Top US and Russian officials have met in Saudi Arabia for the most extensive negotiations between the two countries in three years, agreeing to continue planning an end to the Ukraine war and pursue closer cooperation amid concerns in Kyiv and across Europe that Donald Trump could push for a settlement favouring Vladimir Putin.

After the talks at Diriyah Palace in Riyadh, which lasted almost five hours, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the two sides had agreed to create a high-level team to support Ukraine peace talks and to explore “economic and investment opportunities which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine.”

The statements highlighted a tectonic shift in Washington’s approach to Russia, dramatically moving away from the Biden administration’s efforts to isolate Moscow.

Rubio said an end to the Ukraine conflict must be acceptable to all involved, including Ukraine, Europe and Russia, adding that its European allies were consulted on Ukraine. Still, no Ukrainian or even European officials were present at the meeting.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, were photographed earlier sitting across from Rubio, who attended the talks alongside the US national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East.

Shortly after the meeting, Ushakov said the two sides had agreed for negotiators to talk about Ukraine and had briefly discussed the conditions needed for a Putin-Trump summit, although he noted this was unlikely to take place next week.

But the talks in the Saudi capital underscored the rapid pace of US efforts to halt the conflict, raising alarm in Ukraine and across Europe, where officials fear being sidelined in the negotiations.

Ushakov further said the meeting “went well” and was “a serious conversation on all issues”.

Ukrainian officials earlier said they had not been invited to the talks. Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday that Ukraine would not accept any outcome reached without Kyiv’s involvement.

Speaking during a visit to Ankara where he held talks with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Zelenskyy said he was not prepared to give up territory to Russia.

“Diplomacy does not mean surrendering the interests and sovereignty of our state,” he said at a meeting with representatives of the Crimean Tatar community.

The discussions in Riyadh mark the first high-level attempt to negotiate an end to Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine since the war’s early days, when talks collapsed over the Russian president’s demands.

Despite the flurry of diplomacy, little is known about Trump’s peace plan for Ukraine or Russia’s willingness to engage, and Tuesday’s meeting offered few new clues.

Both sides issued carefully worded statements when the talks concluded. Rubio said the meeting was “the first step of a long and difficult journey”, adding: “An end to the Ukraine conflict must be acceptable to all involved, including Ukraine, Europe and Russia.”

“This needs to be a permanent end to the war and not a temporary end as we’ve seen in the past,” said Waltz.

“The practical reality is that there’s going to be some discussion of territory and there’s going to be discussion of security guarantees, those are just fundamental basics,” he added.

Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, said the two sides had started listening to each other but it was too early to talk about compromises.

Before the talks, Russian officials had said they would pursue “normalisation” with the US and lay the groundwork for a peace deal in Ukraine. But even before the meeting began, the US made several significant concessions to Putin, signalling that Ukraine would have to abandon its Nato ambitions and accept territorial losses.

US officials have also proposed that Europe send a peacekeeping mission to Ukraine after a ceasefire, and EU officials met on Monday to discuss the possibility.

However, Moscow has repeatedly rejected the idea. Lavrov said that the deployment of Nato member troops in Ukraine, even if they were operating there under a different flag, was unacceptable.

“We explained to our colleagues today what President Putin has repeatedly stressed: that the expansion of Nato, the absorption of Ukraine by the North Atlantic alliance, is a direct threat to the interests of the Russian Federation, a direct threat to our sovereignty,” Lavrov said.

He also rejected a US proposal that Russia and Ukraine halt strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure, falsely claiming that Russia had never endangered Ukraine’s civilian energy supply system.

Before departing to Saudi Arabia, Lavrov said Russia had no intention of making territorial concessions to Ukraine during the peace talks.

Putin has not commented publicly on the Saudi talks but told Trump last week during a phone call that Russia wanted to “settle the reasons for the conflict”. Some observers believe this suggests Russia may not limit its focus to Ukraine and may instead seek to reshape European security more broadly.

Moscow’s demands could resemble those it issued on the eve of its full-scale invasion in 2021: that Ukraine adopt a neutral status and that Nato halt the deployment of weapons to member states that joined after 1997, when the alliance began expanding to include former communist nations. This would affect much of eastern Europe including Poland and the Baltic states – Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

After the talks, Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokesperson, issued what appeared to be new conditions for peace, saying Russia was demanding “not just a pledge to deny Ukraine Nato membership but the annulment of the 2008 Bucharest summit declaration which promised Kyiv eventual membership without a specific timeline”.

Putin has previously insisted that Ukraine drastically reduce its military forces, a move that many in Ukraine fear would leave it vulnerable to future Russian attacks.

