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More than 2m Indian students resit medical entrance exam after alleged leak

More than 2 million aspiring Indian doctors have sat one of the world’s toughest entrance exams for a second time after an alleged question paper leak forced authorities to scrap the original test results. Students arriving at test centres on Sunday were greeted by airport-style security. They were frisked, scanned, checked biometrically and made to pass through metal detectors while police and paramilitary personnel stood guard outside. For many students, the retest turned an already gruelling ordeal into a nightmare. “One can only imagine the trauma each of you have gone through in the past few months,” news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai posted on X. One student said: “Thousands of students are emotionally exhausted after this long process. We are trying our best, but many of us are struggling mentally.” The test is the gateway to India’s medical colleges, where only about 5-6% of candidates secure a coveted seat. Many spend years preparing, attending expensive coaching classes and studying for long hours in the hope of making the cut. India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, promised a “fair and transparent” re-test, while the government has launched a sweeping investigation into the alleged questions leak last month. One candidate, Tarun, posted on X: “I did well but let’s see. The exam was tougher than last time.” The scandal led the government last week to temporarily suspend access to Telegram, one of India’s most popular messaging apps, after reports that leaked questions for the fresh exam were being sold on the platform. The ban drew criticism from internet free-speech advocates, but on Friday the company lost a court challenge when judges ruled the ban was justified. The medical test scandal is one of a long list of examination controversies that have shaken confidence in India’s vast testing machinery, which determines access to universities and government jobs for tens of millions of people each year and holds the promise of upward mobility for many. Earlier this month, more than 400,000 Indian students applied for copies of their test papers amid an outcry over marking errors in the country’s most important school-leaving exam after the introduction of a new digital scoring system. Teachers said when they were marking the exams, they were often still figuring out the software. The Indian Express newspaper asked why authorities “spend heavily on damage control instead of planning for prevention”, pointing to the costs of re-evaluations, reruns and the anxiety caused to students. A new Indian satirical group calling itself the Cockroach Janata Party (CPJ), a play on the ruling Bharatiya Janata party’s name, has stepped into the row. The CJP has become a lightning rod for frustration among students over exam glitches and lack of jobs for youth. “This failure cannot go ignored. There must be consequences,” said social media creator and CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke. The movement has quickly amassed more than 22 million Instagram followers while, at demonstrations, protesters have demanded the education minister’s resignation.

Middle East live: US-Iran peace talks underway as strait of Hormuz remains closed

Over ⁠25 ⁠million barrels of Iranian oil ⁠have passed ⁠through the ‌virtual ‌blockade ‌line since Monday, the head of ‌the Iranian National Oil ⁠Company Hamid Bovard told state TV on Sunday.

