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IN the weeks before we lost The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson on June 11 last year, he had two special visitors. 

They were the group’s surviving founder members, his first cousin Mike Love, and his best friend from college, Al Jardine. 

It was their chance to say goodbye to the man who, above anyone, brought “good vibrations” to the world and created their 1966 magnum opus Pet Sounds. 

First to venture up the drive at Brian’s Beverly Hills mansion for one last time was Jardine.  

“I last saw him at the very end,” he says. “I came up to the house and he just pointed at me. 

“He said, ‘You started the band’, and I went, ‘Wait, come on, Brian, I’m sure you had a little something to do with it!’ 

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“He was very direct at times — he could be very unfiltered — but I think our friendship meant a lot to him. 

“He was always my best friend, right from when we started out.” 

Despite Brian’s well-documented struggles with mental health, Jardine insists that his old buddy never lost his passion for music. 

“His reputation remains solid,” he adds, before supplying an answer to his own question: “What’s the term? Legend.  

“His work will be appreciated for centuries to come. He had his own style. Just listen to his arrangements and his chord changes — they’re just so unusual.  

“His brother Dennis actually said it first, ‘Brian is The Beach Boys’. He created our sound and, as Mike Love would say, he heard things we couldn’t hear.” 

Of his last visit to Brian, Love says: “A couple of weeks before he passed away, I was able to go and see him. 

“We had a great time. We sang together, actually, which was a lot of fun.” 

Love leads the latest incarnation of The Beach Boys, keeping their songs alive in concert, including Pet Sounds classics God Only Knows, Wouldn’t It Be Nice and Sloop John B.  

“Brian’s still with us every night in that music,” he affirms 

If Brian, younger brothers Carl and Dennis, Mike and Al started out by singing about surfing, girls and open-top cars in the California sun, it was the elder Wilson sibling who took things to the next level with Pet Sounds. 

A themed song cycle employing pioneering production techniques, sublime harmonies, divine melodies and darker, soul-searching lyrics, it is regarded as Brian’s masterpiece.

He had been impressed with The Beatles’ sonic adventures on Rubber Soul — now he was pushing The Beach Boys to raise the bar higher, in turn inspiring their chart rivals to make Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

Paul McCartney maintains that God Only Knows is his favourite song and that Pet Sounds is among his top three albums.  

He once enthused: “The musical invention on that is, like, ‘Wow!’  

“I just thought, ‘Oh dear me, this is THE album of all time, what the hell are we gonna do?’” 

To mark its 60th anniversary, The Pet Sounds Sessions — including demos, alternate takes and outtakes — are receiving digital, CD and vinyl editions. They feature a host of a cappella tracks shining the spotlight on the breathtaking harmonies.  

Which is why I’m speaking to Brian’s bandmates via video calls that seem entirely appropriate for singers who epitomise California’s sunny beach vibes.  

As we’re connected, Love, 85, reports that he’s “driving down the Pacific Coast Highway outside of Malibu”. 

In a separate call, Jardine, 83, is sitting in his solarium under clear blue skies in Monterey, gateway to the rugged Big Sur coastal region. 

First, Love gives me insights into his Beach Boys journey, leading up to the groundbreaking Pet Sounds.  

His mother Glee was the sister of Murry Wilson, father of Brian, Carl and Dennis, “so every holiday — Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Fourth of July — and birthday was celebrated with music. 

“When Brian and I were teens, we’d get together and sing or listen to the radio, hearing groups like The Everly Brothers.” 

When they formed The Beach Boys, the clean-cut image involving surfing, sun and girls was, he says, “environmental because we lived a few miles from the sea”. 

Love continues: “We would often go to the beach for family outings. There, you’d find people who dressed a certain way, talked a certain way and had a certain attitude.  

“They were the surfers who inspired our first song, Surfin’ [released in 1961].” 

As to whether The Beach Boys joined the craze, he adds: “Dennis, Al and I had surfboards but we weren’t the greatest athletes. We appreciated it though, and we gave it a shot. 

“I’m not sure Brian ever tried it. He could only hear out of one ear and didn’t have much balance. You need all the balance you can get when you’re surfing.” 

Love recalls how he would “sit down at the piano with Brian while he figured out chord progressions, tempos and melodies.  

“I felt it was up to me to come up with lyrics and sing lead on songs we were working on together such as Surfin’ USA, I Get Around and Fun Fun Fun.” 

Jardine, who currently fronts The Pet Sounds Band of ace Brian Wilson associates, also casts his mind back to the early days but is interrupted by “actual pet sounds”. 

“Hang on a second, we have a little dog outside and he’s barking — I gotta shut him up,” he reports.  

When calm returns, I ask Jardine how he came to form a band with three brothers and their cousin in 1961.  

He answers: “Well, Brian and I were classmates in high school but didn’t really know each other. 

“We were on the football team — he was quarterback and I was full back. He would call the plays, either pitching the ball to me or somebody else. 

“But we didn’t interact until we went to college. I’d heard him in concert and, in our second year, I bumped into him on campus and said, ‘We gotta start a band’.  

“We walked over to the music room and started playing music for each other.  

“I’d already been in a folk group and, when he heard me sing, he realised I had a gift. 

“Then he said, ‘I’ve got my little brothers and my cousin, Mike. I’ll introduce you to them. I rented instruments from a local music store but we didn’t know how to express ourselves at first, so we just sang a cappella. 

“Once we finally got around the piano, we were off and running. 

“I soon realised that Brian was a fine-tuned instrument. He had a great voice, a great knack for composition and already had a duet thing going on with Mike.” 

As for the surfer image, Jardine credits Dennis Wilson, the family rebel who played the drums. He says: “Dennis was a surfer and the rest of us were land lovers. He taught me how to surf but I sank like a stone. 

“But surfing was the craze so we put lyrics to our first song and called it Surfin’.” 

In 1964, Brian dropped the bombshell that he was stepping back from touring to concentrate on studio work.  

Love provides this insight into his cousin’s state of mind: “Brian wasn’t comfortable on the road — he got nervous and unhappy. He missed home and he missed the studio. 

“It was a drag to see him leave the live group but it was in his best interests.” 

Afforded fewer distractions, Brian applied himself to Pet Sounds and, in tandem with it, the sophisticated sonic miracle Good Vibrations — a standalone hit deemed not a good fit for the album. 

This period coincided with his experiments with LSD and marijuana.  

He once stated that drugs helped him achieve a deeper level of creativity but later expressed regrets over the damage to his mental health. 

Because of the complexity, Brian needed longer than usual to finish Pet Sounds so The Beach Boys released a stopgap party album, yielding one of their biggest hits, Barbara Ann. 

Then, after a tour of Japan in January 1966, with Bruce Johnston taking Brian’s place, Carl, Dennis, Mike, Al and Bruce returned for the momentous sessions.  

In their absence, Brian had employed lyricist Tony Asher and crack session musicians the Wrecking Crew, including, among many, Glen Campbell on guitar and banjo. 

Love says: “The tracks Brian had done were completely amazing. Our main job was to finish them vocally and we worked very hard.” 

One of the songs was God Only Knows, which he says was “sung so beautifully by my cousin Carl”. 

“We lost him many years ago to lung cancer. For concerts these days, my son Christian sings lead.” 

So what was Carl like? “He was our musical director on stage and the most proficient musician in the group,” replies Love. 

Jardine adds: “Carl could knock it out of the park. He was right in the centre of our harmonies with Mike’s baritone below and me higher, with Brian higher still.” 

And what about Dennis, who had a wild reputation and later befriended cult leader and killer Charles Manson? 

Love says: “He lived a dangerous life because of the alcohol and drugs he got involved with. He died [from drowning] in 1983.” 

Jardine adds: “Dennis was our Keith Moon. Oh boy, all he had to do was just stand up on stage and the crowd would go nuts.” 

It was self-confessed folkie Jardine who brought Bahamian sea shanty Sloop John B to Brian. He says: “I was a Kingston Trio fan. They were big Capitol Records guys, same label as us, and they wore striped shirts.  

“Learning all their songs was my musical training. When the time came to start The Beach Boys, I went out and bought striped shirts for us. 

“Sloop John B was my idea. I said, ‘Brian, if we add one major and one minor chord, it’ll sound like us instead of The Kingston Trio’. 

“He put it to good use. It became Pet Sounds’ lead single. Capitol always wanted a hit to sell an album.” 

Recalling the sessions, Jardine says that Brian’s abilities had been “growing exponentially” while they’d been away. 

“In spite of our jet lag, we were in the studio the day after we got home from Japan. We were extremely impressed with Brian’s arrangements. 

“People forget that he was a masterful producer. He knew the language. He could go into a studio and the studio became an instrument for him.” 

That said, it wasn’t all plain sailing, as Jardine explains: “Mike didn’t like the lyrics on some songs so he insisted on changing a couple around.  

“He thought a song called Hang On To Your Ego was too sophisticated for our crowd so he changed it to I Know There’s An Answer.” 

The story of Pet Sounds wouldn’t be complete without mention of the album title and cover shot of the boys among the goats at San Diego Zoo. Love says: “Brian didn’t know what to call the album.

“At the end [of final track Caroline, No], you hear a train going by and dogs are barking.  

“Those were Brian and [first wife] Marilyn’s dogs. So I said, ‘Why don’t we call it Pet Sounds? It was a double entendre, of course — and it stuck.” 

Jardine picks up the story of the photo shoot: “It was a total mystery to me.  

“We had to drive to San Diego, which was 200 miles away. We had our own zoo in Los Angeles, for God’s sake!” 

The resulting album cover has a quaint charm but it’s not exactly up there with Sgt Pepper’s iconic Peter Blake design. 

Love smiles at the memory and says: “I was in India at the Maharishi’s place when Paul McCartney and I had a conversation one night. 

“He was saying, ‘Mike, you ought to take more care with your album covers’. 

“So I told him, ‘Paul, you’re absolutely right.

We should’. 

“But we always felt that what went into the sleeve was more important than the cover itself.” 

And speaking of goats, to many including Macca, Pet Sounds is the GOAT. 

THE BEACH BOYS 

The Pet Sounds Session Highlights 

★★★★★

Istanbul, Turkiye – When investigations by Al Jazeera and other media outlets in 2024 revealed that Israeli-linked artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as Lavender and Gospel had helped generate thousands of military targets in Gaza, critics warned that warfare was entering a new era – one driven not only by soldiers and bombs, but by algorithms, data, and surveillance technology.

Then, in September 2024, thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies used by members of Hezbollah exploded in coordinated attacks in Lebanon, widely attributed to Israeli intelligence operations that had turned ordinary communication devices into weapons.

And, last year, reporting by Al Jazeera also raised concerns about the use of cloud and data infrastructure linked to major US technology companies in Israeli surveillance operations involving Palestinians.

For a growing number of scholars, economists and political thinkers, such developments reflect more than just the changing nature of conflict. They show how power in the modern world is increasingly exercised not just through military force, but through technology, finance and control over information.

That argument has revived broader debates around decolonisation – a term historically associated with the dismantling of European empires after World War II, when countries across Asia, Africa and the Middle East gained formal independence.

But many proponents of what is termed “decolonial theory” – a school of thought arguing that colonial-era systems of power and hierarchy still shape modern politics, economics and knowledge – argue that colonial power structures never fully disappeared. Instead, they evolved, embedding themselves in global financial systems, technology platforms, media networks and even the production of knowledge itself.

Dependence of Global South countries on Western technology, digital infrastructure and global markets can create new forms of political and economic vulnerability, particularly across the Global South.

“A generation may have grown up believing they had never experienced colonialism or exploitation,” Esra Albayrak, board chair of the NUN Foundation for Education and Culture and daughter of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told Al Jazeera during the World Decolonization Forum in Istanbul on May 11-12.

“Yet, mentally, they may still be living under colonial influence.”

The war in Gaza marked a turning point, Albayrak says, shining a spotlight on how international principles are not applied equally. Global institutions have so far failed to stop what many countries and rights groups have described as genocide against Palestinians.

“The world is sounding an alarm, and we can no longer afford to remain indifferent to it,” she said.

A techno-feudal era

Albayrak argues that a handful of technology companies are emerging as new, invisible centres of power, shaping how information is produced, circulated and consumed in the digital age.

She describes the digital sphere as the realm of what she calls “future colonialism”, warning that AI systems trained largely on Western-centric data risk reinforcing existing global inequalities.

“When AI systems are run by those tech companies and trained on Western sources, they risk carrying the hierarchies of the past into tomorrow’s digital world, as they now have personalised data, suppressing identity,” Albayrak said.

By this, she means that most major AI models are still trained largely on English-language and Western-produced data – a pattern critics say risks sidelining non-Western languages, cultures and perspectives.

On social media platforms, algorithms tend to amplify some conflicts while rendering others nearly invisible, effectively shaping what billions of users see, discuss and remember online.

Walter D Mignolo, professor at Duke University, argues that while what we historically see as “formal colonialism” may have largely ended, systems of Western dominance continue through economics, culture, technology and knowledge production.

“Coloniality is not over. It is all over the world,” Mignolo said, arguing that modern ideas of development and progress often have the effect of pressuring societies to conform to Western norms.

Rather than simply resisting those systems, he said, societies must find a way to “re-exist” by rebuilding intellectual and cultural autonomy outside dominant global frameworks.

Colonisers in the financial age

The March 2026 Global Debt Report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveals that 44 countries face severe debt burdens, often aggravated by global conflicts, forcing some governments to spend more on interest payments than on health or education.

This is not a new phenomenon, as developing countries have been labouring under the weight of foreign debt for decades.

But British political economist and author Ann Pettifor told Al Jazeera that modern forms of domination are now increasingly embedded not in empires or nation-states, but in financial systems operating beyond democratic oversight.

Pettifor points to the growing influence of “shadow” banking networks – financial institutions operating largely outside traditional banking regulations – and giant asset managers such as BlackRock, which manages $13 trillion in assets.

Much of the global financial architecture now functions largely outside the regulatory control of governments, she says, including that of Western states themselves.

“This is not a state colonising other states,” Pettifor said. “This is the financial system colonising the whole world, including my country and the US.”

She argues that elected governments increasingly struggle to control key economic realities – from energy prices to commodity markets – because those systems are dictated by global financial actors operating far beyond public accountability.

In Nigeria, for example, Pettifor says, efforts to expand domestic refining capacity continue to face pressure from international financial institutions and global energy markets to keep fuel prices tied to global markets and maintain reliance on imported refined oil products, despite its vast oil reserves.

Coordinated cooperation between developing nations may be necessary to challenge the dominance of Western-centred financial systems, Pettifor says, pointing to growing efforts across parts of West Africa to expand regional refining capacity and reduce dependence on imported fuel. Yet such ambitions can also leave critical sectors dependent on the decisions and influence of a small number of powerful private actors.

Global financial markets, algorithm-driven platforms, and foreign-controlled digital infrastructure increasingly define everyday life – from fuel and food prices to the information people consume online and the technologies governments and societies depend on, observers say.

A ‘mastery complex’

As wars become increasingly influenced by AI, digital infrastructure and financial dependency, debates around colonisation are focusing less on territorial control and more on who influences energy prices, lending systems, access to technology and the flow of information across borders, observers say.

Albayrak draws a parallel between today’s debates around technology and global power and Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden”, published as the US took control of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. The poem framed colonial expansion as a moral obligation to “civilise” other societies rather than an exercise of domination.

Albayrak said such traces of “mastery complex” still survive today, though in different forms – not necessarily through military occupation, but through technological, financial and informational influence.

But what the world really needs, she argues, is a global order built not on hierarchy, but on shared responsibility.

“The burden should belong to humanity collectively.”

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has refused to resign over a “cash-in-sofa scandal” that continues to haunt his presidency.

Ramaphosa, who addressed the nation on Monday to declare his intention to remain in his post, is set to face a multi-party impeachment committee, which will investigate allegations that he covered up a 2020 break-in at his private ranch and the theft of more than $500,000, concealing the incident from police and tax authorities.

The committee’s findings could spell his impeachment; however, parliament has not provided a timeframe for the investigation, which has yet to commence.

Analysts say the scandal, which has been dubbed “Farmgate”, has been particularly damaging for a president who rode to power in 2018 on an anticorruption mandate, after the much-criticised presidency of Jacob Zuma. Now, eight years later, the case of the cash found stuffed in a sofa at his game ranch could be what takes Ramaphosa down.

Can the South African president survive? Here is what we know.

What’s the scandal all about?

In February 2020, burglars allegedly broke into Ramaphosa’s luxury private ranch, Phala Phala, in Limpopo province, South Africa, and stole $580,000. The cash was said to have been hidden inside furniture at the farm – hence the “Farmgate” label.

Ramaphosa has been accused of covering up the theft and keeping private efforts to trace the burglars a secret to avoid an investigation into where the money had come from – and why it was hidden in a sofa.

Corruption allegations surfaced when a former head of South Africa’s state security agency walked into a police station in 2022 and accused the president of money laundering in relation to the stolen cash.

Later that year, an independent parliamentary committee found that Ramaphosa “may have committed” serious violations and misconduct. In particular, the panel found he had failed to properly report a theft to police as required under anticorruption laws and “acted in a manner inconsistent with his office”.

At the time, the African National Congress (ANC) had a strong majority in parliament – with 230 seats out of 400. It was therefore able to reject the report and refused to open impeachment proceedings.

But the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) challenged this at the Constitutional Court in Cape Town, which, last week, overturned the government’s rejection of the 2022 parliamentary report and referred it to a multi-party impeachment committee for a full investigation.

What has Ramaphosa said?

Ramaphosa has always denied allegations of corruption and maintains that the stolen cash came from selling buffalo.

Since the constitutional court’s ruling last week, Ramaphosa has been facing renewed calls for his resignation, mostly from opposition leaders. In a televised address on Monday, the president refused to step down.

“While there have been calls in some circles that I should resign, nothing in the Constitutional Court judgement compels me to resign my office,” he said.

“Since a criminal complaint was laid against me in June 2022, I have consistently maintained that I have not stolen public money, committed any crime, nor violated my oath of office,” Ramaphosa said in his address, adding that he has cooperated in all investigations.

The president rejected the 2022 report from the independent panel again, saying: “The complaints against me are based on hearsay allegations. No evidence, let alone sufficient evidence, has been presented to prove that I committed any violation, let alone a serious violation of the Constitution or law, or serious misconduct as set out in the Constitution.”

If the committee does find enough evidence against him, it could direct him to be impeached.

It is unclear how long this will take, however. Ramaphosa has pledged to seek a judicial review of the report’s contents, which, in turn, could delay the investigation of the impeachment committee.

What is the process for impeachment?

If a president is found to have violated the constitution or the law, or is unable to perform the duties of office, South Africa’s National Assembly has the constitutional authority to remove him or her.

