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Middle East crisis live: Trump warns US will ‘go back to shooting’ if Iran ‘don’t behave’, as G7 leaders call for Lebanon ceasefire

Since the US-Iran deal was announced, families displaced by war in southern Lebanon have begun to return to their homes. Many of them have found their villages and towns almost completely destroyed by Israeli bombing, which has killed nearly 4,000 people and displaced more than one million since renewed fighting with Hezbollah began on 2 March. Lebanon’s official National News Agency has reported continued Israeli strikes in the south of the country this morning, even as leaders of the G7 called for an immediate ceasefire.

Trump backs G7 leaders’ call for wider talks on Iranian missile programme

Donald Trump has backed a joint G7 leaders’ statement that welcomes the deal he has struck with Iran but says a follow-on agreement is necessary to rein in Iran’s ballistic missile programme, an issue not directly addressed in the memorandum of understanding that is due to be signed on Friday by Iran and the US. The statement says future negotiations with Iran would benefit from the involvement of a wider group of regional and international actors including the UN nuclear weapons agency, the IAEA. Trump is facing severe criticism, including from some of his domestic supporters, for conducting a war against Iran that has ended in a negotiated deal that has met hardly any of its original objectives. He is due to attend a banquet in Versailles on Wednesday evening to celebrate the 250th anniversary of America’s independence. Trump said before the dinner: “Versailles is not just gold-plated. It’s the real deal.” Iran is bound to reject the proposal for further talks involving European leaders about its ballistic missiles and support for proxy forces. Tehran has been negotiating exclusively with the US and regards Europe as largely irrelevant. Iran is also likely to reject France and Britain’s plan for a taskforce to escort ships through the strait of Hormuz, a proposal endorsed in the G7 leaders’ statement. On Ukraine, the G7 leaders hailed the battlefield momentum and called for fresh pressure against Russia through sanctions and additional arms deliveries to Kyiv. The G7 meeting in Évian-les-Bains, chaired by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, brings together the world’s most powerful economies: the US, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, Canada and Japan. The joint statement issued on Wednesday morning suggests Trump unusually has been willing to go some way to accommodating concerns of other leaders on issues on which he has been acting unilaterally, particularly in the cases of Iran and Ukraine. The leaders also said: “We consider this the right moment to proceed with additional measures, as President Trump has delivered a deal that we support in reopening the strait of Hormuz.” The deal reopens the strait and reiterates Iran’s opposition to possessing nuclear weapons but postpones talks on how to dilute or destroy its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Trump has said he is open to the stockpile being diluted inside Iran under the supervision of the IAEA. The memorandum agrees to immediately lift US sanctions on Iran’s oil exports and a raft of related industries, and to create a $300bn reconstruction fund. The US has said it need not contribute to the fund financially. The G7 leaders said the agreement, due to be signed on Friday in Switzerland, provided “an historic opportunity to prevent Iran from acquiring any nuclear weapon and tackling the threats related to its regional and ballistic activities. We support and are ready to contribute to its implementation.” Reaffirming the right of transit passage without restrictions or tolls as a bedrock of international trade, the leaders said: “The multinational, independent and defensive initiative led by France and the UK can play an important role to facilitate the resumption of maritime traffic in the strait of Hormuz.” The initiative would protect merchant vessels, reassure commercial shipping operators and support verification that all mines are removed, the leaders said. As many as 40 countries have expressed a willingness to contribute to the mission, and the initiative is designed not to be an offensive operation, implicitly requiring Iran’s consent. Trump has said he is not sure the mission is necessary and most mines have been located. The G7 leaders stated they “strongly support a robust and comprehensive diplomatic follow-on agreement to the memorandum of understanding secured by President Trump that can bring peace and security for all in the region”, implying that the memorandum of understanding is considered too narrow. Europe has been excluded from the talks the US has conducted with Iran since Trump became president, with some claiming the stretched and relatively small US negotiating team have lacked the expertise to match an Iranian side with deep knowledge of nuclear issues, which is also strengthened by the chokehold they have kept on commercial shipping in the strait of Hormuz. Final leaked versions of the memorandum of understanding circulating at the G7 make no reference to Iran’s ballistic missiles or its support for proxy groups in the region, such as Hezbollah. On Lebanon, the G7 statement calls for an immediate robust ceasefire and backs the Lebanese leadership’s efforts to disarm Hezbollah. It calls for Lebanon’s territorial integrity and sovereignty with the appropriate international security guarantees. The statement proposes that to accelerate new momentum in Ukraine, “we agree to increase the delivery of air defence capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities. We are also ready to consider extending to Ukraine the benefit of licences to allow for an increase in Ukraine’s military production”. Promising to help Ukraine get through next winter, the statement commits to increase the pressure on the Russian war economy by strengthening sanctions, including those on the oil and gas sectors.

