Trump said that Lebanon had been hit hard for decades and that the United States would help the country going forward. “It’s been a very badly treated place and country, and we’re going to have it properly treated, and treated with the respect that it deserves,” Trump said.
And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. Hungary’s opposition Fidesz party, led by the former prime minister Viktor Orbán, said that prosecutors raided its servers to look at party’s “entire communications system and databases” (14:08). Prosecutors told the Guardian the searches were part of a broader investigation into the National Culture Fund (15:11), but declined to offer more details (16:14). Hungary’s prime minister Péter Magyar responded to raids by saying that “we await the information on what case they are investigating and what was seized” (14:08). The search was condemned by French far-right leader and leading presidential candidate Marine Le Pen (14:56). In other news, Italian police clashed with demonstrators in the northern city of Bologna on Monday night, ANSA news agency reported, during a protest over a man’s death after officers tried to arrest him (10:37). A strike on a ship in the Black Sea carrying propane to the Ukrainian port of Reni wounded three seafarers and forced the crew’s evacuation, Romania’s president Nicușor Dan said (10:17). The United Nations said that civilian casualties in the war sparked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine rose 37 percent in the first half of this year (11:28). If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.
A “stressed and dehydrated” monkey has been found in a laundry bag on a London bus in what animal welfare charities warn could be the “first of many” abandonments now owners must obtain primate licenses. The female common marmoset was discovered on a 302 bus waiting in Kensal Rise, north-west London, on Friday by a passenger whose buggy was obstructed by the bag containing the monkey in a cage. The monkey has since been named Oyster after the London transport payment system. The bus driver contacted the RSPCA, which handled 238 reports of primate neglect and cruelty between 2021 and 2025. New legislation passed in April mandated that all primates kept in England are licensed and microchipped. Owners who failed to obtain a license by 6 April risk an unlimited fine or jail. Alison Cronin, the director of Monkey World and a contributor to the new legislation, said over the past decade “a lot of well-meaning people … have fallen victim to people on social media promoting these wild animals as good domestic pets”. She said UK breeders were “making a killing” out of this misconception, though she welcomed the law change’s requirement for them to ensure they were only selling monkeys into homes with suitable environments. Although a Born Free survey in January suggested there had been limited uptake of the new licensing system, Cronin said she had observed that many owners have since obtained licenses. She said abandoned monkeys were “nothing new” and not necessarily a reflection of the law change. “These animals have been out there and subject to abuse and neglect for all of the years running up to this,” she said. The driver and Metroline staff are aiding RSPCA inquiries to trace the person responsible for dumping the marmoset, which had not been microchipped. Clare Dew, RSPCA London’s chief investigator, said Oyster’s abandonment “was clearly intentional”, and she suspected it was “a direct result of the new legislation”. The “frightened marmoset” was well concealed in the bag, Dew said. “She’d been left with some apple but was, understandably, very stressed and dehydrated.” Oyster is now healthy and living in a sanctuary with specialist primate facilities, where she “settled in really well over the weekend” and will be introduced to a male companion shortly. Evie Button, a RSPCA exotic animals expert, described primates as “highly intelligent and social wild animals who need a lot of space, mental stimulation and appropriate companions – needs that can’t be met by human company alone”. She added: “There is a real concern that keepers who cannot or do not want to license their pet may now instead abandon them.” The government estimates that 5,000 primates are kept as pets in England. Chris Lewis, the captivity research and policy manager at Born Free, called on local authorities and the government to raise greater awareness of the law change. “Primates are complex, intelligent animals whose needs cannot be met when kept as a pet,” he said. “Although not the complete ban which experts and primatologists advocated for, the introduction of the Animal Welfare (Primate Licences) (England) Regulations represented an important step towards protecting privately kept primates, but their success depends on effective implementation and strict enforcement.”
