Tropical Cyclone Dana made landfall along the northern coast of Odisha state as the equivalent of a tropical storm in the Atlantic basin with winds of 110 kilometers per hour (70 mph), according to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC). The storm was located about 250 kilometers (155 miles) southwest of Kolkata, moving north-northwest at 12 kph (8 mph), as of 9 a.m. local time (11:30 p.m. ET).

Dana brought rainfall between 50-150 millimeters (2-6 inches) across Odisha and West Bengal state, with the highest total of 160 mm (6.2 inches) reported in the town of Chandbali. There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.

Ahead of landfall, authorities evacuated hundreds of thousands of people, shut schools and canceled trains and flights in parts of the country. The India Meteorological Department (India MET) issued its highest red rainfall warning for parts of Odisha and West Bengal.

Odisha’s Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi told the Press Trust of India news agency before the storm’s landfall that around 300,000 people had been evacuated from vulnerable areas, adding that three districts were likely to be severely affected.

Authorities planned to evacuate more than 1 million people from 14 districts. Several teams of aid and rescue workers have also been deployed to the state, which is prone to severe cyclones and storms.

“The government is fully prepared to tackle the situation. You are in safe hands,” Majhi said.

India’s eastern coasts have long been prone to cyclones, but the number of intense storms is increasing along the country’s coast. Last year was India’s deadliest cyclone season in recent years, killing 523 people and costing an estimated $2.5 billion in damage.

Dana is forecast to weaken as it drifts west through Odisha, bringing moderate to isolated heavy rainfall along its path over the weekend.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press.

At the Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori, the small Georgian town where the Soviet dictator was born, a line of guides is waiting to tell you the story of the local boy who made it big.

They can list the birthdays of Stalin’s family and recite the poems he wrote as a schoolboy (for Stalin “could have been a poet, but chose to be a great leader”). But on other things, they are less exact. Of the millions killed in the gulag, “mistakes were made.” Of show trials, they have little to say.

So revered is Stalin by some that when the government thought it time to remove his towering statue in 2010, they did so unannounced at night, lest locals protest. But while some older voters in rural towns like Gori might harbor fond memories of life under communism and pine for a Soviet past, they seemed set to be swept away by younger generations who have grown up knowing nothing but democracy, and who are happy to see Stalin consigned to history’s dustbin.

Now, as the Caucasus nation counts down to its October 26 parliamentary election, the specter of authoritarianism looms large once again.

Many observers fear the ruling Georgian Dream party will resort to anything to stay in power. It has buried the liberal values it espoused when it took office 12 years ago and effectively torpedoed Georgia’s bid to join the European Union. Its founder, the secretive oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has threatened to imprison his political rivals after the election and ban the main opposition party.

After spending years in the shadows, Ivanishvili – who made his billions in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as Georgia’s prime minister from 2012 to 2013 – returned late last year as the party’s honorary chairman and has since given a string of conspiracy-tinged speeches. He claims Georgia is being controlled by a foreign “pseudo-elite” and that the opposition belongs to a “Global War Party” bent on dragging the country into conflict with Russia. This year, Georgian Dream pushed through a Kremlin-style “foreign agent” law, which critics say aims to shut down watchdogs who call the government to account.

For many, Ivanishvili’s rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of the past from which many Georgians are keen to escape. And the anti-Western posturing of Georgian Dream, along with the country’s controversial foreign agent law, directly mirrors President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on domestic political opposition in neighboring Russia.

In a speech last month in Gori, Ivanishvili also broke a taboo in Georgian society. He said Georgia should apologize for the 2008 war with Russia, for which many Georgians blame Moscow. Russia fought the five-day war in support of pro-Kremlin separatists in Georgia’s South Ossetia region, just north of Gori. Combined with Abkhazia, another breakaway region, Russia today de facto occupies 20% of Georgia’s territory.

Ivanishvili said apologizing to Russia would help preserve “12 years of uninterrupted peace” the country has enjoyed under Georgian Dream’s leadership, which he warned the opposition could jeopardize. The message has some appeal to his rural base but sparked a political firestorm.

Mikheil Saakashvili, who was Georgia’s president during the war but has been imprisoned since 2021 for abuse of power while in office, called the comments a “betrayal.”

Younger, more pro-European Georgians were also outraged. Their earliest memories are not of easier lives under communism, but of Russian tanks rolling into Gori and towards the capital, Tbilisi. Walking out of the Stalin Museum – past his personal railway carriage, past the hut in which he was born – it is easy to find buildings still scarred with bullet holes from the 2008 war. Many buildings still lie in ruins, while Stalin Avenue has been kept pristine.

