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Iran says it is closing strait of Hormuz over Israeli strikes in Lebanon

Iran has said it is closing the strait of Hormuz after waves of Israeli strikes in Lebanon in a move that threatens to derail the fragile interim peace deal with the US, signed just days ago. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned ships not to approach the strategic waterway, which before the war carried a fifth of global oil and liquid gas supplies, citing what it called Israeli crimes in Lebanon and a US violation of ⁠commitments to establish a ceasefire there. It was unclear if the threat had been carried out, or if it would jeopardise talks in Switzerland scheduled for Sunday that were supposed to start the process of turning the current interim agreement between the US and Iran signed this week into a more detailed deal covering Iran’s nuclear programme. Washington denied the strait, which Iran is required to keep open under the new deal, has been closed. “Iran does not control ‌the strait ‌of Hormuz,” US Central Command spokesperson ‌Navy Capt Tim Hawkins told Reuters. “Traffic continues to flow, and US forces are monitoring the situation to ensure ‌this remains the case.” Earlier on Saturday, JD Vance, the US vice-president, told Fox News he expected to travel to Switzerland in “the next couple of days” to take part in negotiations. Pakistan, the key mediator, said the talks would go ahead and reports from Tehran suggested that a delegation of top officials had left Iran to participate in the negotiations. The continuing hostilities in Lebanon between Hezbollah, which has close ties to Iran, and Israel have emerged as the main challenge to the new deal to end the war in the Gulf. Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon on Saturday killed at least 16 people, local authorities said, despite reports of a renewed ceasefire aiming to end the continuing clashes. Lebanon’s civil defence agency said its personnel transported “16 dead and 12 wounded” to hospital, adding that they had been working “since the early morning hours” in the Nabatieh district. The interim agreement calls for a cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon. It has been fiercely criticised by Israeli ministers, officials and commentators, who argue that it stops Israel countering threats posed by Hezbollah. The Israeli military said it was striking Hezbollah targets in response to overnight projectile launches from the Lebanese militant organisation. Violence flared on Friday after four Israeli soldiers including a senior officer were killed when a tank was hit by Hezbollah, which said the strike had come after Israel broke a previous ceasefire agreement by advancing. The Israeli attacks that followed killed 83 people, local authorities said, across southern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley. The exact status of the new ceasefire reported to have come into effect locally on Friday evening was unclear. In public statements, Hezbollah has said it will abide by a ceasefire if Israel does, but has not said a ceasefire is actually in place. Hassan Fadlallah, a Hezbollah parliamentarian in Lebanon, said his group had the right to respond to Israeli attacks. “There is talk of a ceasefire. For us, what concerns us is that the enemy fully … doesn’t attempt to attack our country and villages or seek to occupy any new position,” he said. The most recent round of war between Hezbollah and Israel began days after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on 28 February, with Hezbollah firing rockets and drones at civilian communities in northern Israel, and Israel seizing and occupying large swathes of southern Lebanon to establish a “buffer zone”. The continuing violence and diplomatic back and forth over the planned talks between Iran and the US have fuelled scepticism that a definitive end can be found to a regional war that has killed at least ‌7,000 people, sent energy prices soaring and threatened global economic chaos. The interim US-Iran agreement signed this week called for the US to lift its naval blockade in return for the reopening of the strait of Hormuz, which was closed to most shipping by Tehran shortly after the beginning of the conflict. Neither Israel nor Hezbollah are signatories to the deal, which calls for a halt to military operations in Lebanon and for the country’s sovereignty to be respected. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has vowed to keep Israeli forces in southern Lebanon until any threat to Israel is eliminated. Hezbollah has refused to halt its attacks unless Israel commits to withdrawing from Lebanon, which Iran says is also a condition of the deal. Despite the violence in Lebanon, Vance said he was confident the ceasefire agreed in Washington’s 14-point deal with Tehran would hold, and that he had seen no evidence that ⁠the strait was closed. “I expect that I will leave some time in the next couple of days, but you know it’s always a delicate coordination dance and the diplomatic protocols,” Vance said. He added that the US negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff had been in Switzerland “for a few hours, dealing with some of the technical elements ‌of this negotiation”. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, however, signalled that little progress would be made until Iran was convinced the US was fulfilling its commitments under the deal. “This trip is therefore about demanding that the other side fulfil its obligations,” Baghaei said. The interim deal gives negotiators 60 days to come up with a nuclear agreement but that can be extended. Many observers warn that it will be very hard to reach an agreement on such a complex issue within two months. The 2015 nuclear deal, which the US president, Donald Trump, scrapped during his first term, took more than 18 months to negotiate.

