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US pauses Iran attacks after Trump advised to halt bombing

The US has paused strikes on Iran for a third night as top military officials advised Donald Trump to halt his bombing campaign, and diplomatic negotiations have continued to avoid a return to all-out war. Oil prices fell on Monday as markets responded to the pause in combat. Trump is said to be weighing up diplomatic and military options in the nearly five-month-old conflict, with Benjamin Netanyahu expected to visit the White House on Tuesday. The Israeli prime minister is a vocal critic of Washington’s negotiations with Iranian leaders and has pressed for the US to continue its strikes against Iran. Netanyahu is under considerable political pressure to show that his military campaigns against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon have yielded results before elections scheduled for October. Tehran said on Sunday it would pause what it called “retaliatory” attacks against US allies in the region. “These [US] attacks continued until two nights ago, but over the past two nights the Americans have stopped their attacks,” said the army spokesperson Mohammad Akraminia. “Our strategy has essentially been retaliatory, we have also halted our retaliatory operations.” Senior officials in the Trump administration are reported to have told the president about dwindling munitions stockpiles that could hamper a sustained military campaign in the region. Axios reported on Sunday that Adm Bradley Cooper, the top US military commander in the region, had told Trump the US military campaign had reached the limits of its effectiveness. The message was said to affect Trump’s decision to hold strikes on Iran for the first time in nearly two weeks. Cooper told Trump the US had nearly exhausted the list of targets that it had developed to attack in Iran, and without a return to major combat operations there was little point in continuing the bombing campaign, the news website reported. Asked on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press whether Trump was ruling out additional strikes in Iran, the president’s UN ambassador Mike Waltz said: “I wouldn’t go that far at all. The president is keeping all options on the table.” The lull in fighting, which began on Friday evening, follows nearly two weeks of strikes against Iran and the collapse of a ceasefire brokered by Trump. Washington blamed Iran for strikes on US forces and allies in the region and its closure of the strait of Hormuz, a conduit for an estimated 20% of the world’s oil and gas. Senior diplomats from Iran and Oman were said to be holding negotiations on Sunday on reopening the vital waterway and an official in Tehran confirmed colleagues had been in touch with US negotiators to prevent a return to war. Iran has demanded payment and control over which ships pass through the strait. “Mediators are working and trying to prevent tension from escalating,” the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, told a press conference on Sunday. But an Iranian army spokesperson signalled defiance, saying the US had no clear strategy and was “experiencing strategic decision-making fatigue”. The US vice-president, JD Vance, and Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, warned Trump of the risks of a renewed military campaign against Iran at an Oval Office meeting on Friday, according to media outlets. The president then ordered the military to call off new strikes, which he had warned could “knock out everything they have”. “We’re talking to [the Iranians] right now,” Trump told reporters on Friday. “I think they’re getting more and more serious as the days go by. We’re locked and loaded and ready to go, but we’re talking to them.” At a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that evening he said he did not think Iran was ready to make a deal but he was ready to listen. Caine warned Trump about dwindling munitions stockpiles, which include Patriot missile interceptors and offensive weapons like Tomahawk cruise missiles. Vance campaigned on his opposition to US military interventions in the Middle East and has grown more vocal in his opposition to the war in Iran. Netanyahu’s office announced on Sunday that he would convene a meeting of his security cabinet before leaving for Washington on Monday. He played a crucial role in lobbying Trump to launch joint strikes against Iran in February and has said that US negotiators must take a strong line on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programme. US negotiators have instead prioritised opening the strait of Hormuz. Netanyahu will travel to Washington amid some of the worst violence this year in the West Bank, where his military is launching an “extensive” operation after the deaths of four Palestinians and two Israelis when armed settlers entered a Palestinian village on Thursday. The US and the UK under its new prime minister, Andy Burnham, are discussing plans for a high-level meeting in London this week to discuss the potential for a coalition to protect ships in the strait of Hormuz and de-mine the waterway. The discussions will be an early test for Burnham’s administration. The Labour government has so far refused to allow Washington to use a British airbase for offensive operations against Iran.