Secret correspondence claims suggest tensions at top of Iranian government

A former member of Iran’s negotiating team in the previous round of talks with the US in Islamabad is facing the threat of prosecution and dismissal from parliament after he went on the main state broadcaster to reveal what he claimed were confidential letters from the country’s supreme leader. The interview with Mahmoud Nabavian, the deputy chair of Iran’s national security council, was eventually cut off, but only after he said he had seen secret correspondence written by Mojtaba Khamenei in which the ayatollah allegedly said Iran’s negotiating team had overstepped its mandate An hour after the censored broadcast, the archive of the interview was removed and a senior official at the broadcaster resigned. Nabavian’s claims were dismissed by a spokesperson for the negotiating team as old and distorted. The state broadcaster said Nabavian’s statements were “evidence of a legal violation and worthy of legal prosecution”. Members of the camp of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s chief negotiator at the current talks in Switzerland, called for the leaker to be identified. Centrists and reformists have long argued that the state broadcaster Irib acts as an agent for hardliners in the Paydari or Stability Front, of which Nabavian is a supporter. The episode, apart from revealing tensions at the top of government in near real time, also appears to show that the newly appointed supreme leader has been taking a much more hands-on approach to the talks than was previously known, and has also been ordering the negotiators not to relent on the nuclear file or the immediate payment of tolls to Iran by ships in the strait of Hormuz. Khamenei has not been seen in public or issued an audio tape, operating instead through written statements. Some reports suggest the negotiating team once had to wait a fortnight before securing his guidance on how the talks should proceed, and that he would send detailed questions to the negotiators. In a letter to Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, that Khamenei published on Thursday, he said he took a different view on the outcome of the talks to the president but had deferred to his judgment on certain conditions. Nabavian claimed the supreme leader had in fact set 11 conditions for continuing the negotiations, including receiving compensation from the US, maintaining the right to uranium enrichment, lifting sanctions, releasing Iran’s frozen assets and exercising full sovereignty over the strait of Hormuz, including the immediate charging of fees. According to Nabavian, Khamenei emphasised “Iran’s monopoly on the management of the strait of Hormuz, collecting tolls from passing vessels, restrictions on enemy ships, and allocating the revenues from the tolls to the people, families of martyrs, and veterans.” The reopening of the waterway should only happen when the US agreed to pay compensation, he ordered. The US has agreed to set up a $350bn (£264bn) development fund but has said it will not contribute. Nabavian also claimed Khamenei wrote in a message to the negotiating team: “What was agreed upon in the Pakistan talks is completely different from what was supposed to happen and was a condition for the legitimacy of the talks, and the talks must be stopped.” He was referring to the talks in Islamabad in which the negotiating team did discuss aspects of Iran’s nuclear programme. Later on a Telegram channel, Nabavian continued the argument, saying he has not released secret documents and was only revealing the truth. He said that, based on the memorandum of understanding, “four issues had to be implemented before negotiations could begin: 1. End of the occupation in Lebanon and complete withdrawal 2. The release of our frozen money by America. Not borrowing from Qatar. 3. Lifting the siege 4. Temporary lifting of sanctions.” He questioned whether these four preconditions had been met before foreign ministry officials went to Geneva for negotiations, and further asked: “Does that mean that people should not be aware of what the imam’s orders were and why the agents disobeyed them?”

Dutch PM apologises for Moluccan soldiers’ mistreatment after Indonesian independence

The Dutch prime minister, Rob Jetten, has formally apologised for the “heartless” mistreatment of thousands of Moluccan soldiers who fought for the Dutch colonial army during Indonesia’s struggle for independence. About 12,500 men from a group of Indonesian islands who served in the Royal Dutch East Indies army came with their families to the Netherlands in 1951, many having been given no choice. They thought it would be a temporary evacuation after Indonesia had won independence. They hoped for their own Moluccan republic after a six-month stay but instead they were involuntarily discharged, banned from work and voting, and housed in places such as the former Nazi transit camp Westerbork. A republic never came and some never unpacked their suitcases. At the unveiling ceremony for a crowdfunded national monument on the harbourside in Rotterdam, where their last boat arrived, Jetten said: “For their heartless and dishonourable discharge as soldiers, for their inadequate reception and housing, for being unseen and abandoned, for the unfulfilled longing for home, for the grief and pain in so many Moluccan families. “For this, I offer apologies today on behalf of the Dutch government. It is not only high time, but it is also necessary if we want to move forward.” Activism by the descendants of those Moluccan families in the 1970s – including a school hostage-taking and an armed train hijack – ended in a bloody raid by Dutch special forces. There was a 1986 agreement with the government, including cultural funding and jobs schemes, but pressure had since grown for a formal recognition of the wrongs done. Jetten stressed that a forthcoming parliamentary investigation, involving the community that now numbers 70,000 descendants, was vital. Carola Schouten, the mayor of Rotterdam, said she hoped the monument would be a place for stories to be told openly. “They were treated with coldness, their loyalty had a high price and it was often a silent sorrow,” she said at the opening ceremony. “It is important that there is recognition of the injustice that was done to you.” The project to create the monument – by the artists Jaïr Pattipeilohy and Maurice den Boer, and representing the prow of a traditional ship – had been a 10-year struggle, said Yordi Tahamata, the chair of the monument foundation. “I stand here as the grandson of my grandfathers … part of a generation that came to the Netherlands under military orders and built a life in a strange land, unsure about a future none of them had predicted,” he said. “This is about the right to tell our history and to give it on to new generations.” There was some criticism that the government had in effect gatecrashed the opening of a community’s monument, and that the words of apology had come too late for many people who lived through the exclusion and injustice. Eduard Latuheri, 98, was invited to bless the monument, with several other surviving soldiers and first-generation family members. His grandson Dennis van Peterson spoke for Latuheri. “He is thankful just to come here,” he told the Guardian. “There’s a mixed feeling about an apology. For Grandad, it’s the right thing, but the first generation are mostly not here any more – it’s too late.” Others recalled the lifelong bitterness of their parents over the broken promise from the Dutch government to help them return. Fred Roos, 70, was born and lived for five years in Westerbork and said his late father was never allowed to work and always felt angry. “Everything was always ready to go back but it never happened,” he said. “This is a loaded moment.” Fridus Steijlen, a co-author of a recent history of the Moluccan community in the Netherlands, said that because the Moluccans’ stay was always supposed to be temporary, integration was affected for generations – despite the community’s own resilience. “An apology should address the parternalistic attitude of the Dutch government at the time, and that it didn’t think about how they could go back,” he said. “That’s why the pain went on.”

