Donald Trump abruptly fired the air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff on Friday, sidelining a history-making Black fighter pilot and respected officer as part of a campaign to purge the military of leaders who support diversity and equity in the ranks.

The ouster of the second Black general to serve as chair of the joint chiefs comes three months after Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, outlined a plan for ridding the US military of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts during a podcast interview.

“First of all, you’ve got to fire the chairman of the joint chiefs,” Hegseth said during a November interview on the Shawn Ryan Show. “Any general that was involved, general, admiral, or whatever, that was involved in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go.”

Although Hegseth had been meeting regularly with Brown since the former Fox News host took over the top Pentagon job last month, he had openly questioned whether Brown had been named chair because he was Black. “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt – which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” Hegseth wrote in one of his books.

Brown had been praised, including by Time, for breaking racial barriers in the military and for his “warfighter” credentials. When he was sworn in as the air force chief of staff in 2020, during the first Trump administration, Brown acknowledged previous US military service members who had been denied advancement because of their race, Time reported. “It is due to their trials and tribulations in breaking barriers that I can address you today as the air force chief of staff,” Brown said.

In 2020, Trump himself had celebrated Brown’s confirmation on social media “as the USA’s first-ever African American military service chief” and noted that he had appointed him to that role. Brown’s experience as the former commander of Pacific air forces also meant he was “highly qualified to deter China and reassure allies in the Indo-Pacific”, Time noted that year.

“Under President Trump, we are putting in place new leadership that will focus our military on its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” Hegseth said in a statement after Brown’s firing, calling Brown a “thoughtful adviser”.

In a post on his social media platform Friday evening, Trump announced he would replace Brown with retired Lt Gen Dan “Razin” Caine, a retired military leader Trump said had been “passed over for promotion by Sleepy Joe Biden”.

Trump has repeatedly said that Caine impressed him during his first administration by assuring him that the Islamic State could be defeated very rapidly.

“Many so-called military ‘geniuses’ said it would take years to defeat Isis. General Caine, on the other hand, said it could be done quickly, and he delivered,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday.

At CPAC in 2019, Trump previously recounted a conversation in which he recalled asking Caine how fast the Islamic State could be defeated, and claimed that Caine had told him: “Sir, we can have it totally finished in one week,” a story that fact-checkers said at the time “didn’t add up”.

Caine, who is white, previously served as the associate director for military affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, and had played a direct role in the air defense of Washington DC during the 11 September attacks. Caine recently became a venture partner at Shield Capital, a venture capital firm, which touted his experience as an entrepreneur who “co-founded and successfully exited multiple aerospace, defense, and healthcare companies”.

Trump’s announcements set off a period of upheaval at the Pentagon, which is already bracing for firings of civilian staff, a dramatic overhaul of its budget and a shift in US military deployments under Trump’s new America First foreign policy.

Trump also wrote that he would soon swap out five other high-level positions in an unprecedented shake-up of the leadership of the US military.

In a statement shortly after Trump’s Truth Social post, Hegseth clarified which five positions Trump appeared to be looking to fill, saying that he was “requesting nominations for the positions of Chief of Naval Operations and Air Force Vice Chief of Staff”, firing Adm Lisa Franchetti and Gen James Slife, who currently hold those positions.

“We are also requesting nominations for the Judge Advocates General for the Army, Navy and Air Force,” Hegseth added.

Caine’s military service includes combat roles in Iraq, special operations postings and positions inside some of the Pentagon’s most classified special access programs. However, it does not include key assignments that were identified in law as prerequisites for the job, with an exemption for the president to waive them if necessary in times of national interest.

The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act states that to be qualified, a chair must have served previously as either the vice-chair, as a combatant commander or a service chief – but that requirement could be waived if the “president determines such action is necessary in the national interest”.

Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting

Donald Trump’s presidential administration has reassigned its top official at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) after the agency’s arrests and deportations have been slower than expected, Reuters reported, citing a senior administration official and two other sources familiar with the matter.

The official, Caleb Vitello, was in the role in an acting capacity and had been grappling with pressure to step up enforcement after other top Ice officials were reassigned days earlier.

According to a spokeswoman for the homeland security department who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, Vitello is “actually being elevated so he is no longer in an administrative role, but is overseeing all field and enforcement operations: finding, arresting, and deporting illegal aliens”.

The outlet went on to report that Vitello will remain at Ice and lead the office that is responsible for arrests and deportations.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, one Trump administration official said that the White House is expected to announce a new acting director. Another administration official told the outlet that the Ice team was going to be expanded.

Vitello was hand-picked by Trump last December and has 23 years of experience with Ice.

In a statement on Truth Social explaining his pick, Trump said: “A member of the Senior Executive Service, with over 23 years of service to [Ice], Caleb currently serves as Assistant Director of the Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs, where he oversees Agency-wide training, equipment, and policy to ensure Officer and Public Safety.”

Trump added: “Caleb’s exceptional leadership, extensive experience, and commitment to [Ice]’s mission make him an excellent choice to implement my efforts to enhance the safety and security of American communities who have been victimized by illegal alien crime.”

The latest reshuffling follows the recent reassignment of Russell Hott and Peter Berg at Ice due to frustrations from the Trump administration over the rate of deportations and arrest numbers.

Speaking to the Washington Post which first reported the reassignments of Hott and Berg, a DHS spokesperson said: “Ice needs a culture of accountability that it has been starved of for the past four years. We have a president, DHS secretary, and American people who rightfully demand results, and our Ice leadership will ensure the agency delivers.”

According to the outlet, Hott was reassigned to Ice’s local office in Washington while Berg was reassigned to the office in St Paul, Minnesota.

Since Trump’s return to the presidency on 20 January, immigration officials have been arresting 826 people daily. At that rate, Trump’s administration would make nearly 25,000 immigration-related arrests in the first 30 days of his second presidency, more than any other month in the past 11 years, which included his first presidency from 2017 to 2021.