‘I’ve finally found God without all the extras’: behind the surge in people converting to Progressive Judaism

For Elizabeth Arif-Fear, there was no single moment when she realised she wanted to be Jewish. “It was just a journey over time,” she says. The 37-year-old interfaith activist was born Christian, then converted to Islam and was Muslim for 14 years, before realising that that faith was also not the right fit. Eventually, she found the answer she had been searching for in Judaism. “I feel I’ve finally found God without all the extras,” she says. “Without Jesus, without Muhammad.” Arif-Fear is part of a “surge” in the number of people converting to Progressive Judaism, a movement that represents about a third of British Jews. Figures shared with the Guardian show adult conversions rose from 78 in 2020 to 183 in 2025. “There has been a lot of antisemitism and anti-Jewish feeling in the last three or four years. So you would have thought this is the last time that people would want to identify with the Jewish community, and yet, we’ve had a surge,” says Rabbi Jonathan Romain, convener of the Reform Beit Din, the rabbinic court for Progressive Judaism, and former rabbi of Maidenhead synagogue. Romain says that, until recently, most converts did so for “romantic reasons”: they had Jewish partners and wanted to unify family life. But he believes the recent rise has been driven by three additional factors: the Covid-19 pandemic, the expansion of religious education in schools and DNA tests. “We’ve found several times people have said to me, ‘Somebody gave me a DNA test as a Christmas present and it turned out I was Jewish,’” he says. “For some people, that’s just a matter of information. But other people, it intrigues them, or maybe it even answers something deep inside them.” For Arif-Fear, what drew her towards Judaism was its progressive elements, and a culture in which questioning and debate were encouraged. “What really inspired me was the diversity and the pluralism in it,” she says. “I learned that you could be atheist and Jewish, and then they had Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Liberal, and that was really intriguing and inspiring for me.” She adds: “So that inclusivity, that kind of dialogue, that questioning. It was just a really welcoming space. It’s LGBT-friendly, there are female rabbis, all of that. And people that were really proud of their faith but also felt very British at the same time.” Romain says converts are increasingly coming from more diverse backgrounds. “Whereas beforehand it was largely white British, now because Britain is so multicultural, it’s very common to have people, who may have come from Romania or Portugal or Korea,” he says. There are also notable numbers of LGBT people converting as Progressive Jewish communities can be more welcoming than other religious spaces. For Debbie Collings, 65, conversion was about reclaiming something she had been born into. She had been raised Jewish until she was 16, but later left the faith. She found herself moving back towards it after caring for her ill father, who asked if she would be able to find the graves of his great-grandparents. Collings found the gravesites, overgrown with grass, on a rainy day. “I just stood and looked at the graves and I went, ‘Oh my God’,” she says. Her great-grandparents had fled pogroms in Russia, she adds, and they and their children went on to make a huge contribution to Britain. “And now we – our generation – have rejected it.” She left wanting to find out more about her family and Judaism. Like other converts and returnees, she spent a year in classes learning more about the religion and community, before having an interview with Romain and others on the rabbinic court and receiving confirmation that she was Jewish. She describes stepping back into synagogue as a return to her roots. “I go in there and for me it’s like this peace just comes over me,” she says. “And it sort of fills a big gap that I didn’t really realise was missing until I started to explore it again.” And, she adds, “if I die tomorrow, I know I can be buried in a Jewish cemetery”. Amanda, who did not wish to give her last name, grew up in a Christian family and was a devout follower of the gospel before she began to question it. She felt people had failed to answer her growing issues with the New Testament, and the more she got to know people within Judaism, the more she felt she belonged. She had often heard adults who converted to Christianity say, “‘I felt full of the Holy Spirit’,” but she did not feel that when converting to Judaism. “It just felt normal, like it should have been. Like it always was, if that makes sense,” Amanda says. Her daily life hasn’t changed much: she never ate pork or shellfish, she says. The biggest change is “having gone from Sunday to Saturday,” she says. “Now, I forget that the world carries on on the Saturday.” She particularly enjoys preparing for shabbat. “At the end of the day, when you light your candles and you just collapse on the settee, you think, ‘Oh, phew.’” Romain says that sense of community is one of Judaism’s strongest draws. “There’s an enormous sense of camaraderie. In this world that is becoming increasingly polarised and lonely, because the local pubs are closing, high streets have collapsed, you can’t go to a post office anymore, you order everything online and you work from home, there’s that sense of human kindness and human contact,” he says. “That’s something religions in general can offer, but Judaism in particular is very good at.” The numbers of converts remain modest, in part because Judaism is not a proselytising faith. But Romain says that is central to its outlook. “There is a Jewish saying – this time I can quote – which says that if anyone tells you he loves God but he doesn’t love his neighbour, then you know he’s lying,” he says. “It’s all very well keeping kosher, or saying Hail Marys, or genuflecting, and fasting. But it’s no good if you’re then unpleasant to the person standing next to you.”

