shadow

Officially, Jacqueline Jackson, wife of presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, was not among the 69 passengers aboard a Midway Airlines 737 that made a one-engine landing in Pittsburgh on the way from Washington to Chicago recently.

“Our passenger name list did not include anyone by the name of Jackson,” Midway Airlines said after the emergency.

But she was, said Mark Horrell, a fellow passenger and former neighbor of the Jacksons’, adding, “I saw more of the Jacksons on that plane than I saw of them in two years living across the street from them.”

A couple of days later, Jesse Jackson quietly confirmed his wife and one son had been on the plane. By then, however, the news value had faded.

That’s probably the way Jacqueline Jackson wanted it.

Though the incident faded with hardly a notice, it spoke volumes about Jacqueline Jackson–elusive, private and largely unknown to the public, including fellow travelers on an airplane in trouble.

While Jesse has spent the last 20 years thrusting himself into the limelight, Jacqueline has been almost as successful at avoiding it.

When she doesn’t feel like talking, requests for an interview, directed to her personal secretary, to her home, to the Jackson campaign might just as well be made to dial-a-joke. Calls weren’t taken seriously.

When she does decide to talk, pausing to accommodate an interviewer during the events surrounding the college graduation of her 61-year-old mother, she is articulate, charming, charismatic even.

Yet Jacqueline can be intimidating and combative when discussion drifts into areas she decides are off limits. Once she has made a statement, follow-up questions bounce off an invisible barrier defined by riveting eye contact and pointed repetition.

For instance, does she get a fee for her public speaking?

“Often I do.”

“Now, on the campaign. . . . ?”

“Often I do.”

“Before. . . ?”

“Often I do.”

“But. . . .”

“ Often . . . I . . . do .”

Jackson has little patience for reporters who would pry into her life.

“My friends do not discuss me with the media,” she says flatly.

And she has even less patience with the suggestion that, for an aspiring First Lady, she is elusive if not evasive.

“I would be willing to say to you that my family has been scrutinized far more than any family that’s in this public situation that we’re in today. . . ,” she says, sitting in her hotel suite in Hampton, Va., last weekend. She has granted interviews to a few news organizations lately, and she and her husband are completing a book about themselves. So she sees no reason to talk to everyone who asks.

“I am not private or protective. But there’s a point that you can’t give any more. I can’t permit you to move into my home with me. I must have my family.”

Jacqueline Lavinia Davis Brown Jackson was born 43 years ago, in Ft. Pierce, Fla. Like the man she would eventually marry, she was born out of wedlock. Her mother was Gertrude Davis, a teen-age migrant worker who earned 15 cents an hour picking beans.

Of those early years in Florida, Jacqueline remembers only talking and laughing a lot, and listening to her “little red radio.”

Her mother eventually married Julius Brown, a civilian employee of the Navy who would later work for the post office. Brown soon moved his family to Newport News, Va., where he bought a two-story, clapboard-and-shingle home in the quiet neighborhood in which Jacqueline and her four siblings were raised.

Lined with green lawns and tall crepe myrtles filled with chirping birds, it’s the kind of street where sticky spring afternoons lure folks to the front porch to chat and watch the baby carriages passing on the sidewalks.

The street hasn’t changed much since the days when the Brown children would press their noses up against his window to hear his jazz band rehearse, says De Witt Cooke, 72, who has lived his whole life across the street from the home Julius Brown still owns.

Cooke remembers the Browns as a friendly but very private family, not adverse to visiting, but not much for socializing either. “There was a togetherness in the family,” he says.

Gertrude Brown raised the children while working full time at the local Veterans Administration Hospital.

“When Gertrude spoke, that was it,” says Cooke. Jacqueline remembers that her mother was strict–too strict she thought then–but loving. She taught her daughter how to crochet and do needlework, and Jacqueline made all her own clothes. “I was very fashionable in church,” she says.

Dinner–”simple food: pork chops, corn, green beans”–was served around a big table. Everyone said grace. And the children were in bed by 8:30, Jacqueline says.

Besides church and Sunday school and Baptist Youth Training, the Brown children didn’t get out much. “I didn’t date really,” Jacqueline says. But Julius Brown was the leader of the local Boy Scout Troop, and Jacqueline remembers going to the prom “with my father’s Eagle Scout, some young man he liked.”

Sara Green, who lived next door to the Browns, recalls that Jacqueline “was different. She was the kind of person who would always talk to older people. And she always could talk. . . . She was always a girl who was going to get ahead. She had that drive.”

After graduating from the all-black Huntington High, Jacqueline went on to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College.

Because blacks and whites worked together in the shipyards, segregation in Newport News was not as dramatically defined as in some parts of the South. But the local stores did not serve blacks in their cafeterias, and in clothing stores, Cooke says, “if a black tried something on, it was his, whether it fit him or not.”

Jacqueline says that as a girl she never really had cause to confront the injustice of what Jesse Jackson now calls American apartheid. In college, however, she quickly became active in the civil rights movement. And, she has said, it was political discussion that attracted her to Jackson, a top athlete and campus hotshot.

Jackson, she says, was “my first courting boyfriend.”

When she was 18, they were married. He received his degree and went on to the Chicago Theological Seminary. She began her career as a mother.

“During my day, you either came home with a degree or a husband and you were considered successful . . . I got a husband,” she says.

Jackie is certain she will get her degree some day. “But that will be after my 12-year-old gets hers,” she says.

The Jacksons, who live in a two-story, 15-room house in Chicago’s South Side, have three sons and two daughters in their 25-year marriage. The oldest is daughter Santita, 25, a senior at Washington’s Howard University. Jesse Jr., 23, and Jonathan, 22, are graduates of their father’s college, North Carolina A&T.; A third son, 17-year-old Yusef, recently was graduated from a private school in Washington, D.C. The youngest, 12-year-old Jacqueline, goes to a school in Massachusetts.

Over the years the children have traveled with Jesse. And when Jacqueline headed off to march or boycott or pass out flyers, they often went with her. “They are extremely political because they were never separated from what we thought, or from our conversations,” Jacqueline says. “When we had parties that were political parties, they were at liberty to mingle with the guests. . . . So their conversations became political conversations, they (became) interested in issues.”

It was Jacqueline’s job to hold things together, everyone involved agreed.

“She’s what we call the backbone,” says Yusef. “She’s really there to keep the family together.”

“She stayed out of the way and Jesse kept her out of the way but she gradually has moved forward,” says Edwina Moss, the wife of Rev. Otis Moss who is chairman of Operation PUSH, a Chicago-based civil rights organization founded by Jesse Jackson. Moss went on to say that Jacqueline has somehow found a balance between maintaining her own identity and being overshadowed by her husband. She remembered once telling Jacqueline that she felt at loose ends because her husband was away a lot, just like Jesse. Jacqueline responded, she recalled, “Why don’t you just throw yourself into good books?”

