A representational image showing the FBR logo. — FBR website/File
FBR had set out Rs12.97tr tax revenue target in FY25.
Tax target was revised twice during last fiscal year.
Was brought down to Rs12.332tr and then Rs11.9tr.
ISLAMABAD: With the Fiscal Year 2024-25 coming to an end, it has come to light that the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) missed its tax collection target of Rs12.97 trillion by Rs1.235 trillion, collecting only Rs11.735 trillion.
As per a report published in The News, the tax collection target was revised downward twice — first in February-March 2025, from Rs12.97tr to Rs12.332tr, and then during the 2025-26 budget, when it was further reduced to Rs11.9tr.
Achieving next year’s tax collection target of Rs14.131tr for FY 2025-26, starting July 1, 2025 (today) will be challenging for the FBR, as it failed to meet the base collection of Rs11.9tr. This means the revenue authority will have to intensify efforts to reach the upcoming fiscal year’s goal.
Due to this shortfall, the government has limited options but to restrict expenditures to keep the fiscal deficit—particularly the primary balance — within the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) agreed limit for June 2025. Reduced interest payments, initially projected at Rs9.7tr for the outgoing fiscal year, were lowered to Rs8.9tr, resulting in savings of Rs0.8tr.
“The annual tax collection target was ambitiously set at Rs12.3tr, marking a substantial 32% increase compared to the Rs9.3tr collected during FY 2023-24,” a FBR statement said.
It stated the target was formulated based on the assumption of an autonomous growth rate of 15 per cent in FY25.
“Given the subdued economic environment and lower than expected autonomous growth, the estimated tax collection for FY25 without any corrective measures would have been projected to Rs10.07tr,” it added.
The tax collection body further said: “If the government had opted for fiscal policies that sustained higher inflation, it would have led to a corresponding increase in interest rates along with an increase in debt repayments. Such policies would have disproportionately burdened lower-income households, decreasing their purchasing power and deepening economic inequality. In contrast, by maintaining inflation at relatively low levels, the government has provided critical relief to vulnerable segments of the population, particularly those living near or below the poverty line, and safeguarded their real incomes and cost-of-living pressures.”
It explained that in response to the challenge of lower collection due to macroeconomic pressures, the FBR undertook significant efforts to strengthen enforcement, improve administrative efficiency, and implement new policy measures. “These interventions successfully elevated the provisional total tax collection to Rs11.735tr, representing a 26% increase over the previous year,” it added.
Provisionally, the total collection of Rs11.735tr consists of Rs5.784tr in income tax (28% growth from previous year), Rs3.9 trillion in sales tax (26% growth from previous year), Rs0.767tr in customs duty (16% growth from previous year), and Rs1.284tr in customs duty (27% growth from previous year).
What sparked the ideal of peace, love and understanding of the 1960s? In The Last Great Dream, Dennis McNally, the longtime publicist of the Grateful Dead, explores the roots of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury hippies. It’s the “fourth and last instalment” of McNally’s work documenting the history of the counterculture, following books about Jack Kerouac and the Beats; the Grateful Dead; and the relationship between Black music and white culture.
McNally traces the precursors of hippie culture to 1942, and the first meeting between Bay area poets Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, who would “become the nucleus of a remarkably powerful gathering of poets over the next decade”. Artists began to question societal values during the war, prompted by the internment of Japanese Americans, the threat of atomic annihilation and the McCarthyism that followed. While the GI Bill’s provision of financial and educational benefits for veterans bolstered the pursuit of the American dream, the Beats espoused what McNally calls the “bohemian code”: that “a life of art and spirituality was preferable to money and the pursuit of power”.
The Last Great Dream is an encyclopedic survey, with music acting as the glue between various art forms. McNally does a good job of showing the web of connections between artists from different disciplines. Unfortunately, completism can come at the expense of readability. Although he conducted some 60 interviews for the project, the book reads more like a compendium of Wikipedia entries than first-person accounts of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
While bohemian scenes blossomed in tandem in New York, LA and London, “San Franciscans went further and deeper”, McNally argues. By 1967, a new vision of freedom and sexuality was in place but the “catalyst” of the counterculture, McNally writes, was LSD. At the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park that year, Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist turned acid evangelist, led the crowd in chanting his mantra: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
Ample ink has been spilled on the megalomaniacal Leary but the story of his fourth wife and fellow fugitive Rosemary Woodruff tails off after their split. Susannah Cahalan, a journalist with an interest in altered states since being diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis (the subject of her bestselling 2012 memoir, Brain on Fire), wrote The Acid Queen to prevent Woodruff from fading into a footnote in Leary’s legacy.
A high-school dropout, Woodruff arrived in New York from the Midwest in 1953. Twice divorced by 21, once from a jazz accordionist, she worked as a model and stewardess (an industry “harder to get into than Harvard”, writes Cahalan), until she aged out of the skies at 30. Fleeing an abusive relationship, she met Leary, 15 years her senior, at his psychedelic commune upstate in 1965.
