Read the daily news to learn English

Sabotage, leaks and political ties: the story of the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder trial

The conclusion of the longest-running murder trial in Maltese history has left a country in turmoil, and a grieving family still searching for answers. At 7.30pm on Wednesday, gasps and cheers echoed around hall 22 of the courts of justice in Valletta, as a jury pronounced a businessman accused of ordering the murder of the investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia not guilty. Yorgen Fenech, 44, had been facing a life sentence if convicted. Now, after nearly seven years in and out of custody, he is free to return to a gilded life as the heir to one of Malta’s biggest fortunes. In her reporting, Caruana Galizia had taken aim at many powerful figures, including Fenech and the politicians he was close to. Her revelations, and the fallout from her violent death in a car bombing in October 2017, had ultimately led to the resignation of the prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and several members of his government. Within weeks, three hitmen accused of planting the bomb were arrested. Two were sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to murder, while the third was given a reduced 15-year sentence in exchange for evidence against his accomplices. After Wednesday’s decision, the long search for whoever was responsible for hiring them must begin again. The opposition leader, Alex Borg, has demanded the recall of parliament from its summer recess, and called for the government to act to strengthen press protection and anti-corruption measures. “We believe journalism is the backbone of a democracy,” he told the Guardian, describing the failure to find the culprits as a black mark against the Labour government. The party has been in power since 2013. Caruana Galizia’s family described the verdict as “justice denied”. The attorney general is considering whether to appeal for a retrial. The chances of success may be slim: Both charges brought against Fenech were dismissed by an 8-1 majority. It had taken nine years, a relentless family campaign and a determined judge to bring Fenech before a jury. In the end, they took him at his word. During his evidence, he was adamant: “I never ordered Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder, or anyone else’s. I had no role in her murder.” While the identity of the mastermind remains a mystery, what the trial did reveal was the full extent of the challenges faced by those leading the search for Daphne’s killers. Witness after witness spoke of attempts to block and sabotage the murder investigation. As detectives worked to identify all of those involved, from the bomb makers to the hitmen to their ultimate client, they heard evidence that the most sensitive details were being leaked. Most disturbingly of all, the jury was told much of the information was coming from the prime minister’s right-hand man. “Don’t worry about me, nobody can touch me,” Fenech was heard saying in secret recordings that formed a cornerstone of the case against him, and played to the jury. The man who had made those recordings was a taxi driver, Melvin Theuma, who testified to acting as the middleman between Fenech and the bombers. He was the key prosecution witness, having secured a pardon two years after the murder in return for giving evidence. In July 2020, he was taken to hospital in a critical condition. Overcome with remorse, he had attempted suicide while staying at a safe house, and it took intensive support to get him back in the stand. What follows is the story of the search for those responsible, based on pre-trial hearings, the trial itself, and related court cases. Consumed by an investigation that would kill her In the last summer of her life, Caruana Galizia was deeply isolated. As a younger woman, she had not only been brilliant, but strikingly beautiful, with big statement earrings and shining black hair. She had co-founded a national newspaper, was a lifestyle magazine publisher, and had become one of Malta’s most-read columnists, all while raising three sons. In later life, it was the investigative work that consumed her. Her blog Running Commentary was among the most-read news sites in Malta, but its popularity, and her often scathing satires of public figures, made her a target. She had as many detractors as fans, and on social media she was vilified as a “witch”. There were arson attacks, and the family dogs were killed. “I was worried about her,” her middle son, Andrew, told the trial. “The atmosphere around her was horrible. People would stare at her in Valletta. She wouldn’t leave the house.” Caruana Galizia knew she was at risk and had already started varying her routine. For added security, she drove a rental car. It was in that car that she died on 16 October 2017, aged 53, metres from her house. A bomb placed under the driver’s seat ripped through the vehicle, scattering burning remains across the road and into a field. Barricaded inside their home, sheltering from the media storm, Daphne’s sons and her widow, Peter, wondered who they could trust. They felt sure her work would hold clues, but also that they could not hand sensitive source material to the police. Her eldest son, Matthew, a software engineer who had been part of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer prize for the Panama Papers, a giant leak of offshore company data, suggested contacting journalists outside Malta. “I didn’t have the resources to do the investigation on my own,” he told the jury at Fenech’s trial. He reached out to the Guardian, which joined Reuters, the non-profit Forbidden Stories and others to form the Daphne Project. Before her death, Caruana Galizia had published a series of stories that plunged the Maltese government into scandal. She had found evidence in the Panama Papers that the energy minister, Konrad Mizzi, and the prime minister’s chief of staff, a businessman turned political fixer called Keith Schembri, had set up offshore companies held via anonymous trusts. Posts she published, read out during the trial, suggested she thought they were planning to use these to receive kickbacks. Those allegations are now the subject of a criminal case, in which Fenech, Schembri, Mizzi and others are pleading not guilty to corruption, trading in influence and criminal association. At the time she died, Caruana Galizia was receiving a leak of information about a large government contract – a concession to build a €500m gas power plant that would supply electricity for the national grid. The leak came from the servers of the company building the plant, Electrogas. One of its shareholders was Fenech, and the email traffic suggested he was a driving force, handling communications with the government, and the refinancing of a crucial bank loan. The jury heard how, in her blog, Caruana Galizia had described the venture as a “magic new corruption power station”. The prosecution had claimed, in its closing submissions, that Fenech’s motive for ordering her murder was to prevent any further revelations. The Electrogas data was shared with the Daphne Project. As reporters combed the files, following the money trails, Keith Arnaud, a homicide detective, searched for the killers. At first he made rapid progress, thanks to the FBI. The agency’s cellphone analysis team had been in Europe when the bomb went off, and they diverted to Malta, landing there within hours. The