France cancels events and restricts alcohol consumption amid brutal heatwave

Authorities in France have placed more than a third of the country under a red heat alert, cancelled some outdoor sports events and restricted alcohol consumption at the nationwide Fête de la Musique event amid a brutal heatwave forecast to push temperatures above 40C. Level 1 or 2 heat alerts were issued on Sunday for about 53 million people, just over 75% of the population. A record 35 of the country’s 96 mainland departments were put on danger-to-life red alert, with another 45 under an orange warning. France’s ecology minister, Mathieu Lefèvre, said on Sunday that 14 more departments would be on red alert on Monday. “We do not see temperatures falling before the end of the week,” he said, demanding “great prudence and a great many precautions”. The national meteorological service Météo-France said: “Very high temperatures are setting in for the long term,” with a heatwave of “exceptional severity and duration” likely to break monthly and possibly all-time records. It warned that temperatures could exceed 40C in many places on Sunday, with some areas facing rises to 42C or beyond from Monday. The national heat index, an average of day- and night-time highs at 30 weather stations nationwide, is expected to hit its highest ever level, the forecasters added. Sunday’s Fête de la Musique is a nationwide summer solstice celebration held every year in which musicians take over the streets with free performances and revellers party into the night. This year’s festival is a particular source of heat-related health concerns, especially in Paris, Lyon and other major cities. France’s culture minister, Catherine Pégard, urged “extreme vigilance” and said it should be up to local authorities to decide whether festivities should be cancelled or take place with suitable precautions. Most have opted for the latter. Several towns have cancelled pre-7pm performances or moved them indoors. Many have introduced alcohol restrictions, with drinking banned on the street and in public spaces in areas on red alert and no alcohol on sale at municipally organised events. In Paris, which is under a red warning, stronger drinks including high-alcohol beers, fortified wines and spirits have been banned along the banks of the Seine and the Canal St-Martin, to reduce the risk of people falling in. However, drinking at licensed bars and cafes and their terraces – where many gigs take place – is permitted. Nearly 5,000 police have been deployed across the capital for the day and evening, as well as 2,500 emergency and health service workers. Paris city hall has installed more than 1,300 free public water fountains, while more than 1,500 local shops have signed up for a scheme promising to fill personal water bottles without charge. France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, convened a government heat crisis meeting on Saturday and planned another on Sunday, ordering ministers to urgently plan for better adapting France to further heatwaves in the future. Scientists have said that as Earth continues to warm, extreme heat events historically confined to high summer will become more frequent, more intense and last longer, as well as happening earlier and later in the year. The French education minister, Édouard Geffray, said on Sunday that more than 800 schools across the country had already announced they would not open on Monday because of the extreme heat, while another 1,800 were rescheduling classes and end-of-year exams. Jean Castex, the head of the state rail service SNCF, advised “more vulnerable passengers” to avoid taking the train and postpone journeys if possible, warning that air-conditioning systems and other rail infrastructure were being “heavily tested” by the conditions. Authorities reported on Sunday that four children aged between 11 and 17 had drowned in swimming accidents around the country on Saturday, including two in the Doubs River in the eastern town of Besançon, where swimming has been banned. The heatwave is not confined to France. In Italy, authorities expanded heat warnings for Sunday from seven to eight cities in northern and central parts of the country, out of the 27 cities monitored nationally by the health ministry. In Spain, the national weather agency, Aemet, has issued red warnings for northern regions. Temperatures of between 40C and 42C are forecast in the major river valleys and inland areas such as Andalucía and Extremadura, rising to nearly 44C by Tuesday. In the UK, the Met Office said baking heat could last until at least Thursday, sparking health alerts and concerns for vulnerable people. Forecasters have said there is “growing confidence” this week could break the record for the hottest UK June temperature of 35.6C, which was set in Southampton in 1976.

