Middle East crisis live: Donald Trump cancels US envoy trip to Pakistan for ceasefire talks with Iran
Thousands of people in Tehran gathered in Revolution Square on Saturday evening to protest against the US and Israel.
Macron says EU’s mutual defence clause ‘not just words’
Emmanuel Macron has spoken up for Europe’s ability to defend itself, saying a mutual assistance clause, enshrined in the EU treaty, was unambiguous and “not just words”. The French president said the pact had already been proved in action when several member states sent military aid to Cyprus after a drone attack against a British airbase on the island on 28 February. “On article 42, paragraph 7, it’s not just words,” the French leader said. “We know that for us, it is clear and there is no room for interpretation or ambiguity.” Macron, in Greece to renew a bilateral strategic defence agreement, described the clause as “stronger” than article 5, Nato’s collective defence clause, as he reiterated his long-held belief that Europe was better off boosting its own security than relying on an increasingly erratic US under Donald Trump. “I really believe this US approach will last,” he said. A day earlier, EU leaders, attending an informal council in Cyprus, said plans were being finessed on how the obscure clause would work in practice. Speaking on Friday, the European Council president, António Costa, said: “We are designing the handbook [on] how to use this mutual assistance clause.” Macron questioned the efficacy of the Nato article when asked about the military alliance and its founding principle under which members come to one another’s aid if they are attacked. “There is now a doubt on article 5, not put on the table by the Europeans but by the US president,” he told the audience during a discussion held with the Greek prime minister in the capital’s picturesque Roman-era agora. “It is clearly a de facto weakening of the Nato alliance … I am a strong believer in the European pillar of Nato and my view is that we should strengthen this European pillar.” His Greek counterpart, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, appeared to agree, calling the decision to rush fighter jets and naval support to Cyprus “a gamechanger” for the bloc. Amid fears of the union’s easternmost member coming under sustained retaliatory attack in the first days of the US-Israeli war against Iran, France, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal scrambled to send assistance to the island. “What we did in Cyprus was a gamechanger,” said Mitsotakis, insisting that the time had come for the little-known defence pact to be taken seriously. “We have a mutual assistance clause in our treaties and this is our European responsibility. We never spoke about it because we thought that Nato would always do the job … we need to take this article much more seriously; we need to look at the Cypriot lesson, think about what could happen in another case, have exercises in terms of what it would mean if we were again to offer support to a European country under threat.” Doing so would be tantamount to a “political statement” that the EU did not only rely on Nato, and would be “also good for Nato”, he added. Infuriated by Nato’s failure to support the strikes against Iran, the US president has stepped up criticism of the transatlantic alliance, further raising concerns that support for article 5 from Washington can no longer be guaranteed. Macron, who is making his third official visit to Greece before he leaves office next year, said the strong alliance between the two nations should serve as a model for the rest of the EU. On Saturday an unprecedented nine accords were signed between the countries, foreseeing increased cooperation in areas including scientific research and nuclear technology. Macron vowed that France would stand by Greece if it ever came under attack from its neighbour and long-time regional rival, Turkey. In 2017, Macron, then newly elected, had used the dramatic setting of the ancient Pnyx beneath the Athens Acropolis to give a rousing policy speech on the future of Europe and the virtues of democracy. The tone, nine years later, could not have been more different. At a time of such geopolitical uncertainty, Europe, he said, had to “wake up” and claim its place as a geopolitical power as it faced opponents it had not faced before. “We should not underestimate that this is a unique moment where a US president, a Russian president and a Chinese president are dead against the Europeans,” he told the crowd. It now remained for a continent that had managed to end centuries of civil war – and deliver on prosperity – to “write the next chapter and become a geopolitical power”.