In Riyadh, Russia was also expected to leverage discussions on a potential Ukraine settlement to push for western sanctions relief, which have placed significant strain on its economy.

Leading Moscow’s economic negotiations is Dmitriev, the 49-year-old head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund and a close friend of Putin’s daughter. A former investment banker, Dmitriev has played a key role in Russia’s outreach to international investors.

“US oil majors have done very well in Russia,” Dmitriev said in a brief interview on Tuesday morning before the talks began, suggesting that American companies could come back to Russia. “We believe that at some point they will return – why would they pass up the opportunities Russia has provided for access to its natural resources?”

Tuesday’s talks in Riyadh offer Saudi Arabia and its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, an opportunity to assert themselves on the world stage.

Once labelled a pariah by Biden over the 2018 killing of the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi leader has emerged as a key intermediary in discussions between Russia and the US.

The latest US diplomatic push has left Kyiv and key allies scrambling to secure a seat at the table, fearing Washington and Moscow could move forward with a deal that sidelines their interests. In response, France convened an emergency meeting of EU nations and the UK on Monday to coordinate a response.

Emmanuel Macron announced after the meeting that he had spoken with Trump and Zelenskyy. “We seek a strong and lasting peace in Ukraine. To achieve this, Russia must end its aggression, and this must be accompanied by strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians,” Macron wrote on X.

Still, the security talks in Paris yielded no concrete measures, as European leaders struggled to present a united front amid divisions over the deployment of troops to Ukraine.

Ukraine reacted with gloom and dismay on Tuesday to the meeting between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia, with officials in Kyiv saying the Trump administration was “appeasing” Moscow.

They said negotiations between the two delegations got under way in Riyadh just hours after Russia attacked Ukraine with dozens of drones. At least two people were killed and 26 injured in strikes across the country.

One drone hit the top floor of a high-rise residential building in the central city of Dolynska, in the Kirovohrad region. A mother and her two children were injured and taken to hospital. “A difficult night,” said the local governor, Andriy Raikovych.

Soon after the talks concluded in Riyadh, air raid sirens wailed across the capital, Kyiv. Millions of Ukrainians were told by text message to seek shelter because of a threat from Russian ballistic missiles.

It was absurd for Moscow to talk about peace while killing Ukrainians, said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office. The latest salvo of 176 drones fired at Ukraine represented Russia’s actual “negotiating position”, he posted.

Without criticising the Trump administration directly, he said the high-level US-Russia talks had not been properly prepared, adding that they were merely a forum for more Russian “ultimatums”.

“Encouragement rather than coercion, a voluntary and bizarre renunciation of strength in favour of disheartening and unmotivated appeasement of the aggressor,” Podolyak wrote, summing up Kyiv’s negative reaction.

There is widespread scepticism that Russia would abide by any ceasefire deal unless it was underpinned by security guarantees – from the US and other western powers. Podolyak said there was no point in having a “fake peace” that would lead to “an inevitable continuation of the war”.

Ukrainians have bitter memories of two deals signed with Russia in the Belarus capital, Minsk, after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and began a covert invasion of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Russia repeatedly violated both ceasefires.

There are fears that a quick deal between Washington and Moscow would amount to Minsk 3 – another agreement that Russia would swiftly break. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Zelenskyy warned that Russia was ready to expand its invasion and “wage war” against Nato.

More immediately, there were concerns that a Trump-Putin deal would demand that Ukraine hold elections immediately after a ceasefire came into force, and before any final agreement was reached. The goal, Ukrainian commentators suggested, would be to replace Zelenskyy with a weaker leader, or even a pro-Russian candidate.

Ukraine is not obliged to hold elections under martial law. Few Ukrainians think they are practical, at a time when Russia’s invasion has forced millions of citizens to flee abroad and when soldiers are fighting and dying on the frontline. European embassies in Kyiv agree.

On Monday, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would not recognise any peace agreements made without its participation. The White House excluded Kyiv and European nations from its direct talks with Russia, the first bilateral contact between the two sides since before Moscow’s 2022 invasion.

Speaking in Ankara, after a meeting with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Zelenskyy said on Tuesday he was not willing to give up territory to Russia or accept its ultimatums. The Kremlin currently occupies about 20% of Ukraine and says it has “annexed” four regions, including cities it does not control.

“Diplomacy does not mean surrendering the interests and sovereignty of our state,” Zelenskyy said. He said he would seek the return of occupied eastern and southern towns and villages via diplomatic means, stressing: “They will be Ukrainian. There can be no compromise.”