Lost for years, the music of The Tiger Who Came to Tea author’s mother is heard again

Albert Einstein throws a party at his lakeside house at which he presents to his guests his latest invention: a time machine. So opens the opera Chronoplan, started in the late 1920s by the composer Julia Kerr, who took the score with her when she fled Nazi Germany with her family in early 1933, its planned premiere having been halted following Hitler’s takeover. The wider family story was chronicled in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, an autobiographical novel by Kerr’s late daughter, Judith, in which passing references are made to her mother playing the piano. But Kerr’s reputation as one of the most gifted musicians of her time was widely forgotten after the family’s dramatic escape, which brought her composing career to an end. Until now. On a recent blustery afternoon, descendants who had travelled from London gathered in the garden of Einstein’s former summer house in Caputh, south-west of Berlin, in the location where Chronoplan was set, to celebrate the life and works of Julia Kerr. Compositions which had been found wrongly catalogued and gathering dust in archives were performed by the singer-actor Ruth Rosenfeld and pianist Norbert Biermann, who has spent much time reconstructing them. Julia and her husband, Alfred, who was considered the leading theatre critic in Weimar-era Berlin, were occasional guests at Einstein’s house, along with other cultural figureheads of the day, such as the composer Richard Strauss and the authors George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Schnitzler, all of whom feature in the opera. The wooden house, financed by the prize money from Einstein’s Nobel prize, was where friends enjoyed intimate intellectual soirees and boat trips on the nearby lake before Einstein, who like the Kerrs was Jewish, and many others in their circle were forced into exile. Christian Leitmeir, a historical musicologist from the University of Oxford, first came up with the idea of looking into Julia Kerr’s musical life after reading When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit to his son. “There were fleeting descriptions of her playing the piano and composing. I was intrigued, but I could find no reference to her in the encyclopedia of female composers,” he said. After searching in the archives of the Academy of Arts in Berlin he discovered Kerr’s handwritten scores, which had been incorrectly catalogued under her husband’s name, in the literature and drama section. Meanwhile, Sonja Westerbeck, dramatic adviser to the State theatre in Mainz, rediscovered Chronoplan, which was given its world stage premiere earlier this year, almost a century after it was written. Westerbeck, who was at the Caputh gathering, said: “Julia Kerr has spent too long as the sub-clause in the story – it’s time to bring her back to the fore”. The Kerr family was invited to Berlin by the curators of a new Exile Museum due to open in early 2028 which will bring together Julia, Alfred and Judith’s stories, alongside those of others forced to flee. The rediscovery of Kerr’s work comes amid a surge in scholarly and public interest in forgotten female composers, many of whom have been unjustly expunged from the history of classical music. George Kerr, a civil servant who is Julia’s great-grandson, said he had only recently become aware of Julia’s artistic life. “I’m very inspired to learn of how immensely talented and creative she was,” he said. “Yet she was compelled by circumstances to put the composing aside in order to provide for her family. She’d have been delighted I’m sure that such a keen interest is now being shown in her work when she was so overlooked in life.” As readers of her novel will know, Judith’s stuffed pink rabbit was left behind in Berlin, but Julia managed to take the score of her incomplete opera with her, across half of Europe. But on arriving in England, she had to put her ambitions aside to become the family’s breadwinner, working as a secretary and translator, as Alfred spoke no English. After his death in 1948, she returned to Berlin and worked as an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials and for the US president John F Kennedy when he visited Berlin in 1963. In 1952, Chronoplan was recorded by Bavarian Broadcasting, becoming the first opera to have a radio premiere, in what Leitmeir said was a reflection of how visionary the work was. “Her music was very eclectic,” he said. “She was like a magpie absorbing all the influences around her from a range of different genres.” Corresponding with her family, Julia called the six days spent recording it “the most wonderful of my life. Darlings, practically everything sounded exactly as I have heard it in my head for 20 years. Nobody can take that away from me ever and I know now that I can write music,” she wrote. Julia Kerr died in 1965. Her grandson Tim Kerr, a retired high court judge, remembered her as a “powerful figure, very single-minded”. He added: “She’d play lovely little tunes she had written on the piano and I’d play the same melodies on the recorder. But I really knew nothing about her music, or that she had been or would be taken seriously as a composer. As is often the case, her life has been filtered through that of her husband, and perhaps to an even larger extent overshadowed by that of her daughter, Aunt Judy, who was more famous than all of them put together.” Best known in the UK for her picture book The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Judith Kerr, who died aged 95 in 2019, is most famous in Germany for When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, where it appears consistently in the school curriculum. In a letter to her mother in 1952, Judith Kerr recalled how unhappy Julia had been at not being able to have her works performed.