hitmen, brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio, and their accomplice Vincent Muscat, had used burner phones but they had been careless, often carrying them alongside their usual mobiles. The FBI made the link, tracing a text message sent by George to detonate the bomb. In December 2017, the trio were arrested. In April 2018, Vincent Muscat told police he was ready to turn on his accomplices, in exchange for a shorter sentence. While the hitmen had never known the identity of their ultimate client, Muscat had the name of the middleman: Melvin Theuma. The mosquito and the lion For Theuma, a fatherless teenager, the Malta Racing Club was a home from home. He started as a groom, tending to the ponies that pull small carts around the bare-earth track. Before long he was working as a scout for a bookmaker. The old betting shop still stands across the street from the Fenech family stables. Theuma and Fenech became friends, but it was not a relationship of equals. As the taxi driver said in court: “I was hanging out with a lion, and I’m a mosquito.” Police said in court they had identified Fenech as a suspect by September 2018. But it would take until February 2019 for a warrant to be authorised to intercept his calls. The person signing the warrants was the prime minister, Joseph Muscat. From the beginning, Muscat had been receiving updates about the investigation directly from Arnaud and his colleagues. That decision was controversial because, along with his ministers, he had been one of the main subjects of Caruana Galizia’s reporting. Muscat has indicated it was customary for the prime minister to sign warrants in cases of national importance. He has previously said he fulfilled his duties “without fear, prejudice or favour”. In a statement on Thursday, he said that from the beginning, and while he was still in office, “no one was protected from or immune to justice”. Schembri was allowed to attend the police briefings and told the trial he was kept informed throughout. The two men were close – Schembri had started out as Muscat’s campaign manager – but Schembri had another good friend: Fenech. They had played football together as children, and when Fenech, a few years younger, stepped up to run his family business, Schembri had mentored him. They would often holiday together and gather for family events. Schembri is accused of repeatedly leaking sensitive details about the homicide investigation to Fenech. He denies the allegations, and is being prosecuted over the matter in a separate criminal case. During his trial, Fenech sought to paint Schembri as the ultimate mastermind, describing himself as a go-between, passing messages to Theuma. Fenech’s lawyers depicted the taxi driver as a blackmailer and a liar, and accused the police of framing Fenech because they had failed to properly follow other leads. They said the searches at Schembri’s home and his office had been bungled. His phone, active 28 minutes before the raid, was never found. “All roads lead to Keith and all bridges leading to Keith were burnt,” Fenech’s lawyer said. “And so a bridge had to be built to Yorgen Fenech.” Schembri denies any involvement in the murder. In their evidence, police said he was never a murder suspect. Under questioning, Fenech admitted paying €400,000, via Theuma, to the hitmen to cover their legal bills. He said this was to keep Theuma calm, and that the cab driver “drained” him of money. He also admitted giving Theuma money before the murder, but said he warned that it should not go ahead, telling the taxi driver to “stop it here”. He admitted passing information about the police investigation from Schembri to Theuma, starting soon after the assassination. “Keith Schembri was continuously informed and in a way you can say real time,” Fenech told a court in 2019, in a constitutional case regarding his right to a fair trial. “The information was passed to me by Keith Schembri but it came from Mr Arnaud, and he used to tell me that it came from Mr Arnaud.” Recordings, messages and testimony from Fenech himself indicate that in the first months after the murder he had passed on to Theuma the identity of who had made the bomb and the date on which the police were planning to arrest the hitmen. When the police raided their shed by the docks, they had already thrown their mobile phones into the water, and one of them had written his wife’s number on his wrist. In April 2018, Fenech also shared that Vincent Muscat was offering to become a witness for the prosecution. The news sent Theuma into a spin and he started to record his exchanges with Fenech, using a spare phone switched to airplane mode so it would not ring. It was around this time that Arnaud’s investigation seemed to lose momentum. Eventually, details of what had been uncovered began to leak. By May 2019, reporters had Theuma’s name. Europol, which had been supporting Arnaud and his team, threatened over the summer of 2019 to withdraw unless arrests were made. The family were also losing patience. “We had known what was being alleged about Melvin Theuma for months,” Matthew Caruana Galizia has said. “And it reached a point where I just wanted to go into the street and spraypaint his name on a wall. I wanted the world to know that he was the middleman, to just push the police into action.” While the walls around the prime minister and his friends looked strong from the outside, when the police finally went for Theuma, Joseph Muscat’s administration crumbled. Theuma had been warned of his planned arrest date but police swooped two days early, on 14 November 2019. Fenech had urged him in messages beforehand to dispose of the evidence. The jury saw one message in which he said: “Be 100% sure everywhere is clean.” But Theuma held on to his recordings. On 19 November, the prime minister signed a memorandum guaranteeing Theuma immunity from prosecution in exchange for testimony. Within hours, Fenech was making preparations to flee, messages seen by the jury suggest. “Go while you’re still in time,” his uncle texted. He planned to sail to Sicily, and then head for France. However, the police had been tipped off. His yacht was intercepted a mile off the coast, and he was arrested. The interrogation tapes, played at his trial, showed he offered to implicate Schembri in return for a pardon. As Fenech talked, heads rolled. Schembri was arrested in relation to the suspected leaks, and resigned. The economy minister, a frequent subject of Caruana Galizia’s blog, suspended himself and Mizzi, by now reassigned from energy to tourism minister, quit, citing “political, extraordinary and general circumstances in the country”. Public outrage brought hundreds on to the streets, filling the grand plaza outside the prime minister’s office, chanting: “Mafia, mafia”. Fenech’s pardon request was rejected and on 30 November, he was charged. Two days later, Joseph Muscat resigned. Defiant to the end, he insisted: “This case cannot define everything that our country is.” The saga is once again drawing attention from outside Malta. Shami Chakrabarti, the British Labour peer, has been appointed rapporteur of a Council of Europe investigation into the Maltese government’s response to the murder. Caruana Galizia’s family members intend to give evidence at the first hearing next week. “The failure to ensure individual accountability for the murder risks perpetuating a culture of impunity,” Chakrabarti said on Thursday. “A culture where … those who try to shine a light in the darkness pay the ultimate price.”

