Fifty-nine people have been killed and more than 100 injured in a fire that broke out in a nightclub in North Macedonia early on Sunday.

The blaze in the small eastern town of Kočani is thought to have erupted when special-effect pyrotechnics caused the roof of the Pulse nightclub to go up in flames.

North Macedonia’s interior minister, Panche Toshkovski, informed reporters of the number of deaths after visiting the scene.

Toshkovski said the fire was probably caused by the use of pyrotechnic devices “used for light effect” at the concert taking place in the club. As they were set off, “the sparks caught the ceiling, which was made of easily flammable material, after which the fire rapidly spread across the whole discotheque, creating thick smoke”, he said.

Social media footage showed the blaze breaking out at about 3am when the venue was packed with concertgoers attending a performance by hip-hop act DNK, one of the tiny Balkan state’s most famous pop groups. Chaotic scenes ensued as people ran through the smoke while the musicians urged everyone to escape as quickly as possible.

More than 1,500 were attending the concert in Kočani, 60 miles east of the North Macedonian capital, Skopje.

In a written statement, the prime minister, Hristijan Mickoski, called the loss of so many young lives “irreparable”. As the scale of the tragedy became clear, Mickoski told the country that all forces had been “fully mobilised”.

“I call on all competent institutions – health services, police, local authorities – to take urgent measures to assist the injured and support the affected families,” he said in a statement posted to Facebook.

“In these times of deep sadness, when our hearts are broken with pain due to this terrible tragedy, I call for unity, solidarity, humanity and responsibility.”

The prime minister said he would make a public address on Sunday.

Police had arrested several people, the interior minister told the hastily convened press conference, although he refused to be drawn on the nature of their involvement in the disaster. “The most important thing is to find out all the facts and evidence necessary for the follow-up measures,” he said. “We must remain calm while taking all these steps so that something like this doesn’t happen again.”

By mid-morning relatives were gathering at hospitals in Kočani and Skopje, to where victims had been rushed.

The state’s health minister, Arben Taravari, said 118 people had been admitted to hospital. At least 27 people with severe burns had been admitted to the capital’s main hospital while another 23 were being treated at Skopje’s clinical centre, according to North Macedonia’s public broadcaster MRT. Children were also reported to be among the injured.

“All our capabilities have been put to use in a maximum effort to save as many lives as possible of the young people involved in this tragedy,” Taravari told reporters, at times looking visibly shaken. Neighbouring countries including Greece, Bulgaria and Albania had been quick to offer assistance, he said.

Markos Trosanovski, a political commentator in Skopje, said the entire nation had been plunged “into profound shock over this tragedy”.

While it was clear that the nightclub was well over capacity at the time of the concert, the government had responded immediately to the disaster, he said. “The response on the part of the authorities has been instant,” he said.

“But there were institutional failures,” he said, adding: “It appears there were not enough fire extinguishers which would have been necessary for it to have been granted a licence.”

In a post on X, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, wrote: “Heartfelt condolences to the people of North Macedonia for the lives lost in the tragic fire in Kočani. My thoughts are with the victims and their families, and I wish a speedy recovery to the injured. Greece stands ready to assist in this difficult time.”

The European commissioner for enlargement, Marta Kos, also expressed her condolences on the platform, writing: “Deeply saddened by the tragic fire in Kočani North Macedonia, which claimed the lives of too many young people.”

In a further show of support from the EU, António Costa, president of the European Council, announced that the 27-member bloc “stands in solidarity with the people of North Macedonia in this moment of grief”.

“Heartbroken by the loss of so many young people in the terrible fire … My thoughts go out to all the families of the victims of this tragedy,” he said in a statement posted on X.

US officials have said airstrikes launched by Donald Trump against Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis may continue for weeks, after a first round on Saturday killed at least 31 people and injured up to 100 more.

The strikes, which aim to punish the Houthis for their attacks against Red Sea shipping, are Trump’s first such use of US military might in the region since he took power in January.

The US president on Saturday warned Iran, the Houthis’ main backer, to immediately halt support for the group and said if Iran threatened the US: “America will hold you fully accountable and we won’t be nice about it!”

Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY. IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!”

The Houthis say they have targeted international shipping in solidarity with Palestinians and Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.

The Yemeni group has also launched missiles, drones and rockets at Israel since the beginning of the war in Gaza.

The top commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards responded on Sunday by saying the Houthis were independent and took their own strategic and operational decisions.