Conspiracy theory over UFOs and missing scientists spreads from web to White House
Are the disappearances or deaths of at least 11 US scientists, each allegedly connected in some way to space, defense and nuclear research, really linked in a nefarious plot: one that involves the Chinese or other state enemies, or possibly links back to UFOs? A conspiracy theory positing exactly that has roared through sections of the US population in recent weeks, spreading rapidly from the internet into rightwing media and hence into the mainstream press and prompting an inquiry from Congress and questions from Donald Trump. Could such an outlandish theory have even an inkling of truth? Or are lawmakers, the FBI, the White House, countless substackers and podcasters, along with US media outlets, just pandering to the latest clickbait conspiracy theory in an age rife with them? Like all good conspiracy theories, the mysterious case of the sudden flood of missing or dead US scientists is difficult to sift through. And answers to its puzzle likely lie not in the conspiracy theory itself but what it represents in an era of AI slop and social media disinformation. Especially when each morsel of conspiratorial connection creates more appetite for another and can never be satiated. But there are a few known elements. On 27 February, the retired US air force major general William “Neil” McCasland, 68, walked out of his house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, some time between 10 and 11am. His phone and glasses were left behind, he took his .38 revolver, and he is believed to have left on foot. His wife found that he was missing soon after midday. That afternoon, the Bernalillo sheriff’s office issued a silver alert – a bulletin when an older person goes missing. Nothing has been seen or heard from McCasland since. But as a former commander of the Kirtland air force base’s Phillips research site and laboratory, which focuses on space vehicles and directed-energy technologies, his disappearance raised eyebrows, including within the UFO community. Lt Kyle Woods of the Bernalillo county sheriff’s office told reporters nothing has been ruled out, “which is why we’re investigating every possible link that we can”. Woods added: “I appreciate that there’s a community that wants to go down the rabbit hole of UFOs. I don’t have a way with which to pursue that and so those theories have to be set aside unless we were to find something that would have indicated that. So we can only go off the facts.” But facts were scarce. And into that void soon poured other accounts of missing or dead scientists, often with real or imagined links to national security or space work. Reports eventually surfaced of at least 10 missing or dead scientists. They included Michael David Hicks – a scientist who worked at the Nasa jet propulsion lab from 1998 to 2022 and studied near-Earth asteroids and comets. He died from unknown causes at the age of 59 in 2023. Another scientist, Monica Reza, disappeared in June last year. She served as director of the Nasa lab’s materials processing group. She had set out on a hike in the Angeles national forest with a companion. A police report said Reza, 60, was about 30ft behind her friend when she disappeared. Her body was never found. Others added to the list include astrophysicist Carl Grillmair, shot dead on his porch; MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro, killed by a former classmate; and Jason Thomas, a chemical biologist at drugmaker Novartis, who disappeared in December. His remains were discovered in Massachusetts in March. Another name is Amy Eskridge, an Alabama-based researcher who claimed to be working on “gravity-modification research”. Eskridge died by suicide in 2022. But last week, Franc Milburn, who claims to be a former British intelligence officer, told NewsNation that Eskridge told him not to believe any reports that she had died by suicide if she turned up dead. “If you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I overdosed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I killed anyone else, I most definitely did not,” Eskridge texted, according to Milburn. The accounts were published breathlessly online in social media but also by rightwing press accounts. Trump himself was asked about the story and promised to look into it. Soon, Republican lawmakers joined the debate demanded in a letter that the FBI, the Department of Energy, Nasa and other agencies investigate a “possible sinister connection” in the disappearances. “These reports allege that at least 10 individuals who ‘had a connection to US nuclear secrets or rocket technology’ have ‘died or mysteriously vanished in recent years’,” wrote Kentucky Republican James Comer and Eric Burlison of Missouri last week in a letter to multiple law-enforcement agencies demanding action. “If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to US national security and to US personnel with access to scientific secrets,” they added, citing an additional two workers affiliated with the Los Alamos National Laboratory who have died or or gone missing. They wrote in a letter to the secretary of the department of defense, Pete Hegseth, that Reza and McCasland may have had a “close professional connection”. Then, last week, UFO researcher David Wilcock, 53, used a gun to kill himself outside his home in Boulder county, Colorado. Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett responded to a social media post announcing Wilcock’s death by writing: “Not cool.” Burchett told the Daily Mail: “I just don’t think there’s any chance that this is just all coincidental.” But is there anything more than coincidence that 11 out of more than 2 million scientific researchers in the US, or an estimated 700,000 with top-secret aerospace and nuclear clearances, can variously go out hiking and disappear? Or perhaps chose to end their lives, especially if they might have had mental illness or paranoid delusions? Or fall victim to murder? Experts say it is the onlookers – us – who chose to make connections when, in reality, there are none. The latest uptick in alien/nuclear mystery fears, says Greg Eghigian, professor of history and bioethics at Penn State and author of After the Flying Saucers Came, is different from the New Jersey drone scare of late 2024. “It’s one of those things that get folded into other kinds of concerns and conspiracy theories that are out there about science and medicine that have been circulating around since Covid,” Eghigian said. “That fold neatly into the decades-old notion that UFOs are spotted around nuclear facilities and some of these facilities may be masking UFO-related projects.” All of it seems to be a convergence, he adds, “so when people want to connect these dots it falls readily into a sweet spot for UFO lore because you have all the elements that have always been there – the military, state secrets, nuclear facilities and technologies, and fear of figures that are missing. What is it? Are they being abducted? Assassinated because they know too much? The seeds of this were planted decades ago.” The mystery – or lack of it – comes at a moment of heightened national security anxiety that is often accompanied by increased reports of UFO sightings or alien abductions by people or institutions with an interest in promoting richly imaginative theories that can neither be proved nor disproved. Podcaster Joe Rogan, one of the most powerful figures in US media, recently suggested – unhelpfully – that the disappearances could be to do with “plasma technology, whatever the fuck that is”. It is McCasland’s wife, Susan McCasland Wilkerson, who stands as the best debunker of any mystery surrounding her husband’s work, explaining that he had once had access to classified information but had retired nearly 13 years earlier. In a wry tone that used humor to try and defuse the conspiracy theories starting to sprout up around him, she took tongue-in-cheek aim at those wishing to believe something sinister was going on. “It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him,” she wrote in March before the theory had even spread too far. She said his past association with Tom DeLonge, former Blink-182 singer and a figure in UFO/UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) disclosure effort, “is not a reason for someone to abduct” him. Nor, she said, did her husband have “any special knowledge about the ET bodies and debris from the Roswell crash”. No sign of her husband has been found, she said, so “maybe the best hypothesis is that aliens beamed him up to the mothership. However, no sightings of a mothership hovering above the Sandia Mountains have been reported.”
What counts as the woods? Judge axes Nova Scotia’s ban that defied ‘commonsense definitions’