The Pentagon announced plans Friday to fire 5-8% of its civilian workforce, staring next week with layoffs of 5,400 probationary workers, a Department of Defense official said in a statement.

The initial civilian layoffs will be followed by a Department of Defense hiring freeze to analyze the military’s personnel needs in compliance with Donald Trump’s political goals, Darin Selnick, the acting under-secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in the statement.

“We anticipate reducing the department’s civilian workforce by 5-8% to produce efficiencies and refocus the department on the president’s priorities and restoring readiness in the force,” Selnick said.

“It is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical. Taxpayers deserve to have us take a thorough look at our workforce top-to-bottom to see where we can eliminate redundancies.”

The announcement of sweeping firings of civilian workers was followed by Donald Trump’s firing of the current chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General CQ Brown Jr.

The initial Pentagon job cuts planned for next week are a fraction of the 50,000 defense department job losses that some had anticipated, but they might not be the last. The defense department is the largest government agency, with the Government Accountability Office finding in 2023 that it had more than 700,000 full-time civilian workers.

A 5-8% cut in that force would mean layoffs of between 35,000 and 60,000 people.

The announcement of the cuts comes after staffers from Elon Musk’s “department of government efficiency” initiative, or Doge, were at the Pentagon earlier in the week and received lists of such employees, US officials said. They said those lists did not include uniformed military personnel, who are exempt.

Probationary employees are generally those on the job for less than a year and who have yet to gain civil service protection.

Defense secretary Pete Hegseth has supported cuts, posting on X last week that the Pentagon needs “to cut the fat (HQ) and grow the muscle (warfighters).”

Hegseth also has directed the military services to identify $50bn in programs that could be cut next year to redirect those savings to fund Trump’s priorities. It represents about 8% of the military’s budget.

Most of recently terminated employees throughout the federal government began their current position in the last year and were therefore considered probationary, giving them less job protection. Roughly half of them live in states that voted for Trump in the 2024 election, government figures show.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed reporting

A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to put more than 2,000 US Agency for International Development (USAid) workers on leave, a setback for government employee unions that are suing over what they have called an effort to dismantle the foreign aid agency.

US district judge Carl Nichols in Washington lifted a temporary restraining order he had put in place at the outset of the case and declined to issue a longer term order keeping the employees in their posts. He wrote that he was satisfied by the administration’s assurances in court filings that USAid personnel abroad who were placed on leave would still be protected by US security.

Nichols, who was appointed by Donald Trump during his first term, also wrote that, because the affected employees had not gone through an administrative dispute process, he likely did not have jurisdiction to hear the unions’ case or consider their broader arguments that the administration is violating the US constitution by shutting down an agency created and funded by Congress.

“We are disappointed in today’s decision and believe the harms faced by USAid workers are real. We remain confident that the courts will find the administration’s efforts to decimate USAid contrary to law,” said Skye Perryman, president of the legal non-profit Democracy Forward, which represents the unions, in a statement.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit was brought earlier this month by the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Foreign Service Association. The global anti-poverty group Oxfam has since joined the case, though Nichols has not yet considered its claims.

Trump ordered a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid on his first day in office, throwing global humanitarian relief efforts into chaos.

In the following weeks, officials took steps that have largely shut down USAid’s operations, including placing much of its staff on leave, suspending or terminating most of its contracts and shuttering its Washington headquarters.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a 4 February letter to Congress that he had taken over as acting director of USAid, which Congress established as an agency independent of the state department in 1998. He wrote that the state department would consult with Congress about absorbing parts of USAid and shutting down the rest.

The foreign aid freeze and potential USAid shutdown have prompted multiple legal challenges.

Nichols’ order comes a day after a different judge, who is presiding over lawsuits brought against the administration by foreign aid contractors and grant recipients, for the second time ordered the administration to resume payments on frozen contracts and grants after it failed to comply with an earlier order.

The US envoy to Ukraine, Gen Keith Kellogg, has praised Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war”, striking a dramatically different tone from Donald Trump, who has called Ukraine’s president a “dictator”.

Kellogg left Kyiv on Friday after a three-day visit. Posting on social media, he said he had engaged in “extensive and positive discussions” with Zelenskyy and his “talented national security team”. “A long and intense day with the senior leadership of Ukraine,” he said.

The general’s upbeat remarks are in glaring contrast to those of the US president and his entourage, who have heaped abuse on Zelenskyy during a tumultuous week. Trump claimed Ukraine was to blame for starting the war with Russia, and accused Zelenskyy of doing “a terrible job”.

On Friday, Trump returned to the theme, saying he did not consider it essential for the Ukrainian president to be present at negotiations. “I don’t think he’s very important to be in meetings,” Trump told Fox News. “He’s been there for three years. He makes it very hard to make deals.”

Trump later drew a contrast between his relationship with Zelenskyy and with his Russian counterpart. “I’ve had very good talks with [Vladimir] Putin,” Trump said. “And I’ve had not such good talks with Ukraine.”

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who is leading Trump’s huge governmental overhaul, said Trump was right to leave Zelenskyy out of peace talks with Russia, held in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Without evidence, Musk accused Ukraine’s leader of running a “massive graft machine feeding off the dead bodies of Ukrainian soldiers”.

Kellogg is known to be the most pro-Ukrainian of Trump’s senior team. Nevertheless, the difference in rhetoric suggests a chaotic and contradictory approach to foreign policy from a White House that has dumped Ukraine as an ally and publicly sided with Moscow.

Zelenskyy prompted Trump’s ire by observing that the US president lived in a Kremlin “disinformation bubble”. Despite their disagreement, there were signs on Friday that US and Ukrainian negotiators were closer to making a deal over Ukraine’s vast mineral resources.

Late last year, Zelenskyy floated the idea of a partnership with the US. He was surprised when the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, asked him to sign an agreement that would give the White House $500bn (£395bn) in natural resources as “payback” for previous military assistance.

Zelenskyy declined to sign the document without US security guarantees to enforce any postwar settlement with Russia. There were reports on Friday that talks over US preferential access to Ukraine’s critical resources were ongoing, with drafts being constantly swapped.