“We warn our enemies that Iran will respond decisively and destructively if they take their threats into action,” Maj Gen Hossein Salami told state media.

Washington has already increased sanctions pressure on Iran while trying to bring it to the negotiating table over its nuclear programme. A key question for regional observers is whether Trump might use military means against Tehran, possibly after pressure from Israel.

The US military’s central command, which oversees troops in the Middle East, described Saturday’s strikes as the start of a large-scale operation across Yemen. The strikes on Saturday were carried out in part by fighter aircraft from the Harry S Truman aircraft carrier, which is in the Red Sea, officials said.

The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, wrote on X: “Houthi attacks on American ships & aircraft (and our troops!) will not be tolerated; and Iran, their benefactor, is on notice.”

US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump had authorised a more aggressive approach.

The Houthis, an armed movement who have taken control of most of Yemen over the past decade, are seen as key actors in the “axis of resistance”, a loose regional coalition of militant groups built up by Iran over recent years to project force and pressure Israel.

The group is seen as the only member of the coalition not to have been significantly weakened by Israel during the war in Gaza since October 2023 and the short conflict in Lebanon last year. Both Hamas and Hezbollah, once the most powerful member, have suffered significant losses.

Most of the casualties in the US strikes were women and children, said Anees al-Asbahi, the spokesperson for the Houthi-run health ministry, on Sunday.

The Houthis’ political bureau described the attacks as a “war crime”. “Our Yemeni armed forces are fully prepared to respond to escalation with escalation,” it said in a statement.

People in Sana’a said the strikes hit a building in a Houthi stronghold. A man who gave his name as Abdullah Yahia told Reuters: “The explosions were violent and shook the neighbourhood like an earthquake. They terrified our women and children.”

Strikes also targeted Houthi military sites in Yemen’s south-western city of Taiz, two witnesses in the area said on Sunday. Another strike, on a power station in the town of Dahyan in Saada, led to a power cut, Al-Masirah TV reported early on Sunday. Dahyan is where Abdulmalik al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthis, often meets his visitors.

A Pentagon spokesperson said the Houthis had attacked US warships 174 times and commercial vessels 145 times since 2023.

The previous administration in Washington, under Joe Biden, had sought to degrade the Houthis’ ability to attack vessels off Yemen’s coast but limited US actions.

In a statement shared by state media, Iran’s foreign ministry condemned the strikes on Yemen as a “gross violation of the principles of the United Nations charter and the fundamental rules of international law”.

The Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said the US government had “no authority, or business, dictating Iranian foreign policy”. “End support for Israeli genocide and terrorism. Stop killing of Yemeni people,” he said in a post on X early on Sunday.

On Tuesday, the Houthis said they would resume attacks on Israeli ships passing through the Red Sea and Arabian Sea, the Bab al-Mandab strait and the Gulf of Aden, ending a period of relative calm starting in January with the Gaza ceasefire.

The US attacks came days after the delivery of a letter from Trump to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seeking talks over Iran’s nuclear programme.

Khamenei on Wednesday rejected negotiations with the US.

Last year, Israeli strikes on Iranian facilities, including missile factories and air defences, in retaliation for Iranian missile and drone attacks, reduced Tehran’s conventional military and air defence capabilities, according to US officials.

Iran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon but has dramatically accelerated the enrichment of uranium to up to 60% purity, close to the weapons-grade level of approximately 90%, the UN nuclear watchdog has said.

• Reuters contributed to this report

Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff said on Sunday that he expected the US president to speak with Vladimir Putin this week, saying that the Russian president “accepts the philosophy” of Trump’s ceasefire and peace terms.

Witkoff told CNN that discussions with Putin over several hours last week were “positive” and “solution-based”. He declined to confirm when asked whether Putin’s demands included the surrender of Ukrainian forces in Kursk; international recognition of Ukrainian territory seized by Russia as Russian; limits on Ukraine’s ability to mobilize; a halt to western military aid; and a ban on foreign peacekeepers.

Putin said on Thursday that he supported a truce but outlined numerous details that need to be negotiated before the deal can be completed. The Russian president said he was open to a 30-day ceasefire proposed by the US but offered vague terms for his support, raising questions about what the Kremlin wants.

Witkoff declined to describe Russian terms. He said US envoys “had narrowed the differences” between Ukraine and Russian negotiators, and he would meet Trump on Sunday to discuss “how to narrow the differences even further”.