For these Georgians, Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 rekindled memories of Russian aggression in their own country. They want nothing more than for Georgia to slip from the Kremlin’s orbit and continue its march toward a European future.

But many fear the government is now heading in the opposite direction, and that Georgia could be on the cusp of returning to the one-party rule from which it escaped a generation ago.

At a press conference in Tbilisi on Thursday, Georgia’s President Salome Zourabichvili – a pro-Western but largely ceremonial figure who has urged Georgians to vote against the government – said she “rules out any outcome other than a victory for the pro-European forces,” citing polls which routinely show that only around a third of the public support Georgian Dream.

‘Soviet mentality’

A question puzzling many is why the formerly center-left Georgian Dream has made a sudden authoritarian pivot.

The party’s origin was unusual. It takes its name from a rap song by Ivanishvili’s son, Bera. Although some suspected Ivanishvili – whose net worth is equivalent to about a quarter of the country’s GDP – might pursue a pro-Russian path, during his brief premiership he tacked close to Europe and even promised eventual NATO membership.

“A modern civil society has been a cherished goal of the Georgian people since we regained our independence 20 years ago,” Ivanishvili wrote in an email to then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, subsequently leaked. “Unfortunately, old habits are hard to overcome.”

Having abandoned its liberal origins, Sabanadze said, the party is now “clearly copying” the model of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest this year, Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze praised Orban as a “role model,” parroting his claims to defend “homeland, language and faith.” The government has also passed legislation curbing LGBTQ+ rights.

But now it is poised to go much further. Ivanishvili has promised a “Nuremberg trial” against members of the opposition, who have been subject to increasing persecution. During street protests in Tbilisi against the foreign agent law, Levan Khabeishvili – chair of the pro-Western United National Movement (UNM) – said he was brutally beaten by police. He appeared the next day in parliament, his face blackened and swollen.

The Georgian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Preparing for the worst

A consequence of Russia’s war in Ukraine was the EU’s decision to offer Georgia candidate status. Brussels, keen to stem Russia’s influence in former Soviet countries, put Georgia – along with Ukraine and Moldova – on an accelerated path to membership.

Many say this was despite Georgian Dream, rather than because of it. During protests against the “foreign agent” law, the images of citizens waving EU flags being buffeted back by water cannons put pressure on Brussels to reward the Georgian people, of whom more than 80% support EU membership, polls show.

Whether Ivanishvili wanted candidate status is not clear. Joining the EU would require cleaning up the country’s judiciary and giving up power if Georgian Dream is voted out on Saturday. His opponents doubt he is willing to do this.

Under the country’s new proportional voting system, Khabeishvili of the UNM says Georgia’s fragmented opposition will have no trouble forming a coalition after the election. But he fears that Ivanishvili will seek to cling to power after an election loss.

If this happens, he predicts huge protests in Tbilisi and throughout the country. Here, things could get ugly. Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said in August that Georgia’s Western allies are plotting a coup to remove Georgian Dream from power. He warned Russia will be on standby to prevent this.

For Sabanadze, the stakes could not be higher: How Georgians vote on Saturday, and how the government responds, will determine whether the country remains on a path to Europe or becomes more like Belarus.

“When I was in Brussels, I thought that Georgia would never become an authoritarian state again, because it’s just something that we find very difficult to accept,” she said. “Georgians will put up a fight. The Belarus scenario will not happen easily.”

Britain’s King Charles has said the Commonwealth should acknowledge its “painful” history and urged the organization to “right inequalities that endure” as he opened a meeting of Commonwealth countries in Samoa on Friday.

“I understand from listening to people across the Commonwealth how the most painful aspects of our past continue to resonate. It is vital therefore that we understand our history, to guide us to make the right choices in the future,” Charles said in his first speech as head of the Commonwealth.

“As we look around the world and consider its many deeply concerning challenges, let us choose within our Commonwealth family the language of community and respect, and reject the language of division,” he said in the speech after the subject of slavery reparations reemerged in recent days.

Charles, who did not directly refer to slavery during his address, also said: “None of us can change the past, but we can commit with all our hearts to learning its lessons and to finding creative ways to right inequalities that endure.”