Cahalan makes a case for Woodruff’s contribution to the psychedelic movement during her seven-year relationship with Leary. She spoke to the press, fundraised, edited his books and wrote his speeches, including for a failed gubernatorial run in California against Ronald Reagan. She also cared for his two children, who had lost their mother, Marianne Busch, to suicide. The well-worn phrase “if you can remember the 1960s, then you weren’t really there” luckily doesn’t apply to Woodruff, who at least took good notes. Her archives include diary entries, letters, trip reports and a posthumously published memoir, which Cahalan rounds out with interviews with those who knew her.
It’s a colourful story, involving love triangles, drug busts and the dramatic jailbreak of Leary, who was serving a 20-year sentence for marijuana possession. The couple fled to Algeria, became wards of the Black Panthers and were then sheltered by an arms dealer in Switzerland. Woodruff’s life underground — once Leary was caught in Afghanistan and returned to the US in 1973 — had her hiding in Italy, Colombia and the Caribbean before living under an assumed name in Cape Cod, unable to afford the “mouthful of fillings” she had needed since their escape.
Well researched, The Acid Queen paints an unflattering portrait of Leary. While Cahalan gives him credit for his contribution to the early days of psychedelic research, his lack of political engagement became increasingly dangerous as “dropping out” left young men susceptible to the draft. He was a neglectful father and didn’t visit Woodruff in jail when she served time for refusing to testify against him in a grand jury. His values were not particularly progressive: he treated women as free domestic labour and never accepted the bisexuality of his former colleague Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass).
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Leary was disavowed by the psychedelic community for co-operating with the Feds to reduce his sentence, after which he lived a life of debauched semi-celebrity until his death, aged 75, in 1996, with his ashes blasted into space. Woodruff, meanwhile, remained undercover for more than 20 years, until a judge threw out the charges against her in 1994. Despite Leary trying to entice her out of hiding to save himself, they reconciled: she was the executor of his estate. Woodruff died in 2002, at 66, of congestive heart failure.
Taken together, The Last Great Dream and The Acid Queen raise the question of the legacy of the 1960s. Despite the consciousness-raising potential of psychedelics, Cahalan warns that today’s renewed interest carries the same risks of “evangelism and hubris”. While hippies may not have succeeded in changing politics, they have had a lasting impact on the culture, McNally holds, including organic food, yoga, LGBTQ rights and computing. “The dream died,” he concludes, “but the dreaming continues.”
The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties by Dennis McNally Hachette £28, 461 pages
The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan Canongate £22, 384 pages
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Looking for a hint for today’s Connections puzzle? Below, we have clues to help you unlock whichever category has you stumped for the puzzle on July 1, 2025.
Connections first launched on the New York Times in June 2023. The premise is deceptively simple: Players have to find the thematic connection of four groups of four words … without making more than four mistakes.
Today’s Connections has categories about getting ready, staying chic and more.
Below are the hints, categories and answers for today’s Connections game, puzzle #751, on July 1.
A hint for each Connections category today, July 1
Yellow group hint: What thieves do
Green group hint: What commuters do
Blue group hint: What “suave” means
Purple group hint: What “Papa Was a Rollin’ —” is missing
Traders work at the New York Stock Exchange on June 25, 2025.
NYSE
U.S. equity futures were little changed early Tuesday after the S&P 500 notched another record to close out a stunning quarter.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 37 points, or less than 0.1%. The S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures each lost 0.1%.
In regular trading, the broad market S&P 500 advanced 0.52%, posting another record close, while the tech heavy Nasdaq Composite also rose to fresh all-time highs, gaining 0.47%. The blue-chip Dow climbed 275.50 points, or 0.63%.
Monday’s moves came after Canada walked back its digital services tax in an attempt to facilitate trade negotiations with the U.S. Ottawa’s move to rescind the new levy comes after President Donald Trump said on Friday he would be “terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada.”
Traders are hoping for deals between the U.S. and its trading partners, as Trump’s 90-day reprieve on his steepest tariffs is set to expire next week.
Stocks have made an impressive comeback after suffering steep declines in April, after Trump’s sweeping tariff policy pushed the S&P 500 near bear market territory. The major averages have since made a sharp turnaround, with the broad market index closing the second quarter with a 10.6% gain and the Nasdaq up nearly 18% in the period.
Though traders now head into the second half of the year with stocks at record highs, some remain optimistic the market could surge even higher in the months ahead.
“We think this is going to be a broader recovery,” Mike Wilson, chief U.S. equity strategist and chief investment officer at Morgan Stanley, said Monday on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”
“I think with the Fed cutting in the second half of this year or next year, we can see a rolling recovery – because now there’s quite a bit of pent-up demand, particularly in those interest rate sensitive parts of the market,” he added. Those corners of the market include manufacturing and housing, the strategist said.
Traders are looking ahead to the S&P Global Purchasing Managers’ Index at 9:45 a.m. ET, which will give investors a read on the activity in the manufacturing sector, as well as the ISM manufacturing report at 10 a.m. The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) will also be released Tuesday morning.