The discussions, Witkoff added, included Ukraine, Russia and European stakeholder countries including France, Britain, Norway and Finland as well as other elements “that would be encompassed in a ceasefire”.

Trump, he said, was being updated about the discussions as they happened. “He is involved with every important decision here and I expect that there will be a call between the [US and Russian] presidents this week.”

Witkoff also said the US was continuing to engage and have conversations with Ukraine, and “advising them on everything we’re thinking about”.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has voiced support for a ceasefire plan but said the country wants to work toward a longer, definite peace.

“We’re going to have teams of US negotiators meeting with the Ukrainians this week. Same thing with the Russians,” Witkoff said. “As the president said he really expects there to be some sort of deal in the coming weeks, and I believe that’s the case.”

There have been concerns that the settlement being pushed for by the Trump administration would look a lot like an outright Russian victory, at the expense of Ukraine and its allies in Europe.

Trump and Putin last week set off further alarm bells in Kyiv by exchanging friendly words, as the new US administration cosies up to Moscow while attacking Ukraine with threatening language and the withdrawal of some military support.

Russia and Ukraine traded attacks over the weekend, with both sides reporting more than 100 enemy drones over their territories.

Separately, Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, told ABC’s This Week that back and forth diplomacy was ongoing. Waltz said there would be “some type of territory for future security guarantees, the future status of Ukraine” and he called permanent Nato membership for Ukraine “incredibly unlikely”.

Waltz asked if it was plausible to believe that “we are going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?”

He said: “We can talk about what’s right and wrong. And we also have to talk about the reality of the situation on the ground. And that’s what we are doing through diplomacy, through shuttle diplomacy, through proximity talks.”

Keir Starmer accused Vladimir Putin of dragging his feet over agreeing to a ceasefire with Ukraine on Saturday as international pressure grew on the Russian president to enter talks.

The prime minister said there was a limit to the length of time Putin could prevaricate, after he convened a virtual summit with 29 other international leaders who agreed to take plans for a peacekeeping force to an “operational phase”.

Starmer said military chiefs would meet in London on Thursday to “put strong and robust plans in place to swing in behind a peace deal and guarantee Ukraine’s future security”.

Those who took part in the virtual summit included the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Afterwards, Starmer said “new commitments” had been made on both peacekeeping and tightening sanctions on Russia.

“Sooner or later, he is going to have to come to the table and engage in serious discussions,” the prime minister said.

“So this is the moment: let the guns fall silent, let the barbaric attacks on Ukraine once and for all stop, and agree to a ceasefire now.”

As well as the European nations, the leaders of Australia, Canada and New Zealand also joined the call, as did Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte.

Saturday’s meeting followed an intense week of diplomacy in which American and Ukrainian officials agreed on a proposal for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire, which was put to Russia.

But the Kremlin has so far resisted the deal, saying it would only agree to a ceasefire if Ukraine also agreed to abandon its aim of joining Nato and gave up some of its territory to Russia.

In Kyiv, Zelenskyy said Russia was playing for time so it could get into a stronger military position before any ceasefire.

“I think the delaying of the process is exactly because of what I said. They want to improve their situation on the battlefield,” Zelenskyy told a group of journalists in a briefing at the presidential administration.

He said Ukraine had shown its willingness to agree to US proposals for a temporary ceasefire during which terms for a more lasting deal could be discussed, as agreed last week at talks in Saudi Arabia.

“Today, Putin is the one who doesn’t agree with what [Donald] Trump has proposed,” he said.

Zelenskyy said Russia’s attempts to impose conditions on a ceasefire should be rejected out of hand.

“This is a ceasefire for 30 days; it’s not for ever, it’s 30 days, during which all sides have the chance to demonstrate their willingness to end the war,” he said.

Although it is clear that any potential agreement would probably require Ukraine to accept de facto Russian control of some Ukrainian land, he ruled out formally ceding any territory to Russia.

“Our position is that we do not recognise the occupied Ukrainian territories as Russian in any case,” he said. Zelenskyy called the territorial issue complex and said it should be “resolved later, at the negotiating table”.

Writing in the Observer, the UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, also taunted Putin, saying he had been put on the spot by Ukraine’s agreement to a ceasefire and the moves, led by the US president, Donald Trump, to end the conflict.

“The proposal for a ceasefire is therefore a test. He can’t simply say he is ready to end this war – he has to prove it.”