Colombians vote in runoff election expected to trigger shift in decades-long armed conflict

Colombians are going to the polls in a presidential runoff expected to trigger a dramatic shift in the country’s decades-long armed conflict, now at its most violent point since the landmark 2016 peace agreement between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc). Polls show the frontrunner is the Trump-admiring far-right lawyer and millionaire businessman Abelardo de la Espriella, who has vowed to abandon President Gustavo Petro’s “total peace” plan of negotiating the disarmament of all criminal organisations and instead return to full-scale military confrontation with armed groups. De la Espriella’s opponent in the ballot will be Petro’s chosen successor and the main architect of “total peace”, the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda, who argues for the continuation of the plan, with “necessary changes”. Cepeda led the polls throughout most of the campaign but was defeated in the first round three weeks ago and has since struggled to attract centrist voters. At the opening of polling stations, Petro displayed his ballot showing a vote for Cepeda, urged Colombians to “vote, whatever their choice”, and said he rejected “interference by foreign leaders” – a reference to the US president, Donald Trump, who this week again endorsed De la Espriella while describing the progressive candidate as a “radical left Marxist”. Petro also announced that, as he controversially did during the first round, he would not accept the preliminary vote count released by the National Civil Registry, the independent public body responsible for organising Colombia’s elections, which are expected a few hours after polls close at 4pm local time (10pm GMT). Instead, Petro said he would only recognise the outcome of the official scrutiny process, which is expected to take about two more days. Three weeks ago, the president alleged fraud in the preliminary count without presenting evidence, drawing widespread criticism from election experts. Historically, the difference between the preliminary count and the official scrutiny in Colombian elections has been less than 1%. The election, in which more than 41 million Colombians are eligible to vote, is expected to deliver another victory for a far-right candidate advocating an iron-fist approach to crime, after the examples of Keiko Fujimori, who is leading the vote count in Peru, and José Antonio Kast, who won last year’s election in Chile. Amid what many analysts see as a new wave of far-right victories across Latin America, a De la Espriella presidency would leave only Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay and Guatemala under leftwing governments. Sandra Borda Guzmán, an associate professor of political science at Los Andes University in Bogotá, said De la Espriella successfully tapped into two trends that have shaped recent elections around the world: presenting himself as an anti-establishment “outsider” and promising quick solutions to violence. He even promised that, if elected, he would restore state control over territories dominated by criminal groups within 90 days – although he later appeared to backtrack, telling Radio Caracol: “I never said I would solve the security problem in 90 days.” De la Espriella, a lawyer who launched his legal career defending leaders of rightwing paramilitary militias, maintained that his goal during his first three months in office would be to “capture or kill” 10 major narcoterrorist and organised crime leaders. “Between the international trend favouring candidates who present themselves as anti-political figures and Colombia’s domestic security situation, that combination has helped him significantly,” said Guzmán. Although violence remains far below the extraordinarily high levels recorded in the decades before the peace deal with the Farc, the past year has been the most violent since the 2016 agreement. Miguel Bermúdez, a 40-year-old business administrator from the coastal city of Cartagena, said he would vote for De la Espriella largely because he was an “outsider” despite his long history as a lawyer for the rich and powerful. “For a long time, I’ve been looking for something that feels fresh. I’m tired of that same old political narrative,” said Bermúdez. Kátia Outten, a 57-year-old dentist from the island of San Andrés, said she would vote for Cepeda because “he understands the needs of ordinary people”. During his presidency, Cepeda’s backer Petro expanded social programmes and increased the minimum wage. The poverty rate has fallen to its lowest level since records began in 2012. Outten also decided not to vote for De la Espriella because of what she sees as his sexist views, including a radio interview in which he claimed to have won support among female voters because of the size of his penis. “Women make up just over 50% of the population. If we go out and vote with women’s empowerment in mind, we can show that all of that rhetoric has no basis,” she said.