When U.S. President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, many in Washington expected a rapid settlement to the war in Ukraine. On the campaign trail, Trump had boasted he could end the conflict in 24 hours. Although few analysts believed that specific promise, many speculated about the possible terms and timeline of an impending deal. The investment bank JPMorgan Chase, for example, claimed an agreement could be reached by June.
Yet as the weeks pass and diplomacy stagnates, it is becoming clear that no such resolution is imminent. As Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba noted in Foreign Affairsin late May, neither Russia nor Ukraine “has much of an incentive to stop the fighting.” Ukraine refuses to surrender its sovereignty; Russia will not accept anything less than Ukrainian capitulation.
This conclusion, however, does not mean all is lost. Russia is much weaker economically than many analysts realize, and hard-hitting sanctions and export controls can still cripple its war economy. Ukraine is fighting smartly and could turn the tide on the battlefield with more high-end drones, air defense systems, long-range missiles, and munitions. With a change of strategy, Ukraine can still win the war in the near term—if both Europe and the United States decide to give it the assistance it needs.
THE DOSE MAKES THE POISON
Much of the premature optimism about a settlement earlier this year sprang from the prevailing belief that Ukraine was losing and would soon be forced to negotiate out of desperation. Trump stoked this narrative by asserting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had “no cards” left to play. U.S. Vice President JD Vance took it a step further, declaring that Ukraine—and its foreign backers—never had any “pathway to victory.” Citing Russia’s superiority in manpower and weapons, Vance argued that if the United States kept up its security assistance, it would only postpone Ukraine’s inevitable defeat.
This defeatism has been supported by a second, equally pernicious assumption: that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s commitment to subjugating Ukraine cannot be deterred. The former CIA analyst Peter Schroeder’s assessment in Foreign Affairs last September exemplifies this view, describing Putin as “all in”—personally invested in keeping Ukraine from becoming a European democracy, no matter the cost. Such a narrative holds a kernel of truth, but it also dovetails too neatly with Russian propaganda. By assigning no agency to Ukraine or its foreign partners, it presumes that Ukrainian victory is a fantasy born of Western delusion, and it is a view that risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Both assumptions, meanwhile, rest on an excessively narrow reading of battlefield dynamics and a limited understanding of the policy options available to Ukraine’s backers. Despite significant constraints on the aid that Europe and the United States have offered over the past three and a half years, Ukraine has achieved impressive victories. It repelled Russia’s initial push toward Kyiv in March 2022 with little more than shoulder-fired antitank missiles and grit, defying the predictions of many military analysts. Later that year, in a stunning rout for Russian forces, Ukraine reclaimed nearly a thousand square miles in the Kharkiv region without the benefit of modern armor or air cover. And just weeks ago, Ukraine shocked the world by pulling off Operation Spiderweb, a surprise attack that used cheap, remote-controlled drones to inflict substantial damage on Russia’s long-range aviation.
Indeed, what most consistently hindered Ukraine’s war effort was not Kyiv’s lack of manpower or weak resolve compared with Putin, but rather an insufficient supply of advanced military capabilities. Long after Russia had deployed its most modern tanks, fifth-generation fighter aircraft, long-range air defense systems, and cutting-edge ballistic and cruise missiles, Ukraine was still waiting for deliveries of similar capabilities from its Western partners. When some of these systems finally did arrive, Ukraine was prohibited from using them on targets inside Russia until the United States relaxed its rules of engagement in mid-2024. The truth is precisely the opposite of what the current administration has claimed. Instead of prolonging the war by giving Ukraine too much military assistance, Kyiv’s foreign allies have prolonged it by giving too little, and often with significant delays.
When it comes to punitive economic measures against Russia, the international response has been similarly half-baked. In the early days of the war, the United States and its G-7 allies crafted sanctions and export controls that were thought to pack a powerful punch but in fact had so many mitigations built in that they were robbed of their full impact. In April 2022, just after Russia’s invasion, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union removed seven Russian banks from SWIFT, the dominant international payments system. Many analysts had previously touted the move as a “nuclear option” that would decimate the Russian economy.
But the delisting was so selective in its application—targeting only seven banks out of hundreds in Russia—that the Russian economy actually grew in 2023 and 2024. The gradual implementation of export controls also gave Russia time to adapt, as did numerous carve-outs for certain types of Russian banks or transactions: civil nuclear energy, aviation servicing and maintenance, and fertilizer sales, for example, could still be processed.As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison—and the insufficient dosing of punitive economic measures produced an underwhelming campaign with limited strategic effect.
TIPPING THE SCALE
Despite these missteps, victory for Ukraine—minimally defined as preserving its sovereignty and continuing to chart a course toward NATO and EU membership—is still squarely within reach. Achieving it, however, requires a fundamental shift in Western strategy, one that combines a large boost in military assistance with more robust economic measures to constrain Russia’s war economy.
