restored

From the bus window, the ridge looks like a giant slumbering beast stretched deep green across the flat farmland. “It feels alive,” I say to the woman beside me. “Yes,” she answers. “It is where you would run for safety, don’t you think?”

I am in southern Sweden to explore Söderåsen national park, established in 2001 to protect more than 1,600 hectares (4,000 acres) of the larger Söderåsen ridgeline. Shaped over millennia by immense geological collisions, fractures, volcanic eruptions and ice ages, today it is one of northern Europe’s largest continuous protected broadleaf forests, and only 90 minutes by car from Copenhagen or, in my case, two hours by public transport.

The little village of Röstånga at the gateway to the park is where travellers stop for supplies from the supermarket before disappearing into the forest on foot, bike or horseback, and people gather for food, live music and art.

My room for the first night is in Villa Söderåsen, a grand timber-framed yellow and white guesthouse, which has stood at the park’s entrance since 1904. It was built for tourists arriving via the new railway in search of connection to nature. Sebastian and Åsa, the owners, want to continue that tradition. “We humans are as loud as elephants in the wood,” says Sebastian. “Sit quietly for half an hour and see what happens.”

That evening, I eat with strangers at long wooden tables outside the hip restaurant and live music venue Stationen. Music drifts out of open doors, adults chat around the fire, children run circles around us.

The next morning, Åsa recommends I take a dip in Odensjön (Odin’s Eye) Lake. “Some say it is bottomless,” she says. It’s almost perfectly round, edged by steep beech-covered slopes, and fed by underground springs. Fifteen minutes into the forest and I am there.

A woman making her way back to the village says: “There is a rock in the water, heated by the sun, sit there, let your body adjust.”

Grasshoppers trill, spider silk trails from branches, noble chafer beetles glimmer like the aurora borealis, a dragonfly rests electric-blue on my now empty walking boots. I swim, the circle of blue sky rippling, and emerge ready for anything.

A few years ago, scientists obtained a sediment core from the bottom of the lake, providing detailed information from the past 600 years of land-use history. This showed that in the 18th and 19th centuries the plateau was largely deforested. I would have been walking across a heath, repeatedly burned to improve grazing grounds. It is difficult to imagine as I move through endless layers of beech, interspersed at times with birch, oak and rowan, mossy trunks, roots like octopuses.

Once I start searching, the signs of human history are everywhere too, from hollow ways to clearance cairns and dry-stone walls.

Two hours of hiking later, I arrive at the second entrance to the park: Skäralid, a rift valley. The visitor centre Naturum, packed with information and playful exhibits, shares its premises with Café Italia. Both look out onto a picturesque dam. A ranger explains that much of the initial conservation efforts since designation as a national park involved the felling of non-native Norway spruce and the planting of broadleaved trees in its stead.

In search of solitude, I choose the wilder three-hour Hjortsprångsrundan or Deer Leap circular, a trail named after a prehistoric hunting method where people drove game over a narrow cliff shelf. I pick my way along it, across heather and bilberry, to perch on the hard gneiss bedrock that blushes a startling mineral pink. A buzzard swoops down from the branch of a gnarled oak.

The descent is like scrambling and slipping back through time into an entirely other world. Many of these slopes managed to escape the historical land clearances and thus are the closest to ancient woodland. But all around this area, ferns, lichen, fungi, seeds and spores are recolonising the land.

The scree slopes are dotted with springs pushed up from a subterranean lake and laced with streams that feed into the Skärån river. The scent in the bottom of the valley is heady, sweet and damp, bringing with it a keen awareness of how much is always happening just out of sight.

I rest on a wooden walkway, pop a wild raspberry in my mouth and watch a slowworm the length of my forearm slither past. Then, a sudden crashing through undergrowth. Wolf? Wild boar? Moose? A young stag steps from a pocket of alder trees, pawing the ground. We look at one another. The sun drops, and as it does its light rises up the walls of the ravine.