Danish authorities have advised tourists to stand still, make eye contact and put up “maximum resistance” in the event of attack if they encounter a wolf while on holiday. After a 200-year absence, wolves started returning to Denmark in 2012. There are now estimated to be 49 wolves on the Danish peninsula of Jutland. Generally, it is rare for wolves to even approach humans, but in the area around the popular tourism destination of Oksbøl, young ones were spotted doing so earlier this year. The municipality of Varde and Visit Vesterhavet have distributed flyers containing the government advice around holiday homes, campsites and tourist offices in Danish, English and German. Tourists are told to keep calm and still in the presence of a wolf, hold eye contact, take a picture of the animal and, if it will not go away of its own accord, shout, clap hands and wave arms. They are advised not to follow or to turn their backs on an approaching wolf. The tip is to “stare directly at it” to “show dominance”. While there have been no wolf attacks on humans in Denmark, in the event of it happening, tourists are urged: “You must offer maximum resistance: hit and kick and use any blunt weapon.” The government advice also states that children under the age of 10 should be accompanied by an adult in the Oksbøl area. Wolves have long had a presence in Denmark – the oldest wolf bones in the country are 13,000 years old – but after the last wolf was shot in 1813 they only started to make a comeback in the last two decades. Their presence has received a mixed response, often dividing people along political lines. In April, two ponies were killed by wolves in a fortnight. Soon after, four MPs from the far-right Danish People’s party were reported to police for sharing a Facebook post calling on people to “Shoot the wolf”. Wolves are protected by EU law. The wolf expert Peter Sunde, a wildlife ecology professor at Aarhus University, said: “During the winter and spring of 2026, at least two young wolves were observed approaching humans and exhibiting markedly reduced flight distances in the area around Oksbøl that is a tourist hotspot. One of these wolves is still alive.” This type of behaviour, he said, usually happens when young wolves are repeatedly exposed to humans. “It has been discussed whether tourists, who may be unaware both of the presence of wolves in the area and of the basic recommendations regarding wolf encounters, may have contributed to the development of this behaviour,” he added. “To prevent similar behaviour from developing in future generations of young wolves, it is important that people who live in or visit wolf habitats – including tourists – understand that they should neither approach wolves nor leave food that may attract them.” Varde’s second deputy mayor, Sandie Eis Ravn, said the campaign was aimed at informing tourists at the request of local businesses. “If you are visiting somewhere and you know there is a wolf in the nearby forest, to make sure you have the right code of conduct when you meet this creature,” she said.
The US government’s latest allegations that Cuba is behind “many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history” and that its leaders pose “a unique threat to American homeland security” have come as startling revelations to those living under the six-month-long US oil blockade in Havana, where desperate people search through piles of uncollected rubbish for food, or else swelter at home in 24-hour-plus blackouts. The unsigned 100-page report, Cuba: Capital of 21st-Century Communism, published by the US state department on Monday, blames Havana for everything from “the George Floyd riots to the rise of antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses”. It is the latest push in a maximum-pressure campaign to bring down the island’s government that began with the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, the president of Cuba’s ally Venezuela, on 3 January. Since then, Cuba has been brought to a standstill by the oil blockade, sanctions on foreign businesses and threats of a military intervention. It also seems to be an attempt to “other” those on the US left before November’s midterm elections. “Cuba’s assault on the United States was never, at root, a quarrel over economic policy or sovereignty or even ownership of a particular territory,” the report reads. “It was a revolution against western civilisation itself – waged, in part, via the novel and insidious method of persuading the children of the west to turn against their own inheritance.” “Fidel would have been quite proud of this,” said one amused Cuban as he read it. The US state department, run by the Cuban-American Marco Rubio, refused to name the author, but it is clearly someone who knows their history. “Almost immediately after taking Havana in January 1959, Castro began plotting armed assaults against neighbouring governments – launching expeditions against Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama in just that year alone,” it reads. What it fails to mention is that Haiti was then run by François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who killed an estimated 60,000 of his own people; the Dominican Republic by Rafael Trujillo, who launched the “parsley massacre”, killing between 20,000 to 35,000 Haitians; and Nicaragua by the Somoza family, who are credited with the murder of up to 50,000 Nicaraguans. Although the report provides no new evidence, there is a suspicious emphasis on race. The supposedly remarkable success of Cuban intelligence at infiltrating US institutions was due to a soft spot for “glamorous Latins”, it quotes an intelligence officer saying to the Miami Herald in 2002: “‘We’re much more open to Latins than we are to people with steel teeth and a Slavic accent.’” It also bemoans the ideological commitment of the spies Cuba recruited, while failing to mention either that several were inspired by the CIA’s attempts to assassinate Castro, or the shelter the US offered to the exiles Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who organised the bombing of Cubana flight 455 in 1976, killing 73 people. Most jarringly, the report groups together the US’s long internal struggle around civil rights and social reform and reframes it as a battle between the forces of foreign actors and “western civilisation”, lingering over groups such as the Black Panthers, which it credits to Cuba. While several black revolutionaries found sanctuary on the island, most famously Assata Shakur, who had a $2m price on her head for the killing of a New Jersey state trooper, the experience was not perhaps as conspiratorial as the author suggests. In interviews, Nehanda Abiodun, one of the mentioned fugitives, said her politics and revolutionary rage came from her experience growing up in 1970s New York, not out of any love for Cuba, whose government she came to resent for muzzling her in return for refuge. She used to say that the first thing that happened on landing was being racially profiled by the Cuban police. If she was part of a well-oiled international conspiracy, it didn’t show. For five years the Cuban government has not even been able to afford to feed its 9.5 million people, who mostly blame it for the crisis. But the report is ready for this: “To mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely. Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger.” It concludes: “Today, Cuban agents and operatives maintain a foothold in hundreds of front groups, activist organisations, solidarity centres, and ideological NGO and nonprofit networks. These groups collectively represent one of the single largest, most sophisticated and dangerous vectors for hostile foreign influence in modern American history.” In the run-up to the report’s release, Miguel Díaz-Canel, Cuba’s president, said the US had fallen prey to a “new and more dangerous version of McCarthyism”. But perhaps the more damning criticism came from a Cuban academic who preferred to remain nameless: “It reads just like a report Cuba’s state media might write about the United States.”