Beyond the parliamentary investigation that will now begin into the Farmgate scandal, and which can trigger a vote on impeachment, as well, any member of parliament may introduce a motion seeking the president’s removal. The speaker of the National Assembly would then refer the motion to an independent panel of legal experts to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to proceed.

If this panel decides there is a case against the president, lawmakers must vote on whether to begin impeachment proceedings. After this, a specially constituted impeachment committee is established to carry out a detailed investigation into the allegations. This is separate from the investigation beginning now and could take several months.

Once that committee recommends the removal of the president, parliament holds a final vote to impeach the president. Under Section 89 of the constitution, a two-thirds majority is required – meaning at least 267 lawmakers must vote in favour of removal in the 400-seat National Assembly.

Are there other ways to remove Ramaphosa?

Yes, the South African president can be removed from his job via a no-confidence vote in parliament.

Any member of the assembly can propose the no-confidence motion, and it only requires a simple majority of more than 50 percent.

Ramaphosa would need support from coalition partners to survive a no-confidence vote, however. This has already been proposed by at least two opposition parties in parliament.

Another way could be if his ANC party turns against him, as it did with the last president, Zuma, who came in for years of corruption allegations and was finally forced to resign in 2018.

How strong is Ramaphosa’s position?

Ramaphosa is not only the president of South Africa, but also the leader of its most popular party, the ANC. Nelson Mandela was the ANC’s first Black president after apartheid ended in 1994.

In 2024, the ANC stunningly lost its majority in parliament for the first time following more than three decades in power. Today, the ANC holds 159 of 400 seats in the national assembly, or about 40 percent of seats – and Ramaphosa is governing in a coalition with the Democratic Alliance, which has 87 seats, along with other smaller parties.

But Chris Ogunmodede, an independent analyst of African politics, security, and international affairs, based in Lagos, Nigeria, said Ramaphosa would likely survive any impeachment attempts, “simply because of the arithmetic”.

“His numbers in the parliament virtually guarantee that impeachment will not happen,” Ogunmodede told Al Jazeera.

“It hasn’t been easy, but there is a government that seems to be functional and is showing some signs of reinvigoration,” Ogunmodede added. “There’s a lot of uncertainty on the part of the other coalition parties that suggests that they would much rather be on the side of caution and go with the devil they know, and preserve the government by keeping Ramaphosa in power.”

Despite this, the cash-in-sofa scandal has been damaging, he said.

And, under Ramaphosa, the ANC’s popularity has continued to slide. The party’s national vote share fell from 57.5 percent in the 2019 election to 40.2 percent in the 2024 election, marking its worst performance since the end of apartheid.

The South African economy has shown some signs of improvement, however, and given the Ramaphosa government “something to show for the time that it’s been in power”, said Ogunmodede.

Yet the South African government still faces long-term structural concerns about the economy, the country’s institutions, corruption, crime and other issues, the analyst added.

On the back of underlying anti-incumbency, Ogunmodede said the top court’s ruling on the cash-in-sofa scandal “has resurrected many concerns that South Africans have had about the president and his party, and the political institutions of the country more broadly”.

PLUCKED from obscurity and then dropped when fans lose interest, men in reality TV shows often fare worse than their female counterparts.

While women regularly earn a fortune from brand endorsements, the guys can find themselves struggling after they are no longer on our TV screens.

Now the untimely deaths of The Only Way Is Essex cast members Jake Hall and Jordan Wright within a few months of each other has raised fears that ITV is failing in its duty of care for former reality TV stars.

Jake, 35, died last week in a Spanish villa following a night of partying while Jordan, 33 was found dead in a ditch in Thailand in March.

A TV insider told The Sun: “The tragic deaths of Jake and Jordan have raised some serious red flags.

“No one is blaming ITV but there is definitely a pattern which emerges time and time again on all reality shows.

“Measures were put in place a number of years ago but it doesn’t seem to be enough.”

Artist and designer Jake, who joined Towie in 2015, had been living in Spain.

He was found dead in a pool of blood in a villa in Majorca last Wednesday morning after he seemingly crashed through a window.

A police source said witnesses described Jake as “agitated”, possibly from “alcohol and other substances he may have consumed”.

He had a number of struggles in recent years, from losing his fashion brand Prevu to being hit with a restraining order by ex-girlfriend Misse Beqiri, a model and the mother of his eight-year-old daughter River.

Yet right from the start of his telly career, Jake was open about being uncomfortable with fame.

Shortly after his debut on Towie, Jake said on This Morning: “The privacy part has been quite difficult because everyone knows your life within days of being on the show.”

Jordan, from Basildon, Essex, also admitted he struggled with life in the spotlight.

The former firefighter said: “I had an enjoyable career for six years before I resigned to pursue a life in the limelight of reality TV — a choice that left me hugely unfulfilled, stagnant and lost.

“People think it’s glitz and glamour but the truth is very far from public perception.

“I really struggled.

“When I left I lost a huge part of myself and my sense of purpose.”

Jordan returned to firefighting in 2023 but he struggled to settle and in December moved to Thailand where he was looking forward to a “very exciting year ahead”.

He shared his new life with his 21,500 Instagram followers, but in March was found dead face down in a drainage canal on the island of Phuket.

CCTV footage appeared to show Jordan pacing erratically outside a hotel before bolting out of the complex shortly before his body was found.

Unfortunately, the two deaths were not Towie’s first.

In January 2021, Mick Norcross took his own life, aged 57.

The Sugar Hut owner and businessman had joined the show with his son Kirk, who now runs a waste removal business.

Addiction has also taken hold of a number of cast members, including James Argent, who suffered two near-fatal overdoses at home.

Arg’s drug binges cost him his relationship with co-star Lydia Bright, his job on Towie and other high- profile TV work.

Last year he was in trouble after pushing his former Miss Sweden partner Nicoline Artursson down some steps on holiday in Spain.

He admitted an offence of gender violence and was given a six-month prison sentence, suspended for two years.

Jake and Jordan’s deaths sent shockwaves through fans of Towie and its stars.

Charlie King, who was on the show in 2012 and 2013, has faced his own demons since he left the programme but believes his fellow cast members must “take responsibility”.

He told The Sun: “Reality stars in general are seeking something — whether it’s fame, attention or validation.

“It’s a two-way street — stars want to appear on the shows for that lifestyle and experience, and shows need the participants.

“I can’t say Towie gave me the best support when I finished on the show.

“I remember feeling lost and redundant, trying to navigate a life post the show and still having eyes on me.

“It was hard.

“I missed the show deeply and all that came with it.

“I think access to a counsellor or therapy in those first months or years after appearing is always a good idea.

“But I also don’t think it’s fair to point the finger at these shows for how individuals live their lives after — we have to take responsibility.”

Charlie added that producers offer much better support for their on-screen talent these days and that ITV “isn’t afraid to pull out cast members if they think it’s getting too much or they need a breather, which is great to see”.

Following his stint on Towie, Charlie was diagnosed with body dysmorphia and had a botched nose job.

Other lads from the show have also gone under the knife in a quest for perfection.

Bobby Norris is now almost unrecognisable after having a full deep plane facelift, neck lift and lower eyelid surgery.

James Lock has also battled body dysmorphia and says he has spent around £100,000 on getting work done.

On rival ITV show Love Island, telly bosses brought in a revised set of welfare measures in 2021, including “comprehensive” psychological support, after former stars Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis took their own lives.

Their relatives blamed a lack of support from the show for contributing to their mental anguish.

Love Islanders are offered a minimum of eight therapy sessions when they return home.

They also get advice on coping with their finances.

But unlike Love Island, Towie cast members often appear on the show for years at a time.

A number of its former stars, including Yazmin Oukhellou and Tommy Mallet, have praised the support they have received while on the show — but what happens when the cameras stop rolling?

A telly insider revealed: “When women finish on a reality show, brand deals, an influencing career and other avenues are open to them — but it’s very different for men.

“They can get club PAs but that involves late nights and lots of booze.

“Some people like Jake or Tommy launch a career in fashion, but many struggle to achieve the dizzy heights they once enjoyed.”

Women, meanwhile, have made millions off the back of Towie, thanks to very successful business models.

Former glamour model Sam Faiers owns global collagen brand Revive and is worth £9million, and Gemma Collins is now a huge TV star with £7million in the bank.

Lucy Mecklenburgh — famed for throwing drinks on cheating Mario Falcone — now owns a thriving fitness brand and shows off her happy life on social media.

But there have also been a number of male Towie successes too.

Mark Wright landed I’m A Celebrity and Strictly at a time when Z-listers were reportedly banned, as well as enjoying a stint on US TV.

Now a radio DJ, he is married to actress Michelle Keegan, and the couple live in a £3.5million Essex mansion with one-year-old daughter Palma.

Joey Essex also became a huge breakout star.

These days he is worth at least £10millon thanks to a lucrative reality TV career, savvy personal branding and business ventures.

Another success story is Tommy Mallet, who launched luxury footwear and apparel brand Mallet London and more recently Ctrne trainers.

Tommy, Joey and Mark are living up to Towie’s theme tune The Only Way Is Up — and fans will hope there will be more men from the show who enjoy similar success.

ITV was approached for comment but declined.

San Francisco, United States – Greer Dove’s days are packed with studying business and finance, as well as doing administrative work at college, along with caring for her eight-year-old daughter with special needs. But once a week, Dove, a single mother, makes sure to drop in at the food bank in California’s Marin County to pick up vegetables, fruit and other food. Along with the federal government’s food benefits, they keep her housing running.

“We need this so we can keep functioning at a high level,” she says. “She loves fruit, so I make sure to get it,” she says of her daughter.

Dove, who is also looking for a full-time job, has worked in restaurants, event management, retail, television shows, office administration and payroll over the years. But she has been on the federal government’s Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) for six years, and with the food bank, for more than three years. Before she got food benefits, Dove fed her daughter all she had and skipped meals or looked around for snacks in the offices she worked at to get her through the day.

United States President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed in June, cut SNAP benefits by more than $186bn over the next 10 years to make up for extending cuts to income tax. This could lead to more than 3 million people nationwide, and 665,000 recipients in California, losing such food benefits, according to estimates.

“This will bring a series of cuts that collectively present an existential threat to food benefits,” says Andrew Cheyne, managing director of government relations and public affairs at the County Welfare Directors Association of California.

California’s proposed billionaire tax, which seeks to impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of the state’s more than 200 billionaires to make up for the funding gap created by the OBBBA, got more than 1.5 million signatures in April. It is likely to be on the ballot for the November midterm election.

While most of the nearly $100bn expected to be raised through the tax will go towards filling the gap in health insurance created by the OBBBA, 10 percent will be used to make up for the retrenchment in food benefits.

In California, where more than 5.3 million people, more than any other state, receive food benefits, the impacts of the cuts began to be felt in April when 72,000 immigrants started losing benefits. June onwards, nearly 600,000 recipients will be screened for work eligibility. Recipients, including those who are homeless, seniors, foster youth and veterans, will have to work, study or volunteer to receive food benefits. Failing the screening to meet work requirements for three months will lead to their food benefits being cut.

Brian Galle, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley and one of the tax measure’s authors, says that in California, the state that introduced gig work, “jobs are increasingly precarious. You may find enough work or not. You may get tips or not. But nutrition needs are steady.”

Making impossible choices

On a recent Friday morning, new members lined up to enrol at a whitewashed, bunting-festooned La Ofrenda food bank in San Francisco’s Mission district. The food bank doles out fresh vegetables, fruit and bread that have been donated by large grocery stores once those products neared expiration date.

Gladys Lee had taken a 45-minute train ride after a friend told her about it. Lee worked at downtown San Francisco’s Hyatt hotel as a room cleaner for three decades until a back injury meant she could not push the heavy cleaning carts any more and had to leave. After seven years of struggling to find work, food was getting scarce, and Lee found her way to La Ofrenda. She packed what she could into a carton and held it in her arms for the train ride back.

Food benefit rolls have shrunk by more than 3.3 million nationally in the six months from July 2025, when the OBBBA was enacted, to January 2026.

In California, the rolls of Calfresh, as food benefits are known in the state, shrank by 288,000 or 6 percent from July 2025 to February 2026, according to analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, DC-based think tank. This reduction in rolls happened even before the OBBBA cuts began.

Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote in a recent essay that the shrinking of SNAP rolls reflected an ebullient economy and buoyant job growth.

“The drop in SNAP recipients affirms that many Americans are moving from welfare to work,” she wrote. “It is no secret that Trump’s massive tax cuts and deregulation efforts are unleashing robust, private sector-led economic growth, which are fueling trillions in investments, booming wage growth”.

But unemployment remained stable at about 4.4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, while SNAP rolls shrank.

“This last time we saw such a steep, quick decline, other than during natural disasters, is three decades ago when welfare reform was enacted,” says Dottie Rosenbaum, senior fellow and director of  Federal SNAP Policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Nationally, SNAP rolls shrank by 8 percent, while in California, they shrank by 5.5 percent, in part because the work eligibility requirements were delayed until June, while some other states have already implemented them.

At La Ofrenda, Roberto Alfaro, executive director of the nonprofit Homey, says he started the food bank when food costs went up during the pandemic. They have stayed high, he says. Now he sees people doing day jobs and night jobs and coming for food when they have paid rent.

“People are making impossible choices,” says Keely O’Brien, a policy advocate at the Western Center for Law and Poverty.

While California is the world’s fourth-largest economy, growth has come with a soaring cost-of-living crisis.

“With rising housing and utility costs, few households can dedicate that much of their income towards food,” O’Brien says.

The OBBA has also shifted the administrative cost of meeting work eligibility requirements to states, and beginning next year, part of the cost of SNAP will also fall on states.

“To make requirements more stringent, you are creating more government, more bureaucratic logjam,” says Jaren Sorkow, state director for the Children’s Defence Fund.

This has already led to a 51 percent drop in SNAP rolls in Arizona, which has begun implementing the OBBBA cuts, according to data by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Making something from nothing

Several measures to counter the $100bn gap in funding for health insurance and food benefits created by the OBBBA have been floated in California. The biggest of these is the one-time 5 percent tax on those with assets of more than a billion dollars. The tax will raise $100bn, its authors estimate.

As it seems set to be voted on in the November election, it faces mounting opposition from the state’s tech entrepreneurs who have funded measures to undercut the tax.

Tech entrepreneurs have called it an economic 9/11, saying taxing their assets, including shareholding in startups, will lead to a flight of capital and innovation from the state. Sergey Brin, a cofounder of Google Inc, now spends a week in Nevada and a week in his Bay Area offices and has spent more than $57m on opposing the billionaire tax. He has backed two measures that undercut the billion tax, which have also received 1.4 million and 1.5 million signatures and are also set to be on the ballot for the November election.

One of these measures prohibits future taxes on personal property, including financial assets, savings and retirement accounts, as well as intellectual property. The other would increase audits of taxpayer-funded programmes, and includes language that would essentially invalidate the billionaire tax.

In a recent statement to The New York Times, Brin said, “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”

The coalition of unions backing the billionaire tax is bracing for the fight ahead. “We expect to be outspent,” says Kris Cuaresma-Primm, director of partnerships for the coalition that is backing the billionaire tax. “We will keep communicating to people that there is a tidal wave of pain coming from the cuts, and we want to reclaim the losses from the OBBBA.”

Giulia Varaschin, senior tax policy adviser at the International Tax Observatory, who recently coauthored a study on wealth taxes, says there is little academic evidence that such taxes cause the wealthy to leave at a notable scale. “There is only a marginal flight with very little, if any, economic impact,” she says.

The study, coauthored with the economist Gabriel Zucman, who supports the California billionaire tax, did find that wealth taxes had not raised as much revenue as estimated in several European countries and became less popular as a result.

Varaschin says this was because these taxes were levied on a larger set of the wealthy, which included homeowners or small businesses, rather than the ultra-rich or billionaires. The taxpayers could hardly afford to pay it, and the government made exemptions instead. These taxes also did not touch assets, where much of the wealth of the ultra-rich lies, Varaschin says.

The California tax remedies this by taxing only billionaires and taxing assets, including shares in companies.

Daniel Shaviro, Wayne Perry professor of taxation at New York University, says, “Traditionally, these taxes can be hard to enforce because tax administration don’t want to go after these people.”

Even if it passes, “The governor could just say this is not a high priority for him and not enforce it,” Shaviro says, referring to Governor Gavin Newsom, who has opposed the tax.

But Primm says, “The governor is out of touch with Californians on this”.

Newsom is in the last year of his last term as governor. However, nearly all the candidates running for the June 2 primary for governor, except billionaire Tom Steyer, who is running as a progressive Democrat, also oppose this measure. While some have said this will lead to a flight of capital, others say the spending plan does not include expenses for education, which was not cut in the OBBBA.

Greer Dove, who gets food through Calfresh and the San Francisco Marin Food Bank for herself and her daughter, says the looming food benefit cuts are worrying. “The anxiety of it all is adding up. I could be next.”

Football has gained a foothold in the United States, and the country seems ready to host the World Cup this summer – which was not clear in 1994.

Back then, when the US last hosted the World Cup, the country had no professional league and the national team was cobbled together with ex-collegians, journeymen, and semi-professionals.

“Leading into ’94, we were at risk on the ticket side,” former US Soccer President Sunil Gulati told Al Jazeera in a recent interview. “For the US Organizing Committee, it was a big concern if we could sell all the tickets.’’

In the end, the 1994 tournament was successful. A record 3.5 million (68,991 per game) attended matches; the US advanced from the group stage for the first time since 1930, losing 1-0 to eventual champions Brazil in the last 16; and seeds were planted for a professional league, Major League Soccer.

Football has since moved from the margins to the mainstream in the US.

MLS is thriving, the national team is ranked a creditable 16th in the world by FIFA, and as the World Cup returns this summer, ticket demand far outpaces supply.

“If you said in 1994 MLS would be a 30-team league, with [22] soccer-specific stadiums and averaging 20,000 crowds – not in our wildest dreams,” Gulati said.

“The landscape is completely different. The most visible thing is the development of professional leagues, MLS and the women’s league [NWSL]. We had no first division league. And now there is [also] USL Division 2 and 3. The number of teams has increased dramatically.”

Today, the US Soccer Federation, commonly referred to as US Soccer, sanctions 127 professional teams – 102 men’s and 25 women’s.

“Eighteen of the top 50 [valued] teams in the world are in MLS,” Gulati said. “That’s an extraordinary statistic. The women’s team in Columbus just sold for $205m. Commercial interest in soccer and soccer leagues is at an all-time high.”

Credit Joao Havelange for seeing the future. During his reign as FIFA president, Havelange usually got what he wanted, and he wanted the 1994 World Cup in the US, along with a professional league.