Climate injustices have been laid bare in the Nepal-Tibet flood disaster | Letters

The recent glacial collapse and catastrophic floods in Nepal and Tibet are not isolated tragedies (Report, 28 August). They reflect accelerating climate disruption that disproportionately affects the countries and people that are least responsible for global emissions. As climate change intensifies, glaciers around the world, including in the Himalayas, are melting at unprecedented rates, destabilising ecosystems and causing glacial collapse and ice-and-rock landslides, destroying settlements, villages and livelihoods in minutes. No one died when a Swiss glacier collapsed last year, owing to early-warning systems that were in place. But a lack of early-warning systems means that the disaster in Nepal and Tibet has led to hundreds of deaths and thousands missing. Events like these are not “natural disasters”. They are due to global warming and climate injustices, and also flawed development policies, including rampant property developments on vulnerable floodplains. They call for better disaster preparedness and investment in early-warning systems. Most importantly, they require global action. The UK has long positioned itself as a leader in international development and climate action. Yet recent UK commitments have fallen far short of what is required – including the decision to raid the diminished aid budget to switch international climate finance grants to loans, to fund a bus-fare cap. The foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, recently spoke compellingly about the need to put the climate crisis and overseas development at the heart of UK international relations. These words must now translate into action. The UK must step up its development commitments and funding for climate adaptation, and loss and damage, to support those living on the frontlines of climate change. The recent glacial floods remind us that climate disruption is global, and highly unequal. The UK must act urgently. Anything less is a failure of responsibility. Prof Lyla Mehta Institute of Development Studies • Sunil Acharya is correct when he states: “The countries that benefited most from fossil fuel-driven growth have a responsibility to cut emissions rapidly” (Nepal-Tibet flood: this is the cost of not acting in the face of the climate crisis, 28 August). This was the founding principle of the global “contraction and convergence” framework, tabled by India, China and the African Group of Nations in Kyoto at Cop3 in 1997. Had we enacted this, we would now be on a safe, and equitable, 30-year contraction path, avoiding the worst of the climate crisis and ensuring our survival. Instead, we remain adrift, with no viable solution or plan. Is it really too late to adopt this framework? Lynda McDonald Portaferry, County Down • The key question is: who should pay for this disaster? Yes, the rich world should pay, but the bills should be sent to all the fossil-fuel companies that have known this risk for at least half a century and have ignored it. If they refuse to pay, all of us in countries that have profited from the fossil-driven benefits of “progress” should, through our governments, pay a progressive tax on all things based on fossil fuels, to cover the past, present and future costs of climate change. Jan Bengtsson Uppsala, Sweden • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

