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Russia keeps up demands for Ukraine land as three-way talks begin in UAE

Ukraine, Russia and the US have begun three-way talks for the first time since Russia’s full-scale military invasion began in Feb. 2022; but with the Kremlin maintaining its maximalist demands for Ukrainian territory, it was unclear whether Donald Trump can broker a ceasefire even by putting heavy pressure on US ally Ukraine. The talks in Abu Dhabi on Friday marked the highest-level known summit between the three sides since the beginning of the war, and came as Trump’s demands to take over Greenland have strained tensions among Ukraine’s western allies as Kyiv endures a brutal winter with much of its civilian energy infrastructure damaged by Russian attacks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the three sides were meeting at “negotiator level” and told journalists that the “format [of the talks] is happening for the first time in a long time.” Kyiv’s delegation “knows what to do,” he added in a voice note to journalists. Russia sent a delegation led by the GRU military intelligence chief Admiral Igor Kostyukov and indicated a focus on military, rather than political negotiations. The summit followed a seventh meeting between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin in Moscow, where the main topics of discussion were Russia’s demands for territory and Ukraine’s security guarantees, which Zelensky has said were agreed with Trump during this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Witkoff had been accompanied by Trump’s son-in-law and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. They were joined by Josh Gruenbaum, the Commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, or FAS. He was recently appointed as a senior adviser on Trump’s international Board of Peace. The Kremlin’s diplomatic adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters those talks were “useful in every respect”, adding that it was “agreed that the first meeting of a trilateral working group on security issues will take place today in Abu Dhabi”. As the talks were set to begin on Friday, the Kremlin repeated its demand that Kyiv must withdraw its forces from the eastern Donbas region for the war to end, showing it had not dropped its maximalist demands before the trilateral talks. And other senior Russian officials have gone on record demanding that Ukraine adopt other measures that have been left out of a “20-point peace plan” in what indicated plans to pursue regime change in Ukraine. “Any settlement proposal founded on the primary goal of preserving the current Nazi regime in what remains of the Ukrainian state is, naturally, completely unacceptable to us,” said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, on Tuesday. Ahead of the talks, a German government spokesman questioned whether Moscow would be willing to concede any of its maximalist demands, which includes taking over territory that is currently not under its military control. “There are still major questions about the extent to which Russia is really willing to move away from its maximalist demands,” said government spokesperson Steffen Meyer. “Nothing would be gained if a peace agreement ultimately only gave Russia some breathing space and allowed it to launch new attacks at a later date,” he added. “That is why we have focused very strongly on the issue of security guarantees.” The full details of the talks in the United Arab Emirates were not released at the time of writing, and it was not clear whether Russian and Ukrainian officials would meet face to face. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the talks would last two days. The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said: “Russia’s position is well known on the fact that Ukraine, the Ukrainian armed forces, have to leave the territory of the Donbas. They must be withdrawn from there … This is a very important condition.” Witkoff, Kushner and the US team are scheduled to meet a Russian delegation, headed by Gen Igor Kostyukov, the director of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, in Abu Dhabi on Friday. The Trump administration has been pushing for a peace settlement, with representatives of the president shuttling between Kyiv and Moscow in a flurry of negotiations that some worry could force Ukraine into an unfavourable deal. The US president said on Wednesday that Putin and Zelenskyy would be “stupid” if they failed to come together and get a deal done. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday, Witkoff said one key issue remained to be resolved in the negotiations, without saying what it was. Zelenskyy said the future status of land occupied by Russia in the east of the country was unresolved but peace proposals were “nearly ready”. Both sides have previously highlighted the issue of territory as crucial. In particular, Putin has repeatedly demanded that Ukraine surrender the 20% it still holds of the eastern region of Donetsk. Zelenskyy has refused to give up land that Ukraine has successfully defended since 2022 through grinding, costly attritional warfare. Russia also demands that Ukraine renounce its ambition to join Nato and rejects any presence of Nato troops on Ukrainian soil after a peace deal. Zelenskyy said from Davos: “Russians have to be ready for compromises because, you know, everybody has to be ready, not only Ukraine, and this is important for us.” He added that postwar security guarantees between Washington and Kyiv were ready, should a deal be reached, although they would require each country’s ratification. Zelenskyy was speaking after a closed-door meeting with the US president at Davos. Ukraine’s president made a blistering Davos speech accusing European leaders of being in “Greenland mode” as they waited for leadership from Trump on Ukraine and other geopolitical crises rather than taking action themselves. Despite Trump’s limited and scattershot support for Ukraine since taking office one year ago, Zelenskyy focused instead on Europe’s role in the conflict, accusing the continent’s leaders of complacency and inaction. “Just last year, here in Davos, I ended my speech with the words ‘Europe needs to know how to defend itself,’” Zelenskyy said. “A year has passed, and nothing has changed.” Speaking to reporters as he flew back to Washington, Trump said his meeting with Zelenskyy went well, adding that the Ukrainian president had told him he wanted to make a deal to end the war. “I had a good meeting, but I’ve had numerous good meetings with President Zelenskyy and it doesn’t seem to happen,” he said.