Wednesday briefing: In a new era of far-right organising, how can we tackle hate?

Good morning. Ten years after the murder of the MP Jo Cox by a rightwing extremist in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, her sister Kim Leadbeater, now herself a MP, issued a clear and urgent summons. In an interview on our Today in Focus podcast, she proposed that political hatred in Britain is worse now than at the time of her sister’s killing, but insisted “those voices who are sowing the division are in the minority.” “They are very loud. But the rest of us then have got a duty to drown them out and tell the good stories of this country,” she said. But what if one of those loud voices belongs to Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who owns one of the largest social media platforms, reinstated Britain’s foremost far-right agitator on to it and amplifies a highly networked transnational far-right movement to his 240 million followers? The start of the week was dominated by debate about keeping children safe around social media – today I want to talk about another online harm that is fomenting offline violence and contributing to a feeling and a reality that British streets are hostile, particularly for people of colour. I discussed all of this with political correspondent Ben Quinn, who has reported on the far right across the UK for more than a decade. Before that, the headlines. Five big stories UK news | A Russian warship fired warning shots within a few hundred metres of a British pleasure yacht sailing across the Channel amid a period of heightened tensions between London and Moscow. UK politics | The Lib Dems will urge Andy Burnham to end Labour’s “torpor and timidity” towards the EU as they call for the UK to rejoin the single market, in a notable strengthening of their own position. Middle East | Iran’s top diplomat has said a peace deal with the US would require Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, as concern grows that Israel could undermine diplomatic efforts to finally end the Middle East war. Media | A BBC presenter lauded by the corporation for his appeal to young male audiences has a history of making abusive and misogynistic remarks about women, whom he has variously called “slags”, “sluts”, “psychos” and “bitches”, the Guardian can reveal. US news | Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term was “a terrible mistake” that cost Democrats the presidency and may have permanently damaged his legacy, Hillary Clinton has declared. In depth: ‘Planning is being done quite openly and explicitly’ The racist disorder on the streets of Belfast, Glasgow, Southampton and elsewhere followed what is now a familiar pattern, says Ben. They can be described as “trigger events” and they’re transnational: the far right take a tragedy such as the death of Henry Nowak or the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie, attach it to an existing narrative about immigration, usually disregarding the specific facts of each case, and call for offline protest. In Belfast, this resulted in ethnic minority families being burnt out of their homes. We also saw it in the race riots that followed the Southport killings in the summer of 2024, which were similarly fuelled by online misinformation. In the space of just two years, the mechanics have changed significantly, Ben tells me, with far-right organising happening in plainer sight than ever. “After Southport, far-right activists gathered and planned in private on Telegram, then X was used to amplify those plans. Facebook was used for a different purpose , creating astroturfing initiatives and meetings to get local communities involved in far-right activity.” “After the sentencing of Henry Novak’s killer, planning is being done quite openly and explicitly on X and discussions are taking place there.” This was amplified by Musk himself, who shared details of planned demonstrations across Britain and Northern Ireland , which were seized on by rightwing politicians elsewhere in Europe. Likewise, we see Musk and others seizing on events in Europe on a fairly regular basis, though they don’t appear to have sparked the same sort of unrest. An event that gets shared online again and again, says Ben, even though it was two years ago – is the mass stabbing at a rightwing demonstration in the German city of Mannheim, in which a police officer died and five others were injured by an Afghan national. It’s impossible to overestimate Musk’s impact on what X users regularly see on their feeds. Guardian analysis earlier this year found that he has, at times, posted almost daily about alleged threats to the white race. And there are countless other examples of his influence on political activity in the UK, a country he does not live in nor hold any elected role in, such as endorsing and promoting politicians like Rupert Lowe, who called for “millions” of deportations after the Belfast stabbing. Ben also points to the proliferation of AI-generated images, videos and songs deliberately designed to inflame local anger, such as the multitude of memes generated after the police released the harrowing bodycam footage of Nowak’s arrest, as well as more generalised fakery of “migrant gangs” of men assaulting white women. TikTok is also emerging as a platform to keep an eye on. “When images or footage from attacks are shared there,” says Ben, “it marks a moment when something crosses over into a place for large numbers of folks who are not necessarily politically engaged see it.” *** The piggyback effect The riots in Belfast were grim enough, but they could have been worse, Ben suggests, had a figure like Tommy Robinson attended in person rather than encouraging