The Ukrainian start-up taking the missile fight deep into Russia

Ukraine’s leading arms company is manufacturing about 100 long-range Flamingo cruise missiles a month, a rate able to support an enduring campaign of deep strike against targets hundreds of miles inside Russia. Fire Point is also making FP-1 and FP-2 fixed-wing drones at a rate of “hundreds per day”, according to chief executive Iryna Terekh. Manufacturing at scale is restarting after a pause caused by the delay in signing off €90bn of EU lending to Ukraine. The start-up’s development from its postwar foundation in 2022 demonstrates the rapid maturing of Ukraine’s homegrown defence industry, finally giving its military the long-range capabilities denied by the west earlier in the conflict. “I’m not aware of any deep strike attack that was happening in the past few months that was not involving our products,” Terekh said. Missile and drone attacks using Fire Point munitions were taking place at a daily rate of “on average five to 15”. Flamingo missiles, which can carry 1,150kg of explosive, enough to penetrate concrete walls, were used to attack a Russian military components factory at Cheboksary in June, more than 600 miles from Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s north-east. Their actual flight distance, Terekh said, was among “the longest recorded in the history of cruise missile missions”, at about 1,800km (1,118 miles) because of the complexity of the flight path. Each Flamingo costs a little under $600,000, the chief executive said, cheaper than a US Tomahawk, which cost approximately $3.5m. The lighter FP-1 drones in particular, which have a range of more than 1,000 miles, are used to attack less well defended Russian oil refineries in a campaign that has cut their production by 20% and led to long queues at petrol pumps. They cost between $55,000 and $75,000, Terekh added. Fire Point now operates from 83 factories inside Ukraine, plus another in Denmark, employing 6,000 people, up from 3,500 late last year, according to Terekh. The Guardian visited one manufacturing site last December, where dozens of men were assembling the plywood, plastic and carbon fibre structures into whole drones. “What we’re seeing now is the result of several years of effort by the Ukrainian side,” said Ben Hodges, a former general who commanded the US army in Europe. “They can not only reach deep inside Russia with precision and get past Russian air defences, their weapons also carry a payload big enough to achieve effect.” The result is an evolution in the long-running war, where Ukraine is closing in on Russia’s ability to conduct deadly long-range attacks. Each month Russia produces up to 70 air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles, 25 sea-launched Kalibrs, according to Ukrainian estimates, plus a further 60 Iskander M ballistic missiles. Fire Point is also developing Ukraine’s first ballistic missiles, which Terekh hopes will be first launched by the end of the year. A variant of the short-range FP-7, meanwhile, will form the basis of the separate Freyja initiative, an international effort aimed at creating an alternative air defence system to the US Patriot, involving Ukraine and nine other European countries. Fire Point will make the launchers and interceptors, with a target cost of $1m per interceptor. “We adore Patriot,” Terekh said, but added that global manufacturing is nowhere near the current level of demand. Only Patriot systems are able to stop Russian ballistic missiles hitting Kyiv and elsewhere, but Ukraine’s stocks are out. “The whole Pac-3 missile production, the worldwide production rate is around 600-700 missiles per year; and this is exactly the amount of Patriot missiles that were consumed in the Middle East in two weeks,” she added. It is now hoped the technology can be first tested by July next year. Fire Point is largely owned by its founder, businessman Denys Shtilerman. Though Shtilerman held talks about selling a stake to Timur Mindich, a friend and former business associate of the president, Volodymr Zelenskyy, accused last year of running an energy corruption scheme, the founder says no deal went through. Terekh, who studied architecture before joining Fire Point in the summer of 2023, when it employed 18 people, said the company is an example of how the Russian invasion has urgently forced Ukraine – once at the heart of Soviet industry – to modernise and regenerate itself. “Ukraine, in a postwar economy, will need to be an exporter of things with a high additional added value. We do not want to be like a breadbasket any more for the world,” said Terekh, referring to Ukraine’s historical strength in agriculture. For now, however, the demands of the war mean Fire Point’s weapons are not exported.

Monday briefing: How the Cockroach protests have exposed the cracks in India’s government