As wildfires raged across Nova Scotia last summer, the Canadian province made a simple plea to residents: stay away from the woods. As the situation deteriorated, authorities turned the request into a prohibition: anyone caught hiking under the shade of the forest canopy faced a C$25,000 fine – a figure more than half the average worker’s yearly salary. But exactly the emergency rules considered to be “the woods” was a challenge better suited to a philosopher than a confused hiker in a parking lot. Rock barrens, scrubland or marshes were all considered “woods”. So too was forest – but the presence of actual trees wasn’t necessary, just evidence they had once been there. Residents could still travel as long as it wasn’t “any great distance” through the woods. “Someone who wanted to stay out of the woods had to put in some interpretive effort,” a judge recently declared. “The government just wanted people to use common sense. But the ban seemed to defy commonsense definitions.” Last week, that same judge found the controversial ban wasn’t just confounding, it also violated Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. And while the Nova Scotia supreme court acknowledged the urgency of the wildfire crisis, it warned that if individual rights aren’t protected, “they can be eroded in a way that eventually affects everyone”. The chain of events, which ended in a scathing critique of government overreach, began last summer when the province was engulfed in flames. In July, Tim Houston, a stone-faced provincial premier, told the public that the ban on walking in the woods was “inconvenient” but essential to avoid a repeat of the disastrous 2023 wildfire season. Most people adhered to the order. But not Jeffrey Evely, an army veteran who saw an opportunity to challenge the ban. After letting bylaw officers know of his plans, he ventured into the forest in Cape Breton – and was promptly handed a C$28,872.50 fine. Aided by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) – a libertarian-leaning group that has taken on controversial cases, including an active role in the self-described Freedom Convoy that besieged Ottawa in 2022 – Evely and his supporters challenged the fine in court, and won. On 17 April, justice Jamie Campbell found the government had violated the mobility rights of Nova Scotians, and failed to weigh the cost of that breach against an attempt to stop the fires. Mobility is a protected right and has previously been called “the heart of what it means to be a free person” by courts. While governments can infringe or limit that right, courts have long demanded those efforts be taken with “reasonable” consideration of the effects. But Campbell found this wasn’t the case. At the same time, the province seemed keen to placate the concerns of industry groups such as forest operators, utilities and telecom companies, issuing permits for them to keep using the woods. “Those responsible for safeguarding … had to do something. They had to do it quickly and their options were limited,” he wrote. But he nonetheless also warned of the need to protect the rights of individuals. Campbell also found the order was “so vague as to be incapable of being interpreted at all”. “Being told to stay out of the ‘woods’ made some sense to people who thought they knew what the woods are,” he wrote. Nova Scotia’s premier defended his government’s actions during a fast-moving crisis. “I did what I thought was necessary as premier to support our firefighters, to keep people safe, to keep property safe, and that was the woods ban,” Houston said this week. “That was completely appropriate in those circumstances, in that moment, based on the information I had.” Marty Moore, the legal counsel for the JCCF, said the decision, which was “egg on the face of the government”, would probably deter others from pursuing similar measures. The JCCF takes on cases it believes are government overreach against free expression, religious freedom and individual liberty. It has also taken on controversial cases that centre on culture-war debates over gender identity and human rights law. For Moore, the case echoed themes of pandemic restrictions his organization actively fought. But he said the case also had deep roots – “all the way to the Magna Carta in England and the Charter of the Forest from 1271”- which granted rights to common people to use the forests. “Unless you’ve been to Nova Scotia and touched the forest there, it’s hard to understand the impact of what the travel ban looks like,” he said. “Nova Scotia is the woods.” • This article was amended on 25 April 2026. An earlier version said the Freedom Convoy besieged Toronto in 2022; the intended reference was to Ottawa. This has been corrected.
‘Athens cannot operate as a giant hotel’: mayor vows to rescue capital from overtourism