‘It’s the sovereignty of the country’: Guinea-Bissau says US vaccine study suspended

US health officials insisted it was still on. African health leaders said it was cancelled. At the heart of the controversy is the west African nation of Guinea-Bissau – one of the poorest countries in the world and the proposed site of a hotly debated US-funded study on vaccines. The study on hepatitis B vaccination, to be led by Danish researchers, became a flashpoint after major changes to the US vaccination schedule and prompted questions about how research is conducted ethically in other countries. On Thursday, Quinhin Nantote, a military doctor and the recently appointed minister of health in Guinea-Bissau, confirmed to journalists that the trial had been “cancelled or suspended” because the science was not well-reviewed. Guinea-Bissau experienced a coup in November, and top leaders were recently replaced. A team of research experts at the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, at Nantote’s request, will travel to Guinea-Bissau to help officials review the study. Officials from Denmark and the US have also been invited to review the trial, Jean Kaseya, director-general of the Africa CDC, said at the press meeting. The decision to halt the trial is not for international organizations or foreign countries to determine, Kaseya said. “It’s the sovereignty of the country,” he said. “I don’t know what will be this decision, but I will support the decision that the minister will make.” Officials with the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have called into question the credibility of the Africa CDC, after officials with the organization confirmed the study was cancelled. “To be clear, the trial will proceed as planned,” Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, said in a statement on Wednesday. He said the Africa CDC was waging “a public-relations campaign aimed to shape public perception rather than engaging with the scientific facts”. When asked by the Guardian, he offered no proof of either claim. An HHS official also called the Africa CDC “a powerless, fake organization attempting to manufacture credibility by repeating its claims publicly”, adding that the organization was “not a reliable source”. Kaseya said he had spoken to senior HHS officials, who were unaware of the statement, and he pointed to the Africa CDC’s key role in responding to outbreaks with global implications. “It’s very important to fund research that Africans actually want,” said Abdulhammad Babatunde, a medical doctor and global health researcher in Nigeria. “Africans want to solve Africa’s problems, not satisfy the curiosity of the funders.” The researchers would have given hepatitis B vaccines to 7,000 infants at birth and withheld the vaccines for another 7,000 infants until six weeks of age in order to study the overall health effects of giving the vaccines alongside other shots. Nearly one in five adults and about 11% of young children in Guinea-Bissau have hepatitis B – putting them at high risk of severe illness and death. “This is not acceptable,” said Babatunde of the study’s design. “To prevent things like the Tuskegee study and others, the control group has to get the standard of care, and the intervention group should get [potentially] better care.” The World Health Organization recommends giving the hepatitis B vaccine to all newborns within 24 hours of birth. Infants in Guinea-Bissau currently receive the shot at six weeks of age, but the doses will roll out to all newborns in 2028 in order to close gaps in care standards. “The current reason why the vaccine is not achieving coverage in Guinea-Bissau is because there’s no funding, and the funding should try to promote the vaccine, not use children as lab rats,” Babatunde said. Officials in an imbalanced power structure might be intimidated, he said. “It might be a very tough call for the officials in Guinea-Bissau, depending on what they stand to lose if they restrict the study. At this moment, it’s [time] for other African member states to come support Guinea-Bissau, to maintain their sovereignty and protect the children of Guinea-Bissau.” When deciding whether a revised version of the study will move forward, “the most important voice” was that of Guinea-Bissau’s ministry of health, which is responsible for protecting the health of all Bissau-Guineans, said Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute. “So hearing from ministry officials today is hugely important.” The confusion in Guinea-Bissau comes back to how the trial was given the green light, said Nantote, who spoke in Portuguese through a translator. An early version of the study was approved by Guinea-Bissau’s six-person ethics committee, Comité Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa em Saúde (CNEPS), on 5 November, according to the Danish researchers. The researchers have since made updates that have not been approved by the committee. The Guinea-Bissau ethics committee, CNEPS, initially approved the study, according to an individual who identified himself to the Guardian as the interim director of CNEPS. The study did not mention that infants would go unvaccinated, he said – but the ethical concern is that the vaccine would be withheld from some newborns at birth, when it is most needed. No further changes have been made to the design of the trial because it was “suspended” by the country’s ministry of health, he said. “We think that they did not meet and they did not address this issue adequately,” Nantote said of the ethics committee. The Danish researchers did not appear to seek approval from ethics boards in Denmark or the US, though the Helsinki declaration requires approval from research ethics committees in both the sponsoring and host countries. The HHS said in a statement to the Guardian after publication on Friday that the trial is paused, but did not respond to the Guardian’s questions on ethical concerns and its characterization of the Africa CDC. The researchers did not respond to inquiries about the trial’s cancellation or questions about their research. The HHS, the researchers and the University of Southern Denmark did not respond to inquiries about whether US or Danish ethical committees were consulted. Nantote and Kaseya both highlighted the challenges to health in Guinea-Bissau. Less than a quarter of the country has access to basic services such as water and sanitation. Poverty and food insecurity are persistent. With limited access to healthcare, maternal mortality is high, and malaria is a leading cause of death. “The authorities of Guinea-Bissau, they know that,” Kaseya said. “They are doing their best to address that.”