Four months after the horrific Iran school bombing, fears grow that Trump and Hegseth will bury the truth

The attack on a girl’s elementary school in the Iranian town of Minab was one of the US military’s deadliest civilian bombings in decades. But nearly four months on, the Pentagon has produced no answers about why the military fired a Tomahawk cruise missile into a school on the first day of the war, killing at least 175 people, mostly children. Some critics doubt that the Pentagon ever will, or will bury the results under classifications to keep the worst mistakes secret from the public. As the US signs a shaky memorandum of understanding on a ceasefire with Iran, the secretive investigation into the attack has also become a test case for the self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth’s new approach to what he calls “warfighting”. As he said in early March, nearly two weeks after the attack, “our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it”. Shortly after the attack, Donald Trump suggested that it was carried out by Iran. When it became clear that the strike used a US-made Tomahawk missile, he suggested that Iran also had access to the cruise missiles. It does not. As he celebrated a ceasefire deal to open the strait of Hormuz last week, Trump signalled he was ready to write off the attack as a mistake. “It’s such a strange question to be asked at this date, because you’re talking about a long time ago,” Trump said when he was asked about the investigation during a press conference at the G7 meeting in Évian-les-Bains, France. “But nobody did that on purpose.” It was at the beginning of what Trump has taken to calling a “little excursion” into Iran that the back-to-back or “double tap” strikes on the school building took place, killing mainly children under the age of 12. Officials have told media anonymously that the site was believed to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base. Mohammadreza Ahmadi Tifakani lost two children in the school bombing. His seven-year-old daughter, Hanieh, was killed, along with all of her classmates in the girl’s section of the school, when the first missile hit. According to witnesses, her 10-year-old brother, Sobhan, survived the initial explosion and ran back to look for his sister. He was killed in the second blast. “I personally went to the morgue and identified both of them,” Tifakani told the Guardian in an interview shortly after the attack. “Sobhan was missing an eye, and half of his face was gone. His legs were broken. Hanieh’s skull was fractured but her face was intact. I recognised Sobhan at first glance, even though he was severely injured.” Trump said last week: “Mistakes are made. The war is nasty.” Several former Pentagon and national security officials expressed doubt to the Guardian that the US government would take responsibility for the deaths of the schoolchildren in Minab or even release the full report into the attack. “It’s very rare that you would have a military operation and not have some incidents where there was a mistaken target and civilians are harmed or killed, but then there is a system for investigating, assessing accountability and taking responsibility” in those cases, said one former senior Pentagon official. “Even without the civilian harm mitigation office, there’s a very clear process for this, and I’m very doubtful that the Hegseth Pentagon will follow through,” the former official added. As part of Hegseth’s “anti-woke” crusade at the Pentagon, the military has shuttered or reduced units meant to review civilian casualty incidents and has more broadly indicated that decisions made in combat by “warfighters” would not be subject to such close scrutiny. The reduction in civilian oversight at the Pentagon under Hegseth may make it easier to skirt blame for the incident. The incident is comparable to some of the worst mass-casualty incidents of past US wars, including the 2017 Mosul airstrike that killed at least 105 and perhaps more than 200 civilians, the 2015 Kunduz hospital airstrike that killed 42 people, and the 1991 Amiriyah air raid shelter bombing that killed more than 400 Iraqi civilians who were sheltering during Desert Storm. Trump said last week that the investigation was continuing. US Central Command, when asked about the investigation, gave no new information. “We have no