Ukraine’s former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said he did not expect a truce with Russia any time soon, telling the BBC: “Peace is not even visible on the horizon.” Kuleba said it was in Ukraine’s interest to resist US pressure for a speedy solution and to instead engage with Trump over a sustained period.

Kuleba said: “Peace isn’t visible for one simple reason: because Putin still believes that he can outwit everyone, that time is on his side, fate is on his side, the west has wavered, America is retreating, Europe is not able to take the field instead of America, or … is not ready to put on the captain’s armband.”

He added: “The key question now is, actually, where is Putin in this scheme? In my opinion, he believes that he will win. Victory for him is all of Ukraine. He didn’t come for some piece of land. He came for Ukraine.”

Ukraine reacted with gloom and dismay on Tuesday to the meeting between the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia, with officials in Kyiv saying the Trump administration was “appeasing” Moscow.

They said negotiations between the two delegations got under way in Riyadh just hours after Russia attacked Ukraine with dozens of drones. At least two people were killed and 26 injured in strikes across the country.

One drone hit the top floor of a high-rise residential building in the central city of Dolynska, in the Kirovohrad region. A mother and her two children were injured and taken to hospital. “A difficult night,” said the local governor, Andriy Raikovych.

Soon after the talks concluded in Riyadh, air raid sirens wailed across the capital, Kyiv. Millions of Ukrainians were told by text message to seek shelter because of a threat from Russian ballistic missiles.

It was absurd for Moscow to talk about peace while killing Ukrainians, said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to the head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office. The latest salvo of 176 drones fired at Ukraine represented Russia’s actual “negotiating position”, he posted.

Without criticising the Trump administration directly, he said the high-level US-Russia talks had not been properly prepared, adding that they were merely a forum for more Russian “ultimatums”.

“Encouragement rather than coercion, a voluntary and bizarre renunciation of strength in favour of disheartening and unmotivated appeasement of the aggressor,” Podolyak wrote, summing up Kyiv’s negative reaction.

There is widespread scepticism that Russia would abide by any ceasefire deal unless it was underpinned by security guarantees – from the US and other western powers. Podolyak said there was no point in having a “fake peace” that would lead to “an inevitable continuation of the war”.

Ukrainians have bitter memories of two deals signed with Russia in the Belarus capital, Minsk, after Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and began a covert invasion of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Russia repeatedly violated both ceasefires.

There are fears that a quick deal between Washington and Moscow would amount to Minsk 3 – another agreement that Russia would swiftly break. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Zelenskyy warned that Russia was ready to expand its invasion and “wage war” against Nato.

More immediately, there were concerns that a Trump-Putin deal would demand that Ukraine hold elections immediately after a ceasefire came into force, and before any final agreement was reached. The goal, Ukrainian commentators suggested, would be to replace Zelenskyy with a weaker leader, or even a pro-Russian candidate.

Ukraine is not obliged to hold elections under martial law. Few Ukrainians think they are practical, at a time when Russia’s invasion has forced millions of citizens to flee abroad and when soldiers are fighting and dying on the frontline. European embassies in Kyiv agree.

On Monday, Zelenskyy said Ukraine would not recognise any peace agreements made without its participation. The White House excluded Kyiv and European nations from its direct talks with Russia, the first bilateral contact between the two sides since before Moscow’s 2022 invasion.

Speaking in Ankara, after a meeting with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Zelenskyy said on Tuesday he was not willing to give up territory to Russia or accept its ultimatums. The Kremlin currently occupies about 20% of Ukraine and says it has “annexed” four regions, including cities it does not control.

“Diplomacy does not mean surrendering the interests and sovereignty of our state,” Zelenskyy said. He said he would seek the return of occupied eastern and southern towns and villages via diplomatic means, stressing: “They will be Ukrainian. There can be no compromise.”

Ukraine’s former foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said he did not expect a truce with Russia any time soon, telling the BBC: “Peace is not even visible on the horizon.” Kuleba said it was in Ukraine’s interest to resist US pressure for a speedy solution and to instead engage with Trump over a sustained period.

Kuleba said: “Peace isn’t visible for one simple reason: because Putin still believes that he can outwit everyone, that time is on his side, fate is on his side, the west has wavered, America is retreating, Europe is not able to take the field instead of America, or … is not ready to put on the captain’s armband.”

He added: “The key question now is, actually, where is Putin in this scheme? In my opinion, he believes that he will win. Victory for him is all of Ukraine. He didn’t come for some piece of land. He came for Ukraine.”

More than 200 organisations worldwide have called on nations involved in producing F-35 fighter jets to “immediately halt all arms transfers to Israel” amid fears they have failed to prevent the planes from being used to violate international law.