Ukraine-Russia-US talks start in Abu Dhabi – Europe live

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni said she hoped US president Donald Trump would end the conflict in Ukraine so she could nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. According to AFP, she said during a press conference after meeting German Chancellor Friedrich Merz: “I hope that one day we can award a Nobel Peace Prize to Donald Trump. I trust that if he makes a difference … in achieving a just and lasting peace for Ukraine, for Ukraine too… finally, we too could nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.” On Thursday, Trump unveiled his “Board of Peace”, initially designed to oversee the Gaza truce and the territory’s revival. The initiative has now turned into a mechanism aiming to resolve all sorts of international conflicts. Italy has been invited to join the “Board”, but Meloni said she had told Trump that Italy faced “constitutional problems”. Today (23 January), The European Union’s foreign policy arm has raised questions over Trump’s powers in his “Board of Peace”. In a confidential analysis, seen by Reuters, dated to 19 January and shared with the EU’s member countries – the European External Action Service expressed worries about a concentration of power in Trump’s hands. The Board of Peace’s charter “raises a concern under the EU’s constitutional principles” and “the autonomy of the EU legal order also militates against a concentration of powers in the hands of the chair,” it wrote.

‘Island of peace’: Israeli-Palestinian restaurant in Berlin to close – but live on as TV series