The nature of the marriage is hard to discern. The topic and most personal questions are basically off-limits with both Jacksons. Reporters traveling with the presidential candidate contend that the marriage seems to be showing stress during the few appearances the two make together. Friends, however, disagree.

“She has great influence on him. I think she has a great influence on anyone she’s around,” says John J. Hooker, a Nashville politician who has spent a lot of time with Jacqueline during the campaign. “She once said to me (and she says often), ‘He is, after all, my hero, my political hero.’ I think she has this real feeling for him, and I think she communicates with him on all different levels, as wife, in conjunction with fact that they’re parents, about children, also on political basis.”

“She is able to stand in the background, yet stay on the same level intellectually,” says Moss, who calls herself a longtime friend.

The Jacksons also share the financial burden. According to their latest tax returns, the couple had income of almost $210,000 in 1987, $159,000 of which came from Personalities International Inc., the public-speaking management firm Jacqueline heads, and through which both Jacksons book their appearances.

Widely traveled, Jacqueline is a forceful speaker on issues. At the same time, though, her mission is by its nature linked to her husband and his mission.

In December, 1983, Jacqueline, former Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.) and a dozen or so other women went to Central America as part of a self-appointed “alternative Kissinger commission,” to further explore the information that had been compiled in that bipartisan commission’s controversial report, which recommended increased military aid to El Salvador and implicitly backed the Nicaraguan Contras.

International Tensions

The trip was difficult and sometimes frightening, with guerrilla wars raging and international tensions at a peak, others in the delegation said.

Especially in Nicaragua, many people saw Jesse Jackson as a hero and extended their enthusiasm to Jacqueline, swarming around her, shouting out affectionately and wanting to touch her each time the entourage went into the streets, the others recalled.

Likewise, the Central American press tended to focus its cameras and attention on Jacqueline, says Sonja Johnson, the 1984 presidential candidate on the Citizen’s Party ticket. A continuing and sometimes heated feud developed over Jackson’s open endorsements of her husband’s candidacy. Supporters of then-Vice President Walter Mondale, including Abzug and former Assemblywoman-now-Los Angeles City Councilwoman Gloria Molina “tried to get Jackie not to promote her husband’s candidacy down there . . . They were quite certain he couldn’t get nominated and saw it as divisive.”

“She said, ‘That’s nonsense,’ ” Johnson recalled. “ ‘Obviously I want my husband to win. What a silly thing to ask me not to talk about him . . . . You can tell them we’re not all for Jesse, but I’m always for Jesse.’ ”

“I hadn’t been around many women who were so strong and self-assured, but who didn’t attribute anything to the women’s movement,” says Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, an anthropology instructor at Cal State Hayward who was Jackson’s roommate and frequent companion on the Central American trip. In late-night talks and on long bus rides, however, Jackson told Ortiz that she had been affected by her childhood experiences in the South, and the hardships of the the civil rights movement, rather than organized feminism, sharing a view among some black women that feminism is “a white woman’s thing–feeling sorry for ourselves,” Ortiz says.

“I would say, ‘You had all these kids. They must have limited your involvement,’ ” Ortiz says. “But she said it didn’t at all. She said, ‘I raised these kids to have free minds to fight for themselves. My greatest contribution to the civil rights movement was how I raised my kids.’ Her greatest pride was in her role as mother.”

Her Views

“I am mainly concerned about children and women. Equal pay, comparable pay. I am concerned that women are shouldering the burden of poverty,” Jacqueline said last weekend, her arms slicing through the air. But, she added, “I think I approach the issues of women from a, let me say, a darker perspective.

”. . . Through the slave-ship experience women did the same work and provided the same services as men . . . rather than being protected and shielded and taken care of . . . . So we had a longer relationship with the work force and the economy and politics in this country.”

This heritage has led Jacqueline to a view she calls “progressively old-fashioned.” She embraces equal pay but also certain traditional religious values. She is, for instance, pro-choice on the issue of abortion but she doesn’t believe teen-agers should have that option. Nor does she believe birth control pills and condoms should be dispensed by churches and schools.

“I believe children should be taught abstention . . . They should be taught that there are some dos and don’ts . . . I believe, young people should be taught to keep their zippers up on their pants, and girls should be taught to keep their panties up.”

That she and her mother both became pregnant at an early age does not mean that she finds such behavior acceptable, she says. In overcoming the odds against teen-age mothers, she and her mother were “one out of a million,” she says.

“I’m not terribly liberal when it comes to raising a family,” she adds.

People also observe at deep empathy in Jacqueline when she travels, an empathy that apparently is working its way through the candidate’s wife into the process of American party politics. H. H. Brookins, a power broker in Los Angeles’ black community who calls himself a close friend of the Jackson family for 20 years and a bishop of the A.M.E. Church, recalls a policy discussion among a handful of advisers in the Jackson home a few months back. When talk turned to Nicaragua, Jacqueline made herself heard, he says.

Does the candidate listen?

“Sometimes he does, and sometimes he doesn’t. He’s my husband . . .,” Jacqueline says. “I have never taken advantage of my relationship with my husband. If it is an important decision, I sit at the same table with everyone else. Sometimes I am defeated. And I love to tell them, ‘I told you so.’ ”

Many of her political opinions have been shaped by her extensive travels–to the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

A Different World

“The Third World is no longer as naive as it was 40 years ago,” she says, no longer willing to be pushed around. “America is extremely vulnerable to being perceived as a nation that has military might, and bully behavior. . . .

“In our country, we sing ‘God Bless America.’ We place our hand on the Bible when we go to court. We speak of another force that we suggest should protect us because we are good. And we disrespect it in the same breath when we place so much emphasis on war and building weapons that will destroy other human beings . . . What is it? Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. It’s a contradiction.”

Jackson calls herself a traditionally religious person. On the trip to Central America, Jackson got up each morning and said her prayers, Ortiz recalled. “I’d still be sleeping and overhear her. It was very much felt. Not just ritual.”

During the bitter New York primary election when Jesse Jackson was attacked by New York City Mayor Edward Koch, Robert T. Starks, who calls himself a personal and political friend of the Jacksons’, said the couple “relied a great deal on their religious beliefs and convictions to pull them through.”

What kind of First Lady would she be?

“She’d be the replacement of Jackie Kennedy . . . in terms of style and flair,” says Brookins.

Last Sunday in Hampton, that is just how she was introduced: America’s next First Lady. She stood up in the bleachers of the Hampton Virginia Coliseum, waving to the cheering graduates and alumni of this school that was founded in 1868 to educate newly freed slaves.

On the dais, Jesse Jackson raised Gertrude Brown’s hand, saluting his mother-in-law for overcoming great odds to achieve her dream. It was in an electrifying speech of hope through education and family.