Ghost of far-right paramilitaries hovers over Colombia’s presidential runoff vote

Whoever wins Sunday’s presidential runoff vote in Colombia, the country’s next leader will have a personal history intertwined with one of the criminal forces at the heart of a decades-long armed conflict that claimed nearly half a million lives. The lives of Iván Cepeda and Abelardo de la Espriella have, in very different ways, been shaped by their relationship with Colombia’s paramilitaries – private armies originally established by rightwing landowners, drug traffickers, businessmen, mining magnates and politicians to fight leftwing guerrilla groups. De la Espriella, 47, a far-right admirer of Donald Trump and self-styled outsider, launched his legal career defending paramilitary leaders. Cepeda’s father was assassinated by army officers linked to a paramilitary group, and the 63-year-old leftwing senator forged his public career as a human rights activist exposing those groups’ crimes. The winner will take office on 7 August and inherit the country’s worst violence since the landmark 2016 peace agreement between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The two candidates advocate opposing strategies for dealing with the surge in crime. De la Espriella, who has led the polls since defeating Cepeda in the first round, supports a return to the kind of full-scale military confrontation that has done little to curb violence in the past. Cepeda, who is backed by the current president, argues for a modified continuation of Gustavo Petro’s strategy of “total peace”. Petro, who is barred by the constitution from running for re-election, has proposed negotiations to dismantle all armed groups, including leftwing rebels, paramilitaries and organised crime factions. Violence has surged, however, and security experts say the strategy has broadly failed. Sunday’s vote “reflects the reality of a country shaped by drug trafficking,” said Gustavo Duncan, one of Colombia’s leading scholars of paramilitarism. Paramilitary groups were first formed in the 1960s in response to the emergence of leftwing rebel groups and often operated with the collusion of the Colombian military. By the 1980s, as the cocaine trade grew central to the conflict, the paramilitaries also protected trafficking routes and drug lords such as Pablo Escobar. A major faction later broke with the Medellín cartel leader, helped bring about his downfall and used the resulting power vacuum to expand. “At its peak, these groups had more than 30,000 members. It was an enormous army spread throughout the country,” Duncan said. In the 1990s, the paramilitaries “became notorious for massacres” – choreographed displays of extreme violence designed to terrorise entire communities – said María Teresa Ronderos, the author of major investigations on the private militias. Their fighters would enter towns and rural communities and kill anyone suspected of sympathising with or providing information to the guerrillas, including peasants, Indigenous people and Afro-Colombians. They also carried out what they called social cleansing, targeting people deemed undesirable by paramilitary far-right culture, including LGBTQ+ people, sex workers, homeless people and drug users. Massacres frequently involved extreme forms of torture, including rape followed by murder, dismemberment of victims with chainsaws while they were still alive and decapitations carried out with axes. In 1994, paramilitaries and members of the army murdered the senator Manuel Cepeda as part of a campaign against the communist Patriotic Union party. Iván Cepeda, then a university professor, came across his father’s car riddled with bullet holes. In the early 2000s, the younger Cepeda founded and led a movement representing the death squads’ victims, investigating cases and visiting prisons to collect testimony from former paramilitaries. At the same time, De la Espriella was rising to prominence as a lawyer defending leaders of the country’s main paramilitary organisation, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC by its Spanish acronym), while the group negotiated its demobilisation. The AUC no longer exists, but the Gulf Clan, widely regarded as Colombia’s largest and most powerful illegal armed group, was founded by its former members and inherited much of its territory and many of its trafficking routes. Cepeda filed a criminal complaint against De la Espriella last week, alleging that he had not only represented the AUC in court in the past but had also acted as a “possible recruiter” for the group through a foundation he created. De la Espriella dismissed the accusations as a “smokescreen” and hit back by claiming that Cepeda maintained a “narco-political” alliance with guerrilla groups in order to secure votes. Cepeda is regarded as the main architect of Petro’s “total peace” plan. He has repeatedly denied any links to rebel groups, but the fact that Petro was once a guerrilla has been heavily exploited in De la Espriella’s campaign. After De la Espriella emerged ahead in the first round, Trump announced on social media that he was backing the lawyer, while calling Cepeda a “radical left Marxist”. Eleven Democratic members of the US Congress sent a letter to the Trump administration last week arguing that “rather than campaigning for [De la Espriella], our government should be examining his ties” to the AUC – which the Washington designated a foreign terrorist organisation in 2001 and which “was responsible for numerous massacres, assassinations and forced disappearances, as well as torture, forced displacement, sexual violence, collusion with state/security and political actors, and large-scale drug trafficking to the US and other countries”. They said De la Espriella had allegedly “maintained close relations with multiple leaders” of the AUC. De la Espriella did not respond to requests for comment. He has vehemently denied committing any crime or illegal act in relation to the paramilitaries, insisting that his contact with them was strictly professional in his capacity as a criminal lawyer. For his supporters, his past seems to matter less than his promises of an iron-fist approach to crime, including building private “mega-prisons” in the Amazon and “wiping out” criminals like “cockroaches and rats”. The past year has been the most violent since the 2016 peace agreement, with a surge in armed group attacks, homicides, kidnappings, forced displacement and massacres. The rightwing senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot during a campaign event last year and later died. Security experts say current indicators are far below the extraordinarily high levels of violence recorded in the decades before the peace deal, but many Colombians feel the country has returned to its “worst moments”. “One reason there is so much criminality in Colombia is that people rob, kill and then a few days later they are back on the streets,” said Lucy Vélez, a 38-year-old graphic designer from the western city of Manizales. “So I do like the idea of being tougher on crime.” A former businesswoman who now works as a driver in Bogotá and asked to be identified only as Marcela does not see De la Espriella’s alleged associations with the paramilitaries as a problem. “The paramilitaries kept the guerrillas in check,” she said. “When there were too many thieves or too much crime, the paramilitaries would carry out what they called ‘social cleansing’ … Unfortunately, they have served a purpose in some ways.” An investigation by the Colombian news outlet La Silla Vacía reported that among the minority shareholders of De la Espriella’s businesses – which include rum, wine, clothing and real estate ventures – are relatives of the convicted paramilitary leader Hugues Rodríguez Fuentes, who was known within the AUC as “Comandante Barbie”. “That does not mean he is personally a criminal [but] De la Espriella comes from the heart of those narco-paramilitary networks,” said Ronderos. “Colombia has spent years trying to dismantle that terrible war, and he talks about ‘disembowelling’ leftists and killing criminals,” she said. “To return to that after everything it cost us is deeply sad.”

