The British maritime agency says it has received multiple reports that a tanker is saying it has been struck by an unknown projectile in the strait of Hormuz. Authorities are investigating, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency says in a report posted on X. More on this as it comes to light.
Nicaragua’s long-serving president, Daniel Ortega, has said the country will hold no further elections to prevent the opposition from coming to power. The 80-year-old authoritarian leader, who has been in office since 2007, also said he would work with the congress he controls to pass new laws that would “build a wall” against the opposition. Ortega made the announcement on Sunday during the official ceremony marking the 47th anniversary of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, in which he helped overthrow the brutal dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Although his administration and that of his wife and “co-president”, Rosario Murillo, had already been marked by the steady erosion of democracy in the Central American country, many are describing his announcement as a significant rhetorical escalation. “With this decision, Ortega and Murillo have sealed the country’s transition to a full-fledged family dictatorship,” said Tiziano Breda, Latin America senior analyst at the NGO Armed Conflict Location and Event Data. During a speech in front of thousands of state employees who, according to local media, had been coerced into attending, Ortega said: “There will be no more elections here so that they [the opposition parties] can try to seize the government, seize power.” The president, who had not appeared in public for 61 days, added: “We will work with the National Assembly and the relevant institutions on laws, because we need laws that build a wall, a barrier, against the coup plotters and the traitors who sell out their country.” The elections were due to take place next year, but Ortega gave no details on whether they would be cancelled or whether the opposition would be barred from taking part – something that has already happened in practice. During the 2021 campaign, his regime outlawed parties and jailed all opposition presidential hopefuls. Breda said: “Ortega and Murillo are evidently afraid of the idea that the slightest political opening could create the conditions for dissent to manifest and threaten their grip on power, possibly suggesting that their already feeble domestic support is further falling. Therefore, instead of staging a rigged election, they have opted to eliminate electoral competition altogether.” Last year, Ortega pushed through a series of constitutional reforms that included extending the presidential term from five to six years and promoting his wife, then vice-president, to the position of “co-president”. The US refers to their administration as the “Murillo-Ortega dictatorship”. During his speech, the Nicaraguan president criticised the US over the January operation that abducted the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro: “With all their power, they stormed the presidential palace, where Nicolás and his wife, Cilia [Flores], were. They killed the entire security detail there – most of them were Cubans – and took them away to imprison them in the US. It is monstrous.” The president said preventing the opposition from returning to power was necessary to protect the country from the “coup plotters” who, he claimed, had been behind the nationwide protests of 2018 – when, according to organisations including the UN, his regime carried out a violent crackdown that killed more than 350 people, wounded hundreds, jailed thousands and forced nearly 1 million Nicaraguans into exile. Recently, the UN, the US, human rights organisations and 30 former Ibero-American presidents have directly blamed Ortega and Murillo for the death of the Indigenous leader and four-term congressman Brooklyn Rivera, 73, who spent nearly three years “unjustly imprisoned” by the regime, the US state department said. According to organisations including Human Rights Watch, there are about 50 political prisoners in the country. The regime has stripped 546 people of their citizenship and shut down more than 5,600 non-governmental organisations, 29 universities and 58 media outlets.