The linchpin for this new strategy is the West’s mobilization of the approximately $300 billion in frozen Russian assets held in their jurisdictions—mostly in the EU—to support Ukraine’s current fight. Thus far, the Trump administration has shown no inclination to use congressionally authorized funds to support Ukraine. So, as Wally Adeyemo and David Shimer have written in Foreign Affairs, it makes sense to seize these assets and, in effect, “make Russia pay” for Ukraine’s defense. Some EU leaders have argued that these assets should be saved for reconstruction efforts after the war ends. Others worry about setting a dangerous precedent for the rule of law by seizing a country’s funds—even if that country has violated international laws and is engaged in the mass murder of civilians. If Europe is to help bring this war to an end, it must set these concerns aside and act now.
These funds could serve multiple purposes. A portion could be invested in Ukraine’s burgeoning defense industrial base: its drone sector, for instance, has become highly innovative but needs additional investments for industrial-scale production, sensor development, and counter-electronic warfare measures. Another portion could help Ukraine purchase long-range missiles and other weapons systems from Europe, assisting the continent in building up production lines that support both Ukraine’s defense and, once the war is over, NATO deterrence. A third chunk could fund the production of U.S.-made capabilities—such as air defense systems and long-range precision fires—that Ukraine needs but Europe currently lacks in sufficient quantities. And finally, the remainder could go to distributed energy generation, the protection of critical infrastructure such as switchyards and electrical substations, and humanitarian needs.
Yet helping Ukraine win requires more than just transferring arms. Western governments must prioritize co-production agreements, intellectual property sharing, and defense manufacturing partnerships—especially in missile and ammunition manufacturing, armored vehicles, and drone and counterdrone technologies, as well as cyber, command and coordination systems,and electronic warfare systems. Such arrangements would reduce Ukraine’s dependence on foreign supply chains, fortify its domestic capacity, and foster long-term interoperability with NATO forces. Equally important is for these governments to give Ukraine access to maintenance and life-cycle support technologies and software so that Western platforms can be adapted to the evolving battlefield.
Despite being outnumbered, Ukraine has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to offset its disadvantages with asymmetric tactics, such as sinking parts of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with maritime drones and missiles and denying Russia air superiority by using its limited air defenses creatively. With more sustained military, technological, and economic support, Ukraine could develop new advantages, such as better integrating drones, land mines, and long-range fires to pin down Russian forces and take out their logistics nodes.
EVERY TOOL IN THE TOOLKIT
To buttress Ukraine’s military capabilities, the West must also target the economic foundations of Russia’s war effort. Fortunately for Ukraine, Russia’s economy remains fragile. Although the country’s GDP has increased over the last two years, structural weaknesses abound in its economy: a 20 percent interest rate, a 68 percent decline in Russia’s sovereign wealth fund since February 2022, and persistent inflation of around nine percent. These vulnerabilities present opportunities.
First, the Westmust go after Russia’s primary revenue stream: energy exports. Currently, Europe is still importing roughly $23.5 billion worth of Russian oil and natural gas. If Europe is to get serious about ending the war, it must decrease Moscow’s energy income and foreign currency flows. Moreover,Russia has systematically evaded the G-7’s oil price cap, significantly weakening its intended impact. Western countriesshould impose a full embargo or steep tariffs on Russian oil and gas and should tighten regulations,engage in more systematic maritime tracking, and take stronger legal measures to strictly enforce the G-7 price cap. And if third parties flout these restrictions, the G-7 should impose sanctions on them.
The G-7 countries, meanwhile, must further isolate Russia financially. The Kremlin has taken advantage of the sanctions regime’s carve-outs and has the power to direct Russian banks to process whatever payments are needed. To meaningfully disrupt Russia’s trade, devalue the ruble, and increase economic uncertainty, the G-7 should remove all Russian banks from SWIFT and subject them to full blocking sanctions, which prohibit all transactions with the sanctioned entity. If financial institutions in foreign countries enable sanctions evasion, they, too, should be subjected to secondary sanctions. Only by applying the full power of these sanctions tools can Ukraine’s allies succeed in weakening Russia’s war machine.
Western governments can also redouble their efforts regarding export controls on high-tech components, including semiconductors, precision machine tools, optics, aviation components, and industrial software. There have been export controls on Russia for more than a decade, but these are not one-and-done solutions; meaningfully degrading the Kremlin’s capacity to replenish and maintain its military equipment requires continuous enforcement whenever workarounds and third-party cutouts arise. The U.S. Commerce Department should further restrict Russia’s access to “dual use” goods—products valuable in both civilian and military applications—in order to constrain its production of high-tech weapons and undermine its military-industrial complex. Similarly, Western governments can do more to zero in on Russia’s defense industry by sanctioning more Russian firms that manufacture essential defense equipment such as drones, missiles, and armored vehicles.
Even after three and half years of full-scale war, Ukraine’s supporters have not come close to exhausting the sanctions toolkit. If rigorously applied and internationally enforced, the combination of these sanction enhancements would cripple Russia’s economy.