Good morning. As flames engulfed parts of France and Spain this weekend, in India, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, was trying to put out a very different kind of fire. Thousands of people arrived in Delhi on Saturday to demand the resignation of his education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. When he stepped down in the early afternoon, the protests turned into a triumphant block party. But the Cockroach protests that have swept through India this summer are about much more than a single minister. They have humiliated Modi and undermined the indomitable power of his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) that has ruled India for the past 12 years. They’re also a lesson in using humour to political advantage. Modi likes to present himself as an infallible messiah, but young people have mocked the prime minister online and in the streets, calling him a “56-inch monkey” (a reference to Modi boasting about his ample 56-inch chest), and parodied his social media addresses. “Hating Modi is cool on the internet now, after years of criminalising dissent,” one told a reporter. Now the protesters have secured a victory, will their calls for revolution continue? For this morning’s newsletter, I spoke to our south Asia correspondent Hannah Ellis-Petersen, who has been reporting on the “Cockroaches” in Delhi, about what their anger stems from and what it means for the BJP. That’s after a roundup of the biggest stories of the weekend. Weekend roundup Wild fires | Authorities in France battled to contain a huge wildfire near Bordeaux in the south-west as Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, warned Spain and the Iberian peninsula were suffering the effects of the climate emergency. Germany | A man suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival then going on a knife rampage in an Islamist terror attack has been shot dead by police, German officials have said. Iran | The US has paused strikes on Iran for a second night as top military officials advised Donald Trump to halt his bombing campaign, and diplomatic negotiations have continued to avoid a return to all-out war. UK politics | Britain’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, is to indicate he will put the climate crisis and overseas development at the heart of UK international relations by taking up the country’s seat on the board at the World Bank. UK news | Five Palestine Action activists face being sentenced as terrorists for breaking windows and throwing red paint at a branch of Barclays Bank in Lancashire. In depth: ‘What if all cockroaches come together?’ It started as a sardonic joke. On 16 May, Abhijeet Dipke, an Indian student at Boston University, posted on X: “What if all cockroaches come together?” It was a tongue-in-cheek response to India’s chief justice, who had called unemployed young Indians “cockroaches”. Online, thousands of people responded to Dipke’s message. Realising he had tapped into something big, Dipke flew to Delhi on 6 June and went to Jantar Mantar, its famous protest ground. The protests drew young people from across the country, and the Cockroach Janta party (CJP) – a play on the BJP’s name – created a website listing their demands, including reform of India’s education system. India has a young population who are better educated than ever before, but it has proven a weak point for the BJP, with the country’s universities crumbling and its economy failing to provide jobs for many graduates. Millions of young people spend years prepping for gruelling public exams in the hope of securing a decent job, and their parents go into debt or sell their land to fund these studies. To make matters worse, these exam papers are routinely leaked and sold to the highest bidder. “Anyone rich enough can buy the answers,” Hannah tells me. This is devastating for millions of young people, forcing them to retake tests for which they’ve already studied. After a medical entrance exam was leaked in May, at least 12 students took their own lives; some left notes behind saying they could not bear the thought of resitting the test. The leaks are a potent symbol of institutional corruption, inflaming the anger that young people feel towards a political system that is failing them. *** Thief, thief Sonam Wangchuk, an engineer and education reformer from Ladakh, joined the protest on 28 June and declared he would go on indefinite hunger strike until the education minister resigned. “The idea of a hunger strike has a particularly powerful resonance in India,” says Hannah. “Gandhi put his life on the line several times with his hunger strikes for independence.” Delhi police forcibly removed Wangchuk from Jantar Mantar on 18 July and took him to hospital, supposedly for the sake of his health. Footage of his hospital stay went viral, and the Cockroach party called for a march on parliament. On Monday, tens of thousands of people started to fill Delhi’s streets. “In my whole time covering India, I’ve never seen so many people turning out,” Hannah says. The mood was jubilant, but by the afternoon, things had turned violent as the police began firing teargas and using batons on the protesters. Despite that, many of the protesters stayed put, and Hannah went back to Jantar Mantar in the following days. “It was the place to be in India,” she says. “There were people camping out, delivery guys bringing pizza and biryani, people cooking food. It had become about more than just the education minister resigning. More, even than education.” The protesters’ very public displays of contempt – graffiti of Modi’s name under the image of a urinating dog; people stamping on a poster of his face and chanting “thief, thief” – would have seemed unimaginable just two weeks ago. “People were just revelling in the opportunity to speak their mind,” Rahul Bhatia, a writer and author of The New India, who attended the protests on Saturday, tells me. “It was delightful. It made people think: things are possible.” *** Modi lost control of the narrative Pradhan’s resignation is a major victory for the Cockroach protesters. He is a Modi loyalist and former organiser for the RSS, the Hindu supremacist group closely affiliated with the BJP (for more on its sinister ideology, it’s worth reading this fascinating 2020 piece by Samanth Subramanian). “It creates a crack in the BJP’s armour,” Hannah says. Modi has projected an image of total authority, but this is one of the first instances where he has bent to popular will. He demands unflinching loyalty from his ministers. They may now be questioning whether their positions are quite as secure as they thought. India has taken a sharp turn towards autocracy under the BJP. Its main media channels are controlled by (or intensely favourable to) the government, and most of them gave minimal coverage to the protests, so young people resorted to sharing information and anti-government memes on social media. The party is no stranger to social media (its “troll army” is adept at smearing digital opponents, and the government tried to shut down the Cockroach party’s X account in early July), but it has lost control of the narrative. Modi’s last-ditch attempt to engage protesters with two reels he posted to his then 101 million Instagram followers on Thursday night (after which he gained over 1 million more, an impressive number, though still fewer than Beyoncé’s 299 million) seemed contrived and stilted. “He has been crucified online for those videos,” Hannah says. *** Is this the start of something bigger? It’s tempting to compare the Cockroach protests to other youth uprisings that have led to regime change in south Asia. But “a quick look at the outcome of people’s movements in India is not encouraging,” the novelist Arundhati Roy wrote in a recent piece for Equator magazine. “Revenge is surely being planned and will be visited on those [the government] sees as the main instigators.” After people took to the streets in 2019 to protest against the BJP’s controversial new citizenship act, the government swiftly outlawed gatherings in several places and detained protesters. The real test of the BJP’s power will come at election time. It is one of the world’s richest and most formidable parties, and has attempted to capture India’s electoral machinery, pushing for reforms to its voting map that would tilt power further in Modi’s favour. In West Bengal, a state the BJP had never won before, it “revised” the electoral roll and excluded more than 9.1 million voters from the register, securing a decisive victory earlier this year. “It seems like the BJP has much less support than people actually think,” Bhatia says. But after these protests, Modi will be doing all that he can to maintain his party’s grip on power. The week to come Monday | Andrew and Tristan Tate are due back in the Florida court where they’re fighting their extradition to the UK, to face rape and sex-trafficking charges. Tuesday | Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy are expected to be among those attending the Washington DC memorial service for the late South Carolina senator and Trump ally Lindsey Graham. Thursday | People will go to the polls to elect the next mayor of Greater Manchester, who will replace Andy Burnham. What else we’ve been enjoying To enshittification, we can now add the idea of decadence without pleasure: “For anyone with an Internet connection and a little discretionary income, the contemporary moment offers a superabundance of seductive distractions. Why then the pervasive mood of emptiness?” Truly, what a time to be alive. Toby Moses, head of newsletters The world is approaching “plutocratic collapse”. That’s the view of the French economist Gabriel Zucman, and I’m inclined to agree. I enjoyed Will Dunn’s recent profile of him in the New Statesman (£). Hettie Add shingles to the long list of things millennial women need to worry about – Emily Retter has looked at why the excruciating disease is on the rise. Toby Sport Tour de France | Tadej Pogacar took a record-equalling fifth win in the Tour de France on Sunday, joining the all-time greats, as Mathieu van der Poel won a frantic final stage in Paris. Commonwealth Games | Adam Ramsay-Peaty is ready to bounce back after his 100m breaststroke bronze at the Commonwealth Games. He said: “The last 24 hours have been a bit of a whirlwind, but I’m really happy with that.” Formula One | Lando Norris won the Hungarian Grand Prix with an assured drive for McLaren at the Hungaroring, his and the team’s first victory of the year. The front pages “Miliband vows to give UK ‘global leadership’ role on climate crisis”, is the Guardian’s front page today. The Times says “Teen anxiety pays more than job”, and the Telegraph also has “PM to crack down on youth benefits”. Still on politics, The Mail goes with “Streeting: I will quit if defence plan falls short”, the i Paper says “Council tax and stamp duty to be scrapped under Burnham plans”, and the Express splashes “Police ‘waste’ millions on diversity schemes”. The FT splashes “Biggest defence companies home in on start-ups for nimbler military tech”, and the Mirror leads with its water safety campaign, saying “No child should die for a day at the seaside”. Lastly, Metro splashes “Fly and dry” on Gatwick’s water outage. Today in Focus How Palantir got into the NHS Investigative journalist, Lucas Amin, reports on how the tech company Palantir won a £330m contract with the NHS … and what happened once its software was introduced. Cartoon of the day | Tom Gauld The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Restricting eating to a nine‑hour window and avoiding food for four hours before sleep may improve cognitive health in older adults. In a six‑month trial of 47 women who were considered overweight or obese, both groups lost similar weight, but those following time‑restricted eating performed better on spatial planning and problem‑solving tests, with hints of improved memory. Researchers suggest circadian rhythms, metabolism and inflammation may play a role. Experts stress the findings are preliminary and require larger, peer‑reviewed studies. Prof Wendy Hall, the head of nutritional sciences at King’s College London, said: “Time-restricted eating is a plausible approach to supporting cognitive health in midlife”. Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply

What is a ‘fire cloud’, and how have they worsened wildfires in Europe?

As France and Spain battle some of the worst wildfires in recent history, experts have warned of an unprecedented phenomenon that could exacerbate the effects of the blazes: pyrocumulonimbus, or “fire clouds”. Wildfires often spread when hot, windy and dry conditions coalesce but severe wildfires can generate their own unique weather systems. One of the most striking examples of this are pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or fire-generated thunderstorms, which are the most severe form of fire clouds. Here is what you need to know about them. What is a ‘fire cloud’? In a nutshell, pyrocumulonimbus, or “pyroCb” clouds, are gigantic storm clouds that are generated by a wildfire. Massive wildfires emit large amounts of energy and heat that rapidly rise in a smoke plume. When the fire plume rises high enough, low atmospheric pressure causes its air to cool, and the moisture condenses and forms a cloud. Such clouds can generate lightning strikes and windy conditions. If a wildfire is sufficiently large and intense, the smoke plume it generates can form a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, which can reach altitudes of 10–15km (six to nine miles) and penetrate the stratosphere. Nasa calls them the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds”. “It’s a full thunderstorm forming within the fire plume,” says Rick McRae, an adjunct professor from the University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) bushfire research group. “These things, they get up to roughly 10,000 cubic kilometres of the atmosphere, so they have a big impact.” Why are these pyrocumulonimbus cloud formations so dangerous? When pyrocumulonimbus clouds form, they can create winds that make the wildfires below spread even faster, and sometimes generate their own lightning, which can in turn ignite more fires further afield. Experts say stronger wind gusts can create more unpredictable fire patterns and therefore make conditions more dangerous for firefighters battling the blazes on the ground. “The cloud is confirmation that the fire is very dangerous,” says UNSW’s McRae, who worked as a senior fire manager for 30 years. “The cloud is a confirmation that it’s appropriate that lots of people have been evacuated.” How common are fire clouds? Australia started experiencing pyrocumulonimbus clouds at the beginning of the century and experts say it appears they are becoming more common. They also formed during massive wildfires in California in 2022, but this could be a new situation for France. If confirmed, this would be the first time a pyroCb has been observed in France. “It’s the first time France has had to explicitly consider the concept of a pyroCb,” says McRae. “Whether or not they had one a few days back or not isn’t really the question,” he says, “the question is whether there’s one coming on Tuesday, Wednesday this week.” Why are these clouds occurring more frequently? The climate crisis is creating more dangerous conditions for wildfires globally, and also the conditions that lead to the formation of pyrocumulonimbus clouds. “It’s not just as simple as turning the temperature dial up. It’s full-on climate change,” says McRae. “It’s changes in the atmosphere, changes in the surface weather, changes in a lot of things.” Experts say climate models indicate these trends will increase in severity in the future. The wildfires in Europe have happened during peak tourist season in a region that has been hit by successive heatwaves, with woodland areas dried out from a lack of rain since May. Weather forecasters warn another heatwave could hit France from Tuesday, with temperatures reaching 40C in some areas. “There is going to be a blob of high heat that will move from Czechoslovakia over a four- or five-day period,” says McRae.