Fast-moving wildfires have burned two First Nations communities in Canada to the ground, as members said they were left to self-evacuate without government help or emergency alerts. Thirteen communities in Ontario province have been ordered to evacuate because of wildfires, most of them First Nations. The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, told reporters on Monday that close to 2,000 people had been evacuated so far to cities including Toronto and Niagara Falls. There are nearly 1,000 wildfires burning across Canada, with about 200 in Ontario. The prime minister, Mark Carney, said heatwaves and dry weather had combined to create “one of the most intense wildfire seasons in Canadian history”. Namaygoosisagagun First Nation, located north of Thunder Bay in north-western Ontario, was engulfed by fire on 15 June. About two dozen people quickly boarded boats packed with their possessions and raced across the nearby lake. “If this community waited for a mandatory evacuation process, we’d be doing a recovery mission for the bodies of children, of elders, of men and women,” said Linda Debassige, grand council chief of the Anishinabek Nation, which represents 39 Ontario First Nations. All members safely escaped but the community’s buildings and other infrastructure were completely destroyed. The Namaygoosisagagun people evacuated to Thunder Bay, where the Anishinabek Nation has been providing assistance. Debassige said that Namaygoosisagagun’s chief, Helen Paavola, had made inquiries to the federal government in the days leading up to the fire, but the community had been assured there was no imminent threat. Ford travelled to Thunder Bay over the weekend and said the province was willing to spend whatever was necessary to fight the fires. However, First Nations leaders, including from the Anishinabek Nation, accused the premier of being unclear about what support the province was providing and, and of disorganisation in coordinating with First Nations. The CBC has reported that although Ontario spent $271m on emergency firefighting in 2025-26, it plans to spend only $150m in 2026-27. The Ontario government did not respond to requests for comment. First Nations communities are acutely vulnerable to wildfire danger in Canada, with 80% of Indigenous communities located in areas more susceptible to fires, according to a 2019 study from the Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. The Namaygoosisagagun First Nation faces an additional challenge in that, although it is recognised as a nation by many other First Nations, it is still in the process of being officially recognised by the federal government, making it more difficult to gain emergency funding. Debassige said Canada’s federal government had agreed to provide the funding for now but that the Anishinabek Nation had had to step in and offer financial support because of delays on the government side. The Whitewater Lake First Nation, about 250km north of Thunder Bay, was also destroyed by the recent wildfires. Though the community is made up of mostly seasonal residences with no full-time residents, First Nations leaders say the community’s infrastructure is now gone. Nicole Redvers, an associate professor at Western University in London, Ontario, said there was a disproportionate wildfire impact on Indigenous communities due to proximity to traditional territories that livelihoods are based around, which include forests. That vulnerability, alongside Canada’s lack of planning around community resilience on climate change, made for scenarios like what the Namaygoosisagagun had to contend with, said Redvers. “A community had to evacuate themselves without any warning,” she said. “If we don’t have the preparedness capacity within Canada to ensure that all communities have climate adaption plans in place … we’re definitely not well placed to have resilience within our communities going forward.”
