Seth Mazibuko strides into the intersection of Moema and Vilakazi Street in Soweto, gesturing to the spot that changed South African history.

“This is where the students who were marching peacefully had a first confrontation with the police,” he says.

It was June 16, 1976. Mazibuko had turned 16 the day before. Tens of thousands of students, mostly still just children, streamed through the township to protest the racist education system of apartheid.

For decades, apartheid forced many indignities on the non-white population of the country. Perhaps most tragically, it relegated Black South Africans to a sub-par education and reinforced their place in a segregated society.

But few could have predicted the state violence that followed.

The final straw for Mazibuko and other student leaders was the switch to instruction in Afrikaans – a language few of them understood, and the language of the oppressors.

“When we were raising the hands and fingers of peace, we were met with bullets. I still feel guilty today that I led students and children out of the classroom to be killed,” he says.

Hundreds of students were killed, scores of student leaders, like Mazibuko, were sent to prison, and many more went into exile.

The Soweto uprisings, as they have become known, changed the trajectory of the anti-apartheid movement, and set South Africa on the eventual path of liberation.

But as South Africans celebrate 30 years of democracy this week, many educators and activists believe that there is a crisis hollowing out the country’s education system – a crisis that threatens democracy’s hard-fought gains.

“They sold out. Many of the leaders that were supposed to be leading have left this community. They left the people they were fighting for,” says Mazibuko.

Dropping standards

Just up the road from the iconic intersection, Prince Mulwela teaches a geography lesson to senior students at Morris Isaacson High School. It is a misty fall day; most of the lights in the classroom aren’t working.

The school is famous for its instrumental role in the Soweto uprisings, but Mulwela is focused on today’s problems. During his 18 years at the school, he says it has gotten more and more difficult to educate its students.

“It is becoming harder now because the learners we are teaching are so very problematic,” he says, adding that over the past decade children arriving at high school have been increasingly unprepared.

The statistics do make sobering reading.

Despite substantial education funding, South African students consistently rank among the lowest in global assessments of literacy and numeracy skills.

Out of the 50 countries of a well-respected assessment of fourth graders, South African students ranked last – more than 80% of 9- to-10-year-olds in the country cannot read for meaning.

However, in at least one study, South African sixth-graders do far worse in math than students in Kenya, a much poorer country.

Motshekga says more focus needs to be put on early childhood education and instruction in each learner’s mother tongue, part of a controversial education bill that the government hopes to bring into law. South Africa has eleven official languages.

“I’m very encouraged. I think from where we started off, I don’t think we could have done better,” says Motshekga, who grew up in Soweto.

A challenging history

To illustrate the country’s challenges, Motshekga refers to her own experience. She says she was the only person from her street to attain a proper education in the 1970s. 

Her mother and grandmother were teachers and were able to work around the apartheid system and get her into a Catholic school to finish high school. But the vast majority did not. “That’s why most of my generation are illiterate, unemployed, and poor,” she says.

When Nelson Mandela became president 30 years ago, his ruling African National Congress (ANC) party faced enormous challenges to fix education.

The apartheid education system was a convoluted and racist bureaucracy that had to be undone. There were not enough trained teachers and certainly not enough classrooms.

Now, more than 98% of children aged seven to 14 are in school, according to government statistics. The president recently praised students for their high passing rate in their final school leaving exams known as Matric.

But education experts say that ignores falling standards and high dropout rates.

“In fact, they lie about it when every year we have the festival around the Matric results and they tell us how well they’ve done when it’s not really true,” says Ann Bernstein, the executive director of the Centre of Development and Enterprise, an independent think tank.

Motshekga denied that standards were dropping and said the results show progress.

Bernstein says that South Africa has made meaningful progress in education, but that those gains have slipped in recent years due to corruption, politics, and a lack of political will.

A powerful teachers’ union has also been accused of fostering a “jobs for cash” scheme for teacher placement. Opposition parties and groups like Corruption Watch say that not enough has been done to clean up the education system.

Responding to the most recent accusation relating to jobs, the South African Democratic Teachers Union said last month it “will never condone or tolerate criminal acts in education. The selling of posts is corruption.”

“I think it’s time for the minister to go,” says Bernstein.

For educators like Mulwela, at Morris Isaacson, the problem is obvious. He says education, like many other facets of the state, has been overtaken by a culture of patronage.

“People that are loyal to the ANC, cadres that are loyal to the ANC, are getting jobs in education,” he says. “The government should be saying, ‘let us get people who are qualified for these positions.’”

Earlier this year, the ANC Secretary General admitted that cadre development could be subject to abuse, but said it was key for transformation.

An uncertain future

Many of Mulwela’s students are proud of their school and aware of its role in the protests of 1976.

“They put their lives in danger for a better future, for a better education,” says Mbali Msimanga, a student in her final year.

But she says her generation still faces an uncertain future.

South Africa has the highest unemployment rate in the world and many university graduates struggle to enter the workforce.

“It is scary for us to be sitting at home and doing nothing,” says Msimanga.

“Especially when you went to university for so long and you have a degree, but you are still struggling to get a job,” her classmate, Atlegang Alcock, agrees.

The personal sacrifices of the generations before them were immense.