Easier said than done, though. Organised football has been played in the US since the late 19th century, with the American Cup inaugurated in 1884. But over the following decades, several professional leagues collapsed, and after the North American Soccer League (NASL) folded in 1984, there appeared to be little future for the game. Enter Havelange and FIFA.

“FIFA recognised a long time ago that, for the sport to grow internationally, it had to be successful in the US,” Farrukh Quraishi, a Tampa, Florida-based administrator who played in the NASL, told Al Jazeera.

“For me, it was purely a matter of time. This is a huge and wealthy market. Now, you look at who is buying clubs in MLS, and it’s a who’s who of NFL owners.”

Looking back, it’s remarkable that the US actually competed in World Cups and played host to one at all, without a nationwide professional league.

For years, football’s foundation in the country was built on amateur and youth participation. By the early 1990s, the numbers were high, with an estimated 18 million people playing the sport at some level in the US. But the pyramid lacked a top tier, leaving a dead end for aspiring players, little media coverage, and scattered fan interest.

The 1994 World Cup came and went, and, in 1996, MLS finally kicked off.

Havelange duly arrived to commemorate the inaugural game, sitting in the rickety stands of Spartan Stadium in San Jose, California.

The San Jose Clash edged DC United 1-0, as Eric Wynalda scored an 88th-minute goal – just in time to avoid the game going to a “shootout”, in which draws were decided by players going one-on-one with goalkeepers from 32 metres (35 yards) out. This novel method of deciding games ended in 2000.

Football-specific stadiums started springing up in 1999. Lamar Hunt’s Columbus Crew Stadium became the country’s first major purpose-built football venue since Mark’s Stadium in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1922. Now, Columbus are on their second stadium, the ScottsMiracle-Gro Field, and a total of 22 MLS teams compete at their own venues.

Football finally became part of the American sporting scene.

“Is it in the same way as the NFL, with [average figures of more than 18 million] watching it, or the American Pastime that baseball is? No,” Gulati said.

“It’s not at that viewership level, [but] there is worldwide coverage of games. Look at everyone wearing jerseys on the street, Lionel Messi playing in Miami. It is part of the mainstream.”

‘Soccer still isn’t king in the US’

Not that the picture is not flawed. Wynalda, who went on to score 34 goals in 106 games for the US national team, sees the current system as a recipe for mediocrity, registering millions of youngsters but limiting their ambition as few US players take up prominent roles on MLS teams.

Most are offered the league’s minimum annual salary ($80,622) and only two US players were listed last year among the top 40 highest-paid, according to the MLS Players Association – Austin FC forward Brandon Vazquez (24th at $3.55m) and Nashville SC defender Walker Zimmerman (27th at $3.45m).

“Look at the growth of [MLS] and you can say soccer looks professional, looks like a big deal, looks major league. And a lot of people look at the sport with a different lens now because it’s a legitimate sport,” Wynalda, now a coach and commentator, told Al Jazeera.

“[But] facilities do not create ability. We need more focus on a competitive environment to develop players. We tell them winning doesn’t matter and then wonder why they can’t win. We’ve lost that competitive mentality.”

He favours introducing promotion/relegation as a solution.

“If you’re going to a team that is never going to be relegated, because it’s got enough money, you never learn how to fight relegation, how to beat 11 angry men with their livelihood on the line,” Wynalda said.

And while the MLS franchise model has created riches, with teams valued as high as Los Angeles FC at $1.25bn (thanks to owning the 22,000-seat BMO Stadium) by Forbes Magazine, the quality of play does not always correspond.

MLS teams have tended to struggle in CONCACAF competitions, although in 2022 the Seattle Sounders ended a 22-year drought for an MLS side to win the federation’s elite competition, which was previously won by DC United in 1998 and LA Galaxy in 2000.

“There are things we agree with and disagree with, on and off the field, but [MLS] is successful,” Fox Sports commentator Alexi Lalas, a central defender for the US in 1994, told Al Jazeera. “I don’t think you can argue against that.”

Thanks to the 1994 WC and MLS, football in the US became “a very different world, to finally be even recognised for what you did, let alone respected”, Lalas said. “You know, soccer still isn’t king in the US, but, let’s be honest, it’s part of the palate and certainly part of the landscape when it comes to this generation.”

Lalas predicts the US will harness the “magic” of being hosts to reach the quarterfinals, while Gulati expects the sport to continue to grow in the US after the World Cup.

“That is what the legacy of the tournament is about and why we bid,” Gulati said.

I am a journalist; storytelling is my craft.

Words are the tools I turn to, again and again, to make sense of events and shape them into narratives that do them justice. And yet, when it comes to the genocide in Gaza, my birthplace, language feels wholly inadequate.

There is a limit to what words can say. At a certain point, the instinct to describe, to explain and to make sense of what has unfolded begins to break down under the sheer scale of devastation and pain.

One scene from the start of the war has lingered in my mind: A bulldozer burying 111 unidentified bodies, wrapped in bright blue bags, in a mass grave. It appeared briefly in the endless scroll of social media before it disappeared again, replaced by yet another shocking scene. And another.

A hundred and eleven souls about whom we knew nothing; not their names, not their dreams or what their final moments were. A New York Times headline read: More Than 100 Bodies Are Delivered to a Mass Grave in Southern Gaza. Omission of the perpetrator aside, could that possibly capture the magnitude of such an event?

Every attempt to describe in words what Israel has inflicted on Gaza and its people has felt reductive, compressing something vast, ongoing and staggeringly lethal into language that cannot possibly hold it. What remains is a tension at the heart of the act of telling itself; knowing no account will ever be enough, how do you tell stories of such unspeakable horrors?

This tension lies at the heart of the Gaza Genocide Tapestry, which I am co-curating and which will be displayed at this year’s Venice Biennale. It is an art project that brings together Palestinian women in occupied Palestine and refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan to document Gaza’s destruction in real time. They tell these stories in the way they know best: Needle and thread.

Through 100 embroidered panels, each composed of 55,000 stitches, these women have created a testimonial that refuses to let the world forget what has been done and to whom.

Each panel tells a fragment of what has happened: A journalist weeping over his child’s dead body; young girls with empty pots being crushed at a soup kitchen; a child crying as her world crumbles around her.

Some of these images forced themselves into the public consciousness, if only for a moment; Khalid Nabhan hugging his dead granddaughter, the “soul of his soul”, for the last time before joining her a year later, or Dr Hussam Abu Safia walking towards a tank on the orders of Israeli soldiers, to then never be seen again.

But most images from Gaza are not granted that pause. They pass without names, context or farewell.

The tapestry defies this. To embroider is to decide something is worth the effort – hours, days and weeks of labour. This is to insist it is not lost to the sheer volume of images that pass briefly before our eyes.

A national archive in thread

The Gaza Genocide Tapestry is a new chapter of the award-winning Palestine History Tapestry Project, which I co-chair alongside Gaza-born designer Ibrahim Muhtadi. Following in the tradition of the famous Bayeux Tapestry and the Great Tapestry of Scotland, it is the largest body of Palestinian embroidery narrating the history of Palestine and its people.

The tapestry was started in 2011 in Oxford by Jan Chalmers, a British nurse who lived and worked in Gaza for two years in the 1960s. An avid embroiderer, Jan was previously involved with the Keiskamma History Tapestry, which chronicles the history of South Africa’s Xhosa people and now hangs in the South African parliament.

Recognising the centuries-old embroidery tradition of Palestinians, tatreez, Jan believed a Palestinian history tapestry was in order. I met Jan in 2013 in Oxford during my postgraduate studies. That is when I first joined this invaluable effort.

Tatreez, recognised by UNESCO in 2021, has long expressed Palestinian heritage and belonging. Its motifs encoded identity, place and social status. After the 1948 Nakba, it became a means of preserving Palestinian culture in the face of attempted erasure. Today it is something else again: Testimony.

Not long after Israel unleashed its devastating military assault on Gaza in 2023, the tapestry found new momentum by merging with the Palestine Museum US, an independent institution founded and led by Palestinian American entrepreneur Faisal Saleh. The tapestry is now housed at the museum in Woodbridge, Connecticut, and travels from there for exhibits worldwide.

It was within this expanded framework that the Gaza Genocide Tapestry took shape. Jan, Ibrahim, Faisal, and I came together to discuss how best to document the genocide. We initially created two panels to mark this dark moment in Palestinian history – Gaza on Fire and The Palestinian Phoenix. Faisal then proposed we do 100 panels focused solely on Gaza.

The challenge of producing in a single year what had previously taken a decade was formidable, but it was an urgency dictated by an unfolding genocide and made possible by the scale, visibility and global reach the museum provided.

United in pain

Women in Gaza were initially among the most active contributors to the Palestine History Tapestry. Their work was vibrant and meticulous, and offered them a means of support. But as bombardment intensified, most became unreachable, often displaced multiple times. Materials could not enter Gaza, and finished panels could not leave.

Gaza’s women became the subjects of the story, rather than its narrators.

But the tapestry, at its core, is a kind of “lam shamel” (Arabic for family reunion), as one embroiderer put it. Despite borders and forced displacement, the labour of Palestinian women everywhere converges into a single visual record of the Palestinian experience.

For Iman Shehabi, Basma Natour and the dozen women in Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp, embroidery is how they make a living. But the tapestry project, they said, “restored” a part of their “dignity”.

“It was a space where heritage pulsed, and where our needles stitched both our pains and our hopes,” they wrote to us in a letter upon completion of their panels.

And it is not only the embroiderers who contributed. One of the panels in the Gaza Genocide Tapestry, embroidered by Shahla Mahareeq in Ramallah, was based on an image of Hind Rajab illustrated by London-based artist Khadija Said.

A panel of blindfolded men, arbitrarily detained by Israeli soldiers in Gaza, was painted by Haifa-based lawyer and rights activist Janan Abdu, a Palestinian citizen of Israel. It was embroidered by Bothaina Youssef in Lebanon’s Ein el-Hilweh refugee camp.

Another artwork by Gaza-based artist Mohammed Alhaj, depicting displacement in Gaza, was also embroidered in Lebanon by Kifah Kurdieh, before a million people in southern Lebanon were themselves displaced.

The process of putting together the Gaza Genocide Tapestry has been painstaking. For more than a year, Faisal, Jan, Ibrahim and I held weekly meetings to research and select representative panels across various themes and coordinate the work. Each panel had to be translated by Ibrahim into a format that could be embroidered, then sent to a woman to stitch through field coordinators in each location.

There were constant questions, both ethical and practical. What do we choose to include, and what is left out? What does it mean to translate suffering into a stitched pattern?

At the Venice Biennale

Starting May 9, the Gaza Genocide Tapestry will be exhibited publicly at Palazzo Mora under the title:
“- – – – – – – – – – -” *
*Gaza – No Words – See The Exhibit

It will be available for viewing through November.

When we were informed in November last year that our biennale submission was selected, I felt a complicated kind of recognition. On one hand, it is an honour and a chance for this work, and the women behind it, to be seen on one of the world’s most prominent cultural stages.

On the other hand, it captured the paradox of a world increasingly willing to name what is happening in Gaza, to look it in the eye, call it a genocide, and yet remain unable or unwilling to stop it. What does it say about humanity when art becomes a primary site of real-time testimony because political systems have failed?

I have no simple answer. What I know is this: Palestinian women continue to tell these stories and demand accountability. Theirs is a collective response to my late mentor Refaat Alareer’s final instruction before he was killed: “If I must die, you must live to tell my story.”

Preah Vihear/Siem Reap provinces – When asked how she spends her day, 11-year-old Sokna rattled off a list of chores.

She first fetches water, then washes dishes and sweeps the leaves and dust from around the blue tarpaulin tent her family now calls home, in the grounds of a Buddhist pagoda in northwestern Cambodia.

Sokna and her sister have stopped attending school, their mother Puth Reen said, since moving to this camp for people displaced by the recent rounds of fighting between Thailand and Cambodia.

The two sisters are among more than 34,440 people who remain in displacement camps in Cambodia – 11,355 of whom are children – as of this month, according to the country’s Ministry of Interior.

“I tried to tell them to go to school, but they don’t go,” Puth Reen told Al Jazeera, explaining how precarious life had become since returning to live in Cambodia after fleeing neighbouring Thailand, where she had worked for many years, as the fighting started.

Like Puth Reen and her family, the future looks murky for the tens of thousands of Cambodians – including many schoolchildren – who are still in displacement camps, and their lives remain disrupted months after the last outbreak of fighting between Thailand and Cambodia.

Forced to flee their homes in areas where local troops are now stationed and on high alert, or in areas occupied by opposing Thai forces, Cambodia’s internally displaced say they are surviving off aid donations, while those more fortunate are transitioning from emergency tents into wooden stilted houses provided by the Cambodian government.

But with tension still evident between the leadership in Bangkok and Phnom Penh, the tenuous ceasefire along the Thai-Cambodia border means life cannot yet return to normality.

Some areas on the Cambodian border, such as the villages of Chouk Chey and Prey Chan in Banteay Meanchey province, have become rallying points for nationalists who post on social media about the Thai occupation of Cambodian territory. Their anger is directed at the large shipping containers and barbed wire that Thai forces have used to block access to villages once inhabited by Cambodians and occupied during fighting.

The Thai military-installed containers now form a sort of new frontier between the two countries.

The Cambodian military has also prevented people, such as local farmer Sun Reth, 67, from returning to their homes in front-line areas, which are still highly militarised zones, with troops ready at any moment for a new round of fighting.

“Now the Cambodian military base is just next to [my house],” Sun Reth said, adding that she was not allowed by authorities to sleep in her modest home or pick cashew nuts from her farm to sell for a little income.

Cambodian children more focused on ‘rumours’ of war

The long-held border dispute between Thailand and Cambodia erupted into two rounds of conflict last year, over five days in July and almost three weeks in December.

Dozens were reported killed on both sides, and hundreds of thousands of civilians fled their homes as both countries’ armed forces fired artillery, rockets, and, in the case of Thailand, conducted air strikes deep into Cambodian territory. Thailand has a modern air force, a military capability not possessed by its smaller neighbour.

Cambodian and Thai officials reached a ceasefire on December 27, but the situation remains tense five months on.

For families who fled the fighting, school continues for most children in the displacement camps, but parents say education is fragmented while their lives are still so unsettled.

Mothers at the Wat Bak Kam camp for the displaced in Preah Vihear province told Al Jazeera that primary school students can join classes at a local school, but high school students need to travel daily to the provincial capital, about 15km (9 miles) away.

Now the rising cost of petrol, due to the US-Israel war on Iran, has made it even harder for teenaged students, who have access to motorcycles, to make the journey to school.

Kinmai Phum, technical lead for WorldVision’s education programme, which is providing support to the camps, said school dropout rates and children skipping classes have increased substantially among students from the displaced border regions.

Kinmai Phum said the situation is a perfect storm of problems: Displaced families have been forced to move around for shelters, schools and temporary learning spaces lack facilities, and some students have psychological trauma due to the conflict.

“Local authorities [are] concerned that many children may not return to school at all if displacement and economic hardship persist,” Kinmai Phum said.

Yuon Phally, a mother of two, said she had noticed the impact of the war on her daughter and son, who are in their first and third years in primary school.

When they return from school, Yuon Phally said, they tell her about rumours they had heard about Cambodia and Thailand resuming fighting.

“Their feeling is not fully focused on school; they focus more on these rumours,” she said.

Her children’s world was more impacted by the conflict because their father is a soldier stationed in the Mom Bei area of the border.

During the fighting in December, Yuon Phally said she could not convince her children to go to school because they all waited to see if their father would call on a mobile phone from the front line.

“I couldn’t hold back my tears, and that added more pressure onto my kids,” she said.

“They would ask about their dad and how he is doing now. Then they told me to eat rice. They understood my feelings.”

She said her children’s focus on their studies only improved after their father returned from fighting to the camp where they are staying, to rest and recover from sickness and injuries sustained in battle.

‘Who doesn’t want to have peace?’

Soeum Sokhem, a deputy village chief, told Al Jazeera how his home is located in the militarised “danger zone” along the border, but he feels compelled to return every few days to check on his house, tend crops, sleep an occasional night, and check in with other neighbours doing the same.

“I can’t just stay here”, he said of camp life.

“I have to go back.”

When asked how he felt about the border war, Soeum Sokhem said he had experienced so much war in Cambodia that he did not know how to describe his “inner feeling like I really want to”.

He then listed off all the conflicts he had lived through in Cambodia since the 1960s: The spill over into Cambodia from the US war in neighbouring Vietnam; the US bombing campaign in Cambodia; the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and the civil war that followed after Vietnam’s intervention to topple the regime’s leader Pol Pot in 1979, and which lasted until the mid-1990s.

Then in the 2000s, sporadic border fights with Thailand began, he said.

Cambodia’s contemporary history has been anything but peaceful, a fact which might explain why the current Cambodian government so often speaks of peace. Government buildings and billboards proclaim the government’s unofficial motto: “Thanks for peace.”

“But who doesn’t want to have peace?” Soeum Sokhem said, after charting his life and the many conflicts he had lived through.

Now the 67-year-old said he once again hears gunfire occasionally when he returns to check on his home on the front line.

“Before, when I walked there, it was normal,” he said.

“But nowadays, I walk with fear when going back there.”

Deir el-Balah, Gaza Strip – With a weary expression, Saja arranges her few belongings inside the tent her fiance, Mohammed, has prepared for their wedding in just a few days.

There are two thin mattresses instead of a proper bed, a small cooking corner fashioned from wood and tarpaulin, and a makeshift bathroom that Mohammed also built from scraps of wood and plastic sheets.

The couple, Saja al-Masri, 22, and Mohammed Ahliwat, 27, got engaged a year ago while their families were displaced. They are still living in a camp in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, forced into displacement by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Saja agreed to a modest dowry, but even that will only be paid by Mohammed in instalments.

Yet even this “simple beginning” has become unbearably expensive for Mohammed and many young men in Gaza, who are expected to shoulder the majority of the costs in Palestinian culture when they get married.

“I bought the tent for 1,500 shekels [about $509], the wood cost me around 2,500 [about $850], the tarpaulins exceeded 2,000 [about $679], and a simple bathroom cost another 3,000 [about $1,019],” Mohammed tells Al Jazeera. Before the war, apartments had previously been available for rent for between $250 and $300 a month.

“It’s not enough that I’m starting my life in a tent under harsh conditions, even this is unbearably expensive,” adds Mohammed, who works odd jobs like selling bread and canned goods or repairing bicycles.

“Everything I earn barely covers food and water. I tried to save a little for the wedding, but prices are so high, as if I were preparing a luxurious event.”

Before the war, Mohammed lived in a large seven-storey house in Bureij in central Gaza, and owned a fully furnished 170-square-metre apartment.