Lammy, who attended a meeting of G7 foreign ministers in Canada last week, said the group of nations known as the “coalition of the willing” was determined to create the conditions “that guarantee that Russia does not come back for more”.

Referring to the security guarantee that these nations plan to offer, Lammy added: “To be credible, it needs US support. But Britain and our allies recognise that the bulk of the contribution must come from Europeans.”

Asked about whether he discussed seizing Russian assets with his counterparts, Starmer said it had been on the agenda but added it was “a complicated question”.

Meanwhile, both Russia and Ukraine launched drone attacks overnight, each reporting more than 100 enemy drones entering their respective airspaces.

A Peruvian fisher was found alive after drifting at sea for 94 days, a navy official said on Saturday, as he was discharged from hospital after his ordeal.

Maximo Napa, 61, was rescued in his small fishing boat on Tuesday after being spotted by an Ecuadorian vessel off the coast of Chimbote in northern Peru.

He told local media in a tearful interview that he survived by eating cockroaches, birds and a turtle.

“I didn’t want to die, for my mother. I have a two-month-old granddaughter – I clung to that. Every day I thought about my mother,” Napa said.

On Saturday, he was discharged from hospital in the coastal city of Paita.

“Mr Napa arrived in good physical condition. He could walk, wash himself. Shocked, but in good physical condition,” said a Peruvian navy port captain, Jorge González.

The fisher had set out on 7 December from the port of San Juan de Marcona but bad weather conditions and the current caused him to lose course.

His small boat, which had no radio beacon, ended up on the high seas.

“It is a miracle that my father has been found,” his daughter Ines Napa told the RPP radio station. “We, as a family, never gave up hope of finding him.”

There were emotional scenes of smiling astronauts hugging and embracing in zero gravity on the International Space Station on Sunday after a replacement crew docked with the orbital outpost – a step towards the return home of two astronauts who have been stranded for more than nine months.

A SpaceX capsule delivered four astronauts to the ISS in a Nasa crew-swap mission that will allow the pair of stuck astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, to return home after nine months on the orbiting lab.

Williams said it was a wonderful day and “great to see our friends arrive”, speaking shortly after her colleges emerged on to the orbital lab.

About 29 hours after launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, the Crew-10 astronauts’ SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked with the ISS at 4.04am GMT on Sunday.

In a live video, Nasa astronaut and team commander Anne McClain said: “Hi everybody down there on Earth. Crew-10 has had a great journey up here, about 28 hours to get back up to the space station. And I cannot tell you the immense joy of our crew when we looked out the window and saw the space station for the first time.”

She said: “You can hardly even put it into words … orbiting the Earth for the last couple of days, it has been absolutely incredible.”

McClain’s team were welcomed by the station’s seven-member crew, which includes Wilmore and Williams – veteran astronauts and retired Navy test pilots who have remained on the station after problems with Boeing’s Starliner capsule forced Nasa to bring it back empty.

Otherwise a routine crew rotation flight, the Crew-10 mission is a long-awaited first step to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth.

The pair are scheduled to depart the ISS on Wednesday as early as 8am, along with American Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

Hague and Gorbunov flew to the ISS in September on a Crew Dragon craft with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams, and that craft has been attached to the station ever since.

The Crew-10 crew, scheduled to stay on the station for roughly six months, includes Americans McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russian Kirill Peskov.

The crew-swap mission became entangled in politics when the US president, Donald Trump, and his adviser Elon Musk, who is also SpaceX’s CEO, urged a quicker Crew-10 launch. They claimed, without evidence, that Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, had abandoned Wilmore and Williams on the station for political reasons. One Danish astronaut, Andreas “Andy” Mogensen, who has twice flown to the ISS gave the claim short shrift, saying “What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.”

Wilmore and Williams have been doing scientific research and conducting routine maintenance with the other five astronauts. Williams told reporters this month that she was looking forward to returning home to see her two dogs and family. “It’s been a rollercoaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,” she said.

Reuters contributed to this report

There were emotional scenes of smiling astronauts hugging and embracing in zero gravity on the International Space Station on Sunday after a replacement crew docked with the orbital outpost – a step towards the return home of two astronauts who have been stranded for more than nine months.

A SpaceX capsule delivered four astronauts to the ISS in a Nasa crew-swap mission that will allow the pair of stuck astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, to return home after nine months on the orbiting lab.