In the heart of ancient Athens, on narrow streets and around archaeological sites, visitor groups appear to be everywhere, snaking their way behind tour guides. At other times, officials would have welcomed such scenes. But for Haris Doukas, the socialist mayor who is determined to reclaim the capital’s congested city centre for its citizens, the start of the tourist season leaves much of its historic heart at risk of “over-saturation.” Entire neighbourhoods, he believes, are in danger of losing their authenticity because of uncontrolled tourist development. “Athens cannot operate as if it were a giant hotel,” he said in an interview. “Restrictions and rules are needed. Cities must also have a say in the way they develop.” Last year, more than 8 million people visited Athens, a record for a metropolis that not long ago was regarded as a pit stop to the Greek isles. In short-term rentals alone, overnight stays in the popular Plaka district beneath the Acropolis have more than doubled since 2018, a study commissioned by the municipality recently revealed. In the city’s neo-classical town hall, officials say time is of the essence if Athens is not to fall victim to its own success. The warning signs are everywhere: from soaring property rents that have priced out local people, to overstretched infrastructure buckling under the pressure. “All of Athens is being dug up so that we can cope,” said Doukas, who was a climate energy professor before he went into local government. “We’re building electricity infrastructure, water systems, new drainage, 5G networks. When you have around 700,000 residents and 8 million visitors, the pressure is enormous.” Every month “more staff, more equipment, more machines” were being taken on to meet the challenges. Doukas assumed the post in 2024 after unexpectedly cruising to victory with the support of the main opposition Pasok party, on a pledge “to green” what is widely seen as the continent’s hottest capital. An estimated 3,855 trees have been planted in the historic centre of the 15 sq mile (39 sq km) municipality under his watch. But as Athens’ appeal has grown, the mayor has found himself coming head-to-head with the forces he blames squarely for “runaway development” in prime tourist spots. Doukas has had his sights on construction companies that are determined to erect multi-storey buildings at the foot of the 5th century BC Acropolis, as well as property investors and entrepreneurs. He is also taking aim at the proliferation of often unlicensed roof-top bars and eateries. The battle intensified this week as Doukas told the Guardian he would use a tourism land-use bill, currently under debate, to call for a blanket ban on new business activity in the city’s historical centre. “We’ll be stopping all tourist investment in Plaka, which I am on a mission to save. There’s no more room. Not for short-term rental, not for serviced apartments, not for hotels, or any other tourism use. The area is over-saturated,” he said. “We want to say ‘enough is enough’ in a bill that is enshrined in law.” Investors, he said, should head to other “less congested” areas of the capital. The mayor has also floated the idea of freezing construction permits for new hotels. That would follow a similar ban, introduced by the centre-right government, curbing short-term rentals in neighbourhoods within view of the Acropolis. To his surprise, this week he won support from an unexpected quarter. At an event promoting the capital on Tuesday, the head of the powerful hoteliers’ association, Evgenios Vassilikos, also raised the prospect of a cap on hotel construction, citing the example of Barcelona, which has not issued licences for new hotels since 2017. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” said the hotelier, adding that the moment had come for the capital’s tourism sector to seriously contemplate where it wanted to be in 10 or 15 years’ time. The mayor said: “When the whole of Athens’ centre is turning into a hotel zone, I cannot be the only one saying it. Now that the president of the hoteliers’ association has weighed in, the discussion has officially begun. Athens cannot become [another] Barcelona.” Doukas has clearly been emboldened by Jaume Collboni, his left-wing counterpart in Barcelona, who recently announced a complete ban on short-term rentals from November 2028, when permits for more than 10,000 apartments will be rescinded in an attempt to make the city more livable for its residents. Both Athens and Barcelona are among 15 cities whose mayors have joined a European housing action plan that has urged the EU to take bold initiatives to address the crisis. Like Collboni, Doukas has described access to affordable housing – impossible for many because of short-term rental pressure – as the municipality’s biggest problem. “We’ve created a social housing office to identify buildings and apartments that we can renovate with EU funds,” he said. “We want to incentivise young couples to remain in the centre. While other cities are moving toward cement and skyscrapers, we’re moving in an altogether other direction, and that includes demolishing buildings to create public space for parks and playgrounds. Athens is for its people. It is not only for those who simply want to exploit it.”