Mazibuko spent 11 months in solitary confinement at the Fort Prison in Johannesburg, followed by seven years in Robben Island prison off Cape Town – where Mandela, too, served a lengthy term – for calling for a fair education system. He believes that the next generation is not yet “enjoying the fruit of the tree.”

“When we were marching and doing those things, we said that the tree of liberation shall be watered by the blood of the martyrs,” he says. “These kids are not even enjoying the shade of the tree. And for that, I think our country and our leaders are still going to pay dearly.”

In South Africa’s upcoming election, after 30 years of ANC government, that sentiment could be put to the test.

The raid was carried out by authorities from the Special Public Prosecutor Against Impunity and the Civil Police, government lawyers said, after an investigation was opened into the treatment of migrant children in Texas shelters.

“The Public Prosecutor received a complaint referencing and highlighting incidents regarding Guatemalan children and teenagers being subject to vulnerabilities in shelters in Texas, connected with a network which [involves] NGOs that operate in the United States and Guatemala,” a spokesperson for the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Juan Luis Pantaleon, said.

Pantaleon said the raid was to gather information for the investigation. It included document searches and seizures, the prosecutor’s office said on X.

The complaint was filed in Guatemala but authorities requested the help of the Texas Attorney General’s Office since some of the shelters allegedly involved are located there.

Save the Children, a British organization that helps minors in disasters and humanitarian crises, said in a statement that it was “not given any specific accusation and there is no evidence that support any accusation of improper conduct.”

It added that the organization does “not facilitate – and we never have – any transfer of children or teenagers out of Guatemala.”

Save the Children also said that it answers to the UK’s Charity Commission, which has its books audited annually.

The Guatemalan Prosecutor for Impunity, Rafael Curruchiche, said the case is “transnational and of great transcendence,” involving several organizations.

Curruchiche himself was sanctioned by the European Council last February with asset freezes and listed among those “responsible for undermining democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful transfer of power in Guatemala.”

He is among other Central American officials who have been sanctioned with visa denial or cancellation for allegedly undermining democracy and the rule of law, including obstructing corruption investigations and raising “spurious” claims against other officials, according to a 2022 Report to Congress by the US Department of State.

Guatemala’s current President Bernardo Arévalo, an anti-corruption figure who defied the odds and won the election last year in a landslide, has promised to empower the judiciary.

He has, however, been constrained by the Guatemalan prosecutor’s office – led by US-sanctioned Attorney General Consuelo Porras ­­– that has made two requests to withdraw his immunity and is accused of attempting to disqualify the results of his election.

Shaima Refaat Alareer, the daughter of a prominent Palestinian poet, was killed alongside her family in an Israeli airstrike on a house west of Gaza City on Friday, according to multiple sources, four months after her father died in a similar attack.

Alareer’s husband and their two-month-old son also died in the strike, according to eyewitnesses and family friends.

Shaima was the daughter of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed along with several other family members when an Israeli airstrike hit their home in the Shujayya neighborhood in December.

Residents of Al-Rimal neighborhood said Shaima and her family had been displaced from their home in Shujayya nearly four months ago.

Shaima had posted news of her motherhood in a recent message on her private Facebook account, according to Abu Toha. He shared a screenshot of her message to her deceased father.

“I have a beautiful news for you, I wish I could convey it to you while you are in front of me, I present to you your first grandchild. Do you know, my father, that you have become a grandfather?” Shaima wrote.

“This is your grandson Abd al-Rahman whom I have long imagined you carrying, but I never imagined that I would lose you early even before you see him.”

A 64-year-old British man is receiving “critical care” after he was attacked by a shark 10 meters from the shore in Scarborough, Trinidad and Tobago.

According to Farley Chavez Augustine, the Chief Secretary of Tobago, the man was attacked on Friday morning local time by what appeared to be a bull shark.

Augustine said that the victim’s left thigh and left arm from the elbow down were “severed,” and that the man’s stomach was lacerated. Some of his fingers were able to be reattached after surgery at Scarborough General Hospital, Augustine said in a press conference late Friday night.

Despite being in the ICU and sedated, the man is “stable and is doing well,” Augustine said. The man is mostly sedated because his “wounds will have him in significant pain,” he added.

The victim was vacationing in Tobago with his wife and friends, Augustine said, and was scheduled to return from the Caribbean to the United Kingdom on Friday. The group planned on taking one last swim before preparing to leave, which is when the shark attack took place.

State broadcaster Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT) posted a video of an eyewitness describing the incident. Orion Jakerov, water sports manager at the Starfish Resort, said that the man was in “waist-deep to shoulder-high water,” with his back turned to the shark, though none of the group were originally aware of its presence.

The people accompanying the man “were trying to physically fight off the shark” after it attacked, Jakerov added.

The shark is believed to have been between eight and 10 foot long, Augustine said. The Tobago House of Assembly offered a $10,000 Trinidad and Tobago Dollar reward (around $1,470 USD) for the successful capture of the shark, but later recalled this bounty.

A number of beaches around the area of the incident have been temporarily closed, including the Buccoo Reef Marine Park, authorities said.

The British High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago posted travel guidance related to the attack on X, noting the closure of the marine park.

A Russian oil refinery in the southern Krasnodar region was impacted by a suspected Ukrainian drone attack on Saturday, according to local officials.