Williams said it was a wonderful day and “great to see our friends arrive”, speaking shortly after her colleges emerged on to the orbital lab.

About 29 hours after launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, the Crew-10 astronauts’ SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked with the ISS at 4.04am GMT on Sunday.

In a live video, Nasa astronaut and team commander Anne McClain said: “Hi everybody down there on Earth. Crew-10 has had a great journey up here, about 28 hours to get back up to the space station. And I cannot tell you the immense joy of our crew when we looked out the window and saw the space station for the first time.”

She said: “You can hardly even put it into words … orbiting the Earth for the last couple of days, it has been absolutely incredible.”

McClain’s team were welcomed by the station’s seven-member crew, which includes Wilmore and Williams – veteran astronauts and retired Navy test pilots who have remained on the station after problems with Boeing’s Starliner capsule forced Nasa to bring it back empty.

Otherwise a routine crew rotation flight, the Crew-10 mission is a long-awaited first step to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth.

The pair are scheduled to depart the ISS on Wednesday as early as 8am, along with American Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

Hague and Gorbunov flew to the ISS in September on a Crew Dragon craft with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams, and that craft has been attached to the station ever since.

The Crew-10 crew, scheduled to stay on the station for roughly six months, includes Americans McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russian Kirill Peskov.

The crew-swap mission became entangled in politics when the US president, Donald Trump, and his adviser Elon Musk, who is also SpaceX’s CEO, urged a quicker Crew-10 launch. They claimed, without evidence, that Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, had abandoned Wilmore and Williams on the station for political reasons. One Danish astronaut, Andreas “Andy” Mogensen, who has twice flown to the ISS gave the claim short shrift, saying “What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.”

Wilmore and Williams have been doing scientific research and conducting routine maintenance with the other five astronauts. Williams told reporters this month that she was looking forward to returning home to see her two dogs and family. “It’s been a rollercoaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,” she said.

Reuters contributed to this report

The life of a 79-year-old British man imprisoned along with his wife by the Taliban is in serious danger, his family have warned.

Peter Reynolds and his wife, Barbie, 75, who run a training business in Afghanistan, were detained last month when they travelled to their home in Bamiyan province.

Their daughter, Sarah Entwistle, said her father’s health had “significantly deteriorated” after the couple were separated and moved to a high-security prison.

“We hear he now has a chest infection, a double eye infection and serious digestive issues due to poor nutrition,” she said.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, Entwistle said: “Without immediate access to necessary medication, his life is in serious danger.” He requires pills for his heart after he had a mini-stroke before he was detained.

Entwistle said the family had been told that Reynolds was in immense pain after being “beaten and shackled”.

In a direct plea to her parents’ captors, she added: “Our desperate appeal to the Taliban is that they release them to their home, where they have the medication he needs to survive.

“We believe this request should be viewed not merely as a plea, but as a unique opportunity to demonstrate an unforgettable act of kindness that will resonate around the world.”

The couple’s business, Rebuild, has run projects in schools in Afghanistan for 18 years and continued after the Taliban regained power in 2021. Barbie previously became the first woman to receive a certificate of appreciation from the Taliban.

The pair were arrested on 1 February with an American-Chinese friend, Faye Hall, who had rented a plane to travel with them, and a translator from Rebuild.

The reason for their detention remains unclear. Entwistle suspects it was because they were teaching mothers with children.

A Rebuild employee said last month the group was told their flight “did not coordinate with the local government”, adding that the three had been imprisoned in Kabul.

In a statement reported by the BBC in February, the Taliban official Abdul Mateen Qani said: “A series of considerations is being taken into account and, after evaluation, we will endeavour to release them as soon as possible.”

Qani added that the three foreign nationals had Afghan passports and national ID cards.

The couple, who originally met at the University of Bath, married in Kabul in 1970. It is understood the couple’s family did not want the UK government to get involved with the case.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “We are supporting the family of two British nationals who are detained in Afghanistan.”

Turning animal poo into offspring sounds like a zoo keeper’s conjuring trick, but it might become a reality if researchers succeed in a new project to help save endangered animals from extinction.

From snow leopards to sea turtles, animals the world over are under threat, with some scientists calling the massive loss of wildlife in recent decades a “biological annihilation”.

Now researchers are exploring whether they can use dung to capture – and harness – animals’ genetic diversity.