An Israeli-Palestinian restaurant in Berlin conceived as an “island of peace” will close in the spring, but its Jewish and Arab owners say their dream will live on in a television series based on their unlikely partnership. Kanaan, a decade-old casual eatery in the Prenzlauer Berg district of the German capital, gained an international profile for its message of “unity over hate” after the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas and the outbreak of the Gaza war. Now as the owners Oz Ben David, an Israeli, and Jalil Dabit, a Palestinian, say they will wind down operations, the German production company Traumfabrik Babelsberg has announced plans for a miniseries based on Kanaan. Called Breaking the Binary, it is described as a politically charged “dramedy” with echoes of The Bear, the hit US series set in a hectic restaurant kitchen. The German show will tackle “the difficulties faced by the two protagonists between social expectations, economic pressure and personal contradictions”, the producers said. Participants will include the author and journalist Mirna Funk, who was born in East Berlin to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, the Arab-Israeli actor Yousef Sweid, whose credits include Game of Thrones and Unorthodox, and the screenwriter and director Thomas Mielmann. Kanaan, German for Canaan, was founded in 2015 and boasts a multi-ethnic team, serving up remixed specialities like shakshuka lasagne. Its slogan is: “Make Hummus Not War.” The 120-seat restaurant became a neighbourhood mainstay and a potent symbol of dining across religious and political divides. Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, invited the owners to his Berlin palace in late 2023 to share their thoughts on how best to address the tensions sparked locally by the conflict in the Middle East. Ben David used the occasion to call out the country’s often hardline on pro-Palestinian rallies and expressions of support for the Palestinian people. The restaurant’s premises were ransacked in 2024 after it hosted a queer Jewish-Muslim brunch and the owners have faced persistent anonymous threats. Soon after the attack, Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner, visited Kanaan in a show of support that coincided with its regular drag brunch, calling the restaurant “exemplary” in trying to conquer seemingly intractable divisions. An online fundraising campaign to help rebuild drew nearly €30,000 (£26,000). Ben David and Dabit told the Guardian Kanaan would now shut its doors “probably in March” owing to economic factors, the bite of German bureaucracy but also the fraught political environment. “People say: ‘Unless we have a good reason to go out from the house and to spend some money, we want to do it in some quiet Italian place, a Japanese place, without the whole story behind it,’” Ben David said, describing a “political overdose” among patrons over the Middle East conflict. Dabit, speaking by telephone from Ramla, a mixed Israeli city of Arabs and Jews, called the impending end of Kanaan “bittersweet”. But he is excited about the television series, which he and Ben David are helping to shape with input on the writing and character development. “It was hard but after I talked with Oz we understood it is the best thing to do,” he said of closing the restaurant. “It’s like if you have a child and release him to the world – it’s a good thing.” Ben David agreed the next step felt like a new beginning, with a chance to spread their message of mutual understanding to a wider audience with the TV series and a Germany-wide cooking tour beginning in April. “It’s no longer (just) a story of Israelis and Palestinians but about people who disagree and still can dream and envision something together,” he said. “Hopefully we will reach more hearts.”