“We sent another one yesterday,” one Kyiv source told Agence France-Presse news agency, adding that Ukraine was waiting for a US response. On Friday, the White House national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said he expected the Ukrainian government “in a very short time” to sign the “rare earth” deal.

If Zelenskyy refuses to sign the deal, he was warned during the talks with Kellogg that Ukraine could lose access to Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system, which provides crucial connectivity to the Ukrainian military, a source who was briefed on the threat told Reuters.

Trump’s crude criticism of Ukraine and his repetition of Russian talking points have stunned and alarmed European leaders. Nearly a dozen of them have called Zelenskyy during the past 48 hours to offer support for a just and sustainable end to the war and reaffirm shared democratic values.

They include Keir Starmer and France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, both of whom will visit Washington next week. In a national address, Macron said he would tell Trump: “You can’t be weak with Putin.”

Poland’s conservative president, Andrzej Duda, who is due to meet Trump in Washington on Saturday, said Zelenskyy should stay calm and cooperate.

Several senior Europeans will visit Kyiv on Monday to mark the third anniversary of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez; the European Council president, António Costa; and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, are expected.

The US president’s rambling personal attacks have galvanised support for Zelenskyy among Ukrainians, including people who were previously disenchanted. A new opinion poll found 63% approved of him – a figure many times higher than the 4% rating falsely claimed this week by Trump and Musk.

The prominent Ukrainian journalist Kristina Berdynskykh said: “After three years of full-scale war, Ukrainians are tired, nervous and often quarrel with each other. But I feel that now everyone will unite again. This always happens when Ukrainians feel an existential threat.”

Trump has echoed Kremlin propaganda by claiming Zelenskyy refuses to hold elections and is therefore illegitimate. Under martial law, elections are not allowed. Few Ukrainians support the idea of a poll, at a time when millions have fled abroad, a fifth of the country is occupied by Russia and while soldiers are fighting and dying on the frontline.

On Friday, more than 130 Ukrainian civil society organisations said Russia’s war of aggression made it impossible for Ukraine to hold elections – for the presidency and parliament. In a statement pushing back on Trump’s remarks, they said government legitimacy was “the exclusive prerogative of the Ukrainian people”.

The NGOs said there was a consensus among ruling and opposition political parties, as well as from the general public, that polls could only be held at least six months after a genuine ceasefire. This would give authorities time to prepare the electoral process and rebuild damaged infrastructure, they said.

• Donald Trump has reversed course to admit that Russia did in fact invade Ukraine. In an interview with Fox News radio on Friday, he acknowledged Russia had invaded Ukraine on the order of Vladimir Putin, but said Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, and then-US president Joe Biden, should have averted it. “They shouldn’t have let him attack.” The US president had said on Tuesday that Ukraine “should have never started” the war three years ago, prompting criticism domestically and internationally.

• Trump predicted a minerals agreement with Ukraine would be “signed hopefully in the next fairly short period of time”. The White House national security adviser, Mike Waltz, said on Friday that Zelenskyy was expected to sign a deal imminently. Zelenskyy said on Friday that Ukrainian and US teams were working on a draft agreement. “I am hoping for … a fair result,” he said. Zelenskyy on Wednesday rejected US demands for $500bn in mineral wealth from Ukraine to repay Washington for wartime aid, saying the US had supplied nowhere near that sum so far and had offered no specific security guarantees.

• US negotiators on the minerals deal threatened to cut Ukraine’s access to Starlink, Reuters reported, citing three sources familiar with the matter. Starlink provides crucial internet acces to Ukraine and its military. The issue was raised again on Thursday during meetings between Keith Kellogg, the US special Ukraine envoy, and Zelenskyy, one of the sources said. During the meeting, Ukraine was told it faced losing Starlink if it did not reach a minerals deal, said the source, who requested anonymity to discuss closed negotiations.

• Zelenskyy said after a flurry of phone calls with leaders of allied countries that Europe “must and can do much more to ensure that peace is actually achieved” in Ukraine. “It is possible” to achieve an end to the war with Russia since Ukraine and its partners in Europe have “clear proposals”, he added. “On this basis we can ensure the implementation of a European strategy, and it is important that this is done together with America.”

• The US has proposed a UN resolution on the war that omits any mention of Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, diplomatic sources told Agence France-Presse. It appeared to rival a draft resolution produced by Ukraine and its European allies that stresses the need to redouble diplomatic efforts to end the war this year. Washington’s text on Friday called for a “swift end to the conflict” without mentioning Kyiv’s territorial integrity, and was welcomed by Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, as “a good move”.

• A Russian drone attack killed a rail worker at a crossing outside Kyiv and falling drone fragments struck a building in the capital, local authorities said on Saturday. Kyiv region officials said the rail worker was killed in Boryspil district to the east. Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said drone fragments fell on private residences in the Solomyanskyi district to the west, triggering a fire and smashing windows in a nearby building. There were no casualties. Air raid alerts were in effect in Kyiv for about three hours.

• In Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, Russian forces attacked the town of Huliaipole with a guided bomb, injuring three people, the regional governor said. One person died on Thursday in a attack on a village west of Huliaipole. The accounts of military activity could not be independently verified.

• Kellogg has praised Zelenskyy as “the embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war”, striking a dramatically different tone from Donald Trump, who has falsely called Ukraine’s president a “dictator”, reports Luke Harding in Kyiv. Kellogg left Kyiv on Friday after a three-day visit. Posting on social media, he said he had engaged in “extensive and positive discussions” with Zelenskyy and his “talented national security team”.

• Keir Starmer will not risk riling Trump by challenging him over his attack on Zelenskyy when the pair finally meet next week, as the British prime minister seeks to cool an escalating transatlantic row, reports Kiran Stacey. Starmer will fly to the US for what could be a defining moment for his leadership, as Europe and the US trade accusations and insults about the origins of the war in Ukraine and the best way to end it. Trump added to the tensions on Friday when he accused Starmer and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, of having done nothing to help end the war.