Pedro Sánchez says Spain is suffering effects of climate crisis as firefighters battle wildfires in France

Authorities in France battled to contain a huge wildfire near Bordeaux as the forecast of another heatwave threatened to deepen the crisis and the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, warned Spain and the Iberian peninsula were suffering the effects of the climate emergency. Windy conditions on Saturday night hampered efforts to extinguish the blaze in the Gironde region of south-western France – which has consumed an area four times the size of Paris and caused nearly 220,000 people to be evacuated. In Spain, fires west of Madrid were being brought under control, but Sánchez spoke on Sunday of “difficult hours”. Weather forecasters say another heatwave could hit France from Tuesday, with temperatures reaching 40C in some areas. Wildfires have forced about 375,000 people to flee their homes in France and Spain. In France nearly 260,000 have been forced to flee, while in neighbouring Spain 116,000 have been evacuated this week. Bordeaux’s mayor, Thomas Cazenave, described the Gironde blaze as being “at the gates of the metropolitan area”, between 15 and 20 miles (25-30km) from the city itself, which has a population of 268,000. An evacuation of the city was not on the cards, he said. The fire situation in Gironde remained “broadly stable overnight” with no major developments, the local authority said on Monday. “Security and emergency services remain fully mobilised and are continuing their operations on the ground,” the statement said. Nearly 260,000 people have been evacuated across France as a whole, including 36,000 ordered to leave another wildfire zone in the Landes region farther south earlier this week. Sophie Brocas, the prefect of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, which includes the Gironde, said that the highly unpredictable nature of this wildfire was a phenomenon never seen before in France. “I urge tourists not to come to Gironde as long as the fire has not been contained,” she said. “I invite tourists who are already here to think about going to another destination. We don’t know where the fire is going to go.” France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, was due on Monday morning to hold a crisis cabinet meeting to discuss the emergency. France’s interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said on Sunday the previous night had been difficult and “the situation remains very unfavourable”. He said the Gironde fire had become “extremely virulent and unpredictable again” on Saturday night, generating its own wind and spreading erratically towards the Bordeaux metropolitan area. It had become calmer by the end of the night, he said. Since Wednesday, the fire in Gironde has injured 84 firefighters, 10 of whom have been evacuated, according to the latest situation report published on Sunday by the prefecture. Sebastien Bouvier, federal secretary of France’s CFDT union, said firefighters did not have adequate equipment to protect themselves from the fires’ toxic fumes. About 2,500 firefighters (including a Swiss team), 1,500 military personnel and about 1,200 police had been deployed to Gironde, Nuñez said, as he praised the contribution of 450 volunteers from civil security organisations. He said another five Gironde municipalities had been evacuated overnight. One firefighter told Agence France-Presse that the fire had formed a pyrocumulonimbus, a fire-generated thunderstorm that “creates its own wind, with whirlwinds, becoming erratic and uncontrollable”. A spokesperson for the National Firefighters Federation of France said that while known in wildfire-prone Australia and Canada, one had never been seen before in France. The federation’s Lt Col Éric Brocardi told AFP there was a need to understand a “natural force beyond our control”. He said: “It’s a David v Goliath scenario: the idea is that, at some point, we’ll find a weak spot and strike there.” Police in Gironde made three arrests over the weekend, including one man smoking in the forest and two having barbecues in a forest area. Authorities in Spain said major areas of fire near Madrid had been contained and cooled down, according to a senior officer with Spain’s military emergencies unit. “We’re facing some difficult hours, although it’s true that the latest update has shown that last night was very positive in terms of the fire’s evolution and efforts to control it,” Pedro Sánchez said. Speaking at an advance firefighters’ command post west of Madrid, the prime minister warned that Spain and Portugal were experiencing the varied consequences of the climate emergency, from fires and storms to heavy snowfalls. “The entire Iberian peninsula is suffering the effects of the climate emergency in a very specific way,” he said. While the fire near Madrid was being brought under control, emergency workers battled to extinguish a new fire near the Mediterranean port city of València, where at least 15,000 people were evacuated. “The fire is beyond our capacity to extinguish, it has a perimeter of about 21km,” the València region’s president, Juanfran Pérez Llorca, said late on Saturday. Spain’s interior ministry said on Saturday evening that a man had died in a fire in the Valèncian town of Manises. He had been found in a car in a ravine, officials said. Sánchez was due to visit València on Monday. Authorities also ordered the evacuation of eight more municipalities near Toledo, south of Madrid, on Saturday, bringing the number of people forced to flee their homes by wildfires in Spain in recent days to 116,000, the Associated Press reported. Spain’s environment minister, Sara Aagesen, said the wildfire that had burned through 50,000 hectares of land in the central province of Ávila was “the largest forest fire in our country’s recent history”. The civil protection chief, Virginia Barcones, called the Ávila fire a “monster”. Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, said on Sunday evening the fires were advancing but slowly. The blazes are the latest episode in a summer of wildfires that threaten to burn an unprecedented expanse of land. Europe has endured a series of heatwaves since the spring, fuelled by the climate crisis, including the hottest-ever June, leaving vegetation tinder dry. The EU commissioner for crisis management, Hadja Lahbib, told the BBC it was likely that damage from wildfires would exceed previous records. “Last year, one million hectares burned during the summer and so we are expecting to face another historic, sad record because the season has started earlier in the year,” she said. Spain’s environment ministry said 32 major fires affecting 152,678 hectares (377,276 acres) had been recorded so far in 2026, compared with seven affecting 24,133 hectares in the same period in 2025. The Gironde fire in France has so far burned 42,000 hectares, an area four times the size of Paris and one of the biggest devastations of land since the second world war. At least 240 homes had been destroyed and many more damaged, a gendarme told BFMTV. Firefighters are battling to slow the fire’s progression toward Bordeaux from the ground and air, with planes dropping water and retardants. Jérôme Steffe, the mayor of Cestas commune, 10 miles from Bordeaux city centre, told French media: “We are working together to put in place a firewall to block the advance of the flames.” An exhibition centre in Bordeaux has been turned into an emergency shelter, providing camp beds and food for thousands of people, including hundreds of older people evacuated from care homes. Cazenave said he had asked the central government for an economic crisis plan for the area because many businesses and workers had been evacuated from areas west of Bordeaux and the tourism industry had been heavily affected. He said it was impossible to say when people evacuated as a precaution could return to their homes. “We don’t know how long this crisis will last, whether several days or several weeks,” he said. The Landes fire has consumed 3,600 hectares and a rekindling of flames on Saturday had to be tackled from the air, Nuñez said. French authorities are also dealing with wildfires in the south-eastern Var region, where 3,000 people have been evacuated, as well as the Hautes-Alpes and Corsica.