Regional governor Veniamin Kondratyev said Kyiv had launched the drones in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Russian state media outlet TASS reported that the oil refinery, in Slavyansk-on-Kuban in Krasnodar Krai, had partially suspended operations, citing Eduard Trudnev, security director for the Slavyansk ECO Group, which runs the facility.

Trudnev said work at the plant had been “partially suspended” after 10 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flew into the refinery, causing a fire to break out.

“The presence of hidden damage is possible,” said Trudnev.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said on Saturday that Kyiv had launched 66 drones to attack the Krasnodar region, but all were intercepted.

Kondratyev said there were no casualties due to the refinery fire.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, four thermal energy plants were “severely damaged” after Russian attacks overnight, according to a statement from DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.

The DTEK statement added that “at this moment, power engineers are trying to eliminate the consequences of the attack.”

Ukraine’s Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko posted on Facebook that “facilities in Dnipropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lviv regions were attacked.”

A power engineer at one of the facilities suffered a concussion, Halushchenko said.

Serhii Lysak, head of the Dnipropetrovsk regional military administration, said in an update on Telegram that the region had experienced a “massive attack.”

Although air defenses intercepted 13 missiles in Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih and Pavlohrad districts, energy facilities were damaged in Dnipro and Kryvyi Rih districts, triggering fires and injuring a 39-year-old man. Lysak also said there were “interruptions in the water supply in the Kryvyi Rih district.”

Svitlana Onyshchuk, head of the Ivano-Frankivsk regional military administration, said on Telegram on Saturday that a “critical infrastructure facility” in the Carpathian region was struck, causing a fire that has since been put out.

DTEK said that its thermal power plants have been attacked more than 170 times since the beginning of the war.

Mykola Oleshchuk, Commander of the Ukrainian Air Force, said on Saturday that Russia had attacked Ukraine overnight with “34 air-, land-, and sea-launched missiles,” with 21 of those missiles intercepted.

Hospitals evacuated

On Friday, patients at two Kyiv hospitals were evacuated after Belarus claimed soldiers were sheltering within, prompting fears in Ukraine of a possible attack on the facilities.

A video surfaced online showing the head of the Belarusian KGB security service alleging the two medical facilities were housing soldiers.

Belarusian KGB head Ivan Tertel claimed during a speech on Thursday that Ukrainian fighters were “hiding behind the backs of children,” and provided the addresses of the two hospitals located in northeast Kyiv. One of them is a children’s hospital.

“The enemy has practically announced its strike” and “even named the addresses,” Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said in response, calling it “a provocation used as a pretext for a strike on our social critical infrastructure.”

Fears of a potential attack prompted authorities urgently to start moving patients to other medical facilities in the Ukrainian capital.

“This is an absolute lie and provocation of the enemy” aimed to justify strikes at the social infrastructure of the capital, the Kyiv city administration said in a statement.

Videos shared online showed medical personnel hurrying to move patients and equipment to ambulances that were awaiting to receive them.

By Friday evening, all patients were successfully moved to other medical facilities, Klitschko said, thanking the doctors, technical staff and ambulance workers for their “prompt and well-coordinated work.”

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) also denounced the claim that soldiers were based at the hospitals, calling it “a manifestation of information and psychological special operations that play into the hands of Russia.”

Ukrainian authorities are yet to say whether the urgent transfer has resulted in complications for any of the patients.

China has rolled out the largest restructuring of its military in almost a decade, focusing on technology-driven strategic forces equipped for modern warfare, as Beijing vies with Washington for military primacy in a region rife with geopolitical tensions.

In a surprise move last week, Chinese leader Xi Jinping scrapped the Strategic Support Force (SSF), a military branch he created in 2015 to integrate the People’s Liberation Army’s space, cyber, electronic and psychological warfare capabilities as part of a sweeping overhaul of the armed forces.

In its place, Xi inaugurated the Information Support Force, which he said was “a brand-new strategic arm of the PLA and a key underpinning of coordinated development and application of the network information system.”

The new force would play an important role in helping the Chinese military “fight and win in modern warfare,” he said at a ceremony last Friday.

At a news conference on the same day, a spokesperson for China’s Defense Ministry appeared to suggest the SSF was effectively broken into three units – the Information Support Force, the Aerospace Force and the Cyberspace Force – which will answer directly to the Central Military Commission, the body at the top of the military chain of command headed by Xi.

Under the new structure, the PLA now consists of four services – the army, navy, air force and the rocket force – plus four arms: the three units spun off from the SSF and the Joint Logistic Support Force, according to ministry spokesperson Wu Qian.

Experts on the Chinese military say the reorganization enhances Xi’s direct control over the PLA’s strategic capabilities and underscores China’s ambitions in better mastering AI and other new technologies to prepare for what it calls the “intelligentized warfare” of the future.

The restructuring follows Xi’s sweeping corruption purge of the PLA last year, which ensnared powerful generals and shook up the rocket force, an elite branch overseeing China’s fast-expanding arsenal of nuclear and ballistic missiles.

The Information Support Force will be led by top generals from the now-defunct SSF.

SSF deputy commander Bi Yi was appointed commander of the new unit, while Li Wei, the SSF’s political commissar, will take the same role in the Information Support Force, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.