• Russia could agree to using $300bn of sovereign assets frozen in Europe for reconstruction in Ukraine but will insist that part of the money is spent on the fifth of the country that Moscow’s forces control, three sources told Reuters. While Russia-US discussions are at a very early stage, one idea being floated in Moscow is that Russia could propose using a large chunk of the frozen reserves as part of a possible peace deal, according to the sources with knowledge of the matter. Russia and the US held their first face-to-face talks on ending the Ukraine war on 18 February in Saudi Arabia.

• A Polish court has handed an eight-year prison term to a Ukrainian man convicted of planning acts of sabotage and arson on Russia’s behalf. The court in the south-western city of Wroclaw on Friday found the 51-year-old man, identified only as Serhyi S, guilty of being part of a criminal ring and of preparing to set fire to various structures in the city. Polish state security officers arrested him in January 2024. Authorities said he was preparing to set fire to a factory. He denied intending sabotage but admitted to accepting orders to commit arson in return for money. Four other people have been charged in the case.

German police have arrested a man suspected in a stabbing attack at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial that left a Spanish tourist seriously injured.

There was no immediate indication of a motive for the attack late on Friday, two days before Germans vote in a national election.

A police spokesperson, Florian Nath, said the attack happened at 6pm, “probably with a knife. Maybe with something else.”

Nearly three hours later, a male suspect approached an officer in the cordon around the memorial grounds. “He had blood on his hands and this made him very suspicious,” Nath said.

The spokesperson said police arrested the man and seized the attack weapon.

The victim was identified as a 30-year-old Spanish man, who was taken to a hospital.

The monument, one of the German capital’s most sacred sites, commemorates the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during the second world war.

Germany’s national election campaign – in which polls suggest a far-right party could come in second place for the first time in 90 years – has been marred by a series of high-profile attacks. One of those was a stabbing blamed on an Afghan immigrant, which prompted a fraught debate on immigration.

Earlier on Friday, an 18-year-old ethnic Chechen was arrested on suspicion of planning an attack on the Israeli embassy in Berlin, Bild reported.

They poured on to streets across Germany by the thousands, waving rainbow flags and signs that read “Choose Love”. Days before an election in which the far right is expected to catapult into second place in Germany’s parliament, the simultaneous rallies in 50 municipalities were billed as a show of strength by an LGBTQ+ community as people braced for what might lie ahead.

“Many queer people are unsettled by the social and political situation,” the organisers of the mid-February, cross-country initiative wrote on their website. “The tone against us is getting harsher, and liberal democracy is under pressure.”

For years, rights campaigners have come up against the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and its opposition to marriage equality, safe community spaces and access to healthcare and reproductive justice.

Sunday’s election, however, could leave the LGBTQ+ community grappling with an intensified challenge as polls suggest support for the AfD is set to double, yielding a result that would be unprecedented in the country’s postwar history.

Alva Träbert, a board member of Germany’s LGBTQ+ umbrella group LSVD and Federation Queer Diversity, said: “We are looking at political actors openly including anti-queer and anti-trans policy in their campaigns as part of a larger effort to scapegoat marginalised groups for bigger social issues, while simultaneously legitimising discrimination and hate towards them.”

The AfD’s manifesto for the upcoming election defines family as a “father, mother and children”, to the exclusion of all other forms of families. It calls for minors to be protected from what it describes as “the trans cult, early sexualisation and gender ideology”.

In recent years, as support has surged for the far right, the impact has been palpable: campaigners said they were aware of at least 26 attacks by far-right protesters on Pride marches last year. Träbert said in an email: “As heartbreaking and frightening as this development is, it is an unsurprising consequence of the proliferation and normalisation of anti-queer and anti-trans sentiment in politics and the media. We know this from our history: violence begins with words – and words become actions.”

Träbert said that as the community had grappled with fear and uncertainty, it had been met with love and support from some quarters, with people travelling across Germany to attend Pride events in person, and others becoming activists for the first time.

In the lead-up to Sunday’s elections, polls suggest the conservative CDU-CSU bloc could emerge as the most-voted party, with about 28% of the vote, followed by the AfD.

While the conservative opposition leader, Friedrich Merz, has ruled out any formal cooperation with the AfD, he recently leaned on the party to support a non-binding resolution on border policy, marking a historic breach of a taboo.

His willingness to do so added to concerns about the influence of the AfD, said Träbert. “Over the past months, it has been increasingly concerning to see more centrist parties aiming to win back the electorate by appropriating the AfD’s talking points and policies.”

Both Merz’s party and the AfD have vowed to revoke the self-determination law, which took effect last November and made it easier for people to reflect their preferred names and gender on official records. The shared promise posed a “serious threat” to transgender, non-binary and intersex people, Träbert said.

The far right’s consistent efforts to roll back LGBTQ+ rights seemingly contradicts its candidate for chancellor, Alice Weidel, a lesbian woman who is raising two sons with her Sri Lankan-born wife.

“I would say Alice Weidel serves as a kind of fig leaf,” said Constantin Wurthmann, a political scientist at the University of Mannheim. “Because if you say the AfD is racist, you can point to Alice Weidel’s partner who is not white.

“And if you say, well, the AfD is against homosexuals, you can say, well she’s a lesbian candidate and a leading figure. But I would say that while she has this sexual orientation, she doesn’t share the identity of the community at all.”

The AfD did not reply to a request for comment. Speaking to the Financial Times earlier this year, one senior AfD official sought to explain the paradox in this way: “She is just gay by biology, but not by political conviction.”

In recent months Weidel has courted allies known for their strong stance against LGBTQ+ rights, from Elon Musk, who blamed “the woke mind virus” for his transgender daughter Vivian’s transition; to Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who last year was accused of using a “machinery of fear” to attack the LGBTQ+ community.

The apparent contradictions were put to Weidel earlier this month when she visited Budapest to meet Orbán. In an open letter, the Labrisz Lesbian Association, one of the co-founders of the Budapest Pride parade, laid bare what it meant to be LGBTQ+ in Orbán’s Hungary.