The letter, signed by 232 civil society organisations, was sent on Monday to government ministers in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the US and the UK as the war in Gaza reached 500 days.

The sponsors hail from the jet-building nations as well as Belgium, Jordan, Lebanon, Switzerland, Ireland, India and elsewhere. High-profile charities and NGOs, such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Oxfam, are among the sponsors.

The letter, coordinated by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), reads: “The past 15 months have illustrated with devastating clarity that Israel is not committed to complying with international law.

“Partners to the F-35 programme have individually and collectively failed to prevent these jets from being used to commit serious violations of international law by Israel.”

It adds: “States have either been unwilling to observe their international legal obligations and/or claimed that the structure of the F-35 programme means that it is not possible to apply arms controls to any end-user, making the entire programme incompatible with international law.”

The fighter jets are made by a global consortium led by the US defence giant Lockheed Martin. British firms supply 15% of the parts as part of an international agreement with countries including Israel.

The UK government is already facing legal action over existing arms licences to Israel that includes components of F-35 fighter jets, and allegations of complicity with war crimes. Similar legal action over arms exports to Israel has also been taken in the US, the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada and Australia.

In September the UK suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel because of a “clear risk” they might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law. The government exempted F-35 components, and said that it was not possible to suspend licensing the components without affecting the global programme and has justified the components for wider reasons of “international peace and security”.

More than 48,000 people have been killed in Gaza, with some researchers estimating that the death toll is 40% higher than figures from the Palestinian territory’s heath ministry. Most of the population have been forcibly displaced, and 69% of its infrastructure has been damaged by Israel’s bombardment, according to the United Nations Satellite Centre.

The letter said the “fragility” of the current temporary ceasefire underscores the risk of further violations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. It accused states of being “unwilling” to observe their legal obligations or claiming that the programme meant it was not possible to apply arms controls to any end user, “making the entire programme incompatible with international law”.

All the countries as part of the F-35 programme are parties to the arms trade treaty (ATT) – excluding the US which is a signatory – which is required to prevent the direct and indirect transfers of military equipment where there is risk of violations of international humanitarian law.

The UK has blocked licences supplying arms for Israel’s offensive use in Gaza solely on the grounds of potential maltreatment of Palestinian detainees and Israel’s controls on the supply of humanitarian aid into Gaza. It has refused to come to a judgment on allegations that Israel has used disproportionate force, exposing a potential future gap in UK arms legislation.

“Despite these devastating realities and crimes on the ground, our governments have continued to supply Israel through the F-35 programme,” the letter added.

“The F-35 jet programme is emblematic of the west’s complicity in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians. These jets were instrumental in Israel’s 466-day bombardment of Gaza, in crimes that include war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” said Katie Fallon, advocacy manager at CAAT.

“Since the limited ceasefire the US government, and lead partner to the F-35 programme, has threatened Gaza with mass ethnic cleansing and forced displacement. This programme gives material and political consent from all western partners, including the UK, for these crimes to continue.”

A UK government spokesperson said: “In September we suspended export licences to Israel for items used in military operations in Gaza.

“F-35 components have been excluded because it is not possible to suspend licensing of F-35 components for use by Israel without prejudicing the entire global F-35 programme, including its broader strategic role in Nato and military support to Ukraine.”

A British couple detained in Iran have been charged with espionage after travelling to the country as part of a round-the-world motorbike trip.

The Iranian judiciary’s Mizan news agency said Craig and Lindsay Foreman, who are in their early 50s, had been charged after allegedly gathering information in different locations in the country.

The couple had crossed into Iran from Armenia on 30 December for a five-day visit, according to social media posts, and were reportedly arrested in January. The last post on their Facebook page, from Isfahan, in Iran, on 3 January, included selfies with the caption: “What a wonderful place.”

The detention of the two British nationals and charges of espionage comes as the new Iranian ambassador to the UK, Seyyed Ali Mousavi takes up his post.

Recent economic sanctions reimposed on Iran by the US have placed the UK and other European powers under further pressure to distance themselves from the country.

According to Amnesty International, the penalty for espionage in Iran can range from two years in jail to the death penalty. However, it is unclear how these penalties apply to foreign nationals.

Since 2010, at least 66 foreign and dual nationals have been detained by Iran, according to research by the University of Essex in 2022, part of a growing practice of “politically motivated arrests” that has been decried by Human Rights Watch.

After the death in September 2022 of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman of Kurdish origin who had been arrested three days earlier for allegedly breaching the Islamic dress code, at least 40 foreign and dual nationals were arrested.

Last week, Iranian state media published photographs showing the UK ambassador, Hugo Shorter, meeting two British “national security” suspects at the general and revolutionary prosecutor’s office in Kerman province, about 500 miles south-east of Tehran.