Nobel laureate Machado: ‘Illegitimate’ Venezuela regime has no right to strike US oil deal

The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has questioned Donald Trump’s oil deal with Venezuela’s interim government, saying the country’s natural resources do not belong to “an illegitimate regime”. In her first public comments since Trump announced what he called “the biggest oil deal in world history” with Venezuela last Friday, Machado walked a diplomatic tightrope between challenging the agreement and trying not to rile the White House. In a video posted on social media, the Nobel peace prize winner said: “Of course the United States is the principal partner Venezuela needs to fully develop its strategic potential. This is what the majority of Venezuelans believe … and it is something I’ve spent my whole life defending.” However, Machado said, the current occupants of the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas were “enemies of the US”, saying they did not have the right or the democratic mandate to negotiate Venezuela’s natural resources. “The wealth of our subsoil does not belong to an illegitimate regime – it belongs to the Venezuelan people,” she said, adding that supporters felt “sadness and anger” at being excluded from the decision-making process. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves with an estimated 303bn barrels, of which more than 65bn barrels are involved in the agreement. Trump’s deal was struck with the un-elected interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, who took power in January after her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, was abducted by US special forces. Many observers expected Trump to replace Maduro with Machado, a conservative democracy activist who later gave the US president her Nobel prize award. But instead Trump backed Rodríguez, threatening: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price – probably bigger than Maduro”, and sidelined Machado. The White House claims the oil deal will help secure US “energy dominance for the next century” as well as “purging foreign malign influence from our back yard” by excluding China and Russia. Speaking outside the Miraflores palace on Wednesday, the US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said the aim was “to massively grow production and economic opportunities in Venezuela”, adding: “President Trump has a clear mission in Venezuela. The mission is to bring peace, freedom, opportunity, and prosperity to everyone in Venezuela.” But there has been widespread condemnation of what critics call a predatory and colonial-style land grab. Machado’s supporters fear the deal makes Washington far less inclined to push for fresh presidential elections. Machado’s movement is widely believed to have beaten Maduro by a landslide in the last such vote, in 2024, but he refused to accept the result and clung to power until his dramatic rendition on 3 January this year. On Wednesday, Trump and Rodríguez brushed off questions about when an election might be held. “You had a very powerful, very nasty dictatorship in Venezuela – and they’re just not going to be ready for it yet,” Trump told reporters, before adding vaguely: “But soon.” Rodríguez said: “There will be an electoral process, but when Venezuela is ready. “I don’t set dates,” she added.