Israeli attack kills famed turtle sanctuary ecologist in Lebanon

The Lebanese marine activist Mona Khalil, who became a beloved figure in the country for a decades-long effort to protect a nesting site for turtles near her home, has died from injuries sustained in an Israeli strike. Khalil, 76, ran a sanctuary called the Orange House Project near the Mediterranean city of Tyre. She hosted volunteers in her house to clean and monitor a mile-long beach and welcomed tourists to stay and learn about conservation. An Israeli airstrike hit her house earlier this month, severely wounding Khalil, who was moved to an intensive-care unit in Beirut before succumbing to her injuries on Friday, according to friends. Her assistant, an Ethiopian woman, suffered burns but was recovering. During the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90, Khalil moved to the Netherlands. She returned to her family’s land in 1999, where she had a chance encounter one evening with a turtle digging a nest in the sand on the beach. Khalil painted the house orange to match the national colour of the Netherlands, which she said had given her refuge during a time of need, and started a protection and ecotourism project for loggerhead and green sea turtles that nest along Lebanon’s southern coast. Foreign tourists had to coordinate their trip with the Lebanese military, as the bed and breakfast sat on land that Israel had repeatedly invaded and occupied. Those who managed to get permission would stay in Khalil’s idyllic home, with its flower-lined courtyard often filled with rescued dogs and cats. It is just a short walk through banana groves to the beach. Regular power cuts and a lack of air-conditioning meant some visitors left unfavourable online reviews, although most were glowing as Khalil provided what other B&Bs could not – a chance to witness and help hatching turtles and to take part in protecting their vulnerable populations. Khalil’s marine conservation efforts were initially resented by some local people, including property developers and fishers who used dynamite fishing, a practice she successfully fought against. Her house was also hit by Israeli bombardment during the 2006 war with Hezbollah. Despite Israel’s continued invasions, Khalil remained in her home. In a 2017 interview, she said she had not lost hope in turtle conservation and would continue indefinitely. “As long as God gives me life,” she said. The Lebanese wildlife conservation group Green Southerners mourned the loss of an environmental campaigner they said had inspired generations of Lebanese to value and protect their ecosystems. “Her work made her one of Lebanon’s most respected voices for marine conservation and biodiversity protection,” the group said in a statement. “Green Southerners strongly condemns the attack that claimed Mona Khalil’s life and injured her assistant. The strike targeted a site that had long been known for environmental conservation, biodiversity protection, and public awareness. Her death stands as a stark reminder of the devastating toll that Israeli attacks continue to exact on civilians, environmental defenders, and the natural heritage they sought to protect.” Live Love Beirut, an environment-focused social enterprise group, said Khalil will be “remembered through an incredible legacy”. “Her life was selfless and impactful,” the group said. “May she rest in peace, and may the work she cared for so deeply continue for generations to come.”

‘It’s not science, it’s coercion’: health experts decry RFK Jr order on hantavirus quarantine