The letter said: “Welcome to a country where lesbians cannot participate in artificial insemination programmes, cannot adopt children, and if they already have children, only one of them can exercise parental rights.”

The association contrasted the situation with Orbán’s reception of the AfD. “Orbán and his homophobic comrades, with their political interests in mind, will no doubt discreetly excuse you for being a lesbian. Orbán will certainly not lecture you that you are unfit to bring up children and that you are corrupting your children. And you will discreetly not think of your partner and two children while smiling into the cameras as you shake hands with Orbán.”

The letter finished with a query, echoing the question that had been asked across Hungary, Germany and beyond after the AfD’s announcement of Weidel’s visit to Budapest. “Dear Alice Weidel, what message are you sending to Hungarian lesbians with your visit?”

Authorities in a city in the Brazilian Amazon have declared a state of emergency after huge sinkholes opened up, threatening hundreds of homes.

Several buildings in Buriticupu, in Maranhão state, have already been destroyed, and about 1,200 people of a population of 55,000 risk losing their homes into a widening abyss.

“In the space of the last few months, the dimensions have expanded exponentially, approaching substantially closer to the residences,” an emergency decree issued by the city government earlier this month said about the sinkholes.

The recent sinkholes are an escalation of a problem that residents of Buriticupu have been watching unfold for the last 30 years, as rains slowly erode soils made vulnerable by their sandy nature, plus a combination of poorly planned building work and deforestation.

The large soil erosions are known in Brazil as “voçoroca”, a word of Indigenous origins that means “to tear the earth” and is the equivalent of sinkholes.

The problem becomes worse in periods of heavy rain such as the current one, says Marcelino Farias, a geographer and professor at the Federal University of Maranhao.

Antonia dos Anjos, who has lived in Buriticupu for 22 years, fears more sinkholes will soon appear. “There’s this danger right in front of us, and nobody knows where this hole has been opening up underneath,” the 65-year-old said.

Buriticupu secretary of public works, and an engineer, Lucas Conceiçao said the municipality clearly does not have the capacity to find solutions for the complex sinkhole situation.

“These problems range from the erosion processes to the removal of people who are in the risk area,” he said.

Israelis and Palestinians are bracing for another tense exchange of hostages, prisoners and detainees on Saturday after uproar in Israel over allegations that two child hostages were “brutally murdered” by Hamas, and the group’s failure to deliver the body of their mother, instead returning the corpse of an unidentified woman.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement on Friday afternoon that autopsy results and military intelligence concluded that members of Hamas “used their bare hands” to kill Ariel Bibas, four, and his 10-month-old brother, Kfir, when they were seized in October 2023.

“Their father, [the recently released hostage] Yarden Bibas, looked me in the eyes and asked that the whole world know and be shocked by the way they murdered his children,” the military spokesperson R Adm Daniel Hagari said in a video address.

In Israel and around the world, the fate of the Bibas family has come to embody the trauma of the Hamas attack that ignited the war in Gaza.

Hamas said early in the conflict that the boys and their mother, Shiri, 32, were killed in an Israeli bombing in November 2023. There was no immediate comment from the militant group on the IDF’s allegation.

The remains of the Bibas children, 85-year-old Oded Lifshitz, and a fourth unidentified person who was supposed to be Shiri Bibas, were handed over to Israel on Thursday as part of the first stage of a fragile ceasefire agreement.

Hamas said Shiri’s body had been “mistakenly mixed” with others who were killed and buried under the rubble in Gaza, after the Israeli military said DNA testing showed the woman’s body released was not Shiri Bibas or any other hostage.

Hamas said it was investigating the issue and, late on Friday, released another body to the Red Cross, claiming that it was that of Shiri Babas. Israeli medical authorities said forensic teams were preparing to examine the body.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was quick to capitalise on the crisis, accusing Hamas of breaking the truce’s terms. “We will work with determination to bring Shiri home together with all our hostages – both living and dead – and ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and malicious violation of the agreement,” he said in a statement.

However, relatives of the family have accused the Israeli leader of abandoning their loved ones. They also warned against using their fate as a pretext for a return to fighting amid uncertainty over implementation of the next phase of the deal, which is due to begin in early March.

In the second stage, Hamas is supposed to return the remainder of the hostages in exchange for Israel ending the war, but Netanyahu has long resisted pressure to end the hostilities: much of his far-right coalition government opposes such a step if it leaves Hamas as a significant force inside the Gaza Strip. The third phase is supposed to address the exchange of bodies, a reconstruction plan for Gaza and future governance.

“It was Israel’s responsibility and obligation to bring them back alive,” said Shiri’s sister-in-law, Ofri Bibas, in a statement released on behalf of the family through the Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

“Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we did not receive an apology from you in this painful moment.

“Our painful journey, which has already lasted 16 months, is not over. We are still waiting for Shiri … For Ariel and Kfir’s sake, and for Yarden’s sake, we are not seeking revenge right now. We are asking for Shiri.

“Their cruelty only emphasises the urgent need to bring Shiri back to us, save the lives of the living hostages and return all the fallen for burial,” she said.

The truce in the war in Gaza came into effect on 19 January, pausing 15 months of brutal fighting that killed about 48,000 Palestinians and triggered a devastating humanitarian crisis. About 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack that ignited the war, and 250 were taken hostage.

On Friday, Hamas released the names of the six living hostages it plans to release at the weekend under the terms of the ceasefire. The Palestinian prisoners media office said more than 600 Palestinian prisoners were also to be freed.

The announcements are a sign that the fragile deal remains on track despite the tensions caused by the furore surrounding the Bibas’s fate.

Also on Friday, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said he had ordered the country’s military to ramp up its operations in the occupied West Bank after a series of bus explosions near Tel Aviv the previous day. There were no casualties in the blasts, which a group identifying itself as a branch of Hamas’ military wing, al-Qassam Brigades, from the West Bank city of Tulkarem, stopped short of taking responsibility for in a Telegram post.