THE CHINA FACTOR
Yet it is also important to recognize that Russia is no longer waging this war alone. It has found steady backing from a coalition of autocratic states—backing that has allowed it to weather the bite of Western sanctions and replenish critical materiel. Only a few months into the war, Western intelligence agencies and military analysts had assessed that Russia had significantly depleted its stockpile of precision-guided munitions. As sanctions took hold and component shortages mounted, the Kremlin was forced to ration these weapons. This rationing had a real effect on the war, gradually turning the battlefield dynamics in Ukraine’s favor. The tempo of Russian precision strikes declined markedly by late 2022, replaced in part by the use of unguided bombs and the repurposing of systems such as the S-300 air defense missile for ground-attack roles.
By the fall of that year, however, Iran began supplying Russia with drones. Then, by 2023, China emerged as Russia’s primary supplier of dual-use technologies, including accounting for over 90 percent of imported microelectronics. North Korea, meanwhile, provided short-range ballistic missiles and, later, troops.
Confronting this axis of aggressors will require a shift in Western strategy. There is probably little Europe or the United States can do to dissuade North Korea, but Iran has been greatly weakened following its war with Israel and has less to offer now that Russia is mass-producing its own drones. That leaves China, whose inputs into the Russian defense industrial base are far more consequential than Iran’s or North Korea’s contributions. To constrain Chinese support for Moscow, a unified transatlantic approach is needed to raise the costs of Beijing’s support. That means leveraging trade and market access—areas in which Europe holds unique influence—to apply pressure. European leaders acknowledge China’s key role in enabling the Russian war effort, but they have not taken serious steps to stop it; mere expressions of disapproval are not enough. If the war in Ukraine is to be contained and ultimately resolved, Europe will have to make clear to Beijing that normal commercial relations cannot coexist with China’s support for a war against the European security order.
TURN THE TIDE
Putin’s ambition to dominate Ukraine is unlikely ever to diminish, even as Russian casualties approach a million. What can change are the battlefield and defense-industrial conditions that make Putin’s ambition feasible. Western countries have the collective resources to create a situation in which trend lines turn negative for Russia. Once the strategic risks accumulate to the extent that the Kremlin has to ask difficult questions about Russia’s ability to defend itself against other hostile actors, it will be compelled to reassess its approach.
Indeed, from a strategic vantage point, Russia has already lost this war. Regardless of how much additional territory changes hands, the Ukrainian nation is lost to Russia forever. No matter how many billions of dollars Moscow spends on propaganda and “reeducation,” filtration camps and torture chambers, it will never convince Ukrainians to accept its rule as legitimate. What Ukraine needs now is the time, tools, and space to prove to the Kremlin that an occupation is not just immoral but incompatible with Russia’s long-term security needs.
Ukraine’s allies have a choice. They can continue the current approach of transatlantic division and stillborn diplomacy, risking an expanded, longer, and far costlier war. Or they can act decisively to help Ukraine turn the tide, throttle the tempo of Russian weapons manufacturing, and empower the leadership in Kyiv to negotiate from a position of strength. A peace agreement may forever remain elusive, but once the cost of continued fighting becomes untenable, Russia can eventually be forced to settle for an armistice similar to the one that effectively ended the Korean War. Once that point is reached and the fighting diminishes, the space will emerge for Ukraine to renew its democratic mandate, resettle refugees, reconstruct infrastructure, and—perhaps most critically—finish its accession process with the EU and NATO. The return of all occupied territories may take longer, but Ukraine will have established the foundations of strategic victory.
Victory may not come quickly, cheaply, or easily. But it is still possible and will likely cost fewer lives and resources than a perpetuation of the status quo. What remains to be seen is whether the West—especially Europe—is willing to summon the political will to secure this brighter future.
Netflix is not always known for its restraint in the documentary genre, but with its outstanding recent film Grenfell: Uncovered, and now Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, it appears to be finding a new maturity and seriousness in the field. There have been plenty of recent documentaries on the subject of the attacks and the sprawling investigation that followed – no surprise, given that it is the 20th anniversary this week – but there is still real depth to be found here.
Over four parts, this thorough series unravels the initial attacks on the London transport system, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, then follows that febrile month into the failed bombings of 21 July, and then the police shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, a day later. The first 25 minutes or so simply recount those first attacks, compiling the story using phone pictures, news footage, occasional reconstructions, the infamous photographs of the injured pouring out of tube stations and accounts from survivors and the families of victims. Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail.
Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by police, after being mistaken for a suspect. Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix
In those details, it is unsparing and frequently horrifying. Daniel Biddle lost his legs in the explosion at Edgware Road. His memory of locking eyes with the man who would shortly detonate the bomb in his bag is chilling, and his account of his fight to survive is as gripping as it is brutal. Others talk about the chaos, the noise, the screaming. One woman, who had managed to jump on the 30 bus near Tavistock Square in all of the transport disarray, recounts getting a text from her boyfriend at the time, saying: “You were right, they were bombs.” She had just put her phone back in her pocket after reading it, she says, when the bus exploded.