The US military said it has launched its 10th consecutive round of strikes on Iran to force the reopening of the strait of Hormuz. Earlier on Monday, Iran’s president said the country is in a “full-scale war” after the US expanded its aerial campaign and Tehran struck Washington’s Gulf allies, even as diplomats said talks to de-escalate were continuing. Iranian media reported strikes around Tabriz, believed to hold underground missile bases, as well as Bushehr, home to the country’s only operational civilian nuclear power plant. The US military said it had struck “military command centres, air defence and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites and communications networks”. Iran launched attacks against Bahrain, which hosts the US navy’s fifth fleet, and Kuwait, in addition to striking tankers in the strait of Hormuz, which carried a fifth of global oil and gas supplies before the war. Bahrain said its air traffic systems were damaged by the strikes, but that traffic was not affected. The Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen also announced a blockade of Saudi ports. “The reality is that today the Islamic Republic of Iran is engaged in a full-scale war,” the Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said in a statement on Monday, warning it might have to endure more strikes. Meanwhile, US president Donald Trump signalled an escalation in tactics, saying on Monday that Iran would “pay” for killing US soldiers “many times over” after multiple service members were killed in action over the weekend. The US military on Monday identified two soldiers killed in Jordan while defending against Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. An examination of remains is under way to determine whether they belong to a third service member who was reported missing in that attack. And in Iraq, another US service member died after “a controlled detonation” of an Iranian drone. Since the war began, 17 US service members have been killed. Iran’s health ministry said on Friday that 50 people had been killed and more than 500 injured in the current round of fighting. The latest tit-for-tat attacks came as the region lurched back towards a total war despite an interim peace deal agreed last month. The memorandum of understanding (MoU) to halt attacks and open the strait is more than halfway through a 60-day implementation period that was intended to provide breathing room for diplomacy. Shipping in the strait has slowed to a trickle as a result of the fighting and the price of oil reached its highest in a month, passing $90 (£67) a barrel, exacerbating the global energy crisis. A Houthi blockade of Saudi ports announced on Monday could further strain global energy markets as Saudi Arabia was using the Red Sea route to export millions of barrels of oil and circumvent Iran’s closure of the strait of Hormuz. The group said it was responding to what it called Riyadh’s targeting of Sana’a airport last week after it was bombed by the Saudi-backed Yemen government, and that it would answer a “blockade with a blockade”. But in a sign that talks could still stop the escalating round of conflict, an Iranian official told Reuters that mediators gave Iran a proposal for a 10-day-ceasefire to find ways to revive the MoU. The proposal follows a statement by Iran that diplomacy with the US was continuing despite the fighting, without giving details on the content of the discussions. Iran’s interior minister was expected to travel to Islamabad on Monday, Agence France-Presse reported. Hours earlier, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the US was still open to negotiations with Iran, but that “it has to be real”. “We’re going to continue to respond. If the door opens to diplomacy – if the guys that want to do something productive for Iran win and take control of that system, or take control of the negotiations – that’ll be a very positive development,” Rubio said. Mediators including Qatar and Pakistan have continued to speak to both sides during the current round of escalation in an attempt to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table. As the strikes began early on Monday, a ship caught fire in the strait of Hormuz near the coastline of Oman in the southern corridor the US military has encouraged ships to use to avoid Iran’s control. The crew safely abandoned the vessel, while the ship was recovered by a tug boat, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claimed two oil tankers were blown up after attempting to transit through the southern route, but there was no independent confirmation. The IRGC also claimed to have launched a “surprise attack” on an enemy command centre in the al-Tanf region of Syria, in a statement reported by the state news agency IRNA. After Iran targeted sites in Jordan on Sunday, Israel warned of the danger of the strikes spilling across its borders, reigniting a direct regional conflict that had been restrained even as tensions between the Trump administration and Iran have soared again. “If Iran fires missiles at Israel, we will attack them with full force,” said the Israeli defence minister, Israel Katz, on Sunday. The US is expected to send dozens of additional refuelling planes to Israel as part of a reinforcement of its force posture in the region, a US official told Reuters. Trump has threatened to target Iran’s power stations and bridges to try to compel Tehran to loosen its hold on the strait of Hormuz. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, defended the Trump administration’s strategy for the war, but argued that the mission had since shifted toward ensuring oil shipments could move through the strait. “We did a pause to try to get an agreement with the Iranian people to allow oil to flow without them attacking it,” Wright said on Sunday. “They’ve proven unwilling to do that, and we’ve pivoted. Now what we’re doing is assuring that that oil and gas and other products can flow through the strait of Hormuz with or without Iranian cooperation.” The US also announced that the “pilot zone” scheme in Lebanon had begun in three villages in the south, after peace talks in Rome between the governments of Lebanon and Israel. Under the programme, Israel will withdraw soldiers from areas it occupies in south Lebanon, to be replaced by the Lebanese army, which will be tasked with dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure in the areas. The US state department spokesperson Thomas Pigott said on Monday that the scheme started in the villages of Froun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiya. The Associated Press contributed reporting