“When I remember my apartment in our home that was destroyed in the war, I feel deep sorrow … My brothers and I each had fully prepared apartments before marriage.”

“We had stability, and we owned poultry farms that supplied several areas in Gaza,” he says bitterly. “Today, I’m getting married in a tent.”

As for the wedding venue, Mohammed rented a small space that had been used as a cafe, unable to afford a wedding hall.

“A friend helped me rent this small place … for 1,500 shekels [$509],” he says. “It’s not a small amount considering how simple the place is. Wedding halls cost more than 8,000 shekels [$2,717].”

Mohammed’s situation is not exceptional in Gaza. Many weddings are now held in tents, with only the most basic preparations, amid soaring prices and a collapse of basic living conditions brought on by the war and the accompanying economic crisis.

Unemployment in Gaza has reached 80 percent, according to the Gaza Ministry of Labour, and poverty rates have risen to 93 percent.

Incomplete preparations

Saja holds back her tears as she listens to her fiance.

What should have been the happiest moment of her life feels incomplete, and she has nothing to offer to ease Mohammed’s burden.

She understands the situation can’t be helped, and has tried to remain calm. But the difficulty in finding an affordable wedding dress broke her.

Dress shops have quoted her incredibly high prices to rent one – more than 2,000 shekels ($679) for one night.

“Everyone says crossings, goods, and coordination are expensive, so everything is overpriced,” Saja explains.

In an attempt to solve this, Mohammed brought a modest dress from an acquaintance “just to make the wedding happen”, placing her in what she describes as “a painful choice”.

“When I tried the dress yesterday, I felt so sad … I burst into tears. It was worn out, torn at the edges, and outdated,” Saja says, her voice breaking.

“I slept last night with tears on my cheeks … but there’s nothing we can do. This is what’s available.”

She points to the yearlong wait to have the wedding, after postponing it repeatedly because preparations were incomplete.

“The situation doesn’t improve … it only gets worse. Every time we say let’s wait, nothing changes. So we decided to get married next week,” says Saja, who studied graphic design for one year before the war forced her to stop.

Since then, she has been displaced with her family on a long journey that began in Beit Hanoon, in northern Gaza, passed through Gaza City, and ended in Deir el-Balah.

It’s not just the dress that worries her. Beauty salons charge nearly 700 shekels ($238) to prepare a bride.

“They tell us cosmetics are very expensive and unavailable, electricity and generators cost a lot, fuel is expensive … everything is expensive, and people like us are the ones who pay.”

“What did we do to deserve this?” she says.

No taste of joy

Saja’s mother, Samira al-Masri, 49, interrupts gently, trying to console her, saying the conditions are the same for everyone in Gaza, where the majority of Palestinians have been displaced from homes destroyed by Israel, and more than 72,000 have been killed since October 2023.

“I married off four of my daughters: Ilham, Doaa, Ameerah, and now Saja, during the war, without joy,” Samira says, her voice trembling.

“Each wedding felt like a tragedy to me.”

“They all started their married lives the same way … in tents, with almost nothing.”

Samira describes her deep sadness at being unable to celebrate her daughters properly or give them the wedding they dreamed of.

“As you can see, there aren’t enough clothes, no proper items for a bride … no suitable dress, not even a wardrobe or a bed,” she says, while helping Saja arrange her few belongings.

Mohammed adds that bedroom furniture now costs between 12,000 and 20,000 shekels ($4,076 and $6,793) – before the war, the sets had cost around 5,000 shekels.

“Unbelievable prices, and there’s barely any goods in the market. We settled for mattresses on the ground.”

No signs of improvement

In Gaza, weddings are no longer joyful occasions; they are painful experiences repeated over and over.

Despite her natural desire as a mother to celebrate her daughter and give her a dignified start, Samira finds herself powerless, unable even to ask more from the groom.

“The situation is not normal … I can’t pressure him or ask what he did or didn’t bring. Everyone knows the situation … we’re all living it.”

Her worries extend beyond her daughters to her 26-year-old son, who is approaching marriage.

“I put myself and my son in the groom’s place: What does he have? Nothing. The same situation. Every time I see the costs, I step back from arranging his marriage.”

Amid this reality, Samira expresses deep sorrow for young men and women trying to marry today.

“I pray God helps them … our days were much easier … even the simplest costs have become unaffordable.

As her marriage shifts from a moment of joy into a heavy confrontation with reality, Saja tries to hold herself together despite having no real options.

She admits it is not easy, but Mohammed’s presence next to her gives her strength.

“Sometimes, I feel it’s a miserable beginning … but when I see Mohammed with me, I overcome my sadness,” she says with a faint smile as she looks at her future husband.

There are few signs that circumstances will improve anytime soon for the couple. Still, they try to achieve a balance between harsh reality and fragile hope.

“I feel things will stay the same, as is written for us,” Saja says, “moving from one tent to another.”

New Delhi, India – Seema Das, a househelp in New Delhi, took on a two-day journey to reach her village in India’s West Bengal state, changing trains to make sure she got home in time to vote in provincial elections.

Das had previously always voted for the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) party under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, a centrist political force that has been in power in the eastern Indian state since 2011. But this time, she said, her mother-in-law had convinced her that “Didi” – a nickname for Banerjee, which translates to elder sister in Bangla  – “favours Muslims”.

Das, a Hindu, added: “Didi has lost the track and only appeases Muslims to stay in power.”

That’s an accusation that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party has long levelled against the TMC, which emphasises religious pluralism and the protection of minority rights. But for 15 years, Banerjee and her party have ruled the state of more than 90 million people, even as the BJP gained ground in a state where it had traditionally been a marginal player.

On Monday, that changed. Modi’s party won West Bengal. Early results from elections to the state’s legislature – which were held in April, but votes were counted on May 4 – show that Modi’s well-oiled election machinery is poised to deliver a thumping majority for the BJP in a state that its ideological founder was from, but that it has never won before. By 4:30pm India time, the BJP had won or was leading in 200 out of the state’s 294 seats, where its previous best performance was 77 seats in 2021. Banerjee’s TMC, meanwhile, was leading or had won just 87 seats.

The West Bengal elections were among five whose results were declared on Monday. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu, actor C Joseph Vijay threw up a surprise, defeating dominant parties to win with his upstart TVK party; in its neighbouring state of Kerala, the Congress party – the largest national opposition party – beat a coalition of left parties. A BJP-led alliance won the self-administered territory of Puducherry, once a French colony. And in the northeastern state of Assam, Modi’s party returned to power with a sweeping majority.

Yet it is the outcome in West Bengal that analysts say is by far the most consequential of the results that were declared on Monday, with the BJP walking the trails of religious polarisation and leveraging underlying anti-incumbency to win, experts told Al Jazeera.

Inside Banerjee’s bastion in East

Banerjee founded the TMC in 1998, breaking with the Congress party, disillusioned with its refusal to frontally take on a coalition of communist parties that had ruled West Bengal since 1977.

Rising from a humble background, the lawyer-turned-student-activist-turned-politician finally defeated the communists to win the state in 2011. Since Modi became prime minister of India in 2014, she emerged as a key challenger to the BJP – framing her politics, especially her defence of Bengal’s Muslims, as an act of opposition to Hindu majoritarianism.

She also launched a series of women-centric welfare schemes and pushed back against controversial land acquisition projects sought by big industry.

“There is visible support for Mamta and she remains popular, but there is anti-incumbency against the TMC machinery, and people were not happy with their interference in everyday life,” said Rahul Verma, an election observer who teaches politics at the Shiv Nadar University in Chennai.

He added that the BJP also ran a better-managed campaign this time, noting that he is not “shocked” by the results. “It was a difficult election for the BJP, but not impossible.”

To Verma, “there was a corridor available to them [in West Bengal], and one can now say everything aligned in a way to produce this outcome for them.”

Verma emphasised that “without serious anti-incumbency, West Bengal would not have gotten this kind of result.”

Nearly 68.2 million people voted in the election, or about 92.93 percent, a record high for the state.

Banerjee’s party failed to “offer anything new to the voters and to beat strong anti-incumbency sentiments against it”, said Praveen Rai, a political analyst at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, in New Delhi.

“The party system had turned hostile towards the people who did not subscribe to their ideology,” he argued, adding that “the TMC failed to read the growing resentment against economic deprivation and aspirational needs of the common people.”

Rai added that the loss in West Bengal also weakens Banerjee’s hopes of emerging as a national challenger for Modi’s job.

But the implications of the result extend beyond Banerjee, he said. The BJP’s win, and the TMC’s dramatic defeat, would “decrease the political capital of [all] the parties opposed to [Modi]”.

That’s a major shift from two years ago. In the 2024 national elections, Modi’s party had fallen short of a majority, leaving it reliant on allies’ support for survival. The election wins on Monday “offset the electoral setback” suffered in the national vote, Rai said.

“It substantially increases the national standing of Modi’s leadership and extends the hegemonic power of the party [BJP] to govern India,” Rai told Al Jazeera.

‘BJP ran on Hindu-Muslim polarisation’

Neelanjan Sircar, a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, who travelled across West Bengal before the polls, told Al Jazeera that his team identified “a big urban-rural gap among voters’ preferences”.

“We found urban men are very polarised,” he added. “In Bengal, the Muslim population is disproportionately rural, and given the levels of polarisation, the result ended up in a big difference for the BJP.”

Historically, election analysts have argued that due to the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian politics, the party did not stand a chance of winning West Bengal. More than a quarter of the state’s population is Muslim. “That has, of course, not turned out to be true, something we did pick during our research,” Sircar said.

The BJP has not shied from projecting itself as the party of Hindu voters.

Suvendu Adhikari, leader of the BJP in the state and potential chief minister candidate, said, “There has been a Hindu consolidation [of votes].”

He claimed, however, that many Muslims also did not vote for Banerjee’s TMC like earlier, and got swayed towards the BJP. It is impossible to verify the claim until the Election Commission of India (ECI) has released details of the vote count, expected in the next few days.

“I want to thank every Hindu Sanatani who cast their votes in favour of the BJP,” Adhikari said, referring to Banerjee’s TMC as a “pro-Muslim party”. Sanatan Dharma is an endonym for Hinduism.

For the BJP, the win in West Bengal is also deeply symbolic: Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, who founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh – the forerunner of the BJP – in 1951, was from the state.

Al Jazeera reached out to TMC spokespersons but has not received any response.

Pre-poll voter revision in spotlight

Before the polling in West Bengal, the ECI carried out a so-called revision of its electoral rolls through a Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which authorities have conducted in more than a dozen states so far.

The exercise in West Bengal controversially removed more than nine million people – nearly 12 percent of the state’s 76 million voters – from the voting list, snatching their right to cast a ballot in the elections.

Nearly six million of them were declared absentee or deceased, while the remaining three million were unable to vote because no special tribunals could hear their cases in the short timeframe available before the elections.

Banerjee’s TMC and other opposition parties in several states have called out the discrepancies in the revision of the voter list, accusing the ECI of siding with Modi’s BJP. Right activists and observers believe that the exercise disproportionately disenfranchised Muslims before the election.

Banerjee also appeared before India’s Supreme Court, challenging the “opaque, hasty, and unconstitutional” revision process. The top court did not restore the voting rights of millions affected but directed the ECI to publish a list of affected voters.

“Once the question of whether ‘I should be on the voter list’ became the dominant question for vulnerable populations, it’s not politics as usual,” said Sircar. “The level of polarisation that the voter revision caused is something that people outside the state do not really grasp.”

The Modi government also deployed 2,400 companies of paramilitary troops to West Bengal for the elections – a record for such provincial votes. The federal government claimed this was to assist election officials in carrying out the exercise without fear of political violence.

But the TMC and other opposition parties argued that the forces served to intimidate – or influence – voters.

“The heavy presence of security forces could have also created a favourable situation for the BJP,” argued Verma, of Shiv Nadar University. “Those who might be fence sitters and might have been afraid of TMC’s machinery on the ground were moved by this.

“There is no doubt that the trust level between opposition parties in India and the Election Commission of India is very low,” added Verma.

However, the analysts who spoke with Al Jazeera, including Sircar and Verma, agreed that the voter revision exercise alone could not have delivered such a decisive victory for the BJP – and that it reflects several other factors, including anti-incumbency and religious polarisation.

Still, analysts said, Banerjee will likely not go out without a fight.

In her first reaction to the vote counting, Banerjee addressed her party workers in a video statement, calling all workers and leaders not to leave vote-counting booths until the last ballots are counted.

“It’s a total forceful use of central forces to oppress the Trinamool Congress everywhere, breaking offices, and forcibly occupying them,” she said. “We are with you. Don’t be afraid. We will fight like the cubs of a tiger.”

Those aren’t empty warnings, Sircar said. “We are definitely in for drama.”

The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway once carrying roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, remains effectively closed after the United States and Iran imposed competing blockades.

Naval blockades are one of the oldest weapons in warfare, requiring no ground troops or invasion, just the ability to cut off what an enemy needs to survive. These blockades have reshaped economies, societies and alliances across generations, sometimes with instant shockwaves, sometimes with effects only seen later.

From Israel’s ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip to blockades during World War I, here are some notable naval blockades in modern history:

Israel’s siege of Gaza (2007-present)

Israel’s complete land, sea and air blockade of the Gaza Strip is one of the longest sieges in modern history.

Launched in 2007, Israel has limited the entry of goods and essential supplies, causing a prolonged humanitarian and economic crisis for the Strip’s 2.3 million people, who cannot travel freely.

Before Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023, fishermen were restricted to 6-15 nautical miles (11-28km) from shore, well below the 20-nautical-mile (37km) zone guaranteed by the Oslo Accords.

After 2023, with Israel’s policy of starving the population, fishermen have taken extreme measures to feed their families, leading to many being killed by Israeli fire.

Since 2008, several Freedom Flotilla vessels have attempted to break the Israeli blockade. Since 2010, all flotillas attempting to break the Gaza blockade have been intercepted or attacked by Israel in international waters.

On April 30, Israel raided 22 out of the 58 vessels in the most recent Global Sumud Flotilla campaign in international waters more than 1,000km (620 miles) from Gaza.

Blockade of Biafra (1967-70)

During the Nigerian Civil War, which began in July 1967, the Nigerian federal government imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the secessionist Republic of Biafra shortly after it declared independence.

The blockade led to widespread starvation, widely seen as a deliberate wartime strategy, transforming a territorial conflict into a global humanitarian crisis. Death tolls vary, but it is estimated that one to two million people died, the vast majority from hunger and disease rather than direct conflict.

The nearly three-year-long blockade ended with the Biafran surrender in January 1970.

Beira Patrol blockade (1966-75):

The Beira Patrol was a nine-year-long blockade by the British navy to prevent oil from reaching Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe, through the Mozambican port of Beira, enforced under United Nations sanctions following Rhodesia’s unilateral declaration of independence.

The blockade largely failed its strategic goal. Rhodesia continued receiving oil via South Africa and other Mozambican ports, which the UN resolution did not authorise the British navy to intercept.

Additionally, the cost to the United Kingdom was substantial. The operation tied up 76 naval ships over nine years, with two frigates required on station at all times.

The blockade ended in July 1975, when Mozambique’s newly gained independence from Portugal allowed it to credibly commit to blocking oil transit to Rhodesia, rendering the naval patrol redundant.

Cuban Missile Crisis ‘quarantine’ (1962)

In October 1962, the US ordered a naval “quarantine” of Cuba after US U-2 spy planes discovered Soviet nuclear missile sites under construction on the island.

The US deliberately called it a “quarantine” rather than a blockade, which would have been legally an act of war, aiming to prevent the Soviets from bringing in more military supplies and to pressure them to remove the missiles already there.

The quarantine drew a line 500 nautical miles (920km) from Cuba’s coast, with US warships authorised to stop, search, and turn back any vessel carrying offensive weapons if necessary.

The crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. The then-Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev called the blockade “outright piracy” and an act of aggression, and initially ordered ships to proceed. For several days, Soviet vessels steamed towards the quarantine line as the world watched.

The most dangerous phase of the standoff lasted 13 days. An agreement was reached in which the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba in exchange for a US public declaration not to invade Cuba, and a secret agreement to remove US Jupiter missiles from Turkiye.

The naval quarantine was formally ended on November 20, 1962, after all offensive missiles and bombers had been withdrawn.

Blockade of Wonsan (1951-53)

During the Korean War, UN naval forces led by the US imposed a blockade of the North Korean port of Wonsan in February 1951, lasting nearly two and a half years.

It aimed to deny the North Korean navy access to the city, which was strategically significant for its large harbour, airfield and petroleum refinery.

The blockade was preceded by a dangerous mine-clearance operation in October 1950. North Korean forces had been well supplied by the Soviet Union and China with sea mines, and during the clearance, the sweepers USS Pledge and USS Pirate were sunk, killing 12 men and wounding dozens.

The operation successfully constrained North Korean and Chinese forces on the east coast, forcing them to divert thousands of troops and artillery pieces away from the front line. UN forces also captured several harbour islands, which strengthened the blockade’s grip on the port.

The blockade ended after 861 days with the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement in July 1953. By that point, allied naval fire had almost levelled Wonsan.

US submarine blockade of Japan (1942-45)

The US imposed a submarine blockade against Japan during the Pacific War.

The blockade began taking shape in 1942, combining US naval submarine attacks on merchant shipping with minelaying operations to cripple Japan’s war capabilities, disrupt shipping and cut off vital supplies such as food and fuel.

As an island nation, Japan was especially vulnerable, almost entirely dependent on imports of oil, rubber and raw materials. Its economy and military could not function without open sea lanes.

Over the course of the war, US submarines sank some 1,300 Japanese merchant ships and roughly 200 warships. By 1945, oil imports had effectively ceased.

Food imports collapsed, causing significant shortages and malnutrition across Japan by 1945, though the extent of civilian starvation is disputed.

After the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, Japan announced its surrender on August 15, bringing the blockade and the Pacific War to an end.

Blockade of eastern Mediterranean (1915-18)

In August 1915, during World War I, the Allied forces imposed a blockade of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean to cut off military supplies and weaken the Ottoman Empire’s war effort.

The declared area ran from the intersection of the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Egyptian frontier in the south. The blockade was initiated by Britain and France, later assisted by Italy and other Allied powers.

The consequences were devastating. Military supplies, munitions, oil, food and medicine were all targeted. The food crisis was compounded by a locust plague in 1915 and a severe drought, contributing to severe famine across Lebanon and Greater Syria.

Reports suggest the famine led to 500,000 deaths by 1918, mostly civilians, with Mount Lebanon losing an estimated one-third of its population. Mass migration followed.

The blockade remained in place throughout the war and lifted only when Allied forces occupied Beirut and Mount Lebanon in October 1918.