Those attacks led to the largest criminal investigation ever seen in the UK, which is the primary focus of all four episodes. These were the first suicide bombings to take place on British soil, and police did not know, immediately, that the bombers had also blown themselves up. The revelation about how they came to suspect this – from evidence gathered in one of the tube carriages – is gruesome and fascinating. Explosives expert Cliff Todd talks of material and techniques he had never seen before, and the work that went into tracking down those responsible – and attempting to prevent further attacks – is astonishing in its scale and reach.
This is not simply a police procedural – and that strengthens it greatly. It is impressively comprehensive, taking in the political and media climate of the time. There are interviews with Eliza Manningham-Buller, then director general of MI5, as well as the former prime minister Tony Blair. It even puts the crucial question to Blair: did the invasion of Iraq in 2003 lead directly to these attacks in Britain? His answer is politician-like and broad, but at least it asks the question, and offers context to attacks that did not happen in a vacuum.
Another survivor, Mustafa Kurtuldu, recalls his experience of being on the tube near Aldgate when his train was blown up. When he was finally removed from the carriage and taken out of the station, police searched his bag. There is footage of an appearance on GMTV, just days later, when the presenter asks him how he feels about the attacks, “as a Muslim”. When the investigation moves to Beeston, in Leeds – where two of the four attackers were from – a youth worker in the Muslim community talks about the realisation that, as after 9/11, he would be asked, once more, to apologise for the actions of extremists.
The third episode deals with the failed attacks on 21 July. There are eyewitness accounts of the explosions that went wrong – chilling and eerie, in their own way – the subsequent hunt for the four men who escaped is, again, astonishing in its scope. The next day, the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was on his way to work when he was described as behaving in an “edgy” manner by police who had mistakenly identified him as a suspect. He was shot dead. One of the officers who pulled the trigger speaks here, his identity disguised.
Again, the strength of Attack on London is in the details. When officers finally caught up with Yassin Omar – who had attempted to blow up Warren Street and had fled to Birmingham disguised in a burqa – he was standing in a bath with a backpack on. Fittingly, though, this does not end with the attackers, but with the survivors and their relatives. It strikes a careful balance throughout.
Freddie Mercury’s performance with Queen at Live Aid in 1985 is often seen as the crowning glory of one of the greatest showmen the world has ever seen.
But he still needed some very clear instructions from Bob Geldof, the festival’s organiser, before going out on stage. “Don’t get clever,” the Boomtown Rats frontman told him, according to fellow Queen members Roger Taylor and Brian May. “Just play the hits – you have 17 minutes.”
Twenty years after Live Aid, Queen’s six-song performance was voted the world’s greatest rock gig. During the short set, Mercury had 72,000 people clapping as one. Speaking to the Radio Times, Taylor, the band’s drummer, said: “During Radio Ga Ga, it did seem that the whole stadium was in unison. But then I looked up during We Are the Champions, and the crowd looked like a whole field of wheat swaying.”
The performance might never have happened, too, if it were not for the persuasive powers of May, Queen’s lead guitarist. “We weren’t touring or playing, and it seemed like a crazy idea, this talk of having 50 bands on the same bill,” May said. “I said to Freddie: ‘If we wake up on the day after this Live Aid show and we haven’t been there, we’re going to be pretty sad.’ He said: ‘Oh, fuck it, we’ll do it.’”
Mercury was told by Geldof to focus on playing Queen’s hits. Photograph: Brook Lapping/BB/Band Aid Trust
He added: “It was one of the few moments in anyone’s life that you know you’re doing something for all the right reasons.”
The singer was not the only one who wasn’t immediately convinced that Queen should even play that day. It has previously been reported that Geldof was reluctant too.
Speaking to Mojo magazine earlier this month, the promoter Harvey Goldsmith said he and Geldof were working together on the lineup. “Being the producer, I understood how slots work and who went where. I was also dealing with the technical side: we were doing two shows [London and Philadelphia] and had to stay strictly to time because of the satellite.
“I thought about it, and said for the late afternoon slot the perfect act would be Queen. Bob said: ‘No, they’ve peaked. I don’t think they should play! I said to Bob, I really think they’ll be perfect to go on in that 5.30, 6 o’clock type slot – knowing Freddie as I did, I knew they’d really make a show of it.
It’s a hot June lunchtime at remote stand 572 at Heathrow Terminal 5, and I’m waiting on the tarmac for British Airways flight 343 to arrive from Nice. I’m here to see a “turn”, as it’s known in aviation jargon; in layman’s terms it’s a turnaround, the process that deals with an arriving aircraft, unloading it and getting it ready to go back out again.
It’s 1.30pm, and the Airbus A320neo is late. It was due to arrive at 1.10pm, but despite the flight information having flashed up on a digital information board, it has disappeared again. After a quick look at Flightradar24, a plane tracking site, I realise the aircraft has performed a go-around — an aborted landing, perfectly normal — to avoid coming too close to another plane on the runway. At 1.48pm, it inches onto the stand and turns off its engines.