Gloria Steinem obituary

Gloria Steinem, who has died aged 92, was a writer, community organiser, political campaigner and a charismatic feminist activist who called herself “an entrepreneur of social change”. She spent much of her life on the road, often accompanied by equally committed fellow campaigners. Steinem loathed public speaking, but during two years travelling in India in her 20s, she moved from village to village, with “a sari, a cup and a comb” in a group countering religious intolerance. She said she learned then, as Gandhi taught, that a message was all the more powerful delivered “eye to eye”. Steinem, unlike some of her contemporaries, never recanted or modified her many causes, which included civil rights, violence against women, and the struggle for equality. She continued to argue that every economics course ought to start not with production but with reproduction, and an understanding of the patriarchal instinct to restrict a woman’s right to contraception and abortion. She was one of Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics throughout his rise to power. She labelled him “harasser in chief”, a man whose rhetoric and conduct ran counter to the values she had dedicated her life to advocating. Like many of her generation, Steinem came to feminism at the end of the 1960s. In the early days of the women’s movement, as separatists, socialists, radicals and essentialists deifying the feminine made their arguments, Steinem initially described herself as a humanist. She had had a “vagabond childhood”, living in poverty for several years as the sole carer of her mentally ill and sometimes violent mother, Ruth. Her mother’s indifferent treatment by the male medical profession, Steinem wrote later, fuelled her sense of injustice and put her on the side of the underdog. Steinem lived with the fear that she too might experience mental illness, ending up like her mother “wandering the streets in a night dress”. In 1963, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique – describing the frustration of affluent, well-educated, middle-class white women trapped in domesticity – Steinem was “a girl reporter” living in New York, working on The Beach Book, a compendium of extracts from literature about beaches and tips on what to do in the sun. A rising media star who was later described, to her annoyance, as “the world’s most beautiful byline”, she had already begun to make connections: she asked the economist JK Galbraith to write the foreword, and he agreed. For another journalistic assignment that year, she spent three weeks undercover as a Playboy bunny for Show magazine, detailing the poor conditions and humiliations of wearing satin rabbit ears and a fluffy tail. The resulting article, A Bunny’s Tale, made her name. Steinem became a highly paid writer for magazines including McCall’s and Glamour, and interviewed, among others, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin and Paul Newman, as well as taking on “girl writer” tasks such as analysing textured stockings for the New York Times. Concurrently she was politically active, campaigning and fundraising for, among other causes, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the Democrat George McGovern’s campaign for the presidency, and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s battle for fair wages for migrant farm workers. As Steinem later wrote, she was “working on one thing and caring about another”. In 1968, the millionaire Clay Felker launched New York magazine, and hired Steinem to write a political column, The City Politic. A year later, she attended a “speak out”, organised by the radical feminist group the Redstockings, at which women spoke about their illegal abortions. As Steinem later put it, she felt “a big click”. Women were not to blame, but a sexist and misogynistic system that forced them to have dangerous terminations. The humanist had become a feminist. “Once the light began to dawn I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t figured out any of this before,” she said. Later that year, in New York magazine, she wrote the landmark article After Black Power, Women’s Liberation. Steinem was born in Toledo, Ohio, a second daughter for Ruth (nee Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Leo owned a summer resort in Clark Lake, Michigan, where swing bands would play. In the winter, the family took to the road in a trailer. Leo bought and sold antiques and used the children to charm away the debt collectors. In My Life on the Road (2015), Steinem said it was the equal relationship she had had with her father – for all his irresponsibility towards his family – that provided the foundation for the strong friendships and love affairs she later had with men including the film director Mike Nichols and the jazz musician Paul Desmond. Gloria’s mother had been a reporter on the Toledo Blade, sometimes writing under the name Duncan Mackenzie. When her first daughter, Susanne, was six, and a few years before Gloria’s birth, Ruth had a nervous breakdown and never worked again. She spent time in a series of psychiatric hospitals, and became addicted to a sedative called chloral hydrate. When Gloria was 10 her parents separated, her sister went to college, and she was left alone with her mother, occasionally receiving $50 from her nomadic father. In Ruth’s Song (Because She Could Not Sing It), one of the essays in her 1983 collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Steinem described the woman who had “lived too little”, but who had encouraged her daughters to get an education and learn the meaning of choice. Steinem laid no blame. “I knew my mother loved me, but she couldn’t take care of me.” Steinem majored in government at Smith College, Massachusetts, and in 1956, a year after Sylvia Plath, she graduated with distinction. In a stopover in Britain on the way to India and an academic scholarship, she had an illegal abortion aged 22. On her return to the US in the 1960s, she began to build a reputation as a journalist. In 1962, the year Helen Gurley Brown published Sex and the Single Girl, encouraging women to become financially independent and not wait for a wedding ring to take lovers, Steinem wrote an article for Esquire titled The Moral Disarmament of Betty Coed. Still not identifying with women’s liberation, she wrote perceptively: “The problem is that many girls … who depend on the roles of wife and mother for their total identity are being pressured into affairs they can’t handle and jobs they pretend to like.” By 1970, at Vassar College, New York, at the first of what were to be many commencement speeches given to graduating students, she showed an acute understanding of the depth of conditioning: “Our first problem is not to learn … but to unlearn,” she said, and “woman means submission, black means inferior … preconceptions embedded so deeply in our thinking we may not know they are there.” The women’s movement advocated no leaders, so some fellow activists were incensed when the media appointed Steinem as chief spokesperson. Her streaked blond hair, aviator glasses, wit, soft-voiced calm and miniskirts appealed. In 1975, the Redstockings claimed that Steinem had been “meteorically installed” as the leader of the movement by the CIA. Steinem had briefly co-founded a CIA-financed organisation, Independent Research Service, in the late 50s when, she said, the CIA was among the good guys. Unlike contemporaries such as Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millett, Steinem never wrote a seminal work, but she was a powerful polemicist, funny and had a way with words that her critics found too pat. “The human race is like a bird with two wings,” she said, in one of thousands of lectures. “If one wing is broken, the bird can’t fly.” Steinem fretted all her life that the media opted for trivialisation when it came to reporting what she saw as one of the greatest social changes in history, the rise of second-wave feminism, which led to changes, as the New York Times put it, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom. (The first wave was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.) In 1971, Steinem helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus, which encouraged women to run for political office. In the same year, Esquire published The Awesome Power of Gloria Steinem, largely an analysis of her impact on men. In a comment that was emblematic of the casual sexism of the time, the talkshow host David Susskind said: “What Gloria needs is a man.” In 1971, Steinem co-founded Ms, the first magazine owned and run by women. Critics predicted it would sell fewer than 20,000 copies. The first issue, published that December as part of New York magazine, sold 300,000 copies, sold out in eight days and attracted tens of thousands of subscriptions. Steinem said she would stay for two years, but in fact did not leave until the magazine was sold to Fairfax in 1987 – later she was part of the Liberty Media group that took it back into independent ownership. Ms had numerous internal battles about how radical it should be and funding was a constant struggle, since advertisers wary of articles such as If Men Could Menstruate shunned it. Later it went ad-free. When Steinem turned 50, in 1984, a birthday gala was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. Dinner was $250 a head – it was yet another fundraiser for her causes – and among Steinem’s friends in attendance were Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Betty Ford. Two years later Steinem was diagnosed with breast cancer. She subsequently suggested she had “burned out”. She went into therapy to discover why she had spent a lifetime as, she said, “Ms Fix-it”, avoiding confrontation, resistant to introspection, constantly on the move, battling a fear of overeating. Her next book was Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1992), for which she received a $700,000 advance. Critics worried that the book’s references to Steinem’s inner child meant the personal had become more important than the political; that psychobabble had taken over from protest. But her activism, apparently reinforced by meditation and visualisation, continued robustly. She went on supporting the Ms Foundation for Women and in 2005 co-founded the Women’s Media Center, to improve women’s representation in the media. As she said: “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.” As Steinem’s official biographer, Carolyn G Heilbrun, said in The Education of a Woman (1995), Steinem was a woman of contradictions: the feminist photographed in a bubble bath; the loner who was always in the spotlight; the compassionate listener who seemed accessible to no one; the person who hated to offend – but who still offended many, including full-time housewives, anti-abortionists and Friedan. Friedan accused Steinem of attracting what she called “the lavender menace”, lesbians, to the cause. She said Steinem was from the “bra-burning, anti-men, ‘politics of orgasm’” school of feminism. In turn, Steinem lightly mocked the plight of rich, white, middle-class women suffering from “the problem that has no name”. It might be painful, Steinem said, but you didn’t die of it. Ironically, several decades later, during the 2008 race for the Democratic presidential candidacy, Steinem controversially gave her support not to the black outsider Barack Obama, but to Hillary Clinton, the ultimate example of the white, privileged woman. In 1998 in a newspaper column, she also defended Bill Clinton against sexual allegations, to the confusion of many of her supporters. In 2000, Steinem married David Bale, an entrepreneur and animal-rights activist. She said they married because he was South African and needed a visa. Later she wrote: “He … loved me out of old ruts and patterns and choices.” He died in 2003. Steinem’s sister, Susanne, died in 2007. In 2013, Obama presented Steinem with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of many awards she received during her life. A year later, Rutgers University established a chair in her name to fund teaching and research into equal representation in the media. Until her death, she continued to travel, lecture and organise with a family of female friends. She gave the New York home that was her sanctuary to Gloria’s Foundation as a place for women to meet, speak out and organise. The latest of her books, An Unexpected Life, is due to be published later this month. In an interview with the New York Times in 2022, she was asked her view on women’s progress towards equality. “I feel proud,” she said. “And I feel mad as hell we are still dealing with the same old issues.” • Gloria Marie Steinem, feminist, writer and civil rights campaigner, born 25 March 1934; died 2 September 2026