Allied blockade of Germany (1914-19)

The British navy began blockading Germany almost immediately after the outbreak of the war in August 1914.

The naval blockade extended from the English Channel to Norway, cutting off Germany from the oceans.

Britain mined international waters to prevent ships from entering the ocean, creating danger even for neutral vessels.

Germany responded by declaring the seas around the British Isles a “military area”, prompting Britain and France to ban all goods to and from Germany.

The blockade’s most devastating consequence was famine. The winter of 1916-17, known as the Turnip Winter, marked one of the harshest years in wartime Germany.

The blockade had cut off food and fertiliser imports, a failed potato harvest left little to fall back on, and a breakdown in food distribution compounded the crisis. It is estimated that between 424,000 and 763,000 civilians died from diseases related to hunger and malnutrition.

The blockade was not yet fully lifted until July 1919, after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed.

Mukalla, Yemen – At the Mukalla Creative Hub, a man in a black T-shirt leans over a desk to help a colleague with his project, while other men remain fixed on their laptop screens. Nearby women sit in ergonomic office chairs, writing or scrolling on their phones. On the other side of the space in Yemen’s coastal city of Mukalla, a sleek cafe-style counter stands at the entrance, while colourful armchairs are neatly arranged and occupied by a few people working among rows of computers.

What draws entrepreneurs, remote freelancers, and students here is not just the stylish setting or uninterrupted electricity, but something far more essential: fast, reliable Starlink satellite internet.

“Four Starlink devices power the space, delivering speeds of 100 to 150 Mbps and allowing users to stay constantly connected,” Hamzah Bakhdar, a digital freelancer who also works at the hub, told Al Jazeera.

In a country where war has devastated telecommunications, eroded salaries and cut off remote areas, Starlink is helping create a small but growing digital workforce of designers, developers, teachers, and freelancers who can now work for clients abroad and earn far more than Yemen’s crumbling local economy would otherwise allow.

Internet access in Yemen has also been weaponised, with buried land cables sometimes cut, leaving parts of the country abruptly disconnected. The Houthi rebels, who are based in the Yemeni capital Sanaa and have fought the internationally recognised government since 2014, control the country’s major internet providers. That allows them to block websites they view as linked to their opponents inside and outside the country, including key platforms used by tech developers and remote workers.

The arrival of Starlink satellite internet has provided an alternative, allowing people to bypass the Houthis’ tight grip on telecommunications and stay online even in remote areas.

Mohammed Helmi, a video editor and motion graphics designer, was juggling projects for three clients in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the United States. Thanks to the fast internet at the cafe, he no longer worries about losing connection or missing deadlines, problems he said repeatedly disrupted his work in the past.

“In the past, when I downloaded files to my laptop, it would stop as soon as my data ran out,” Helmi, a young man with a thin moustache, told Al Jazeera at the cafe. “I had to buy another gigabyte and start the download all over again. Because of this, I often had to turn down projects.”

Control over the internet

Starlink is operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, and delivers internet by linking a ground dish to low-orbit satellites owned and operated by the company.

While other satellite internet companies exist, and others are quickly entering the space, Starlink is the only low-orbit satellite internet service legally available in Yemen after the internationally recognised government signed an agreement with the company in September 2024.

But it’s not for everyone.

The kits cost about $500, a price that remains unaffordable for the vast majority of Yemenis, living in one of the poorest countries in the world, where more than 80 percent of people live below the poverty line.

Owning a dish is therefore still a distant dream for many Yemenis desperate to get online.

University students, like Mariam, a student at Hadramout University, says that even buying internet vouchers from local providers who resell Starlink access is beyond her reach – let alone purchasing a device herself.

“People are using vouchers because they cannot afford Starlink devices, whose prices are very high,” Mariam, who preferred to be identified only by her first name, told Al Jazeera.

The Houthis have also reacted aggressively to the arrival of Starlink, launching a campaign warning people against using the service and threatening legal action against anyone found in possession of the device.

They have accused the company of serving as a “US espionage agent” and said it posed “a major threat to national security”. Experts have worried that data gathered over Starlink’s internet service could be used for “intelligence gathering and economic exploitation“.

There are also concerns internationally over the concentration of satellite internet services and infrastructure in the hands of Starlink, particularly in light of Musk’s ownership, with the South African-born billionaire increasingly associating himself with far-right causes in the United States and Europe.

Connecting Yemen’s remote areas

But despite Houthi threats and the high cost of the devices by Yemeni standards, Starlink has spread across the country, reaching areas that had long been isolated.

Omer Banabelah, a mobile app developer, said that before Starlink arrived, a visit to his home village in Hadramout’s countryside meant disappearing from the digital world altogether. He could not make a phone call, let alone connect to the internet, leaving him anxious that clients would move on when their messages went unanswered. With Starlink now available in rural parts of the province, Banabelah said he no longer fears losing work every time he travels.

“I can reply to their messages anytime, from anywhere,” he told Al Jazeera. “Work that takes 10 minutes with Starlink could take an entire day without it.”

Similarly, Yemeni teachers, struggling with poor and delayed salaries that have stagnated for years, have also benefited from the spread of the internet service, which has allowed them to offer uninterrupted online classes and earn badly needed extra income.

Raja al-Dubae, a school director in Taiz, told Al Jazeera that her school began offering online classes based on the Yemeni curriculum to Yemeni students living abroad in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China in 2023. It started with just 50 students, with teachers connecting through local networks.

But when internet traffic surged in the densely populated city each afternoon, the connections would collapse, forcing teachers to abandon classes mid-session.

“Teachers were often disconnected from their students, and by the time the internet stabilised, the next class had already begun, leaving them frustrated and unable to finish their lessons,” she said.

Al-Dubae said she initially rejected her nephew’s proposal to buy Starlink because of the high upfront cost, but now regrets the delay. Since installing the service, the number of students has climbed to more than 200, revenues have grown, and teachers have begun earning better additional pay.

“With Starlink, the internet is very fast and reaches every corner of the school,” she said. “Teachers no longer disconnect from their students. I never imagined it would make such a difference. Videos load quickly, we no longer turn away new applicants, and our reputation for fast internet has spread.”

For Yemenis who have grown used to Starlink’s high-speed internet, and the better incomes and business opportunities it has helped create, the worst-case scenario is a return to the slow, unreliable service of local networks.

“Go back to the headache of local networks? Perish the thought. We hope the service will continue to improve,” al-Dubae said, scoffing at the idea of reverting to local internet providers.

Helmi reacted similarly. “If Starlink were cut off, I would be devastated and forced back into the local market, which cannot cover my expenses or living costs,” he said, shifting in his seat and smiling at the thought. “I would need to take on three or four jobs just to match what I earn from a single project from abroad.”

AS Maura Higgins’ career has soared since making the final of Love Island in 2019, her romantic life has gone the other way.

The Irish beauty has been linked with famous hunks including Pete Wicks, Curtis Pritchard, Giovanni Pernice and Joey Essex. 

But Maura, 35, reveals that some high-profile stars actually struggle to cope with her popularity and success.

She said: “My friends tell me that I need someone quieter than me.

“Some of my ex-partners didn’t like me overshadowing them — it was probably an ego thing.

“My friends keep saying that my next partner needs to let me shine and be who I am.”

The former hairdresser and grid girl showed she was not afraid to speak her mind on Love Island seven years ago. 

Fans loved her and TV companies could not wait to snap her up.

She was soon signed for Dancing On Ice, and by 2024 she was starring on I’m A Celebrity.

Now she has cracked America, too. 

She has just been announced as a competitor on Dancing With The Stars, the US version of Strictly, which follows on from her presenting Love Island USA and ­finishing runner-up on the American version of The Traitors in February. 

It has led to her walking some of the biggest red carpets Stateside, including at the Oscars. 

And her work there has seen her gain American friends, including ­fellow Traitors star and Melrose Place actress Lisa Rinna. 

Maura recently went to Lisa’s home for an event and was blown over by the relationship she has with husband of 29 years, Clash Of The Titans and L.A. Law star Harry Hamlin. 

Maura told Cosmopolitan: “Harry gave a speech, and I sat there thinking, ‘That’s exactly what I want’. He spoke about her with so much respect, and he adores her. 

“I genuinely thought, ‘That’s the type of relationship I want. I want a man to let me be me and not try to dim my light’.” 

It was during her stint on the fifth series of ITV2 reality series Love Island that she began her first high-profile romance, with Curtis Pritchard. 

After leaving the villa, they dated for eight months but Maura says: “I feel like starting on Love Island is why everyone is so invested in my love life and wants to know whether I’m single or dating.” 

It is probably also because there have been so many relationships with fellow celebrities.

Next came another ex-Love Islander, Chris Taylor, in 2020, followed by Strictly pro Giovanni Pernice in 2021. 

At the time, friends said he had “never felt like this about anyone before”. But four months later it ended, leaving Maura reportedly “blindsided”.

In October 2022 she was photographed kissing Towie star Joey Essex at an awards bash. 

A ten-month relationship with American stuntman Bobby Holland Hanton followed. 

Next came Towie lothario Pete Wicks. The pair split in February last year after a series of rows. 

And on Valentine’s Day she was overheard telling a friend who asked where he was: “I don’t know, probably cheating”. 

But the following month, she was caught in a cheating drama of her own — kissing married I’m A Celeb campmate Danny Jones, the McFly guitarist, at a Brit Awards after-party. He later apologised to his wife.

Maura then started to spend more time in America.

Now, the announcement that she will star in the new series of the US dance show cements her place as ­America’s Irish sweetheart.

But many people are now ­commenting on her accent, with American fans on social media ­joking about her saying, “tink”, instead of “think”. 

Maura told Cosmo mag: “Everyone’s spelling it T-I-N-K! Even I’m doing it now.

“My Irish fans — they’re all DM-ing and making videos. I’ve seen a few Irish people get defensive and say, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this’.

“But look, if I’m OK with ­people making fun, then I tink it’s fine.” 

After she landed the job on Dancing With The Stars she told fans: “I tink I’m very excited.” And she told American TV show ABC News how she “manifested” her appearance on the dance show.

She said: “I was asked to do ­Dancing With The Stars Ireland when I first came off Love Island. But around that time there was a lot going on. 

“And then when Strictly came about I was very tempted because I always wanted to do a dance show. 

“I dunno, like my sights were always set on Dancing With The Stars America and I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardise that position. 

“It’s something I’ve been manifesting. I’ve had it on my vision board for the past couple of years. 

“And now it’s actually happening. I cannot believe it.”

Maura revealed that although she rarely cries, she was overcome with emotion when she landed the gig. 

She said: “I don’t get like that about anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had a moment like that, but because I really wanted it . . . 

“If I could get to the finale I’d be over the moon. Obviously I’d love to win. I’ve never won a show in my life.” 

It does mean, though, that she will be spending more time in America — and less in the £1.25million home she bought last year in a gated community in Essex. 

Maura was so excited when she got the keys that she set up her own Casa A’Maura Instagram — a nod to the Casa Amor villa on Love Island.

But since then she has barely been at the house and only posted twice — one picture of her bean bags in an empty lounge and a second of her cooking pasta, with Sex And The City playing on a TV in the background. 

She previously revealed she has not had time to furnish it as she has not been home due to her hectic schedule.

As well as her TV career, Maura has also landed lucrative tie-ins with brands including Primark, L’Oreal Paris, Mac, Ann Summers, Victoria’s Secret and Uber.

Her face may be everywhere, but it has also come under scrutiny on social media, with some asking if she has had tweakments.

Others have commented about her weight loss since her days on Love Island.

Maura told Allure mag: “I have never in my life had cheek filler. If they’re talking about Botox, however, yes, I do get Botox.

“But the only filler I’ve ever had was lip filler, and I’ve not had it in years.

“I’ve had my teeth done. I had Invisalign when I came out of Love Island, and then I had bonding over my teeth, which obviously is going to change my face a lot.”

But one thing she is never without is a spray tan — something that will hold her in good stead as she ­competes for the glitterball as ­Ireland’s current hottest export. 

She said: “When I’m tanned I feel good, and I’m ready to take on the world”. 

Seoul – Shekinah Yawra had no other option but to spend the night at a South Korean jjimjilbang, a 24-hour bathhouse, after every hotel near central Seoul sold out in late March.

But sleep was secondary for the 32-year-old Filipino who had made her way to Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square at 7am to secure a spot in a crowd that city officials estimated would grow to hundreds of thousands.

All this was for a glimpse at the seven-member K-pop supergroup BTS, who returned to the stage on March 21 after almost four years away from the limelight for their staggered, mandatory military service.

Though she failed to secure one of 22,000 free tickets for BTS’s first return concert in the square, Yawra was still ecstatic to stand on the sidelines and watch the concert live on a big screen set up for the occasion.

“We all came just for this,” she told Al Jazeera, recounting how friends had flown in from the Philippines for a single night to catch the concert.

Worldwide, more than 18.4 million viewers tuned in for the Netflix livestream of the concert.

With an estimated 30 million fans worldwide – who refer to themselves as the BTS ARMY – the K-pop group is the most visible symbol of “Hallyu”, or the “Korean Wave”, and the global surge of interest in South Korean popular culture and the financial revenues being generated as a result.

In late March, BTS’s 10th studio album, Arirang, topped the charts in the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom, the world’s three largest music markets. The group’s upcoming world tour is expected to generate more than $1.4bn in revenue across more than 80 shows in 23 countries.

Domestically, inbound tourist numbers for the first 18 days of March rose 32.7 percent from the previous month, according to Ministry of Justice data, as the return concert approached and hotel prices surged across central Seoul amid the demand for rooms.

In the week leading up to the concert, sales of BTS merchandise – from BTS glow sticks to blankets – surged 430 percent at the Shinsegae Duty Free retail outlet in central Seoul, the company said.

Over the concert weekend, revenues also rose 30 percent at the city’s Lotte Department Store and 48 percent at Shinsegae overall, compared with the same March weekend a year earlier, in 2025.

As far back as 2022, the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute (KCTI) – a government-sponsored think tank and research organisation – estimated that a single BTS concert in Seoul could generate up to 1.2 trillion won ($798m) in overall economic impact.

KCTI researcher Yang Ji-hoon told Al Jazeera that a sample study of the crowd at the BTS comeback event at Gwanghwamun Square highlighted the uniqueness of fandom-driven tourism. More than half of those at the concert were foreign visitors and many required long-haul travel to attend.

“In Europe and the United States, travel tends to be concentrated within its own regions,” Yang said.

“So, for people to overcome such travel barriers and come to South Korea, it usually requires more than just ordinary motivation or typical spending – it’s not something that happens easily,” he said.

K-pop’s transition to the global mainstream

The scale of BTS’s return to the entertainment world reflects a broader state-backed strategy.

When music promoter Hybe requested Seoul city support for the Gwanghwamun square comeback concert, authorities approved it on public-interest grounds, treating the event as a showcase of national cultural influence.

Almost befitting an official event, more than 10,000 state personnel were deployed for security, logistics and crowd control.

According to data retrieved by South Korean publication Sisain, through a public information disclosure request to the Seoul government, close to 130 million won ($87,400) of city funds were spent as part of logistics for the comeback concert.

South Korean government support for BTS has a precedent.

As members of the boyband approached South Korea’s mandatory military service age, policymakers debated special exemptions for members of BTS, which was estimated to have generated $4.65bn annually to the country’s economy.

After BTS’s forthcoming concerts in Mexico City sold out in just 37 minutes, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum urged South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung to “bring the acclaimed K-pop artists more often”, noting nearly one million fans in Mexico had attempted to secure 150,000 tickets.

South Korea’s cultural influence is also extending beyond music.

South Korea’s cosmetics exports surpassed $11bn last year, according to global accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), overtaking France in cosmetics shipments to the US, while South Korean food and agricultural exports reached a record $13.6bn, according to data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

KCTI researcher Yang described the growing interest as a phase of “transition to the global mainstream”, where South Korean products are internationally recognised and content output is measured against worldwide benchmarks such as the Billboard charts and the Academy Awards.

He also warned that structural reform is now essential to keep pace with the wave of interest in South Korea.

“As the industries expand in scale, they must also evolve in its underlying systems, infrastructure, and workforce,” he said.

“Rather than focusing solely on direct financial support, future governmental policies should move toward strengthening foundational conditions – such as improving labour environments, addressing unfair practices, building relevant infrastructure, and establishing more robust statistical and data systems,” he said.

Politicians appear to be paying attention.

During his election campaign last year, President Lee framed the next phase of cultural expansion as “Hallyu (Korean Wave) 4.0”, with promises to grow the sector into a 300 trillion won ($203bn) industry with 50 trillion won ($34bn) in exports.

In line with this vision, the government set the budget to bolster “K-content”, support the “pure” arts sector and strengthen the overall culture-related fields at a record 9.6 trillion won ($6.5bn) — reflecting the president’s view of the cultural sector as a strategic national industry rather than merely a consumer market.

South Korea’s strategy appears to be paying off.

South Korea now ranks 11th globally in “soft power”, according to Brand Finance’s Global Soft Power Index, placing the country as both “influential in arts and entertainment” and “products and brands the world loves”, just behind the US, France, the United Kingdom and Japan.

The darker side of K-pop: Pressure to become a perfect idol

Amid its global success, the darker side of the K-culture industry has received more scrutiny.

Mega-promoter Hybe has been embroiled in a prolonged dispute with K-pop’s New Jeans, a band considered to be a potential heir to BTS and their all-female colleagues Blackpink. The highly public legal dispute that started in 2024 highlights industry tensions over creative control and artist autonomy.

Since the early 2000s, K-pop has also grappled with the legacy of “slave contracts”, or highly restrictive agreements limiting artists’ freedom. Although reforms by the Fair Trade Commission have improved protections for performers, contractual obligations in the K-pop industry are exacting on new performers and their strict work routines have long been documented.

From their trainee years, aspiring idols endure gruelling schedules that involve long workdays and little sleep.

Many top stars often face contractual restrictions on socialising, using their phones or dating. They are also typically limited in what they can say publicly, relying on agency-managed messaging to communicate with fans and the media.

While the rise of social media and other online platforms has opened new avenues for more direct expression and interaction in recent years, concerns over burnout and depression have continued to shadow the industry, with several high-profile stars taking their own lives.

Beauty standards associated with the K-culture genre have also become another flashpoint for controversy.

A 2024 report by South Korean economy news site Uppity found 98 percent of 1,283 respondents born between 1980 and 2000 viewed physical appearance as among the most desirable “social capital” an individual can possess.

Nearly 40 percent of respondents in the survey had undergone cosmetic procedures, while more than 90 percent held neutral or positive attitudes regarding undergoing medical procedures to enhance beauty.