The Hungarian chess legend Judit Polgár has said she will not accept the nomination for president, only a day after the prime minister, Péter Magyar, said he would ask her to take up the largely ceremonial role. Magyar had said he would meet Polgár on Monday to discuss the matter. “Our country needs unity, peace and a president that all Hungarians can be proud of,” he wrote on social media. “Judit Polgár’s name has been synonymous with talent and perseverance for decades.” Polgár, 49, said later in a Facebook post that she was grateful to be asked but added: “I do not feel enough strength within me to take on the historic responsibility of uniting a divided nation, so I am unable to accept the request.” Polgár – the subject of the documentary Queen of Chess, released in February – is the only female player to have been ranked in the world’s top 10 of the male-dominated sport. She is the only woman to have crossed the rating of 2700, the threshold that many consider the definition of a super grandmaster. The latest developments come after a months-long standoff between the newly elected Magyar and Tamás Sulyok, the president appointed during the former leader Viktor Orbán’s time in power. Since his landslide victory in April, Magyar has repeatedly called on Sulyok to step down, accusing him of being a puppet who had failed to stand up for the country as Orbán’s rightwing, nationalist Fidesz party was criticised for weakening democratic institutions and undermining the rule of law. Hungary’s parliament – where Magyar’s centre-right Tisza party holds a two-thirds majority – voted last week to back a constitutional amendment that included an immediate end to Sulyok’s term. From there, Sulyok had five days to sign off on the amendment. The manoeuvre was criticised by several rights groups in Hungary, including Human Rights Watch, which said the rushed constitutional changes to oust the president were “reminiscent of [the] Fidesz era”. Magyar, however, has insisted that the changes are needed as part of a wider push to loosen Orbán’s lingering grip on the country. As news emerged that Sulyok had signed the legislation, bringing an end to his time in office, Magyar proposed nominating Polgár as his replacement. The idea was first floated in an open letter signed by 16 prominent Hungarians, including Ernő Rubik, theinventor of the Rubik’s Cube. Born in Budapest, Polgár, who will turn 50 in a few days, had been the top-ranked female player for 25 years when she retired in 2014. She became the youngest grandmaster in the world at the age of 15, breaking the record set in 1958 by Bobby Fischer. She won victories against several male world champions including Garry Kasparov in 2002. Since being swept into power on the promise of “regime change”, Magyar and his party have moved swiftly to dismantle the bastions of Orbán’s 16 years in power, from suspending news broadcasts by public media outlets with ties to the former prime minister to abolishing the sovereignty protection office, which had allowed intelligence services to access information on individuals and organisations without judicial oversight. Additional reporting from Reuters
Ukraine’s commander in chief Oleksandr Syrskyi is widely expected to lose his job amid signs that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has bowed to pressure from protesters and will reshuffle the army’s top leadership. Over the past five days, thousands of demonstrators have gathered outside the presidential office in Kyiv, chanting: “Syrskyi out.” They have demanded Zelenskyy reinstate Mykhailo Fedorov, who was fired as defence minister last week after a clash with Syrskyi and the general staff. Aged 35 and a moderniser, Fedorov is widely credited with improving the country’s position on the battlefield during the six months he was in the job. In a newspaper column published on Monday, Syrskyi said he was “surprised to learn the minister and I had a conflict”. “I perceived our relationship as a working one: with complex issues, with different positions. This is how it should be between two institutions during a major war,” he wrote. He offered a personal apology, saying that if he had offended Fedorov, he was “sorry”. The general added: “I can be harsh. But I ask you, and everyone who is following this story with enthusiasm: let’s focus not on the personal, but on the global. On victory.” Syrskyi also insisted it was wrong to accuse him of a “lack of strategy” and said he was at war with Moscow, not the defence ministry in Kyiv. “My job is war. Strategy, the frontline, the people. That is what I do and will continue to do,” he said. Ukraine’s general staff denied media reports on Monday that Syrskyi was about to be sacked. It said Syrskyi and his deputy, Andriy Hnatov, continued to carry out their duties. “Dismissal from these posts takes place on the basis of a decree by the president of Ukraine,” it added. Despite these denials, Zelenskyy’s influential chief of staff, Kyrylo Budanov, hinted that the government had listened to the popular mood. “The public’s position has been heard,” he said. The situation was being resolved “professionally and constructively”, he added, urging “everyone to keep calm”. “The enemy is closely watching every one of our internal disputes and waiting for us to start fighting among ourselves … work is under way. Results will follow,” he said. The noisy protests began last Thursday. Several demonstrators waved cheese graters – a pun on the commander’s name, which sounds like cheese in Ukrainian. Zelenskyy confirmed last week that the relationship between Fedorov and Syrskyi had broken down. After his firing, Fedorov said Ukraine’s top brass had blocked reforms with “bureaucratic impediments” and ignored data, instead rewarding brigades that were loyal to Syrskyi personally. One source in the armed forces confirmed Syrskyi’s imminent departure. “His destiny is decided. The question is who will replace him. There are a few important requirements. The person should be known and popular so everyone applauds,” they said. “But they should also not have open political ambitions so as not to create a new rival. It should be an experienced military guy who listens