The Trump administration is employing “authoritarian” and “unconstitutional” quarantine measures for at least one person who came into contact with a hantavirus patient, health law experts say. The mandatory quarantine, reimposed without an offering scientific evidence, reveals how the US might approach future cases of Ebola and other pathogens in the US – and sets a precedent for detaining Americans with no scientific rationale. “Cavalierly detaining somebody for no good reason, no crime and no significant public risk” is “arbitrary, it’s capricious and it’s unjust”, said Lawrence Gostin, health law professor at the Georgetown University law center. James Hodge, a professor and director of the Center for Public Health Law and Policy at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, said that health officials should never “use unconstitutional, ill-advised, unproven techniques to control infectious diseases”. This incident could become “really damaging” for public health, particularly as the Ebola outbreak rages in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and cases could arise in the US, said Hodge. “Wait and watch for it, because we’re probably going to see that later this summer. CDC set a terrible precedent right now with the specific hantavirus cases, and I only hope that we’ll see improvements for that to come,” he said. Angela Perryman, an American passenger on the MV Hondius cruise ship, came into contact with another passenger who was sickened by Andes virus, a type of hantavirus. She has attempted to appeal a federal order to quarantine in a North Dakota facility, asking instead to self-quarantine in Florida. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has asked states to provide in-person symptom checks and round-the-clock guards for the passengers, an unusual move – especially for a pathogen like the Andes virus that is typically only transmitted between people in rare cases. “It just isn’t the type of thing that you tend to have to quarantine for as tightly as what we’re seeing here,” Hodge said. Some states acquiesced to the requirement and 10 other passengers have returned home to self-quarantine. Florida refused these conditions. Michael Bell,deputy director of the division of healthcare quality promotion (DHQP) at the CDC, recently concluded that Perryman could effectively quarantine at home with daily remote symptom monitoring and access to public health support, according to a copy of his analysis obtained by Inside Medicine. But on 15 June, Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), overrode that conclusion and continued the mandatory quarantine. He cited no scientific rationale for the decision in his order, which was also shared by Inside Medicine. Kennedy’s decision to overrule the medical advice of the CDC is “unprecedented”, Hodge said, adding that it acts as “a very bad precedent for just how Americans might expect to be treated if they’re coming back to the United States with highly infectious or even semi-infectious conditions”. Kennedy “specifically considered the medical recommendation before deciding to continue the current order”, said HHS spokesperson Courtney Spencer. “In the absence of proper home monitoring by state authorities, the administration’s quarantine order is necessary to ensure both Ms Perryman’s and her community’s wellbeing,” she added. The agency did not answer the Guardian’s questions about why Kennedy overruled the CDC and whether this sets an unconstitutional precedent for responding to other pathogens. Officials are meant to use the least restrictive option available to contain health threats in public health. That means that when there are multiple options that are effective in limiting spread, “you take the one that’s less restrictive on civil liberties violations or infringements”, Hodge said. The situation is “highly atypical” for the CDC, Hodge said. Usually, state and local officials set quarantine and isolation measures; the CDC may offer guidance on doing so. But now, “even when state and local governments have been willing to take over the mantle” of managing some of these cases, “CDC has been reluctant to let them out”, Hodge said. Both Gostin and Hodge were closely involved in drafting the CDC’s updated quarantine rules in 2017, and they opposed allowing the HHS secretary to overturn the agency’s medical review. While the rules allow the secretary to take this step, “it’s just unconstitutional”, Gostin said. “I was assured that this would be very rare, and this was not supposed to happen. This wasn’t supposed to work like this. There is a flagrant violation of her constitutional rights,” Gostin added. Part of his objection is over the lack of accountability. “Secretary Kennedy issued the order, and he’s reviewing his own order, which is outrageous,” Gostin said. “You’ve got a political appointee reviewing his own order, providing no evidence or reasons – a person’s liberty should not hinge on a political calculation, and that’s exactly what this is.” Officials are required to provide scientific justification for quarantine orders, Hodge said: “That’s a constitutional requirement. This is exactly what Congress expects.” Heavy-handed requirements – such as institutional quarantine for hantavirus or banning travelers from the DRC, Uganda and South Sudan, for instance – will likely lead to people evading the rules or not providing sufficient information about their activities, making it harder for public health officials to follow up on possible cases or contain outbreaks at the source, Hodge pointed out. “The threat is not knowing cases that are actually out there, because we created a climate to which people would not self-report for this. That would be the biggest threat,” Hodge said. It also signals a dangerous “authoritarian” approach from top health officials, Hodge said – despite previous opposition from those leaders to unspecified “lockdowns” from the Covid pandemic. “The hypocrisy is almost unreal,” Gostin said. “The whole raison d’etre of Secretary Kennedy’s tenure has been based upon medical freedom, ‘the patient gets to choose’, and yet here they’re issuing immediately a compulsory deprivation of liberty.” Officials in the Trump administration, like Kennedy and Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, have castigated the Biden administration and blue states for their handling of Covid, a much more transmissible and novel virus, Gostin said: “Yet their first response is not public health, it’s not science, it’s coercion.”

What lessons will Iran’s new leadership draw from the 110-day war?