There was no mention of any new appointment for SSF commander Ju Qiansheng, who last year spurred speculation when he disappeared from public view amid a flurry of military purges before eventually resurfacing at a conference in late January.

‘Better visibility’

Longtime PLA watchers say the latest reorganization is unlikely the result of the recent corruption purges, but rather a reflection that the SSF wasn’t an ideal organizational format for the Chinese military.

“It shows that the SSF was not a satisfactory arrangement. It reduced Xi’s visibility of important functions and did not really improve coordination between space, cyber, and network defense forces,” said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University.

Before its disbandment, the SSF had two principal units – the Aerospace Systems Department overseeing the PLA’s space operations and reconnaissance, and the Network System Department tasked with cyber, electronic and psychological warfare capabilities.

“I think the new structure will give Xi better visibility into what is happening in space, cyberspace, and network management. These functions will now be supervised at his level and not through the Strategic Support Force, which served as a middleman,” Wuthnow said.

The lack of such visibility could bear high risks, especially during times of heightened tension and deep distrust between Beijing and Washington.

Last year, the US shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon after it traversed the continental United States. The incident caused a fresh crisis between the two powers and plunged bilateral relations into a deep freeze for months.

Though US intelligence officials said the balloon was part of an extensive surveillance program run by the Chinese military, Xi may not have been aware of the mission.

US President Joe Biden said last June that the Chinese leader didn’t know about the balloon and was “very embarrassed” when it was shot down after it floated off course into American airspace.

James Char, a research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said the conduct of strategic reconnaissance during the spy balloon incident would have been under the purview of the SSF’s Aerospace Systems Department.

“That was one of the roles and responsibilities of the PLASSF,” he said.

It is unclear if the balloon incident contributed to Xi’s decision to disband the SSF.

Wuthnow, of the National Defense University, said the newly created Information Support Force will likely take charge of communications and network defense for the PLA.

“Getting these things right is of huge importance for the PLA in any future conflict, and they have been paying close attention to these functions and probably drawing lessons for their own organization from the war in Ukraine,” he said, referring to Russia’s ongoing invasion of its neighbor.

“So it makes sense that the [Central Military Commission] chairman would want to play a more direct role in that area.”

‘Intelligentized warfare’

The latest shake-up is likely the result of an ongoing review of how the military can better meet the strategic objectives of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, according to Char.

“I suppose the reorganization better reflects the importance the PLA has placed on speeding up the development of intelligentized warfare” brought by a new round of technological and industrial advancement, he said.

The concept of “intelligentized warfare” drew attention in a 2019 Chinese defense white paper that highlighted the military application of cutting-edge tech such as AI, quantum information, big data and cloud computing.

“The landscape of international military competition is undergoing historic changes. New and high-tech military technologies with information technology as the core is advancing with each passing day, and there’s a prevailing trend to develop long-range precision, intelligent, stealthy or unmanned weaponry and equipment,” the white paper said.

“War is accelerating its evolution in form towards informationized warfare, and intelligentized warfare is on the horizon.”

The creation of the Information Support Force as a new branch directly under the Central Military Commission also underscores the importance of information dominance in modern warfare.

A commentary in the PLA Daily, the Chinese military’s official mouthpiece, described network information technology as “the biggest variable” in enhancing combat capability.

“Modern wars are competitions between systems and structures, where control over information equates to control over the initiative in war,” it said.

The emphasis on information dominance and “intelligentized warfare” also has significant implications for any potential future conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

China’s Communist Party views Taiwan as part of its territory, despite never having controlled it, and has vowed to take control of the island – by force if necessary.

Char said in the event of a Taiwan conflict, the Information Support Force “would likely take over as the tip of the spear in supporting the PLA’s attempts to dominate the information space before Beijing’s adversaries can do so.”

Julian Assange started his WikiLeaks whistleblowing website on a quest for “radical transparency and truth,” a mission that turned an already polarizing personality into a notorious character and earned him crusaders and critics in equal measure.

The long-running battle for his extradition to the United States continued this month, with US lawyers providing the UK High Court with a series of assurances around the 52-year-old WikiLeaks founder’s First Amendment rights and that he would not receive the death penalty if he were handed over. Those are set to be reviewed at a fresh hearing on May 20.

It has been 12 years since the embattled Australian has been able to walk freely. He’s spent the past five years in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison and nearly seven years before that holed up at the Ecuadorian embassy in the English capital, trying to avoid arrest.

He faces life imprisonment in the US for publishing hundreds of thousands of sensitive military and government documents supplied by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning more than a dozen years ago. But recently there has been increased pressure for Assange’s case to be dismissed.

Just this month, President Joe Biden offered Assange’s supporters a glimmer of hope saying his administration was “considering” a request from Australia to drop its charges against the WikiLeaks founder. The remarks were described as an “encouraging” signal by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who added that Assange had “already paid a significant price” and “enough is enough.”

The ascent of Assange

Born in Townsville, eastern Queensland, in 1971, Assange had a less than conventional upbringing. His education was a combination of home schooling and correspondence courses, since his family moved frequently.

In his teens, he discovered a natural proficiency for computing, but his activities – which included accessing several secure systems, including the Pentagon and NASA, under the hacker alias “Mendax” – soon put him on the radar of authorities. In 1991, he was charged with 31 counts of cybercrime by Australian authorities but only received a small fine at sentencing after pleading guilty to most of the charges.

