The Iranian state media said Mojtaba Khamenei had released his first written statement as the new leader. It included a call to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.
Tens of thousands of flights have been cancelled since the initial strikes, and airlines that relied on Iranian airspace are now trying to find alternatives.
When news breaks that dominates the agenda to the extent of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, one challenge for the Guardian Weekly team is how to keep the magazine’s covers feeling fresh, week after week, while remaining focused on the same story.
For this week’s edition, in response to Patrick Wintour’s must-read essay on how the US has ignored the lessons of two previous Gulf wars, we asked illustrator Doug Chayka to play with the idea of a Middle East that the US either cannot, or refuses to, see. Doug’s artwork neatly captures the dilemma of a Trump administration that now finds its Iran exit strategy – assuming there was one – cut off by chaos.
Spotlight | War losses mount in rural Russia Residents of a remote village in Komi Republic say dozens have left to fight in Ukraine, leaving behind grieving families and labour shortages. Pjotr Sauer reports
Science | Is the passion for taxonomy in danger of dying out? Insect taxonomist Art Borkent fears his field of science is fading, despite millions of insects, fungi and other organisms waiting to be discovered, he tells Patrick Greenfield
Feature | The miraculous survival of Nada Itrab After a nine-year-old girl was kidnapped and taken from Spain to Bolivia, authorities feared the worst. They found her in the rainforest nine months later – but that wasn’t the end of her ordeal. Giles Tremlett picks up the story
Opinion |In this war, Britain’s enemy now is Donald Trump As the Iran disaster escalates, Simon Tisdall argues that Starmer should treat the US president as someone whose actions threaten the lawful, democratic way of life everywhere
Interview | Corinne Bailey Rae The English singer and songwriter was riding high with a hit album when her husband died tragically young. She discusses grief, fame and rebuilding her life with Simon Hattenstone
In the lead-up to the U.S.-Israeli attack, President Trump downplayed the risks to the energy markets as a short-term concern that should not overshadow the mission.
The attack launched on Iran by the US and Israel on 28 February was a textbook case of international aggression, justified in only the most cursory fashion by fictional Iranian threats and undertaken with no clear aims and no clear demands or terms. In announcing the war Donald Trump described it as a wholesale attack on both government and state. The US and Israel would ‘raze their missile industry to the ground’ and ‘annihilate their navy’. Benjamin Netanyahu called on Iranians to ‘come out to the streets and finish the job’. By Tom Stevenson
The late queen can be held responsible for much, but nobody could accuse her of seeming to enjoy her role. For the Yorks, however, enjoyment was everything, and the notion of royal sacrifice, arguably a red herring in the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was finally obliterated by their actions. By Andrew O’Hagan
As Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance shows despite itself, it is not Marlowe’s life story that we still need, but his plays and poems: we might well want to avert our eyes from the bathetically dismal life of the man who wrote them. By Michael Dobson
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie
Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
The United States and Israel killed Ayatollah Khamenei, and Xi Jinping’s decade-long project to build an alternative to the American-led order died with him. For years, Beijing quietly assembled a network of dictatorships and client states designed to blunt American power. Iran supplied China with cheap oil and kept Washington bogged down in the Middle
The history of the global trading system is a story of narrow and vulnerable waterways: the Suez and Panama Canals, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Straits of Dover and the Skagerrak, which defends the entrance to the Baltic. But none has the power to seize up the global economy as much as the Strait of…..
Like everyone, I’m glued to the news coming out of Iran. I’m experiencing some depression, as one might, upon realizing that much of what one has worked on for 25 years has suddenly gone up in smoke, destroyed when Donald Trump discovered he was pretty much a neocon after all. Like everyone else, I have…
Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. That might sound wildly optimistic, but what it really means is that war with Iran has been decades in the making. If the mission succeeds, it will mark the end of an era.
When President George W. Bush invaded Mesopotamia in 2003, everybody laughed at Comical Ali, the bespectacled Iraqi information minister who kept insisting that the American “rats” were doomed as Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed around him. The world moved on. Iran is not Iraq, as President Donald Trump’s supporters are so fond of saying, and Bush-eraOwen Matthews
With the exception so far of a single missile intercepted over Turkish airspace and a strike on an Azeri-controlled territory near the Iranian border, Tehran has so far declined to mess with the Turks, and for good reasons. Turkey is a member of NATO and attacking it would trigger Article 5 mutual defense measures. And
President Trump has both called for Iranians to rise up and oust the ruthless theocracy and then said that he’s fully prepared to deal with a new religious leader. By Robin Wright
The Zombie Regulator
As the cost of living continues to spiral upward, the Trump Administration is gutting the government agency built to protect Americans from financial ruin. By E. Tammy Kim
The Unmaking of the American University
For decades, research universities have relied on federal funding, with no guarantee that it will last. Now their survival may depend on compliance with the government. By Nicholas Lemann
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