Israel’s latest operation in the West Bank, launched immediately after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, has wreaked widespread damage, killed more than 50 Palestinians, caused thousands to flee their homes and ripped up roads and infrastructure in refugee camps.

Israelis and Palestinians are bracing for another tense exchange of hostages, prisoners and detainees on Saturday after uproar in Israel over allegations that two child hostages were “brutally murdered” by Hamas, and the group’s failure to deliver the body of their mother, instead returning the corpse of an unidentified woman.

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement on Friday afternoon that autopsy results and military intelligence concluded that members of Hamas “used their bare hands” to kill Ariel Bibas, four, and his 10-month-old brother, Kfir, when they were seized in October 2023.

“Their father, [the recently released hostage] Yarden Bibas, looked me in the eyes and asked that the whole world know and be shocked by the way they murdered his children,” the military spokesperson R Adm Daniel Hagari said in a video address.

In Israel and around the world, the fate of the Bibas family has come to embody the trauma of the Hamas attack that ignited the war in Gaza.

Hamas said early in the conflict that the boys and their mother, Shiri, 32, were killed in an Israeli bombing in November 2023. There was no immediate comment from the militant group on the IDF’s allegation.

The remains of the Bibas children, 85-year-old Oded Lifshitz, and a fourth unidentified person who was supposed to be Shiri Bibas, were handed over to Israel on Thursday as part of the first stage of a fragile ceasefire agreement.

Hamas said Shiri’s body had been “mistakenly mixed” with others who were killed and buried under the rubble in Gaza, after the Israeli military said DNA testing showed the woman’s body released was not Shiri Bibas or any other hostage.

Hamas said it was investigating the issue and, late on Friday, released another body to the Red Cross, claiming that it was that of Shiri Babas. Israeli medical authorities said forensic teams were preparing to examine the body.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was quick to capitalise on the crisis, accusing Hamas of breaking the truce’s terms. “We will work with determination to bring Shiri home together with all our hostages – both living and dead – and ensure that Hamas pays the full price for this cruel and malicious violation of the agreement,” he said in a statement.

However, relatives of the family have accused the Israeli leader of abandoning their loved ones. They also warned against using their fate as a pretext for a return to fighting amid uncertainty over implementation of the next phase of the deal, which is due to begin in early March.

In the second stage, Hamas is supposed to return the remainder of the hostages in exchange for Israel ending the war, but Netanyahu has long resisted pressure to end the hostilities: much of his far-right coalition government opposes such a step if it leaves Hamas as a significant force inside the Gaza Strip. The third phase is supposed to address the exchange of bodies, a reconstruction plan for Gaza and future governance.

“It was Israel’s responsibility and obligation to bring them back alive,” said Shiri’s sister-in-law, Ofri Bibas, in a statement released on behalf of the family through the Israeli campaign group the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

“Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, we did not receive an apology from you in this painful moment.

“Our painful journey, which has already lasted 16 months, is not over. We are still waiting for Shiri … For Ariel and Kfir’s sake, and for Yarden’s sake, we are not seeking revenge right now. We are asking for Shiri.

“Their cruelty only emphasises the urgent need to bring Shiri back to us, save the lives of the living hostages and return all the fallen for burial,” she said.

The truce in the war in Gaza came into effect on 19 January, pausing 15 months of brutal fighting that killed about 48,000 Palestinians and triggered a devastating humanitarian crisis. About 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack that ignited the war, and 250 were taken hostage.

On Friday, Hamas released the names of the six living hostages it plans to release at the weekend under the terms of the ceasefire. The Palestinian prisoners media office said more than 600 Palestinian prisoners were also to be freed.

The announcements are a sign that the fragile deal remains on track despite the tensions caused by the furore surrounding the Bibas’s fate.

Also on Friday, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said he had ordered the country’s military to ramp up its operations in the occupied West Bank after a series of bus explosions near Tel Aviv the previous day. There were no casualties in the blasts, which a group identifying itself as a branch of Hamas’ military wing, al-Qassam Brigades, from the West Bank city of Tulkarem, stopped short of taking responsibility for in a Telegram post.

Israel’s latest operation in the West Bank, launched immediately after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, has wreaked widespread damage, killed more than 50 Palestinians, caused thousands to flee their homes and ripped up roads and infrastructure in refugee camps.

Australia’s foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, has confronted her Chinese counterpart after Chinese warships conducted apparent live-fire exercises at short notice on Friday, forcing commercial aircraft to change course.

In a post on X late on Friday night Australian eastern time, Wong said she met with China’s foreign affairs minister, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting in South Africa that day.

“Calm and consistent dialogue with China enables us to progress our interests and advocate on issues that matter to Australians,” Wong said.

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The live-fire drills have raised tensions between the countries, despite the conduct being in international waters and according to international law, due to the extremely short warning period given by the Chinese military.

The Australian deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, said on Saturday that Chinese authorities had not given “a satisfactory answer in relation to this”.

“When Australia, for example, does a live-firing event such as this – which countries are entitled do on the high seas and that’s where this task group is, they’re in international waters – we would typically give 12 to 24 hours’ notice, which enables aircraft that are going to potentially be in the vicinity to make plans to fly around,” Marles said.

“What happened yesterday was the notice that was provided was very short. It was obviously very disconcerting for the airlines involved in Trans-Tasman flights.”

Marles said while Wong raised the issue of the insufficient notice period directly with Wang Yi, the government had additionally raised it with China through Canberra and Beijing channels.

The New Zealand defence minister, Judith Collins, said the drills were the “most significant and sophisticated” seen in the region.

The Australian and New Zealand military had been monitoring the three People’s Liberation Army-Navy vessels – the Jiangkai-class frigate Hengyang, the Renhai-class cruiser Zunyi and the Fuchi-class replenishment vessel Weishanhu – off the Australian coast for at least a week.

The flotilla was about 340 nautical miles or 640km off Eden, on the New South Wales south coast, in international waters, when it notified of the drill.