According to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, South Korea has the world’s highest rate of procedures, with 8.9 per 1,000 people compared with 5.91 per 1,000 people in the US and just 2.13 per 1,000 in neighbouring Japan.

Yoo Seung-chul, a professor of media studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said that K-culture has reinforced the normalising of beauty as a significant metric of personal and social value.

“K-culture has reinforced systems and structures around self-expression,” Yoo told Al Jazeera.

“With the rise of webtoons that incorporate themes like plastic surgery, there has been a noticeable reduction in the stigma towards going under the knife among younger audiences in their teens and early twenties,” Yoo said, explaining that popular plastic surgery platforms such as Unni have further normalised the trend by connecting people to clinics and reviews of these clinics and their surgeons.

At the same time, globalisation has reshaped the K-culture industry itself. Many new K-pop acts now include international members to broaden appeal.

Hybe has expanded this strategy through its US subsidiary, Hybe America, producing globally oriented groups like Katseye, which only has one South Korean member in its six-member girl group.

The shift has prompted debate.

Even BTS’s latest album Arirang – a nod to South Korea’s most iconic folk song – has divided fans over its use of English lyrics and foreign producers.

“K-content is being designed with global audiences in mind from the outset. In film, there has been a noticeable rise in genres like horror and science fiction, which are easier to export internationally,” Yoo said.

“This global orientation is also reflected in K-pop agencies recruiting foreign members for idol groups,” he said.

But international audiences do not always prefer highly globalised versions of Korean content, Yoo said, adding, in fact, that many are drawn to K-pop’s “sense of locality”.

As audiences increasingly seek authenticity, Yoo argues the industry faces a defining challenge.

“Industries and companies need to figure out how to preserve a sense of local identity while effectively marketing to global audiences,” Yoo added.

“Striking that balance will be crucial in shaping the next phase of Korea’s cultural exports.”

HARRY STYLES’ love life is heading in just One Direction after The Sun told this week how he and Zoe Kravitz have confirmed he popped the question – and she said YES.

While he is engaged for the first time, she hopes it will be third time lucky for her — after wedding plans with two previous fiancés crashed and burned.

But some cheeky pals are joking US actress Zoe could turn out to be the proverbial runaway bride.

A source tells us: “There is a bit of an in-joke in Hollywood about how Zoe has been trading ‘internet boyfriends’ — a term used by Gen Z for celebrities of the moment — and how she’s becoming like Julia Roberts’ character in the hit Nineties film, who leaves all her fiancés.

“While Harry and Zoe have an impressive roster of very attractive and famous exes, neither has the best track record with long-term romances. Of course, people are asking if this will last and questioning if they will even marry.”

One Direction star turned solo ­hitmaker Harry, 32, is not new to wooing American beauties — he dated Taylor Swift between 2012 and 2013, then actress Olivia Wilde from 2021 until 2022.

‘Deeply in love’

Batman actress Zoe, 37, daughter of rocker Lenny Kravitz, was wed to US actor Karl Glusman from 2019 to 2021. She then dated Hollywood A-lister Channing Tatum, who proposed in 2023 only for the pair to split the following year.

But what people at first assumed was no more than a summer romance for Harry and Zoe, after they began dating last August, now seems far more serious.

They shared news of their engagement just days after we revealed shots of Zoe with a huge diamond ring on her wedding finger, while out in London with Harry.

She looked chic in a beige trench coat and baseball cap emblazoned with the word Kiss — merchandise from Harry’s new collection for his latest No1 album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.

Earlier last month, the pair had been pictured strolling hand-in-hand near to Harry’s home in Hampstead, North West London, as she stepped out in her trusty trench coat and he kept a low profile in navy slacks, coat and cap.

Harry is said to have popped the question with a ring worth up to £500,000 and it is thought Zoe could make her first official appearance with the bling, and her fiancé, at the star-studded Met Gala ball in New York on Monday. 

We previously told how Harry first sparked engagement rumours when he and Zoe flew to the Bahamas just after Christmas to stay in her dad’s home there.

A source said at the time: “If it wasn’t an engagement, then it was something that shows they are very much committed to each other.”

Speculation mounted when Zoe was spotted wearing a ring on her left hand from jewellery designer Jessica McCormack — but it turned out she was an ambassador for the brand. Then Zoe later revealed her bling from Harry.

It might seem like a whirlwind romance but pals report the lovebirds are already seriously thinking about the wedding day — and even starting a family.

Zoe certainly has history with finding The One, or hoping she has.

She was engaged to Channing Tatum the year before she met Harry and fans have not been able to resist pointing out how similar her ring from Harry is to the one given to her by Channing.

Before her romantic misfire with the actor, Zoe had been wed to Karl Glusman after they said “I do” at her dad’s home in Paris in June 2019 — but she filed for divorce just 18 months later.

Now, we are sure that what she has with Harry is very different and that Zoe is determined not only to make it down the aisle, but also make the relationship last.

A source close to Zoe says: “She is incredibly excited about Harry asking her to marry him.

“She had a strong feeling for weeks that something was coming and now that it’s happened she truly believes he is the love of her life — her soulmate.

“Over the past few weeks, she’s been the happiest she’s been in a long time. She feels deeply in love and grateful to be with someone she sees as the perfect partner — the best companion in every sense.

‘Wedding outfits’

“There’s a real sense of relief for her, too. In past relationships, especially engagements that didn’t work out, she ­carried doubts and fears.

“But Harry has reassured her. He’s made it clear he wants to build a life with her and make her his wife as soon as possible.

“After past heartbreaks, and relationships that didn’t meet her expectations, she now feels like everything has fallen into place

“She’s always believed in love, partnership and building a life with someone, but she never fully felt that connection until Harry.

“To her, their relationship feels like destiny — the beginning of the rest of their lives together.”

Indeed, Zoe has never been shy of commitment. After her first marriage ended, she told GQ mag in 2022: “You meet someone who’s amazing and wants to marry you, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I

“If there’s nothing wrong, then why wouldn’t you do it? You love them and that’s what you do.”

Harry, meanwhile, has always been quite open to the idea of ­marriage — and in 2020, when asked in conversation with US broadcaster Howard Stern if he could ever picture being “married and devoted to one person”, he reckoned he would welcome that.

Harry said: “It’s definitely what I would like to do. I’d like to think I would want that at some point.” In 2018, asked about starting a ­family, he said: “I can’t wait for a time when that’s a thing for me. I look forward to that in my life.”

Becoming a mother might not have been on Zoe’s agenda in the past, but an insider tell us: “She has even begun thinking about having children — something she wasn’t particularly excited about in the past.

“Now, Zoe feels ready for the next steps — marriage, building a peaceful home together and starting a family.”

Meanwhile, Harry has not attended the annual haute-couture Met Gala since 2019, but Zoe is part of the host committee this year, so for them to make a grand display of their love seems very possible.

We are told a wedding may take place in the South of France — or Italy, as it is special for Harry and Zoe after they spent time together in Rome last summer.

Our source says: “Zoe is already thinking about the wedding. She wants something unique and has started discussing ideas for outfits, themes and designs.

“She’s torn between a very intimate ceremony — possibly even eloping — and a larger celebration with all their loved ones, though a bigger wedding may ultimately win out. She’s particularly drawn to the idea of a summer wedding in Europe — possibly France.

“She talks about it all the time — beautiful locations like Paris or the French Riviera, lots of flowers, stunning outfits, and a ­celebration that lasts all day and night, surrounded by love.”

Zoe grew up in the limelight thanks to her rocker dad, now 61, and US actress mum Lisa Bonet, 58, who starred in US sitcom The Cosby Show. She was born in LA and, after her parents split when she was 11, moved to Miami to live with Lenny.

Harry’s start in life was very different — he was a ­regular kid growing up in the Cheshire village of Holmes ­Chapel before he tried out for The X Factor at 16 and his life changed overnight.

Our source close to Zoe adds: “Harry feels like a dream come true for her, and marrying him would be the perfect culmination of everything she’s wanted.

“She envisions walking down the aisle and sharing the most meaningful day of her life with him. She often says her heart belongs entirely to Harry.”

TV star Simon Cowell’s fiancée Lauren strongly believes social media MUST be made safe for our children. 

The US socialite, 48, is a determined campaigner for tougher curbs.  

Her passion for change is driven by her sons – Adam, 20, from a previous relationship and 12-year-old Eric with music mogul Simon – plus the anguish of parents who blame online content for their child’s death.  

This week, the Government finally agreed to bring in stronger, age-based restrictions for under-16s following pressure from grieving mums and dads. 

Here, Lauren – who does not allow Eric to use social media – explains why more needs to be done . . .  

WHEN I heard what had happened to 14-year-old Jools Sweeney, it broke my heart. 

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After he had been playing ­happily with his friends one afternoon, his mother Ellen Roome came home to find his lifeless body in his bedroom. 

Jools was one of several British children who died in 2022 having seemingly copied a deadly challenge shown on TikTok. 

I thought, “God forbid, this could have been my child”. 

My youngest son Eric, 12, isn’t much younger than Jools was, and my eldest Adam, 20, is close to the age Jools would be now. 

Since then, myself and Simon have met Ellen, who is a remarkable woman taking on the big tech giants. 

Ellen is one of the parents behind a campaign called Raise The Age, which wants the restriction on access to social media to be raised from 13 to 16. 

The policy was opposed by the UK Government, but they finally saw sense this week and agreed to introduce stronger controls on what young people can and cannot do online.  

There is no issue more important to parents right now. It’s what everyone cares about.

Making social media safe is the topic that dominates all my parent group chats.  

In our family we have already made up our minds. 

Me and Simon won’t allow our son Eric to access social media. 

We recently gave him a brick phone so he can communicate with his friends by text and WhatsApp. 

A lot of his friends use Snapchat, but I said no to that platform because I believe it is one of the least safe products. 

Eric is fine with that decision because we have had so many ­discussions about the dangers. 

But a lot of parents are not aware of the risks, particularly on seemingly innocuous sites such as Discord, Pinterest and CapCut. 

It is unreasonable to expect ­parents to monitor everything their children do online. 

Instead, it should be the government which keeps them safe. 

The evidence we hear is sick.

The tech companies knew their ­platforms were addictive and yet they kept going, inventing new ways to keep our children hooked.  

Some told our politicians that their products were safe, even though their own internal research showed they did not believe it.  

In my opinion, these firms put profits ahead of children’s safety, and that is absolutely unacceptable.  

We have seen groundbreaking court cases in the US which ruled that these platforms were intentionally designed to be addictive and were endangering children.  

Our children could not wait any longer because they were dying as a result of what they saw and experienced online. 

This movement isn’t about a total ban on the internet.

It is about a restriction on unsafe and harmful social media.  

We want an end to infinite scrolling where children are sent ­material they did not ask for, and an end to strangers being able to message them.  

Those firms that make their products safe will be available — those that don’t must restrict access by law or face massive fines. 

I met with Lord Nash, who has been calling in the House of Lords for tougher controls on social media. 

It was his pressure which forced the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson to commit to implementing social media restrictions for under-16s. I hear people saying that restrictions won’t work because children will find workarounds.  

However, we haven’t given up on age restrictions for alcohol just because some children still get their hands on booze.  

When seatbelt laws were first passed, many people ignored them. 

But eventually, the message got through that they save lives.

Now, it is natural to strap in safely. 

The Government U-turn doesn’t mean the fight is over.  

Far from it. 

We need to keep the pressure on them to act quickly. 

Our children cannot wait years, because they are dying every month as a result of what they see online. 

I made a vow to Ellen, who I consider to be a close friend, to not give up until social media is safe for our children. 

I have huge respect for the families that are campaigning for this change.

They know it won’t bring their children back. 

But they want to do everything in their power to stop anyone else experiencing these horrors. 

IN The Devil Wears Prada, ambitions and egos are trampled over by stiletto-heeled rivals desperate to claw their way to the top of the fashion world.

But behind the scenes of the original 2006 film, British star Emily Blunt was playing matchmaker to the cast.

The actress reveals she was partly responsible for connecting co-star Anne Hathaway with her now- husband Adam Shulman.

Speaking ahead of the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, which is in cinemas today, she also talks about her close ties with cast member Stanley Tucci, who went on to marry Emily’s sister Felicity.

Emily, who has two children with her actor husband John Krasinski, says: “Stanley is my brother-in- law now. I have a little nephew and niece from it.

“And Annie met her husband Adam through me and John. There are so many tendrils that run out from this experience 20 years ago. It’s amazing.”

It certainly is remarkable how much has changed for the cast since the first film.

Before the hit movie was released, Londoner Emily was a relative unknown.

Being cast as Emily Charlton, the put-upon senior assistant to Meryl Streep’s nightmarish fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly, was her big break.

‘So kind to me’

Emily recalls: “It really was my first big role. I mean, I had done some stuff in England that no one knew about. I felt very green but thrilled to be there.

“The first film — I have these lasting, very prominent memories of it. Such an informative time in my life. I really didn’t know anything.”

The actress hit it off straight away with Anne, who she affectionately refers to as Annie.

She continues: “Annie and Meryl and Stan. They were all so kind to me.”

The Devil Wears Prada was a worldwide success, making more than £250million at the box office — ten times its modest budget.

Anne, 43, who played naive aspiring journalist Andy Sachs, and Emily found their lives intertwined again two years later.

Emily met A Quiet Place actor John, 46, in a Los Angeles restaurant in 2008 and, later that year, he helped introduce Anne to his actor and jewellery designer friend Adam, 45.

This was a fortuitous event for Anne because that year her relationship with businessman Raffaello Follieri had ended after he was charged with fraud.

The Devil Wears Prada played an even bigger part in bringing Stanley and wife Felicity together.

We do love talking some s*** about family. It’s great. Bit of goss

Emily Blunt, on working with her brother-in-law Stanley Tucci

Oscar-nominated star Stanley, 65, first met Emily’s sister at the movie’s premiere. At that time, though, he was happily married to Kathryn Spath with whom he has three children.

Tragically, social worker Kathryn died from breast cancer in 2009, aged 47, leaving Stanley heartbroken.

A year later, he reconnected with literary agent Felicity at Emily and John’s star-studded wedding in Lake Como, Italy.

And the love links do not stop there.

In a strange twist, Anne and Adam held their California wedding on the same weekend in September 2012 as Stanley and Felicity celebrated their nuptials in London.

Meryl, 76, who had also remained good pals with Tucci, was one of his guests.

Working with her brother-in-law on the Devil Wears Prada sequel was fun for Emily.

She says: “We do love talking some s*** about family. It’s great. Bit of goss.”

Stanley, who plays Miranda’s right- hand man Nigel Kipling in the movies, has become a well-known foodie thanks to his BBC travel show Searching For Italy.

On their eating habits, Emily adds: “Stanley and I have never had a no-carbs rule. All we eat is beige. We eat only beige food. And John loves to eat.”

Emily’s daughters Hazel, 12, and Violet, nine, enjoyed playing with Stanley and Felicity’s children ­Matteo, 11, and eight-year-old ­Emilia when they stayed together in Italy to film scenes for The Devil Wears Prada 2.

Anne and Emily have also remained good friends since making the original, which meant the cast of the sequel were unusually close.

She says: “I do get nostalgic. I was very moved when we got back together and we did the table read 20 years later. Going into the second film, 20 years felt like a blink and also a lifetime. It’s a really wild thing.”

That continued during filming in New York last summer.

Going into the second film, 20 years felt like a blink and also a lifetime. It’s a really wild thing

Emily Blunt

Emily continues: “When we got back together, I loved working with Annie because she’s a great dance partner in scenes. You know, she’s very spontaneous. She’ll sort of go with whatever you want to do.”

Emily also lapped up the attention of three-time Oscar winner Meryl.

The actress wore a glamorous tulle and feathered Schiaparelli gown at the New York premiere, which Streep clearly appreciated.

Emily laughs: “Meryl said she almost grabbed my boob on the red carpet just to feel it . . . the furry feathers. I would have loved it — it’s Meryl Streep.”

While her Devil Wears Prada character is famously particular about what she wears, that isn’t the case for Emily in real life.

The actress is far more casual when she is at home in London and New York.

She comments: “I feel like I still dress like a teenage boy. I think most of my life is dressed for comfort, you know, with the kids and everything, and going to set.

“But what I love about a press tour or a red carpet is that it can be a spectacle.”

The cast’s cosy love-in couldn’t be more different to the plot of The Devil Wears Prada 2.

Catty in catwalk

In the sequel, Miranda is still the ruthless editor of Runway, but the magazine is in financial trouble.

Andy, who made it as a writer, suddenly loses her job and finds herself back at Runway.

Meanwhile, Emily’s namesake character — Miranda’s former mistreated assistant, whose witty quotes include “I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight” — is now in charge of global brand Dior, which gives her all the power she needs for revenge.

Emily has more money and power now, and access to the archives. So that was thrilling

Emily Blunt, on her character

Emily says: “It’s quite a switch-up in dynamics. She’s a major executive at Dior. And Miranda is ultimately rather beholden to her for the advertising space.

“Emily has more money and power now, and access to the archives. So that was thrilling.”

While Miranda has to tone down her harsh comments due to our woke work culture, Emily can still deliver a biting one-liner.

By keeping the catty in catwalk, it is Emily’s performance that has once again caught the eye of critics.

The Sun’s movie reviewer Dulcie Pearce commented yesterday that “it’s Blunt who steals every scene.”

That will come as no surprise to fans, who have followed the star’s glittering movie career over the past two decades. She has received Bafta nominations for The Devil Wears Prada, psychological thriller The Girl On The Train and ­biopic drama Oppenheimer in 2024.

The actress also enjoyed box office hits with Mary Poppins Returns in 2018 and, in the same year, post-apocalyptic horror film A Quiet Place, which was directed by her husband John.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is expected to earn even more than the first film, with fans desperate to see the gang back together.

That is something Emily fully appreciates.

She concludes: “It feels like ­people really want to unite for something joyful. I love it.”

• The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A) is in ­cinemas tomorrow.

“I WAS a bit of a Duracell bunny,” confesses Iron Maiden’s irrepressible Bruce Dickinson. 

“To some extent, I still am — much to the dismay of people around me! They’re like, ‘Don’t you EVER stop?’” 

Dickinson is reflecting on the manic energy he brought to the heavy metal titans after replacing original singer Paul Di’Anno. 

In 1981, he was a 22-year-old member of hard-rocking fellow travellers Samson when Maiden’s manager Rod Smallwood came calling.

Unlike many of his peers, including his predecessor, Dickinson didn’t have to rely on drugs and booze to fuel his high-octane performances. 