The photo, with blurred faces of two individuals sitting across from Shorter, shows that the meeting on Wednesday was held in the presence of the Kerman prosecutor Mehdi Bakhshi and Kerman governor’s deputy for security and law enforcement, Rahman Jalal.

Relatives of the Foremans spoke of their concern at the couple’s “distressing situation” . The pair are being held in the southern city of Kerman.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian dual national freed in 2022 after five years in a Tehran prison, was transferred to Kerman after her initial arrest. In 2016, she was detained for more than 150 days and later sentenced to five years in jail for spying. At the time, the UK accused Iran of using the dual citizen as a “pawn for diplomatic leverage”.

On Sunday, Richard Ratcliffe, Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband, called on UK ministers to act “more promptly” than they did in his wife’s case. “A court process may soon come. It’s not a real court. But it will be a form of brutal theatre to get the government’s attention,” said Ratcliffe.

The Foreign Office has been approached for comment.

The UK government advises against all travel to Iran, saying British and dual nationals are at significant risk of arrest, questioning or detention, and that a British passport or UK connections “can be reason enough” to be detained by Iranian authorities.

Thousands of tourists have flocked to Mount Etna to watch spectacular eruptions on the volcano, but some people are blocking streets and preventing rescue services from reaching those in need of assistance, the local authorities have said.

Sicily’s head of regional civil protection, Salvo Cocina, described the tourism of recent days at Etna as “wild” and “extremely dangerous”, warning that day-trippers drawn by the exceptional views had parked their cars along narrow streets, impeding rescue vehicles.

In a post on Facebook on Sunday night, Cocina said the flow of people had created “a wild scene with cars crowding the narrow roads, a traffic standstill … and rescue vehicles unable to pass”. He added: “As darkness falls, the situation becomes extremely dangerous, with rising risks of falls and people sinking into the snow.”

His warning, however, appeared to fall on deaf ears.

Eight people, including two minors, got lost during an excursion on Monday and were only located several hours later, a development that prompted a call to the fire brigade. On Sunday, a 48-year-old man suffered a fractured foot from a fall and four others had gone missing the previous night.

Firefighters were brought in to assist locals and curb the flow of tourists and day-trippers from Sicily and beyond through the overcrowded streets, while mayors of the towns on the volcano’s slopes have ordered visitors to stay at least 500 metres from the lava – a directive which has been almost completely ignored.

Hundreds of videos featuring day-trippers who reached the area have gone viral over the weekend, showing visitors just centimetres from the snow. One TikTok clip shows dozens of tourists near a lava flow that, slowly descending the snowy slope, has melted the snow to form a stream.

“I’ve seen many photos and videos of people dangerously close to the front, even skiing,” said Carlo Caputo, the mayor of Belpasso, a town nearby. “Though visually striking, it exposes them to serious risks, as the lava, interacting with the snow, can instantly vaporise it and, with the thermal energy released, may violently hurl fragments or rocks.”

Italy, home to the most Unesco heritage sites in the world, is becoming wearily accustomed to episodes of overtourism.

Last month, the mayor of Roccaraso, a popular Italian ski resort, clamped down on day-trippers and even hinted at calling in the army to deal with an unprecedented invasion of tourists after the town was overwhelmed by 260 buses carrying more than 10,000 visitors from Naples and the surrounding Campania region, lured by a TikTok star and cheap tickets.

A plane carrying 80 people crash landed at Toronto Pearson airport on Monday, flipping upside down and leaving at least 18 people injured.

Video from the scene showed a Delta Air Lines plane belly-up on snow-covered tarmac and people walking away.

Two adults in a critical condition were airlifted to a nearby trauma centre and one child was taken by ambulance to a hospital in downtown Toronto. Fifteen others sustained minor injuries.

Flight 4819 – a Bombardier CRJ900 jet operated by the Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air – crashed while landing in Toronto about 2.45pm local time, having flown from Minneapolis in the US state of Minnesota.

The US Federal Aviation Authority said all 80 people onboard had been evacuated.

Video footage posted on Instagram showed passengers being helped by cabin crew to leave the upturned plane, with firefighters hosing the fuselage.

A Facebook user who said he was a passenger on the flight, John Nelson, posted a video showing the crashed plane and wrote: “Our plane crashed. It’s upside down. Most people appear to be OK. We’re all getting off.”

Nelson later told CNN there was no indication of anything unusual before landing. “We hit the ground, and we were sideways, and then we were upside down.

“I was able to just unbuckle and sort of fall and push myself to the ground. And then some people were kind of hanging and needed some help being helped down, and others were able to get down on their own.”