First, the guests stopped coming. As Ukrainian drones and missiles pounded Crimea throughout the spring and into the summer, Russian tourists began cancelling their bookings at the small guesthouse Marina runs in Yevpatoria, a resort town on the peninsula’s Black Sea coast. Then petrol became scarce, making it harder to stock the business with food and other essentials. Now, electricity and running water are cut off for much of the day, just as the summer heat sets in. “For 12 years they told us Crimea was 100% protected,” Marina said, referring to the promises Russian officials have made since seizing it from Ukraine in 2014. “And then, within a month, we’ve been thrown back into the Stone Age – no electricity, no water, no fuel.” Since the start of this year, Kyiv has launched its largest sustained air campaign against Crimea, targeting both the peninsula and the land and sea transport links connecting it to Russia. Residents are facing the most severe disruption to daily life since its annexation in 2014. It was the first Russian-controlled region to experience the acute motor fuel shortages that have since spread to Russia. The Kremlin-installed authorities last month declared a state of emergency and temporarily banned sales to private motorists in an effort to preserve supplies for the military and emergency services. But as Ukrainian drones increasingly targeted the peninsula’s energy infrastructure, the crisis has quickly moved beyond petrol. More than 70% of Crimea’s roughly 2.5 million residents have experienced some form of power outage, according to a Guardian analysis, while many have now gone several consecutive days without electricity or running water. Interviews with more than a dozen residents across Crimea pointed to a growing sense of abandonment and frustration with both the Russian-installed authorities and Moscow, as Kyiv seeks to turn the peninsula “into an island”. The festivals, summer camps and beach events that once filled Crimea’s season have been cancelled. In their place, long queues for petrol and a daily search for somewhere to shower and charge a phone. “We’re surviving, not living,” one resident said. Aleksei, a Crimean native who supported Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014, says his restaurant has been largely empty this summer as tourists stayed away, while shortages and disrupted supply routes have made it increasingly difficult to source fresh produce from outside the peninsula. “The authorities kept insisting Crimea was ready for anything. Literally anything. It turns out the authorities failed to prepare for the worst,” he says. “People are hunting for fuel like it’s The Hunger Games.” Like others interviewed by the Guardian, Aleksei asked for his surname to be withheld for security reasons. Crimea is home to one of Russia’s most pervasive and repressive security apparatuses that has left many people fearful of speaking openly. Public expressions of dissent are rare. Comments beneath officials’ social media posts have, however, become flooded with pleas for help from people who say they cannot contact relatives, buy food or cope with the prolonged outages. “Belogorsk has been without electricity for more than 70 hours, and all we keep getting are promises,” read one of dozens of comments addressed to Crimea’s Russian-installed head, Sergei Aksyonov. Local Telegram chats have turned into improvised survival guides, with residents swapping tips on where fuel has just arrived, setting alarms for late-night voucher releases, sharing maps of the shortest queues and informing each other which neighbourhoods still have electricity or running water. Since it was seized by Russia in 2014 amid the turmoil of Ukraine’s Maidan revolution, which ousted the country’s pro-Russian president, Crimea has been transformed into one of the Kremlin’s most strategically important territories. In 2022, it became the main staging ground for the invasion of southern Ukraine, where Russian forces advanced far more rapidly than in their failed assault on Kyiv. Since the full-scale invasion, its military infrastructure has been used for air attacks and battlefield support. Moscow has also encouraged hundreds of thousands of Russians to settle on the peninsula. The 2014 annexation – of what for many Russians is seen as a desirable region of warm weather and beaches – sent Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings soaring and, for years, annual celebrations marking Crimea’s “return” served as choreographed displays of Russian military power and national resurgence. By targeting Crimea – long held up by the Kremlin as the crown jewel of Putin’s rule – Ukraine hopes to strengthen its hand in any future peace negotiations, says Rob Lee, a military analyst and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Ukraine has more leverage in future negotiations than it did before because it can now reliably strike almost any target in Crimea.” Ukraine has focused its strikes on the main transport routes supplying Crimea, particularly the Novorossiya highway, a key logistics corridor linking the peninsula to Russia’s Rostov region through the occupied cities of Melitopol and Mariupol. Ukrainian forces struck more than 240 Russian military trucks during the first week of July alone, according to an analysis of verified strike footage by the French open-source intelligence analyst Clément Molin. More recently, Ukraine has escalated its campaign against Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov. Over the last week, Kyiv’s military said it had struck 90 vessels used by Russia to supply the occupied peninsula. In a recent interview with the