My room for the second night is in Söderåsens Skafferi, a vandrarhem, or wanderer’s home. The house glows like a lantern on the edge of the dark wood. The owner Elisabeth, who spent her childhood exploring Söderåsen on horseback, says the house was once the first nature school in Sweden.

On my final morning I climb to Kopparhatten, the park’s highest viewpoint at 212 metres, and hold up a booklet with an image of a painting from 1840 of this same vista, almost bare of trees. “We used to holiday in the south,” a couple tell me. “But we’re searching for cooler climates now.” I wonder what stories they will bring home.

Summer, all green infusion; autumn, rust and gold; winter, snow and stone; spring, wood anemones and paper-thin leaves. The national park feels like living proof that damaged landscapes can recover if nature, and humans, are given half a chance.

Accommodation was provided by Villa Söderåsen (doubles from 1,095 Swedish Kronor, about £85, B&B). Coco also stayed at Söderåsens Skafferi (doubles from around £78). Söderåsen national park has multiple wild campsites with wind shelters and barbecue areas. For information on public transport access, visit skanetrafiken.se

July 13 (UPI) — Mexico announced the United States will begin to restore Mexican sugar’s access to its market, a measure that could significantly increase exports during the 2026-2027 season and boost income for about 170,000 sugarcane producers.

Mexico’s presidency said in a statement released Friday that the measure is the result of talks with U.S. authorities led by President Claudia Sheinbaum since November 2025.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated the country will need to import up to 1,152,000 tons of Mexican sugar during the 2026-2027 marketing year, an amount 512% higher than the estimate for the current marketing year, according to the statement.

The estimate appears in the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture on July 10, the Mexican government said.

The presidency said the new conditions could generate a potential increase of up to 4.76 billion pesos, about $272 million, in the price paid by the sugar industry to about 170,000 Mexican sugarcane producers.

The talks that led to the announcement began in November 2025 during a visit by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to Sheinbaum, the statement said.

The Mexican government said the outcome demonstrates that “through dialogue it is possible to build important agreements” benefiting agricultural producers and food consumers in both countries.

Sugar trade between Mexico and the United States has been regulated since late 2014 under the so-called suspension agreements, according to background information published by the Latin American and Caribbean Economic System.

In June 2017, the governments of both countries reached an agreement in principle that reduced the share of refined Mexican sugar to 30% of total imports from the previous 53% limit, while increasing the share of raw sugar, the regional organization reported.

The U.S. sugar industry initially refused to support that agreement. Then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Mexico had accepted nearly all of the requests made by the industry, but U.S. producers still did not support the proposed terms.

U.S. refiners argued that high-quality Mexican raw sugar was reaching consumers directly instead of passing through their plants, according to the Latin American and Caribbean Economic System.

The dispute involved a coalition of U.S. sugarcane and sugar beet producers, as well as ASR Group, maker of Domino Sugar, and Imperial Sugar.

ASR Group and Imperial Sugar said at the time that the 2014 agreement did not provide sufficient supplies for their refining operations and had asked the U.S. government to end the pact, the regional organization reported.

Members of Congress are again moving to block the U.S. Air Force from retiring all of its U-2S Dragon Lady spy planes. This time, legislators also want to compel the service to “fully restore” four of the iconic aircraft through heavy depot maintenance, which would bolster the fleet’s operational capacity. The Air Force continues to argue that the high-flying Cold War-era jets are too vulnerable to support future high-end fights and should be supplanted by a mix of space-based and other capabilities. This would presumably include a classified stealthy high-altitude drone, commonly (and unofficially) referred to as the RQ-180, or an evolution thereof, which first emerged publicly just earlier this year.

Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee released a draft defense spending bill for the 2027 Fiscal Year. It includes a provision that would prevent the Air Force from retiring more than two U-2Ss in that fiscal cycle. The Air Force currently has 23 of these aircraft in inventory, including three two-seat TU-2S trainers.

A summary of the proposed legislation also says it includes “$81 million for U-2 programmed depot maintenance to fully restore four aircraft.” The current operational status of the aircraft in question is unclear. This is included under the umbrella of $335.3 billion in total funding for operation and maintenance (O&M) accounts across the services that the draft bill would appropriate for Fiscal Year 2027.