Todd Aitken, the airport’s fire chief, said: “It’s very early on. It’s really important that we do not speculate. What we can say is the runway was dry and there was no crosswind conditions.”

Deborah Flint, Toronto airport authority chief executive, said the crash did not involve any other planes.

The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, said he was “relieved there are no casualties”.

All departures and arrivals at the airport resumed at 5pm local time, having been paused minutes after the crash.

A massive snowstorm hit eastern Canada on Sunday, and strong winds and bone-chilling temperatures could still be felt in Toronto yesterday. Before the crash, dozens of departures and arrivals had been delayed.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) said it was “deploying a team to investigate” the accident, which came weeks after four fatal crashes in the US. The US National Transportation Safety Board said a team of investigators would assist Canada’s TSB.

Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse and Reuters

A plane carrying 80 people crash landed at Toronto Pearson airport on Monday, flipping upside down and leaving at least 18 people injured.

Video from the scene showed a Delta Air Lines plane belly-up on snow-covered tarmac and people walking away.

Two adults in a critical condition were airlifted to a nearby trauma centre and one child was taken by ambulance to a hospital in downtown Toronto. Fifteen others sustained minor injuries.

Flight 4819 – a Bombardier CRJ900 jet operated by the Delta subsidiary Endeavor Air – crashed while landing in Toronto about 2.45pm local time, having flown from Minneapolis in the US state of Minnesota.

The US Federal Aviation Authority said all 80 people onboard had been evacuated.

Video footage posted on Instagram showed passengers being helped by cabin crew to leave the upturned plane, with firefighters hosing the fuselage.

A Facebook user who said he was a passenger on the flight, John Nelson, posted a video showing the crashed plane and wrote: “Our plane crashed. It’s upside down. Most people appear to be OK. We’re all getting off.”

Nelson later told CNN there was no indication of anything unusual before landing. “We hit the ground, and we were sideways, and then we were upside down.

“I was able to just unbuckle and sort of fall and push myself to the ground. And then some people were kind of hanging and needed some help being helped down, and others were able to get down on their own.”

Todd Aitken, the airport’s fire chief, said: “It’s very early on. It’s really important that we do not speculate. What we can say is the runway was dry and there was no crosswind conditions.”

Deborah Flint, Toronto airport authority chief executive, said the crash did not involve any other planes.

The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, said he was “relieved there are no casualties”.

All departures and arrivals at the airport resumed at 5pm local time, having been paused minutes after the crash.

A massive snowstorm hit eastern Canada on Sunday, and strong winds and bone-chilling temperatures could still be felt in Toronto yesterday. Before the crash, dozens of departures and arrivals had been delayed.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) said it was “deploying a team to investigate” the accident, which came weeks after four fatal crashes in the US. The US National Transportation Safety Board said a team of investigators would assist Canada’s TSB.

Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse and Reuters

Placebo frontman Brian Molko is being charged with defamation after appearing to call the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, a “piece of shit, fascist, racist” in Italian while performing at a festival in Turin in 2023.

In August 2023, Meloni sued Molko over the comments. Prosecutors subsequently opened an investigation into the claims and have charged Molko with “contempt of the institutions”.

On Monday, Italy’s justice ministry allowed prosecutors in Turin to move forward with the legal proceedings. Defaming the Italian government, parliament, courts or army carries a fine of up to €5,000 (£4,146) and a direct summons to trial. Although public defamation in Italy can carry a prison term of up to three years, a spokesperson for justice minister Carlo Nordio has said Molko is unlikely to receive a custodial sentence.

A spokesperson for the band said there would be no comment.

Meloni leads the nationalist Brothers of Italy party and the hard-right coalition that has led the country since 2022 and pursued hardline policies on immigration, abortion and same-sex parenting. She recently joined far-right figures at the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Her party has recently banned surrogacy, putting those who go abroad to access it on a par with terrorists, paedophiles and war criminals – seemingly as part of the party’s homophobic stance – but ignoring the fact that nine out of 10 of the 250 Italian couples who seek surrogacy overseas each year are heterosexual. In September, the granddaughter of Italian wartime dictator Benito Mussolini said she was leaving Brothers of Italy because it was too rightwing.

In May, the philosopher Donatella Di Cesare, who was being sued by Meloni’s brother-in-law for comparing one of his speeches to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, claimed that her government was strategically using defamation suits to silence public intellectuals. Meloni’s first year in office recorded the highest number of lawsuits against public participation, according to the European parliament’s civil liberties committee.