The precise ideological lessons that Iran’s new leadership draws from the 110-day war may prove to be the overriding factor in determining whether negotiations with the US culminate in an agreement that verifiably prevents the country from developing a nuclear weapon – an outcome that could usher in a new era for the Iranian economy while also reshaping the Middle East. Does this rapidly assembled leadership team, forged in the fire of war, still represent an Islamic ideological crusade – a description coined by Henry Kissinger – or does the acceptance of the memorandum of understanding, in the words of JD Vance, denote a desire for pragmatism? The vacuum created by the invisibility of Iran’s injured supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, makes this moment something of an interregnum. On Thursday, Khamenei published a letter saying he opposed the deal in principle but had deferred to the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, after being given undertakings that if the US demanded too much, he would not accept. The rights of the country and the axis of resistance had to be protected, Khamenei said. Like his father and predecessor, Ali Khamenei, he has put himself in the enviable position of ensuring absolution from blame if the elected politicians get burnt dealing with the west. His public intervention, on the eve of now-cancelled talks in Switzerland, may yet influence the balance of a charged debate inside the US administration as to the nature of Iran’s new, younger leadership. On Friday last week, Donald Trump seemed to land on one side when he accused the Iranian leadership of being “very dishonourable people who don’t deal in good faith”. That assessment appeared to chime with the views of John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, who warned his president that a significant gap separated the positions publicly expressed by Iranian officials from what they were saying privately. “Intelligence indicates that Iranian intentions do not align with the commitments made in the agreement,” Ratcliffe concluded, a source close to the discussions told Axios. The hint was that Iran’s leadership team would either stall on a nuclear agreement or, worse, conclude they must secretly assemble a weapon since the strait of Hormuz would eventually become a wasting asset. Few Iranians deny that the strait was decisive in proving the US could no longer impose global order unilaterally. Payam Fazlinejad, a hardline editor of the magazine Naqd Andisheh, said: “History has also shown America that geography sometimes takes revenge on technology; part of the source of power lies in geographical straits, not in heavy military equipment. Iran has come to understand that it possesses a greater deterrent power than a nuclear weapon.” But, like many others, Fazlinejad urged the leadership to break the never-ending cycle of war, negotiations and protests. “The country cannot afford a new miscalculation and must restore stability to the country,” he told Pezeshkian at a meeting of media editors this week. Politicians may have different prescriptions but it is clear the public crave a return to normality. Trump, judging by his remarks at the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, has gone all in on a version of this analysis and, as a result, decided to embrace Iran’s leadership. On Tuesday, he described the country’s leaders – the third set with whom he has had to negotiate – as “the most rational group we have ever dealt with … They are not radicalised. They are looking to help their country.” Trump’s team like to think they have been given in the last few weeks privileged access to the most senior figures in Tehran in a way that is unprecedented for US politicians since the 1979 revolution. Vance, for instance, said the US had never got so close to the Iranian leadership. “The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you’re seeing people within the Iranian system – senior leadership, even IRGC officials – say: ‘You know what? We recognise the way that we’ve done business with the US for 47 years is a mistake.’” He said it was the hardliners in Tehran who were playing up the benefits of the deal for Iran and playing down its drawbacks – an assessment that in fact is probably the opposite of what has been happening in the capital over the past two weeks. *** In reality, it has been the most hardline faction, known as the Paydari Front and long opposed to engagement with the west, that has denigrated the deal. This group, linked to the former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and prominent in the parliament, described the deal as a catastrophe and said ending the blockade now was premature. Many of its members appeared at street rallies and on TV to denounce the negotiating team as a betrayal of the revolution and of the martyred supreme leader. Jalili’s brother Vahid, who runs much of the state broadcaster Irib, has provided a platform for critics of the deal, to the open frustration of Pezeshkian. Critics claim Irib is an inverted version of Fox News, suppressing diverse opinion. The internal battle over the deal was, in some ways, a re-run of the arguments Iran went through when it signed the nuclear deal in 2015. The chief negotiator, the then foreign minister Javad Zarif, became a target of vitriol for years, accused of naively striking a deal with the “Great Satan”. When Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal in 2018, he severely undermined the faction that saw Iran’s opening to the west’s markets as essential. Ever since, the advocates of negotiation have had to overcome the reasonable argument that the US cannot be trusted. Currently it is Trump’s inability to control Israel in Lebanon that weakens the negotiations in Tehran. Nevertheless, it still feels as if, despite Khamenei’s intervention, the hardliners are the ones who had to retreat. The advocates of a deal won not only an argument but also a power struggle. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the conservative-inclined consensus builder recently re-elected as speaker of Iran’s parliament, is probably – along with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) from where he came – the most high-profile beneficiary of the war. Ghalibaf was so confident of his position, he suggested a vote was taken at the supreme national security council on whether to accept the deal. Unusually, army members were allowed to vote as well. Only one person present opposed, reportedly most likely Jalili. Key figures in the parliament, a possible roadblock, concede the memorandum is not a document that requires parliament’s approval. In a long interview on Wednesday, punctuated by many personal pronouns as well as praise for national unity, Ghalibaf justified the act of negotiation and, implicitly, the concessions inherent in bargaining. “My job is not diplomacy,” he said. “I am a fighter. But with the spirit and culture of a fighter I pursue diplomatic work. Our goal was to relieve the pressure and fire on the people. If this negotiation had not taken place, would such an event have just happened just by firing a missile? No. “Our armed forces, compared to an enemy armed to the teeth, can wipe the floor with them, but could this have been possible without the support of the people? Never.” But if survival in war was the primary objective, the big question now is how the government will behave. The early clues, experts say, are that the new leadership is operating a new grand strategy, that it will be more authoritarian, more pro-China and more willing to listen pragmatically to the advice of the IRGC. Preparations for Ali Khamenei’s funeral hardly suggest Iran is morphing into a secular regime. On the nuclear front, a deal is available, since the US has abandoned previous red lines. However, Kelsey Davenport, an Iran expert at the Arms Control Association, warned that discussions about the critical on-the-ground verification role of the UN nuclear inspectorate, and the regime’s willingness to accept a necessarily intrusive UN inspection regime, were still to be tested. Strict timelines were needed for Iran to report to the International Atomic Energy Agency, she said. *** Ghalibaf also seems aware that the focus inside government needs to shift to address inflation and the currency markets. “We must take over the frontline from the launcher kids and relieve the people from economic pressure,” he said. “The criterion of success is shifting from repelling external threats to improving the economy.” One way to do that is to not put all Iran’s eggs in the western basket. Ghalibaf, appointed as special envoy to China last month, emphasised a balanced approach between west and east. Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Policy, said: “For years, Iran treated China transactionally. They were ultimately seeking some kind of accommodation with the west, and were using China as a form of leverage. But they did not really deliver to China everything that China wanted. “Xi Jinping visited Tehran in January 2016, the same month the JCPoA [joint comprehensive plan of action] was signed. During his visit, China and Iran signed a comprehensive strategic partnership agreement, but Iran gave all the contracts to European countries.” Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, one of the best analysts of Iran’s economy, said: “Chinese business leaders and officials felt jilted. It was a strategic error by Iran not to prioritise relations with China. Ghalibaf is signalling he’s not about to make the same mistake.” After all, few countries in the region are making progress without Chinese investments, but since 2018 US sanctions have made that investment in Iran near impossible. Another unresolved problem is politics. Iranians who pinned their hopes on Trump’s promise that “help is on its way” feel abandoned. One said: “When you go in a taxi, to the stores, [or] talk to friends, no one is happy with the deal. We did not expect this in March. We did not want a Xi, or an Iranian Putin.”