independent Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev, an unnamed Russian general said Ukraine’s recent successes were partly the result of Moscow diverting resources away from defending Crimea and towards its offensive in the Donbas. With the military leadership fixated on capturing the remaining parts of the Donbas, the general said, Crimea had slipped to “third or fourth” on Russia’s list of priorities. Lee says Ukraine has succeeded in producing large numbers of medium- and long-range drones, making it increasingly difficult for Russia to defend against them all. “The cost of these drones is low enough that it’s not prohibitively expensive for Ukraine to keep launching these attacks,” he said. Military analysts on both sides believe Ukraine is likely to intensify its campaign in the coming weeks against the Kerch Bridge, which opened in 2018 to link Crimea to Russia, in an effort to deepen the peninsula’s mounting shortages. Successes in isolating Crimea have provided Ukraine with a much-needed morale boost at a time when Russian forces continue to make slow but steady gains on the battlefield, most recently advancing to the brink of capturing the strategically important city of Kostiantynivka in eastern Ukraine. For Moscow, the crisis on the peninsula is an embarrassment it can neither hide nor easily fix. The Kremlin instead has sought to play down the crisis. During a meeting with senior officials last week, Putin instructed the government to urgently provide subsidies to Crimea and Sevastopol to finance fuel purchases and lower petrol prices on the peninsula. “These are temporary problems,” he said. But in Crimea, many residents said the Kremlin’s reassurances only deepened their frustration. “They keep telling us these are only temporary problems,” said Dmitry, a university student. “We’ve been living like this for weeks. This isn’t normal life, and it can’t go on much longer.”
Police have clashed with demonstrators during a protest in the Italian city of Bologna after a Moroccan-born man died pleading for help under police restraint. Human rights campaigners and Italy’s opposition parties have demanded urgent answers over the death on Sunday of Abderrahim Fakir, 42, who had lived in Italy since he was five years old and ran a small removals and cleaning business. A video shared widely on Italian media shows Fakir, who reportedly had heart issues and asthma, repeatedly calling out “aiuto, aiuto, basta” (Help, help, that’s enough) as two officers sit on him and ambulance workers look on. After he stops moving, the police officers are seen binding his ankles together, only later checking his vital signs with the ambulance workers, the video shows. Prosecutors have opened an investigation and requested the officers’ body cam footage. “You can’t die like this,” Fakir’s sister, Khadija, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper. “The police have to protect us. If someone is agitated, you have to calm them down … not kill them like a dog.” Italian media reported that police had been called to the scene, in the north-eastern neighbourhood of Pilastro, shortly after noon on Sunday by local residents who were concerned by Fakir’s erratic and aggressive behaviour. The officers reportedly called emergency services soon after they arrived, and tried to calm Fakir before using pepper spray and holding him down while trying to handcuff him. They told ambulance personnel that he was “having a psychiatric episode”. During the protests late on Monday, firecrackers were thrown near police buildings and police reacted using teargas and water cannon. A group of demonstrators also sat down in a square holding a photograph of Fakir, the Ansa news agency reported. The incident has been compared in Italy to George Floyd’s murder in the US six years ago, and also prompted comparisons with tactics used by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Donald Trump. However, Italy’s interior minister, Matteo Piantedosi, told public television: “Whoever makes insulting remarks against the police shows they have no trust in our law enforcement nor in our justice system [and] should look into what happened.” Tommaso Foti, the European affairs minister, said: “The chants of ‘police murderers’ and ‘the whole world hates you’ shouted during a demonstration in Bologna … are disgraceful.” The far-right deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, also defended the police, while Galeazzo Bignami, head of prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party in parliament’s lower house, praised the officers’ “professional conduct”. Ilaria Cucchi, a senator whose brother died in custody in 2009, told Agence-France Presse she was sickened by the “solidarity and thanks” expressed to police after such an “inhumane act”. Cucchi, a member of the opposition Greens and Left alliance (AVS) party, criticised Meloni and her coalition government, saying their “policies seeped in hatred and racism” had fostered a climate of violence. Francesco Boccia, head of the centre-left Democratic party (PD) in the senate, told La Repubblica daily: “If the right wants to import the ICE model, this is the wrong country for it. We have democratic antibodies.” Barbara Spinelli, a lawyer, told Ansa she had met Fakir last year when he applied to renew his permit to stay. He had been “a very kind, well educated, respectful person” who was in Italy legally but worried about being expelled, she said. “I told him: ‘We are in Italy, a democratic country. Here the police respect the rules,’” she said. “I don’t know how I will ever again manage to tell someone they don’t need to be afraid.” Agence-France Presse and Reuters contributed to this report