Molko formed Placebo in 1994. The British rock band are known for their androgynous appearance and lyrics discussing sexuality, drug use and mental health. Their single Nancy Boy reached UK No 4 in 1997. Their most recent album, Never Let Me Go, was released in 2022.

Authorities in Damascus have arrested three men they claim were involved in a notorious massacre of civilians by Syrian security forces revealed by the Guardian three years ago.

Footage posted online purported to show one of the men, Monzer al-Jazairi, with his hands bound and being led through the heavily damaged streets of Tadamon, the Damascus suburb where nearly 300 people were killed in an atrocity filmed by the perpetrators themselves and then leaked by a whistleblower to activists in Europe.

After his arrest on Monday, Jazairi said the final death toll was even higher. “About how many were killed?” he was asked by a uniformed man.

“About 500 people,” he replied.

A witness in the neighbourhood said that it was stormed by truckloads of security forces on Monday afternoon, who closed off the perimeter of several blocks to prevent anyone escaping.

The two others arrested – and pictured sitting in the back of a pickup truck guarded by masked men – were identified as Somer Mohammed al-Mahmoud and Imad Mohammed al-Mahmoud.

It is unclear what role the trio played in the events in Tadamon. Their names are understood not to have come up in earlier research into the mass killings, suggesting they were not major players.

Over the course of a civil war in which the Bashar al-Assad regime killed at least 300,000 civilians, by one estimate, the massacre at Tadamon has become one of the most infamous for the clarity and detail with which it was documented by regime forces.

More than two-dozen videos showed uniformed members of Syrian military intelligence working with pro-Assad militiamen to kill an estimated 288 people, including 12 children. Their bodies were burned and buried using a bulldozer. The footage was dated to April 2013, a period in which the Syrian government and rebels were fighting over neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the capital.

A technician in Damascus discovered the footage on a Syrian government laptop and secretly sent it to activists in Paris, who passed the videos to a pair of researchers in the Netherlands, Annsar Shahhoud and Prof Uğur Ümit Üngör, from the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The face of the massacre became a Syrian military intelligence official named Amjad Yousef, who is still at large.

One of the videos showed Yousef, in military fatigues and a green fisherman’s hat with a distinctive scar on his eyebrow, leading 11 blindfolded men one-by-one to a pit, taunting several as he shoved them into the hole and murdered them.

Üngör and Shahhoud found a Facebook profile belonging to a man who resembled Yousef. The researchers befriended him and, posing as regime supporters, persuaded him to take part in several video calls that they filmed, excerpts from which were later published by the Guardian.

After one of the videos was published online, several of the families of the victims came forward saying they had identified their missing loved ones in the footage. The horror it sparked in Syria and among its diaspora led to rare concessions from the Assad regime, including the release of hundreds of prisoners and the appointment of a new defence minister.

But Yousef remained free, and two years ago was reportedly working on a military base outside Damascus. A former colleague said that year that Yousef had terrorised the Tadamon neighbourhood for the past decade, regularly snatching women from the streets, many of whom never returned.

“I saw him take women from a bread queue one morning,” the colleague said. “They were innocent. They had done nothing. They were either raped or killed. Nothing less.”

The US government announced it had imposed sanctions on Yousef and his family in 2023.

Syrian authorities announced in the days after Assad’s fall that they had arrested Yousef’s superior, Salih al-Ras.

“We used to bring detainees arrested at checkpoints, put them under the buildings here and execute them, and then after we’re done explode the buildings over them,” Jazairi told the Associated Press in a separate interview. It was unclear whether he was speaking under duress or voluntarily.

“Every batch constituted around 25 [people],” he said, adding that “around one week” passed between one batch and the next. The Damascus Security Chief, Lt. Col. Abdul Rahman al-Dabbagh, corroborated the number, citing additional confessions from those arrested.

“Many of those killed used to be collected at checkpoints and security [detention] centres, brought to Tadamon neighbourhood, where they were executed,” Dabbagh said. “The operation is ongoing to apprehend all those involved in violations and massacres against Syrians.”

Syria’s new transitional government, led by the former leader of the Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has been conducting raids in different cities to arrest remnants of the previous regime and says it is working on a judicial mechanism to hold them to account.

The apparent leader of a cultlike group known as the Zizians has been arrested in Maryland along with another member of the group, Maryland state police have said.

Jack LaSota, 34, was arrested on Sunday along with Michelle Zajko, 33, of Media, Pennsylvania. They face multiple charges including trespassing, obstructing and hindering and possession of a handgun in the vehicle, police said on Monday.

A bail hearing for the two is scheduled for 11am on Tuesday at Allegany district court.

The Zizians have been tied to the killing of US border patrol agent David Maland near the Canadian border in January and five other homicides in Vermont, Pennsylvania and California.