to the president and does what he wants to do,” the source added. On Monday, Zelenskyy held meetings with several possible replacements. The senior commanders included Mykhailo Drapatiy, the head of Ukraine’s joint armed forces. Drapatiy cemented his reputation by driving a tank through a pro-Russian blockade in 2014, when Russia first tried to seize the eastern city of Mariupol. The meetings with top military figures were attended by Yevheniy Khmara, whom Zelenskyy appointed as defence minister. It is unclear if Fedorov will be reinstated – a key demand from demonstrators – or brought back into government in another role. Protest organisers say that Zelenskyy has a deadline of Friday to give Fedorov his old job back. If this doesn’t happen they promise a “general indefinite protest” in towns and cities across the country. Zelenskyy praised recent long-range Ukrainian strikes on targets in Russia. “They have produced results against logistics facilities and an oil depot. The targets were more than 400km from our border. Two shadow fleet tankers and four cargo ships were also struck in the Black Sea,” he said. “We are responding, justly, to every Russian strike against our cities and communities. This war must be brought to an end, and that is only possible by increasing the pressure on the sole cause of this war – Russia,” Zelenskyy added.
Even by the brutal standards of militant settler violence in the West Bank, the raid on Deir Jarir late on Sunday night that killed two Palestinians and left another in hospital with a gunshot wound was extreme. Palestinians in the town said settlers from a nearby outpost arrived after 9pm on Sunday claiming that they were searching for stolen livestock. Israeli soldiers and police soon joined them, protecting them as they sought to take several villagers’ sheep by force. But when villagers raised the alarm and a crowd gathered, soldiers shot two men, beginning a night of three successive raids by settlers from nearby outposts and Israeli soldiers that lasted until after 2am, according to Palestinian residents of Deir Jarir. Saber Ajaj, a relative of one of the victims, 53-year-old Odeh Farajna, said he found him moments after he had been shot through the chest. Farajna, a member of the village council, owned a flower shop and helped with the stonework at the local graveyard. “The moment I put him in the car I knew that he was dead,” Ajaj said in an interview during a reception held after the funeral. “This shooting was meant to kill.” In interviews as they buried the two victims on Monday, family and friends of the dead Palestinian men described several attacks each month in which they said settlers, backed by security forces, arrived in houses on the outskirts of the village and then stole livestock. “It’s a partnership between the army and the settlers,” said Adel Rashid, the father of the younger victim, Abdul Adel Rashid Abu Mukh, 26. Rashid said local settlers on Sunday had stolen 21 of his sheep, while 50 more had been taken from another member of the village. Video of Sunday’s incident showed a settler protected by four IDF soldiers in green camouflage leading a sheep out of a local house. The raids are part of a picture of worsening settler violence in the region as Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right allies have accelerated a land grab in the occupied West Bank. Arbitrary checkpoints and other restrictions to cut off towns like Deir Jarir after the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas have been bolstered by plans for the government to endorse new settlements in the West Bank before national elections that could challenge the Netanyahu government’s mandate. On the hill above the village is a settlement built last year that appears to share water infrastructure with an Israeli military base, according to Dror Etkes, an Israeli who founded Kerem Navot, an organisation that monitors Israeli land policy in occupied Palestine. Residents said the settlers and military appeared to have coordinated the raid. Seven people have been killed in the village since 7 October 2023. Their portraits have been spray-painted on the walls of the town, along with the date they died. “The killing in Deir Jarir is one example of how Israel promotes ethnic cleansing in the West Bank: settlers invade and steal, while the military and police accompany them and shoot Palestinians who try to protect their homes and property,” said Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, a human rights organisation based in Israel that catalogues violations by the security forces. A Guardian analysis has shown that Israel has not prosecuted its citizens for killing Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank since the start of this decade, creating impunity for a campaign of violence. The West Bank attacks are intensifying. Fadi Hamdallah al-Naasan, a 17-year-old from the town of al-Mughayyir, north-east of Ramallah, died on Saturday after succumbing to a gunshot wound to his leg during a raid on his house by the Israeli military and settlers on 11 July. Nearly a thousand mourners, mostly men, gathered in Deir Jarir on Monday shortly after noon for the burial. They marched from the mosque in the centre of the town, carrying the two bodies down to the old graveyard. On the road entering the area stands a new set of gates at a checkpoint established after 7 October that security forces are said to open or close arbitrarily, effectively cutting off the villages from the outside world. “Every time they come to attack us they are trying to make life here unlivable,” said Iyad Odah, 56, a member of the village council who knew Farajna. Since 7 October, he said, the town’s farmland, which once occupied thousands of hectares, was inaccessible as local settlers beat back farmers, attempting to access their orchards and grazing land. The Israeli military on Monday said they had gone to Deir Jarir to escort Israeli settlers, who claimed their livestock had been stolen and wanted to take it back. The military said they opened fire after Palestinians threw rocks and concrete blocks at the security forces. They did not respond to questions clarifying why they did not use non-lethal crowd control instead of live ammunition. Responding to the IDF’s claim that they had been attacked by “terrorists” in the village, Odah, of the town’s village council, said: “They are the real terrorists.”