Taking back power or taking the mickey? The activists ‘liberating’ food from big stores
Eve Middleton was sitting on a picnic blanket in a park, sharing out vegan biscuits with six fellow activists, when she saw a squad of police bearing down on them. About 30 officers, she said, surrounded the seven young people, and one officer told them: “Don’t run or you’ll be cuffed.” Another officer focused on gathering evidence. “Whose Oreos are these?” they asked, seizing the biscuits. “It was pretty farcical, but it’s still frightening when you see that amount of officers running towards you. It’s pretty scary,” said student Bridie Leggatt, another of the seven. The seven activists had gathered for a “nonviolence training event” – meeting in the park to enjoy the sunny weather. Leggatt, 22, and Middleton, 25, were among 13 people arrested last weekend in Salford and London as part of a national police crackdown on a new civil resistance group called Take Back Power. A further 15 arrests had been made in March when police raided a “nonviolence training” event, this time at the Grade II-listed Quaker House in Westminster. They were all held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit theft, police said, linked to Take Back Power’s campaign of “mass shoplifting” in supermarkets across Britain in a protest against inequality. On TikTok, the group’s videos show activists of all ages “liberating” rice, pasta, beans, nappies, stock cubes and tinned fruit from supermarkets in Cornwall, London and Manchester. They pile the goods into cardboard boxes branded with the message: “These things are going to those who need them.” The items are then distributed at local food banks – if they manage to get past security. Even by today’s standards of shoplifting, when supermarket thefts have reached record highs, the mass looting is quite brazen. Steph Parker, an assistant chief constable at Greater Manchester police, said forces would take “robust action to disrupt this type of organised criminality and it will not be tolerated”. Middleton and her six comrades were held in custody for 24 hours before being released on Monday. For Middleton, like many of the activists, this is not her first encounter with the law. Many of those involved with the group are seasoned activists – despite being in their early 20s – having taking part in actions with Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Animal Rising and other groups in recent years. Neither Middleton or Leggatt wanted to say how many times they had been arrested as they feared a telling off from their parents. Take Back Power announced itself in December when activists threw custard and apple crumble at a case containing the crown jewels at the Tower of London. Eight people were charged with criminal damage over the stunts, with four due to appear before Westminster magistrates court on Monday. The group said a total of 50 people had been arrested since December, with the majority detained while taking part in “nonviolence training” events. On its website, activists are invited to join upcoming action in London “targeting the luxury lifestyle of the super-rich” by “occupying where they play and shop”. A spokesperson for Take Back Power, who would only give his name as James due to the risk of arrest, said the group planned further headline-grabbing stunts this year with the aim of focusing attention on Britain’s deepening inequality. James said the organisation, which wants to see higher taxes levied on the rich and a legally binding citizens’ assembly, had no leader “as such”. It has raised more than £65,000 in donations in the past four months, according to a fundraising page. Another of those arrested last weekend, who would only give his name as Mark, said mass shoplifting would have “no real effect” on supermarkets who make billions of pounds in profit. “Supermarkets are profiting off other people’s misery and we can’t put up with that,” said Middleton, pointing out that Tesco’s chief executive, Ken Murphy, was paid £9.2m last year, about 400 times that of the shop’s typical worker. What about the effect on low-paid staff? Will they not risk losing their jobs if mass shoplifting has an effect on company profits? “It shouldn’t be staff that get cut,” said Mark, 44, who works in education. “What should get cut are the obscene profits and salaries of the chief executives.” The vegan picnic raided by police last weekend was in Salford’s Peel Park – named after Sir Robert Peel, the founder of modern law enforcement whose philosophy of “policing by consent” is a guiding principle of forces today, recognising that those in uniform operate on the basis of public trust rather than fear or force. Yet the arrests of activists at a training event – rather than for a specific act – appears to run counter to that principle, said Middleton. Parliament’s joint committee on human rights has condemned legislative changes in recent years that it said (pdf) have had “a chilling effect” on the right to protest in England and Wales. Middleton said the arrests on suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy was part of a wider “repression” of civil resistance in Britain. “Other groups were able to take part in training without everyone getting arrested,” she said. “For doing not as much, the risk of prison is a lot higher.” James, the Take Back Power spokesperson, said the group planned to build up its action with the aim of pushing inequality to the top of the agenda by the next general election, which has to be held by August 2029. Middleton believes the police crackdown is a sign that the authorities are scared. “They can see that Take Back Power does speak to a lot of this country’s people [who are] fed up with inequality. They are scared of what it could become.”