The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, or CHOGM, is held every two years, and brings together delegations from the 56 member states to work together to try and tackle some of the world’s most pressing issues such as climate change, creating opportunities for young people and fostering inclusive and sustainable prosperity for all.

Charles was addressing Commonwealth leaders, foreign ministers and dignitaries during the welcome ceremony on Friday.

Ahead of the gathering, the BBC reported that diplomats were preparing text for the summit’s official communique that would commit to a “meaningful, truthful and respectful conversation” on the issue.

In recent years, the British monarchy has adopted a more conciliatory tone when addressing the past horrors of transatlantic slavery. In Kenya last November, his first trip to a Commonwealth nation as head of the body, Charles said, the “wrongdoings of the past are a cause of the greatest sorrow and the deepest regret.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.

“La tasweer! La tasweer!” (“Don’t film! Don’t film!”) the general shouted, his eyes flashing with anger, his jaw clenched as he stormed towards us. A couple of fighters hopped off the back of the militia’s lead truck, fanning out around our vehicle, their rifles drawn.

The second truck that had been following us, tan-colored and laden with a heavy machine gun abruptly pulled over to our side, hemming us in.

There was a moment of panic — were they going to shoot us?

We had come to Darfur to report on the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, never intending to become part of the story.

But months of planning came apart in moments when we were detained by a militia led by the man everyone called the general.

Cameraman Scott McWhinnie handed him the camera, assuring him, “We’re not filming, we’re not filming.” Producer Brent Swails quickly got out of our truck to try to defuse the situation.

“Are we OK? Are we OK?” he asked.

Abruptly, the general turned his back on us and grabbed a rifle from one of his soldiers, before taking aim across the tree-dotted savanna. I was relieved that the gun wasn’t pointed at us but still disturbed by his erratic behavior.

I looked pleadingly at our driver. “What’s going on?” His face was ashen. “I don’t know,” he said.

The general fired off a round. The target appeared to be a bird. He missed.

We had arrived in North Darfur the previous day. The goal was to get to Tawila, a town under the control of SLM-AW, a faction of the Sudan Liberation Movement, led by Abdul Wahid al-Nur, a neutral party in Sudan’s bitter civil war. Tawila is just 32 miles (51 kilometers) southwest of the besieged city of El Fasher which is the frontline of the grisly fight for the Darfur region. As a result, it has become a refuge of sorts for the tens of thousands fleeing the city.

The 18-month conflict in Sudan has been drastically overshadowed by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza but the UN fears it could become far deadlier: a cruel confluence of hunger, displacement, and disease with both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the two main warring parties in this conflict, accused of war crimes.

According to the UN, more than 10 million people have been displaced in the violence, almost a quarter of Sudan’s population. More than 26 million people — over three times the population of New York City — face acute hunger.

In particular, all eyes are on Darfur, where a genocide was perpetrated from 2003 to 2005 and where vicious war crimes have heightened fears that the worst could be realized again.

In August, a famine was declared in the Zamzam displaced people’s camp in Darfur. And yet, only a handful of international journalists have been able to get in since the start of the war to report on what is happening.

After many months of failing to get permission to visit Darfur from the SAF or the RSF, the invitation from the SLM-AW leadership to visit Tawila seemed the safest way to get in and tell the story.

But when we reached the agreed meeting spot in the town of Abu Gamra, our hosts were nowhere to be found. Instead, a rival militia stood in their place. They had two Toyota Land Cruiser pickup trucks, weighed down with rocket propelled grenades and heavy machine guns.

Our driver was led off in chains to the town jail.

For three hours we were interrogated, one by one, in a small, windowless room. About eight men asked the questions. “Why are you here?” “Who sent you here?” “Who gave you permission to be here?”

We answered their questions but got no information in return: who these men were or what they wanted with us.

When the driver returned later without the chains, there was a brief moment of optimism. Perhaps, we would be escorted to the border and simply instructed not to return.

But the militants bundled us into our vehicle and ordered us to follow them.

Our convoy quickly veered off onto a dirt track, heading deeper into Darfur.

It was at this point that the general suddenly stopped his vehicle and started shouting at us, before shooting his gun. The goal, presumably, to scare us. It worked.

We stopped again, maybe an hour later, by a dry riverbed lined with trees. The youngest fighters laid out a mat and brought out a flask of camel milk for the general and another older man known as the security chief, who wore a turban and sunglasses to hide a missing eye. Trembling, I took off my shoes and sat down in front of them.