Beyond the beach: Spain pushes offbeat regions as tourist numbers nudge 100m

Spain is redoubling its efforts to push its tourist appeal beyond the familiar “sun and sand and coast” model as it prepares for another record-breaking year in which the number of foreign visitors could reach 100 million for the first time, the country’s tourism minister has said. Speaking to the Guardian, Jordi Hereu rejected suggestions that Spain was now saturated with tourists but said it had become clear that the “old formulas no longer work”, especially amid growing concerns about overtourism and the effects of the climate emergency. Hereu, the minister of industry and tourism, said the steady growth in tourist numbers – which could be further boosted this summer by uncertainty over Middle Eastern destinations after the US and Israel’s war on Iran – could be managed sustainably and responsibly. Last year, the number of foreign tourists rose by 3.2% to 96.8 million, while the value of their spending grew by 6.8% to hit €134bn (£116bn). Figures from the first quarter of this year show tourist numbers up by 3.4% and revenue up by 6.7%. “With that growth, we could reach 100 million,” Hereu said. “But I’d like to point out that that doesn’t worry us or obsess us … [We favour] what I call calm growth – in other words, growth that can be easily managed. And this year, despite what’s happening and the demand diversion effect, I think that in general, for the moment, our forecast is for moderate growth.” While tourism has long been a pillar of the Spanish economy, making up more than 12% of its GDP, its rapid and unchecked growth in many parts of the country over recent years has triggered protests and a furious backlash. Overtourism, not least the proliferation of tourist flats, has changed the face of entire neighbourhoods and cities, priced locals out of the housing market and increased pressure on public services and natural resources. Asked if the current rates of tourism were sustainable, Hereu said: “Yes, if we do our homework, and no if we don’t do anything.” The minister, a former mayor of Barcelona, praised his successor in that role, Jaume Collboni, a fellow socialist, for pushing ahead with a decision to ban tourist flats in the Catalan capital by 2028, but he said Spain’s highly decentralised nature made it hard for the central government to drive local change. He also contrasted the different approaches of leftwing and rightwing administrations. “I think there are places in Spain that are now seeing the effects of not regulating anything,” he said. “But I also want to be very clear, because this is also influenced by political stripes. The left is more in favour of regulating tourism than the right, because the right holds the view that we should allow freedom because the market will self-regulate, which isn’t true, and in many places it’s clear that it isn’t self-regulating.” Hereu said that while he believed anti-tourism feeling was “very much a minority thing” in Spain, it was becoming increasingly clear that a new approach was needed and that local and regional authorities needed to properly limit, regulate and tax their tourist offerings. “What I do believe is that in some places there’s a demand for better tourism in the sense of a better model,” he said. “But the culture I see throughout Spain is a culture of a country that knows how to welcome people. Our key principle is that we’re in favour of transforming the model to keep ahead and that we’re working humbly to transform that model because the old formulas no longer work.” Although he defended traditional beach tourism, which still makes up 37% of all visits, and said Spain had to be open to “all sectors” of the market, he noted that people were now seeking experiences beyond their sun loungers. “It’s very interesting to see in the qualitative surveys that people who come basically because ‘hey, I’m here to relax, sun and beach, etc,’ also start asking for add-ons – like ‘beach plus’,” Hereu said. “I think this is also a good trend, because what we need is to add value.” The minister said Spain’s socialist-led coalition government was committed to the socially, economically and environmentally sustainable principles set out in its 2030 tourism strategy. “One is decentralising destinations over time and we’re also working towards deseasonalisation,” he said. “The third, very clear principle is the diversification of our offering away from all those decades of sun and sand and coast, which is where the [Spanish tourist industry] was born, and which is still the dominant offering.” Although Spain has been pushing the summery charms of its eastern and southern coasts for decades, Hereu argues that the key to sustainable tourism lies in making it less seasonal, less beach-fixated and more geographically and culturally diverse. The country’s current advertising campaign, called Think You Know Spain? Think Again, swerves sun-kissed costas to focus instead on images of churches, paradores, orange groves, folk festivals, food, wine, lakes, green spaces, handicrafts and brown bears. It even features rain. “You don’t see any coastal beaches; instead, it’s inland Spain and the green Spain of the north,” he said. “So, it’s about decentralising and discovering other realities. And what’s happening? Low and mid season are growing much more than high season, and the inland, green Spain is growing much more than the majority segment.” Spain’s reliance on tourism was laid bare during the Covid pandemic. In 2020, international visitor numbers dropped by 77% to just 18.9 million. That led the government to invest €3.4bn of EU next generation funds in a plan to modernise and transform the sector. According to Hereu, that investment has allowed less visited areas of Spain – such as Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, Extremadura, Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque Country and Navarre – to develop their tourist markets. “There’s a lot of potential there, and that’s where we need growth to happen,” he said. “Because, for example, on the Mediterranean coast, especially now, in the high season, there are limits.” The minister believes that diversifying and decentralising the tourist industry can help Spain tackle depopulation by ensuring that young people don’t have to leave their home towns in search of work elsewhere. Lengthening the season would also help to provide more stable employment, he added. “Before it was June, July, August and, at most, September,” he said. “But now people open in April, May or June, and we have more stability. October is also very important now, and the truth is, in some cases chains tell me they’re open almost all year round. This also gives us more job stability, and it’s obvious that salaries also have to increase, right? You have to attract people to the sector and retain them. And that’s good news because it also brings social stability and a redistribution of profits.” Hereu said the government was also seeking to help the industry adapt to the effects of the climate emergency, which are becoming ever more evident in Spain in the form of droughts, heatwaves, forest fires, floods and rising sea levels. He said renewable energy, efficient water use and good waste management could all help mitigate the consequences of the crisis. It was now abundantly clear, he added, that sticking to the old model would be a mistake. “We’d have the opposite of what we have now – we’d be growing the number of tourists rather than the spending value,” he said. “And [now] we are growing more in value than in number.”