Following his brush with the law, Assange worked as a computer security consultant, traveled and briefly studied physics at the University of Melbourne before withdrawing from the course.

His vision when starting WikiLeaks in 2006 was that it would be a kind of online repository, which would publish anonymously submitted documents, video and other sensitive materials after vetting them.

It ran for several years, uploading material ranging from the US military’s operating manual for its detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to internal documents from the Church of Scientology and some of 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s stolen emails.

On first impressions, Assange was “vague” and “elusive,” Shubert recalled. With the benefit of hindsight, she now believes his behavior was the result of “sitting on this cache of documents from Chelsea Manning and trying to figure out how to publish it.”

WikiLeaks ultimately released the video from the US helicopter attack in Iraq, sparking condemnation from human rights activists and earning rebuke from US defense officials. By the year’s end, the organization had gone on to publish nearly half a million classified documents relating to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Under a global spotlight

As WikiLeaks continued its disclosures, Assange found himself the latest cause célèbre – his every movement intensely scrutinized. And with each headline, his infamy grew among those who did not share his vision.

Fidel Narvaez, former consul of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, met Assange in 2011, after WikiLeaks released another huge archive – this time of secret US diplomatic cables. The pair became close friends through the years.

Assange’s story, as the “teen hacker who became insurgent in information war” as the Guardian put it in 2011, sounded like the plot of a Hollywood blockbuster. Soon his tale was immortalized in documentaries and films, perhaps most notably in 2013’s “The Fifth Estate,” which Assange labeled a “geriatric snoozefest” that used what he considered flawed source material.

For journalist and author James Ball, who briefly worked at WikiLeaks and was based for a time at Ellingham Hall, a remote manor house north of London where Assange holed up before seeking refuge in Ecuador’s embassy, the infancy of WikiLeaks was an “exhilarating” time.

WikiLeaks became a household name thanks to its frequent data dumps, but some were starting to question the founder’s behavior. For many, his polarizing personality became an issue.

Ball added: “He sort of liked the attention. … He liked the fuss that (the disclosures) caused but he was oddly incurious actually about the documents.”

Others offer alternative explanations for Assange’s eccentricities. Narvaez said the Assange he knew was “hyperactive and workaholic” and pointed to his diagnosed autism spectrum disorder as an element of his personality.

Shifting attitudes

Such questions aside, WikiLeaks essentially ground to a halt when Assange was accused of sexual assault in Sweden in August 2010. The organization’s focus shifted from offense to defense, despite the transparency campaigner’s vehement denial of the allegations against him. There were mounting calls for Assange to leave WikiLeaks and, when he didn’t, many cut ties with it.

Assange labeled it “a smear campaign” orchestrated to pave the way for his further extradition to the US and refused to go to Sweden for questioning.

In June 2012, while out on bail from UK officials over the Swedish probe, he opted for a nuclear option and knocked on the door at 3 Hans Crescent, where he requested political asylum from Ecuador.

Outside the confines of his diplomatic shelter, the world questioned whether Assange was trying to circumvent justice.

Over time, his relationship with his host soured along with the arrival of a new president in Ecuador in 2017. Assange was “an inherited problem” for Lenin Moreno, who was facing pressure from the US to expel him from the diplomatic bolthole.

“It was obvious that former President Moreno was going to give in to external and internal pressure,” Narvaez said.

Narvaez, seen as too close to the unwanted houseguest, was asked to leave in July 2018 amid a shake-up of the diplomatic mission’s staff. “I left him isolated, and I was the last person he trusted,” Narvaez said.

Nine months later, in April 2019, Assange was pulled kicking and screaming from the building by London’s Metropolitan Police on an extradition warrant from the US Justice Department.

Legal limbo

Assange has since lived, mostly isolated, in a three-by-two-meter cell at Belmarsh prison in southeast London. The prison has the capacity to hold over 900 inmates and is known for once housing infamous terror suspects such as Abu Hamza al-Masri within its high-security unit.

The US has accused Assange of endangering lives by publishing secret military documents in 2010 and 2011. He is wanted on 18 criminal charges relating to his organization’s dissemination of classified material and diplomatic cables. If convicted, he could face up to 175 years in prison conditions much harsher than here in the UK.

Fighting his corner since he entered Belmarsh: his wife, Stella Assange. The couple married in March 2022, while he was in prison.

Stella, the mother of Assange’s two young sons, called her husband a “political prisoner” outside court last month and has repeatedly voiced her fear that, if extradited, he could take his own life.

She labeled the US’ latest guarantees that Assange could lean on First Amendment protections at trial  “blatant weasel words” in a statement on April 16.

“The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism,” she said.

Assange’s team argue he is being extradited for political reasons and that a handover to the US violates the European Convention on Human Rights. It’s a claim supported by independent experts.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, in February called on the British government to halt a possible extradition and reiterated her concerns about Assange’s fitness and “the potential for him to receive a wholly disproportionate sentence in the United States.”

Marking Assange’s five years at Belmarsh, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard warned that Assange, if extradited, would “be at risk of serious abuse, including prolonged solitary confinement, which would violate the prohibition on torture or other ill-treatment.” She added that US assurances over his treatment could not be relied upon as they are “riddled with loopholes.”