from the social media sidelines. “I don’t think the British far right quite understood the Northern Irish dynamics,” he says, for example describing the man who fought off Ogilvie’s attacker with an Irish hurling stick as a British patriot. He also notes many of the long list of proposed protest assembly points pushed by Robinson – who was meeting Elon Musk’s father at a luxury hotel in Moscow as he urged his supporters on to British streets – failed to materialise. “The numbers are not really there unless it’s something that Robinson spends months organising, like the Unite the Kingdom rallies.” What the far right find more effective offline is to “piggyback on an authentic local event”, Ben explains, like the protests against the Bell Hotel in Epping last year, after an asylum seeker who was living there sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and a woman. “Those protests grew bigger because there was buy-in from many local people, as well as Reform councillors and extreme far-right characters.” *** The normalisation of hate speech This highly networked online activity also has consequences for the language we use – and that in turn, as I wrote about last week, matters for how safe people from minority communities feel. At these protests, Ben has witnessed how “the language and slogans people use jump from X to the real world”. “A phrase like ‘re-migration’ was beyond the pale a few years ago,” says Ben. The explicitly racist concept advocates for the mass expulsion of non-white residents, regardless of nationality. “It is now used by Tommy Robinson on a routine basis. It’s something that may, in time, make its way into mainstream conservative discourse.” In multitude ways, on X in particular, hate speech is becoming normalised. Earlier this week, the Guardian reported that the social inclusion thinktank British Future is accusing X of giving racists “impunity” after the platform refused to bar posts using the N-word and P-word. *** Deplatforming division After the racist riots in Belfast, Keir Starmer vowed to crack down on platforms fuelling division. We know that ministers plan to amend the Online Safety Act to require social media firms act faster to remove inflammatory content when off-line violence erupts, but this won’t take effect until mid-July at the earliest. In the meantime, the government is leaving any official reprimand of X to Ofcom. You’d be forgiven for wondering if it’s credible that effective regulation of the far right is going to come from an organisation whose recently departed chair, Michael Grade, argues that the voice of “the white majority” has not been heard properly in recent times. Nevertheless, Dr Avaes Mohammad, a researcher with British Future who worked on their X project, argues that – while it may seem a thankless task – there is merit in continuing to report offensive posts and informing Ofcom when they’re not taken down. “As citizens, we’re all capable of gathering data.” Elsewhere, I heard a powerful argument for collective action from Pat Younge, media consultant and former chief creative officer of BBC Television Production, who called on Starmer to regulate social media platforms as we do broadcasters and other news organisations. On an episode of the podcast Over the Top, Under the Radar, Younge said: “Starmer needs to grow a pair – we need to act and the public will be with him. Because this isn’t free speech, it’s an abuse of power and that’s what we need to treat it as.” But it’s too easy to personalise this around Starmer’s weakness, he added: “Where are the trade unions? Where is civic society? Our institutions are being hollowed out and we need organisations to take a stand.” What else we’ve been reading This yarn of a long read by Tobias Jones is a fascinating tale involving funerals, arrests and divorces; football ultras, a lottery winner, and 1970s terrorist group the Red Brigades. One to enjoy with our morning coffee. Michael Segalov, newsletters team Jessica Murray meets three “stubborn northern working mums” took on the developers and helped push through the biggest ever overhaul of the archaic leasehold system. Libby Into free holidays and cheap fizzy wine? Zoe Williams has you (OK, us) covered. She writes about discovering a secret scheme that lets you buy tax-free plonk while visiting France … for free. Bon voyage, mon ami! Michael World Cup 2026 On the pitch France 3-1 Senegal | A spluttering first-half performance gave way to a second period characterised by a combination of physical intensity and technical ability, with a record-breaking double for Kylian Mbappé. Argentina 3-0 Algeria | Lionel Messi’s splendid hat-trick secures thumping victory over Algeria and ties him with Germany’s Miroslav Klose as the World Cup’s all-time leading goal scorer. The best of the rest | Erling Haaland punished Iraq with a brace of goals against the Group I underdog, while in Miami Uruguay’s Maximiliano Araújo scored a late equaliser as they battled back to secure a 1-1 draw with Saudi Arabia. Off the pitch You’re fired | Tunisia confirm Hervé Renard as their new manager, having sacked Sabri Lamouchi after just one World Cup match, a 5-1 drubbing by Sweden. Picture perfect | After going viral with his bizarre official competition portrait, maverick Uruguay manager Marcelo Bielsa defends the unconventional image. Dream or nightmare? | Meet the football fans being paid £37,000 to watch every World Cup match from inside a glass box in the heart of New York’s Times Square. Today’s fixtures • Portugal v DR Congo, 6pm BST on BBC • England v Croatia, 9pm BST on ITV • Ghana v Panama, 12am BST on ITV • Uzbekistan v Colombia, 3am BST on BBC The front pages “Russian warship opens fire in the Channel to warn off British yacht”, is the Guardian’s front page today. The development dominates most titles, with the Telegraph running “Russian warship fires shots in Channel”, the Times says “Russian warship fires at yacht in the Channel”, and the i Paper has “Retired UK couple reveal ‘scary’ clash in Channel with Russian warship”. The Express says “Putin’s warship opens fire” the Mail, similarly, has “Putin opens fire in the Channel” and the Sun’s take is “Vlad fires on Brit OAPs in Channel”. Elsewhere, the FT leads with “SpaceX races past Amazon as fifth most valuable group”, the Mirror has “It’s not too late for Labour”, and Metro ahead of England’s World Cup match against Croatia says “Here we owe!”