Then the Jacksons went back to the hotel for a reunion party with family and friends. After an hour, Jesse Jackson said a quick goodby to his wife and, flanked by Secret Service men, headed off for more campaigning.

Jacqueline Jackson returned to her family.

In recent months, a series of videos surfaced on Donald Trump’s social-media platform, showing what appeared to be drone footage of small vessels exploding somewhere in the Caribbean. The clips were accompanied by triumphant statements from the former president, who claimed that U.S. forces had struck “drug boats” operated by Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua cartel as they ferried narcotics toward the American coastline. Within hours of the first announcement, officials confirmed that “multiple interdictions” had taken place, that several suspected traffickers were dead, and that survivors were in custody.

For Washington, the operation was presented as a new frontier in counter-narcotics self-defense. For much of Latin America, it looked alarmingly like extrajudicial warfare. Colombia’s president protested that one of the destroyed boats had been Colombian, carrying his own citizens. Caracas called the attacks “acts of piracy.” And legal scholars, both in the United States and abroad, began to question not only the strikes’ legitimacy under international law but also who, exactly, had carried them out.

The Law of the Sea Meets the War on Drugs

The United States is not a signatory to the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, yet successive administrations have claimed to act “in a manner consistent” with its provisions. Under that framework, ships on the high seas enjoy freedom of navigation. Interference is allowed only in narrow cases such as piracy, slavery, or “hot pursuit” when a vessel flees territorial waters after violating a state’s laws. The deliberate destruction of a boat on the open ocean—without proof of an immediate threat—sits uneasily within those boundaries.

“Force can be used to stop a boat,” observed Luke Moffett of Queen’s University Belfast, “but it must be reasonable and necessary in self-defense where there is an immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life.” Nothing in the public record suggests the crews of these vessels fired upon U.S. assets. The claim of self-defense, therefore, stretches maritime law close to breaking point.

International law’s broader prohibition on the use of force, codified in Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter, is equally uncompromising. Only an armed attack, or an imminent threat of one, allows a state to respond with force in self-defense. Trump’s officials insist that Tren de Aragua constitutes a transnational terrorist organization waging “irregular warfare” against the United States. Yet, as Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin argues, “Labelling traffickers ‘narco-terrorists’ does not transform them into lawful military targets. The United States is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or with this criminal organization.”

Nonetheless, a leaked memorandum reportedly informed Congress that the administration had determined the U.S. to be in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels—a remarkable claim that effectively militarizes the war on drugs. If accurate, it would mean Washington has unilaterally extended the legal geography of war to the Caribbean, with traffickers recast as enemy combatants rather than criminals.

Domestic Authority and the Elastic Presidency

The constitutional footing for these operations is no clearer. The power to declare war resides with Congress, but Article II designates the president commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Since 2001, successive presidents have leaned on the Authorization for Use of Military Force—passed in the wake of 9/11—to justify counter-terror operations across the globe. That statute, intended to target al-Qaeda and its affiliates, has been stretched from Yemen to the Sahel. Extending it to Venezuelan cartels represents another act of legal contortion.

Rumen Cholakov, a constitutional scholar at King’s College London, suggests that rebranding cartels as “narco-terrorists” may be a deliberate attempt to fold them into the AUMF’s reach. But it remains uncertain whether Congress ever envisaged such an interpretation. Nor has the White House explained whether the War Powers Resolution’s requirement of prior consultation with lawmakers was honored before the first missile struck.

The Pentagon, asked to disclose its legal rationale, declined. The opacity has fuelled speculation that the operations were not conducted solely by uniformed military forces at all, but by an entirely different arm of the American state—one that operates in deeper shadows.

The “Third Option”: Covert Power and the CIA’s Ground Branch

In October, Trump confirmed that he had authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to “conduct covert operations in Venezuela.” The statement was brief, but within the intelligence world it carried enormous significance. For decades, the CIA’s Special Activities Center—once known as the Special Activities Division—has been Washington’s chosen instrument for deniable action. Its paramilitary component, the Ground Branch, recruits largely from elite special-operations units and specializes in missions that the U.S. government cannot publicly own: sabotage, targeted strikes, and the training of proxy forces.

These operations fall under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which governs intelligence activities rather than military ones. By law, the president must issue a classified “finding” declaring that the action is necessary to advance foreign-policy objectives and must notify congressional intelligence leaders. Crucially, Title 50 operations are designed so that “the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.”

That distinction—between covert and merely secret—sets Title 50 apart from the military’s Title 10 authority. Traditional special-operations forces under the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operate as uniformed combatants in overt or clandestine missions authorized under defense law. Their actions are governed by the law of armed conflict, subject to military oversight, and, at least in theory, open to public accountability. CIA paramilitaries, by contrast, function outside those rules. They wear no uniforms, deny official affiliation, and are overseen not by the Pentagon but by the White House and select members of Congress.

Since 9/11, the line separating the two worlds has blurred. Joint task forces have fused intelligence officers and military commandos under hybrid authorities, allowing presidents to act quickly and quietly without triggering the political friction of formal war powers. The “drug boat” strikes appear to be the latest iteration of that model: part counter-narcotics, part counter-terrorism, and part covert action.

A Legal Twilight Zone

If CIA paramilitary officers were indeed involved, the implications are profound. A covert maritime campaign authorized under Title 50 would have required a presidential finding and congressional notification, but those documents remain classified. Conducting lethal operations at sea through the intelligence apparatus—rather than under military or law-enforcement authority—creates a twilight zone of accountability.

The law of armed conflict applies only when a genuine armed conflict exists; human rights law governs peacetime use of force. Covert paramilitary strikes sit uneasily between the two. They may infringe the sovereignty of other states without ever triggering a formal act of war, and they obscure responsibility by design. Survivors of the October strike—a Colombian and an Ecuadorian now detained by U.S. authorities—exist in a legal limbo, neither civilian nor combatant.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, professor at Notre Dame Law School, calls the rationale “utterly unconvincing.” No credible facts, she argues, justify treating these actions as lawful self-defense. “The only relevant law for peace is international law—that is, the law of treaties, human rights, and statehood.”

The Price of Secrecy

Covert action was conceived as a tool for influence and sabotage during the Cold War, not as an instrument of maritime interdiction. Applying it to counter-narcotics missions risks collapsing the boundary between espionage and war. Oversight mechanisms designed for covert influence operations struggle to accommodate lethal paramilitary campaigns. Only a handful of legislators—the so-called “Gang of Eight”—receive full briefings, and judicial review is virtually nonexistent. In practice, the president’s signature on a secret finding becomes the sole check on executive power.

