The air quality index exceeded 1,000 on Saturday, above the 300 considered ‘dangerous’, according to data from IQAir.

Pakistan’s second city of Lahore will close primary schools for a week over record pollution, government authorities said on Sunday, to avoid exposing millions of children to smog several times above levels deemed dangerous.

For days, the city of 14 million people has been enveloped by smog, a mix of fog and pollutants caused by low-grade diesel fumes, smoke from seasonal agricultural burning and winter cooling.

“Weather forecast for the next six days shows that wind patterns will remain the same. Therefore we are closing all government and private primary schools in Lahore for a week,” said Jahangir Anwar, a senior environmental protection official in Lahore.

“This smog is very harmful for children. Masks should be mandatory in schools. We are keeping an eye on the health of children in senior classes,” Punjab senior minister Marriyum Aurangzeb told a news conference on Sunday.

Smog counters have been established in hospitals, she added.

Breathing the toxic air has catastrophic health consequences, with the WHO saying strokes, heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory diseases can be triggered by prolonged exposure.

On Saturday, the concentration of deadly PM2.5 pollutants – fine particulate matter in the air that causes most damage to health – was more than 40 times the level deemed acceptable by the World Health Organization. PM2.5 levels on Sunday morning exceeded that before decreasing slightly.

Last week, the provincial environmental protection agency announced new restrictions in four “hotspots” in the city.

Tuk-tuks equipped with polluting two-stroke engines are banned, as are restaurants that barbecue without filters.

Children are particularly vulnerable because they have less developed lungs and breathe more rapidly, taking in more air relative to their size than adults.

Pollution in excess of levels deemed safe by the WHO shortens the life expectancy of Lahore residents by an average of 7.5 years, according to the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute.

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Callum Parslow was convicted on 25 October of attempted murder after stabbing an asylum seeker at a hotel in April. It can now be revealed he was jailed in 2018 for targeting 10 women and girls with messages describing sexually motivated murder, torture and rape, and then changed his name after his release.

At the time, the 32-year-old was on bail and awaiting trial for his most recent offences against women, which followed a similar pattern to the abuse he was jailed for in 2018.

Parslow was targeting Mercy Muroki, a policy researcher and former GB News presenter, from multiple accounts under fake names on Facebook, Instagram and X.

Among the messages sent in July and August 2023 were videos of himself performing sexual acts and footage of a black woman being flogged. “The message he sent was about him fantasising that this would ­happen to me,” said Muroki, who has chosen to waive her anonymity.

Speaking to the Observer, Muroki said: “I said to the police: ‘This is clearly a very deranged person who is fixated on the far-right stuff and on me – do I need to be worried that he might escalate it to something in person?’

“They were kind of like: ‘Oh no, don’t worry.’ They said he seems like a bit of a loner, a bit of a saddo. That’s how they characterised him – just a sad person on a computer – whereas actually I feel that the content he had posted demonstrated it was way past some keyboard warrior stuff.”

“For France”, occupied Western Sahara’s “present and future fall under Morocco’s sovereignty”, declared French President Emmanuel Macron, drawing a standing ovation from the lawmakers he was addressing in the parliament of its former colony Morocco earlier on October 29.

“The sole and exclusive sovereign over Western Sahara is the Sahrawi people. [Neither] Macron, nor anyone else, has the right to decide on their behalf,” retorted the government of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), as Western Sahara is officially known.

This government, led by the Polisario Front (PF) which is recognized by the UN as the sole representative of the Sahrawi people, is in control of the Free Zone – or the Liberated Territory – amounting to a fifth of Western Sahara. With the military and financial support of the US and France and the complicity of Western Sahara’s former colonizer France, the Moroccan army annexed the remaining 80%, including the whole of its coastline, in 1975 and continues occupation to date.

Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara is not recognized by the African Union (AU), of which the SADR is a member-state. The UN includes it in the list of Non-Self-Governing Territories where decolonization is yet to be completed. Its General Assembly regards Moroccan presence in Western Sahara as an illegal occupation. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) maintains there is no “tie of territorial sovereignty between the territory of Western Sahara and the Kingdom of Morocco.”

Macron’s decision to grant French recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara also contravenes the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). In a ruling earlier that month on October 4, CJEU reiterated that the fisheries and trade agreements between the European Union (EU) and Morocco involving natural resources extracted from Western Sahara were illegal because Morocco has no sovereignty over this territory.

The judgment requires these illegal agreements to cease within a year. In less than a month, Macron entered France into fresh deals worth USD 10.8 billion, pledging “investments” he claimed would “benefit local populations” in Western Sahara.

“Past international investments in Western Sahara’s resources, such as in the [extraction of] phosphates and fisheries,” have yielded little benefit to the Sahrawi people, Kamal Fadel, Western Sahara’s Representative to Australia and the Pacific, told Peoples Dispatch. “The influx of foreign capital only tends to further entrench the occupation by supporting Morocco’s infrastructure and military presence in the region.”

Most of the jobs created in the process are handed to Moroccan settlers to incentivize them to stay put in the occupied territory. The remaining jobs are doled out to a few in exchange for their “loyalty and obedience”, while the Sahrawi masses are condemned to live under “poverty, oppression and abuse”, added Babouzeid Lebbihi, President of Collective of Sahrawi Human Rights Defenders (CODESA).

Leaders of this organization, along with other Sahrawi activists, suffer constant harassment at the hands of the occupation authorities, whose security forces regularly besiege homes, confiscate properties, and take political prisoners, several of whom have been subjected to torture and rape.

In December 2020, Trump announced the US recognition of “Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory,” in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel, legitimizing the apartheid settler colonial state’s occupation of Palestine.

Taking office a month later in January 2021, the current US President Joe Biden reiterated the endorsement of Moroccan occupation. A year later, in March 2022, Western Sahara’s former colonizer Spain followed suit, before France crossed that bridge earlier this week. Earlier this year, the AU also decided to suspend the members of representatives of SADR from meetings with international partners.

These developments undermining the prospects of a sovereign SADR “fuel discontent among Sahrawis and escalate regional unrest,” warned Fadel.

“Gaza has changed the whole equation,” said Babouzeid. “For more than three decades, the Sahrawi people under occupation have bet on political action and peace in order to avoid bloodshed, and today our land is being sold to the occupation by imperialist powers.” With major powers like France “adding fuel to the fire… I believe that the situation will explode in the region,” he added.

“Under the legitimate leadership of the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi people remain resolute in resisting Moroccan occupation, with all legitimate means, including armed struggle,” warns the Sahrawi government.

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