updates at this time,” a defence official wrote. But media reports indicate that the investigation has concluded. Preliminary results said the attack came because of the US using seven-year-old targeting data that failed to indicate that the building next to an IRGC base was in fact a girls’ school. The New York Times reported last week that at least one analyst had alerted a colleague several years ago that the US appeared to be targeting what was now a school in Minab. But the targeting data was not updated, and military officials continued to revalidate the site as a legitimate target for bombing. Tifakani said at the time he had little hope of accountability from US investigations or the world. Asked what message he had for legal institutions or investigators looking into the bombing, he said: “They are witnessing everything themselves. We saw what happened in Gaza and Palestine. Now the same tragedy has befallen our own children. No matter what we say to them, that will not change anything.” Congressional inquiries into the incident have also been stymied. “The US strike in Minab is one of the most horrific episodes of the entire illegal Trump war in Iran,” said Yassamin Ansari, an Iranian-American congresswoman who represents Arizona’s third district. She said she had written to the Trump administration to demand answers about the strike and “gotten little to no response”. “Donald Trump is hiding the truth from the American people and Congress, and deflecting blame to Secretary Hegseth, because he does not want the public to know the true horrors of what he unleashed on the Iranian people with absolutely nothing to show for it,” Ansari said. “I will continue to do everything in my power to get answers for the families of these girls.” Wes Bryant, a former US air force special operations targeting expert and former chief of civilian harm assessments at the Pentagon, said his few remaining colleagues overseeing civilian harm reduction at the Pentagon had been prevented from seeing the preliminary results of the investigation. “I believe Hegseth and Trump are both going to do everything they can to suppress this investigation,” he said. “So, even if there is one really sitting there, it’s not getting out any more, unless we have, you know, a brave whistleblower.” He added: “The amount of people with eyes on that report are going to be very small.” He said strikes in Iran that had killed thousands of civilians were a sign of the rising “aggregate harm” that the US was willing to accept as part of a culture of that pointed to “pure negligence and recklessness, but also to a degradation of culture at senior leadership levels in the military”. Early in his tenure as secretary of defence, Hegseth moved to close down or severely reduce civilian oversight of the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response, and a report released in May by the department’s inspector general concluded that the US military no longer had the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy and operate a civilian protection centre of excellence. In September, Hegseth said publicly that he had done away with “stupid rules of engagement” for the US military as part of an anti-woke revamping of the Pentagon. In March, weeks after the strike on the school, as the US campaign against Iran continued at a fever pitch, he boasted: “Warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly.” Observers have said the remarks and shuttering of key offices have limited civilian oversight at the Pentagon, with one former official saying the US “threw in the trash the whole mitigating civilian harm strategy”. Niku Jafarnia, the acting deputy Washington director for Human Rights Watch, said: “Hegseth himself has publicly expressed a lot of his scepticism around the amount of measures that we had in the military previously to mitigate these types of reckless errors and massive civilian harm incidents. “He has publicly expressed scepticism about the value of constraints on fighters, and he has taken actions that have systematically weakened some of these protection measures that are supposed to ensure compliance with the law.” Pointing to Hegseth’s earlier public remarks about “untying the hands of our warfighters” and ignoring “stupid rules of engagement”, she added: “I think we saw the effects of that on day one of the war.”