The “drug boat” operations thus reveal how the United States’ shadow-war architecture has evolved since 9/11. The Special Activities Center, once reserved for coups and clandestine support to insurgents, now appears to function as an offshore strike arm for missions the military cannot legally or politically conduct. The public framing—protecting Americans from narcotics smuggling—masks a far broader assertion of authority: the right to employ lethal force anywhere, against anyone, without declaration or disclosure.

War Without War

Trump’s supporters hail the strikes as decisive. His critics see a dangerous precedent—a campaign that bypasses Congress, ignores international law, and blurs the line between defense and vigilantism. The tension runs deeper than partisanship. It touches the central question of modern U.S. power: who decides when America is at war?

The CIA’s motto for its paramilitary wing, Tertia Optio—the “third option”—was meant to describe a choice between diplomacy and open war. Yet as that option expands into an instrument of regular policy, it threatens to eclipse both. When covert action becomes a substitute for law, secrecy replaces accountability, and deniability becomes the new face of sovereignty.

Whether these “drug boats” carried cocaine or simply unlucky sailors may never be known. What is certain is that the legal boundaries of America’s global operations are eroding at sea. The United States may claim it is defending itself; international law may call it aggression. In that unresolved space—the realm of the third option—the world’s most powerful democracy is waging a war it will not name.

Last week, a ceasefire was announced after two years of genocide in Gaza. The bombs have stopped falling, but the devastation remains. The majority of homes, schools, hospitals, universities, factories, and commercial buildings have been reduced to rubble. From above, Gaza looks like a grey desert of rubble, its vibrant urban spaces reduced to ghost towns, its lush agricultural land and greenery wiped out.

The occupier’s aim was not only to render the Palestinians of Gaza homeless but also unable to provide for themselves. Uprooting the dispossessed and impoverished, those who have lost their connection to the land, is of course much easier.

This was the goal when Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered my family’s plot of land in the eastern part of Maghazi refugee camp and uprooted 55 olive trees, 10 palms and five fig trees.

This plot of land was offered to my refugee grandfather, Ali Alsaloul, by its original owner as a place to shelter in during the Nakba of 1948. Ali, his wife, Ghalia, and their children had just fled their village, al-Maghar, as Zionist forces advanced on it. Al-Maghar, like Gaza today, was reduced to rubble; the Zionists who perpetrated the crime completed the erasure by establishing a national park on its ruins – “Mrar Hills National Park”.

Ali was a farmer and so were his ancestors; his livelihood had always come from the land. So when he settled in the new location, he was quick to plant it with olive trees, palms, figs and prickly pears. He built his house there and raised my father, uncles and aunts. My grandfather eventually bought the land from its generous owner, by paying in installments over many years. Thus, my family came into the possession of 2,000 square metres (half an acre) of land.

Although my father and his siblings married and moved out of their family home, this plot of land remained a favourite place to go, especially for me.

It was just two kilometres away from our house in Maghazi refugee camp. I enjoyed doing the 30-minute walk, part of which went through a complete “jungle”: a stretch of green populated with clover, sycamore, jujube and olive trees, colourful birds, foxes, leashed and unleashed dogs and many beehives.

Every autumn, in October, when the olive picking season began, my cousins, friends and I would gather to collect the olives. It was an occasion that brought us closer together. We would get the olives pressed and get 500 litres (130 gallons) of olive oil from the harvest. The figs and dates were made into jams to have for breakfast or for suhoor during Ramadan.

The rest of the year, I would often meet my friends Ibrahim and Mohammed between the olive trees. We would light a small fire and make a kettle of tea to enjoy under the moonlight, while we talked.

When the war started in 2023, our land became a dangerous place to go. The farms and olive groves around it were often bombed. Our plot was also hit twice at the beginning of the war. As a result, we could not harvest the olives in 2023 and then again in 2024.

When the famine took hold of Gaza in the summer, we started sneaking into the plot to get some fruit and some firewood for cooking, since a kilo of that cost $2. We knew that Israeli tanks might storm in at any moment, but we took the risk anyway.

Seven families – we, friends and neighbours – benefited from the fruit and wood of that land.

One day in late August, a friend of mine called me with a terrible rumour he had heard: the Israeli tanks and bulldozers had advanced into the eastern part of Maghazi and levelled it all, uprooting trees and burying them. I gasped; our lifeline was gone.

Days later, the rumour was confirmed. The Israeli army had uprooted more than 600 trees in the area, mostly olive trees. Those who had fled from the area shared what they had seen. What was once a lush green stretch of land had been bulldozed into a yellow, lifeless desert.

Earlier in August, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported that 98.5 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land had been damaged or made inaccessible. I guess the destruction of our plot shrank that 1.5 percent remaining land even further.

As Israel was completing the erasure of Palestinian agricultural land, it started allowing commercial but not aid trucks into Gaza. The markets were flooded with products with packaging covered in Hebrew.

Israel was starving us, destroying our ability to grow our own food, and then making us buy their products at exorbitant prices.

Ninety percent of people in Gaza are unemployed and can’t afford to buy an Israeli egg for $5 or a kilo of dates for $13. It was yet another genocidal strategy that forced the two million starving Palestinians in Gaza to choose between two horrible options: dying from hunger or paying to support the Israeli economy.

Now, aid is finally supposed to start coming into Gaza under the ceasefire agreement. This may be a relief to many starving Palestinians, but it is not a solution. Israel has rendered us fully dependent on aid, and it is the sole power that determines if, when and how much of it enters Gaza. Per the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 100 percent of Palestinians in Gaza experience some level of food insecurity.

Much of Gaza’s agricultural land remains out of reach, as Israel has withdrawn from just a part of the Gaza Strip. My family will have to wait for the implementation of the third phase of the ceasefire deal – if Israel agrees to implement it at all – to see the Israeli army withdraw to the buffer zone and regain access our land.

We have now lost our land twice. Once in 1948 and now again in 2025. Israel wants to repeat history and dispossess us again. It must not be allowed to convert more Palestinian land into buffer zones and national parks.

Getting back our land, rehabilitating and planting it is crucial not just for our survival, but also for maintaining our connection to the land. We must resist uprooting.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Goals grab the headlines, so given Ethan’s position is a midfielder he is unlikely to outshine his brother in that department.

But the youngster is seen as an exciting talent in his own right.

His mentality was praised as he broke through from the PSG youth system, appearing to cope well with the weight of expectation that came with being an Mbappe.

Laurent Glaize, a former head of youth recruitment at Caen, spent three years tracking a young Kylian and became close to the Mbappe family during that time.

Speaking about Ethan in 2022, he told TNT Sports: “He is a balanced, well-educated kid who is respectful even if he is obviously in the shadow of his brother, which is not easy for him.

“But I find him calm and with a real personality. I find that he manages this pressure rather well. He does not mistake where he is in the game, even if he is already being asked for autographs more for his name, than for what he has done, because he is still very young.”