Ukraine war briefing: Air ceasefire talk ahead of Trump-Zelenskyy meeting

Ukrainian and US officials have discussed a proposal to offer Russia an air ceasefire, the Reuters news agency has reported, citing a Ukrainian source. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is due to meet Donald Trump, the US president, in Washington on Tuesday. The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on ⁠Sunday that Russia considered it premature to comment on any such ceasefire proposal. “We do not know how credible these reports are or where they come from. These are newspaper reports and nothing more. Therefore, it is premature to comment on them at this stage,” the Interfax news agency quoted Peskov as saying. “We have heard statements that some new formulas may be possible. We still need to learn more about them … What happens next will depend on how closely they correspond to our interests.” Romania said it was summoning Russia’s ambassador after the Nato member’s military shot down a third drone in as many days. A Romanian F-16 fighter jet shot down the drone over the Black Sea, five minutes after it entered the country’s airspace, said Romania’s defence minister, Radu Miruță. The foreign minister, Oana Țoiu, condemned “repeated violations”. The Romanian president, Nicușor Dan, said that according to an investigation, a drone shot down on Friday was a “Shahed model used by the Russian Federation in its war of aggression against Ukraine”. Investigations into drones shot down on Saturday and Sunday continued, he said. The Golden Leo, an international cargo vessel, sank off the coast of ⁠Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa on Sunday, a week after Ukrainian ⁠officials said ⁠it had been struck by Russian forces. Nine ⁠crew members were killed in the attack while eight ‌were evacuated to safety. The ‌ship had left the ‌port of Chornomorsk with a cargo of corn when it was shelled by Russian forces on 19 July. Russia’s defence ministry ⁠said on Sunday that its forces had ⁠struck Ukrainian ⁠ports and shipping. Russia claimed the container terminal ‌at Chornomorsk, near ‌Odesa, handled “military cargoes”. Russia launched seven ballistic missiles and 136 drones at Ukraine overnight into Sunday, the Ukrainian air force said. In the northern Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, a Russian drone hit ⁠a supermarket, killing two people – including a nine-year-old child – and wounding 25, emergency services said. In the eastern city of Kharkiv, one person was killed and 16 others required medical attention ‌after a daytime drone attack, said the mayor, Ihor Terekhov. A glide bomb attack killed one person and wounded six in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, said the regional governor, Ivan Fedorov. In Kyiv, a fire broke out on the seventh and eighth floors of a multi-storey apartment block in a central district after ‌a missile attack, said the mayor, Vitali Klitschko. Three people were wounded. In Sloviansk, Donetsk region, the national oil and gas company Naftogaz said two of its employees died in a Russian attack while trying to help residents affected by an earlier strike. Russia said ⁠areas of Ukraine under Moscow’s control had also come under attack, with four people killed in a Ukrainian drone strike in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Horlivka. Twelve ⁠people, including two children, were ⁠injured ⁠in drone attack on ⁠the Russian city of Belgorod, close ⁠to Ukraine’s ‌border, regional authorities ‌said early on Monday. Ukraine denies targeting civilians. Volodymyr Zelenskyy will become Andy Burnham’s first overseas visitor as prime minister, in a visit that Burnham said underlined Britain’s “unwavering” backing for Ukraine, Peter Walker writes. Less than two weeks after Keir Starmer travelled to Kyiv for the final foreign visit of his prime ministership, Zelenskyy will on Monday join Burnham at a naval base where Ukrainian forces have been receiving training. According to statistics released by No 10, since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, total UK support for the country has totalled £25bn, including £16bn in military assistance. Burnham and Zelenskyy are due to discuss joint projects including Stone Cloak, an electronic jammer for which the UK has shared the intellectual property, allowing Ukraine to use the system immediately to prevent Russia shooting down Ukrainian drones. Since being proven on the Ukrainian frontline, the jammers are due to be fitted to new UK weaponry, including cruise missiles.