EU’s ability to defend against invasion remains in doubt, finds official report

The EU’s ability to respond to a foreign invasion by 2030 remains in doubt due to a continuing reliance on the US and fragmented national defence systems, according to a report from its official auditor. The European court of auditors (ECA) said the EU was much better prepared than before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine of 2022, but achieving its goal of defence readiness by the end of the decade would be difficult. “Achieving defence preparedness in the EU by 2030 remains challenging,” said Marek Opioła, an ECA member who led the review of the EU’s defence policy published on Thursday. “There are still major difficulties such as fragmented national systems or industrial bottlenecks. We also still rely on the United States.” Speaking to the Guardian, he stressed the EU could “still make major progress” if it sharply increased defence spending and rapidly expanded ammunition production. Between 2020 and 2025, EU member states increased defence spending by 79%, a response to the Russian threat and a belated effort to meet Nato spending targets. In November 2024, the EU met its pledge of providing 1 million rounds of ammunition to Ukraine – eight months behind schedule. The EU set the goal of defence readiness by 2030 last year, after intelligence services warned that Russia could be ready to wage a large-scale war in Europe around that time. The bloc’s financial watchdog said major difficulties had to be overcome to reach this target, defined by a senior auditor as “having strategic autonomy” and “the ability to independently sustain high-intensity warfare”. The senior auditor said the EU was better prepared than 2019 when a similar review was conducted, but warned that fragmented national defence industries and “insufficient cooperation” between EU governments contributed to a risk of duplication in spending or persistent gaps in military capabilities. Emblematic of the dysfunction – although not mentioned in the report – is France and Germany’s decision to abandon a €100bn project to build a joint fighter jet, because the lead companies were unable to resolve disputes over leadership and control. The report highlighted a possible tension between short-term battlefield needs and a “Buy European” policy that aims to reduce dependencies on foreign suppliers. Between February 2022 and June 2023, 78% of EU governments’ defence acquisitions were sourced outside the bloc, with the US alone representing 63%, according to one study cited by the ECA. The senior auditor said purchases from the US went up after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine “which was understandable because the EU needed to find capabilities that were available quickly”. The official added that “early signs of improvement in that situation” were visible, although the auditors did not have complete data to draw conclusions. The EU has set requirements that common defence spending should benefit domestic defence industries or those of closely-associated countries, such as Ukraine and Norway. But some flexibilities have been allowed where Europe is unable to produce critical supplies in time. After a brutal summer of deadly Russian missile and drone attacks, this week Ukraine asked for an exemption from Buy European procurement rules to acquire US-made Patriot interceptors using the EU’s €90bn support loan. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Wednesday that Ukraine had requested funding “worth several billion euros” for air defences, including Patriot air-defence systems. A commission spokesperson said Ukraine’s request for Patriot interceptor missiles “would require a derogation” from rules requiring majority European content in military purchases under the loan. “The final say is with the member states and of course our hope would be that this would soon be granted,” the spokesperson said. The senior auditor said sometimes “it may make sense” to buy outside “when you have a short-term urgent need”. The person added: “Even if you buy something that you don’t have in-house, you [should] always have a plan how to develop that critical capacity in the long-term within the European Union.”