‘A kind of massive rave’: Paris braces for 2m revellers as Fête de la Musique returns amid heatwave warnings

Paris is preparing for a street party of unprecedented scale on Sunday, as more than 2 million people are expected to gather for the Fête de la Musique amid a huge influx of music fans from the UK and warnings of record temperatures. France’s annual free street music festival, which has been running for more than 40 years, has grown into the country’s largest cultural event. What was previously a nationwide showcase for local and amateur talent – from village choirs to classical ensembles and techno acts in the capital – has evolved into a vast international open-air celebration. Last year, Paris welcomed a sudden and unexpected rush of music fans from the UK and other neighbouring countries after word spread on social media, creating an impromptu festival attended by about 2 million people. Lamia El Aaraje, Paris’s deputy mayor, said “calls to all of Europe’s youth to come and party” in the city had transformed the event into “a kind of massive rave”. She added: “Last year there was an impact on the public space, there were excesses, incidents, lots of sexual violence. We had a large clean-up issue afterwards so this year we wanted to mobilise ahead of time to secure the event.” After reports of sexual violence last year – including some women and men who reported being pricked with syringes – authorities have adopted a zero-tolerance approach. Special cordoned-off safe spaces for women and disabled people will operate in key locations, including near city hall and Bastille, staffed by specialist support teams trained to deal with sexual violence complaints. Paris city hall also warned international visitors about the dangers of canals and waterways. Last month, during celebrations after Paris Saint-Germain’s Champions League final victory over Arsenal, two people died in the Seine. One had a cardiac arrest after jumping in the river, while another was later found dead. The city is also bracing for the practical consequences of hosting such vast crowds. Last year’s event generated so much litter that refuse teams needed two weeks to clear it. Thousands of additional bins and recycling points have been installed across Paris this weekend, while officials have urged visitors to use the city’s 600 round-the-clock public toilets rather than urinate in the street. About 1,400 water fountains will be available as Paris contends with heatwave conditions. Pierre Rabadan, the city hall official responsible for tourism and nightlife, said: “The DNA of Fête de la Musique is kindness and lots of people. It’s a party that is responsible, joyous, happy and cosmopolitan. That’s all we want in Paris.”