He continues: “I discovered that having these amazing, ecstatic, endorphin-filled moments — being in front of people and singing with a group in total sync — was way more uplifting than any drugs on offer.” 

savage end

Megan Thee Stallion QUITS Broadway show after split and on-stage breakdown

SAD GOODBYE

Rock band member QUITS group after 10 years as band mates confirm departure

One of the great spectacles in rock is a sweat-soaked Dickinson running and jumping around on stage with audiences in the palms of his outstretched hands. 

Match his physical presence to a rich operatic tenor and an iconic catchphrase, “Scream for me!”, and you have a powerful combination.  

The songs that stretch his vocal cords aren’t too shabby either — many filled with intriguing historical references.

Run To The Hills deals with European colonisation of Native American territory, The Trooper visits the Crimean War’s Charge Of The Light Brigade and Aces High is a pilot’s eye-view of the Battle Of Britain — not your average metalhead subject matter.  

What about the 14-minute Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem and written by Maiden founder and leader Steve Harris? 

“It’s just epic,” says Dickinson of the closing track on the band’s fifth album Powerslave, released in 1984.  

“It’s one of my favourites to perform.

“I love the storytelling aspect and we’ve got huge screens now to tell the whole story.” 

Let’s also not forget the enduring core band which today comprises bassist and chief lyricist Harris, three virtuoso guitarists in Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Jannick Gers, mighty drummer Nicko McBrain (now retired from touring after a stroke in 2023) — and, of course, Dickinson.

The singer remembers Maiden’s gruelling, breathless climb to metal’s summit in the Eighties, when he was “run ragged but young enough to handle it”. 

Now 67, he accepts that his unfettered antics have taken their toll on his body, but insists: “Damaging it and knackering it by doing things on stage is a relatively easy fix — drugs take away your soul.” 

I’m speaking to Dickinson to mark the arrival in cinemas next Thursday of Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition, a riveting film documenting their 50-year rollercoaster ride with insightful interviews, live footage and unguarded offstage moments. 

Through the prism of band members past and present, and superfans including Metallica’s Lars Ulrich, Public Enemy rapper Chuck D and actor Javier Bardem, it is 106 minutes of pedal to the metal. 

The movie is the first milestone in a momentous year for the band formed in Leyton, East London, by Harris in 1975. 

In late May, Maiden continue the Run For Your Lives world tour, including a monster outdoor event, Eddfest (named after their shape-shifting undead mascot Eddie), at Knebworth on July 10 and 11. 

Then, in November, they join Oasis, Phil Collins and Billy Idol, among others, in being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in the US. 

Dickinson says: “We’re about to do the biggest tour of our lives, playing to 2.5million people in six months. 

“People might say, ‘How the hell did that happen?’ to which I answer, ‘Have a look at the film — that is how’. 

“We’ve had lots of tidal waves and earthquakes in our career.”

Crucial to the upward trajectory has been the sense of community around Maiden and their fans, which Dickinson believes is only rivalled by “a very different kind of band, the Grateful Dead and their Deadheads”. 

He says: “We’ve never compromised and have grown on our own terms, creating our own universe. 

“You reach those millions one person at a time,” he adds. “Look them in the eyes — although that is a lot easier in a pub than in a 50,000-seat arena!” 

Though the upcoming tour will send Maiden through Europe, then on to North, Central and South America, Australia and Japan, Dickinson spares a thought for the places they can’t visit “because of the chaos in the world”. 

“There are huge pockets of fans in Iran,” he affirms.

“And in Israel, Ukraine and Russia — all these wonderful people who just want to love everybody else who loves Iron Maiden. It’s tragic.” 

This is cue for him to trawl through the mists of time to the early days again and it’s clear that, above all, it is Steve Harris’s band. 

Referred to as “the boss”, he formed Maiden just before punk upended the music scene. 

Dickinson says: “Steve felt very strongly about punk because many in the media decided it was the ‘acceptable face of heavy metal’ — and that enraged him. 

“Frankly, the first LP wasn’t that well produced so it actually sounded like a crap punk album.

“Steve has always said, ‘My God, I wish I could have remade it with Martin Birch [who produced their next eight records].” 

In the Burning Ambition film, we see the struggles of original singer, the late Paul Di’Anno, who embraced rock and roll excesses to the full, prompting Harris and Smallwood to search for a replacement. 

“Paul was very charismatic with a characterful voice,” says his successor. “He was a bit of a pirate . . . like Adam Ant or a member of band I loved, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates.  

“His look was different to the rest of the metal world — and that was cool.” 

With a rueful expression, Dickinson remembers being described as a “human air-raid siren” after his first gig with Maiden. 

He says: “They were obviously big fans of Paul who came to see me at the [now defunct] Rainbow and one of them sent a letter to a music magazine, Melody Maker maybe. 

“It said what a terrible disaster the show was, like ‘hearing my favourite songs being sung from inside a cement mixer by an air-raid siren’. 

“Even though someone was trying to be insulting, Rod Smallwood took the attitude, ‘When life throws lemons, make lemonade’. 

“He nicked the idea and turned the whole thing on its head, which actually made me laugh.” 

ON EDDIE: ‘EASTWOOD OF ZOMBIES’

MENACING mascot Eddie is an Iron Maiden icon.

Illustrated in numerous guises by Derek Riggs, the shape-shifting creature has appeared on every album cover and in every outlandish stage set. 

He inspired the name of the band’s outdoor shindig Eddfest at Knebworth in July and features in new animated sequences for the Burning Ambition movie. 

Bruce Dickinson calls Eddie the “Clint Eastwood of zombies” and says: “He has a Dirty Harry type of morality about him. 

“You think he’s evil but he’s ambivalent, so you don’t know exactly where you stand with him,” he explains. 

“If you’re basically a good person, you’re probably going to be OK – but he’ll blow you away if you’re not!” 

Dickinson believes Eddie has a future beyond Maiden. “One day, inevitably, we’ll stop playing live. 

“The great thing about Eddie is that he’s eternal. He can have a whole career on his own. We could even write albums for him.  

“In fact, there’s so much you could do with him, whether it’s movies, animation, or an Eddie avatar show. All these things are up for grabs.” 

To Dickinson, sharing the stage with Eddie is a rite of passage. 

“He’s an extension of our world but you just can’t pin him down.” 

A fascinating aspect of Maiden has been Dickinson’s relationship with Harris, not always plain sailing but one that created undeniable chemistry. 

And surely Harris accepts that the flamboyant singer helped propel his band to stadium-slaying proportions. 

“When I was in Samson, people were calling Steve ‘the Ayatollah’,” says Dickinson. “He had a reputation for being uncompromising and rigid. 

“But, as we’ve got older, he’s been much more amenable to ideas that might broaden the vision.” 

However, Dickinson had to set one thing straight from the start.  

“When I first did shows with Maiden, I was thinking, ‘Why am I standing on one side of the stage? I’m the singer’. 

“The answer was because Steve would go running down front and centre playing the bass. Suddenly I would have this big old lump of wood thrust in my ear. I nearly lost a couple of teeth because of it!” 

Dickinson insisted that, as lead singer, he was going to “stand at the front, in the middle — and I wasn’t going to back down”. 

Iron Maiden’s third album, The Number Of The Beast (1982), was Dickinson’s first and its songs including the title track, Run To The Hills and Hallowed Be Thy Name took the band to the next level. 

For the new recruit, making the album was the calm before the storm.  

He says: “It was like 1939 when Britain was at war but everybody was still out sunbathing and reading the papers because nothing bad had happened.  

“Then we hit the road and, wow, we had a No1 album, the single was going crazy and we were doing seven, eight, nine shows in a row. Even our day off was travelling.” 

Despite the overwhelming demands, Maiden enjoyed a rocket-fuelled rise to the crest of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM), a movement that included Def Leppard, Saxon and Motörhead. 

Dickinson says: “The albums we were producing in the Eighties were phenomenal. We created a style with The Number Of The Beast and it continued with Piece Of Mind and Powerslave. The trajectory was fantastic.” 

As the Burning Ambition movie attests, the band began building a devoted following in all corners of the globe. 

In August 1984, Iron Maiden ventured behind the Iron Curtain to play five shows in Poland, much to delight of fans starved of music from the West. 

In January the following year, the band went nuclear in South America by playing Rock In Rio to a 300,000-plus crowd.  

ON FLYING: ‘I HAD ROAD TO DAMASCUS MOMENT’

ANYONE who follows the life less ordinary of Bruce Dickinson will know there’s a lot more to him than just being the singer in Iron Maiden.

At school, he took up boxing but he “wasn’t very big” and people “would beat the crap out of me”.

So he took up fencing instead, inspired by a metalwork teacher who brought in a “full-on, two-handed sword like Excalibur”.

Not one to do things by halves, he became a champion – so good that he reached the UK top ten, trained with the Olympic squad and is still a member of fencing clubs in London, Paris and LA.

Dickinson harboured other dreams, too. “I was really into aviation and wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot,” he says.

This helps explain how he qualified as an airline pilot and ended up flying Iron Maiden on three world tours, firstly in a Boeing 757 dubbed Ed Force One and then, in 2016 for the Book Of Souls tour, a jumbo jet.

He says: “My love of flying came from my great uncle who was in No. 200 Squadron RAF in the Second World War. When I was five, he’d tell me all these stories.

“But I was rubbish at maths in school and you need to be a rocket scientist to be a pilot so I became a rock star instead.

“Then, in the Nineties, I took a trial flying lesson in Florida for 30 bucks, just to see. It was a road to Damascus moment.”

The next step for Dickinson was training with British Airways, flying a 757. Picking up the story, he says: “From 2000 to 2011, I was a pilot for UK company Astraeus, flying people around the world on holiday. I had to take unpaid leave to go on tour with Iron Maiden.

“You would probably have had no idea I was your captain because no one listens to captain’s announcements!”

During this time, Dickinson hatched the idea to extend his flying exploits to his other job as a member of Iron Maiden.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we put all the equipment, the band and the crew on one airplane?’ To my surprise, our manager Rod thought it was a great idea. Normally, I get told to p*** off!

“So we did three world tours. It was brilliant calling it Ed Force One – I think that was an invention by the fans.”

Dickinson remembers his initial horror when American secret servicemen boarded the plane in Chicago. “I went, ‘Oh s**t! What have we done wrong?’ Turned out Obama was coming in the next day on Air Force One and the men just wanted to have a look at Ed Force One.

“I’ve still got Air Force One-branded M&Ms, matches and a bottle opener somewhere.

“So, I’m thinking, ‘What’s going on in the President’s plane?’ They’re cracking open beer bottles, smoking themselves to death and taking all the red Smarties.”

As the Eighties progressed and the Nineties dawned, the pace rarely slackened and, as we witness in unvarnished detail in Burning Ambition, “the wheels eventually fell off”.  

Guitarist Smith quit in 1990 over “creative differences” and an exhausted Dickinson dropped a second bombshell by leaving in 1993 to pursue his solo career, much to the consternation of his bandmates, notably McBrain. 

“It was a sudden burst of artistic integrity of my own invention,” confesses Dickinson. 

“I knew Maiden were great, but they didn’t allow me to do anything a bit out there.  

“I was still in my thirties and the thought of leaving momentarily terrified me. But then I read Henry Miller’s quote, ‘All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience’. 

“It hit me like a ton of bricks. I thought to myself, ‘If you don’t jump, you’ll never find out’.” 

As for the reaction to his departure in the Maiden camp, Dickinson says: “The only person I told was the manager, Rod. I don’t know what got said between him and the guys but Nicko got upset about it. And fair enough.” 

He sees what became a five-year absence as part of “a real story of real people”.  

He adds: “We’re a bunch of bizarre brothers who got stuck together. In the end, we had to make it work.” 

So it was in 1999, after Wolfsbane singer Blaze Bayley had gamely attempted to hold the fort, that guitarist Smith and singer Dickinson returned to the fold — for good. 

“To use a football analogy, Blaze had been passed a ball which was a ticking timebomb,” says Dickinson, before recalling his bizarre meeting with Harris and Smallwood to discuss his return. 

They convened in secret at a yacht club in Brighton, entered by a special code — an occasion Dickinson likens to a scene from a John Le Carré novel. 

“Part of me was thinking, ‘This is ridiculous’. It felt like going through Checkpoint Charlie in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,” he says. 

“But I looked at Steve and realised he’d been through the ringer with all kinds of things. I decided that if he’s up for it, then we should get on with it. 

“I told him, ‘I am the one guy on the planet you can trust. When I say we’ll make a great new album together, we will’. And we did [Brave New World]. 

“Steve and I are very different individuals — but that’s our strength. 

“I’ve certainly grown to respect him. Has he grown to respect me? I don’t want to put words into his mouth.” 

Dickinson signs off with a heartfelt statement: “The music is the thread that holds us in Maiden together. Whatever we started, we started well — and when eventually we finish, we will finish well.” 

Beirut, Lebanon – On April 8, Ahmad Hamdi, 22, was sitting on his couch at home in Beirut’s Tallet el Khayat neighbourhood, hours after Israel had launched more than 100 attacks in under 10 minutes across Lebanon.

Then he heard the “indescribable sound” of a rocket. Ahmad jumped off the couch as the glass in his building shattered around him before more rockets hit.

Clouds of dust obscured the view from his apartment on the fourth floor. When they dispersed, he saw the building directly facing his had been reduced to a pile of rubble.

He looked back at the couch he had been sitting on. At some point between the second and fourth explosion, shards of shrapnel had hit the couch exactly where his chest had been when the first rocket struck.

“When you think of Tallet el Khayat, you feel it is safe and secure,” Ahmad told Al Jazeera. “No one would expect something like that would happen.”

Indiscriminate attacks

April 8 has become known in Lebanon as Black Wednesday. Israel’s attacks on that day killed at least 357 people across the country. Israel claimed it killed 250 Hezbollah operatives. The exact breakdown of civilians and combatants is still not known, but numerous sources looking into the day’s casualties told Al Jazeera that the attacks appeared to be indiscriminate at best and in some cases may have amounted to the direct targeting of civilians. United Nations experts have described Israel’s attacks on April 8 as “indiscriminate”.

“The method in which the attacks happened in the middle of the day with dozens of strikes all at one time without warning and when civilians were present shows recklessness in Israeli military conduct,” Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera.

On March 2, Israel intensified its war on Lebanon for the second time in under two years. Earlier that day, Hezbollah had responded to near-daily Israeli attacks on Lebanon for the first time since December 2024 in response to the United States and Israel’s assassination of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Israel also invaded southern Lebanon, where it has gone about systematically destroying towns and villages in what experts – and Israeli officials – said is an effort to create an uninhabitable “buffer zone” along its border.

“Part of [Israel’s] military strategy is to create a buffer zone and no man’s land,” Bassel Doueik, the Lebanon researcher for the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) conflict monitor, told Al Jazeera. “What Israel is doing in southern Lebanon is creating a multilayered buffer zone inside Lebanese territory and that is why they are demolishing houses in towns along the border.”

Israel has not stopped attacking Lebanon since October 2023 and has violated a November 2024 ceasefire more than 10,000 times, according to the UN. Most of its attacks have been in southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east.

Doubts about Israel’s claims

Israel conducted 100 air strikes and dropped more than 160 bombs across Lebanon on April 8, according to ACLED.

Israel claimed the attacks targeted Hezbollah headquarters, command-and-control sites, military formations and assets of its air force unit and elite Radwan Force.

Hezbollah discontinued the practice of providing the circumstances of its fighters’ deaths in September 2024. The Lebanese group does conduct some public funerals for fighters killed during the battles in southern Lebanon, but it is difficult to ascertain the exact number of those killed, making it hard to prove or disprove Israel’s claims.

But groups investigating the April 8 attacks said the available information casts doubt on the Israeli narrative. Analysts with ACLED said they are still confirming casualties but early indications showed that only a few victims were known Hezbollah members.

“One hundred one women and children were killed on April 8,” Ghida Frangieh, a Lebanese lawyer and researcher with Legal Agenda, a Beirut-based nonprofit research and advocacy organisation, told Al Jazeera. “For this number of 250 to be correct, it means every man killed must have been a Hezbollah combatant. This is not true as we were able to document several civilian men killed during these attacks.”

Lebanese media reported on a number of those killed by Israel on April 8, including employees of local restaurants, teachers, a poet, journalists, Lebanese soldiers and a member of a Druze-majority political party.

In some cases, Israeli attacks wiped out several members of the same family. Seven members of the Nasreddine family were reportedly killed on April 8 in Hermel in northeastern Lebanon. And three generations of the displaced Hawi family, including three children, were killed in the Jnah neighbourhood bordering Beirut.

Israel ’emboldened to continue’ violations of international law

Even if Hezbollah targets were present at all of the sites struck during the April 8 attacks, researchers said the attacks should still be considered indiscriminate. And while there still may be a discrepancy over the exact numbers of Hezbollah members vs civilians killed, international humanitarian law places the burden of proof on the attacking army.

“International humanitarian law is clear: Armed forces must distinguish at all times between civilians and military objectives,” Reina Wehbi, Amnesty International’s Lebanon campaigner, told Al Jazeera. “Even when there is a legitimate military target and in order to avoid indiscriminate, disproportionate or other unlawful attacks, parties must respect the principle of precaution and do everything feasible to verify that targets are military objectives, to assess the proportionality of attacks and to halt attacks if it becomes apparent they are wrongly directed or disproportionate.”

Over the past two and a half years, Israel has regularly violated the laws of war in Lebanon and in Gaza by indiscriminately attacking civilians, targeting paramedics and journalists, and using white phosphorus. Still, experts said there is little chance Israel will be held accountable.

“For the Israeli military, there is no deterrence to committing violations in Lebanon,” Kaiss of Human Rights Watch said. “After the crimes of humanity against Gaza, countries could have immediately suspended arms sales, the transit of arms through airports, placed targeted sanctions on officials, and the US and others could have suspended arms sales, but none of that happened.”

Kaiss said Lebanon could also give jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court (ICC), of which it is not currently a member, to investigate and prosecute Israel’s crimes in Lebanon. The ICC has already issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Attacks on Beirut have temporarily halted since US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire in Lebanon on April 16. But the war rages on in southern Lebanon with Israel continuing to kill civilians, including rescue workers. Israel and Lebanon have started to engage in direct negotiations despite Hezbollah’s objections in what the Lebanese state hopes will bring an end to Israel’s attacks and occupation of southern Lebanon.

But on the ground, there has been little deterrence or accountability for Israel’s crimes against civilians.

“This hasn’t happened in the last two years, so the Israeli military on the ground feels emboldened to continue,” Kaiss said.

Indian-administered Kashmir – Rashid Ahmad Mughal was barely six when armed rebels barged into their home in Chunt Waliwar village, in Ganderbal district of Indian-administered Kashmir, on a freezing January night in 2000.