Two cousins hired a 4WD to find their missing Australian family in Nepal. Then ‘there was no more road’

As the hot sun beats down in Kathmandu, Santosh Swaminathan and his cousin Nathan Subramanian take a break from searching for their missing loved ones to stop at a temple and pray. After they lost contact with Swaminathan’s sister and her husband following the devastating flood last week, they flew from India to Nepal. But as they wait for the army to rebuild roads and bridges into the areas where their loved ones were, they’re getting desperate. Like other families of missing Australians, they’re now taking matters into their own hands. They’re hiring four-wheel drives and heading into the flood zones to search. Swaminathan’s sister Chitra Venkatraman, 46, and her husband, Venkatraman Balakrishnan, 52, were among 15 Australians travelling to Mount Kailash, on a spiritual trip with the Himalayan Glacier Adventures tour group. In total, more than 5,000 people have been reported missing in Nepal and a further 546 in the Tibet region of China after the flooding, which has killed more than 1,200 people. Thirty-eight Australians remain unaccounted for. “They are just fun-loving people,” Swaminathan, 42, says of the missing New South Wales couple. “My sister, she is so funny … They are a very loving family. We miss them very badly right now.” On the weekend, the pair hired a 4WD in the capital, Kathmandu, and headed up the valley. The conditions are dangerous: roads collapse under cars, landslides are common and near-constant rain makes it hard to see. There are long delays, and when parts of the road slide away, travellers jump out of their cars to fill holes back in with rocks. Parts of the valley don’t have power, and there is no clean water or food. But Subramanian, 45, says they had to try. They managed to get to Trishuli, a town roughly 40km from Kathmandu but still another 20km from where the Australians would have been in Syabru Besi. “We took a car, food, everything,” Subramanian says. “The conditions are very bad. It’s been really bad – after Trishuli, there was no more road. “It was a risk, a very high risk. But that is all we can do. As family members, we need to do whatever we can do.” The day after their attempt, there was a huge mudslide on the road just down from Trishuli, leaving army personnel, aid workers and journalists stranded overnight. Other families sent another search car up on Wednesday to look for the missing group, which is made up of Canadians, Americans, Singaporeans, British citizens and Australians. They are hoping they can get all the way to the area where the group was staying. “We are just trying whatever we can,” Swaminathan says. There’s two pieces of information buoying the families from the group. First, the group was around a 45-minute drive from the area of the border with Tibet which was decimated by the wall of water and rock that ran down the valley. Second, the phones of other members of the group pinged last Wednesday – one as late as 2.30pm, hours after the flood hit. In Kathmandu, the family have visited the Australian and Indian embassies. They’ve spoken to Nepali politicians. They’ve been handing over any leads to police, and visiting the hospitals as the injured and dead start to arrive from Rasuwa, where the worst of the flooding hit. Swaminathan is in contact with the couple’s son, Akash Venkatraman, 22, who lives in Sydney with his younger brother. He says they’re being supported by family there. On Tuesday, the Australian ambassador to Nepal, Simon Ernst, warned families against heading into the flood zone. “We do understand for those with missing loved ones what an incredibly difficult time this must be,” he said. “Please do be assured we are working around the clock … to locate loved ones. “And a reminder, please, avoid travel to the impacted area. We remain in the monsoon season; the risk of further flooding is very real and furthermore, access to flood-damaged areas is very difficult, if not impossible.” Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email A lack of technology available to the Nepali army has hampered the search efforts. On Thursday, the Australian government announced it was deploying a team of specialist drone operators to contribute to the search efforts. But families are questioning why Nepal didn’t ask for technical help sooner. Subramanian says he knows the army is doing its best and trusts their capabilities, but acknowledges the technology they have access to is limited. “Ideally on the first day, they should have actually taken support from other governments,” he says. “Things could have been different.” In the heat and chaos of Kathmandu, the pair are trying everything they can. Running on anxiety and adrenaline, they are determined to bring their family members home. “Today we are in a situation where we don’t know what to do tomorrow,” Subramanian says. “We don’t know what’s next. We are just trying to turn over every stone that we can as civilians. We believe they are still alive, and now we are begging for a miracle.”