A NZ navy vessel shadowing the flotilla observed the ships change formation and place a target in the water, manoeuvre again and then recover the target. No surface-to-air firing or live fire was observed but the change in formation was consistent with a live-fire drill.

Qantas, Emirates and Air New Zealand modified flight paths between Australia and New Zealand after receiving reports of live fire in international waters.

China advised of the drill by a verbal radio broadcast on civilian channels, a Defence spokesperson said in a statement.

“[China] did not inform Defence of its intent to conduct a live-fire activity and has not provided any further information,” the statement read.

“That formation has now reverted to normal, indicating that the live-fire activity has most likely ceased … no weapon firings were heard or seen; however, a floating surface firing target was deployed by [China] and subsequently recovered.”

The incident follows an Australian air force encounter with the Chinese military last week, when a Chinese fighter jet released flares in front of an RAAF surveillance aircraft during a patrol in international airspace over the South China Sea.

The flares had come within 30m of the RAAF plane.

Marles said the encounter last week was different to Thursday’s drills, with the former involving “unsafe and unprofessional conduct in our view in relation to Chinese fast jet in the presence of an Australian P8 aircraft”.

The RAAF had been acting in accordance with international law and registered concern with China about the fast-jet’s behaviour, Marles said.

The presence of the Chinese vessels around Australia was “not unprecedented but it is unusual”, Marles said, and he had asked the defence force to provide correspondingly high levels of monitoring.

The incidents were indicative of growing global instability, Marles said.

Six weeks after the most destructive wildfire in city history, Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, ousted the city’s fire chief on Friday following a public rift over preparations for a potential fire and finger-pointing between the chief and city hall over responsibility for the devastation.

Bass said in a statement that she was removing Chief Kristin Crowley immediately.

“Bringing new leadership to the fire department is what our city needs,” Bass said in a statement.

“We know that 1,000 firefighters that could have been on duty on the morning the fires broke out were instead sent home on Chief Crowley’s watch,” Bass claimed. She also accused the chief of refusing to prepare an “after-action report” on the fires, which she called a necessary step in the investigation.

The Palisades fire began during heavy winds on 7 January, destroying or damaging nearly 8,000 homes, businesses and other structures and killing at least 12 people in the Los Angeles neighborhood. Another wind-whipped fire started the same day in suburban Altadena, a community to the east, killing at least 17 people and destroying or damaging more than 10,000 homes and other buildings.

Bass has been facing criticism for being in Africa as part of a presidential delegation on the day the fires started, even though weather reports had warned of dangerous fire conditions in the days before she left.

In televised interviews this week, Bass acknowledged she made a mistake by leaving the city. But she implied that she was not aware of the looming danger when she jetted around the globe to attend the inauguration of the Ghanaian president, John Dramani Mahama. She faulted Crowley for failing to alert her about the potentially explosive fire conditions.

Crowley has publicly criticized the city for budget cuts that she said made it harder for firefighters to do their jobs.

Crowley was named fire chief in 2022 by Bass’s predecessor at a time when the department was in turmoil over allegations of rampant harassment, hazing and discrimination. She worked for the city fire department for more than 25 years and held nearly every role, including fire marshal, engineer and battalion chief.

After she was removed as fire chief, the mayor’s office told reporters Crowley had “exercised her civil service rights to stay with the fire department at a lower rank”.

A New York judge on Friday said he would not immediately dismiss Eric Adams’s corruption case, but ordered the Democratic New York City mayor’s trial delayed indefinitely after the justice department asked for the charges to be dismissed.

In a written ruling, the US district judge Dale Ho in Manhattan said he would appoint an outside lawyer, Paul Clement of the law firm Clement & Murphy PLLC, to present arguments against the federal prosecutors’ bid to dismiss, in order to help the judge make his decision.

Justice department officials in Washington asked Ho to dismiss the charges against Adams on 14 February. A hearing was held in New York earlier this week.

That came about after several prosecutors resigned rather than follow orders from the acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, an appointee of Donald Trump and the Republican president’s former personal criminal defense lawyer, to seek dismissal of the case brought last year by prosecutors during the Biden administration.

The current justice department argued that dismissal was needed so Adams could focus on helping Trump crack down on illegal immigration. The controversy, especially because the city has a strong sanctuary law designed to stop local enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement, has sparked a political crisis in the most populous US city. Senior Democrats have said that dismissing the charges makes Adams beholden to Trump’s administration.

Adams, 64, was charged last September with taking bribes and campaign donations from Turkish nationals seeking to influence him. Adams, running for re-election this year, has pleaded not guilty.

Many have called on Adams to resign.

Four of the mayor’s deputies plan to resign amid loss of confidence in the mayor. The governor of New York state, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said on Thursday she would not use her power to remove Adams, but proposed new oversight of the mayor’s office.

Apple has taken the unprecedented step of removing its strongest data security tool from customers in the UK, after the government demanded “backdoor” access to user data.

UK users will no longer have access to the advanced data protection (ADP) tool, which uses end-to-end encryption to allow only account holders to view items such as photos or documents they have stored online in the iCloud storage service.

Apple said it was “gravely disappointed” that it would no longer be able to offer the security feature to British customers, after the UK government asked for the right to see the data.

It said the removal of the tool would make users more vulnerable to data breaches from bad actors, and other threats to customer privacy. It would also mean all data was accessible by Apple, which could share it with law enforcement if they had a warrant.

Earlier this month the Home Office served Apple a request under the Investigatory Powers Act, which compels firms to provide information to law enforcement agencies, asking for the right to see users’ encrypted data, which currently not even Apple can access.

After the change at 3pm on Friday, new users had no access to the ADP tool and existing users would need to disable the security feature at a later date. Messaging services like iMessage and FaceTime would remain end-to-end encrypted by default.

Apple said: “We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy. Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.

“Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the UK. As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will.”

Alan Woodward, from the University of Sussex, said Apple’s move was “quite an extraordinary development”. The cybersecurity professor said: “It was incredibly naive of the British government to think they could tell Apple what to do.