At about midnight, nearly a dozen armed men broke the window by force and entered the Mughals’ home, where six people were asleep – 23-year-old Ishfaq, his 20-year-old sister Naseema, and younger brothers Ajaz, 8, and Rashid, 6, besides their two cousins.

The rebels had come looking for Ishfaq, who, the family admitted, worked for the Indian army, which controls the region.

“He tried to flee,” Naseema recalls, “but they shot him.”

As the family raised an alarm, the rebels took Ishfaq’s body and fled into the dead of the night.

Since then, the Mughal siblings have been hoping for the return of his remains so that they can perform his last rites in accordance with Islamic traditions.

As the siblings waited for more than 26 years for closure on losing Ishfaq, another tragedy hit them last month.

On March 31, Rashid, now 32, was shot dead by the Indian army for being a suspected rebel.

The army said it launched an operation along with the police in the Arahama area of Ganderbal after receiving “specific intelligence input” on the presence of “terrorists”, as Indian authorities and the media describe the rebels.

The army said Rashid was killed during an exchange of fire with the rebels in a forest. But the residents reject the claim, calling it another instance of a “fake encounter” – staged extrajudicial killing of suspects by the Indian forces.

In a further blow to the Mughal family, Rashid’s body was buried 80km (50 miles) away in a graveyard marked for alleged rebels in the frontier town of Kupwara – a practice followed by the army in recent years to prevent the eruption of street protests.

Only Ajaz was allowed by the authorities to attend the funeral.

The Kashmir conflict

The killing of the two brothers over 26 years – one killed by suspected rebels and the other by the army – in many ways encapsulates the tragedy unfolding in Kashmir for decades.

Kashmir is a disputed Himalayan territory divided between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, but claimed by both in full, with neighbouring China also controlling a sliver of its land. An armed rebellion erupted on the Indian side in the late 1980s. To crush it, New Delhi sent nearly a million soldiers, with the conflict since then killing tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians.

Anti-India sentiments in the Muslim-majority region intensified in 2019 when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s right-wing government revoked Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted partial autonomy to Kashmir, and brought the region under New Delhi’s direct control by dividing it into two federally-administered territories – Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

Modi’s government defended the revocation by claiming it would end the armed rebellion and bring lasting peace to the region. However, nearly seven years later, Kashmir continues to remain on the edge, with incidents of suspected rebel attacks, as well as alleged extrajudicial killings, torture and preventive detention of residents continuing to dominate headlines.

The Mughal family belongs to Kashmir’s Gujjar community, a nomadic Muslim tribal group that historically sided with the Indian state. When the armed rebellion broke out in 1989, the forest-dwelling Gujjars were seen as the “eyes and ears” of the Indian forces for sharing intelligence and, at times, assisting troops in operations against the rebels.

Over time, however, this relationship has frayed. Once trusted as a front-line community, the Gujjars and Bakarwals – the two main tribes in the region – now increasingly find themselves under pressure from the very system they once supported.

Since the 2019 abrogation of Kashmir’s special status, at least 11 Gujjars have been killed in suspected extrajudicial encounters, while more than 10 have suffered serious injuries, allegedly due to torture in custody, marking a stark shift in the fortunes of a community once central to India’s security apparatus in the region.

Government policy changes have added to their concerns. Alterations in quotas affected the marginalised community’s access to jobs and education, triggering protests and resentment. They have also faced eviction drives and displacement, with authorities accusing them of illegally occupying forest land and demolishing their seasonal shelters.

‘My brother wasn’t a rebel’

Today, the Gujjars find themselves increasingly vulnerable amid evolving security challenges. Rashid’s killing is seen by the community as part of that pattern.

As soon as the news of the killing spread in Kashmir, hundreds of people hit the streets, rejecting the army’s claims that he was a rebel and demanding an investigation into the March 31 “encounter”.

“I was busy with my work when I received a call from a local police official, saying that my brother had met with an accident and that I should reach the police station immediately,” Rashid’s elder brother, Ajaz Ahmad Mughal, a daily wage worker, told Al Jazeera.

When Ajaz reached the Ganderbal police station, he was taken to another station in Srinagar, some 30km (20 miles) away, where he saw a body lying inside an ambulance.

“The police said your brother was a militant and that he was killed by the army in an encounter,” said Ajaz. “His face was mutilated, apparently to hide his identity. I identified him with his feet.”

Rashid was a commerce graduate – the only one in the impoverished village – and therefore helped the mainly illiterate people in his community in accessing essential government documents.

On the day he was killed, Rashid had left his home with the documents of some people he was helping – like he did every day before returning home by the evening.

“However, this time, he didn’t return and his phone was switched off,” Ajaz recalled.

The next morning, news about the army operation in nearby forests spread in the area. That is when, said Ajaz, people came to know about Rashid’s killing.

“We were absolutely devastated. How did my brother, who was a civilian until the day before, suddenly turn into a militant?” he asked.

Ajaz said the clothes Rashid was found wearing when he saw his body did not belong to his brother, alleging the security forces put the clothes on him after the killing. The family asked why Rashid was never questioned or arrested by the police if he was an armed rebel.

As protests and questions over the killing grew, the New Delhi-appointed governor of the disputed region ordered a magisterial inquiry into the killing. The authorities said a probe will be completed within seven days. It has been nearly a month now, and no inquiry report has yet been published.

Al Jazeera reached out to the army and the regional police for their statements on the family’s allegations, but received no response.

However, a police official, on condition of anonymity since he was not authorised to speak to the media, told Al Jazeera the decision to return Rashid’s body to the family would be taken based on the “nature of the inquiry report” submitted by the magistrate.

The police official also said Rashid had no adverse police records and that he had never been summoned for questioning for any rebellion-related case.

‘Prepared a grave for Rashid’

Even as the government investigates the killing, the Mughal family doubts it will lead anywhere, noting that numerous such probes ordered in Kashmir in the past yielded little or no outcome.

Experts say such probes by magistrates, who are members of the same bureaucracy that governs the region, lead to little or no remedial action.

“The very least that can be done is a time-bound probe by a judicial magistrate answerable to the chief justice of a high court,” Ravi Nair, executive director of the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre, told Al Jazeera.

According to data compiled by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), there were at least 108 cases of rights violations by the Indian forces between 2008 and 2018, where probes were ordered, but no one has been prosecuted to date. JKCCS is now a defunct rights organisation after its founder, Khurram Parvez, was arrested under a stringent anti-terror law in 2023.

In 2018, the Indian government informed the parliament that it received 50 requests from the then-regional government for the prosecution of security forces accused of rights violations. It denied sanction in 47 cases, while the matter is still pending in the remaining three.

Since the onset of the armed rebellion in 1989, between 8,000 and 10,000 people have disappeared in Kashmir, according to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), which represents the families of the missing.

As of December 2025, government data shows that the region recorded the highest number of arrests under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for five consecutive years. In 2021, the federal government informed the parliament that as many as 33 custodial deaths took place in Kashmir between 2016 and 2021. The next year, an analysis of data provided by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) revealed 38 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings in Kashmir – the highest in India that year.

Human rights experts say the 1990 Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act (AFSPA), a controversial law that provides impunity to the army in Kashmir, acts as a legal shield for the accused members of the security forces.

Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera that despite several cases of extrajudicial killings in Kashmir and families clearly identifying the alleged perpetrators, not much action has been taken by the authorities.

“Unfortunately, there is a culture of impunity that has perpetuated such abuses. The Defence Ministry restricts sanction to prosecute soldiers, while the Home Ministry has shielded paramilitary forces,” she said, demanding a repeal of the AFSPA “and all other laws that provide security forces immunity from prosecution”.

“Justice and accountability are key to lasting peace,” she said.

Praveen Donthi, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, an international think tank, says India’s 2019 move to revoke Article 370 was aimed at “fully integrating Kashmir into the union and end[ing] separatism and militancy”.

“However, seven years down the line, the situation remains precarious. The conflict is far from resolved, and militancy still has the capacity to ramp up at will,” he said.

“The pressure on security forces to maintain peace and stability may be leading to procedural errors and excesses.”

However, retired Indian army commander, DS Hooda, argues that the army “does not tolerate such incidents and has taken action if they found any wrongdoing by their soldiers”.

“It was an army investigation that revealed that one of the officials was involved, and the accused was punished by the army court,” Hooda said, referring to a staged killing of three civilians dubbed as rebels by the army in Kashmir’s Shopian area in 2020.

The army later acknowledged its soldiers exceeded powers under the AFSPA law and sentenced an accused soldier to life imprisonment. He was later suspended by an armed forces tribunal.

“The army carries out its own investigation. There is no impunity and if they find anything wrong, they take action. This is not an organisation thing.”

But the Mughal siblings say they had never thought a tragedy that struck them 26 years ago would return in such a devastating way, reopening old wounds and leaving them once again searching for answers and closure.

They say their suffering has not ended, with the years only deepening their grief as they wait for the return of the remains of their siblings.

“We have prepared a grave for Rashid. We will bury him in our own graveyard,” says his sister Naseema. “It will feel as though he is close to us.”

As Iran stares down the economic consequences of a prolonged blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, attention is shifting north.

With Gulf shipping lanes disrupted and oil exports constrained, Tehran may seek to depend less on the Gulf and more on a patchwork of railways, Caspian ports and sanctions-era trade networks linking it to Russia.

The importance of that relationship was underscored this week when Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi travelled to St Petersburg for talks with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, praising Moscow’s “firm and unshaken” support as the two sides discussed the war, sanctions and the future of the Strait of Hormuz.

But could Moscow really offer a lifeline for Iran’s beleaguered, war-torn economy, and would it even want to? We spoke to experts to find out.

Increasing but modest bilateral trade

Economic relations between Iran and Russia deepened after the US withdrew from a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and other nations in 2018 and reimposed sweeping sanctions on Tehran.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 served to accelerate that trend as both countries found themselves increasingly cut off from the Western financial system. They turned to sanctions-evasion networks, alternative payment systems and non-Western trade corridors to keep goods, energy and money flowing.

Current trade is dominated by agricultural products – especially wheat, barley and corn – alongside machinery, metals, timber, fertilisers and industrial inputs. Tehran has also supplied Russia with low-cost Shahed drones, which Russia updated and has been using in its war on Ukraine.

“Trade turnover reached $4.8bn last year [2024], but we believe that the potential for our mutual trade is much greater,” Russian Energy Minister Sergey Tsivilyov told an intergovernmental commission on trade and economic cooperation between Moscow and Tehran in 2025.

Bilateral trade is reported to have increased by 16 percent during that period, driven largely by Russian exports of grain, metals, machinery and industrial goods.

But experts say that despite this increase, the overall trade relationship remains relatively modest compared with Iran’s trade with China or the Gulf countries.

Trade between the two is “not substantial, because both countries are producing almost similar products and the industries are similar”, Mahdi Ghodsi, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, told Al Jazeera.

Alternatives to Hormuz

The backbone of Russia-Iran trade is the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a network of shipping lanes, railways, and roads linking Russia to Iran and onward to Asia, bypassing Western-controlled maritime routes.

Goods move from southern Russian ports, across the Caspian Sea to northern Iranian ports, including Bandar Anzali, before continuing by rail or truck.

The route has become increasingly important for Russian grain, machinery and industrial exports to Iran.

This route can serve as a “viable but partial lifeline”, Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at London-based Think Markets, told Al Jazeera, adding that Russian ports in Astrakhan, on the Volga River delta near the Caspian Sea, and Makhachkala, on the Caspian Sea, are already “primed for a surge in grain, metals, timber and refined products”.

A western branch also runs through Azerbaijan, though a key missing rail link between Rasht and Astara in northern Iran remains unfinished.

In 2023, Moscow agreed to help finance the line, with Russia’s president calling the agreement a “great event” that “will help to significantly diversify global traffic flows”.

Easier in theory than in practice

Analysts say that, although these routes may provide a temporary solution, the Strait of Hormuz offers a scale and efficiency that rail and land corridors cannot easily replicate.

Although maritime trade has been highly volatile in recent weeks, “from a historical perspective it is simply the quickest and the most cost-effective way of transporting anything”, Adam Grimshaw, an economic historian at the University of Helsinki, told Al Jazeera.

“Roughly 90 percent of Iran’s international trade is maritime trade that goes through the Gulf, which can’t be quickly or immediately replaced through land access to Iran or through air transport to circumvent the American blockade”, Nader Hashemi, an associate professor at Georgetown University, told Al Jazeera.

Ghodsi said Russia might be able to offer a “lifeline” in the short term, as it did when it exported grain during Iran’s droughts, but in the long run, it simply “cannot substitute” the vast amounts of maritime trade.

Re-routing trade routes via land “takes time”, pushing up prices for consumers and creating more food waste as perishables rot en route.

Does Moscow want to help Iran?

Most analysts say throwing an economic lifeline to Iran is not in Russia’s interests.

“They’ve got their own economic problems,” John Lough, head of foreign policy at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre, told Al Jazeera, pointing to signs of stagnation inside Russia, pressure on reserves and growing frustration over the prolonged war in Ukraine.

While Moscow could offer symbolic support or limited humanitarian assistance, “now is not a good time” to invest in Iran, he said, referring to the US-Israel war on the country.

Replacing maritime trade with overland routes would be extremely difficult, despite years of discussion about alternative corridors linking the two nations, he said.

It also won’t necessarily help Iran’s economy, which needs all the export revenue it can get, experts say.

“Much of Iran’s economy revolves around the sale of oil, and with that blocked or prevented by the American blockade, Russia really can’t help in that regard”, Hashemi said.

Others are more optimistic, however.

“Propping [up] Iran locks in higher global oil prices that buoy Russia’s war economy, cements INSTC dominance for Asian trade, and keeps a key anti-Western ally alive – no downside for Moscow in a fragmented Gulf,” Aslaam said.

On March 13, 2013, Fakhr al-Din al-Aryan, a judge at Idlib’s Civil Court of Appeal, publicly defected from the Syrian regime – an act that led him to be sentenced to death in absentia.

In December 2024, more than a decade later, Bashar al-Assad’s regime – the very one he had defected from – was overthrown, and al-Aryan was able to finally return to Syria’s judiciary.

In the latest step on al-Aryan’s journey from defection to exile to return, he was the presiding judge on Sunday at the opening of the trial of Atef Najib, a cousin of former President al-Assad and the former head of political security in the southern province of Deraa who faces charges of premeditated murder, torture leading to death and crimes against humanity.

Al-Assad and his brother Maher al-Assad, a former top military commander, are also being tried in absentia. Both men fled to Russia after their 2024 overthrow.

Fadel Abdulghany, the founder of the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), told Al Jazeera that the moment carries deep symbolic weight.

“A judge once sentenced to death by the Assad regime for defending the rule of law has returned to the bench to apply that same law to one of the regime’s most extensively documented perpetrators of violations,” Abdulghany explained. “This reversal of power dynamics reflects the promise of the rule of law so rarely fulfilled in post-authoritarian transitions. The significance of this moment lies not in spectacle but in its adherence to due process.”

Defection and return

Al-Aryan was a judicial adviser during the early years of Syria’s uprising, which began in March 2011, as protests intensified and the state increasingly relied on security-based rule.

By 2013, he decided that he had to break from the Syrian state and defected in a recorded statement that framed his decision as a matter of legal and moral responsibility.

“In light of the responsibility placed on the shoulders of judges, who are the guardians of justice and truth, and as a result of the massacres committed by the regime against civilians, children and women, … I announce my defection from the Ministry of Justice and my joining the Independent Syrian Judicial Council … to be a strong shield for justice and equality,” he said in the video.

After his defection, al-Aryan joined the judicial bodies of the then-Syrian Interim Government and became involved in building what was described as a parallel judicial track in opposition-held areas.

As part of that, he worked on establishing alternative courts, handling legal cases and documenting alleged crimes committed by the now former regime.

In response, the authorities sentenced al-Aryan to death in absentia and confiscated his property, including assets later sold at public auction.

After the fall of al-Assad’s regime, al-Aryan’s name re-emerged in June after a presidential decree reinstating dismissed judges. That process culminated in his appointment as head of the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus, positioning him at the centre of the country’s first transitional judicial proceedings.

Najib’s links to repression of Syrian revolution

The transformation in al-Aryan’s life mirrors that of the man on trial in his courtroom on Sunday.

The position of the al-Assad family member as a top security official in Deraa in 2011 placed Najib at the centre of some of the first major confrontations between civilians and state security officers. Deraa is called the “cradle of the revolution” after government repression of protesters there inspired al-Assad’s opponents in other areas of the country to rise up.

One specific incident – the arrest and torture of schoolchildren detained after scrawling, “The people want the fall of the regime,” and the killing of one of them, 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb – is widely regarded as the spark for the country’s revolution.

Najib’s connection to that incident and the death of Hamza is one of the reasons why his trial is so significant in Syria.

The former official was arrested in January 2025 in the Latakia region, where some former regime loyalists had taken refuge.

Transitional justice

For the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the trial is significant because of how it is being conducted and not just who is being tried.

Abdulghany stressed that “this is neither a revolutionary court nor a victors’ court” but a case that has moved through formal legal stages, including arrest by the Ministry of Interior, investigation, prosecution and referral to a criminal court in Damascus.

The charges include premeditated murder and torture leading to death, classified as crimes against humanity under international law. This framing, Abdulghany said, is deliberate: It places domestic proceedings within the framework of international criminal standards, which is essential for the credibility of any verdict.

Abdulghany also highlighted the institutional message of the trial and in particular the inclusion of the former president and his brother as defendants despite their absence from the proceedings and from Syria.

“Physical absence does not amount to legal immunity,” he said.

Despite this, Abdulghany stressed that the trial was not the end of the transitional justice process in a country where hundreds of thousands of people died and disappeared during the war and the five-decade rule of al-Assad and his father, Hafez. There is still little information in many of the cases of the disappeared and imprisoned. The SNHR has documented at least 177,000 cases of enforced disappearances since 2011 with the vast majority attributed to the former government.

Abdulghany explained that accountability in Syria cannot be reduced to criminal trials alone and instead must include four interconnected pillars: criminal accountability, truth-seeking, reparations and institutional reform.

These, he argued, must function together under a unified structure rather than as separate or sequential processes.

Abdulghany placed particular emphasis on institutional reform, noting that Syria’s judiciary was previously used as a tool of repression rather than justice.

“Without these reforms, transitional justice trials risk being conducted through judicial institutions that have not themselves been transformed,” he said, pointing to the need to dismantle exceptional courts and rebuild judicial independence.

Truth-seeking, he added, is equally essential.

Families of victims have a right to know what happened to their relatives, and this right exists independently of criminal prosecutions, Abdulghany said.

“They deserve answers,” he said, adding that recognition of truth, justice and reparations must be unconditional if any durable reconciliation is to be achieved.