Burnham to meet Zelenskyy at UK naval base in show of ‘unwavering’ support

Volodymyr Zelenskyy will become Andy Burnham’s first overseas visitor as prime minister, in a visit that Burnham said underlined Britain’s “unwavering” backing for Ukraine. Less than two weeks after Keir Starmer travelled to Kyiv for the final foreign visit of his prime ministership, the Ukrainian president will on Monday join Burnham at a naval base where Ukrainian forces have been receiving training. Zelenskyy was one of the first world leaders Burnham spoke to when he entered No 10 last week, and the prime minister has promised to maintain Starmer’s strong support for the country in pushing back against Russia’s invasion. On the visit to the base, the pair will speak to Ukrainian and British military personnel who have taken part in Exercise Sea Breeze, a 15-country training deployment based on mine exercises and other maritime operations in the Black Sea. The second part of this year’s exercise, which took place in Portland, Dorset, finished on Friday and involved more than 200 Ukrainian personnel. Burnham and Zelenskyy are also due to discuss joint projects including Stone Cloak, an electronic jammer for which the UK has shared the intellectual property, allowing Ukraine to use the system immediately. Thousands of the jammers, each about the size of a tablet computer, have been sent to Ukraine to be fitted to drones, with the aim of stopping Russian air defence systems from tracking and targeting them. Ukraine is now able to mass produce the devices itself. After being initially used there, the jammers are due to be fitted to new UK weaponry, including cruise missiles. Burnham, in a comment released by Downing Street before the visit, said: “Britain stands with Ukraine, shoulder to shoulder, and our support remains unwavering. Russia should be in no doubt of our resolve, and we will not back down until we achieve a long-lasting and just peace for Ukraine. “Stone Cloak is the best of homegrown British innovation and proven on the frontline, and it will be vital to protecting our security in both our countries.” According to statistics released by No 10, since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, total UK support for the country has totalled £25bn, including £16bn in military assistance. Starmer visited Ukraine a number of times, and hosted Zelenskyy regularly. In one of the most telling displays of UK support, after a March 2025 visit to the White House during which the Ukrainian leader was publicly berated by Donald Trump, he then travelled to the UK and met not only Starmer but also King Charles at Sandringham, which is primarily a royal home and rarely used for official events. During Starmer’s final visit to Ukraine, Zelenskyy presented him with the country’s Order of Freedom, the most prestigious honour that can be given to an overseas national. During a press conference with Starmer, the Ukrainian president said he hoped to build a strong relationship with Burnham, and to arrange a meeting “as soon as possible”.