After days of acrid smoke from northern wildfires choking major US cities and inspiring Donald Trump to threaten Canada with tariffs, officials now say the reverse is also happening as parts of Canada issue air quality warnings caused by American fires to the south. Officials in the Canadian province of British Columbia warned in an alert on Saturday evening that smoke from US fires, spurred on by thousands of lightning strikes in the north-east, was creating smoky conditions as polluted air drifted north. “Much of this smoke is originating from fires south of the Canada-US border in Washington and Oregon,” the provincial wildfire service said. Twenty-two large fires are burning across Washington and Oregon, according to the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center, the fire coordination agency for both states. British Columbia has air quality warnings in place for two regions, Kootenay Lake and Cranbrook, located along the south-east border with the US. Despite the US facing its own wildfire issues, Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have chosen to accuse Canada of improper wildfire management and have threatened to hit Canadian officials with sanctions. In a social media post on Friday, Trump wrote the US had been “invaded” by dirty air. “[The] cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying,” he said. The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to several climate protections. Wildfires continue to blaze across the US and Canada. According to the Canadian government, as of Monday there were 843 active wildfires burning across Canada. Of those 181 are considered “out of control”, meaning the fires are spreading and not responding to suppressive actions. Another 532 of those fires are also considered “out of control” but suppressive actions have not yet been taken. The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, who sat alongside Trump at the World Cup final on Sunday, where the US president again suggested slapping Canada with tariffs, has sidestepped the criticisms. “Fighting climate change is the responsibility of all countries, including the United States,” he told reporters last week. But Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, where many fires are burning, said on Friday: “If there’s politicians out there chirping away, well maybe what you should do rather than complain is send support, send help, because we have done the exact same thing for our American friends.” Eleanor Olszewski, Canada’s minister of emergency preparedness, said in a statement that Canada had invested C$12bn (£6.36bn) on fire prevention and forest sustainability over the past five years. “This is a challenge that knows no borders,” she said.
And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. Ten people were killed in a Russian strike near the Ukrainian port city of Odesa on a merchant ship flying the flag of Guinea-Bissau (9:42). Overnight, Ukraine struck Moscow with hundreds of drones, wounding at least 10 people (9:38, 10:24). The attacks come as Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues behind-the-scenes talks looking at defusing a political crisis triggered by his decision to oust a popular defence minister last week (10:41, 12:32, 14:24, 15:07). Lithuanian defence minister Robertas Kaunas warned that Russia sees the Baltic countries and Poland as possible next targets as it looks for “a new escalation” amid stalling war in Ukraine (10:15). In other news, Andy Burnham has become the new British prime minister, replacing Keir Starmer and pledging his arrival in power will be a “circuit breaker” moment for Britain and continued support for Ukraine (10:20, 12:56, 14:19). Hungary’s prime minister, Péter Magyar, has announced plans to ask Judit Polgár, widely considered the greatest female chess player of all time, to take on the largely ceremonial role of president (16:02). A fire that burnt down an entire neighbourhood in a town near the Norwegian city of Drammen was still smouldering on Monday and authorities said they expect to be fighting the fire for days to come (12:13). 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.