‘We need to fight’: Trump Greenland threat brings sense of unity in Denmark

For the past three weeks, 24 hours a day, Denmark has been consumed by discussions about whether or not Greenland, a largely self-governing part of the Danish kingdom, will be invaded by the US, the Danes’ closest ally. “We got a wake-up call,” said Linea Obbekjær, 64, as she left a supermarket with her bike in Copenhagen’s sprawling Østerbro neighbourhood. “So we are thinking about what is important to us.” Many had been spurred by recent events to take action. “People want to do something,” said Obbekjær. “Not sit and look at the television, but go out and do something.” The country is working through a shared sense of anger and bewilderment that has bruised its pride and shaken its collective sense of self. But as well as galvanising the Danish population against him, Donald Trump’s martial rhetoric – often arriving in the early hours of the morning thanks to the transatlantic time difference and his habit of posting on social media late into the US night – has also gone some way to easing tensions between Denmark and Greenland. Last weekend, thousands took to the streets of Copenhagen in protest, waving red and white Greenlandic and Danish flags. Many wore Maga-style red hats bearing slogans including “Nu det NUUK!”, a play on the Danish phrase nu det nok, meaning “now it’s enough”, to incorporate the name of the Greenlandic capital. Julie Rademacher, a member of Uagut, the national organisation for Greenlandic people in Denmark and one of the protest organisers, was overwhelmed by the support the protesters had received – from Greenlanders, Danes, Americans and people around the world. “The first half-hour in front of City Hall when this ocean of people just showed up, every time they cheered because of the speeches I couldn’t stop crying,” she said, her eyes welling up at the memory. Like many in Denmark and Greenland, Rademacher has a family member who fought alongside US soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. “It’s been unbelievable to experience one of our closest allies threatening to annex our country,” she said. “But it is happening and we need to fight.” Rademacher believes Trump has achieved the opposite of what he was seeking to do, in that Greenlanders have been pushed away from him, while relations between Greenlanders and Danes, while having a long way to go, are “under reparation”. She cited a recent encounter on the streets between another member of Uagut and a Danish stranger who wanted to apologise for Denmark’s colonial abuses of Greenlanders. “One Greenlander, one Dane,” she said. “Our Greenlandic member was so touched by it, because it shows so much respect and trust.” Caps and ‘Canados’ Jesper Rabe Tonnesen, 58, a vintage shop owner and creator of the Nu det NUUK! hats, said Denmark had gone on a journey from disagreement to unity. “We feel threatened like the people from Greenland,” he said. “Of course, we are a little country – one of the best countries in the world, but a small economy. We can’t do anything about this without France and the greater nations.” There was, he said, a feeling like wartime solidarity between Denmark and Greenland and with the EU. Tonnesen said the cap had been “my little protest” eight months ago when people kept telling him that they had stopped paying attention to the news because it made them depressed. He had 80 made and nobody bought them, but after going viral a couple of weeks ago, supplies sold out in two hours. Hundreds more were made to distribute at the protest, with thousands more on the way. In another small act of defiance, the cafe at his creative workshop now calls Americanos “Canados”, in reference to another country in the crosshairs of Trump’s aggressive and erratic foreign policy whims. The US, he said, had meant everything to Denmark in terms of defence but had also influenced culture. “In the fashion, the way of thinking, the American dream to become something, and especially maybe to take care of democracy to keep a free world,” he said. “And what we see now is not a free world any more in America. All the values in Denmark and almost all of Europe are changing now.” Outside the US embassy, Tina Henriksen, 58, a nurse, who is half Greenlandic and half Danish, said Greenland and Denmark now “have to stand together”, adding that Danish people were “opening their minds to Greenland” in a new way. Boycotting Björk Despite the signs of a newfound unity between Danes and Greenlanders, the colonial wounds run deep. As recently as December, victims of a historical IUD scandal, in which thousands of Greenlandic women and girls were forcibly fitted with contraceptive coils without their knowledge or consent, claimed victory in their legal fight with the Danish government after it was confirmed they would be eligible for compensation. It was not until last year that “parenting competence” tests were banned on people with Greenlandic backgrounds after years of criticism by campaigners and human rights bodies, who argued successfully that the tests were racist because they were culturally unsuitable for people from Inuit backgrounds. At the beginning of January, Björk drew attention to the scandals on social media and urged Greenlanders to declare independence. “I burst for sympathy for Greenlanders,” wrote the singer, who comes from Iceland, itself a former Danish dependency. The post divided people in Denmark. One record store, RecordPusher in the city of Odense, responded by boycotting the star’s music entirely. Its chief executive, Bo Ellegaard Pedersen, said at the time that the statement had “in no way done anything good for the current situation of the Danish commonwealth” and accused her of “creating her own reality like Trump”. He added: “This post divides friends and only helps the idiot on the other side of the Atlantic.” Speaking this week, Ellegaard said he had felt compelled to act because Björk’s comments felt like a “stab in the back”. He said he had been inundated with messages in the aftermath, including some calling him a racist and a colonialist, but he says many were positive. When Jakob Hejnfelt Thoren, 37, the owner of Rekords, a hip-hop record store in Copenhagen’s Nørrebro district, saw the boycott post, he decided to do the opposite and started stocking Björk records. While he does not necessarily agree entirely with what Björk wrote, he wanted to support the right to freedom of speech. “Being a part of hip-hop culture it comes very natural to be on the oppressed side,” he said in his store, its racks filled with hip-hop classics by artists including The Notorious BIG and 2Pac. Greenland is “trapped between these two colonisers, so of course we are on their side”, he added. A father of two small children, he wakes up every morning checking the news and is worried about what might happen with Trump’s politics suddenly feeling so close to home. “You never know what Trump is going to say, what he is going to do.” ‘The shock has turned into clarity’ Danish students Emily Jensen, 26, and Rikke Nielsen, 26, said the current crisis had been dominating conversations at home. “It’s impossible to understand what he is going to do actually so it’s really frustrating and scary,” said Jensen. They have been trying to learn more about Greenlandic people. Nielsen said she had become more aware of Denmark’s colonial history with Greenland when the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, last year apologised to victims of the IUD scandal. Others have been showing their outrage with the US by boycotting US products. Usage of Made O’Meter, an app that helps people to identify US products in Danish supermarkets, rose by 1,400% in the days after Trump started threatening tariffs against Denmark and other allies that opposed his plans to invade or buy Greenland. Ian Rosenfeldt, who created the app last March when the US president first hit Europe with tariffs, said this time the reaction was different. “The shock has turned into clarity,” he said. “An ally became someone we cannot trust and one we’re far too dependent on.” People in Denmark and across Europe were realising they needed to reduce their reliance on US technology, products and platforms, he added. Not everybody thinks the US president has permanently damaged US-Danish relations. In a coffee shop on Wednesday afternoon, as Trump finished his Davos speech, 76-year-old Mette Jensen said of the relationship: “Of course they can be repaired. But not with Trump.”