UK schoolboys’ fatal hike remembered in Black Forest 90 years on
On 17 April 1936, the bells of St Laurentius church in the Black Forest rang out to guide to safety a group of London schoolboys trapped in deep snow on a mountain hike gone very wrong. Ninety years on to the day, as the bells sounded again, there was hardly a dry eye in the congregation of British relatives and German villagers remembering the night that had brought together their parents and grandparents. The people of Hofsgrund risked their lives heading out with sledges and lanterns in the deadly weather to rescue the party of 27 and their teacher after two boys, fumbling though fog and frozen to the bone, had reached a farmhouse and told its startled inhabitants there were many more of them strewn over the Schauinsland mountain. The Daily Sketch from 20 and 29 April 1936 But it was the Hitler Youth Organisation that would claim credit for the action, in a propaganda coup ceremoniously flanking the coffins of the five boys who perished in what local people refer to as the Engländerunglück (English Misfortune) before they were transported on trains back to London. Those images dominated the headlines and went around the world. Jenny Davies, the daughter of Douglas Mortifee, who as a 17-year-old had reached the farmhouse clad in shorts and sandals – dressed the same as the other boys when they had set out from their hostel with just two buttered rolls and nothing to drink – said it was finally time to pay tribute to the villagers of Hofsgrund and correct the historical record once and for all. Jenny Davies (right), the daughter of Douglas Mortifee, who was one of the boys to raise the alarm “Without your help we would not be here now,” she said in an emotional address from the church pulpit, speaking on behalf of relatives of five of the 22 survivors and a niece of one of the deceased at a ceremony to mark the anniversary attended by the parish priest and a village brass band. The Nazis’ hijacking of the narrative, in which they were able to feign feelings of friendship towards Britain, was supported by promoters of Britain’s appeasement efforts to prevent the second world war. It also allowed the boys’ teacher, Kenneth Keast, then 27, to get off the hook. Equipped with a tiny scale 1:100,000 map and a compass he did not know how to use, he had set out on the hike despite minus temperatures, snowfall and repeated warnings from local people who knew their weather and urged him to turn back. Afterwards, charges were dropped in Germany, and British newspapers portrayed him as the “man of the hour” without whom more boys would have died, although UK authorities did ban him from taking further school trips abroad. Ninety years on, and in better weather, relatives and villagers retraced part of the boys’ route on the mountain path, visiting a bombastic, rune-style monument erected by the Nazis as well as a modest stone cross on a grassy slope close to the spot where Jack Eaton, 14 years and 10 months old, had collapsed and died metres from the village. That cross has slowly gained recognition as the true memorial to the boys of Strand school in Brixton Hill, south London. It was commissioned by the father of Jack, the school’s boxing champion, who had flown to Germany determined to find out who was responsible for the death of his only son. Nancy Whelan, Jack’s niece, visited the spot for the first time on the anniversary, touching its lichen-mottled inscription as she fought back tears. “My nan [Jack’s mother] and my mother, Jacqueline, who was named after Jack, always said they just wanted the truth to come out,” she said. A blank space on the cross shows where Nazi authorities forced Jack’s father to remove words blaming the teacher, as it impugned the official narrative. Nancy Whelan (right) and three relatives of Norman Hearn study the Eaton memorial Ewald Lorenz welcomed the boys’ relatives at the Dobelhof farmyard where Douglas Mortifee and RGS Farrants had sought help. His grandparents, Elisabeth and Bernhard Lorenz, had brought the hypothermic boys into the safety of their wood-panelled parlour and urged them to stand some distance from the dark green ceramic oven, which still dominates the room, so as to not rewarm too quickly. Ewald Lorenz at the front door of the Dobelhof farmhouse in Hofsgrund The grandparents of Ewald Lorenz Everyone in the village has their own story to tell of that night. “We know to always have an open door and an open mind,” Lorenz said. In the wood-beamed village hall, local people and the families swap stories after the hike. The rescuers included Bruno Lorenz, the village cobbler, who, his son Kurt recalled, said of that night: “The snow and wind was monstrous.” Kurt