So far, so ordinary. BA343 is just one of about 650 planes that land at Europe’s busiest airport each day. But the cool thing here is that it’s the first time a BA turnaround has been performed using only zero-emission equipment: buses that run on vegetable oil; baggage tugs, which look like little golf buggies, running on lithium batteries; and electric-powered steps to get passengers off. It might not sound like much, and if you’re disembarking chances are you won’t even notice. But the goal of this new hardware is to make the whole process more efficient and reduce delays for passengers. It’s part of a wider multibillion-pound transformation of the airline.
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This summer is predicted to be exceptionally busy, according to figures from the aviation data agency Cirium, with a record number of passengers forecast to go on holiday. Almost 52 million of us will travel between June 1 and August 31, up from 51 million last summer. There is also some nervousness about air-traffic control delays due to hot weather or strikes. Eurocontrol, which runs European air traffic control, said in April that in the first four months of the year European air traffic was up by 5 per cent compared with the same period in 2024, with delays also up by the same amount. Add to that a pile-on over British Airways’ revamped loyalty scheme, the Club, and you can see why the flag carrier might be nervous.
Last year BA announced a £7 billion transformation programme, with money funnelled into new cabins in state-of-the-art aircraft such as the Airbus A320neo and sustainable initiatives, such as the carbon-neutral hardware out on the airfield. The airline has also invested £100m in “gamechanging’ and “integral” AI forecasting tools — essentially what the BA boss Sean Doyle calls “devising a better way of working on the ground at Heathrow” — which, when put into practice, will ultimately mean fewer delays and cancellations for passengers. The results so far are promising: in the first three months of 2025, 86 per cent of BA flights left on time from London Heathrow, the highest on record; in 2008 it was 46 per cent.
I went to Heathrow to find out more and see how BA is using machine learning to improve the passenger experience. I’m getting an exclusive look at the airport’s revamped Air Operations Control Centre (AOCC), the eyes and ears of BA’s operation at Heathrow; as well BA’s Integrated Operations Control (IOC) at its Waterside headquarters, to the northwest of the airport.
One of the new tools at the AOCC is Mission Control, a giant interface beamed onto a giant screen in the control centre. It shows real-time tracking of each BA plane on the ground at Heathrow (blue shows arriving aircraft, flashing yellow shows planes about to depart) and how many connecting passengers are on board. I can see flight BA453 arrive from Ibiza and BA115 depart to New York. A screen tracking New York JFK has been configured too. London-New York is the busiest international route in the world; after the British capital it’s BA’s largest international destination.
Mission Control is also a big part of BA’s IOC at its Waterside headquarters, where staff monitor up to 900 daily BA flights across the network. The real-time data from the interface ensures that staff can track the aircraft and make on-the-go decisions about where aircraft need to go.
I sit down with Ben Lang, who looks after BA’s schedule, planning where to use its more than 280 jets. He showed me the Pathfinder planning tool, which uses thousands of pieces of historical data to make the flight plans, pulling in information about delays, air-traffic control restrictions and aircraft capacity. For example, Lang explains, if flights from Paris are always delayed by ten minutes, Pathfinder will allocate an extra ten minutes to the turnaround process; and if there’s a big sporting event happening, bigger jets will be deployed to cope with demand.
I also get a look at Runway, another AI forecasting tool that kicks in when disruptive events such as storms, strikes and — particularly relevant at the moment — blocked airspaces threaten to throw passengers off course. Using masses of data, it can allocate the most efficient aircraft for a particular flight, making what it calls a “swap”. For example, during Storm Eowyn in January, Runway swapped out smaller aircraft that would typically fly to Glasgow and Edinburgh for larger planes to stop passengers getting stranded in Scotland. At the top of Lang’s screen, it says the tool has improved the number of on-time flights by 1.1 per cent over the past five days by making 233 of these swaps.
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Elsewhere in the IOC there’s AI-powered Flight Watch, which shows flight routes, closed sections of airspace and particularly nasty bouts of turbulence as well as other weather events; it can also communicate directly with air-traffic control towers, which helps teams to reroute flights through less-delayed airspace. More than 3,500 minutes of flight time were recently saved in one day, Richard Treeves, head of the IOC, told me. A new AI crew app launched earlier this month, automating the manual task of rostering the right staff onto the right aircraft. Everything is designed to make the operation run more smoothly and crucially reduce delays and cancellations for passengers.
“We’re now entering one of our busiest periods of the year and will be flying millions of customers around the world throughout July and August,” René de Groot, BA’s chief operating officer, says. “The new technology we’ve introduced has been a real gamechanger, allowing us to make more informed decisions based on vast amounts of data. We have even more in the pipeline — including new apps for our operational colleagues — and we’re in a much better place to deliver a smooth travel experience this summer and beyond.”
Back on the tarmac, I can see for myself how Mission Control has alerted flight teams, showing them that it was better to change the aircraft to quash the potential delay. The late arrival of BA343 means it’s too late to be turned around for its planned 2pm departure to Milan. It’s instead bound for Amsterdam, now departing at 2.30pm — not even 45 minutes after it arrived. I watch as bags are loaded and passengers arrive to board. No one will notice the work that went on behind the scenes — but that’s the point; the important thing is that everyone gets from A to B on time.