. Today in Focus: The Latest Can Trump be convinced to back Ukraine? Donald Trump has urged Russia to ‘make a deal’ with Ukraine as the leaders of G7 countries meet on Tuesday and try to put the conflict back at the top of the agenda. European leaders are hoping to capture Trump’s attention for long enough to speak to him about Ukraine, with the US president’s focus more on the US-Israeli war against Iran. Erling Haaland punished Iraq with a brace of goals against the Group I underdog, while in Miami Uruguay’s Maximiliano Araújo scored a late equaliser as they battled back to secure a 1-1 draw with Saudi Arabia. – watch the full episode here. Cartoon of the day | Rebecca Hendin The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Children in the Netherlands are some of the most healthy and happy kids in the world, and it may all be because of a century-old walking tradition. Avondvierdaagse (which literally translates to “four-day evening walk”) is a Dutch walking festival where children, parents and teachers embark on a 5-10km excursion. Come rain or shine, approximately and half a million people take part every year in 700 locations across the Netherlands. The extended walk allows children to connect with their community and helps build resilience. “I like that it’s something that happens each year and you get exercise out of it,” says Ansel Howard, 13. “It’s something that people have been doing for a long time and that you can do with friends and family and just enjoy.” Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply

Lib Dems to urge Labour to drop ‘torpor and timidity’ on EU and rejoin single market

The Lib Dems will urge Andy Burnham to end Labour’s “torpor and timidity” towards the EU as they call for the UK to rejoin the single market, in a notable strengthening of their own position. Ahead of the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote next week, Ed Davey will challenge Burnham to scrap Labour’s red lines on the customs union and single market if he becomes prime minister and immediately begin talks on a more ambitious deal with the EU. He will argue on Wednesday for closer economic ties with the EU, even though that would include free movement, as well as a new European security council to counter mounting threats from Russia and the unreliability of the US president, Donald Trump. It marks a significant step towards calling to rejoin the bloc. The Lib Dems took a more gradual approach at the last election, in contrast with 2019, when the words “stop Brexit” appeared in bold on the front of their manifesto. Keir Starmer confirmed on Tuesday that the second EU reset summit would take place on 22 July, despite fears it could be postponed to the autumn with talks over youth mobility in deadlock. In 2024, Labour promised not to rejoin the EU, the single market or the customs union. But in a major speech, Davey will say: “Labour’s red lines are holding Britain back. They are hurting the British people and they are playing into the hands of Farage and Reform. “So my message to Andy Burnham, to Wes Streeting – to whoever the next prime minister may be – is this: drop those red lines. Drop them now, so we can move on from the torpor and timidity that marks out Labour’s approach to Europe so far. “We can put an end to the endless talk of a ‘reset’, that so far seems to just mean saying ‘no’ more politely than the Conservatives did. And we can get on with properly fixing our relationship with Europe.” Davey will argue that the Lib Dems’ plan to join the single market as a member of the European free trade agreement – alongside Norway and Iceland – and form a new UK-EU customs union would fully remove trade barriers to Europe and reverse years of economic damage from Brexit. It would represent “the best hope our country has to stop the chaos and end the crisis – and the biggest step we can take back towards membership of the EU”, he will say. “People are fed up … They know the hard truth that most politicians won’t admit: the Conservatives’ Brexit experiment has failed. And it’s failed all of us. £90bn a year – that’s how much it’s costing us all.” A return to the single market would require the UK to accept free movement, putting Davey on a collision course with the Tories and Reform UK over immigration. EU officials have said they are open to the UK joining the European Economic Area – the European single market – but have ruled out a British proposal for common rules on goods without free movement of people. Charles Michel, a former European Council president, told the Guardian that the EU single market was “not for sale” when asked about the British proposal of a single market for goods. “If the dream in the UK is to build closer ties, but if the consequence is less integrity in the single market, that will not work, because I feel that the single market is not for sale.” He said the UK’s wish “to take the advantages of Brexit … without having any constraints” was not new and had