Far-reaching repercussions

Beyond the personal costs for Assange, many have expressed concern about the broader implications for press freedom around the world if he is sent to the US.

Five international media organizations that collaborated with Assange have called the US government to end its prosecution of him for publishing classified material. In a 2022 letter, representatives for The New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel argued publishing is not a crime.

“Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalised, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker,” the letter stated.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said anyone who cares about press freedoms should not be comforted by the First Amendment assurances offered by US lawyers.

He continued, “And if the government is successful, no journalist will ever again be able to publish US government secrets without risking (their) liberty.”

George Mallory is renowned for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s — until the mountain claimed his life.

Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Mallory’s hopes and fears about ascending Everest, leading up to the last days before he disappeared while heading for its peak.

On June 8, 1924, Mallory and fellow climber Andrew Irvine departed from their expedition team in a push for the summit; they were never seen alive again.

Mallory’s words, however, are now available to read online in their entirety for the first time. Magdalene College, Cambridge, where Mallory studied as an undergraduate from 1905 to 1908, recently digitized hundreds of pages of correspondence and other documents written and received by him.

Over the past 18 months, archivists scanned the documents in preparation for the centennial of Mallory’s disappearance. The college will display a selection of Mallory’s letters and possessions in the exhibit “George Mallory: Magdalene to the Mountain,” opening June 20.

The Everest letters outline Mallory’s meticulous preparations and equipment tests, and his optimism about their prospects. But the letters also show the darker side of mountaineering: bad weather, health issues, setbacks and doubts.

Days before his disappearance, Mallory wrote that the odds were “50 to 1 against us” in the last letter to his wife, Ruth, dated May 27, 1924.

“This has been a bad time altogether,” Mallory wrote. “I look back on tremendous efforts & exhaustion & dismal looking out of a tent door and onto a world of snow & vanishing hopes.”

He went on to describe a harrowing brush with death during a recent climb, when the ground beneath his feet collapsed, leaving him suspended “half-blind & breathless,” his weight supported only by his ice axe wedged across a crevasse as he dangled over “a very unpleasant black hole.”

Other letters Mallory exchanged with Ruth were written at the time of their courtship, while he was serving in Britain’s artillery regiment during World War I. Throughout his travels, correspondence from Ruth provided him with much-needed stability during the most challenging times, said project lead Katy Green, a college archivist at Magdalene College.

“She was the ‘rock’ at home, he says himself in his letters,” Green said. The archivist recounted one note in which Mallory told Ruth: “I’m so glad that you never wobble, because I would wobble without you.”

Yet while Mallory was clearly devoted to his wife, he nonetheless repeatedly returned to the Himalayas despite her mounting fears for his safety.

“There’s something in him that drove him,” Green said. “It might have been his wartime experience, or it might have just been the sort of person that he was.”

‘Documents of his character’

Together, the letters offer readers a rare glimpse of the man behind the legend, said Jochen Hemmleb, an author and alpinist who was part of the Everest expedition that found Mallory’s body in 1999.

“They are really personal. They are documents of his character. They provide unique insights into his life, and especially into the 1924 expedition — his state of mind, his accurate planning, his ambitions,” said Hemmleb, who was not involved in the scanning project. “It’s such a treasure that these are now digitized and available for everyone to read.”

Frozen in place

Three of the digitized letters — written to Mallory by his brother, his sister and a family friend — were recovered from Mallory’s body by the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition, which ascended Everest seeking the remains of Mallory and Irvine.

On May 1, 1999, expedition member and mountaineer Conrad Anker found a frozen corpse at an altitude of around 26,700 feet (8,138 meters) and identified it as Mallory’s from a name tag that was sewn into his clothes.

Mallory’s body was interred where it lay at the family’s request, said Anker, who was not involved in the letter digitizing project.

Mount Everest, the highest peak in the Himalayan mountain range, is also the tallest mountain on Earth, rising 29,035 feet (8,850 meters) above sea level on the border between Nepal and Tibet — an autonomous region in China. Its Tibetan name is Chomolungma, meaning “Goddess Mother of the World,” and its Nepali name is Sagarmatha, meaning “Goddess of the Sky.”

However, these names were unknown to 19th century British surveyors who mapped the region, and in 1865 the Royal Geographical Society named the peak Mount Everest after British surveyor Sir George Everest, a former surveyor general of India.

Mallory participated in all three of Britain’s first forays onto Everest’s slopes: in 1921, 1922 and 1924. When he vanished in 1924, he was less than two weeks shy of his 38th birthday.

Many have speculated about whether Mallory and Irvine managed to reach Everest’s summit. The climbers were last seen in the early afternoon of June 8 by expedition member and geologist Noel Odell, who was following behind and glimpsed them from a distance. Odell later found some of their equipment at a campsite, but there was no trace of Mallory and Irvine.

“(Mallory) risked a lot despite the fact that he had a family back home and three small children,” Hemmleb said. “We don’t know whether it was really irresponsible to make that final attempt, because we don’t really know what happened. It could be that in the end, he simply had bad luck.”

So close, yet so far

Decades after Mallory’s death, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and British mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary became the first to reach Everest’s peak, summiting on May 29, 1953. In the years that followed, thousands attempted to climb Everest, with nearly 4,000 people reaching its summit. More than 330 climbers have died trying since modern records were kept, according to the Himalayan Database, which compiles records of all expeditions in the Himalayas; some of those bodies remain on the mountain, frozen where they fell and visible to climbers who pass them by.