Spain’s Sánchez defends Morocco over Ceuta crisis as opponents call for his removal – as it happened

And, on that note, we will be closing the blog for today. Spain has seen no evidence “whatsoever” that Morocco planned or facilitated a mass border breach into its north African territory of Ceuta, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has told parliament (9:34, 9:50, 9:57, 10:13, 10:17). Sánchez addressed the parliament during a tense debate in which his political rivals demanded his resignation and early elections for what they believe was mishandling of the migration crisis (10:29, 10:53). In other news, Russia is “actively” preparing sabotage operations against Denmark, particularly its defence industry, Danish intelligence agency PET warned (10:59). French, German and Polish foreign ministers projected a united front as they spoke about Europe’s response to alleged acts of Russian sabotage (11:16), with the EU looking at tightening visa requirements for Russians looking to enter the bloc (12:41). The UK has joined a growing list of countries summoning top Russian diplomats over the recent attempted drone attack on Leipzig (12:56). 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.

US commerce secretary erroneously said no Americans have died in Iran war, Trump claims

Donald Trump has claimed his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, erroneously stated that no Americans had been killed in the war with Iran because he was thinking about a previous US operation, in Venezuela. The claim, at odds with the Pentagon’s count of 18 US service members dead in the US-Israel war on Iran, sparked a swift backlash as Trump struggles to end the conflict after six months. In a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, the US president wrote: “Sec. Lutnick had Venezuela on his mind when he said nobody was killed. 18 people were killed in Iran!” The rebuke came a day after Lutnick appeared on CNBC’s Squawk Box and framed the Trump administration’s approach to Iran as primarily economic. Describing the strategy as an “economic choke-out”, he erroneously told the network there had not been American deaths in the conflict, adding that he was optimistic bond markets would respond well to the approach. Lutnick this morning acknowledged the mistake, posting on X that he had misspoken and also claiming he had been thinking of the US operation in Venezuela, where US forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January with minimal US casualties. The Pentagon said seven US troops were injured and none were killed in that operation, while Venezuelan officials put their overall death toll at 47, and Cuba said 32 of its military and police personnel were killed. Trump’s post landed as Iranian authorities detailed heavy casualties from the latest US strikes. Iran’s health ministry said Tuesday night’s strikes killed 18 people and wounded 108, while the country’s Red Crescent identified that four people were killed and 67 wounded when a US strike hit a wedding ceremony near the coast of the strait of Hormuz, which also killed a child. Reuters said it was able to verify the location of the damaged building using satellite imagery. A US Central Command spokesperson, Capt Tim Hawkins, said the US military does not target civilians and that the reports, which originated with Iranian state media, were being reviewed. The strikes were part of a broader operation that Central Command said hit Iranian air defense systems, radar installations, maritime assets, mine-laying equipment and communications sites near the strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway through which a large share of the world’s oil passes. The Pentagon’s capacity to independently verify such claims has been sharply reduced. Its Civilian Protection Center of Excellence has been cut from 40 staff to nine since the start of last year, according to the Pentagon’s own inspector general, while the department has also stopped developing a database meant to track civilian harm from US operations. The episode has exposed a wider tension in how the White House is presenting the conflict. Officials have sought to characterize the campaign (estimated to have cost at least $37.5bn as of July) against Iran in economic terms even as it continues to produce US military deaths, mounting Iranian civilian casualties and rising oil prices. Polling from UMass-Amherst in late August found that 54% of Americans disapprove of the war initiated by the US and Israel, and one in six Trump voters would go back and change their vote in 2024. The current round of fighting began after the US struck rocket launchers on Larak Island that officials said were being prepared to mine the strait, prompting Iranian missile and drone attacks on US and allied positions in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Iraq. Jordanian authorities said 13 ballistic missiles were fired at the country, of which 10 were intercepted. Trump described Iran’s retaliation as a “love tap”, but warned that further strikes remained an option. “It was a very heavy attack last night, and we’re prepared to do another one anytime we want,” he said earlier this week.