Hailed “the poo zoo”, the project is based on a simple premise: besides being rich in undigested food, bacteria and bile, poo also contains cells from the creature that deposited it, shed from the lining of their intestines.

Crucially, research has suggested some of these cells within the poo are still alive – at least when the deposit is fresh.

“It’s very, very early stages,” said Prof Suzannah Williams of Oxford University, who is leading the team. “But so far it’s feeling very positive,” she added, noting they have not only isolated live cells from mouse poo, but also from elephant dung.

The hope is these cells could be used to help boost genetic diversity within populations, thereby increasing the chance of species surviving.

The approach, known as “genetic rescue”, can take several forms. In the first place, DNA from the cells could be analysed to help scientists understand the genetic variation of different populations, informing various conservation efforts. That DNA is of higher quality if extracted from cells that are alive.

But if cells from poo can be cultured and grown it raises another possibility: the creation of entire animals using state-of-art assisted reproductive technologies.

These include cloning – in which the nucleus of a cell is inserted into a donor egg, an electric impulse is applied, and the resulting embryo is implanted into a surrogate to produce a genetic “twin” of the original animal.

Perhaps more exciting still is the possibility of reprogramming the cells so that they have the capacity to become any cell type. Crucially, research in mice has suggested such cells can be turned into sperm and eggs – meaning they could be used in IVF-type techniques to produce offspring.

“If you use eggs and sperm, you get to leverage sexual reproduction and all of the recombination that happens during those events, and you get to really start to build the potential for adaptation to environmental stress,” said Dr Ashlee Hutchinson, who came up with the idea of the poo zoo and is a programme manager of Revive & Restore, a US-based conservation organisation that is funding the work.

Put simply, by creating sex cells in a laboratory, it is possible to harness the genetic diversity of a species without having to bring together individual animals – who might be in different parts of the world, or otherwise inaccessible – or needing to collect their sperm and eggs.

Reprogrammed cells could also allow scientists to use gene-editing techniques to understand, for example, the genes involved in wildlife diseases or environmental adaptations – information that could subsequently be used to engineer greater resilience into a species, for example by screening sex cells or embryos for certain genes, or even through gene editing.

Gene editing is already being explored by Revive and Restore to bring back the extinct Passenger Pigeon, and by the bioscience company Colossal in an attempt to revive the woolly mammoth.

Freezing cultured cells in liquid nitrogen at -196C means they can be preserved indefinitely, allowing the DNA they contain to potentially be used in applications not yet dreamed of.

The biobanking of cells and tissues of endangered species, from semen and ovarian tissue to skin cells, for genetic rescue has already been embraced by charities and organisations, from the UK-based Nature’s Safe to San Diego’s Frozen Zoo.

But this typically involves taking cells or tissues from the animal itself, whether alive or after it has died. By contrast, taking cells from poo is non-invasive and does not involve capture, raising the possibility of collecting them from even the most elusive creatures – an approach that could enable scientists access to greater genetic diversity by sampling wild populations.

“It’s a case of how can we, en masse, collect living cells in as many species as we can to maintain diversity that we’re losing at a terrifying rate,” said Dr Rhiannon Bolton, a researcher on the project from Chester zoo, a charity that is collaborating on the project.

But the approach is not without challenges. The sheer volume of dung that must be processed is considerable – “think about buckets and sieves at the beginning,” said Bolton.

What’s more, poo contains more than just animal cells and organic waste.

“This is the most bacteria-heavy environment you could possibly collect cells out of,” said Williams. The team are already working on a solution – using dilution to remove the bacteria.

“Then we culture [the animal cells] in antibiotics and antifungals,” Williams said.

But even if living cells can be isolated from poo and cultured, there are hurdles to clear before offspring can be produced. Among them is the lack of understanding of the reproductive physiology of many animals, meaning the focus, at least initially, is likely to be on well-studied species.

Yet while the poo zoo is in its infancy, the team have form: Williams also leads an endeavour to save the northern white rhino by using lab-based methods to produce a large number of eggs from rhino ovarian tissue while, among other projects, Revive and Restore has been involved in the successful cloning of the black-footed ferret – a species twice thought to have gone extinct – from cells frozen decades before.

Some conservationists, however, maintain prevention is better than cure.

“The best way to protect species is to stop them declining to the point that such approaches as cloning are required. While these new technologies might provide some exciting opportunities for conservation they are unlikely to provide the transformation we need to see,” said Paul De Ornellas, the chief adviser on wildlife science at WWF UK.