“If you’re out in this environment, you make peace with your own mortality and the deaths of others,” Anker said. “You’re above 8,000 meters, and when there are weather changes or your own systems cease to function due to the lack of oxygen, it gets serious really quickly.”

When mountaineers are close to a mountain’s summit, they sometimes proceed even under dangerous conditions due to so-called summit fever, a compulsion to reach the peak even at the cost of their own safety. It’s unknown whether Mallory was in the grip of summit fever when he died, but he might have thought that his reputation depended on summiting.

“That was going to be the defining moment in his life,” Anker said.

By comparison, Mallory’s team member Edward Norton had attempted to summit four days earlier but turned back at roughly the same altitude where Mallory and Irvine were seen for the last time.

“I had a conversation with one of Edward Norton’s sons a couple of years ago,” Hemmleb said. “When I asked him, do you think it was mere luck that your father survived and Mallory died? He said, ‘No, I think there was one difference: My father, Edward Norton, didn’t need the mountain.’”

As a climber himself, Hemmleb took that message to heart.

“That is something I personally learned from Mallory,” he said. “You need to be very careful not to make yourself dependent on that summit success.”

A century has elapsed since Mallory’s death, but the digitizing of these letters assures that his story will keep being told, Hemmleb said.

“This will continue beyond my own lifetime, I’m certain of that,” he added. “In a sense, it’s the expedition that never ends.”

Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.

A ubiquitous, resilient and seemingly harmless plant is fueling an increase in large, fast-moving and destructive wildfires in the United States.

Grass is as plentiful as sunshine, and under the right weather conditions is like gasoline for wildfires: All it takes is a spark for it to explode.

Planet-warming emissions are wreaking havoc on temperature and precipitation, resulting in larger and more frequent fires. Those fires are fueling the vicious cycle of ecological destruction that are helping to make grass king.

“Name an environment and there’s a grass that can survive there,” said Adam Mahood, research ecologist with the US Department of Agriculture’s research service. “Any 10-foot area that’s not paved is going to have some kind of grass on it.”

Over the last three decades, the number of US homes destroyed by wildfire has more than doubled as fires burn bigger and badder, a recent study found. Most of those homes were burned not by forest fires, but by fires racing through grass and shrubs.

The West is most at risk, the study found, where more than two-thirds of the homes burned over the last 30 years were located. Of those, nearly 80% were burned in grass and shrub fires.

One part of the equation is people are building closer to fire-prone wildlands, in the so-called wildland-urban interface. The amount of land burning in this sensitive area has grown exponentially since the 1990s. So has the number of houses. Around 44 million houses were in the interface as of 2020, an increase of 46% over the last 30 years, the same study found.

Building in areas more likely to burn comes with obvious risks, but because humans are also responsible for starting most fires, it also increases the chance a fire will ignite in the first place.

More than 80,000 homes are in the wildland-urban interface, in the sparsely populated parts of Kansas and Colorado that Bill King manages. The US Forest Service officer said living on the edge of nature requires an active hand to prevent destruction.

Property owners “need to do their part too, because these fires – they get so big and intense and sometimes wind-driven that they could spot miles ahead even if we have a huge fuel break,” King said.

‘A perfect storm’ for fire

Climate change-fueled fire is attacking the western half of the US on all fronts.

“Globally, the places that burn the most are places that have intermediate precipitation,” said John Abatzoglou, a climate professor at the University of California, Merced. “It’s a little bit like Goldilocks. Not too wet, not too dry, just right, with plenty of ignition.”

In America’s grassy heartland, the typically dry and often windy Plains, a series of compounding extremes across seasons are creating ideal fire fuel conditions in perennial grasses. Grass is more plentiful here than in other regions in the US, offering more continuous fuel for fires to feed off.

The region is seeing more megafires like Texas’s largest fire, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, and more destructive ones like Colorado’s Marshall Fire, which burned through more than 1,000 homes in 2021.

Rainy springs fuel more grass growth. Then it goes dormant, or plays dead, in the winter. Warmer winters with less snow cover, especially in the Northern Plains, expose the grass to warmer, drier spells in the late winter and early spring, according to King and Todd Lindley, a fire weather expert for the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma.

Grass is uniquely flammable because of its sensitivity to weather, Lindley said. Unlike in forests, it doesn’t take long spells of warm, dry weather to turn grass to tinder. Moisture can be sapped from the plant in as little as an hour and even a day after rain. Throw in a spark, strong winds and invasive shrubs that burn hotter and longer and you have a recipe for grass fire disaster.

“These compound extremes, these sequences of extremes that follow one another, if you get the right sequence, it can be game on for this sort of wildfire,” Abatzoglou said. “Basically, you’re creating a perfect storm for the fire to spread there.”

Grass invasion

Extreme drought and years of forest neglect are creating larger and more intense fires in western forests, King said.

“When I started 30 years ago, a big fire was 30,000 acres, and now that’s normal, that’s typical,” said King. “I’d have maybe one a year, one every couple of years of that size, and now we hear of 1-million-acre forest fires.”