been demonstrated throughout the Brexit negotiations. Michel, who was Belgium’s prime minister at the time of the 2016 referendum, said he expected the EU would react with “a positive spirit” if the UK ever decided to rejoin. He emphasised this was a question for UK politics “if and when there is the readiness for a serious domestic debate”. Lib Dem party sources argued that Brexit had led to the “Boris wave” and small boats crisis, suggesting the UK could negotiate a “very tight” returns agreement under the Dublin framework, while sectors including hospitality, agriculture and social care would benefit from more EU workers. The party is also calling for much deeper defence cooperation with the EU to help guarantee UK security, including the establishment of a European security council and a new rearmament drive to improve the continent’s ability to deliver Nato’s operational requirements. The party, which has 72 MPs, believes the UK could use its defence prowess as a bargaining chip with Brussels to negotiate a better deal, with some EU members already hoping to go further on military cooperation, alongside – rather than instead of – their Nato commitments. A Labour source said: “The kind of things the Lib Dems would say, wedded to the past and old routine fringe issues. Pitching a rejoin policy that only serves to recreate the most divisive debate this country has seen is careless and desperate. The latest in a long queue of Ed Davey stunts that people have grown numb to.”

They were forced into marriage and abused. Now women facing exploitation in China have a glimmer of hope

Last summer, Xiaocao, a softly spoken woman in her 40s, received a tip-off that in Lüliang, a small city in China’s Shanxi province, vulnerable women were being forced into marriages. Along with another volunteer, she wanted to investigate. After leaving Beijing, the two volunteers travelled south for hours, on trains and in rental cars. A few villages turned out to be dead ends. But on the final day of their trip, the women stopped in a county where they’d heard about a woman with learning disabilities who was “married” to two brothers. Soon, they found her. “She could see we didn’t mean any harm, so she stopped and chatted with us,” says Xiaocao, who asked to be referred to by her nickname because of the sensitive nature of her work. The woman ultimately declined their assistance. But her case is just one of possibly thousands across China that activists pursue in an attempt to identify and help vulnerable women who have been either abused or trafficked. Instead of advocating publicly, these activists are working behind the scenes to offer hands-on support to women they fear are being failed by the state. In a four-part series, the Guardian analysed the changing status of women across Chinese society. The series examines how women are responding to government restrictions and shifting social and economic conditions, in different aspects of their lives. The ‘chained woman’ incident The trafficking and exploitation of women in China gained global attention after a case in 2022. Every detail was shocking: A woman chained by the neck in a filthy shed. The eight children she’d given birth to. Local officials’ initial defence of her marriage to the man who had tied her up. The case of the “chained woman”, a woman with a mental illness who was later named as Xiao Huamei, quickly went viral after being posted online by a vlogger in 2022. And despite the efforts of the authorities to contain the reaction, the incident inspired a new type of feminism in China, one that operates in the shadows. The Chinese government says that tackling trafficking is a priority, but activists say that the government’s plans lack transparency. In 2021, the Chinese government launched a 10-year action anti-trafficking plan that said investigation methods should be “modernised and upgraded”. In April this year, the supreme people’s court claimed the number of trafficking and abduction crimes involving women and children has declined nearly 80% since 2012. But in recent years, China has dramatically reduced the number of legal judgments that are available online, making it hard to find details about cases or to check the official claims. Traditional social norms in rural areas mean that many cases are never reported in the first place. A US government report published last year about trafficking in China said: “Some forced marriage cases … were mediated at the village level; these proceedings rarely culminated in a guilty verdict.” Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, he has cracked down on all forms of civil society, including organisations working to eradicate sexual harassment, domestic violence and discrimination. Despite this, new groups of women across China are taking action. Since Xiao’s case, more and more privileged women have become willing to speak up for rural women with disabilities, a feminist activist who asked not to be named said. The activist said that as “anti-marriage, anti-childbirth” attitudes become more common among urban women, many have become more sensitive to the idea that in rural areas, women are being forced into marriages and childbearing against their will. Activists are focused on helping women who they see as the victims of trafficking, exploitation and abuse. As well as being bought or sold into marriages, some are forced into relationships that they’re unable to consent to. Celine Liao, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington who studies feminism in China, said that prior to the “chained woman” incident, “trafficking was not at the centre of mainstream feminist discourse” online. But since 2022, “feminists and