“Addressing the primary drivers of biodiversity decline like habitat loss and overexploitation while supporting conservation efforts at scale that enable the protection and recovery of nature must be our primary focus if we’re to address the biodiversity crisis.”

Dr David Jachowski, an associate professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University and an expert on the black-footed ferret, added that while persevering genetic diversity is important, it is not enough on its own.

“Producing more animals doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve removed the threat in the wild to release the animal and have it survive,” he said.

But the poo zoo team say modern and traditional methods can work in parallel.

“I’m not saying we should stop protecting habitats and stop doing in situ conservation efforts,” said Bolton. “I just think because of the dire straits we are in, you need to try multiple different tools”.

Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.

Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.

“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said.

“I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”

“I’m not being alarmist,” he added. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”

Since his inauguration, Trump has ended policies giving LGBTQ+ Americans protection from discrimination. He has also restricted access to gender-affirming healthcare, said the US would only recognise two sexes, and barred transgender people from enlisting in the military.

Davies also used his keynote speech at the awards ceremony, which rewards the efforts made to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, to criticise Trump, and the president’s ally Elon Musk.

“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime,” he told the audience, which included the singers Louise Redknapp and Katy B, and the Traitors contestants Leanne Quigley and Minah Shannon.

Davies said he had turned 18 and left home in 1981, adding: “And that is exactly the year that rumours and whispers of a strange new virus came along, which came to haunt our community and to test us in so many ways.”

“The joyous thing about this is that we fought back,” he said. The community “militarised, campaigned, marched and demanded the medicine”.

He added: “We demanded the science. We demanded the access.”

When he wrote the TV series Queer As Folk in the late 1990s, he said, it was part of a movement, with writers “fomenting ideas” and putting gay and lesbian characters on screen.

Had he been asked to imagine then what life for LGBTQ+ people would be like in 2025, “I want to say it’s going to be all rainbows,” he said, “skipping down the street hand-in-hand, equality, equality, equality.”

But the peril the gay community now faced, he said, was even greater than that in the 1980s.

“The threat from America, it’s like something at The Lord of the Rings. It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil,” Davies said.

“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he added.

Musk, the de facto head of the “department of government efficiency”, bought the social networking site Twitter, which he renamed X. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found hate speech on the platform rose by 50% in the months after it was bought by the billionaire.

“We have never had this in the history of the world,” Davies said. “It is terrifying because he and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”

But Davies said the gay community would do “what we always do in times of peril, we gather at night”, and would once again come together, and fight against this latest wave of hostility and oppression.

“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done,” he told the Guardian, “which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march.”

“If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again,” he added, “which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.”

The solid bronze severed head of Melbourne’s decapitated King George V statue appears to have briefly reappeared in public, gracing the stage during a performance by a visiting Northern Irish hip hop group.

The statue in the King’s Domain parklands was beheaded during the King’s Birthday Weekend in June 2024 – one of a series of anti-colonial acts of sabotage targeting British memorials in Melbourne.

A social media post by Northern Irish hip hop trio Kneecap – renowned for their Irish republican views and Irish language lyrics – showed what appeared to be the head on stage at Melbourne venue 170 Russell on Friday night.

“Well well a chairde Gael [my Irish friends]! Some madman dropped by with a huge King George’s head so he could hear a few tunes for our last Melbourne show!” the post said.

“Allegedly his head was cut off last year in the city..…anyways he was put on stage for a few tunes and then whisked away…remember every colony can fall 🔥”

Victoria police have been searching for the bodiless bust since June, when it was removed from the 2.7m high solid bronze statue of King George V, which was unveiled in 1952 in the South Melbourne parklands. Police were contacted for comment.

“It appears the head of the statue has been removed and red paint thrown at the monument,” a police spokesperson said in a statement last year.

Authorities had been unable to locate the missing head. On 26 January, pictures posted on social media claimed to show the same head alight on a backyard barbecue along with the #invasionday hashtag.

Other statues were also the apparent target of anti-colonial activists last year, including a statue of Captain James Cook that was cut at the ankles before it toppled in Fitzroy Gardens, near Cook’s namesake cottage in the heart of Melbourne, on 27 February.

Another Captain Cook statue, at St Kilda’s Jacka Boulevard, was also sawn off at the ankles in January 2024.