Canadian Olympic snowboarder turned alleged cocaine kingpin in custody

Ryan Wedding, the Canadian Olympic snowboarder turned alleged drug kingpin, has been arrested, US law enforcement officials announced on Friday. Wedding, 44, has been sought by the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for his role in overseeing what the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, called the “one of the most prolific and violent drug-trafficking organizations” in the world. Officials in the US allege that Wedding’s organisation had moved nearly 60 metric tons of cocaine a year into Los Angeles from Mexico using a network of semitrucks. Wedding is also accused of ordering the killing of a key FBI witness as well as several other murders, including that of a couple who were killed in a case of mistaken identity. US authorities had previously said that they believed Wedding to be in hiding in Mexico. On Thursday, the FBI director, Kash Patel, was in Mexico City for meetings with the country’s security chief, Omar García Harfuch. And on Friday morning he left with a souvenir: Ryan Wedding, and another, unnamed, “priority objective”. García Harfuch released a statement saying that Patel was leaving with “a non-US citizen who was arrested by Mexican authorities and is among the FBI’s 10 most wanted, and a Canadian citizen who voluntarily surrendered yesterday at the US embassy”. NBC News first announced news of the arrest and US law enforcement officials familiar with the operation confirmed it to the Guardian. In March, Wedding, whose nicknames include “Public Enemy”, “El Jefe” and “Giant”, was added to the FBI’s list of 10 most wanted fugitives, and there was a $15m reward for information leading to his arrest. Patel, who is due to speak to the media later in the day from California, has compared Wedding to Pablo Escobar and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. The head of the RCMP, Michael Duheme, will also be present. Wedding was allegedly being protected by the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico while he was on the run. More details soon …

Spain train collision investigators examine rail damage theory

Experts investigating the deadly rail collision in southern Spain, which killed 45 people and left dozens more injured, believe the accident may have happened after one of the trains passed over a damaged section of rail. The disaster occurred near the Andalucían town of Adamuz on Sunday, when a high-speed train operated by Iryo, a private company, derailed and collided with an oncoming high-speed train operated by the state rail company, Renfe. A preliminary report published by the Rail Accidents Investigation Commission (CIAF) on Friday found nicks in the wheels on the right-hand side of the three front carriages of the Iryo train consistent with an impact with the top of the rail. “These nicks in the wheels and the observed deformation in the rail are consistent with the rail being fractured: with the rail’s continuity interrupted, the section before the break would initially bear the full weight of the wheel, causing that part of the rail to sag slightly,” the report said. “Since the section of rail after the break would not be acting in unison with the section before it, a step would momentarily form between the two sides of the fracture, which would strike the wheel rim.” Given the available information, the report added: “We can hypothesise that the rail fracture occurred prior to the passage of the Iryo train involved in the accident and therefore prior to the derailment.” But the CIAF also stressed that the theory was provisional and would be subject to further testing and investigation. Two days after the Adamuz accident, a train driver was killed and 37 people were injured when a train was derailed by the collapse of a retaining wall near Gelida in Catalonia. The two deadly events have led Semaf, Spain’s largest train drivers’ union, to call a three-day strike in February to demand measures to guarantee the safety of railworkers and passengers. Semaf said industrial action was “the only legal avenue left for workers to demand the restoration of safety standards on the railway system and, consequently, guarantee the safety of both railway professionals and passengers”. The tragedy has also been seized on by opposition parties which have accused Spain’s socialist-led coalition government of a chaotic response and a lack of transparency. “The state of the railways is a reflection of the state of the nation,” Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party, said on Friday. He added: “Right now, we don’t have the best rail system in our history; what we have is the worst government in our history.”