Do you think the changes will make a difference this summer? Let us know in the comments below
For the first time, the extreme variability in dengue fever has been linked to a biological mechanism, potentially opening doors to new treatments and vaccines for the most common mosquito-borne disease worldwide. The study was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, UPMC and Instituto Aggeu Magalhães in Brazil.
Cases of dengue fever, commonly known as “breakbone fever” for the excruciating joint pain that is the hallmark of the disease, have been rising around the world in recent years. More than half the global population is at risk.
There’s an urgent need for better prevention and treatment for this global threat. Dengue outbreaks can quickly overwhelm local hospitals.”
Priscila Castanha, Ph.D., MPH, lead author, assistant professor of infectious diseases and microbiology at Pitt’s School of Public Health
The course of the disease varies widely from person to person. Some are asymptomatic; others experience dengue’s painful flu-like symptoms and then recover within days or weeks. “But 5% have serious bleeding, shock and organ failure-they can be critically ill within two days,” said senior author Simon Barratt-Boyes, Ph.D., professor of infectious diseases and microbiology at Pitt Public Health and immunology at Pitt School of Medicine.
For decades, epidemiologic studies have documented a puzzling phenomenon: In countries with ethnically diverse populations-like Brazil, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba-people of African ancestry tend to have milder cases of dengue, while people of European ancestry have more severe disease. But no one could explain why.
In this study, the team used a model they developed with samples of human skin that had been donated by individuals who had undergone elective skin-reduction surgeries after profound weight loss. The participants consented to contributing their tissues to this study.
“We used skin because it is an immunologic organ and the body’s first line of defense against dengue infection,” said Barratt-Boyes. When maintained in culture under proper conditions, the tissue samples used in this model can survive and carry out their normal immune functions for days, providing a unique opportunity for scientific study, he added, “because the skin is where the story begins with all mosquito-borne diseases.”
The study focused on samples from individuals who had self-identified as having European or African ancestry. First, the researchers objectively measured the ancestral geographic origins written into the skin samples’ DNA by analyzing genetic markers known as single nucleotide polymorphisms. The team then injected each sample with dengue virus, observed the samples’ subsequent immune responses over a 24-hour period and compared them.
The team found that the inflammatory response was much greater in skin from people with higher proportions of European ancestry. And unfortunately, in severe dengue, this immune response is prone to “friendly fire.” The virus infects inflammatory cells, actually recruiting them to spread the infection instead of fighting it off. This dynamic is believed to be what is so damaging to blood vessels and organs in severe cases of dengue fever.
In the samples from donors of European ancestry, the team saw this friendly fire in action as myeloid cells mobilized to confront the virus, then themselves became infected. The turncoat cells then moved out of the skin and spread out into the dish-similar to how they would spread within the body, traveling through the bloodstream and into lymph nodes.
The team further showed that the problem was not the skin itself-it was indeed the inflammatory response. In the samples from individuals with higher proportions of African ancestry, the researchers added inflammatory molecules called cytokines, and the friendly fire ensued. Then, when the team blocked the inflammation within those same samples, the virus’s rate of infection in the cells plummeted.
“It makes sense that, in parts of the world where ancient populations were exposed to deadly mosquito-borne viruses-like the one that causes yellow fever, which is related todengue viruses and has been around for a very long time-those with a limited inflammatory response had an advantage,” said Barratt-Boyes. “They then passed that advantage down to their descendants.” Ancient Europeans’ descendants, however, lack that ancestral exposure and the evolutionary adaptation it made possible.
The authors hope that, eventually, the mechanism they’ve identified could be exploited for precision medicine approaches to things like risk assessment, triage in an outbreak, therapies and vaccines. In future studies, they hope to describe this mechanism in further detail, including which specific gene variants contribute to protection from severe dengue. The current study’s broader analysis of geographic ancestry could be an important first step to that end.
“Ancestry does affect biology. Evolution has made its mark on everyone’s DNA,” said Castanha.
Other authors on the study are Michelle M. Martí, M.S., Parichat Duangkhae, Ph.D., Jocelyn M. Taddonio, M.S., Kristine L. Cooper, M.S., Megan Wallace, M.S., Gwenddolen Kettenburg, M.S., Geza Erdos, Ph.D., Hasitha Chavva, M.S., Aleena Alex, M.S., Pharm. D., J. Peter Rubin, M.D., Simon C. Watkins, Ph.D., Louis D. Falo, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., and Jeremy J. Martinson, Ph.D., all of Pitt; and Ernesto T. A. Marquesa, M.D., Ph.D., of Pitt and Instituto Aggeu Magalhães.
This research was supported by Pitt, the Institute for Precision Medicine, the Richard K Mellon Foundation for Pediatric Research and the National Cancer Institute (P30CA047904).
Source:
Journal reference:
Castanha, P. M. S., et al. (2025). Genetic ancestry shapes dengue virus infection in human skin explants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2502793122.