Maland, 44, was killed in a 20 January shootout following a traffic stop in Coventry, Vermont, a small town about 20 miles (32km) from the Canadian border.

Officials have offered few details of the cross-country investigation, which broke open after Maland’s death. Associated Press interviews and a review of court records and online postings tell the story of how a group of young, highly intelligent computer scientists, most of them in their 20s and 30s, met online, shared anarchist beliefs, and became increasingly violent.

Their goals aren’t clear, but online writings span topics from radical veganism and gender identity to artificial intelligence.

At the middle of it all is “Ziz”, who appears to be the leader of the strange group members who called themselves “Zizians”. She has been seen near multiple crime scenes and has connections to various suspects.

LaSota published a dark and sometimes violent blog under the name Ziz and, in one section, described her theory that the two hemispheres of the brain could hold separate values and genders and “often desire to kill each other”.

LaSota, who used she/her pronouns, and in her writings says she is a transgender woman, railed against perceived enemies, including so-called rationalist groups, which operate mostly online and seek to understand human cognition through reason and knowledge. Some are concerned with the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

LaSota, 34, has not responded to multiple Associated Press emails in recent weeks, and her attorney Daniel McGarrigle declined to comment when asked whether she is connected to any of the deaths. Before her weekend arrest, she missed court appearances in two states, and bench warrants have been issued for her arrest.

Reached on Monday, McGarrigle would confirm only that he has represented LaSota and wouldn’t confirm her arrest or any details of the latest case.

Guy Pearce, the actor Oscar-nominated for his role in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, has opened up about his experiences when working with Kevin Spacey on 1997 film LA Confidential.

Pearce had previously been oblique about his time with Spacey, who has been dogged by accusations of sexual misconduct, which Spacey has always denied, calling him “a handsy guy” in 2018. But speaking on Hollywood Reporter’s podcast Awards Chatter, the actor said he was now attempting to be franker about his co-star’s alleged behaviour.

“I just try to be more honest about it now and call it for what it is,” said Pearce, saying that he “broke down and sobbed” once he achieved more clarity on what had happened.

But Pearce sought to minimise his distress compared with that of others who allegedly had more troubling experiences, saying: “Even though I probably was a victim to a degree, I was certainly not a victim by any means to the extent that other people have been to sexual predators.”

He continued: “But I did that thing that you do where you brush it off and go, ‘Ah, that’s nothing. Ah, no, that’s nothing.’ And I did that for five months. And, really, I was sort of scared of Kevin because he’s quite an aggressive man. He’s extremely charming and brilliant at what he does – really impressive, etc. He holds a room remarkably. But I was young and susceptible, and he targeted me, no question.”

Pearce said that through the film’s production in Hollywood, the only moments in which he felt “safe” were when Spacey’s attention was focused on another actor, Simon Baker.

Once “things came to light in 2017”, said Pearce, he reassessed his times with Spacey and raised them with him, saying he subsequently “had a couple of confrontations with Kevin” that “got ugly”.

Pearce’s rethink was precipitated by the accusations, made by the actor Anthony Rapp, that Spacey made sexual advances at a party in New York in 1986 when he was 14. Numerous other accusations followed.

“I heard these stories about Kevin, sort of officially as news stories,” said Pearce. “And I was in London working on something, and I heard [the reports] and I broke down and sobbed, and I couldn’t stop. I think it really sort of dawned on me the impact that had occurred and how I sort of brushed it off and how I had sort of either shelved it or blocked it out, or whatever. That was a really incredible wake-up call.”

Of his appearance on an Australian talk show shortly afterwards, Pearce said: “I just blurted it all out. And of course then it all hit the press. I’m sort of in that weird position of going, ‘I don’t want all the focus on this. I don’t want it. But at the same time I don’t want him to get away with what he gets away with.’” He added, “I just try to be more honest about it now and call it for what it is.”

Spacey was legally cleared of misconduct and, respectively, sexual assault, in separate trials in the US and the UK and successfully defended himself against a lawsuit brought by Rapp.

Speaking last May on NewsNation, Spacey said he believed the #MeToo movement had “swung very, very far in the direction of unfairness”.

“I’m trying to show that I’ve listened,” he said. “I’ve learned. I’ve got the memo. I feel very strongly that whatever mistakes I’ve made in my life, that I paid a price.”

Since the allegations, Spacey has struggled to secure major roles on screen or stage. He voiced an evil GPS in the thriller Control, whose gala premiere was cancelled by the Prince Charles Cinema in London in 2023, and plays a character called The Devil in upcoming Italian thriller The Contract.