Police shoot dead Berlin Pride van and knife rampage suspect, officials say

A man suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival then going on a knife rampage in an Islamist terror attack has been shot dead by police, German officials have said. Police confirmed on Sunday evening that the chief suspect had been shot dead, reportedly during an operation at an allotment garden complex ⁠in the capital’s Spandau district. One woman was killed on Saturday evening and 29 others were injured after a man drove a rented minivan into a crowd of pedestrians, then attacked people with what appeared to be a machete. The attack took place in the Tiergarten park near the Brandenburg Gate at about 10pm local time on Saturday, close to one of Europe’s biggest LGBTQ+ celebrations. The attack forced organisers to cut short one of Europe’s largest Pride events and came as Germany remained on edge after a series of deadly vehicle and knife attacks. The German interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt, named the chief suspect as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout. “We are dealing here with ‌a suspected ‌perpetrator, who had previously drawn attention ‌to himself through a high volume of criminal offences, radicalisation and affiliation with the Islamist scene,” he told ‌a press conference near the site of the attack. He said Ballout had a criminal conviction and had been sentenced as a juvenile to a year and 10 months in prison, but that the sentence had been suspended. German media reported that Ballout, a German national with Lebanese roots, was a supporter of Islamic State and last year travelled to the Middle East in a failed attempt to join the group. He was then convicted in Germany of “preparing a serious act of subversive violence”, the news outlets Bild and Der Spiegel reported. Police and prosecutors had asked for help in finding Ballout, but warned the public to avoid “direct contact” with him, saying he may be armed and dangerous. Police searched an apartment in the Schöneberg district of Berlin near the scene of the attack in the early hours of Sunday, but said they had found no one there. Before Ballout was shot, Der Spiegel spoke with his father, Tawfik, by telephone from Lebanon, where he was visiting relatives. Describing Ballout as “generous, emotional, loving”, he said his son had lived with his mother, from whom Tawfik is divorced, and two of his three sisters. Ballout attended school until 10th grade, then bounced from job to job, in security or as a driver. Tawfik described the family as Shia but “not extremely religious” and said it “does not support Islamic State”, an extremist Sunni group. He and Ballout had fought about his hair and beard. “I did not allow him to wear a long beard,” he told Spiegel, calling it a symbol of extremism. Asked about a possible motive for the attack, he said: “He was brainwashed.” Tawfik spoke with Ballout on Saturday, the day of the attack. “He called me and we spoke normally, like every day. He said he missed me and wished he was with us in Lebanon.” The chancellor, Friedrich Merz, urged Germany to avoid division and intimidation in the aftermath of the attack. “We will think about consequences, we will ‌defend our freedom,” he said in a news conference. Earlier, Merz vowed to punish those responsible, describing the “heinous act” as an “attack on our society” in a social media post. The flag at the German Bundestag was ordered to be lowered to half mast. Police said the vehicle had struck multiple ⁠people after being driven into the Tiergarten. Shortly before 10pm the driver of the white minivan swerved into the park, close to where the route of the Pride march had been earlier in the day, hitting people on a path and crashing into a tree. Bild cited a witness as saying that a man had emerged from the vehicle and fled on foot. A hunt involving helicopters and officers from several German states was under way across the capital on Sunday. Julian Methig, who attended the event, described it as a nightmare come true. “It’s one of the worst days for the queer community and a day I personally hoped I’d never have to experience … I’m shocked,” he said. Hundreds of thousands of people had gathered in Berlin in warm summer sunshine to celebrate the Pride parade. It is known in Germany as Christopher Street Day (CSD), named after the site of the Stonewall Inn in New York City where riots against police raids touched off the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. CSD was first held in West Berlin in 1979. Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, called the deadly assault “an attack on our free and cosmopolitan society”. “Following a peaceful and colourful CSD, the rally for a tolerant and peaceful Berlin was attacked in the most brutal manner,” he said on X. “Berlin is the city of freedom – and our freedom has today been attacked in the most appalling way. My thoughts are with the victims, their families and friends.” For the first time in its history, CSD began on Friday night this year with a pro-democracy political rally. Berlin will hold a regional election in September along with two other states. The parade on Saturday ran under the motto “taking a stand is hot”, which organisers said was “in response to increasing hostility” to LGBTQ+ people in Germany. More than 80 floats and 50 groups on foot joined the procession through the city centre past Potsdamer Platz and the Victory Column monument in the Tiergarten, culminating in a rally at the Brandenburg Gate. Earlier in the day one person was arrested for resisting police orders at a far-right counterprotest. Before last year’s parade, Berlin LGBTQ+ organisations sounded the alarm that attacks had become more frequent while hard-won rights were under threat. Campaigners said a rise in hostility had accompanied the surge in support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), now the most popular party in national opinion polls, as well as an increase in Islamist-inspired attacks. European leaders offered solidarity, including heads of government in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. “Italy firmly condemns and opposes all forms of hate and extremism,” the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, wrote on X, adding: “We stand with Germany and the German people.” The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: “Faced with hatred and violence, our response will always be unity, freedom, and resolve.” The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, a German centre-right politician allied with Merz, sent her deepest sympathy to the victims of the attack, describing the CSD parade as standing for “freedom, dignity and equality – the fundamental values of the EU”. Britain’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, said he was “horrified by the appalling attack in Berlin” and had spoken to his counterpart, Johann Wadephul, “to convey the UK’s solidarity: we stand with Germany”. Far-right leaders were also quick to comment on the attacks. The co-leader of the AfD Tino Chrupalla wrote on X: “We will not allow religious extremists to divide our country with violence and intolerance!” The president of France’s far-right National Rally, Jordan Bardella, wrote: “The Islamist threat remains a major issue in Europe and continues to target what they hate most about our civilisation – and what we cherish so much – freedom.”