Lorenz, whose father, Bruno, the village cobbler, was involved in the rescue effort, listens to speeches at the Hofsgrund community centre Marius Buhl, a local journalist, said he wished he had had the chance to ask his grandfather Reinhold Gutmann about his role in the rescue, but the village had only truly realised the significance of the event after the publication of research byBernd Hainmüller, a retired teacher from nearby Freiburg, who spent 26 years unearthing the real story behind the tragedy. “We lived with the towering monument right in front of our noses, but it took an outsider to really bring the story to our attention,” Buhl said. Marius Buhl, a Hofsgrunder whose grandfather was involved in the rescue effort, speaks during the memorial service in the local Catholic church “The rescuers never talked much about it,” said Paula Gnaehrich, whose grandfather, Ignatz Schelb, had carried the boys on a horn sledge back into the valley. “But it was always something of interest to us youngsters. We often thought of the children, and I was always shocked that the teacher might have ignored the warnings of Black Forest locals who are always going to know their heimat and its weather better than a visiting Londoner, however clever he thinks he is.” Vanessa Barton, the daughter of Russell Petty, who was 16 at the time, quoted her father’s account of the hike and how “the wind and snow together were felling small trees”. She said: “On family holidays he never took us anywhere it was snowing, and certainly not up a mountain.” Julia and Lucy Warner had brought with them the pencil-written diary of the youngest survivor, their grandfather Ken Osborne, and donated it to the local museum along with the postcard he had sent to his parents after the event. “We got lost. It might be in the papers and so we have been told to write and say that I am quite safe,” it said. A Guardian long read published soon after the 80th anniversary brought Hainmüller’s work to a wider audience, prompting many relatives of the schoolboys to contact him – connections that eventually led to the memorial meeting. Research by the Guardian’s Richard Nelsson in UK archives also uncovered a paper trail now central to the understanding of events. The Catholic church of Hofsgrund Over kaffee und kuchen the families swapped stories and shared photos, letters, diaries and newspaper cuttings, piecing together details such as who carried whom off the mountain, and where and when the boys subsequently served in the war. Russell Petty had carried Peter Ellerkamp, who was one of those to die. Stephen Hearn said he was reasonably sure his father, Norman Hearn, had put Ken Osborne, the smallest boy, on his shoulders. “My dad only ever gave us snippets of information when we were young,” Hearn said. “He simply told us he had nearly lost his thumbs due to frostbite trying to rescue a boy off the top of a mountain.” It was only 27 years after his father’s death that Hearn looked through two boxes of documents from his life, found the Guardian article through a web search and “realised what I’d stumbled across”. In October 2024 he sent the information to Hainmüller, who helped him piece together the puzzle. Speeches at an exhibition on the tragedy in the community hall Norman Hearn, like one other survivor, Stanley Few, refused to fight against the Germans when war broke out, insisting it was Germans who had saved their lives. Both were sent to Asia instead. It was noted also that several of the rescuers went to war and never came back, two of them killed at the Battle of Stalingrad. Kevin Mitchell, visiting Hofsgrund with his father, Max, whose late brother Hubert had survived the hike, said he felt a great sense of satisfaction. “Most of us had the big picture, but the pleasure has been in the minutiae we’ve been able to share.” The parlour of the Dobelhof farmhouse with the original oven. Apart from the kitchen, this was the only heated room in the house. In a video message from Perth, Australia, Debra Cadee, the daughter of Donald Hooke, another survivor, said: “I can remember Dad telling us ‘the tolling of the bells saved us’.” She said he suffered from the effects of frostbite for the rest of his life. The local mayor, Hanspeter Rees, has promised that Jack Eaton’s father’s inscription – “their teacher failed them in the hour of trial” – will soon be re-engraved on the monument. Whelan said: “After nine decades, I feel my family’s painful attempts to get to the truth have finally paid off.” • This article was amended on 25 April 2026. The mayor is Hanspeter Rees, not Klaus Vosberg as stated in an earlier version. Also, the spellings of Paula Gnaehrich and Ignatz Schelb’s surnames were corrected.