the broader public have become significantly more sensitive to trafficking-related issues. In subsequent cases … there has been stronger public pressure on prosecutors to examine whether trafficking was involved”. A world away from the modern, wealthy cities of Beijing and Shanghai, Xiao’s case triggered an outpouring of anger from those who saw another example of a society failing to protect its most vulnerable. Activists have been spurred on by the sense that Xiao’s story was not unique. In February, news spread of another case. A man in the poor, mountainous region of Guangxi in southern China was discovered with a wife who had learning disabilities, with whom he had had nine children. “I dare not call this human trafficking. I have no evidence. But I want to ask: how could a woman with intellectual disabilities ‘voluntarily’ have nine children with a man? Could she express consent?” the legal blogger Li Yuchen wrote in an article that was soon censored. ‘An indictment of the society we live in’ Women have responded in a range of different ways. Some, like Xiaocao, physically travel to places where there are reports of exploitation, to investigate cases. Others use their spare time to monitor national anti-trafficking efforts. Some have lobbied internationally to raise awareness of the issue in China – a highly risky move in today’s climate. Nearly all of them operate under a cloak of anonymity because of the fear of retribution from the authorities, who, despite officially supporting the cause, treat independent activists harshly. An analysis published by researchers from Renmin University found that of the more than 1,200 female victims of trafficking mentioned in judicial case files between 2017 and 2020, 20% lived with a physical or mental disability. And many cases, like the woman who Xiaocao discovered in Shanxi, are not reported. In February, Free Nora, a media collective that was launched in the wake of Xiao’s case, published an article marking the fourth anniversary of the case. It described it as “an indictment of the society and history we live in” and published a lengthy analysis of the government’s progress and shortcomings in protecting the rights of rural women, based on publicly available judicial statistics. It concluded that progress was “insufficient”. The article, and Free Nora’s WeChat account, were later deleted. Six people, including the husband, were later convicted of crimes relating to Xiao’s case. The authorities launched a special operation to uncover similar incidents which resulted in the discovery of more than 1,000 missing women and children. But efforts to investigate the problem more deeply have been quashed. Activists have noted that Chinese law criminalises the buying and selling of women, but it does not cover cases in which vulnerable women are forced into marriages. The Chinese government did not respond to a request for comment. For now, women like Xiaocao are limited to trying to help women on a case-by-case basis rather than pushing for more wide-ranging reforms. But Xiaocao is studying to be a lawyer to better equip herself to advocate for women and children. She believes the government has failed to take the problem seriously enough, despite the renewed push since Xiao’s case. “I don’t think it’s realistic to rely on the authorities to crack down on this,” she says. Additional research by Lillian Yang and Yu-chen Li

Lives and incomes lost as Ebola takes toll on Bunia’s public-facing workers

Justin Keno watches more than 400 pupils stream through the Nelson Mandela school’s gate each morning, and wonders which of them might be carrying Ebola. The institution’s principal has done everything he can to prevent the spread of the virus: installing hand-washing basins at the entrance, providing alcohol-based hand rub for parents, making pupils bring packed lunches instead of eating in the canteen, and banning food sellers from outside the gates. But he knows the virus moves in ways he cannot control. “Children come from everywhere, including neighbourhoods declared epicentres,” he said in his office in Bunia. “We cannot know which child comes from a confined area. If one is infected, it could reach many children very fast.” Nearly six years after the last Ebola outbreak in Ituri in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was declared over, residents of the province’s capital, Bunia, have for the past month found themselves reliving their fears as another epidemic takes hold. The health ministries of the DRC and neighbouring Uganda announced outbreaks of Ebola on 15 May, but the virus is thought to have been circulating undetected for weeks before then. The epidemic, which the World Health Organization has declared a public health emergency of international concern, is caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, which has no vaccine or approved treatment. Responders are racing to contain the virus, which has caused 136 deaths from 676 confirmed cases in the DRC as of 10 June, according to a government report. In Uganda, it had caused two deaths from 19 confirmed cases as of 6 June, according to WHO. The DRC report also noted that the outbreak in the country had spread to three new health zones – all in North Kivu and Ituri provinces. The previous Ebola outbreak in Ituri lasted from July 2018 to June 2020, and also affected neighbouring North Kivu province. Overall, it involved 3,470 cases and 2,287 deaths, making it the largest in the country and second-largest globally. Modelling by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US shows that the current outbreak could affect more people than the largest on record, which occurred in west Africa from 2014 to 