Praised for his football intelligence, calmness on the ball and passing ability, Ethan impressed the coaches at PSG and was given his league debut at just 16, coming on as a late substitute in a 3-1 win against Metz, with Kylian having scored two of the goals.

“Ethan is a very interesting player who can play in several positions,” PSG boss Luis Enrique said after that game.

“I am sure he will play again. He has a prestigious surname, which is difficult to live up to.”

In total, he made five appearances for PSG before leaving at the end of his contract last summer, although there was some controversy around his departure.

Kylian has previously implied, external that Ethan not getting a new contract at PSG was linked to his decision to leave and join Real Madrid, and was willing to instead stay at the French giants if it meant his brother got a new deal there also.

“It’s the thing that affected me the most,” Kylian said.

“He [Ethan], didn’t ask for anything. His Real Madrid was PSG. What Real meant to me, his childhood dream, was PSG.

“At one point, I even told him: ‘If you want me to, I’ll extend [my contract] and you can stay, we’ll stay here.’ I would have given up my dream of Madrid and stayed for him.

“Ethan told me… ‘I don’t want to stay here. What they did to you, what they did to me, it’s not normal.’ If he had told me, ‘Kylian, it’s what I want’, I would have given up my dream of Madrid and stayed for him.”

Moscow has called France’s detention of the ship, and arrest of the captain, an act of piracy.

France has said it is increasing pressure on Russia to end its invasion of Ukraine by detaining an oil tanker suspected of operating as part of Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” and putting its captain on trial.

France’s detention of the tanker is part of a new European strategy to block revenue funding Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron said at an EU event in Copenhagen on Thursday.

“We want to increase pressure on Russia to convince it to return to the negotiating table,” Macron said. “We have now decided to take a step further by moving towards a policy of obstruction when we have suspicious ships in our waters that are involved in this trafficking.”

The tanker, called the Boracay, was sailing last week off the coast of Denmark and was cited by European naval experts as possibly being involved in drone flights over the country. A series of drone incidents near the country’s airports and military bases over the last week forced the closure of the Copenhagen airport, causing major disruptions.

Macron said he could not rule out a connection between the vessel and the drone incursions, but so far lacked proof. Moscow has denied any involvement.

French Navy commandos raided the Boracay on Saturday off western France.

An investigation led by the French navy concluded that the ship, coming from Russia and heading to India with a “large oil shipment,” was flying no flag, Stéphane Kellenberger, prosecutor of the western port city of Brest, said.

The United Nations has detailed rules governing how ships must fly flags at sea and identify themselves under the flag of the state granting them nationality.

The ship’s captain, a Chinese national, will stand trial in France in February. He faces up to one year in prison and a 150,000 euro ($176,000) fine if convicted.

In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Europe of stoking “hysteria” and called France’s actions an act of “piracy”.

“This is piracy. I am aware of this case – the tanker was seized in neutral waters without any justification,” Putin said on Thursday at a foreign policy forum in the southern resort city of Sochi, adding that there was no military cargo on the vessel.

“It’s piracy, and how do you deal with pirates?” Putin said. “You destroy them. It doesn’t mean that tomorrow a war will erupt all across the global ocean, but certainly the risk of confrontation will seriously increase.”

Russia has been accused of operating a “shadow fleet” of tankers made up of ageing ships bought used, often by nontransparent entities with addresses in non-sanctioning countries, and sailing under flags from nonsanctioning countries. Their role is to help Russia’s oil exporters elude the $60 per barrel price cap imposed by Ukraine’s allies.

Macron said “30 to 40 percent” of Russia’s war effort is “financed through the revenues of the shadow fleet”.

“It represents more than 30 billion euros. So it’s extremely important to increase the pressure on this shadow fleet, because it will clearly reduce the capacity to finance this war effort for Russia,” he said.

With next week’s publication of his ninth novel, “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon’s secret 20th century is at last complete.

For many of us, Pynchon is the best American writer since F. Scott Fitzgerald. Since the arrival in 1963 of his first novel, “V.,” he has loomed as the presiding colossus of our literature — revered as a Nobel-caliber genius, reviled as impenetrable and reviewed with increasing condescension since his turn toward detective fiction with “Inherent Vice” in 2009.

Now comes “Shadow Ticket,” and it’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, “Shadow Ticket” capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.

Only now can we finally see that Pynchon has been quietly assembling — one novel at a time, in no particular order — an almost decade-by-decade chronicle no less ambitious than Balzac’s “La Comédie Humaine,” August Wilson’s Century Cycle or the 55 years of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury.” This is his Pynchoniad, a zigzagging epic of America and the world through our bloodiest, most shameful hundred years. Perhaps suffering from what Pynchon called in “V.” our “great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in,” he has now filled in the only remaining blank spot on his 20th century map: the 1930s.

A photograph of Thomas Pynchon in 1955. The elusive novelist has avoided nearly all media for more than 50 years.

(Bettmann Archive)

It all begins in Depression-era Milwaukee as a righteously funny gangster novel. In a scenario straight out of Dashiell Hammett’s early stories, a detective agency operative named Hicks McTaggart gets an assignment to chase down the runaway heiress to a major cheese fortune. Roughly midway through, Pynchon’s characters hightail it all the way to proto-fascist Budapest, where shadows more lethal than any Tommy gun begin to encroach. By the end, this novel has become at once a requiem, a farewell, an old soft-shoe number — and a warning.

When Pynchon’s jacket summary of this tale of two cities first surfaced six months ago, cynics could be forgiven for wondering whether an 88-year-old man, hearing time’s winged chariot idling at the curb, hadn’t just taken two half-completed works in progress and spot-welded them together. Younger people are forever wondering — in whispers, and never for general consumption — whether some person older than they might have, you know, lost a step.

Well, buzz off, kids. Thomas Pynchon’s voice on the page still sings, clarion strong. Unlike most novelists, his voice has two distinct but overlapping registers. The first is Olympian, polymathic, erudite, antically funny, often beautiful, at times gross, at others incredibly romantic, never afraid to challenge or even confound, and unmistakably worked at. The second, audible less frequently until 1990’s “Vineland,” sounds looser, freer, warmer, more improvisational, more curious about love and family, increasingly wistful, all but twilit with rue. He still brakes for bad puns and double-negative understatements, but he avoids the kind of under-metabolized research that sometimes alienated his early readers.

“Shadow Ticket’s” structure turns the current film adaptation of “Vineland” inside out — that would be “One Battle After Another,” whose thrilling middle more than redeems an only slightly off-key beginning and end. By contrast, “Shadow Ticket” offers a wildly seductive overture, a companionable but occasionally slack midsection, and a haunting sucker punch of an ending.