Programmed depot maintenance for any aircraft is an intensive process that essentially involves a full tear-down and detailed inspection. Paint and other coatings are typically stripped and reapplied. Upgrades and modifications are often worked into depot maintenance cycles given the extensive work already being done.

U-2 Dragon Lady Maintenance

The Air Force’s proposed budget for the 2027 Fiscal Year completely zeroes out the line for U-2 O&M, to include depot maintenance, reflecting the service’s desire to retire the fleet. An annual force structure report the Pentagon released in May concisely outlines the current argument for retiring the remaining U-2Ss.

“The Air Force will retire the entire 23-ship U-2 fleet, as the platform is no longer viable for future high-end conflicts,” the force structure report says. “Continued operation presents significant safety, logistical, and financial risks that outweigh the platform’s remaining utility in contested environments.”

“This decision allows for the strategic reallocation of fiscal resources to fund more critical, high-priority service requirements and accelerate modernization efforts in other key areas,” it adds. “Continuing to operate the U-2 fleet would require a significant investment to address systemic issues, including diminishing manufacturing capacity, material shortages, and safety risks inherent in the aging platform.”

Questions about the continued relevance of the U-2 in the face of an ever-expanding global air defense threat ecosystem are not new. Near-peer competitors like China and Russia, as well as lower-tier potential adversaries like Iran, continue to develop and field more capable air defense systems and expand their anti-access and area denial bubbles. This, in turn, has threatened to push the U-2 further and further from the areas where it would be tasked to collect.

On top of all this, the U-2s are aging and becoming more costly to operate and maintain. The U-2S models in service today were upgraded from earlier variants that began their service careers in the 1980s.

As noted, this is not the first time the Air Force has tried to retire its remaining U-2s, citing operational and sustainment-related factors. In response, Congress has repeatedly intervened in the past few years to at least block full divestment of the fleet over persistent concerns about the aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capability and capacity gap that might result.

The Dragon Lady continues to offer a unique ISR platform that can fly higher than any other operational non-orbital platform, crewed or uncrewed, the U.S. military has, at least from what we know today. This, in turn, means that the aircraft can bring imaging, signals intelligence, communications payloads, and other sensors up to those altitudes, giving them particularly good fields of view. From this perch, aircraft can use a slant angle to peer deep into denied areas while still flying international airspace and further away from potential threats. The use of the U-2 to gather intelligence about a Chinese spy balloon that soared over parts of the United States and Canada in 2023, which involved flying above it, offered a particularly public demonstration of the value of the aircraft’s high-altitude capabilities.

Each Dragon Lady can also carry a wide array of different sensor systems simultaneously, as well as communications packages, further increasing its flexibility. The U-2Ss have the ability to be readily deployed to forward locations globally and conduct long-duration sorties, as well. The latter points have been especially relevant in comparison to known existing ISR satellite constellations that are constrained by their orbits and can only offer relatively short-term coverage over a specific area. We will come back to this in a moment.

It is worth noting here that the Air Force’s Dragon Lady fleet also has a long history now of providing valuable ISR support outside of traditional combat operations. Last year, the service confirmed U-2Ss were supporting the enhanced border security mission along the United States’ southern boundary with Mexico. The aircraft have been used to support counter-narcotics operations over the years, as well as humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions. NASA also operates a pair of ER-2 aircraft, another version of the Dragon Lady, as high-flying scientific research platforms.

The Air Force has been hinting for years now at the existence of advanced aircraft in the classified realm that could help fill gaps left by the retirement of the U-2, and also be more survivable in very high-threat environments. This has now been further underscored by the emergence of the ‘RQ-180,’ or a related stealthy design, in Greece earlier this year, the likely capabilities and roles of which TWZ explored in a detailed feature in April. At the same time, we have raised still unanswered questions in the past about how many of any such drones might actually be in service and what kind of operational capacity those fleets might provide.