Grass exists in forest systems, too, and acts like a fuse to connect easier-to-ignite finer fuels to larger, drought-impacted tree systems, creating and spreading more intense fires.

When the trees die, grass moves in. Grass recovers from fire much faster than other plants and can burn again, sometimes within a matter of months. King has seen this firsthand.

“You could have green grasses coming up in a burned-grass landscape within a day or two, that’s how fast it rejuvenates,” King said.“Forest recovery could take years or generations, or never recover in our lifetime, or our generation’s.”

As more vegetation in the West burns, it’s being replaced by both native and nonnative grass.

In the desert, it’s creating fire where it wasn’t before, USDA’s Mahood said. The same drought-fueled fires are now becoming bigger in deserts because of annual grasses, which unlike the perennial grasses in the Plains, don’t exist year-round.

These grasses take advantage of rare bursts of rain to propagate, then die, forming a carpet of fire fuel on the desert floor.

Two recent fires in California’s Mojave National Preserve are perfect examples, Mahood said. Those fires took advantage of invasive red brome grass and burned hundreds of thousands of acres of Mojave Desert and over a million iconic Joshua Trees.

The increasing hot and dry conditions then suppress native plant recovery.  The result is more grass.

The West’s stubby, iconic sagebrush is the single biggest ecosystem in the Lower 48, but half of it has been lost or degraded over the last 20 years. A roughly Delaware-sized area of sagebrush falls victim to grass, fire and other stressors each year, a USGS study found.

With more grass and a complex web of climate stressors comes more fire risk now and increasingly in the future.

“It may seem bad now, but this will probably not seem nearly as bad in the next decade,” Mahood said. “Think about how bad the fire season was two decades ago – now, that seems like nothing.”

Britain’s King Charles III will resume public duties next week following “a period of treatment and recuperation,” Buckingham Palace announced Friday, two months after revealing that he was being treated for cancer.

The 75-year-old monarch will be joined by his wife, Queen Camilla, for a visit to a cancer treatment center on Tuesday “where they will meet medical specialists and patients,” according to a palace statement.

It is understood that the facility is not the same treatment center that has been directly involved in the King’s medical care.

It will be the first of several engagements the King is expected to carry out in the weeks ahead. The palace also announced that the British sovereign would host Japanese Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako for a state visit in June.

“As the first anniversary of the Coronation approaches, Their Majesties remain deeply grateful for the many kindnesses and good wishes they have received from around the world throughout the joys and challenges of the past year,” the palace statement concluded.

A royal source said there were no plans to share any further details specific to the monarch’s condition or treatment plan.

However, a Buckingham Palace spokesperson added that “His Majesty is greatly encouraged to be resuming some public-facing duties and very grateful to his medical team for their continued care and expertise.”

Friday’s announcement was accompanied by a new portrait of the King and Queen taken to mark one year since the couple were crowned at Westminster Abbey in London last May.

The picture was taken by Millie Pilkington, one of the UK’s most respected portrait photographers, within the gardens of Buckingham Palace on April 10, the morning after the pair’s 19th wedding anniversary. Camilla, 76, is dressed in an indigo day dress with velvet detail by couturier Fiona Clare.

The palace spokesperson said the King will continue treatment but that doctors were “sufficiently pleased with the progress made so far” to let him resume some public-facing duties.

The spokesperson said it was “too early to say” how much longer the King’s treatment would continue but his medical team “remain positive” regarding his ongoing recovery. They added that upcoming events in his diary will be adapted where necessary to minimize any risks to his recuperation.

The palace did not specify how many engagements were being added to the King’s diary or whether he would be able to attend his birthday parade in London or the D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations in Normandy in June.

Instead, the spokesperson said “planning continues for ways in which Their Majesties may attend such Summer and Autumn engagements, though nothing can be confirmed or guaranteed at this stage.”

Forthcoming public engagements will continue to be announced closer to the time and in consultation with the King’s doctors. But the palace spokesperson did clarify that Charles was not expected to carry out a full summer program.

Charles’ last public appearance was on Easter Sunday when he went to church in Windsor with several family members. He delighted waiting crowds by making an unexpected walkabout and heading over to them after leaving St. George’s Chapel. He stopped to chat to well-wishers and shake hands with members of the public.

Throughout his treatment, the King has continued to carry out his constitutional duties, receiving his daily red boxes and paperwork. This week he gave royal assent to UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s controversial plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Charles’ rubberstamping of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, which was approved earlier this week, was announced in the House of Lords on Thursday.

He has also continued to hold private meetings, most recently holding an audience with Adm. Benjamin Key, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, on April 16.

Charles announced his cancer diagnosis and that he would step back from public-facing duties while undergoing treatment in early February. Catherine, Princess of Wales revealed her own cancer battle last month, in a second blow to the British royal family.

She has not been seen on official public duties since Christmas Day but on Tuesday, the Waleses continued the tradition of sharing a photo to mark their children’s birthdays when a photo taken by Kate was uploaded to their social media accounts for Prince Louis’ sixth birthday.

In the King’s absence, Prince William and Queen Camilla have been holding down the fort for public outings, leading the family with the support of Princess Anne, Prince Edward and other royals.

On Thursday, the Prince of Wales made a trip to the West Midlands, visiting a number of projects supporting mental health and wellbeing.