British crown was world’s largest buyer of enslaved people by 1807, book reveals

The British crown and the navy expanded and protected the trade in enslaved African people for hundreds of years, unprecedented research into the monarchy’s historical ties to slavery has found. The Crown’s Silence, a book by the historian Brooke Newman, follows the Guardian’s 2023 Cost of the crown report, which explored the British monarchy’s hidden ties to transatlantic slavery. The book reveals that by 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade in its empire, the British crown had become the world’s largest buyer of enslaved people, buying 13,000 men for the army for £900,000. Buckingham Palace does not comment on books, but a source said King Charles, who has previously spoken of “personal sorrow” at the suffering caused by slavery, took the matter “profoundly seriously”. Newman said she had started working on the book 10 years ago, having found “secret correspondence” detailing George IV’s fears of an uprising like the Haitian Revolution happening in Jamaica. She made the discovery while researching an earlier work about the Caribbean island, which was a British colony for more than 300 years. Newman, who is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US, researched royal archives and manuscripts relating to the Royal Navy, colonial officers, government officials, the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company for The Crown’s Silence. She said: “The crown used to trumpet their connections to the transatlantic slave trade. They put the royal brand on this practice and literally on people’s bodies.” In the 18th and early 19th century, “formerly enslaved people, like Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince and Ottobah Cugoano, were directly appealing to the monarchy, sending books that they’ve written, sending them letters and petitioning them in newspapers. And the monarchy is doing nothing. “It’s only as you have activism on the part of people like [Black abolitionists] Sons of Africa that things really start changing in the 19th century and the monarchy starts to dramatically pivot away from their previous stance,” Newman said. “One of the key revelations is that the crown owns thousands of enslaved people in the Caribbean up until 1831. Even when George IV is essentially overseeing the Royal Navy’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, he is still technically profiting from the labour and sale of enslaved people. This is something the government are aware of and they’re concerned about how it looks.” Newman said enslaved people “owned” by the crown had included workers on plantations that had been forfeited after revolts or planters dying without heirs, and people “purchased in the king’s name” to work at royal dockyards and naval installations, in a process that began in Jamaica under George II. She added: “White people sent to work on the island were succumbing to tropical fevers and they decide we need to purchase enslaved men and boys we can train as skilled labourers who will be owned by the king – as shipwrights, as carpenters, as caulkers, servicing Royal Navy ships. Once they decide that this is a cost-saving measure for the monarchy, they start replicating it elsewhere.” The book details how after abolition, Africans liberated from slavers’ ships by Royal Navy patrols were coerced into apprenticeships or conscripted into British military service. Slavery exploded as an industry in the 18th century, after the Royal African Company, founded by the Stuart monarchy, lost its monopoly, fuelling the expansion of English cities such as Liverpool and Bristol, Britain’s insurance and finance sectors, and the United States, Newman said. The Royal Navy was “critically involved in expanding the slave trade, in protecting slaving vessels … loaning out Royal Navy vessels to slave trading companies and stocking them with men and supplies”, she added, from the reign of Elizabeth I until the 18th century, with profits flowing back to thecrown. “By the 18th century, [the British monarchy] don’t need to be involved in these more minor behind-the-scenes ways – it becomes about defending the empire itself in major imperial conflicts like the seven years’ war and the American Revolution. “George II and George III start thinking about enslaved men as pawns in this imperial chess game. Even after the abolition of the slave trade, liberated Africans are forcibly conscripted into West India regiments and a royal forces station in west Africa. “Things are not really better regardless of whether you’re owned by the monarchy or not. They want it to be better because it should be, if you’re going to have the king as your nominal master, but that’s not the way things played out on the ground.” • The Crown’s Silence: The Hidden History of Slavery and the British Monarchy by Brooke Newman (HarperCollins, £25) is published on 29 January. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.