state that has risked his own countrymen’s well-being to advance Venezuelan freedom, referencing the U.S. military operation carried out in January.

    The rally itself was backed by prominent local conservative opposition figure Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the regional leader of Madrid who is one of Sánchez’s most vocal domestic critics. Ayuso formally welcomed Machado earlier the same day before the main public gathering.

    Spain is home to more than 600,000 Venezuelan migrants, the largest concentration of Venezuelan people outside of the Americas. Most of these residents fled to Spain to escape political persecution, widespread violence, and Venezuela’s crippling economic collapse, with a majority settling in the capital city of Madrid.

    Among the attendees was 27-year-old Venezuelan migrant Grehlsy Peñuela, who says she still pins her hopes for her home country on Machado and her eventual return to Caracas. Peñuela carried signs bearing the photos of her two cousins, who she says are still being held as political prisoners in the Venezuelan capital. Like many migrant supporters at the rally, she says she would only consider returning to Venezuela if one condition is met: the full resignation of the country’s current ruling government.

  • Iran signals re-closure of Hormuz as it rejects uranium transfer abroad

    Iran signals re-closure of Hormuz as it rejects uranium transfer abroad

    A fresh standoff between the United States and Iran has thrown the strategically critical Strait of Hormuz back into crisis, as Tehran rejected Washington’s unsubstantiated claims of a planned enriched uranium transfer and threatened to reclose the global energy chokepoint if the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports remains in place. The escalation unfolded Saturday even as a small group of commercial vessels began transiting the waterway, marking days of fragile progress that has been put at sudden risk.

    The chain of tensions traces back to a U.S.-brokered 10-day ceasefire that halted Israel’s ongoing war in Lebanon, which prompted Iran to end its initial closure of the Strait of Hormuz this past Thursday. But just one day later, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the American naval blockade imposed on Iranian ports earlier this week would remain in force until a comprehensive final agreement is reached between the two nations.

    In the wake of Trump’s announcement, Iran quickly reversed its earlier stance on opening the strait. Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf emphasized in a post on X that the waterway would not stay open as long as the U.S. blockade remains in place. “What they call a naval blockade will definitely be met with an appropriate response from Iran,” Ghalibaf wrote. As of overnight, U.S. Central Command confirmed it had ordered at least 21 ships to turn away from the region since the blockade was first implemented.

    Hours before Iran issued its new threat, a convoy of eight commercial vessels — including one very large crude carrier (VLCC), oil product tankers, chemical carriers, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) carriers — was observed transiting Iranian waters south of Larak Island on Saturday morning, with additional vessels anchored in the Gulf preparing to follow the convoy. A spokesperson for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had previously stated that the limited passage was permitted under temporary negotiation terms, though it remains uncertain whether the initial convoy will be allowed to complete its full transit.

    The Strait of Hormuz is widely recognized as the world’s most important energy chokepoint, carrying roughly one-fifth of the global supply of crude oil and liquefied natural gas. The International Energy Agency has already warned that any extended closure would trigger the largest global energy supply disruption in history: cutting more than 10 million barrels of daily oil output and reducing global LNG supplies by 20 percent.

    Beyond the strait standoff, Tehran has issued a firm denial of a separate claim made by Trump Friday, in which the U.S. president stated that Iran had agreed to transfer its stockpile of enriched uranium to the United States. Trump told supporters at an Arizona rally that the U.S. would “very soon” retrieve what he called “nuclear dust” remaining from U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2024. “We’re going to get it together. We’re going to go in with Iran, at a nice leisurely pace, and go down and start excavating with big machinery… We’ll bring it back to the United States,” Trump said.

    Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei rejected the claim outright in comments to state television, saying: “Iran’s enriched uranium is not going to be transferred anywhere. Transferring uranium to the United States has not been an option for us.” Currently, Iran is estimated to hold more than 900 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, just a step away from weapons-grade material. The Trump administration has repeatedly listed preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon as a core war goal, while Iran has consistently maintained its uranium enrichment program is exclusively for peaceful civilian energy and medical purposes.

    Negotiations between the two sides have also hit snags over other key sticking points, including the unfreezing of billions of dollars in Iranian assets held abroad. A senior Iranian official told Reuters that a preliminary agreement had been reached on the issue, but Trump denied any such deal Friday, saying “no money will exchange hands in any way, shape or form.” On nuclear terms, Washington has proposed a 20-year full suspension of all Iranian nuclear enrichment activity, while Tehran has countered with an offer of a three to five-year pause, according to anonymous sources familiar with the talks cited by Reuters. Two Iranian sources have noted preliminary signals of a possible compromise that would see part of Iran’s uranium stockpile removed, but no formal deal has been announced.

    The broader conflict that sparked this crisis began on February 28, when the U.S. and Israel launched a massive coordinated barrage of strikes on Iranian targets across the Islamic Republic. Tehran responded with its own strikes against Israeli and Gulf targets, and the initial closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Days after the conflict began, Israel launched a ground invasion of Lebanon, which has killed more than 2,000 Lebanese people to date.

    As tensions spike again, regional powers are ramping up diplomatic efforts to de-escalate. Pakistan concluded two parallel high-level diplomatic visits Saturday aimed at securing a permanent end to the conflict. Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir completed a three-day visit to Tehran, where he held meetings with Iran’s president, foreign minister, parliament speaker, and top military commanders, according to an official statement from the Pakistani military. Separately, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif wrapped up a three-day tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey focused on building regional consensus for a peace deal.

    A second round of direct high-level talks between the U.S. and Iranian delegations is scheduled to take place in Islamabad next week. The first round, held last week, marked the highest-level face-to-face diplomatic engagement between the two nations in decades, with Ghalibaf and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi leading the Iranian delegation to the Pakistani capital.