“Please, we are very frightened,” I told them in halting Arabic. “I am a mother. I have three little boys.”

The general looked disinterested, but I could see the security chief’s face soften.

“Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened,” he assured me, “We are human beings.”

The security chief asked us for our partners’ phone numbers, so that he could call them and assure them that we were OK. Grudgingly, I handed him my husband’s number — reluctant to put my family through any stress but conscious that it might also be a way for our captors to check my story. Later, we would find out that an English speaker had called my husband and Scott’s wife from the city of Port Sudan, thousands of miles away from where we were held, to say that we were safe and in good health but threatening that we would be imprisoned for many years if they spoke about it to anyone.

For the next 48 hours, we were held under armed guard by the general, the security chief and roughly a dozen soldiers, some who looked no older than 14. Our detention was spent out in the open, underneath acacia trees. As the only woman, and with no private space to relieve myself, I limited my water and food intake. Sleep, when it came, was a mercy, a reprieve from the clawing sense of panic at not knowing when I would be able to see my children again.

As a journalist, one never wants to become the story. And yet our experience is instructive in understanding the complexities of the conflict in Darfur and the challenges of getting food and aid to those who need it most and getting the story out to the world.

During our journey in and out of North Darfur, we spent many hours traversing the remote region on sandy tracks. We had to dig ourselves out more than 10 times and had a flat tire at least once a day. There are no paved roads in the area, which makes the distribution of aid even more challenging.

But where sturdy trucks with the appropriate tires may help expedite that process, the issue of gaining access to the territory is a much harder problem to solve. The state of North Darfur is the center of some of the heaviest fighting between the RSF and SAF. Swaths of it are under the control of a patchwork of different militias with competing agendas who regularly shift allegiances.  You can have a guarantee of safe passage from one, only to be blocked by another 10 miles down the road.

In August, at US-led talks on Sudan in Geneva, the Sudanese Armed Forces agreed to allow the flow of aid through Adre, the largest border point between Chad and Darfur. But fewer than 200 trucks have entered in the last two months — a fraction of what is needed on the ground — and only a handful of those have reached the famine-hit Zamzam camp outside El Fasher, where close to half a million people are struggling to survive.

Earlier this month, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) announced it was having to suspend its operations in Zamzam.

“This is a disaster for us. Knowing that we have the team on the ground capable to work and that this suspension is due to either administrative impediments or blockages by the warring parties is, of course, frustrating. We keep trying to push … We cannot abandon these people,” Michel Lacharité, MSF’s Head of Emergency Operations told me.

Compounding the chaos is the difficulty of communications. During our time in North Darfur, we passed at least six cell phone towers but none of them were operational. The pecking order of any group is clearly marked by who is carrying the satellite phone. Our captors confiscated our satellite phone but allowed us to keep our cell phones — confident that they would never work. And they did not. Some of the groups have Starlink satellites that they use to stay in touch. But for most ordinary people, there are few ways to have contact with the outside world.

The net result of these manifold challenges is that NGOs, human rights organizations and journalists have almost no access to North Darfur.

“The world doesn’t see us, the help doesn’t come,” the security chief mused to me one afternoon.

Instead, the most valuable and reliable data we have about the situation on the ground in Darfur comes from satellites.

According to the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which uses satellite imagery to build up a picture of the situation on the ground, in the first two weeks of October at least 14 villages in Darfur were set ablaze by the RSF, heightening concerns that after a relative lull during the rainy season, the conflict is once again ratcheting up.

But satellite images can only tell part of the story. They don’t allow us to connect, to empathize, to engage.

On our last day in detention, the general and security chief disappeared for about six hours, leaving us in the custody of their young fighters. At one point, several of them told us to remove our bags from our vehicle, saying they were taking our driver to the local market. The four of us looked at each other uneasily. Were they planning to abandon us? Or hand us over to another group? We had no choice but to do what we were told and unload our gear.

Later, when the general and the security chief returned, they were in good spirits.

“It has been decided you will be released tomorrow,” they told us. “We thought you were spies but now you can go home.”

A wave of relief crashed through my body. There were smiles and handshakes with our captors. We posed awkwardly for a photograph at the edge of the mat that had been our makeshift prison.

Our ordeal was over. We were unharmed and soon to return home. The fear and worry quickly replaced by a feeling of bitter disappointment, of failure. We never made it to Tawila. Never managed to talk to the people in Darfur whose lives have been chewed up by this vicious civil war. Untold stories that the world may never hear.

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