Mercifully, having already set “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Inherent Vice” largely in L.A., Pynchon still hasn’t lost his nostalgia for Los Angeles, a place where he lived and wrote for a while in the ’60s and ’70s. “Shadow Ticket” marks Pynchon’s third book to take place mostly on the other side of the world, but then — like so many New Yorkers — the novel finds its denouement in what Pynchon here calls “that old L.A. vacuum cleaner.”

Pynchon may not have lost a step in “Shadow Ticket,” but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now. His chapters end with a wink as often as a thunderclap. Sometimes he sounds almost rushed, peppering his narration with “so forths,” and making his readers play odds-or-evens to attribute long stretches of dialogue.

Maybe only on second reading do we realize that we’ve been reading a kind of Dear John letter to America. Nobody else writing today can begin a final chapter as elegiacally as Pynchon does here: “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman. … Like somebody we knew once a long time ago.”

Is this the Statue of Liberty, turning her back at last on the huddled masses she once welcomed? One character immediately suggests yes, another denies it. Either way, it’s a sobering way to introduce an ending as compassionately doom-laden as any Pynchon has ever given us.

Bear in mind, this is the same Pynchon who, a hundred pages earlier, has raffishly referred to sex as “doing the horizontal Peabody.” (Don’t bother Googling. This one’s his.) One early reviewer has compared “Shadow Ticket’s” shaggy charm to cold pizza, and readers will know what he means. Who’s ever sorry to see a flat box in the fridge the next morning?

For most of the way, though, “Shadow Ticket” may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl. The catch is, for an encore — just when you could swear the band might actually be improving on the original — the musicians turn around and blow you away with a lost song that nobody’s ever heard before.

Thus, with a flourish, Pynchon types fin to his secret 20th century. But what does he do now? The man’s only 88. (Anybody who finds the phrase “only 88” amusing is welcome to laugh, but plenty of people thought Pynchon was hanging it up at 76 with “Bleeding Edge.” Plenty of people were mistaken.)

So, will Pynchon stand pat with his 20th century now secure, and take his winnings to the cashier’s window? Or will he, as anyone who roots for American literature might devoutly wish, hold out for blackjack?

Hit him.

Kipen is a contributor to Cambridge Pynchon in Context, a former NEA Director of Literature, a full-time member UCLA’s writing faculty and founder of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library and the just-birthed 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project.

Sept. 16 (UPI) — The U.S. Department of Treasury announced Tuesday that it’s sanctioning two Iranian financial facilitators and more than a dozen Hong Kong- and United Arab Emirates-based people and entities for “shadow banking” in support of Iran.

The Treasury Department alleged that these people helped coordinate funds transfers, including from the sale of Iranian oil, that benefited the IRGC-Qods Force and Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics, a press release said.

“Iranian entities rely on shadow banking networks to evade sanctions and move millions through the international financial system,” Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence John K. Hurley said in a statement. “Under President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, we will continue to disrupt these key financial streams that fund Iran’s weapons programs and malign activities in the Middle East and beyond.”

The department said that between 2023 and 2025, Iranian nationals Alireza Derakhshan and Arash Estaki Alivand worked to facilitate the purchase of over $100 million worth of cryptocurrency for oil sales for the Iranian government. Derakhshan and Alivand used a network of front companies in foreign jurisdictions to transfer the cryptocurrency funds, the release said.

The two are now considered “blocked,” meaning all their assets in the United States will be seized, and Americans and their companies can’t do business with them or their businesses.

Besides Derakhshan and Alivand, the department named several other people and businesses that are now blocked from American trade.

Shadow banking is credit intermediation by entities outside the regular banking system, performing bank-like functions, like maturity transformation and liquidity transformation, without the same strict regulatory oversight as traditional banks.

Britain, Germany and France sent a letter in late August to the United Nations Security Council saying they are starting the 30-day process of “snapback” of sanctions against Iran.

The snapback is used to re-impose sanctions on Iran in the event of “significant non-performance” of treaty commitments. The sanctions were suspended under the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal.

Conservative MP Danny Kruger has become the first sitting Conservative MP to defect to Reform UK.

Kruger has been an MP since 2019, and sat on Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s team as a shadow work and pensions minister.

“The Conservatives are over,” he told a press conference, sitting alongside Reform party leader Nigel Farage.

Kruger said he had been “honoured” to be asked to help Reform prepare for government, and said he hoped that Farage would be the next prime minister.

The East Wiltshire MP – who has said he would not be triggering a by-election – said the Conservatives were no longer the main party of opposition.

He said: “There have been moments when I have been very proud to belong to the Tory party”, but added: “The rule of our time in office was failure.

“Bigger government, social decline, lower wages, higher taxes and less of what ordinary people actually wanted.”

He added: “This is my tragic conclusion, the Conservative Party is over, over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left.”

Although he said he had “great regard” for Badenoch, he said the Tory party had a “toxic brand”, adding: “We have had a year of stasis and drift and the sham unity that comes from not doing anything bold or difficult or controversial.”

Describing his move leaving a party he has been a member of for 20 years as “personally painful”, he said his “mission” with Reform would be to “not just to overthrow the current system, it is to restore the system we need”.

Responding to the news of the defection, Badenoch said: “Danny has made his case very clear, that this is not about me.

“I can’t be distracted by that, and I’m not going to get blown off course by these sort of incidents.

“I know this is the sort of thing that is going to happen while a party is changing. I’m making sure people understand what Conservative values are.”

Kruger’s defection is damaging for Badenoch, not only as a Tory thinker and veteran, but also as the most significant among several from the party moving to Reform.

Speaking after the press conference, Kruger told the BBC he had come to the conclusion the Conservative Party remains “the same party that failed the people in the last government” and doesn’t have “any chance” of winning the next election.

A few weeks ago, Kruger said he agreed with Reform on many issues except public spending, telling MPs in July: “There is a problem: they would spend money like drunken sailors.”

Asked about his comment, Kruger said: “I think we’re all sober sailors now, I’m glad to say, because since I said that Reform have corrected their position on welfare spending.

“I was very concerned that we need to really reduce overall benefit spending… Nigel made clear he also wants to bring down overall benefit spending but he does want to support families with children.”

Kruger is the second sitting MP to join Reform UK. Lee Anderson, who was previously a Tory MP, sat as an independent before joining Reform in 2024.

Reform now have five MPs in the Commons, having seen two of their MPs elected in the 2024 general election, Rupert Lowe and James McMurdock, leave the party.

His previous jobs include serving as former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s speechwriter, penning the “hug a hoodie” speech, and as former political secretary to Boris Johnson when he was prime minister.

Kruger spoke in a 2022 Parliamentary debate about the US’s abortion ban and told MPs he disagreed that pregnant women had an “absolute right to bodily autonomy” and that he didn’t understand why the UK was “lecturing” the US.