“Unpleasant a fact of life as it may be, you simply can’t tell a large US technology company what to do. You have to work with them, [practise] diplomacy – that’s what has been tried before and was working. Waving a UK law at them was not going to work.”

He said Apple was sending a message that “you cannot weaken encryption for your enemies without weakening it for your friends”, and that all the government could achieve would be to make its applications less secure for UK users, while obtaining no benefit for intelligence operations.

A cybersecurity expert, Peter Sommer, said technologists had unsuccessfully tried to develop a “foolproof backdoor” for the last 30 years.

“Instead of looking for a universal solution, the Home Office should be concentrating on targeted rather than bulk encryption breach”, given that this ensured “warrants are justified as proportionate and leave the innocent with their privacy”, he said.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “We do not comment on operational matters, including for example confirming or denying the existence of any such notices.”

Donald Trump’s Jewish daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, refused to sign a statement saying Trump was not antisemitic, according to a new book by the veteran Trump tell-all author Michael Wolff.

“As he kept seeming to be incapable of offering absolute support for Israel in the wake of October 7,” Wolff writes, referring to the deadly 2023 attacks by Hamas, “Trump, not for the first time, turned to Jared for Jewish cover, explicitly asking him and Ivanka for a public endorsement.

“As Trump had continued to waffle, the Washington Post, the campaign understood, was working on a piece that would recycle all the language Trump had variously used over the years, which, on its face, might certainly sound antisemitic. Kushner kept dodging on the formal endorsement of his father-in-law. The campaign then tried to settle for merely a statement from him that his father-in-law was not antisemitic.”

According to Wolff, Kushner finally said: “No, Ivanka and I aren’t going to do that. We’re not going to go and put our names on something and get in the middle of things. That’s just not what we’re going to do this time.”

Kushner and Ivanka Trump were senior advisers to Trump during his first presidency, from 2017 to 2021. But they kept their distance after his attempt to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat to Joe Biden culminated in his supporters’ January 6 attack on Congress. The couple have not taken up roles in his second administration after he won back the presidency in November at the expense of former vice-president Kamala Harris, though Kushner has been linked to Trump’s controversial plans to depopulate and redevelop the Gaza strip after Israel’s relentless assault in response to 7 October.

Wolff’s book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, is his fourth on the president. The new volume was formally confirmed this week, shortly ahead of its US publication on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.

Wolff’s first Trump book, Fire and Fury, was released in 2018 and sold millions as Trump tried to block it, kicking off a lucrative rush of Trump-focused books that has shown new signs of life since he won re-election.

Wolff followed Fire and Fury with Siege and Landslide. Excerpts from All or Nothing have been published in Vanity Fair and the Daily Beast, the latter detailing what Wolff claims is Melania Trump’s “hatred” for her husband.

Announcing All or Nothing, publisher Crown said: “Wolff’s thesis in his 18 months of covering the campaign was that the establishment would destroy Trump, or Trump would destroy the establishment. All or Nothing is Wolff’s panoramic and intimate picture of that battle … from indictments, to trials, to assassination attempts, to the humiliation and defenestration of a sitting president, to Trump’s staggering victory.”

Last November, as Wolff wrote the book, a group of Trump aides including his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said: “A number of us have received inquiries from the disgraced author Michael Wolff, whose previous work can only be described as fiction. He is a known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations, and conclusions that never happened. As a group, we have decided not to respond to his bad faith inquiries, and we encourage others to completely disregard whatever nonsense he eventually publishes. Consider this our blanket response to whatever he writes.”

On Friday, the Trump White House’s communications director, Steven Cheung, told the Beast: “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of shit and has been proven to be a fraud.

“He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”

Among other moments in All or Nothing sure to be widely discussed, Wolff reports that Trump demanded to know “what the fuck is wrong with” Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who became a key campaign backer, and called JD Vance, the vice-presidential pick over whom Wolff says Trump had grave doubts, “shifty, very shifty”.

Describing a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in October, where Trump survived an assassination attempt in July, Wolff writes: “And Elon is here, waiting when [Trump’s team] arrive[s], which is cause for a moment of consternation … Elon! Next only to Trump, there is Elon.”

Saying aides viewed Musk as “a new, overwhelming, and discordant presence in the campaign”, generating “an ever-rising tide of bewildering, if not opaque, requests, orders, and recommendations”, Wolff said aides thought Musk had “elevated the Trump campaign in his own mind to a personal mission and religious cause”, while “the Trump circle” was “already anticipating the earth shaking when he and Trump invariably f[e]ll out.

“When they arrive, Elon – wandering about by himself, with only a thin layer of assistants or security – is hungry. This causes a kerfuffle and results in uncertainty over how to attend to him. Someone produces a bag of pretzel sticks.

“The suggestion is made that JD is here and would love to speak to him. Musk, sitting down and eating his pretzel sticks, politely declines: ‘I’ve really no interest in speaking to a vice-president.’

“Later, called onstage, with no one having any idea what he might say, Musk bounds up and, suddenly – in Mick Jagger style, prancing and jumping – becomes the headline, his T-shirt rising far above his midriff.

“What the fuck is wrong with this guy?” says a bewildered Trump. “And why doesn’t his shirt fit?”

Elsewhere, Wolff describes Trump’s extensive second thoughts about Vance, in one instance reportedly described in a phone conversation with an unnamed confidant.

“Yeah. What the fuck is with that name-change stuff?” Trump is depicted as saying. “How many name changes has he had? That’s shifty, that’s very shifty. That’s my staff fucking up. They know what I think about people changing their names. I think it’s shifty. And they didn’t tell me.”

Vance was born James Donald Bowman. After his parents split up he was adopted by his new stepfather and renamed James David Hamel. Long known as “J.D.”, he later changed to his surname to Vance, after the beloved grandmother of whom he writes in Hillbilly Elegy, his bestselling book from 2016. He eventually dropped the periods, to become “JD”.