2016 and infected more than 28,000 people, killing more than 11,000. First identified in 1976 in what is now the DRC, Ebola is a highly contagious and often fatal viral disease that affects humans and non-human primates. It spreads through body fluids or contaminated materials and causes organ damage, blood vessel impairment and sometimes severe internal and external bleeding. Ebola’s economic cost People living Bunia said the economic toll of the virus was beginning to bite. Sylvie Guilaine was forced to close her used-clothes business because of the fear of contracting the disease in the high-contact operation. “Someone comes, touches a shirt, tries it on, throws it away. Another picks it up,” she said. “That can contaminate. I stopped completely.” She’s now a bricklayer’s assistant, and she soaks her work clothes in bleach before entering her house, delaying greeting her children. “They can cry but will have to wait until I have washed,” she said at Bunia general hospital, where she and colleagues were constructing a new Ebola treatment centre. “[Ebola] does not want dirt. It wants cleanliness. But it kills entire families – five, six, seven people. That is what I fear,” she said. Yves Buakya, a motorcycle taxi rider, has seen his earnings plunge since the outbreak started. He explained: “Before, two passengers could share the bike. Now they refuse. Some prefer to walk rather than take a moto [a motorcycle taxi]. I spend hours waiting [for passengers].” Buakya says Ebola is real but he also suspects that some organisations are profiting from it. To protect himself, he prays every morning and drinks traditional remedies made from guava leaves. He has a message for fellow residents: “Respect the measures. Wash your hands. Avoid unnecessary contact. Even if you think Ebola is politicised, protect your life.” Richard Ngongo, an airline travel agent, is counting losses as the outbreak affects movement in the province, a business centre and migratory hub that borders Uganda and South Sudan. “Flights are blocked. My cash registers are empty. We were waiting for the high season, for holiday travellers. Now nothing,” he said from his office. At the workplace, he has a sanitiser gel and a non-contact infrared thermometer for customers, who he said complied without resistance. He said no health team had ever come to sanitise him at work and urged more effort: “The message must be spread in churches, in communities, everywhere.” Georgette Kalume, who runs a secondhand clothes shop, said members of her Jehovah’s Witness congregation had stopped going door to door to preach to people, and were now using WhatsApp. She decried the fact that she had never received an Ebola awareness visit. “Not the government, not humanitarians,” she said. As the outbreak continues, medics in eastern DRC are struggling with shortages of basic equipment to protect themselves and prevent the spread of the virus, partly due to aid cuts, logistical challenges and the large size of the outbreak. Last week, the International Rescue Committee warned that basic protective equipment was likely to run out within days due to border closures with Uganda and Rwanda, where many supplies are sourced, and insecurity along transport routes. Africa CDC said that, as of 4 June, only a quarter of the critical supplies needed for the next three months had arrived in the DRC and Uganda. Thirty-four healthcare workers so far have been infected with the virus, and seven have died from it. Disinformation is fatal At Elikya hospital, Dr Yazid Yassine said the isolation ward was full, despite the number of beds increasing from six to more than 18. He is relentless, despite the deaths of other Ebola responders in the line of duty: “A soldier does not fear the battlefield. Better to die there than at home.” At ISIG University, academic secretary Maki Mugeni Sagesse has managed to prevent infections on the campus. He has installed chlorinated basins and does awareness sessions before lectures. He has lost five people close to him to Ebola in the past month alone. He praises the government’s efforts in setting up treatment sites and doing public awareness announcements, but said more must be done. “Go to ordinary people. Use megaphones in neighbourhoods. Use local languages. Train neighbourhood chiefs to sanitise 10 houses each,” he said. Dr Charles Kachindi, who works at CME Nyankunde hospital, told of a grim situation at the facility, saying it currently had 10 confirmed cases and 15 people had died. Testing, he said, was not as helpful as it might be as results for samples took up to three days to arrive – and sometimes not all of them came back. He appreciates the government’s efforts in trying to control the spread but warns: “We are not yet on a plateau.” Despite the growing danger of the virus, information gaps mean that some Bunia residents are not convinced that it is real. Yassine has watched patients arrive too late after believing rumours that the outbreak is fake and visiting traditional healers. “Disinformation has been rife,” he said. “People say Ebola was created by health workers to get funding. Some say it is poisoning.” People have become hostile, he said. “When we go into the community, people watch our movements. In this period, you cannot buy a motorcycle. They will say: ‘That is Ebola money,’” he said, smiling. Yassine said he had received death threats. “A man told me: ‘My family member died in your care. One day we cross paths, you will follow the same path.’” For Ngongo, the airline operator, the reality is beyond question. “I have never read in any manual that an epidemic can be invented. When you see doctors dying, do you think they would accept to die for a lie?”