In 2023, Kruger was one of the speakers at a National Conservatism Conference, an event organised by a right-wing think tank from the United States, and made comments about the role of conventional family values in society.

The evangelical Christian told delegates that marriages between men and women were “the only possible basis for a safe and successful society” and one that “wider society should recognise and reward”.

Rishi Sunak, the Conservative prime minister at the time, distanced himself from the remarks.

Kruger is the son of TV chef Prue Leith and an Old Etonian, who studied at Edinburgh and Oxford Universities before becoming a director at the Centre for Policy Studies.

A Labour Party spokesperson said: “Nigel Farage can recruit as many failed Tories as he likes – it won’t change the fact that he has no plan for Britain.

“Britain deserves better than Reform’s Tory tribute act that would leave working people paying a very high price.”

Liberal Democrat deputy leader Daisy Cooper labelled the Conservative Party “a shell of its former self” and said Badenoch had pushed lifelong Tories towards her party “in their droves”.

“Nigel Farage’s party is shapeshifting into the Conservatives in front of our very eyes,” she said.

“It is getting to the point where the only difference between them is just a slightly lighter shade of blue.”

ANTHONY JOSHUA looks ready to fight right now as he showed off his shadow boxing and hulking physique.

The two-time heavyweight world champion has been out since September 2024 when he was knocked out by Daniel Dubois.

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But he posted a video online – showing off his incredible shape – shadow boxing outside.

Elbow surgery in May also kept Joshua sidelined – meanwhile shock talks to face YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul progressed behind the scenes.

Paul has since announced a November 14 exhibition bout against WBA lightweight champion Gervonta Davis – who is FIVE STONE lighter.

AJ’s promoter Eddie Hearn is still in talks with Paul’s promotional partner Nakisa Bidarian over a fight in 2026.

He told iFL TV: “They want to move forward with the Joshua fight around March 2026.

“But I said to him, ‘If you get chinned by Gervonta Davis, I can’t possibly make the fight with AJ.’

“Gervonta’s a 135lber. Obviously, they don’t think that’s going to happen but I don’t know too much about it.

“It’s an exhibition with bigger gloves? I don’t know. But they definitely want to go from Gervonta Davis to AJ.

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“The issue is, I don’t think we can wait till November to see how he gets on against Gevonta Davis.

“AJ is back in training with the view to fight in early 2026 so it’s very likely we’ll do our own thing. But we’ll see. We’re still talking.

“We do realise it’s a massive event. If he was to go in there and bash up Gervonta Davis, it wouldn’t be nothing much to boast about.

“It’s a cruiserweight vs a lightweight but at least he’s in there with a pound-for-pound fighter.”

Joshua, 35, is now set to return in January or February in a warm-up bout before turning his attention again to Tyson Fury, 37.

Fury retired in January following two defeats to Oleksandr Usyk, 38, last year but has teased a comeback in 2026.

Paul, 28, meanwhile made a heavyweight fight in November when Mike Tyson controversially made a comeback aged 58.

And over 100 MILLION watched Tyson lose his first professional fight in 20 years over eight shorter rounds of two minutes.

Paul then followed it up by beating ex-middleweight world champ Julio Cesar Chavez Jr, 39, in June to earn himself a No14 WBA cruiserweight ranking.

But his next fight against Davis is not set to count towards his official record with the exhibition unable to be professionally sanctioned.

Paul fights in the 14st 4lb cruiserweight limit of 200lb while Davis is a champ in the 9st 9lb lightweight division of 135lb.

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CHELSEA’S free-flowing attack tripped at the starting line of the Premier League title race, as Enzo Maresca’s side stuttered to a bore-draw at home to Crystal Palace. 

Reportedly on the verge of a move away from the club, it was Eberechi Eze who thought he had opened the scoring, only for VAR to rule his free-kick out over an infringement in the wall by Marc Guehi. 

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It was a VAR call that really wrote the story of this game, with both teams unable to create any moves with much meaning beyond it. 

A tightly contested first half was met with an equally tight second 45 minutes. 

The introduction of teenage wonderkid Estevao threatened to shake things up in the second half, as the Brazilian injected pace and enthusiasm into a lacklustre Chelsea attack.

But even his Brazilian brilliance wasn’t incisive enough to carve an opening for Maresca’s men. 

And despite a number of substitutes following Estevao, including new number nine Liam Delap, Stamford Bridge’s shooters could only fire blanks before going to West Ham next week. 

Here’s how SunSport Chelsea Reporter Lloyd Canfield rated the players…

Robert Sanchez – 6

It’s unclear if Robert Sanchez was blinded by the sun or by a player as an Eze free-kick was rifled past him, but VAR perhaps saved him in that sense, as it was ruled out. 

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The Spaniard made a solid stop to deny Jean Phillipe-Mateta in the first half, and his distribution seemed improved from last season, but there are still question marks over him among the Blues’ fanbase. 

With an ‘elite’ goalkeeper like Gianluigi Donnarumma up for grabs, he is under a lot of pressure to perform at this moment in time. 

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Reece James – 7

Chelsea’s captain was tasked with marshalling Ebere Eze from right-back for the Blues, as well as leading from the back with the young Josh Acheampong next to him. 

It wasn’t a vintage, flying fullback Reece James performance, but one that showed a maturity to his game with a good passing range and an air of calmness on the ball that he has always possessed. 

Josh Acheampong  – 9

The Cobham Academy graduate was thrown in the deep end once more in the absence of Levi Colwill and Tosin for Chelsea. 

With all the talk of whether or not the Blues will sign a new central defender or not, the teenager did extremely well under huge pressure, putting in crunching tackles and showing elite composure on the ball, sending something of a soothing aura around Stamford Bridge with it at his feet.

Dealing with the physicality of Jean Phillipe Mateta is a tough task for any defender, and Acheampong will need to grow physically before he can dominate that kind of threat, but it didn’t bother him much today. 

Enzo Maresca has got the answer to his injury dilemma from within the club, as they wanted, and Chelsea will hope the youngster can build on such an impressive display. 

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Trevoh Chalobah – 7

Perhaps should have done better when he had a chance to open the scoring after 30 minutes, as the ball fell kindly to him eight yards out, only to be fired over the bar.

But Trevoh Chalobah put in a solid showing against his former club, with an array of good tackles and blocks, as well as guiding Josh Acheampong next to him into a brilliant showing. 

Marc Cucurella – 5

Almost opened the scoring with a header before a clumsy challenge gave a free kick to Crystal Palace, from which they thought they had opened the scoring.

Marc Cucurella has often become a source of attacking threat and chance creation under Enzo Maresca, but wasn’t able to create many openings when he did progress further up the pitch, losing the ball too often.

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Moises Caicedo – 8

Consistency personified in blue, Moises Caicedo was his usual brilliant self today. 

Vital interceptions, tackles full of heart and the stamina of a marathon runner, Caicedo distributed the ball through Chelsea’s midfield and put out fires from the very first whistle to the last. 

A bit more creativity and ball progression from the deep-lying midfielder would have improved his rating to that truly elite level. 

Enzo Fernandez – 4

A very quiet first half saw Moises Caicedo doing the work of two people on his own, with Enzo Fernandez seeming overrun by the enigmatic Ebere Eze. 

Struggled to get his foot on the ball and create chances as he has done so well in recent games for the Blues, before being swapped for Andrey Santos in the final 15 minutes. 

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Jamie Gittens – 4

After an electric pre-season that left fans excited to see him in Premier League action for the first time, he was somewhat disappointing in the first half. 

He was given a run for his money by Daniel Munoz and failed to deliver any sort of end product on his PL bow. 

Better things will be coming from Chelsea’s new number 11, who was substituted after 54 minutes for wonderkid Estevao Willian.  

Cole Palmer – 3

A shadow of his usual self, Cole Palmer didn’t deliver the same kind of fireworks we have become so accustomed to seeing from him under Enzo Maresca. 

Instead for much of the game he looked the same player we saw during his ‘rough patch’ last year. 

He wasn’t allowed much, if any, space on the ball and wasn’t able to create something from nothing in this game, which everyone knows he can do at his mind-blowing best.

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Pedro Neto – 5

Chelsea fans know what to expect from Pedro Neto by now, at his worst he will give you heaps of hard work and running, even on a baking hot day at Stamford Bridge like today. 

He was more impressive than Gittens on the other wing, but also struggled to really create any meaningful chances, with a few deliveries sailing over any Chelsea attackers. 

Neto was switched to the left side when Estevao was introduced, but it was much the same as the first half in truth. 

Joao Pedro – 4

After five goals in his first five games for Chelsea, he had fully justified his place in Enzo Maresca’s starting XI for this game. 

In this game, though, fans were keen to see the introduction of Liam Delap after the half-time whistle, which came to fruition with little under 20 minutes to go. 

The Brazilian struggled to grasp the game by the scruff of the neck against Palace, and couldn’t provide the link-up with Cole Palmer that was so impactful in the Club World Cup. 

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Substitutes

Estevao – 7

Instantly injected energy and enthusiasm into the game but also into the crowd, Estevao is a catalyst for making things happen in this team.

As soon as he came on he had Marc Guehi in a twist before delivering a cross that created a Chelsea chance, despite not being finished off – a move that will have Blues’ fans clamouring for him to start against West Ham next week. 

Estevao perhaps should’ve opened the scoring, with a chance falling to him in the second half that he seemed to overthink before firing over. 

Nonetheless, with the iconic Romario watching on at Stamford Bridge, he will be confident that Joga Bonito has a place here for years to come. 

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Malo Gusto – 4

Took on Reece James’ role when he came on, and was mostly solid at the back but also unable to create any kind of forward spark. 

Saw his name up in lights in the 88th minute, but those lights may have blinded him as his shot from range sailed into row Z. 

Andrey Santos – 5

A solid showing from the Brazilian in midfield, but leaned back too much and fired over the bar in the dying embers of the game with a left-footed shot in front of the Matthew Harding end. 

He came close moments later, this time with a header that was grasped by Henderson. 

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Liam Delap – 5

His determination and hard work allowed him a sight of goal as the game came to a close, but his effort on the half-volley was stopped relatively easily by Dean Henderson. 

Delap will no doubt be a handful for defenders this season if he is coming from the bench, and likely won’t want to settle for playing second fiddle to Joao Pedro for too long. 

European Union says move amounts to one of the strongest sanctions packages against Russia to date linked to the war.

The European Union has approved a new raft of stiff sanctions against Russia over its war in Ukraine, including a lower oil price cap, a ban on transactions with Nord Stream gas pipelines, and the targeting of more shadow fleet ships.

“The message is clear: Europe will not back down in its support for Ukraine. The EU will keep raising the pressure until Russia ends its war,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said in a statement on Friday.

Kallas said the EU move amounts to “one of its strongest sanctions packages against Russia to date” linked to the war, which is now in its fourth year.

Ukraine’s newly appointed Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko welcomed the EU’s agreement on an 18th sanctions package against Russia, saying it “strengthens the pressure where it counts”. Svyrydenko added on X that there was more to be done in terms of measures to help bring peace closer.

French President Emmanuel Macron said that he spoke with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy and added he also welcomed the adoption of the sanctions. “The Russian attacks must stop immediately,” he wrote in a post on social media platform X. “France is and remains at Ukraine’s side.”

Meanwhile, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the bloc is “keeping up the pressure on Russia” following the announcement. “It’s good that we in the EU have now agreed on the 18th sanctions package against Russia,” Merz wrote on X.

“It targets banks, energy and the military industry. This weakens Russia’s ability to continue financing the war against Ukraine,” he added.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday that Russia has built up an immunity to Western sanctions and adapted to them. Peskov also called the sanctions illegal, saying every new restriction creates negative consequences for those countries that back them.

The move comes as European countries start to buy United States weapons for Ukraine to help the country better defend itself.

US President Donald Trump announced the deal to supply more weapons to Ukraine and threatened earlier this week to impose steep tariffs on Russia unless a peace deal is reached within 50 days.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, had proposed to lower the oil price cap from $60 to $45, which is lower than the market price, to target Russia’s vast energy revenues.

The EU had hoped to get major international powers in the Group of Seven countries involved in the price cap to broaden the effect, but conflict in the Middle East pushed up oil prices, and the US administration could not be brought on board.

In 2023, Ukraine’s Western allies limited sales of Russian oil to $60 per barrel, but the price cap was largely symbolic as most of Moscow’s crude – its main moneymaker – cost less than that. Still, the cap was there in case oil prices rose.

Oil is Russia’s main source of income

The linchpin of Russia’s economy is oil income, allowing President Vladimir Putin to pour money into the armed forces without worsening inflation for people, and avoiding a currency collapse.

The EU has also targeted the Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Germany to prevent Putin from generating any revenue from them in future, notably by discouraging would-be investors. Russian energy giant Rosneft’s refinery in India was hit, as well.

The pipelines were built to carry Russian natural gas to Germany but are not in operation. They were targeted by sabotage in 2022, but the source of the underwater explosions has remained a major international mystery.

Additionally, the new EU sanctions are targeting Russia’s banking sector to limit the Kremlin’s ability to raise funds or carry out financial transactions. Two Chinese banks were added to the list.

The EU has slapped several rounds of sanctions on Russia since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

But each round of sanctions is getting harder to agree on, as measures targeting Russia bite the economies of the 27 member nations. Slovakia held up the latest package over concerns about proposals to stop Russian gas supplies, which it relies on.